As I am sure you have all heard, there's a lot of debate in New York right now (city and state) about whether they should reject Amazon's decision to open up a new headquarters in Queens.

Urbanist Richard Florida has been arguing that one of the richest companies in the world shouldn't be receiving taxpayer subsidies and that Amazon should do the right thing here. They should open up in New York but without any inducements.

As a counter argument, Kenneth Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University, recently opined that this is actually business as usual. American cities have a long history of competing for companies because the benefits outweigh the costs over the longer term.

Here is an excerpt from his op-ed in the New York Times:

They are right about one thing. It is absurd that any city would agree to such a deal. But this is how the game is played. Paying companies to relocate has been the American way since 1936, when Mississippi established the nation’s first state-sponsored economic development plan. Under that plan, since followed by many other jurisdictions, cities and states agreed to pay companies to relocate by promising them new factories and low or nonexistent taxes. With those inducements, numerous businesses relocated in the decades after World War II, usually from the union-dominated Northeast and Midwest to the business-friendly South.

Perhaps this would make a good debate topic for Kialo.

Update: Amazon just cancelled its plans for a corporate HQ in NYC.

Perhaps for obvious reasons, I am interested in how important issues get debated. I have written before about how I think the community engagement process for new developments is largely broken. I think it naturally incents certain kinds of feedback.

Recently, I've been playing around with an online platform called Kialo. They call themselves "an easy to use, yet powerful tool to engage in thoughtful discussion, understand different points of view, and help with collaborative decision-making."

The site works by trying to create a structured hierarchy of pros and cons around debatable questions. You participate by making claims (supported by links). Duplicate claims are neatly grouped together. And unthoughtful suggestions are moderated out.

The UI looks like this (top level question shown):

But you can then drill down into specific claim groupings (note the org chart looking graphic at the top):

I'm not yet convinced that it creates the "collaborative reasoning system" that they are after (maybe because I haven't used it enough). But I do really appreciate the structure and civility that they are trying to introduce to topics that are often vehemently debated.

Are any of you regular users of Kialo?