> Then a man named Bill Gates came along and he decided that they were going to give away a free encyclopedia with every damn bit of his personal computer software. Away went our $50 million a year. Now, we still sell the encyclopedias in libraries, making a few million per year doing that. But most of the wealth just went away and all that wonderful constructive product.
Encarta was (and is?[1]) great, and I'm disappointed that Microsoft discontinued it. As much as I use wikipedia, I still think that shipping a decent curated encyclopedia with every computer/tablet/phone is a fantastic idea.
One of my favorite features of macOS is that it still contains a built-in dictionary that you can access even if you're offline.
Did Rhapsody/Mac OS X ever include the complete works of Shakespeare like NeXT originally did? Given the massive amounts of storage that we have today, I wouldn't mind having a built-in high-quality library of classics and reference works included in every phone, tablet, and PC.
One of my favorite things about Raspbian is that it includes Mathematica and Sonic Pi.
Perhaps there is an educational Linux distro that includes curated offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan academy, etc. as well as educational software?
[1] Apparently you can still download Encarta 2009 from the internet archive.
Kiwix has curated¹ as well as complete offline versions of Wikipedia, WikiSource, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg (including of course the complete works of Shakespeare), Khan Academy LearnStorm, various other Khan Academy focused collections, TED Talks, CrashCourse, Super User, MathOverflow, Server Fault, lots of other Stack Exchange sites, the OpenStreetMap Wiki, ArchWiki, Ask Ubuntu, etc. You can browse through their packages at https://library.kiwix.org/ and download things like individual books from Project Gutenberg without the Kiwix application. Or you can download the files, directly or via torrent. Kiwix hides them in .local/share/kiwix.
The "standard" Kiwix app is a hypertext GUI with a built-in search engine, but you can also run it as a web server that serves up content on, for example, a local network, or just to your browser on the same machine. It's the same server running at the site above.
Kiwix is packaged in a lot of Linux distributions, including Debian (Buster, Bullseye, Bookworm, and Sid) and Ubuntu. In addition to desktop Linux, Kiwix runs on Android. Maybe some proprietary OSes too, I forget.
I don't know of an educational Linux distribution that comes with Kiwix already set up.
Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. I don't know which ones are best.
DebianEdu does package a bunch of education-related software, including both specifically didactic programs like Kgeography and non-didactic programs that can be useful for topics people commonly encounter in classes like Gpredict: https://blends.debian.org/edu/tasks/
If you just want a built-in dictionary to access offline, on Debian or Ubuntu, type "sudo apt install dict-gcide".
I don't think there's a free equivalent of Mathematica, but there's a lot you can do with Jupyter, Matplotlib, Numpy, SciPy, and Sympy, or with Octave, or with R; in some areas these programs exceed Mathematica's capabilities. Pari-gp is pretty great for number-theory stuff.
Sonic Pi looks pretty great, and it's free software. Popular alternatives include PureData.
More old books than Project Gutenberg and WikiSource have would be pretty great too. The Internet Archive in particular has a huge quantity of books scanned; relevant to the dictionary topic, they were kind enough to let me use their equipment to scan the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary some years ago; each volume is a separate item of about 100 megabytes as PDF or DjVu, one example being at https://archive.org/details/oed9barch. It really rewards browsing, but looking things up in it is a bit of a pain: you need to first find the correct volume, then the correct page, then the correct column, and finally the position in the column where your desired entry starts. PDF readers are really not the ideal tools for that, particularly when they need a second or two to decompress each page image.
At any rate, you could imagine topical, selected collections of Internet Archive scans of public-domain books; for mechanical engineering, for example, you might group together a public-domain version of the Machinery's Handbook (135 MB), Reuleaux's Kinematics of Machinery (86 MB), Reuleaux's The Constructor (40 MB), Roe's English and American Tool Builders (19 MB), Brown's 507 Mechanical Movements (18 MB), and Fox's The Mechanism of Weaving (32 MB), each using the best-quality scan available (ideally one of the Internet Archive's "Scribe" scans rather than the shoddy Google Books scans that are sometimes the only ones the Archive has available). Or maybe if you knew more about mechanical engineering than I do, you would make better choices than that.
If you were going to distribute files like this to a bunch of people whose computers were going to be in close proximity, like students in a classroom, it might be a good idea to give each of them different parts of the library, instead of each getting the same standardized data set. I mean, maybe everyone's computer should have all of Shakespeare and the 2.25 GB "Best of Wikipedia", but if you distribute The Constructor to one person and The Mechanism of Weaving to another, along with some kind of file-sharing system to make local copies of files that you want to look at, then the total library available to the group can be a lot bigger than each cellphone's SD card. This is not functionality Kiwix provides at present.
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¹ God, I hate using the word "curated" this way. It trivializes the work done by museum curators to an absurd degree.
> Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. I don't know which ones are best.
I also use OsmAnd~, which is great, and often find myself wondering what the best equivalent is for the Linux desktop.
Have you used any of these other solutions? I've used qmapshack along with generated garmin format images, but I find the OSM viewer ecosystem perplexing and I'm realistically unlikely to spend the required time to research and understand the various options.
Mapnik is what runs the main OSM website, so I've used that, and I'm pretty sure I've used someone's website built on Tileserver, but I can't remember the details. In both cases I have no idea how much RAM or CPU the server side requires. I have vague memories I maybe tried JOSM once.
I also find OsmAnd~ very useful but I am often frustrated with both its slowness and its interaction design. I wish I had something better.
The train de-rails about 2/3rds of the way through the article. You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless.
If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction.
If there are a large number of warehoused homes, and a vacancy tax successfully puts those homes on the market, then housing prices go down, and if they’re still high, the argument for building more homes is even stronger. You will have a bunch of progressives who have seen with their own eyes that increasing supply lowers prices.
This confusing ideological misalignment also happened with AirBnB regulations. YIMBYs, in general, were against it, but the week that San Francisco’s law regulating AirBnB went into effect, a flood of new apartments showed up on Craigslist, nudging the overall price for new apartments down a few percentage points.
Either you believe in supply and demand, or you don’t. We need new housing construction, and we also need to make it extraordinarily expensive to keep homes intentionally empty in cities with low vacancy rates.
> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless.
I don't follow at all. The argument that vacancy taxes are pointless is that there just aren't many vacancies compared to the enormous housing shortage. We could tax vacant apartments 1M$/day and not move the needle on pricing.
Further, a vacancy tax creates a risk that if too much housing gets build I end up holding the bag. So it creates some amount of disincentive to build or own housing. Just think about owning an apartment building in Detroit in 2008. Everyone moves away. Now I have no tenants and get punished by a tax. I'm already paying a mortgage or opportunity cost for not having my wealth in another form.
So.. sell or lower your rent? If you’re saying that what you’d do otherwise is sit on a bunch of empty housing hoping for a market correction, it seems like you’re just violently agreeing that such a tax would have a net effect of reducing vacant housing by disincentivizing overly speculative development and holding.
In other words, maybe if you’re not holding the bag (that is, your bad investment), that just means everyone else is instead.
Say you're already charging the lowest rent that makes economic sense (i.e. at cost) and you still can't get tenants? What then? It's not like anyone is going to want to buy the place from you under those conditions. Your best bet would probably be to tear the place down in hopes that without an actual inhabitable residence on the property it will no longer qualify as vacant for tax purposes. Perhaps even get the land rezoned from residential to commercial. This certainly won't do anything to improve the availability of housing when demand eventually picks back up, but then that's an entirely predictable outcome of attacking "speculation".
Better than vacancy tax is progressive real estate tax. The more properties you own, the higher tax rate on them you have.
This would force largest estate owners to drop their properties onto the market like hot potatoes. Then people who own just a few or none could buy them and make better use of them.
That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot. The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster, and also to include clauses against leaving until a new tenant had signed to replace you.
Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there.
Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene case there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands - or you can gift it to the federal government, which can sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather than contribute to the constriction of supply.
>by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there.
Unfortunately, the vacancies I am describing are unavoidable, because people do not rent apartments forever and empty apartments cannot instantly be leased.
>there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands
And pay the vacancy tax themselves? They'd be in the same position as the previous owners.
If the taxes are not the obvious hyperbole of 1M/day, there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out - and even accepting that ridiculous premise, there is the escape hatch for giving it the federal government the day-of, who obviously don't care about paying taxes to themselves.
The point is that there are logical paths where even punitive (or intentionally ridiculous) levels of vacancy taxes result in a decrease in real prices.
>there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out
Yes, but they are that the tenants pay the taxes. Capitalists are free to move their money anywhere they want to keep the return on investment up, but people must live somewhere.
An owner-occupier would naturally not have to worry about vacancy taxes. If you are a landlord, can't afford the vacancy tax, and would lose money on tenancy, eventually your most efficient option is to simply give away the home to someone who will happily take it.
Owning buildings, yes. In this hypothetical and ridiculous scenario, the only people buying would be those who intended to live there. This would decrease prices (it is no longer a speculative asset) and increase home ownership rate. Functionally no one would own a whole apartment building just to rent it out. Individual units would end up being sold the way condos are. Building "apartment" buildings would still be attractive, because they could be sold as condo units. With no one willing to rent, there would a more direct demand from actual buyers.
Let me once again reiterate that the 1M/day vacancy tax is an obviously ridiculous proposal, and any real-world policy would have many more caveats and be orders of magnitude less radical. But even something so obscenely and grossly unrealistic has potential for solving the supply issue, so we should be considering the more moderate solutions.
Even then no, I build a 30 unit building, covid 22 hits, nobodies buying, I'm on the hook for 30mm / day. Nobody would even build with that risk. You'd have low density housing, single unit homes and massive traffic/pollution issues often associated with suburban sprawl.
Yes, 1m/day is hyperbolic, but if you put the constraint on the suppliers (builders, owners), and the demand is inelastic (you've got to live somewhere), then the outcome is to constrain supply for maximal benefit.
2) A builder can hypothetically continue "building"/renovating the units indefinitely until they have a buyer. Alternatively, nothing about this hypothetical scenario requires the original constructor to even pay the $1M in the first place - it could be deferred, or be another rate entirely.
Side note) Landlords/owners aren't suppliers, they are speculators.
>determined by the economic opportunity of the land.
That makes sense for agricultural land that is being worked as well as it can be, where there are already roads for tractors and no improvement could help it become more productive, but in a city the same square feet of land can support anywhere between one and a thousand residences depending on what is invested in to it.
If rent was really inelastic, anywhere that it was profitable to build housing would be a free infinite money opportunity, because no matter how high you stacked the apartments they'd all rent for more than it cost to build them. You'd be able to build a skyscraper with 100 floors of penthouses in the middle of a rich suburban neighborhood, if increased supply really did nothing to reduce rents.
The rent of a land site is equal to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use, relative to the advantage obtained by using marginal (i.e., the best rent-free) land for the same purpose, given the same inputs of labor and capital.
Income is income ---doesn't matter if that's ag, manufactures, retail, commercial, or wage or salary of a residential tenant.
The restriction of new housing increases rent on the remaining lots. NIMBYism, architectural codes, zoning, etc., serve to restrict what can be built, so that the rent on what can be built increases.
There's a great, highly readable, 1930s take on this in "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", Bernhard J. Stern. See the section title "Building".
>The restriction of new housing increases rent on the remaining lots. NIMBYism, architectural codes, zoning, etc., serve to restrict what can be built, so that the rent on what can be built increases.
If reductions in supply raise the price, you are saying that it is elastic. I basically agree with you on this, it seems. Supply restrictions raise prices.
This is the whole idea behind a land value tax. Where a tax is made on the unimproved value of land, surplus value is taken by the taxing authority (and presumably returned as public expenditures). The landlord cannot increase rent to compensate (supply hasn't changed, price has), and the result, if other conditions permit, should be increased supply in the sense that idle property is now rented, and low-density / low-value uses are replaced by higher-density / higher-value uses.
The tax applies to the unimproved value so that property investments which increase utility and utilisation are not discouraged. Idle land is penalised.
Real-world validation of the theory ... varies, though seems generally to bear it out. A considerable problem is in getting the LVT in place to begin with, and in dealing with other barriers to enhancement, including zoning and building codes.
In the alternative, increasing asset valuation allows property owners to benefit from constrained supply. Part of their gains come through rent, but a large share is simply in the asset inflation of their property. This can be exercised as collateral on loans for other spending or investment.
I think your facts are plausible but your terminology is wrong. The market can be elastic if either the supply or the demand is elastic, or both. You are saying that the price is not elastic but then contradicting yourself by correctly saying that supply changes change the price.
Scarcity prices are determined mostly by the last units available. Imagine demand is just below supply: then very little of the price is driven by scarcity. Now imagine that demand is just above supply: it's not hard for prices to increase dramatically, because every item is being competitively bid on the price will increase until demand at that point is below supply again.
The only time you don't expect small improvement in supply to have an effect on price is when you're far from being supply limited.
> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless.
Why not? If supply actually does work to reduce housing affordability problems, it takes the wind out of the sails of housing speculation.
Speculators are attracted to markets where things are going wild and there is the promise of making stacks of cash. If the market is boring and stable and there's enough for everybody, they aren't interested.
Leaving a home empty is naturally expensive because of carrying costs (property taxes, maintenance, utilities, etc.). The only way it's worth it is if appreciation is so crazy high that it more than offsets that. Fix that more basic problem of rapid appreciation, and speculation will solve itself.
Of course, once your real estate market is broken at a basic level, things like speculation will ensue, and maybe vacancy taxes are a useful band-aid then.
> Leaving a home empty is naturally expensive because of carrying costs (property taxes, maintenance, utilities, etc.). The only way it's worth it is if appreciation is so crazy high that it more than offsets that.
> If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction.
Is 1,893 vacancies in the entire city of Vancouver close enough to "nobody" for you? Is it enough to fix the crisis and render housing affordable again?
Don’t assume the only options are a 100% fix or do nothing dropping prices by even 1% makes a significant difference.
Further these taxes aren’t about the every day situation they are to get the market to respond to temporary dips which helps deflate bubbles and keep the market healthy.
> Don’t assume the only options are a 100% fix or do nothing dropping prices by even 1% makes a significant difference.
This is hyped as the Big Headline Fix For Everything and its impact is trivial. 1% impact on rents? No way. Zero-point-one percent, maybe, but I still doubt. Why is anyone even wasting time talking about it? Where is their vision?
The opposition to vacancies in real estate is one of the most absurd memes I've seen recently. Imagine if you went to a supermarket and all the shelves were empty. That's what zero vacancies in the real estate market looks like! There's nothing wrong with available stock.
I think in context, "vacant" means a property that nobody is living in and is not on the market for rent. It's simply owned by someone as an asset. This was the complaint in some parts of Canada: Chinese owner/investors buying condos and not renting them out but just letting them sit empty.
Imagine if the supermarket shelves were empty BUT there was a warehouse full of all the items that would normally be on the shelf, waiting for people to get desperate and pay more, while renting some fraction of them (bring that lightbulb back next week or keep paying indefinitely!).
Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity.
Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you." But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.
As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives us the mandate to transform our public life.
Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go.
The reason this narrative lasts is survivorship bias. Those who survive were provided for and did prosper at least to some extent. They are ‘gods chosen’.
The untold millions that starved to death or died of disease or oppression get no vote and propagate no religion, yet in a divine universe they were just as much chosen too, just for a different fate. And of course they’re mostly the poor and disadvantaged, while the wealthy by and large tend to do just fine. I think I’ll throw my lot in with the wealthy, thanks.
Was there a larger message in your comment than "poor people starve, so no thanks, I wanna be rich"? I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but if that was it, I think you missed, literally, the entire point of the comment you are responding to.
It isn't saying you need to be poor to be godly. It's saying pointing your wealth toward your wants before the needs of your neighbors is wrong. Taking care of your own needs before the needs of others is martyrdom, and I don't think anything said above was saying that was required, or even suggested.
One final thought:
>while the wealthy by and large tend to do just fine
Is debatable. In times of peace and prosperity, yes, they certainly do. In times of turmoil however, they are often the first to suffer, because they grow sure that money will carry the same weight in all social orders, which is not true. People, without fail, look around for the reason there isn't enough to go around, and the first thing they see is the castle in the hill.
>God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty
There's nothing anywhere in that quote or analysis that talks about giving to the poor or helping your neighbour. It says god will do that, not that we should do that.
In fact how are we supposed to help our neighbours and uplift them in times of need if we're poor and have no surplus? The bible tells us not to worry about that, god will provide.
I know that other parts of the bible tell us to give our wealth to the poor, but actually supporting the poor is not our problem. God will do it. Giving away our wealth isn't functional, it's not with the goal of solving poverty, it's with the goal of impoverishing ourselves so that we become virtuous because otherwise we will be punished.
> In times of turmoil however, they are often the first to suffer
In times of turmoil the rich buy first-class tickets out of there and head to one of their secondary mansions. Too late for a ticket? Bribes will still get the job done.
And anyway it's turmoil, so food-/shelter-/safety-insecure people always suffer earliest and most.
Societies made of selfish people die out, and before dying out they impoverish themselves, because human interaction is not zero-sum. Narratives promoting altruism last because people can observe the misery selfishness causes. Cooperation, not rationality, is the fundamental advantage the humans have over other animals.
Historically altruism was the most important form of cooperation, and trade was secondary. Now we have additional modes of cooperation like science, law, employment, and free software; and trade has also improved its powers dramatically.
But they cannot substitute for altruism in all situations.
You've probably met people who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through selfishness and distrust. More, probably, than who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through getting ripped off when being too trusting. In my own experience they are abundant.
My closest friend, (I set him up with his wife), lost his job in the financial crisis and then had his life ruined by a severe illness that’s still crippled him. He lost everything. My wife is a nurse, one of her friends at work lost her sister to cancer, her husband was killed in an accident and now she has terminal cancer. She has a young daughter.
How often on the news do we see third world countries devastated by natural disasters like tsunami, volcanoes, storms and floods. I remember the famines in Africa.
I particularly remember the aids epidemic and the way conservative Christian politicians in the US particularly said it was gods justice. Government spokesmen made jokes about it in news conferences. They thought it was funny.
I was otherwise a Thatcher/Reagan conservative, but I’m not forgetting that, ever. It’s what made me realise no political faction has a monopoly on the truth or morality.
I'm not sure if you think I'm saying that selfishness causes cancer or volcanoes? That's obviously nonsense. And all political factions are pretty selfish; that's what makes them factions. (Though some are so selfish they remain insignificant because they can't join coalitions and keep splintering after growing to some small maximum size.) So I don't think any of this is relevant to the question.
The question is whether, as the quote claims, the poor generally experience better life outcomes than the rich due to divine intervention. I would claim that the actual evidence is overwhelmingly that this is utter nonsense.
Furthermore the number of bible believers that actually impoverish themselves in order to avoid divine punishment is extremely tiny, so it seems to me that they don't believe this either.
Or that certain groups of people survive because the ideologies that they adopt help their group compete with people of other ideologies... and people with successful ideologies are able to convert others from less successful ones.
i'm sorry, the reason "altruism is better, actually" lasts is because all the altruists who could have told you about that are poor and dead, so be like them?
FWIW, I don't identify as Christian, but was raised as such by devout parents. The Bruggemann citation reminds me of a book "The Jesus I Never Knew" which, despite the cringe-inducing title, is worthwhile, as a non-religious look at the life of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. If Christianity had developed differently, in an alternate reality where its adherents modelled their behavior on that person's teachings, what a different world it'd be.
A blogger named Andrew Sullivan coined a term "Christianist" to avoid conflating followers of Jesus' teachings with the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP. I hope the term catches on.
Bruggemann, Crossan, Stringfellow, and a few others trace a through-line of really very subversive dissent, back to the beginning, and make for really fascinating reading.
> the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP
"hijacked" to me would imply that a significant majority of GOP members are not willing and enthusiastic participants in the political shifts that have taken place, which is clearly false.
Great article. This is always the tension on the political left. Adding restrictions to protect a group accidentally creates downstream effects of hurting this group.
The right is no better and can tend toward abusive and unfair advantages.
Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
> Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
It might be more accurate to say, scarcity issues are worst when neither party advocates for abundance.
In housing, neither party advocates for densification nor deregulation on the front of zoning; instead party lines revolve around subsidized housing, mortgage industry regulation, etc.
In medicine neither party talks about increasing the supply of doctors(or the ability for hospitals to deliver care more efficiently without being hamstrung by insurance), party lines are fought over who pays for it.
In education the two sides might bicker over affirmative action and how Harvard decides which high school seniors get to attend; but not whether it’s OK that the worlds foremost university accepts only 2000 undergrads a year.
None of these are easy problems to solve, but the common theme is that both parties accept the status quo. Housing is scarce, desirable education is scarce, medical care is scarce.
On the other hand, food or gas prices start moving and it becomes a priority political issue for the current administration guaranteed. It’s night and day.
This is the result we are seeing now. Nobody wants to fix the issue because then you wouldn't have the issue to berate the other side. It's better to campaign and raise money with that issue than to actually solve the issue.
Imagine you are someone who does not want the healthcare problem to be solved. Wouldn't you want to pay both sides of the aisle to drum up pointless bickering?
For housing, like many issues, it's definitely partisan. One party is anti-density and one is a big-tent umbrella. Elizabeth Warren was on the podium saying, "build, build, build!" during primary debates, while both Trump & traditional Republicans grumble about liberals "destroying the suburbs."
Disagree, the fact that individual politicians support certain policy does not mean that policy is partisan. Neither party pushes the issue, which is why for example lots of blue states never advance on density.
I’d say all in all the progressive left sub party could be considered pro density but doesn’t wield enough power to do anything about it except in small municipalities like Somerville MA.
Interesting article! But two corrections are in order:
"it is not like very many rich people have three apartments" - oh yes, they absolutely do - "or take nine years to finish undergrad" - let me tell you about a time and place in Europe that had effectively removed education scarcity with free college for everyone. People lurking in (sometimes multiple) degrees for close to a decade was so common that there was a word for it. Not that that was a terrible place to live, quite nice actually.
I have close friends in Germany who worked on multiple degrees for years without progress. While I personally don't see that as ideal life choices and they would agree, it actually came at very little cost for the university. The reason they took so long is because they were hardly studying. This also means not submitting homework, usually not coming to lectures and taking up space there and more often than not, not even attending the exam, so there was nothing to grade either. In the case of my friends, it turned out the degrees they focused on initially weren't right for them in the end. But they were able to realize that on their own time and settle for something that suits them better and despite that aren't stuck with crippling debt.
Working on the side was a big factor why people put less time into their studies. As waiters, in jobs actually relevant to their degrees (especially engineers), or administrative jobs in companies. I couldn't really name any way how that would have hurt the economy or the universities. But the US economy has been and is far more dynamic, so maybe it does have some impact.
I think there are lots of reasons the US economy is more dynamic, but I don't think expensive university is it. Hiring and firing is easier/faster. More freedom for businesses in general. The rural area in Germany where I grew up in had no McDonald's because you somehow need permission from existing businesses to open a competitor. I don't fully understand this, but would lose all composure if this craziness were to stop me from opening a business. It's also easy to underestimate the massive boost that comes from a huge, trustingly homogenous market. I build a web app business in the US and there are 350 million customers right there. No need to translate into a bunch of languages, advertise in a bunch of languages. Regulations between states might differ, but there usually are solutions already in place because so many businesses have the cross-state issues (taxes or whatever).
Doubt that has anything to do with the dynamism of the US economy - that’s all due to the US being much more business friendly, market size, few employer regulations, immigration, cultural values around entrepreneurship and dreaming big, a more level playing field, etc
What cost did they create? Their parents paid for their housing and food. One of them later made money doing tech support jobs at the university and after finally graduating through that got jobs in IT.
Other than being enrolled and going to 2-3 lectures in a hall with 100-200 students at the beginning of every semester they didn't use any services provided by the university.
Important article. This is the biggest blindspot of our era. We've enculturated several generations into a zero-sum scarcity mindset because we feared growth. As population growth collapses, the change that we need in the zeitgeist is going to be jarring to most people.
Author seems to have a hard-on on blaming "progressives" for the problems, but their evidence seems to be just this:
> This is doubly mysterious when we consider that artificial scarcity policies are often championed by self-described “progressives”, a label usually reserved for those concerned with improving the lot of the less fortunate. While the American Medical Association might be traditionally conservative, elite colleges are famously liberal, and restrictive housing policy is a hallmark of our bluest cities.
>College: Elite colleges are failing every abundance-agenda test imaginable. They’re hardly expanding the total number of admissions; their share of total enrollment has actually been shrinking; and they’re admitting fewer of the low-income students who gain the most by attending elite colleges in the first place.
Peter Turchin argues that we're overproducing elites and there aren't enough elite roles to go around. I'm inclined to agree. Think of all the elite business schools that are pumping out MBAs year after year.
While I think much of the article is right, the amount of time spent on dismantling housing NIMBYism is somewhat unfortunate. The analysis is right to some extent, but there are also valid reasons to consider that urban sprawl should be limited, while also protecting historic city centers, and trying to make sure normal people can still afford housing close to or in the center of their cities.
A very problematic tendency with a free housing market and free reign for development is that it ties the price of buildings to the price of the land they sit on. No one is going to, of their own accord, buy a piece of land in downtown Manhattan and build a low-income housing building there. So, free development does allow prices to overall go down even as the city grows larger, but at the cost of moving poor and middle-class people towards the periphery of the city.
Land near the city center and other landmarks is naturally scarce, there is no way to create an abundance of physiccal space. That inevitably drives the price of that land up as the city expands. The only way to prevent the rich buying it all up and excluding everyone else from those areas is for the city to regulate the need for low-income housing being built or regulate the price itself.
A better policy overall, though no one has managed it to any extent, would be to find a way of developing in a less centralized way - stop growing cities to this mega metropolis level, and somehow encourage the creation of more big-but-not-huge cities. Or, find a new way of organizing cities so that they are less centralized themselves.
Abig part of this, I suspect, would be reducing centralization of companies as well. The huge behemoths we have today control a vast amount of resources, so their decisions of locations naturally force people to gather in the same city, and create high value space. If instead you had a much larger range of much smaller companies, there would be less need to have huge HQs with thousands of workers in the same building a la Apple's Infinity Loop 1.
The best proof, I think, that this type of decentralized development can work at some scale lies in Europe. Even though individual European countries and cities have similar problems and tendencies to those in the USA, these are much more recent problems, and overall there are many times more large cities across the EU, and no mega metropolises like NYC or LA. And, many of these cities have city centers that are somewhat frozen in time for 100 or 200 years, not since the 70s, without reaching the ridiculous prices of San Francisco for example (though they might get there).
I was very explicit that I am discussing the land, not constructed surface.
My point is that the land close to a major attraction is forever scarce and thus expensive, and that this attracts only developers who want to build expensive constructions to maximize their return on investment. I agree with the article that this still pulls median prices down, but it does so by forcing middle class and poor people towards the peripheries. Taking this to the extremes, you get cities like Sao Paolo - with extremely expensive city centers and dirt-cheap favelas where people live in squalor.
Looking at my own city (Bucharest) this is very visible in new constructions - the farther away from the expensive city center most constructions are, the smaller the apartments, the less nicely looking etc. Of course there are exceptions, especially once you get to the suburbs, but this is the general trend for the city itself, and is a common trend in most cities.
Exactly. Transportation is another way to "compress" physical space in the sense that you can reach more of it for the same distance.
In the extreme case where we have ubiquitous teleportation, the only remaining reason to live physically near a desirable location would be bragging rights.
Which European cities do you think are good examples of this kind of development where a lot more land is more-or-less equally desirable while the city as a whole stays as desirable as NYC?
I don't take issue with housing as a topic which is most of the article because there actually is scarcity issues, but I take a lot of issues with the idea in general summed up in the piece as "Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity"
While I'm no fan of 'web3' or cryto I think the existence of artificial scarcity imposed on abundant digital resources not by a cartel but by ordinary people dispels that idea. Scarcity is in many ways the only way to create individuality and authenticity. We're already in a world of abundance in the West at least, our waistlines don't suggest that we lack in essential goods, with few exceptions.
The idea that bigger pie = more stuff = world better has little pull any more even among people who aren't particularly well off. Another user is quoting a Christian theologian, and I've personally seen younger people be interested in religion again, mostly for that reason. The article also mentions healthcare in the US but ironically it seems to me that abundance lifestyles are by far the biggest drivers of healthcare costs. We could safe ourselves a lot of doctor and dentist visits if we cut down the soda and took the bike out for a ride. I don't think it can be overstated how much of our disease burden is related to our consumption. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and so on. Among the poor predominantly.
It seems to me almost bizarre when one looks at countries like Singapore where national healthcare spending is 4% of the GDP, compared to 20% in the US that the issue is not having enough doctors. Rather than talking about the culture in which we live and how it's affecting us.
I feel like a huge amount (not all) of NIMBYism is also due to the total disregard for aesthetics or cohesiveness of new developments with existing neighborhoods. Look at new developments in Brooklyn
If you live on a block with the former, and someone comes in wanting to build the latter, of course you're going to say no. Some might say that this is just a preference for low-density housing, and big buildings will just always look worse to some people, but I disagree. There are plenty of attractive churches, schools, and other high-density buildings that don't look out of place.
Really low quality builds, random stupid rectangles, you can hear everything your neighbor does, yadda yadda yadda. The market is so ridiculous, they can build it as cheap as possible and somebody will snatch it up no matter what.
A lot of them are quite big and use wooden frames, even though they're not really supposed to, because of a loophole with fire-retardant treated wood. There will likely be some major disasters in the next decade.
Kind of an unfair statement because those buildings are actually in downtown Brooklyn, which is a dense downtown in its own right. I don’t think there are many brownstones in that area. The buildings in the more residential areas tend to be far less conspicuous, even if they don’t tend to strictly hew to the styles of early 20th century architecture.
>Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity.
Sadly, this isn't the case. Being rich is about more than having abundance. It is about having 'above average' abundance with the 'richness' level being determined by how far above average you are.
Create a post scarcity society and the bar will move, likely with major societal consequences. I don't know if I'm ready for the paradigm shift.
I agree. Indeed, conspicuous consumption is often about showing off that you own things that are scarce (the more scarce, the better) and non-scarce items have little value in this context.
It's amazing how a city like New York has an abundance of food. All those restaurants and grocery stores. People can generally get what they need when they need it. It's a system so complex, no human can comprehend it. At best, you can apprehend it.
Imagine if a food czar was put in charge of feeding New York equitably... There would be shortages and black markets and all kinds of crazy things.
Isn’t it a good thing that these coastal hubs become too expensive eventually and stop growing. Doesn’t it force the economy to re-centre on hubs in other locations and give the rest of the country a chance to flourish. Do we really want most of the country living in the shadow of a few megacities.
I predict a whole lot of tech work being done from the likes of Montana and South Carolina as remote becomes the norm and people can choose not to live in cities.
I live in a former socialist country (slovenia, then yugoslavia), where housing went from something cheap, something you got for free from the government, or (literally) built yourself over the weekends to something that is not affordable at all.
Our current left parties blame the government not building enough housing, even though every government project is vastly overpaid (due to corruption).
But the real reason for pricing increases is regulation. Back in the time you could buy a plot of land and build. Usually you started building first, then dealt with the papers, permits and all the related stuff... and people knew where the papers won't be problematic, and build housing on plots that were actually ok to build on. In every village, you could buy a plot of land at the edge of it, and just make a house there. You could also literally build the house yourself... usually yu hired someone to dig out the basement, but a lot of the actual work was done by future-owners themselves and their friends. Yes, some houses didn't have proper insulation, or stuff like that, but you had a place to live in.
And now? Usually those same villages are the same size as they were before the breakup of yugoslavia, because you need a permit to start anything (and they're actually enforced), and local governments don't want to change zoning, because of NIMBY neighbours. You can't build/do anything by yourself anymore. We have huge areas of buildable land, empty, and in many places, the only way to build something is to buy an existing old house, tear it down, and build a multi-apartment building there, bringing the prices even higher.
Add to this speculative investments and buying dedicated apartments/houses for airbnb, and the young(er) generations are fucked.
(I'm not saying we should allow everything everywhere, but in places with not enough housing but enough land, we should rethink our zoning)
Right. It could have more succinctly summarized just by quoting Hayek's: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men [or people, if you'd rather] how little they know about they imagine they can design."
Doesn't this problem essentially rise and fall with wealth inequality?
If you have a plot of land and you can either build a McMansion for one family or an apartment building for 16 families, then (absent heavy-handed regulation) you're going to build whichever one is more profitable, right? And the story of the last ten years is that we build (relatively) more McMansions than we used to, because they are (relatively) more profitable than they used to be, because the rich have (relatively) more money than they used to. What am I missing?
That doesn't seem very relevant. Obviously there are places where you can realistically only build one or the other, but there's lots of places where you can build either, and if your goal is to increase housing density, those are the places you're interested in (regardless of what your method is).
edit: and it's also obvious that density can be affected by zoning laws, but I was assuming those are held constant (because a, they kind of are constant in that they don't change much, and b, the present phenomenon of rents rising sharply since 2005 is, I think, not generally believed to be caused primarily by a change in zoning regulations)
In most areas that have single-family houses, it is illegal to build 16-unit apartment buildings. In the places that most need more housing, this is the most true.
I guess I should've used a more realistic example (one home vs a duplex, or a 16-plex vs four single-family homes) but I really thought the point would be obvious. I guess not, so I'll try again.
You recognize that there are occasions when a developer has the option to build more density or less density on a specific piece of land, yes? I was using an exaggerated example (1 vs 16) to illustrate the more general concept of less-vs-more. I am arguing that, other things being equal, higher wealth inequality will lead to developers choosing to build less density, because an increase in wealth inequality implies that the rich have more to spend than the poor (relative to whatever previous period you're comparing to that had less wealth inequality).
I disagree. It's just another housing bubble. That should be bleeding obvious from looking at the article's FRED chart. Scarcity was not suspended from 2007-2012 when the previous bubble collapsed and brought housing prices down to settle on long-term inflation as if the previous 10 years never even happened.
Blaming NIMBYism instead of loose debt looking for a safe haven is either a well-funded political agenda or mass hysteria of bloggers getting wound up on each others' articles.
> housing scarcity benefits homeowners by giving them the option of selling their home at an inflated price later and downsizing or moving to a cheaper locale for retirement
If housing is fungible then the value of their downsizing destination will have also gone up. If your house price surges then that is good for you, unless you want to use this surge to buy a new house (like-for-like) which will have (maybe) also surged.
That’s why it only benefits you if you want to downsize (you gain the inflated delta) or move to a cheaper location (you gain the inflated location premium).
This should generally hold for housing as well. Even though land is finite, we can build upward, so each individual new unit uses a negligible amount of land.
Perhaps the author has forgotten that the land base required to support a given human population cannot be expanded upward? The minimum area of productive farmland required to support a rather subsistence-level diet (95% vegetarian say) is about a hectare - two football fields - per person, according to most studies I've looked at.
Technology can mitigate some of these issues to some extent, and already have - extensive inputs of fossil fuels to agriculture in the form of fertilizer and diesel powered water pumps have doubled per-hectare productivity, but at the cost of fertilizer pollution and eventual exhaustion of groundwater supplies. Hence, we have to conclude that there really are hard ecological limits to human economic activity.
Property developers and their affiliated investors have an unfortunate habit of ignoring these realities, and for their own pockets it might make sense - build some housing, ignore the demands on the surrounding area, sell the housing, take the money and run. Most communities can see through these efforts. Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment.
P.S. If you want to examine 'artificial scarcity driving market prices' the place to start is the diamond industry.
It seems you perhaps haven't been to Tokyo, or haven't been to America. The typical Tokyo apartment today is larger, newer, and cheaper than the typical apartment in New York. That's the result of decades of housing construction policy, in both places, but in opposite directions.
> "Just under 40% of all new apartments were in the 70 sqm (753 sq.ft) range, while just 9.1% were sized between 80 ~ 100 sqm. The biggest shift is in the 30 ~ 50 sqm (323 ~ 538 sq.ft) sector where the total share has increased by 3.1 points to 10% in 2019."
> "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975 square feet on average over the last five years — roughly a 5% increase... Despite much-hyped tiny housing trends, the vast majority of new development in the city over the last 20 years has been in the “luxury” sector (i.e., larger than average). Meanwhile, each year, unit combinations enlarge the average square footage of individual apartments, while shrinking the city’s housing stock."
That's actually the opposite trend on size in both places, isn't it?
Japanese apartments are furnished in a different way that makes them feel spacious even though they're tiny compared to apartments in the USA
My guess is the parent comment had a misconception because of that, or maybe because laissez-faire policies make Tokyo apartments way cheaper per square foot (you can take a job as a janitor in Shinjuku and easily afford a comfortable apartment within a 30 minute door-to-door commute)
> "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975 square feet on average over the last five years — roughly a 5% increase…."
I know you're quoting, but that sentence alone makes me suspicious; it represents an increase of under 3%, not 5%.
> Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment.
How do you figure? Japan has one of the most laissez faire real estate markets around. I would assume whatever steady state the housing market assumes is most profitable
Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics. You seem (to me) to have two conservative-centrist parties in power, both with extremely neoliberal economics, and with slight differentiations on very emotional side shows like abortion and gun control.
Pretty true for economics but not for much else. On pretty much anything cultural there are two very vocal poles and a bunch of people in the middle picking one pole or another as the lesser evil.
When it comes to housing both parties for different reasons promote something that looks a lot like protectionism. Republicans often try to keep housing values high, and Democrats like to punish real estate developers or alternatively have bizarre ideas about what makes housing affordable. They both accomplish their different goals by making it hard to build. Obviously there are regional differences in local parties. Republicans will often favor building out and not up, preferring suburban development. Democrats have lost the plot on housing, IMHO.
We get too caught up in two-party partisanship to focus on the larger picture.
It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma, actually. We could collaborate on solving mutual problems but we know the other party isn't trustworthy. Or we could focus on just getting our own way and making sure the other party doesn't take advantage of us.
Socially the US is far more liberal than basically every country in Europe (even ignoring Eastern Europe.) Only people who have not lived in both places say otherwise. The US also -by far- spent more per capita during the COVID economic recovery than any country on earth (even excluding the retainment loans.) No country comes even close. That doesn't really fit the "right" wing dogma.
There's a myth around American politics largely pepetuated by people that have only had political experience in one place or only uses the media as a means to know the politics of countries. Even on abortion, the US has among the least restrictive in the entire world, looser than Germany, France, etc.
The big thing America really lacks is universal healthcare, which is the main axe people wield over the head of American politics to claim it's only corporatist right leaning. Government outlays really tell a different story than the narrative.
It's more than healthcare, the entire social security net is far more extensive in Germany than in the US. This also affects the part about COVID, one really important measure here was to essentially have the government continue to pay people in jobs that would otherwise have been lost during the pandemic. That was an already existing measure that was expanded during the pandemic.
> Socially the US is far more liberal than basically every country in Europe
You're telling me that rural Alabama is more liberal than Sweden? I think your viewpoint is leaning on definitions of "social" and "liberal" and "US" that are not universally understood.
New York City alone has a similar population to all of Sweden, and is twice that of Alabama. I'm sure you can find 1.5% of the Swedish population that is just as conservative.
If California wanted more representation in both the Senate and the House, it could divide. Instantaneously the population of California would get 2 Senators and probably a large number of House Seats. Further, it would help with the political divide in California: coast is left, farmers are right. You don't see California, as a political entity, chomping at the bit to subdivide.
As to the particulars of your comment, States should have far more autonomy than they do under FDR's federalist system. States should be able to tax more, but with the Feds already eating 20-50% of the populations income, States have a hard time raising funds. If we weakened the feds, but first paying down the debt, Alabama might have a far more interesting economy.
California would likely divide itself in a way to advantage the current politicians that govern the state. Not really Gerrymandering as we know it, but a similar principle.
Republicans would obviously not accept this. We would likely replay the decades leading up to the Civil War, where adding states was a contentious and at times violent process.
The feds would also have to approve it. If Republicans can stop it, they will. If Democratic politicians can push it through, they would likely get blowback from moderates. Republicans would get power and seek to balance or even advantage themselves. We could end up with eight Dakotas (just kidding on this specific example; other Republican states might want to split too).
This is not a fight either party wants to start because it could be a disaster for them. The intended outcome (increase relative Senate representation) has slim odds and a high cost.
Extreme disagree. The United States does not have a party that represents the interests of working people, and has done almost nothing to stem the consolidation of corporate power for decades.
It’s not even a close contest. There’s literally not a labor party here.
They are, because in both cases the party wanting to change the status quo cannot possibly do so and the party leadership know it. They are simply exploiting it for political gain with showy but pointless time wasting banner legislation to stoke up the base. The activists don't know it's pointless, but generally speaking the activists on both sides are dissociated from reality.
On gun control there is no conceivable way gun ownership, gun crime and gun death statistics can be meaningfully changed. They are just too many guns out there already. Those states that do have 'strict' gun laws by US standards are right next to ones that don't and have open borders. As has been said many times, once Sandy Hook happened and didn't shift the consensus on the issue, it was all over. Face it, school shootings are going to be a fact for a very long time. You can have some local regulation like no conceal carry and such, fine, but banning guns and getting them off the streets and out of people's homes at a society level is impossible and pretending that it isn't is disingenuous.
On abortion, pregnant women are just going to go somewhere that allows abortion. Face it, women are going to get abortions if they rally want them. You can make it harder and coerce some vulnerable women, but broadly you can't stop them all you can do is mess with them.
The only effect of strict punitive anti-regulation in either case is to aggravate members of the pro-community, and harm people in edge case situations.
At least that's how it looks from the other side of the Atlantic.
The other way to view this is that america is a prosperous country, most americans recognize where that prosperity comes from, and instead are divided mainly be cultural issues.
I suspect immigration actually has a lot to do with it. I have a theory that, in the long run, immigration prevents the development of a meaningful left-wing party in the U.S. The left of center party ends up getting co-opted by immigrants who are open to same change, but not that much.
You can see this happening in the U.S. in real-time. Eroding support among hispanics may well cost Democrats the election in 2022. A notable fact about Hispanics is that they enjoy strong income mobility--typically moving up from the bottom to the middle within a couple of generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. If you're vastly better off than your grandfather who came here from Mexico, you may well be skeptical of efforts to change things too much.
We have a left, it's just overshadowed and punished by the Democrat centrist majority, and the right wing political majority. Plenty of politicians in the progressive caucus have been pushing for reform for years, but the sad reality of our political system is that it's incredibly difficult for them to pass legislation. But that's not to say we don't have a left.
Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice. The average European sentiment on race and immigration, such as their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is definitely considered right-wing in America.
>Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice. The average European sentiment on race and immigration, such as their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is definitely considered right-wing in America.
Just because the US is fixated on identity politics does not mean it leads on progressive social values. Germany, a country with a quarter of the US population and way less territory has hosted a third of the amount of refugees the US has. Not even mentioning the data on total amount of refugees hosted by the EU because it absolutely dwarfs the US. As a migrant to the EU, the path to (legal) residency was extremely straight forward and easy, compared to the US. This is without going into topics such as socialised health care.
I disagree. If anything, US is far too left. The current leftist politics and the administration is distinctly different from Obama's run. Btw, this goes for right as well (Trump vs. Bush era).
Compared to Europe America skews politicians more slightly to the right and or center. Also, elected presidents become more centrist once they are in office .
> slight differentiations on very emotional side shows
Slight differences? In the U.S. right now there are states that would ban abortion immediately if Roe were overturned, and ones that allow abortion until birth, limited only be the conscience of the doctor. The two sides are further apart than the most extreme poles of the EU.
I think the GP was missing a comma or something - they probably meant that differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties (I should stress that this is about the parties, not thr voters), even those as embittered as abortion, gun rights, gay marriage etc, are small compared to the overwhelming amount of policy they agree on almost entirely (foreign policy, medical care, primacy of corporate interests, little will to battle climate change).
Sometimes the policies both parties agree on are in stark contrast to the will of the US electorate, such as the case of many recent wars, or Medicare for All.
Small in what sense? We have Obamacare and most people now support it, and there isn't that much support for program that's $3 trillion a year bigger. We supported foreign wars, and did a few, then we didn't, and so now we're not intervening in Ukraine. As you observe, we have little will to battle climate change. Everybody dislikes corporations in the abstract, but we vote with our wallets and keep voting for Amazon over the Mom & Pop. If you keep in mind that the median voter is like 45, I don't really see how the country doesn't closely reflect what most people want.
By contrast, our disagreements regarding what you teach my kids about the nature of marriage and our purpose on the earth, or the laws around terminating human life, or whether we should have a color blind society or not, seem pretty important by comparison. Whatever problems we perceive ourselves as having, we don’t trust others to fix them if we disagree about fundamental things like the socialization of children.
While Medicare for All itself is only polling at 55%, with most Republican voters (62%) opposing it, a public option is polling at a whopping 68% support, including 55% support among Republican voters [0]. And yet, neither party is willing to implement it (a public system would significantly reduce Healthcare costs for the entire economy - remember that the USA has by far the largest expenditure on health-care out of any country on Earth, while doing relatively bad among rich countries at outcomes).
For wars, the occupation of Afghanistan has been opposed by the public for at least 10 years before Biden withdrawing, with strong support from voters of both parties, as seen in both Obama, Trump and Biden winning with a platform of ending the war, but without any concrete action from the first two (if anything, Obama intensified the war, ordering even more illegal drone strikes on civilians than George Bush, and even publically admitting to assassinating an American citizen on "suspicion of terrorism").
Also, voting with your wallet doesn't work when Amazon undercuts the Mom&Pop, pumps billions into marketing, and outright buys what they can't compete with - as do all others.
> While Medicare for All itself is only polling at 55%, with most Republican voters (62%) opposing it, a public option is polling at a whopping 68% support, including 55% support among Republican voters [0].
Polling like that (do you want this free stuff?) is meaningless. Look at polls that ask how many people support taking action on climate change, versus ones that ask what people are willing to pay in higher utility bills for such action. People want change, but only if it costs less than $10/month: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...
Americans support universal healthcare--right up until you propose to pay for it the same way everyone else pays for it, with payroll taxes on middle class people.
> And yet, neither party is willing to implement it (a public system would significantly reduce Healthcare costs for the entire economy - remember that the USA has by far the largest expenditure on health-care out of any country on Earth, while doing relatively bad among rich countries at outcomes).
And here is where the abstract choice rubber hits the political reality road. After the Obamacare experience, very few people believe that they'll get more from a government program while paying less. Also, people are broadly in disagreement about why healthcare costs more in the U.S. and what drives our outcomes.
> For wars, the occupation of Afghanistan has been opposed by the public for at least 10 years before Biden withdrawing, with strong support from voters of both parties, as seen in both Obama, Trump and Biden winning with a platform of ending the war, but without any concrete action from the first two
> (if anything, Obama intensified the war, ordering even more illegal drone strikes on civilians than George Bush, and even publically admitting to assassinating an American citizen on "suspicion of terrorism").
tldr; compare the US with China, Japan, India, or any other large country. The US is considerably less conservative than most—though not quite all—of the world.
The claim that the US is particularly conservative only really makes sense coming from an extremely Euro-centric worldview.
The article simply shows this is not born out by evidence in certain cities. That doesn't mean it can't be true in others.
In general, it seems pretty clear that if a city is attracting new people, the article is right: whatever else you do, keeping the housing supply limited will increase prices. The mistake NIMBYs make is typically to assume the city population won't grow if they prevent new housing stock, but this is not the case - even if a city has tight regulations on no new housing, adjacent communities will likely not, and will simply cause sprawl from there.
However, there may be cities that are not seeing significant population growth, and are still seeing significant price increases, for various other reasons (tourism, realty as investment, gentrification, etc).
> The problem with redistribution is that it cannot overcome an artificial cap on supply.
Yes it can.
Tax the unimproved value of the land, not the people who live and work there. "Redistribute" the wealth generated by the people who work in the city to the people who work in the city, not to the landlords and property owners. Make it pointless to sit and hoard property while you wait for other people to make it more valuable.
I can assure you that property owners, in high cost of living areas, would love to "improve" their land, by building lots of tall buildings on that land, if it were legal to do so.
Its the laws that prevent them from acting on their incentives.
> Then a man named Bill Gates came along and he decided that they were going to give away a free encyclopedia with every damn bit of his personal computer software. Away went our $50 million a year. Now, we still sell the encyclopedias in libraries, making a few million per year doing that. But most of the wealth just went away and all that wonderful constructive product.
Encarta was (and is?[1]) great, and I'm disappointed that Microsoft discontinued it. As much as I use wikipedia, I still think that shipping a decent curated encyclopedia with every computer/tablet/phone is a fantastic idea.
One of my favorite features of macOS is that it still contains a built-in dictionary that you can access even if you're offline.
Did Rhapsody/Mac OS X ever include the complete works of Shakespeare like NeXT originally did? Given the massive amounts of storage that we have today, I wouldn't mind having a built-in high-quality library of classics and reference works included in every phone, tablet, and PC.
One of my favorite things about Raspbian is that it includes Mathematica and Sonic Pi.
Perhaps there is an educational Linux distro that includes curated offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan academy, etc. as well as educational software?
[1] Apparently you can still download Encarta 2009 from the internet archive.
Kiwix has curated¹ as well as complete offline versions of Wikipedia, WikiSource, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg (including of course the complete works of Shakespeare), Khan Academy LearnStorm, various other Khan Academy focused collections, TED Talks, CrashCourse, Super User, MathOverflow, Server Fault, lots of other Stack Exchange sites, the OpenStreetMap Wiki, ArchWiki, Ask Ubuntu, etc. You can browse through their packages at https://library.kiwix.org/ and download things like individual books from Project Gutenberg without the Kiwix application. Or you can download the files, directly or via torrent. Kiwix hides them in .local/share/kiwix.
The "standard" Kiwix app is a hypertext GUI with a built-in search engine, but you can also run it as a web server that serves up content on, for example, a local network, or just to your browser on the same machine. It's the same server running at the site above.
Kiwix is packaged in a lot of Linux distributions, including Debian (Buster, Bullseye, Bookworm, and Sid) and Ubuntu. In addition to desktop Linux, Kiwix runs on Android. Maybe some proprietary OSes too, I forget.
I don't know of an educational Linux distribution that comes with Kiwix already set up.
Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. I don't know which ones are best.
DebianEdu does package a bunch of education-related software, including both specifically didactic programs like Kgeography and non-didactic programs that can be useful for topics people commonly encounter in classes like Gpredict: https://blends.debian.org/edu/tasks/
If you just want a built-in dictionary to access offline, on Debian or Ubuntu, type "sudo apt install dict-gcide".
I don't think there's a free equivalent of Mathematica, but there's a lot you can do with Jupyter, Matplotlib, Numpy, SciPy, and Sympy, or with Octave, or with R; in some areas these programs exceed Mathematica's capabilities. Pari-gp is pretty great for number-theory stuff.
Sonic Pi looks pretty great, and it's free software. Popular alternatives include PureData.
More old books than Project Gutenberg and WikiSource have would be pretty great too. The Internet Archive in particular has a huge quantity of books scanned; relevant to the dictionary topic, they were kind enough to let me use their equipment to scan the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary some years ago; each volume is a separate item of about 100 megabytes as PDF or DjVu, one example being at https://archive.org/details/oed9barch. It really rewards browsing, but looking things up in it is a bit of a pain: you need to first find the correct volume, then the correct page, then the correct column, and finally the position in the column where your desired entry starts. PDF readers are really not the ideal tools for that, particularly when they need a second or two to decompress each page image.
At any rate, you could imagine topical, selected collections of Internet Archive scans of public-domain books; for mechanical engineering, for example, you might group together a public-domain version of the Machinery's Handbook (135 MB), Reuleaux's Kinematics of Machinery (86 MB), Reuleaux's The Constructor (40 MB), Roe's English and American Tool Builders (19 MB), Brown's 507 Mechanical Movements (18 MB), and Fox's The Mechanism of Weaving (32 MB), each using the best-quality scan available (ideally one of the Internet Archive's "Scribe" scans rather than the shoddy Google Books scans that are sometimes the only ones the Archive has available). Or maybe if you knew more about mechanical engineering than I do, you would make better choices than that.
If you were going to distribute files like this to a bunch of people whose computers were going to be in close proximity, like students in a classroom, it might be a good idea to give each of them different parts of the library, instead of each getting the same standardized data set. I mean, maybe everyone's computer should have all of Shakespeare and the 2.25 GB "Best of Wikipedia", but if you distribute The Constructor to one person and The Mechanism of Weaving to another, along with some kind of file-sharing system to make local copies of files that you want to look at, then the total library available to the group can be a lot bigger than each cellphone's SD card. This is not functionality Kiwix provides at present.
______
¹ God, I hate using the word "curated" this way. It trivializes the work done by museum curators to an absurd degree.
> Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. I don't know which ones are best.
I also use OsmAnd~, which is great, and often find myself wondering what the best equivalent is for the Linux desktop.
Have you used any of these other solutions? I've used qmapshack along with generated garmin format images, but I find the OSM viewer ecosystem perplexing and I'm realistically unlikely to spend the required time to research and understand the various options.
Mapnik is what runs the main OSM website, so I've used that, and I'm pretty sure I've used someone's website built on Tileserver, but I can't remember the details. In both cases I have no idea how much RAM or CPU the server side requires. I have vague memories I maybe tried JOSM once.
I also find OsmAnd~ very useful but I am often frustrated with both its slowness and its interaction design. I wish I had something better.
Upvoted for the footnote.
MacOS and iOS don't have one but many dictionaries. I have a thesaurus and a few multilingual dictionaries. It makes reading really pleasant.
I wish that Android did this better.
The train de-rails about 2/3rds of the way through the article. You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless.
If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction.
If there are a large number of warehoused homes, and a vacancy tax successfully puts those homes on the market, then housing prices go down, and if they’re still high, the argument for building more homes is even stronger. You will have a bunch of progressives who have seen with their own eyes that increasing supply lowers prices.
This confusing ideological misalignment also happened with AirBnB regulations. YIMBYs, in general, were against it, but the week that San Francisco’s law regulating AirBnB went into effect, a flood of new apartments showed up on Craigslist, nudging the overall price for new apartments down a few percentage points.
Either you believe in supply and demand, or you don’t. We need new housing construction, and we also need to make it extraordinarily expensive to keep homes intentionally empty in cities with low vacancy rates.
> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless.
I don't follow at all. The argument that vacancy taxes are pointless is that there just aren't many vacancies compared to the enormous housing shortage. We could tax vacant apartments 1M$/day and not move the needle on pricing.
Further, a vacancy tax creates a risk that if too much housing gets build I end up holding the bag. So it creates some amount of disincentive to build or own housing. Just think about owning an apartment building in Detroit in 2008. Everyone moves away. Now I have no tenants and get punished by a tax. I'm already paying a mortgage or opportunity cost for not having my wealth in another form.
So.. sell or lower your rent? If you’re saying that what you’d do otherwise is sit on a bunch of empty housing hoping for a market correction, it seems like you’re just violently agreeing that such a tax would have a net effect of reducing vacant housing by disincentivizing overly speculative development and holding.
In other words, maybe if you’re not holding the bag (that is, your bad investment), that just means everyone else is instead.
> So.. sell or lower your rent?
Say you're already charging the lowest rent that makes economic sense (i.e. at cost) and you still can't get tenants? What then? It's not like anyone is going to want to buy the place from you under those conditions. Your best bet would probably be to tear the place down in hopes that without an actual inhabitable residence on the property it will no longer qualify as vacant for tax purposes. Perhaps even get the land rezoned from residential to commercial. This certainly won't do anything to improve the availability of housing when demand eventually picks back up, but then that's an entirely predictable outcome of attacking "speculation".
Better than vacancy tax is progressive real estate tax. The more properties you own, the higher tax rate on them you have.
This would force largest estate owners to drop their properties onto the market like hot potatoes. Then people who own just a few or none could buy them and make better use of them.
That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot. The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster, and also to include clauses against leaving until a new tenant had signed to replace you.
Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there.
Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene case there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands - or you can gift it to the federal government, which can sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather than contribute to the constriction of supply.
>by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there.
Unfortunately, the vacancies I am describing are unavoidable, because people do not rent apartments forever and empty apartments cannot instantly be leased.
>there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands
And pay the vacancy tax themselves? They'd be in the same position as the previous owners.
If the taxes are not the obvious hyperbole of 1M/day, there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out - and even accepting that ridiculous premise, there is the escape hatch for giving it the federal government the day-of, who obviously don't care about paying taxes to themselves.
The point is that there are logical paths where even punitive (or intentionally ridiculous) levels of vacancy taxes result in a decrease in real prices.
>there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out
Yes, but they are that the tenants pay the taxes. Capitalists are free to move their money anywhere they want to keep the return on investment up, but people must live somewhere.
An owner-occupier would naturally not have to worry about vacancy taxes. If you are a landlord, can't afford the vacancy tax, and would lose money on tenancy, eventually your most efficient option is to simply give away the home to someone who will happily take it.
Sounds like a great way to make owning and building apartment buildings let's attractive.
Owning buildings, yes. In this hypothetical and ridiculous scenario, the only people buying would be those who intended to live there. This would decrease prices (it is no longer a speculative asset) and increase home ownership rate. Functionally no one would own a whole apartment building just to rent it out. Individual units would end up being sold the way condos are. Building "apartment" buildings would still be attractive, because they could be sold as condo units. With no one willing to rent, there would a more direct demand from actual buyers.
Let me once again reiterate that the 1M/day vacancy tax is an obviously ridiculous proposal, and any real-world policy would have many more caveats and be orders of magnitude less radical. But even something so obscenely and grossly unrealistic has potential for solving the supply issue, so we should be considering the more moderate solutions.
Even then no, I build a 30 unit building, covid 22 hits, nobodies buying, I'm on the hook for 30mm / day. Nobody would even build with that risk. You'd have low density housing, single unit homes and massive traffic/pollution issues often associated with suburban sprawl.
Yes, 1m/day is hyperbolic, but if you put the constraint on the suppliers (builders, owners), and the demand is inelastic (you've got to live somewhere), then the outcome is to constrain supply for maximal benefit.
1) Buyers can be arranged during construction
2) A builder can hypothetically continue "building"/renovating the units indefinitely until they have a buyer. Alternatively, nothing about this hypothetical scenario requires the original constructor to even pay the $1M in the first place - it could be deferred, or be another rate entirely.
Side note) Landlords/owners aren't suppliers, they are speculators.
>A builder can hypothetically continue "building"/renovating the units indefinitely until they have a buyer.
If that's true, then speculators who do not want to bother renting can renovate the units indefinitely until never.
Rents are price-inelastic and are determined by the economic opportunity of the land.
Translation: landlords eat taxes.
(Landlords also eat pay-rises.)
>determined by the economic opportunity of the land.
That makes sense for agricultural land that is being worked as well as it can be, where there are already roads for tractors and no improvement could help it become more productive, but in a city the same square feet of land can support anywhere between one and a thousand residences depending on what is invested in to it.
If rent was really inelastic, anywhere that it was profitable to build housing would be a free infinite money opportunity, because no matter how high you stacked the apartments they'd all rent for more than it cost to build them. You'd be able to build a skyscraper with 100 floors of penthouses in the middle of a rich suburban neighborhood, if increased supply really did nothing to reduce rents.
David Ricardo, Law of Rent.
The rent of a land site is equal to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use, relative to the advantage obtained by using marginal (i.e., the best rent-free) land for the same purpose, given the same inputs of labor and capital.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/rent/ricardian-theory-of...
Income is income ---doesn't matter if that's ag, manufactures, retail, commercial, or wage or salary of a residential tenant.
The restriction of new housing increases rent on the remaining lots. NIMBYism, architectural codes, zoning, etc., serve to restrict what can be built, so that the rent on what can be built increases.
There's a great, highly readable, 1930s take on this in "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", Bernhard J. Stern. See the section title "Building".
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
https://rentry.co/szi3g
>The restriction of new housing increases rent on the remaining lots. NIMBYism, architectural codes, zoning, etc., serve to restrict what can be built, so that the rent on what can be built increases.
If reductions in supply raise the price, you are saying that it is elastic. I basically agree with you on this, it seems. Supply restrictions raise prices.
If price were elastic, the demand would change as prices increased.
Demand largely does not. Instead, as supply is constrained, the price increases because demand remains constant.
https://budgeting.thenest.com/price-elasticity-affect-housin...
This is the whole idea behind a land value tax. Where a tax is made on the unimproved value of land, surplus value is taken by the taxing authority (and presumably returned as public expenditures). The landlord cannot increase rent to compensate (supply hasn't changed, price has), and the result, if other conditions permit, should be increased supply in the sense that idle property is now rented, and low-density / low-value uses are replaced by higher-density / higher-value uses.
The tax applies to the unimproved value so that property investments which increase utility and utilisation are not discouraged. Idle land is penalised.
Real-world validation of the theory ... varies, though seems generally to bear it out. A considerable problem is in getting the LVT in place to begin with, and in dealing with other barriers to enhancement, including zoning and building codes.
In the alternative, increasing asset valuation allows property owners to benefit from constrained supply. Part of their gains come through rent, but a large share is simply in the asset inflation of their property. This can be exercised as collateral on loans for other spending or investment.
I think your facts are plausible but your terminology is wrong. The market can be elastic if either the supply or the demand is elastic, or both. You are saying that the price is not elastic but then contradicting yourself by correctly saying that supply changes change the price.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1093/aepp/ppr011
That's a paper talking about agricultural land use...
It details how and why land is price inelastic, and how elasticity is defined.
Economically, ag and urban land behave similarly. To wit: they're not making it any more. The supply is price-inelastic.
Your understanding is incorrect.
Tenants in cities don't rent land, they rent housing. You can vary the amount of housing on a plot by making investments.
Scarcity prices are determined mostly by the last units available. Imagine demand is just below supply: then very little of the price is driven by scarcity. Now imagine that demand is just above supply: it's not hard for prices to increase dramatically, because every item is being competitively bid on the price will increase until demand at that point is below supply again.
The only time you don't expect small improvement in supply to have an effect on price is when you're far from being supply limited.
> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless.
Why not? If supply actually does work to reduce housing affordability problems, it takes the wind out of the sails of housing speculation.
Speculators are attracted to markets where things are going wild and there is the promise of making stacks of cash. If the market is boring and stable and there's enough for everybody, they aren't interested.
Leaving a home empty is naturally expensive because of carrying costs (property taxes, maintenance, utilities, etc.). The only way it's worth it is if appreciation is so crazy high that it more than offsets that. Fix that more basic problem of rapid appreciation, and speculation will solve itself.
Of course, once your real estate market is broken at a basic level, things like speculation will ensue, and maybe vacancy taxes are a useful band-aid then.
> Leaving a home empty is naturally expensive because of carrying costs (property taxes, maintenance, utilities, etc.). The only way it's worth it is if appreciation is so crazy high that it more than offsets that.
Welcome to California!
> If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction.
Is 1,893 vacancies in the entire city of Vancouver close enough to "nobody" for you? Is it enough to fix the crisis and render housing affordable again?
Don’t assume the only options are a 100% fix or do nothing dropping prices by even 1% makes a significant difference.
Further these taxes aren’t about the every day situation they are to get the market to respond to temporary dips which helps deflate bubbles and keep the market healthy.
> Don’t assume the only options are a 100% fix or do nothing dropping prices by even 1% makes a significant difference.
This is hyped as the Big Headline Fix For Everything and its impact is trivial. 1% impact on rents? No way. Zero-point-one percent, maybe, but I still doubt. Why is anyone even wasting time talking about it? Where is their vision?
The opposition to vacancies in real estate is one of the most absurd memes I've seen recently. Imagine if you went to a supermarket and all the shelves were empty. That's what zero vacancies in the real estate market looks like! There's nothing wrong with available stock.
I think in context, "vacant" means a property that nobody is living in and is not on the market for rent. It's simply owned by someone as an asset. This was the complaint in some parts of Canada: Chinese owner/investors buying condos and not renting them out but just letting them sit empty.
Slap a "for sale" sign on the window. It's "on the market" now.
Imagine if the supermarket shelves were empty BUT there was a warehouse full of all the items that would normally be on the shelf, waiting for people to get desperate and pay more, while renting some fraction of them (bring that lightbulb back next week or keep paying indefinitely!).
> If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax
Hum... Yeah. The name for a tax that nobody pays is exactly "pointless".
If the aim of the tax is to raise revenue, then it’s pointless. If it’s to change behaviour, then perhaps it has worked.
If there was never anybody to pay for it, like the GP said, no, it didn't.
But if people don't pay because there was actually somebody doing the bad behavior and they changed, then it would be useful.
https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abund...
Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity.
Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you." But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.
As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives us the mandate to transform our public life.
Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go.
Walter Bruggemann, 1999
The reason this narrative lasts is survivorship bias. Those who survive were provided for and did prosper at least to some extent. They are ‘gods chosen’.
The untold millions that starved to death or died of disease or oppression get no vote and propagate no religion, yet in a divine universe they were just as much chosen too, just for a different fate. And of course they’re mostly the poor and disadvantaged, while the wealthy by and large tend to do just fine. I think I’ll throw my lot in with the wealthy, thanks.
Was there a larger message in your comment than "poor people starve, so no thanks, I wanna be rich"? I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but if that was it, I think you missed, literally, the entire point of the comment you are responding to.
It isn't saying you need to be poor to be godly. It's saying pointing your wealth toward your wants before the needs of your neighbors is wrong. Taking care of your own needs before the needs of others is martyrdom, and I don't think anything said above was saying that was required, or even suggested.
One final thought:
>while the wealthy by and large tend to do just fine
Is debatable. In times of peace and prosperity, yes, they certainly do. In times of turmoil however, they are often the first to suffer, because they grow sure that money will carry the same weight in all social orders, which is not true. People, without fail, look around for the reason there isn't enough to go around, and the first thing they see is the castle in the hill.
>God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty
There's nothing anywhere in that quote or analysis that talks about giving to the poor or helping your neighbour. It says god will do that, not that we should do that.
In fact how are we supposed to help our neighbours and uplift them in times of need if we're poor and have no surplus? The bible tells us not to worry about that, god will provide.
I know that other parts of the bible tell us to give our wealth to the poor, but actually supporting the poor is not our problem. God will do it. Giving away our wealth isn't functional, it's not with the goal of solving poverty, it's with the goal of impoverishing ourselves so that we become virtuous because otherwise we will be punished.
> In times of turmoil however, they are often the first to suffer
In times of turmoil the rich buy first-class tickets out of there and head to one of their secondary mansions. Too late for a ticket? Bribes will still get the job done.
And anyway it's turmoil, so food-/shelter-/safety-insecure people always suffer earliest and most.
Societies made of selfish people die out, and before dying out they impoverish themselves, because human interaction is not zero-sum. Narratives promoting altruism last because people can observe the misery selfishness causes. Cooperation, not rationality, is the fundamental advantage the humans have over other animals.
Historically altruism was the most important form of cooperation, and trade was secondary. Now we have additional modes of cooperation like science, law, employment, and free software; and trade has also improved its powers dramatically.
But they cannot substitute for altruism in all situations.
Sooo... they all had it coming?
I know that's the Bible's take on things, but I'm not sure how well that is supported by actual history.
You've probably met people who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through selfishness and distrust. More, probably, than who rendered their own lives miserable and poor through getting ripped off when being too trusting. In my own experience they are abundant.
My closest friend, (I set him up with his wife), lost his job in the financial crisis and then had his life ruined by a severe illness that’s still crippled him. He lost everything. My wife is a nurse, one of her friends at work lost her sister to cancer, her husband was killed in an accident and now she has terminal cancer. She has a young daughter.
How often on the news do we see third world countries devastated by natural disasters like tsunami, volcanoes, storms and floods. I remember the famines in Africa.
I particularly remember the aids epidemic and the way conservative Christian politicians in the US particularly said it was gods justice. Government spokesmen made jokes about it in news conferences. They thought it was funny.
I was otherwise a Thatcher/Reagan conservative, but I’m not forgetting that, ever. It’s what made me realise no political faction has a monopoly on the truth or morality.
I'm not sure if you think I'm saying that selfishness causes cancer or volcanoes? That's obviously nonsense. And all political factions are pretty selfish; that's what makes them factions. (Though some are so selfish they remain insignificant because they can't join coalitions and keep splintering after growing to some small maximum size.) So I don't think any of this is relevant to the question.
The question is whether, as the quote claims, the poor generally experience better life outcomes than the rich due to divine intervention. I would claim that the actual evidence is overwhelmingly that this is utter nonsense.
Furthermore the number of bible believers that actually impoverish themselves in order to avoid divine punishment is extremely tiny, so it seems to me that they don't believe this either.
Or that certain groups of people survive because the ideologies that they adopt help their group compete with people of other ideologies... and people with successful ideologies are able to convert others from less successful ones.
i'm sorry, the reason "altruism is better, actually" lasts is because all the altruists who could have told you about that are poor and dead, so be like them?
Great comment / quote.
FWIW, I don't identify as Christian, but was raised as such by devout parents. The Bruggemann citation reminds me of a book "The Jesus I Never Knew" which, despite the cringe-inducing title, is worthwhile, as a non-religious look at the life of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. If Christianity had developed differently, in an alternate reality where its adherents modelled their behavior on that person's teachings, what a different world it'd be.
A blogger named Andrew Sullivan coined a term "Christianist" to avoid conflating followers of Jesus' teachings with the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP. I hope the term catches on.
Bruggemann, Crossan, Stringfellow, and a few others trace a through-line of really very subversive dissent, back to the beginning, and make for really fascinating reading.
That would be Andrew Sullivan the eugenicist and warmonger?
Even a clock running backwards at double speed is right four times a day!
> the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP
"hijacked" to me would imply that a significant majority of GOP members are not willing and enthusiastic participants in the political shifts that have taken place, which is clearly false.
Great article. This is always the tension on the political left. Adding restrictions to protect a group accidentally creates downstream effects of hurting this group.
The right is no better and can tend toward abusive and unfair advantages.
Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
> Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
It might be more accurate to say, scarcity issues are worst when neither party advocates for abundance.
In housing, neither party advocates for densification nor deregulation on the front of zoning; instead party lines revolve around subsidized housing, mortgage industry regulation, etc.
In medicine neither party talks about increasing the supply of doctors(or the ability for hospitals to deliver care more efficiently without being hamstrung by insurance), party lines are fought over who pays for it.
In education the two sides might bicker over affirmative action and how Harvard decides which high school seniors get to attend; but not whether it’s OK that the worlds foremost university accepts only 2000 undergrads a year.
None of these are easy problems to solve, but the common theme is that both parties accept the status quo. Housing is scarce, desirable education is scarce, medical care is scarce.
On the other hand, food or gas prices start moving and it becomes a priority political issue for the current administration guaranteed. It’s night and day.
One could conclude the entire point of such debate(s) is to make sure nothing of importance gets changed.
This is the result we are seeing now. Nobody wants to fix the issue because then you wouldn't have the issue to berate the other side. It's better to campaign and raise money with that issue than to actually solve the issue.
That's still a lot more charitable than my take.
Imagine you are someone who does not want the healthcare problem to be solved. Wouldn't you want to pay both sides of the aisle to drum up pointless bickering?
Haha, this reminds me of that James Roswell character https://www.protocol.com/policy/w3c-privacy-war
Transparently stalling browser standards over privacy stuff but couched in different language.
Point of view I guess. I'm suggesting the politicians don't want to fix anything.
You seem to be implying that private companies--BigPharma--are more interested in keeping conditions chronic with medication than curing people.
They seem equally shit in my book
For housing, like many issues, it's definitely partisan. One party is anti-density and one is a big-tent umbrella. Elizabeth Warren was on the podium saying, "build, build, build!" during primary debates, while both Trump & traditional Republicans grumble about liberals "destroying the suburbs."
Disagree, the fact that individual politicians support certain policy does not mean that policy is partisan. Neither party pushes the issue, which is why for example lots of blue states never advance on density.
I’d say all in all the progressive left sub party could be considered pro density but doesn’t wield enough power to do anything about it except in small municipalities like Somerville MA.
Interesting article! But two corrections are in order:
"it is not like very many rich people have three apartments" - oh yes, they absolutely do - "or take nine years to finish undergrad" - let me tell you about a time and place in Europe that had effectively removed education scarcity with free college for everyone. People lurking in (sometimes multiple) degrees for close to a decade was so common that there was a word for it. Not that that was a terrible place to live, quite nice actually.
I have close friends in Germany who worked on multiple degrees for years without progress. While I personally don't see that as ideal life choices and they would agree, it actually came at very little cost for the university. The reason they took so long is because they were hardly studying. This also means not submitting homework, usually not coming to lectures and taking up space there and more often than not, not even attending the exam, so there was nothing to grade either. In the case of my friends, it turned out the degrees they focused on initially weren't right for them in the end. But they were able to realize that on their own time and settle for something that suits them better and despite that aren't stuck with crippling debt.
Working on the side was a big factor why people put less time into their studies. As waiters, in jobs actually relevant to their degrees (especially engineers), or administrative jobs in companies. I couldn't really name any way how that would have hurt the economy or the universities. But the US economy has been and is far more dynamic, so maybe it does have some impact.
I think there are lots of reasons the US economy is more dynamic, but I don't think expensive university is it. Hiring and firing is easier/faster. More freedom for businesses in general. The rural area in Germany where I grew up in had no McDonald's because you somehow need permission from existing businesses to open a competitor. I don't fully understand this, but would lose all composure if this craziness were to stop me from opening a business. It's also easy to underestimate the massive boost that comes from a huge, trustingly homogenous market. I build a web app business in the US and there are 350 million customers right there. No need to translate into a bunch of languages, advertise in a bunch of languages. Regulations between states might differ, but there usually are solutions already in place because so many businesses have the cross-state issues (taxes or whatever).
Doubt that has anything to do with the dynamism of the US economy - that’s all due to the US being much more business friendly, market size, few employer regulations, immigration, cultural values around entrepreneurship and dreaming big, a more level playing field, etc
Someone was paying for those clowns to goof around. The taxpayers were being stuck with crippling debt.
What cost did they create? Their parents paid for their housing and food. One of them later made money doing tech support jobs at the university and after finally graduating through that got jobs in IT.
Other than being enrolled and going to 2-3 lectures in a hall with 100-200 students at the beginning of every semester they didn't use any services provided by the university.
Important article. This is the biggest blindspot of our era. We've enculturated several generations into a zero-sum scarcity mindset because we feared growth. As population growth collapses, the change that we need in the zeitgeist is going to be jarring to most people.
Author seems to have a hard-on on blaming "progressives" for the problems, but their evidence seems to be just this:
> This is doubly mysterious when we consider that artificial scarcity policies are often championed by self-described “progressives”, a label usually reserved for those concerned with improving the lot of the less fortunate. While the American Medical Association might be traditionally conservative, elite colleges are famously liberal, and restrictive housing policy is a hallmark of our bluest cities.
Gee, I wonder if they have some bias there..
>College: Elite colleges are failing every abundance-agenda test imaginable. They’re hardly expanding the total number of admissions; their share of total enrollment has actually been shrinking; and they’re admitting fewer of the low-income students who gain the most by attending elite colleges in the first place.
Peter Turchin argues that we're overproducing elites and there aren't enough elite roles to go around. I'm inclined to agree. Think of all the elite business schools that are pumping out MBAs year after year.
While I think much of the article is right, the amount of time spent on dismantling housing NIMBYism is somewhat unfortunate. The analysis is right to some extent, but there are also valid reasons to consider that urban sprawl should be limited, while also protecting historic city centers, and trying to make sure normal people can still afford housing close to or in the center of their cities.
A very problematic tendency with a free housing market and free reign for development is that it ties the price of buildings to the price of the land they sit on. No one is going to, of their own accord, buy a piece of land in downtown Manhattan and build a low-income housing building there. So, free development does allow prices to overall go down even as the city grows larger, but at the cost of moving poor and middle-class people towards the periphery of the city.
Land near the city center and other landmarks is naturally scarce, there is no way to create an abundance of physiccal space. That inevitably drives the price of that land up as the city expands. The only way to prevent the rich buying it all up and excluding everyone else from those areas is for the city to regulate the need for low-income housing being built or regulate the price itself.
A better policy overall, though no one has managed it to any extent, would be to find a way of developing in a less centralized way - stop growing cities to this mega metropolis level, and somehow encourage the creation of more big-but-not-huge cities. Or, find a new way of organizing cities so that they are less centralized themselves.
Abig part of this, I suspect, would be reducing centralization of companies as well. The huge behemoths we have today control a vast amount of resources, so their decisions of locations naturally force people to gather in the same city, and create high value space. If instead you had a much larger range of much smaller companies, there would be less need to have huge HQs with thousands of workers in the same building a la Apple's Infinity Loop 1.
The best proof, I think, that this type of decentralized development can work at some scale lies in Europe. Even though individual European countries and cities have similar problems and tendencies to those in the USA, these are much more recent problems, and overall there are many times more large cities across the EU, and no mega metropolises like NYC or LA. And, many of these cities have city centers that are somewhat frozen in time for 100 or 200 years, not since the 70s, without reaching the ridiculous prices of San Francisco for example (though they might get there).
> there is no way to create an abundance of physical space.
Sure there is. The sky is the limit, quite literally. A 10 floor building can fit 10x the amount of people that a single house can.
We have the technology, we have people willing to put the time and effort into using it. The only thing stopping this is some nonsense law.
I was very explicit that I am discussing the land, not constructed surface.
My point is that the land close to a major attraction is forever scarce and thus expensive, and that this attracts only developers who want to build expensive constructions to maximize their return on investment. I agree with the article that this still pulls median prices down, but it does so by forcing middle class and poor people towards the peripheries. Taking this to the extremes, you get cities like Sao Paolo - with extremely expensive city centers and dirt-cheap favelas where people live in squalor.
Looking at my own city (Bucharest) this is very visible in new constructions - the farther away from the expensive city center most constructions are, the smaller the apartments, the less nicely looking etc. Of course there are exceptions, especially once you get to the suburbs, but this is the general trend for the city itself, and is a common trend in most cities.
Exactly. Transportation is another way to "compress" physical space in the sense that you can reach more of it for the same distance.
In the extreme case where we have ubiquitous teleportation, the only remaining reason to live physically near a desirable location would be bragging rights.
Which European cities do you think are good examples of this kind of development where a lot more land is more-or-less equally desirable while the city as a whole stays as desirable as NYC?
Frankfurt perhaps?
I don't take issue with housing as a topic which is most of the article because there actually is scarcity issues, but I take a lot of issues with the idea in general summed up in the piece as "Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity"
While I'm no fan of 'web3' or cryto I think the existence of artificial scarcity imposed on abundant digital resources not by a cartel but by ordinary people dispels that idea. Scarcity is in many ways the only way to create individuality and authenticity. We're already in a world of abundance in the West at least, our waistlines don't suggest that we lack in essential goods, with few exceptions.
The idea that bigger pie = more stuff = world better has little pull any more even among people who aren't particularly well off. Another user is quoting a Christian theologian, and I've personally seen younger people be interested in religion again, mostly for that reason. The article also mentions healthcare in the US but ironically it seems to me that abundance lifestyles are by far the biggest drivers of healthcare costs. We could safe ourselves a lot of doctor and dentist visits if we cut down the soda and took the bike out for a ride. I don't think it can be overstated how much of our disease burden is related to our consumption. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and so on. Among the poor predominantly.
It seems to me almost bizarre when one looks at countries like Singapore where national healthcare spending is 4% of the GDP, compared to 20% in the US that the issue is not having enough doctors. Rather than talking about the culture in which we live and how it's affecting us.
I feel like a huge amount (not all) of NIMBYism is also due to the total disregard for aesthetics or cohesiveness of new developments with existing neighborhoods. Look at new developments in Brooklyn
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62552986/...
vs. a Brooklyn Brownstone
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lXakKpLLBt65Mj0q-QKtmnoVLtQ=...
If you live on a block with the former, and someone comes in wanting to build the latter, of course you're going to say no. Some might say that this is just a preference for low-density housing, and big buildings will just always look worse to some people, but I disagree. There are plenty of attractive churches, schools, and other high-density buildings that don't look out of place.
The brownstones were hated when they were built, because they didn't fit in the neighborhood!
https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/14363665088091504...
Your personal aesthetics shouldn't dictate what others do with their property.
That tower isn't even the worst example, though. Philly is flooded with this kind of crap now: https://billypenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DSC_0484-10...
Really low quality builds, random stupid rectangles, you can hear everything your neighbor does, yadda yadda yadda. The market is so ridiculous, they can build it as cheap as possible and somebody will snatch it up no matter what.
A lot of them are quite big and use wooden frames, even though they're not really supposed to, because of a loophole with fire-retardant treated wood. There will likely be some major disasters in the next decade.
Kind of an unfair statement because those buildings are actually in downtown Brooklyn, which is a dense downtown in its own right. I don’t think there are many brownstones in that area. The buildings in the more residential areas tend to be far less conspicuous, even if they don’t tend to strictly hew to the styles of early 20th century architecture.
>Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity.
Sadly, this isn't the case. Being rich is about more than having abundance. It is about having 'above average' abundance with the 'richness' level being determined by how far above average you are.
Create a post scarcity society and the bar will move, likely with major societal consequences. I don't know if I'm ready for the paradigm shift.
I agree. Indeed, conspicuous consumption is often about showing off that you own things that are scarce (the more scarce, the better) and non-scarce items have little value in this context.
It's amazing how a city like New York has an abundance of food. All those restaurants and grocery stores. People can generally get what they need when they need it. It's a system so complex, no human can comprehend it. At best, you can apprehend it.
Imagine if a food czar was put in charge of feeding New York equitably... There would be shortages and black markets and all kinds of crazy things.
Isn’t it a good thing that these coastal hubs become too expensive eventually and stop growing. Doesn’t it force the economy to re-centre on hubs in other locations and give the rest of the country a chance to flourish. Do we really want most of the country living in the shadow of a few megacities.
I predict a whole lot of tech work being done from the likes of Montana and South Carolina as remote becomes the norm and people can choose not to live in cities.
I live in a former socialist country (slovenia, then yugoslavia), where housing went from something cheap, something you got for free from the government, or (literally) built yourself over the weekends to something that is not affordable at all.
Our current left parties blame the government not building enough housing, even though every government project is vastly overpaid (due to corruption).
But the real reason for pricing increases is regulation. Back in the time you could buy a plot of land and build. Usually you started building first, then dealt with the papers, permits and all the related stuff... and people knew where the papers won't be problematic, and build housing on plots that were actually ok to build on. In every village, you could buy a plot of land at the edge of it, and just make a house there. You could also literally build the house yourself... usually yu hired someone to dig out the basement, but a lot of the actual work was done by future-owners themselves and their friends. Yes, some houses didn't have proper insulation, or stuff like that, but you had a place to live in.
And now? Usually those same villages are the same size as they were before the breakup of yugoslavia, because you need a permit to start anything (and they're actually enforced), and local governments don't want to change zoning, because of NIMBY neighbours. You can't build/do anything by yourself anymore. We have huge areas of buildable land, empty, and in many places, the only way to build something is to buy an existing old house, tear it down, and build a multi-apartment building there, bringing the prices even higher.
Add to this speculative investments and buying dedicated apartments/houses for airbnb, and the young(er) generations are fucked.
(I'm not saying we should allow everything everywhere, but in places with not enough housing but enough land, we should rethink our zoning)
Looking like evidence for a severe scarcity of editors.
Right. It could have more succinctly summarized just by quoting Hayek's: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men [or people, if you'd rather] how little they know about they imagine they can design."
Doesn't this problem essentially rise and fall with wealth inequality?
If you have a plot of land and you can either build a McMansion for one family or an apartment building for 16 families, then (absent heavy-handed regulation) you're going to build whichever one is more profitable, right? And the story of the last ten years is that we build (relatively) more McMansions than we used to, because they are (relatively) more profitable than they used to be, because the rich have (relatively) more money than they used to. What am I missing?
You're missing that in most high priced housing markets, you can't just build an apartment building anywhere you can build a single family home.
That doesn't seem very relevant. Obviously there are places where you can realistically only build one or the other, but there's lots of places where you can build either, and if your goal is to increase housing density, those are the places you're interested in (regardless of what your method is).
edit: and it's also obvious that density can be affected by zoning laws, but I was assuming those are held constant (because a, they kind of are constant in that they don't change much, and b, the present phenomenon of rents rising sharply since 2005 is, I think, not generally believed to be caused primarily by a change in zoning regulations)
In most areas that have single-family houses, it is illegal to build 16-unit apartment buildings. In the places that most need more housing, this is the most true.
I guess I should've used a more realistic example (one home vs a duplex, or a 16-plex vs four single-family homes) but I really thought the point would be obvious. I guess not, so I'll try again.
You recognize that there are occasions when a developer has the option to build more density or less density on a specific piece of land, yes? I was using an exaggerated example (1 vs 16) to illustrate the more general concept of less-vs-more. I am arguing that, other things being equal, higher wealth inequality will lead to developers choosing to build less density, because an increase in wealth inequality implies that the rich have more to spend than the poor (relative to whatever previous period you're comparing to that had less wealth inequality).
I disagree. It's just another housing bubble. That should be bleeding obvious from looking at the article's FRED chart. Scarcity was not suspended from 2007-2012 when the previous bubble collapsed and brought housing prices down to settle on long-term inflation as if the previous 10 years never even happened.
Blaming NIMBYism instead of loose debt looking for a safe haven is either a well-funded political agenda or mass hysteria of bloggers getting wound up on each others' articles.
Great piece.
> housing scarcity benefits homeowners by giving them the option of selling their home at an inflated price later and downsizing or moving to a cheaper locale for retirement
If housing is fungible then the value of their downsizing destination will have also gone up. If your house price surges then that is good for you, unless you want to use this surge to buy a new house (like-for-like) which will have (maybe) also surged.
Thoughts?
That’s why it only benefits you if you want to downsize (you gain the inflated delta) or move to a cheaper location (you gain the inflated location premium).
This should generally hold for housing as well. Even though land is finite, we can build upward, so each individual new unit uses a negligible amount of land.
Perhaps the author has forgotten that the land base required to support a given human population cannot be expanded upward? The minimum area of productive farmland required to support a rather subsistence-level diet (95% vegetarian say) is about a hectare - two football fields - per person, according to most studies I've looked at.
Technology can mitigate some of these issues to some extent, and already have - extensive inputs of fossil fuels to agriculture in the form of fertilizer and diesel powered water pumps have doubled per-hectare productivity, but at the cost of fertilizer pollution and eventual exhaustion of groundwater supplies. Hence, we have to conclude that there really are hard ecological limits to human economic activity.
Property developers and their affiliated investors have an unfortunate habit of ignoring these realities, and for their own pockets it might make sense - build some housing, ignore the demands on the surrounding area, sell the housing, take the money and run. Most communities can see through these efforts. Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment.
P.S. If you want to examine 'artificial scarcity driving market prices' the place to start is the diamond industry.
> Tokyo-style tiny apartments
It seems you perhaps haven't been to Tokyo, or haven't been to America. The typical Tokyo apartment today is larger, newer, and cheaper than the typical apartment in New York. That's the result of decades of housing construction policy, in both places, but in opposite directions.
I researched your claim briefly. Doesn't seem very well-supported.
https://japanpropertycentral.com/2020/02/apartments-in-tokyo...
> "Just under 40% of all new apartments were in the 70 sqm (753 sq.ft) range, while just 9.1% were sized between 80 ~ 100 sqm. The biggest shift is in the 30 ~ 50 sqm (323 ~ 538 sq.ft) sector where the total share has increased by 3.1 points to 10% in 2019."
https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/why-the-size-of-an-nyc-apartme...
> "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975 square feet on average over the last five years — roughly a 5% increase... Despite much-hyped tiny housing trends, the vast majority of new development in the city over the last 20 years has been in the “luxury” sector (i.e., larger than average). Meanwhile, each year, unit combinations enlarge the average square footage of individual apartments, while shrinking the city’s housing stock."
That's actually the opposite trend on size in both places, isn't it?
Japanese apartments are furnished in a different way that makes them feel spacious even though they're tiny compared to apartments in the USA
My guess is the parent comment had a misconception because of that, or maybe because laissez-faire policies make Tokyo apartments way cheaper per square foot (you can take a job as a janitor in Shinjuku and easily afford a comfortable apartment within a 30 minute door-to-door commute)
> "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975 square feet on average over the last five years — roughly a 5% increase…."
I know you're quoting, but that sentence alone makes me suspicious; it represents an increase of under 3%, not 5%.
> Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment.
How do you figure? Japan has one of the most laissez faire real estate markets around. I would assume whatever steady state the housing market assumes is most profitable
Iain M. Banks and the culture novels speak of post-scarcity...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
> Health care: The U.S. has fewer physicians per capita than almost every other developed country, [...]
Interestingly, the U.S. has about twice as many firefighters per capita than other developed countries.
It's puzzling to me how some university hospitals and clinics seem to have greatly expanded without a commensurate increase in med school admissions.
No mention of how AirBNB has affected housing scarcity.
Are we in denial about that still?
Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics. You seem (to me) to have two conservative-centrist parties in power, both with extremely neoliberal economics, and with slight differentiations on very emotional side shows like abortion and gun control.
Pretty true for economics but not for much else. On pretty much anything cultural there are two very vocal poles and a bunch of people in the middle picking one pole or another as the lesser evil.
When it comes to housing both parties for different reasons promote something that looks a lot like protectionism. Republicans often try to keep housing values high, and Democrats like to punish real estate developers or alternatively have bizarre ideas about what makes housing affordable. They both accomplish their different goals by making it hard to build. Obviously there are regional differences in local parties. Republicans will often favor building out and not up, preferring suburban development. Democrats have lost the plot on housing, IMHO.
You see what most of us Americans can't.
We get too caught up in two-party partisanship to focus on the larger picture.
It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma, actually. We could collaborate on solving mutual problems but we know the other party isn't trustworthy. Or we could focus on just getting our own way and making sure the other party doesn't take advantage of us.
Socially the US is far more liberal than basically every country in Europe (even ignoring Eastern Europe.) Only people who have not lived in both places say otherwise. The US also -by far- spent more per capita during the COVID economic recovery than any country on earth (even excluding the retainment loans.) No country comes even close. That doesn't really fit the "right" wing dogma.
There's a myth around American politics largely pepetuated by people that have only had political experience in one place or only uses the media as a means to know the politics of countries. Even on abortion, the US has among the least restrictive in the entire world, looser than Germany, France, etc.
The big thing America really lacks is universal healthcare, which is the main axe people wield over the head of American politics to claim it's only corporatist right leaning. Government outlays really tell a different story than the narrative.
Within Europe, Germany and Italy eclipsed the spending of the USA in terms of %GDP, and globally, Japan eclipsed them - see https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107572/covid-19-value-g...
It's more than healthcare, the entire social security net is far more extensive in Germany than in the US. This also affects the part about COVID, one really important measure here was to essentially have the government continue to pay people in jobs that would otherwise have been lost during the pandemic. That was an already existing measure that was expanded during the pandemic.
> Socially the US is far more liberal than basically every country in Europe
You're telling me that rural Alabama is more liberal than Sweden? I think your viewpoint is leaning on definitions of "social" and "liberal" and "US" that are not universally understood.
New York City alone has a similar population to all of Sweden, and is twice that of Alabama. I'm sure you can find 1.5% of the Swedish population that is just as conservative.
The problem here in the US is that Alabama has much representation in the Senate as NY state.
That's how the Senate is supposed to work.
That doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
If California wanted more representation in both the Senate and the House, it could divide. Instantaneously the population of California would get 2 Senators and probably a large number of House Seats. Further, it would help with the political divide in California: coast is left, farmers are right. You don't see California, as a political entity, chomping at the bit to subdivide.
As to the particulars of your comment, States should have far more autonomy than they do under FDR's federalist system. States should be able to tax more, but with the Feds already eating 20-50% of the populations income, States have a hard time raising funds. If we weakened the feds, but first paying down the debt, Alabama might have a far more interesting economy.
California would likely divide itself in a way to advantage the current politicians that govern the state. Not really Gerrymandering as we know it, but a similar principle.
Republicans would obviously not accept this. We would likely replay the decades leading up to the Civil War, where adding states was a contentious and at times violent process.
The feds would also have to approve it. If Republicans can stop it, they will. If Democratic politicians can push it through, they would likely get blowback from moderates. Republicans would get power and seek to balance or even advantage themselves. We could end up with eight Dakotas (just kidding on this specific example; other Republican states might want to split too).
This is not a fight either party wants to start because it could be a disaster for them. The intended outcome (increase relative Senate representation) has slim odds and a high cost.
Extreme disagree. The United States does not have a party that represents the interests of working people, and has done almost nothing to stem the consolidation of corporate power for decades.
It’s not even a close contest. There’s literally not a labor party here.
There isn’t one in Europe either.
> The big thing America really lacks is universal healthcare
Throw in employee protections and reasonable amounts of vacation time, and I'm with you 100%.
Neither of those are side shows.
They are, because in both cases the party wanting to change the status quo cannot possibly do so and the party leadership know it. They are simply exploiting it for political gain with showy but pointless time wasting banner legislation to stoke up the base. The activists don't know it's pointless, but generally speaking the activists on both sides are dissociated from reality.
On gun control there is no conceivable way gun ownership, gun crime and gun death statistics can be meaningfully changed. They are just too many guns out there already. Those states that do have 'strict' gun laws by US standards are right next to ones that don't and have open borders. As has been said many times, once Sandy Hook happened and didn't shift the consensus on the issue, it was all over. Face it, school shootings are going to be a fact for a very long time. You can have some local regulation like no conceal carry and such, fine, but banning guns and getting them off the streets and out of people's homes at a society level is impossible and pretending that it isn't is disingenuous.
On abortion, pregnant women are just going to go somewhere that allows abortion. Face it, women are going to get abortions if they rally want them. You can make it harder and coerce some vulnerable women, but broadly you can't stop them all you can do is mess with them.
The only effect of strict punitive anti-regulation in either case is to aggravate members of the pro-community, and harm people in edge case situations.
At least that's how it looks from the other side of the Atlantic.
They absolutely are not, but in the context of economic scarcity, I can see why they're put off to the side when comparing policy.
The other way to view this is that america is a prosperous country, most americans recognize where that prosperity comes from, and instead are divided mainly be cultural issues.
I suspect immigration actually has a lot to do with it. I have a theory that, in the long run, immigration prevents the development of a meaningful left-wing party in the U.S. The left of center party ends up getting co-opted by immigrants who are open to same change, but not that much.
You can see this happening in the U.S. in real-time. Eroding support among hispanics may well cost Democrats the election in 2022. A notable fact about Hispanics is that they enjoy strong income mobility--typically moving up from the bottom to the middle within a couple of generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. If you're vastly better off than your grandfather who came here from Mexico, you may well be skeptical of efforts to change things too much.
They're more like a 'marketing scheme' than a sideshow.
We have a left, it's just overshadowed and punished by the Democrat centrist majority, and the right wing political majority. Plenty of politicians in the progressive caucus have been pushing for reform for years, but the sad reality of our political system is that it's incredibly difficult for them to pass legislation. But that's not to say we don't have a left.
Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice. The average European sentiment on race and immigration, such as their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is definitely considered right-wing in America.
>Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice. The average European sentiment on race and immigration, such as their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is definitely considered right-wing in America.
Just because the US is fixated on identity politics does not mean it leads on progressive social values. Germany, a country with a quarter of the US population and way less territory has hosted a third of the amount of refugees the US has. Not even mentioning the data on total amount of refugees hosted by the EU because it absolutely dwarfs the US. As a migrant to the EU, the path to (legal) residency was extremely straight forward and easy, compared to the US. This is without going into topics such as socialised health care.
I disagree. If anything, US is far too left. The current leftist politics and the administration is distinctly different from Obama's run. Btw, this goes for right as well (Trump vs. Bush era).
Worth going through this entire article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
Compared to Europe America skews politicians more slightly to the right and or center. Also, elected presidents become more centrist once they are in office .
> slight differentiations on very emotional side shows
Slight differences? In the U.S. right now there are states that would ban abortion immediately if Roe were overturned, and ones that allow abortion until birth, limited only be the conscience of the doctor. The two sides are further apart than the most extreme poles of the EU.
I think the GP was missing a comma or something - they probably meant that differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties (I should stress that this is about the parties, not thr voters), even those as embittered as abortion, gun rights, gay marriage etc, are small compared to the overwhelming amount of policy they agree on almost entirely (foreign policy, medical care, primacy of corporate interests, little will to battle climate change).
Sometimes the policies both parties agree on are in stark contrast to the will of the US electorate, such as the case of many recent wars, or Medicare for All.
Small in what sense? We have Obamacare and most people now support it, and there isn't that much support for program that's $3 trillion a year bigger. We supported foreign wars, and did a few, then we didn't, and so now we're not intervening in Ukraine. As you observe, we have little will to battle climate change. Everybody dislikes corporations in the abstract, but we vote with our wallets and keep voting for Amazon over the Mom & Pop. If you keep in mind that the median voter is like 45, I don't really see how the country doesn't closely reflect what most people want.
By contrast, our disagreements regarding what you teach my kids about the nature of marriage and our purpose on the earth, or the laws around terminating human life, or whether we should have a color blind society or not, seem pretty important by comparison. Whatever problems we perceive ourselves as having, we don’t trust others to fix them if we disagree about fundamental things like the socialization of children.
While Medicare for All itself is only polling at 55%, with most Republican voters (62%) opposing it, a public option is polling at a whopping 68% support, including 55% support among Republican voters [0]. And yet, neither party is willing to implement it (a public system would significantly reduce Healthcare costs for the entire economy - remember that the USA has by far the largest expenditure on health-care out of any country on Earth, while doing relatively bad among rich countries at outcomes).
For wars, the occupation of Afghanistan has been opposed by the public for at least 10 years before Biden withdrawing, with strong support from voters of both parties, as seen in both Obama, Trump and Biden winning with a platform of ending the war, but without any concrete action from the first two (if anything, Obama intensified the war, ordering even more illegal drone strikes on civilians than George Bush, and even publically admitting to assassinating an American citizen on "suspicion of terrorism").
Also, voting with your wallet doesn't work when Amazon undercuts the Mom&Pop, pumps billions into marketing, and outright buys what they can't compete with - as do all others.
[0] https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/24/medicare-for-all-publi...
> While Medicare for All itself is only polling at 55%, with most Republican voters (62%) opposing it, a public option is polling at a whopping 68% support, including 55% support among Republican voters [0].
Polling like that (do you want this free stuff?) is meaningless. Look at polls that ask how many people support taking action on climate change, versus ones that ask what people are willing to pay in higher utility bills for such action. People want change, but only if it costs less than $10/month: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-...
Even millenials, who skew liberal, generally would prefer smaller government if bigger government meant higher taxes: https://reason.com/2014/07/10/millennials-prefer-small-gover....
Americans support universal healthcare--right up until you propose to pay for it the same way everyone else pays for it, with payroll taxes on middle class people.
> And yet, neither party is willing to implement it (a public system would significantly reduce Healthcare costs for the entire economy - remember that the USA has by far the largest expenditure on health-care out of any country on Earth, while doing relatively bad among rich countries at outcomes).
And here is where the abstract choice rubber hits the political reality road. After the Obamacare experience, very few people believe that they'll get more from a government program while paying less. Also, people are broadly in disagreement about why healthcare costs more in the U.S. and what drives our outcomes.
> For wars, the occupation of Afghanistan has been opposed by the public for at least 10 years before Biden withdrawing, with strong support from voters of both parties, as seen in both Obama, Trump and Biden winning with a platform of ending the war, but without any concrete action from the first two
Obama won because he was willing to recognize the war as a mistake, but that isn't the same thing as believing we should pull out. Opposition to ending the war didn't reach a decisive majority until 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/world/asia/support-for-af.... And by the end of Obama's term, we were down to 1/3 of what they had been at the start of Obama's term: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-41014263. Even then, the majority of Americans disapproved of the execution of Biden's pull out: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-give-biden-low-ma...
> (if anything, Obama intensified the war, ordering even more illegal drone strikes on civilians than George Bush, and even publically admitting to assassinating an American citizen on "suspicion of terrorism").
Virtually nobody cares about that.
> Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics.
Maybe from a European or South American perspective but not from the perspective of the world as a whole.
I saw someone else make the same (IMO absurd) claim on HN yesterday and responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31335968
tldr; compare the US with China, Japan, India, or any other large country. The US is considerably less conservative than most—though not quite all—of the world.
The claim that the US is particularly conservative only really makes sense coming from an extremely Euro-centric worldview.
I think you nailed it.
Where I live, housing scarcity is mostly drive by rich-investors and then in general supply chain issues.
I am sure reasons vary locally all over the place.
But at my location if you could stop investors from buying houses it would help a lot.
The article addresses this.
The article simply shows this is not born out by evidence in certain cities. That doesn't mean it can't be true in others.
In general, it seems pretty clear that if a city is attracting new people, the article is right: whatever else you do, keeping the housing supply limited will increase prices. The mistake NIMBYs make is typically to assume the city population won't grow if they prevent new housing stock, but this is not the case - even if a city has tight regulations on no new housing, adjacent communities will likely not, and will simply cause sprawl from there.
However, there may be cities that are not seeing significant population growth, and are still seeing significant price increases, for various other reasons (tourism, realty as investment, gentrification, etc).
Yes. Housing is expensive for the same reason bitcoin is expensive, not because of scarcity.
> The problem with redistribution is that it cannot overcome an artificial cap on supply.
Yes it can.
Tax the unimproved value of the land, not the people who live and work there. "Redistribute" the wealth generated by the people who work in the city to the people who work in the city, not to the landlords and property owners. Make it pointless to sit and hoard property while you wait for other people to make it more valuable.
Suddenly, the incentives are better aligned.
> Make it pointless to sit and hoard property
I can assure you that property owners, in high cost of living areas, would love to "improve" their land, by building lots of tall buildings on that land, if it were legal to do so.
Its the laws that prevent them from acting on their incentives.