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The room the economy can't see

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Re: The room the economy can't see

#141

Post by eszed »

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 agree. To expand your point, that requires upstream regulation of trash incinerators (and road safety, which I'll ignore because developed economies mostly have that at least nominally in place), to make sure it's not a noxious neighbor. Where that doesn't exist, there will be pressure for (blunt force and inefficient) zoning codes to keep the smelly stuff away.

That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)

There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.

I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#142

Post by inigyou »

pixl97 wrote: post #127
EliRivers wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space" I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?

Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis. The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things…

What happened to Tornado Cash, Session, GrapheneOS and others is a soft ban on creating privacy tools.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#143

Post by AndrewDucker »

jplusequalt wrote: post #136
AndrewDucker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.

The real issue isn't inflation, it's that UBI is too bloody expensive in practice.

Entirely true.

If you want UBI without massive inflation then you have to suck back in most of the money you've produced.

Of course, you can then do that pretty sensibly so that you don't have cliff edges like we do at the moment.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#144

Post by inigyou »

jplusequalt wrote: post #129

I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell. UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale. There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the b…

UBI would overhaul the economy, but it's not like that doesn't happen regularly, just not for the benefit of workers. It's got to be studied before being implemented on a wide scale but there's no reason to assume it's not possible.

Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#145

Post by inigyou »

ponector wrote: post #116
AndrewDucker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

UBI isn't positive for everyone either, above a certain income point people have to be paying more in tax to balance it.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#146

Post by inigyou »

fortzi wrote: post #95
occz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's happens to the price of construction when the state suddenly commissions millions of homes?

when each home is a cardboard shack?

Re: The room the economy can't see

#147

Post by inigyou »

throwaway70345 wrote: post #63
Davidzheng wrote: post #21

Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?

It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage. Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name f…

But it has to be done by everyone at once. A single factory owner paying a higher wage doesn't see that benefit. It only works if all the factory owners do it.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#148

Post by frameset »

infecto wrote: post #48
multjoy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space. >t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.

I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization. The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article. Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play out…

> The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby

The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.

Re: The room the economy can't see

#149

Post by eszed »

cousin_it wrote: post #69
bluGill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless. I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property…

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom. Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a re…

> if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air

Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?

Re: The room the economy can't see

#150

Post by pixl97 »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #80
mschuster91 wrote: post #7

Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets. The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces a…

Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and sp…

>which is the central thesis here

No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a swell idea. The population exploded.

Then you couple this with the technological revolution and the necessity of training huge amounts of the population for specialists jobs if they want to make a living and suddenly a boat load of kids doesn't make any sense at all. And it's getting to the point of the squeeze that having any kids doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people.

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