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Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

lareviewofbooks.org

211–220 of 229 posts

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because at the micro level, investments can be sub-optimal when they could be replaced by better more productive investments. At the aggregate level, the alternative to investment is just economic inactivity. At this level, turning investment into fiat means stopping economic value creation and preventing economy value retention. Unless you really believe that the unemployed would be destroying more than 100% of…

Sorry, but you stated the inexistence of bad investments on aggregate, and you support that extraordinary claim with a rant about stores of value? Anyway, that rant makes no sense. You can't just informally move from real and nominal values at will, as you can't claim that in a population, if everybody lose any amount less than 100% of their wealth, everybody would get richer. Or better, well, you can claim it, you j…

I like to make simplified agrarian economy metaphors:

Say you had an isolated farming village where people wanted to save to be able to eat in the winter. It is important that farmers invest their profits into additional production to have something to eat in the winter, even if, because of perdition, the stored crops are only worth 90% of the initial investment required to produce them.

Otherwise, if they instead mandate their government to create a currency that keeps 98% if its real value when other forms of savings available don't, most farmers are going to work, trade part of the crop they don't want to eat to diversify their diet and keep their cash profits to be able to buy something to eat in the winter. They will not produce a crop to store for the winter since it would only return -10% and their central banks promised to keep money at -2% real value.

However, now comes winter and all farmers have cash but few have anything to sell because they didn't reinvest their cash in the production of a stored crop for the winter!

It's going to be difficult for the government to control inflation in such conditions because there will be too few goods for the amount of money people will want to spend. If the government manages to control inflation it will be by depressing the nominal value of the crops of the few farmers who did invest and save a crop for the winter. The central bank might do this by giving high enough interests payment on cash to prevent people from wanting to spend it immediately. In any case, people won't eat much during the winter.

This could all have been prevented if the central bank had kept money devaluating sufficiently and farmers would not have kept their savings as cash but would have reinvested them into an extra crop for the winter and have continued to trade during the winter.

What you call allowing "malinvestment", I call allowing sufficient production or production capacity to fill the needs of the future even if the returns are quite negative on this production.

Note that there are parallels with farmers saving for the winter and a baby boom saving in preparation for retiring and stopping to work.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a very good question. There are really a few possible answer to this. The main one is that those clever people that can make it into the ruling class, but choose to reject it, are not a worry to the ruling class since these people are not going to organise a revolution from outside. If you are not interested in ruling then you are not a worry to those in power. More fundamentally most very smart peop…

I'm curious about the ideas that people have when they speak of such subjects, can you possibly enumerate on the other answers that you had in mind besides the main one you listed?

I am of course speaking as an outside observer to the ruling class, but I have some personal interaction with this class (Australia is not that big). The vast majority I have met are intelligent and decent people. Their one major flaw is they believed that they made it there on merit, when in fact they all came from very privileged backgrounds (both genetically and environmentally). If you believe that you are rich and powerful because of your own hard work then you are prone to dismiss people who aren't rich as just the people who have just not worked hard enough.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#213
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if the person who downvoted this anonymously would chime in as to why. Because this is exactly what a landlord is.

I can see why. This argument goes beyond simply just landlords and rent into a critique about the dark sides of capitalism itself. In capitalism you can not only own land as an landlord but you can also own labor. Someone who owns the corporation, can sit on the profits, dividends, and growth without producing actual GDP himself. It's very similar to the landlord situation. The owner of the corporation essentially su…

I would say that investing looking for growth and creation(Y-Combinator), is much different than buying an unchanging asset, doing nothing to it and simply collecting a non-trivial portion of the renter's value created. It's the difference between creating new value and simply gaining control of a static asset to extract rent.

EDIT: I should add I appreciate that you took the time to shed some light on what the downvote may have been about.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might mean population genetics, not evolutionary biology. If you study population genetics you might discover what results from assortative mating.

How on earth would you study evolutionary biology without studying population genetics? Is a bit like saying not to study mathematics because you actually need calculus.

Evolutionary biology is a real big field. Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level.

I was not suggesting to not study evolutionary biology (we should just call it biology as there is no such thing as non-evolutionary biology), just explaining what is the area you need to study if you want to understand the question being discussed.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#215
post #62

TL;DR We vote and so politicians listen to our desires. Falling house prices would be a boon for renters and first-time buyers (and probably for society at large), but their political clout is less than that of middle-aged, middle-class property owners. Link baity article with no real "answer". Rents and house prices follow simple supply and demand over long term. Cities are either already saturated or don't allow ne…

Cities are only "saturated" if you consider existing zoning. American cities in general are distinguished by having a very large proportion of single family homes, right in the city, generally on relatively large lots. And of course, the homeowners are relatively influential in local politics so they vote for policies that prop up the value of their assets by creating artificial scarcity. Some cities have been buildi…

Even if you removed all these single family homes inside city and built skyscrappers instead, the additional units will get filled up pretty soon and at some point not too distant, you will be in the same situation again where you are now. The key fact here is that cities are seeing huge migrations from other areas since last couple of decades. There 100s of thousands of people piling up each year. Eventually they will get saturated. In large scheme of things, cities are artifact of ancient times when transportation was hard and natural landscape for habitat was scarce. Now both problems can be solved even for extreme places such as Dubai and there is no reason for huge swaths for human population to be concentrated in cities.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#216
The author does not cite the true reason for the high cost of housing in NYC (I live in Manhattan), SF, (and I'm told Bombay) which is 1) using politics to create artificial scarcity of housing through zoning density restrictions ("rent seeking"in microeconomics or "green belting") and 2) overuse of historic landmark status. This is well-recognized by economists, but I suggest reading this Op-Ed by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.... Nobelist and NY Times Columnist Paul Krugman cites Glaeser as well.

What I find frustrating is that people write and publish articles without consulting the experts like Glaeser or consulting any economist for that matter.

Prices rise because of scarcity. The high cost of housing is from inflated land costs through politically induced scarcity which is done through zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. It is really that simple, yet many writers don't seem to understand that concept.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super low rates are bad all the time. They allow many things to exist that shouldn't, while the viable businesses have to pay higher prices for all their inputs. When you have cheap money, more people think marginal investments now make a lot of sense. But if you create too many online dog food companies, eventually most of them have to be shut down. It would have been better to allow an organic recovery. And remove…

>And remove the impediments to hiring. What're those?

Anything that makes labor more expensive than the price the market is willing to pay.

Government adds a lot of costs and even fixes the price of unskilled labor in the belief that these workers are benefiting.

But if the total cost of labor is higher than employers are able to pay for labor, they won't hire. This is especially true in a downturn.

If we want to assist these workers, it would be far better to help them directly instead of forcing employers to do it. We'd avoid distorting the market place and shutting a certain percentage out of it altogether.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth would you study evolutionary biology without studying population genetics? Is a bit like saying not to study mathematics because you actually need calculus.

Evolutionary biology is a real big field. Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level. I was not suggesting to not study evolutionary biology (we should just call it biology as there is no such thing as non-evolutionary biology), just explaining what is the area you need to study if you want to understand the question being discussed.

Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=population+genetics+bsc

oh no it isn't

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolutionary biology is a real big field. Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level. I was not suggesting to not study evolutionary biology (we should just call it biology as there is no such thing as non-evolutionary biology), just explaining what is the area you need to study if you want to understand the question being discussed.

Typically population genetics is its own separate subject at the university level. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=population+genetics+bsc oh no it isn't

Subject as in unit, not subject as in degree. When I taught population genetics I taught population genetics as one half of a unit on human genetics. I would have loved to devote an entire unit to population genetics, but the timetable did not allow it.

As a unit it often is called something else to appeal more to students and is more often mixed in with other biology fields. This is a general trend across biology where areas that were once separate fields have come back together with the rise of molecular biology.

Re: Why Rent Is So High and Pay So Low

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Actually Paris is quite smart, she just plays an idiot for the masses. People said the same thing about George W. Bush. We have yet to see any evidence for that assertion, both for him and Hilton. >>There are plenty of dumb rich as even with assortative mating your children will be normally distributed, just from a higher mean. Quite a bold claim. I'd like to see a citation.

Like another poster said, GWB scored 1206 in his SAT - that is below the 80th percentile. An 80th percentile IQ score is 113 - it will not get you into Yale or Harvard unless you are both a legacy admit as well as a son of a millionaire.

Don’t only the right hand side of the bell curve take the SAT [1]? Also hasn’t there been significant inflation in SAT scores over time [2]?

1. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_154.asp

2. http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RR-02-04-Dorans.pdf

Edit. This article is rather interesting [3]. I am not sure how much we can draw from SAT marks from along time ago other than GWB was not an idiot nor the smartest person at Yale. No dumb person is going to graduate from Yale even if they are a legacy student.

3. http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2000/01/bill...

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