Moretti’s idea, which has been echoed by some urban development activist groups, is to build lots more housing in cities, driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone. Another idea is to use research universities to revitalize flagging regions by dispersing knowledge workers to less-populated areas.- This is actual a nice idea..!!
Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
401–410 of 430 posts
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don’t think middle class refers to median income. At least it certainly didn’t used to. How else could a population have a small middle class? Well, it could if it meant “near median income” if few had near the median income. Median doesn't mean particularly common (or even the most common, which is the mode.)
The median is what you get if you sort all people by income and pick the middle person. If one forces the median to be in the middle class then this forces the upper class to be large when the middle is small: Example with a large middle class: |...|...........|...| ^ ^ ^ | median | (working) (upper) Example with small middle class: |.......|...|.......| ^ ^ ^ | median | (working) (upper) Real life example with small…
> If one forces the median to be in the middle class then this forces the upper class to be large when the middle is small
It doesn't force the working and upper class to be equally large unless you further assume the distribution is symmetric, but yes, there is a limit to how small the upper class can be since at least half of the distribution has to be split between the upper and middle class.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
You basically told the previous poster that he is an idiot. That's arrogance in my view especially since you are only stating things with nothing to back them up or any coherent thought besides that you are right and everyone else is stupid and not even worth discussing with.
The idea that two different things are in fact different does not require "back up". Wealth inequality and poverty are not interchangeable concepts, but wonderwonder was treating them like they were by appealing to everyone's innate sense that poverty is bad and then conflating that with wealth inequality. This isn't up for debate. The two things are, by definition, not the same. You may think they are related, but t…
Your starting point was that wealth is not a zero sum game. I replied that it is. If you do some arithmetic and look at growth rates you will see quickly that the economy never has grown beyond certain rates. That means if someone or a whole industry or population group accumulated wealth at a higher rate then the money had to come from someone else. It wasn't "created" out of thin air.
You really should work on your debating style. Phrases like "this is not up for debate" are just bullying to stop a debate you don't want to have. If you are the same at work I feel for the people who have to put up with this.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
What proportion of Americans now have the ability to study topics of less directly monetary connections as compared to those of Adams' day? I imagine the answer to that question would be interesting and nuanced.
There were only a ~dozen colleges at the time, and women couldn't attend. 90% of colonists were farmers. I don't see where there can be much nuance. American's today have vastly more ability to study a bunch of nonsense.
So narrow the lens a bit - compare only those with the ability to attend university.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that two different things are in fact different does not require "back up". Wealth inequality and poverty are not interchangeable concepts, but wonderwonder was treating them like they were by appealing to everyone's innate sense that poverty is bad and then conflating that with wealth inequality. This isn't up for debate. The two things are, by definition, not the same. You may think they are related, but t…
Your starting point was that wealth is not a zero sum game. I replied that it is. If you do some arithmetic and look at growth rates you will see quickly that the economy never has grown beyond certain rates. That means if someone or a whole industry or population group accumulated wealth at a higher rate then the money had to come from someone else. It wasn't "created" out of thin air. You really should work on your…
I’ve dealt with enough people who willfully conflate different topics to know that it is not worth my time to engage on that level and be forced to show repeatedly that two things are different, only to have the other person continue to conflate them. It is not up for debate because it needs to first be shown that there is some relation in order for it to be debated. This is neither arrogance or bullying: it is pragmatism.
Now, as to your comment (which was never the topic of discussion in this part of the thread): if the entire economy grows at 2%, and 0.1% of people’s wealth grows at 10%, the growth of the entire economy can absolutely account for that subset’s gain in wealth. It depends entirely on how big those respective groups are, not purely on “this % is larger than that %”. The money is not necessarily coming from someone else. The growth of the economy is not a fixed rate — if more people produce more good work, the economy will grow more. You also might be forgetting globalism and the fact that the "1%"’s wealth is not necessarily coming from One Place™. For example, Jeff Bezos is wealthy because of AMZN. AMZN operates in many countries all over the world. Therefore, saying “the US is growing at X rate, so Jeff Bezos’ wealth growth rate is too high!” is misguided at best. This is true for many of the "1%" -- they are creating value all over the world, not just in their home country, so it follows that the growth of their wealth is not tied to the growth rate of their home country.
I hope making calculations is not part of your job, because if so I feel for the people that are forced to rely on them.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reality doesn't agree with you. In SF, for example, fine dining is doing well, while the mid range is slowly failing and being replaced by fast casual, where they focus on fast turnover. The only way to pay the bills seems to be to either be super high end (fewer customers overall, but at a much higher service level and price point), or just above fast food, where you serve a reasonable-quality menu, but items th…
is this truly indicative of market failure though? maybe it's not unreasonable that traditional table service becomes a luxury in high CoL areas.
I commented on this elsewhere, but my general reaction is that it's an interesting change regardless.
I think there's a very plausible argument that Applebee's range restaurants are very labor-intensive without adding substantial value, and so they naturally get shut out of any market where labor is expensive. The "cheap hot meal" role is filled by fast food, while the "place to sit and chat" role is filled by everything from pubs (order at the counter, high margin alcohol) to dedicated desert places (order at counter, often cheap nonperishable ingredients).
But granting that it's not something to 'solve', it's still newsworthy. There are ~3M waitstaff jobs in the US, and despite tipped minimum wage it's often pretty well paid, with nonstandard hours that can help part-time students, households with two working parents, etc. If our biggest cities are no longer compatible with common forms of work, that's worth discussing and looking at the secondary impact of.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree, exactly - I'm strongly opposed to most rent-control measures other than scrapping protectionist zoning rules. But I do think can versus will is a thorny question. Restaurant and delivery dining are highly elastic in general, and big cities aren't necessarily an exception. People who can stably afford to live in downtown SF, NYC, LA, Boston, etc. are still frequently paying >33% of income in rent, an…
> I realize that we can label all of this as free markets doing their thing; maybe mid-tier restaurants with lots of staff are just an inefficient use of valuable urban space. That would assume that the real estate market is a free market, which in many cities is a laughable idea.
Sorry, I should have broken down that thought - because you're of course right about urban real estate.
I think it's quite likely that midprice, full-service restaurants are an inefficient use of expensive urban space. It's also possible that they're an inefficient use of valuable urban space, and would be squeezed out of dense cities even by healthy, responsive real estate markets.
That second claim is much bolder, though, and my personal guess is that taller buildings and better mass transit would relax labor costs via lower rent, while also lowering the price of downtown real estate. A few extremely dense cities (NYC, Tokyo, whatever) might use better transit for a "reverse commute" where people live near work and go outbound for restaurants, but that's even more hypothetical. And I can't really think of a "free real estate market" city to use as a reference, because I'm not sure anything close exists at this point.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is wealth truly proportional to matter? How many physical resources are used when making software, music, art, theater, writing? How much wealth did the internet create and how much matter did it use? There may be a finite limit on potential wealth but it’s effectively limitless for human planning purposes. (For the trees, we can certainly mismanage our resources; it doesn’t mean it’s a priori impossible to create a…
How many physical resources are used when making software, music, art, theater, writing? Actually a pretty decent amount over the life cycle of a person. After all those things require a functioning civilisation that educates properly to begin with. The internet is mostly a means of making communication more efficient - that was one stupidly inefficient process ripe for an upgrade. So yeah, no additional wealth reall…
What "pretty decent" physical resources does making software consume? (Beyond energy, which is renewable.)
The internet and other tech doesn't create new wealth? Why has the size of the economy grown exponentially since the industrial revolution?
If wealth were fixed, as population in increased we'd be getting vastly poorer worldwide (1.6 billion in 1900 -> 7 billion people today). Have we gotten 5x poorer on average?
(These facts are easily googleable.)
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even just that it's hard to be upper middle class (build wealth), but that people aren't even being taught to build wealth. Learning to build wealth isn't taught in schools. It's passed down from parents to children and it was far more common to find families where the parents taught these skills when there were lots more mom&pop businesses and homesteads where they built their own wealth and taught the skil…
This is something I think a lot about. If you have a pension plan, you have zero incentive not to spend all your money. You have guaranteed income to maintain your standard of living. Having money for a rainy day becomes someone else's problem, just like you said. I guess I don't have anything to add, just struck a nerve because that is exactly how I feel, so I wanted to say something.
I would also add that if you had a pension and pensions are a cultural norm, you not only have an incentive to spend everything, you also have no incentive to teach your children to save and invest in anything except maybe education (so they can get a job with a good pension), since you expect pensions to still be a thing when they hit retirement age. Pensions were a form a corporate welfare that essentially wiped out the cultural norm/practice of investing in your own future and made people dependent on the firm. No one foresaw a time when pensions would end up being a massive corporate expense that would lead bigger companies with them to fall behind nimbler upstarts without them.
Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word 'allocate' presupposes a fixed pie that we're expected to split in a zero-sum game. That works for redistributing the fraction of wealth captured in taxes. But the parent's argument is about the process of accumulating wealth itself being zero-sum somehow. Thinking "someone earned money which would have gone to me otherwise" is like thinking "someone got in shape and that physical fitness would have gone to…
I don't really matter if it is a growing pie or not, you are still getting a share. I am sure Uber creates a lot of new wealth, but the average driver most likely isn't seeing a lot of it.
Why doesn't the absolute share matter? If I give everyone an iPhone and a few people get an iPhone + Macbook, is that "bad"? Isn't everyone better off? (Yes, humans can be petty and jealous, but they are objectively better off.)
Uber created a lot of wealth. Some got more than others. Is that objectively bad if the wealth didn't exist before?