Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

A dumb rich person won't get nearly as much benefit as a smart poor person

Compounded by nearly 2-3 decades of astonishing population decline, and a 'freeter' type lifestyle for all but the most 'privileged' youth that also helps in reducing access to desirable housing, too. Personally speaking had Fukushima not occurred, I think I would be owner and chef of a Kaiseki kitchen at an Onsen Ryoukan in the Country-side by now given how affordable and plentiful those abandoned compounds are all over Japan.

NIMBY is real and gets the nouveau riche up in arms and drives them out to the polls and releases purse strings for lobbyists like nothing else, but to be entirely honest as a multi-generational Californian: they can keep the Valley.

Its atrociously managed, its old, over-crowded, needlessly expensive and stricken with horrible politically ambitious and greed driven shortsightedness, the homeless problem is a glaring symptom that has clearly proven that neither money nor legislation can solve its core problem.

My family up there divested from their businesses and sold their homes in the area in mid 2000s to move to the South, and while its not perfect it shows that there are is no better way to show your opposition to a system then to just leave.

If many former office jobs and school classes (K-12 as well as University) can be optimized to be done remotely, then I will reluctantly accept that the COVID situation was worth it. Having a population density like seen in New York is not just undesirable (for many reasons) but also a biological hazard. Disruption had to come the housing situation, and I think this could be just as good as anything else in trying to alleviate the damage caused from having remained in an archaic system created to benefit the Land-owning class for doing nothing but being born at a time when housing prices as well as overall Economic health and sound wages were accessible to most in the US.

These land owners don't create wealth, they just consume it off the backs of people far more risk-prone than themselves that still have Utility in the Labor force, and we're thinking they'll ever allow for implementing something that is against there interests? That's a deluded panacea that won't ever be achieved using orthodox methods, like voting for fairer zoning laws.

Healthcare is going to be special. We're OK with a person not getting a Lexus if they can't afford one, but we are deeply uncomfortable with treating, say, cancer surgery the same way. So healthcare will always have a social component.

That's not the case for housing. Housing can be managed the markets just fine, you just need to make sure you don't constrain it a level where it cannot react to demand. Where housing fails, it's always the case of local regulations, from property owners who want to limit supply to keep their house prices up to activist and the local council who will restrict high-density housing development for the dumbest reasons (e.g. if the shadow of the new housing development falling on a playground - true story). You mentioned you're from Seattle - are you sure housing isn't constrained due to crazy progressive municipal policies?

>I see rent control as one mechanism to attempt to decommodify housing (which I'm strongly in favor of)

This is very perplexing to me. We know rent control hurts housing supply, and it hurts people that it purports to help because we have data on this from decades of studying this policy. There is no economist that supports it. I don't understand how it keeps coming back.

>It's been demonstrated, again and again, that 'more supply will come in' just isn't working for housing.

Where? Do you mean places like Seattle or San Francisco which make it almost impossible to build new development? Why wouldn't you look at regulatory policies of those areas before wanting to socialize an entire industry?

>You have a lot more faith in markets than I do.

It's not about faith in anything. Because markets are a messy, chaotic and complicated bottom-up structures where the individual transaction is impossible to predict, but where everything optimizes (at some minima) on a large scale - some people tend to be fundamentally uncomfortable with it. So the alternative is to fix the messiness of the markets by imposing a 'clean' top-down policy where the one true answer is dictated. The problem is that nobody at the top fully understands all the variables of the underlying messiness and hence they always get it wrong. If you take that to the extreme, you end up with a Communist disaster.

There are two problems with it. First, the US system is completely broken. It isn't a free market system, it's a worst of both worlds compromised hellscape. It's like comparing the USSR to Colombian druglords as evidence that communism is a great system. The USSR isn't great, Colombian druglords are just awful.

Second, the European systems rely on the US to fund world medical research through its high medical costs. We're subsidizing them. That makes us look bad, but they're the ones free riding on our system. And it's obviously not possible for the US to pay lower prices by doing the same thing and offloading its medical research costs onto the US. What we could do is make the EU pay more of the R&D somehow -- that could lower our costs for sure, or improve outcomes world-wide because there is more R&D. But what does that look like? Higher costs in Europe, right?