IMO: Wealth/money/capital is more like heat. Heat doesn't pool, it spreads (although it spreads faster through different materials.)
Maybe something like products or workers pool like water but I don't think wealth really does.
Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
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Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#12"taxation" is the drainage, if we understand Marriner Eccles.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/08/reading-between-t...
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#13I remember reading an article about how a large proportion of tech venture capital ultimately makes its way into the pockets of Silicon Valley landlords. Georgism posits as a general principle that a lot of money is captured as land rent.
Yep, that's exactly the kind of possible and believable explanation (not perfect of course, but a generalisation) that I think would be useful to examine and prove/disprove. (separately: perhaps Georgism would require some upgrades for today's digital economy where land isn't necessarily required for production)
Well Georgism says land deserves special treatment because "downtown San Francisco land" is a finite resource you can't make more of. Perhaps that would also apply to tech "real estate" like, 3 letter .com domains?
But I think a lot of big tech's expenses are engineer salaries in High Cost of Living areas, which really does come down to landowners preventing housing construction there.
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#14I remember reading an article about how a large proportion of tech venture capital ultimately makes its way into the pockets of Silicon Valley landlords. Georgism posits as a general principle that a lot of money is captured as land rent.
Yep, that's exactly the kind of possible and believable explanation (not perfect of course, but a generalisation) that I think would be useful to examine and prove/disprove. (separately: perhaps Georgism would require some upgrades for today's digital economy where land isn't necessarily required for production)
To quote P&P:
"The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities..." (in the context of contrast with "capital")
So I don't think any upgrades are required; just perspective.
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#15I think the concept makes sense if you think in terms of e.g. big tech consolidation: Startups all over the land, eventually accumulating in the basins of Amazon/Alphabet/Meta.
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#16Economist here. Probably not, but I’m not really sure what you’re asking? What do you want this concept to do? - do you want to know where people will migrate to? - do you want to know how people will sort themselves based on some feature they possess?
Hey - thanks for responding. I think it was this HN discussion[1] of housing prices that led me to wonder about this; I considered commenting there but it could've seemed like an obscure tangent. It seems unsustainable societally for housing prices to continue to rise long-term, and I'm wondering if there is a way to graphically represent the state of the market and the players involved, in order to first of all unde…
> unsustainable societally for housing prices to continue to rise long-term
Housing supply is rising slower than the supply of dollars.
Simple supply and demand, you should expect housing prices to continue to rise long-term and it shouldn't be a surprise, nor should it be considered unsustainable if the supply of dollars continue to increase at this rate.
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey - thanks for responding. I think it was this HN discussion[1] of housing prices that led me to wonder about this; I considered commenting there but it could've seemed like an obscure tangent. It seems unsustainable societally for housing prices to continue to rise long-term, and I'm wondering if there is a way to graphically represent the state of the market and the players involved, in order to first of all unde…
> unsustainable societally for housing prices to continue to rise long-term Housing supply is rising slower than the supply of dollars. Simple supply and demand, you should expect housing prices to continue to rise long-term and it shouldn't be a surprise, nor should it be considered unsustainable if the supply of dollars continue to increase at this rate.
If, on aggregate, each person's financial inlay over life remains in balance with those increased costs of purchase: then what you say is fair.
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, that's exactly the kind of possible and believable explanation (not perfect of course, but a generalisation) that I think would be useful to examine and prove/disprove. (separately: perhaps Georgism would require some upgrades for today's digital economy where land isn't necessarily required for production)
Well Georgism says land deserves special treatment because "downtown San Francisco land" is a finite resource you can't make more of. Perhaps that would also apply to tech "real estate" like, 3 letter .com domains? But I think a lot of big tech's expenses are engineer salaries in High Cost of Living areas, which really does come down to landowners preventing housing construction there.
Increasingly, I'd guess that the equivalent of land is "pure mind-stuff", as someone whose name I forget described it.
(and companies absolutely do not pay their taxes on that: quite the opposite, they pay exorbitant compensation in order to convince people that no such taxes are required of them as corporations, and indeed to help persuade the owners of the mind-stuff that taxes themselves are problematic)
(.com, ipv4 addresses - yes, examples of similar circumstances, but not the core)
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#19The hydrology term you are looking for is catchment. I suspect an analogous economic "catchment", could be a company town, or a country who's economy is closed to the rest of the world.
Re: Ask HN: Do 'economic drainage basins' exist?
#20"taxation" is the drainage, if we understand Marriner Eccles. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/08/reading-between-t...
Performing a DNS lookup on that same domain name, they seem to have claimed[1] in 2013 that the fair price of bitcoin is zero; that's certainly a valid opinion, although not one that appears to have stood the test of time.