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The room the economy can't see

wilsoniumite.com

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Re: The room the economy can't see

#111

Post by appplication »

kubb wrote: post #91
admjs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids. Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).

These are good examples and it’s even worth noting that the net impact of these can be a huge boost to the market. But it is a local and greedy optimizer. It doesn’t think “would having public transit improve the economy long term” it thinks “could I make enough on fares to justify the investment” (which is almost always no, at least relative to other investments). This is the nature of positive externalities. They are value that the market is unable to weigh in its decision making.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#112

Post by atmavatar »

derektank wrote: post #64
layer8 wrote: post #15

We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.

The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.

I would expect such a grant to be handled by local/city government, which should have the local knowledge you speak of.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#113

Post by cogman10 »

cousin_it wrote: post #102
cogman10 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones. Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of prop…

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

I disagree.

I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.

It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#114

Post by bluGill »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #110
bluGill wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if there is any alternative. Every other system as well has people who are good at psychology spreading propaganda.

Oh I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just saying if they aren't really your choices, why is making them valuable to you? Sure, you have 30 different choices of peanut butter to pick from, but you always pick the same one, because it's what your mom used when you were a kiddo, or because you don't like the oil separating ones, or because the chunky makes you feel like it's healthy even though it's loaded down with…

I have changed my peanut butter choice - when science started realizing trans fat was a problem I switched before the law changed to reflect science. I have also tried various of the 30 different options in other situations and found the one I personally like best. The value isn't just that I can make a choice, it is also that other people really do make different choices.

You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#115

Post by dh2022 »

bluGill wrote: post #103
forgetfreeman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own." Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value. You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incin…

Why do I care about a trash incinerator? The truth is I don't. I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.

I don’t follow. Your first sentence says you do not care about trash incinerators, presumably next to your house. Your second sentence says you care about the smell.

Trash incinerators are very smelly. You are contradicting yourself. I don’t get it.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#116

Post by ponector »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #79
phkahler wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.

It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X. (I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)

There are multiple points against such comparison: 1. Minimum wage goes up - for some amount of people. Most are not feeling it as they are not on the minimum wage or not working. 2. Salary is not UBI, it is actually earned, taken from revenue.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#117

Post by duskdozer »

svnt wrote: post #59
ixtli wrote: post #9

Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us w…

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

It's possible we're at the point now where it fools me, but I didn't see it that way. I think more evidence against would be the fact that the author discloses genAI usage in another article [0] and provides their own version of the same [1].

[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

Re: The room the economy can't see

#118

Post by grey-area »

admjs wrote: post #76
kubb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

Healthcare.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#119

Post by ponector »

occz wrote: post #78
phkahler wrote: post #22

>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.

Radical concept: you could provide UBI in the form of housing, food and transportation

Food and transportation is extremely cheap nowadays. Big bag of rice is couple dollars and a bicycle is a 100$.

Oh, people don't want affordable food but a 20-buck burrito and a 100k truck of ridiculous size?

Re: The room the economy can't see

#120

Post by kupfer »

Wilsoniumite wrote: post #41
alex_suzuki wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.

They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one: https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...

On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.
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