Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 600 posts

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#211

Post by RobotToaster »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #42
neilv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

YIMBY policies just end up with a small number of luxury condos being built.

You need SHIMBY policies, social housing in my back yard.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#212

Post by jmholla »

keiferski wrote: post #90
asynchronous wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want a financial person to explain to me why we continue to expect exponential growth of companies’ revenue year after year, and why that makes any logical sense in a world with finite resources.

A hundred years ago, the average person had little free time, little spending money, and little to actually spend that money on, if they had any. Human attention is absolutely not a finite resource. Or at least companies haven’t come close to monetizing all of it.

I think you need to take your comparison further back. As I understand it, before the Industrial Revolution, people had plenty of free time. For instance, looking at the Middle Ages, many spent the morning tending to their fields and then the rest of the day was theirs.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#213

Post by binary132 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #178
toomuchtodo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple solution is to remove the local district's ability to veto local development. At least, as long as city-level/state-level planners don't have an agenda that favors certain districts over others. That is what state level YIMBY policy is intended to do, to override the free rider problem of existing property owners in the local domain. If the human can say no to any new housing, and it costs be nothing to…

NIMBY seems to be one of the intrinsic faults of democracy. Some people really don't like any change happening around them, and, once empowered, will go to great lengths to stop anything from happening. This is probably something that democratic states need to address by reducing such empowerment. Much like your neighbor cannot tell you what to cook for dinner - even if he is a vegetarian and hates the smell of meat…

can you tell your neighbor not to have a loud party, burn garbage, or release toxic chemicals into the air?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#214

Post by robotcapital »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #205
bryanlarsen wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard refrain is that the housing market is over-regulated, NIMBY's have made it too hard to build. Adding more regulation discouraging instutitions from building sounds like making the problem worse rather than better.

Could it simply be over-regulated in the housing generation aspect, but under-regulated in the housing distribution aspect?

These are (strongly?) correlated though, right? Over-regulating distribution should reduce generation because builders can’t depend as much on pricing signals.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#215

Post by mystified5016 »

gruez wrote: post #70
Pet_Ant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richest? How? Maybe by total wealth. I think wealth should be measured by how many hours at the median wage do you need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living. Unfortunately, our standards have gone up and there are things that are now necessities that weren't before.

>Maybe by total wealth. >I think wealth should be measured by how many hours at the median wage do you need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living. That's a weird definition of "wealth". Wealth is generally understood to mean how much assets you have accumulated, not your free cash flow. What you're describing is properly referred to as discretionary income. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_incom…

If that's the case, everyone in postwar Germany or modern Zimbabwe should be the wealthiest people to ever exist and therefore have the highest quality of life.

There's a lot more to it than how many beans you have in the bank.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#216

Post by pixl97 »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #111
toomuchtodo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

> Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation I believe this nationally, but when you see things investors buying 1/3 of Atlanta homes in a given quarter [1] or investors buying 26% of the affordable homes, it becomes hard to believe there is not some level of effect occurring in target population centers. Most of the arguments I see about the small effect of inv…

I also think there is far more informational to sellers that allow easier one way ratchets in price. Just a few houses selling higher than average in a neighborhood can increase housing prices in that area in the matter of days. In addition buyers are not limited to local market work. With online information you've brought the worldwide back to worldwide web. You see very view poorly listed underpriced houses any more. They get bought up insanely quickly.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#217

Post by BadHumans »

RobotToaster wrote: post #211
toomuchtodo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

YIMBY policies just end up with a small number of luxury condos being built. You need SHIMBY policies, social housing in my back yard.

This doesn't sound true so I would need a citation on this.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#218

Post by asynchronous »

SirMaster wrote: post #105
foobarbecue wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing. Most people can't afford a home here; we're renters. The exception is upper class people riding stock market hype bubbles.

I can easily afford a home, but I have no interest in buying one. I'd rather take all the extra money I save by renting and invest it in other assets. I also value my time and I don't want to have to do all the chores and upkeep a house needs. Sure I could pay someone to do all those things I suppose, but then it makes renting even that much cheaper. Owning a house used to be a goal of almost everyone? But I wonder i…

If anything that would make homes cheaper to afford, but I’d argue you’re in the tiny minority of people who think like that.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#219

Post by crop_rotation »

floatrock wrote: post #204
Zababa wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of encouraging healthier diets which have lots of follow-on nutritional and long-term medical benefits This has been done for a while and mostly doesn't work.

Cool statement. Why not?

I think why not will not fit in a single book let alone an HN comment, but everyone can see that it definitely doesn't work.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#220

Post by pixl97 »

notaustinpowers wrote: post #117
gruez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or you can rent that house after the PE firm buys it and rents it out... That's fine? It's still contributing to the housing supply, it's not like they're hoarding the houses. Moreover unless you want to ban rentals entirely, you're going by definition need people owning more than one house. Finally, the fact that rents are sky-high as well, suggests that housing is expensive in general, not only home ownership.

Homeownership is one of the main ways that Americans transfer wealth, as it's usually the only asset that adults nowadays have that can be transferred outside of whatever's in their bank accounts. When homeownership becomes restricted due to PE firms and Investment firms buying up entire communities to turn into rentals, the wealth transfer is hampered. Well-off adults are still having to rent and are now directly co…

What is worse the PE firms can collude (internally and/or externally) to withhold units for rent to influence prices once they capture enough of the market.
Post reply on HN