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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

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Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#191

Post by mantas »

missedthecue wrote: post #182
mantas wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate bubble would pop for simple reason that were would be significantly less people overall. And much lower real estate prices could amortize a lot of wages shrinking, from labour perspective.

Real estate bubble won't pop with a shrinking population, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $10,000 houses and all of them are overpriced. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are, without hyperbole, more expensive than they've ever been.

Japan or Korea are not shrinking that much, but they’re getting older. Give it a couple decades when last bigger generations start vanishing entirely en masse.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#192

Post by mantas »

pqtyw wrote: post #184
mantas wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.

I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.

That’s what is going on here

- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations

- parties can take capped membership fees

- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously

- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.

Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#193

Post by Yizahi »

93po wrote: post #126
anon191928 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact

this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think: University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders Stanford University - 21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17 Cornell University - 10 Georgia Institute of Technology - 7 Carnegie Mellon University - 7 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7 Harvard University - 6 University of Oxford - 6 University of Cambridge - 6 University of Pennsylvani…

Doesn't that list consist entirely of the top of the top world universities, with small-ish admittance numbers and sky-high tuition price per year? I think you are kind of proving the point of the top commenter :)

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#194

Post by esafak »

pqtyw wrote: post #188
esafak wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience. I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to…

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not equating the values themselves, as you said they are the polar opposite. And to be honest I'm certainly not a fan of moral relativism in the direct sense. The methods seem more concerning. First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think…

> First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.

Once you have a democracy, you are not supposed to dictate from the top but distribute political power, and decision-making. The US has seen the executive's usurpation of power from the other branches of government since the turn of the century. Such an unbalanced government is by definition inimical to democracy.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#195

Post by missedthecue »

mantas wrote: post #191
missedthecue wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate bubble won't pop with a shrinking population, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $10,000 houses and all of them are overpriced. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are, without hyperbole, more expensive than they've ever been.

Japan or Korea are not shrinking that much, but they’re getting older. Give it a couple decades when last bigger generations start vanishing entirely en masse.

Japan is already shrinking a million people per year, and Korea about 100k, but both are accelerating. It won't be long before Korea is also shrinking a million people per year.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#196

Post by maest »

pezezin wrote: post #180
k__ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.

Japan is a really rigid country that values stability, hierarchy and following rules above all else. There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990. And yeah, the houses might be cheap, but they are also tiny and most Japanese cities are ugly as sin. Not a great example IMHO.

> There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.

There are many many reasons that go into explaining an economic outcome.

Reducing everything to a perceived cultural difference is wrong and intellectually uncurious.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#197

Post by ericmay »

rangestransform wrote: post #179
ericmay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise. Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly. Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly…

It would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciates, people invested in business that provide something to scoring instead of land, and we could periodically tear down housing and rebuild it for cheap so that people can live in nicer residences

I think it's very difficult to compare policies in a meaningful way, and be curious to understand why you believe it would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciated, and you could be right, but I don't think your claim that periodically tearing down housing and rebuilding it for cheap means nicer residences. On its face it seems that the opposite is true: cheaper materials means cheaper housing, but not necessarily nicer housing. One way that this claim is suspicious to me is that older houses in the United States are much nicer, if maintained, than newer builds, dollar for dollar and the quality of craftsmanship and materials isn't easy to replicate today. I have actual hardwood planks for flooring. Today if you want "hardwood flooring" it's typically a series of interlocking planks for easy/cheap install (and substantial markup) but not necessarily nice.

And the homes I've seen in Japan personally didn't seem to stand out to me as particularly nice but maybe you have some examples that you are thinking of or a different experience?

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#198

Post by dot1x »

ljf wrote: post #14
adastra22 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a trope?

Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...

Ehm... definitely NOT!

> Ultimately, we found that the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year is still largely accepted as a valid estimate by academic economic historians, at least in England for a period starting around 1350 and lasting between a few decades and more than a century, depending on the methodology used to study the data.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#200

Post by ljf »

dot1x wrote: post #198
ljf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...

Ehm... definitely NOT! > Ultimately, we found that the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year is still largely accepted as a valid estimate by academic economic historians, at least in England for a period starting around 1350 and lasting between a few decades and more than a century, depending on the methodology used to study the data.

As below; Totally agree - their lives were no doubt hard and busy with back breaking work - my 'yes' was a 'yes it is a trope' - not a 'yes they barely worked
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