Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.
An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.
This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?
Not an American, so maybe I'm underestimating the insanity of US zoning laws, but I always thought "residental ares" means "no businesses". Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.
But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.
> Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.
I dont get the rationale with those two. What it is, to make living less comforta ble for residents? Doesnt everybody wants a grocery store and cafe nearby?
also just as importantly (or moreso for cases of individual rooms used for social/hobbyist clubs like this) would be 'empty building taxes' to prevent the eventuality of landlords preferring to rent out fewer properties over reducing the cost of vacant ones because
* housing is necessary for survival so people cannot afford to baulk at the prices of artificial scarcity, making the optimal price effectively arbitrarily high without regulation
* landlords are generally not infinitesimal entities in a vacuum, and generally stand to lose existing customers who are still on the expensive contracts if they cheapen their unoccupied offerings
although such a solution would just move the problem one layer further up (stop building properties to have them be vacant) and the solution is land tax
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
segregating poor people into their own area is a sure way to make them stay poor. i believe there is evidence that the best way to help people out of poverty is to let them live in mixed areas where they have a chance to associate with people who are better off than them. i believe the primary reason is that even if you work hard to improve your life, as long as everyone around you remains poor then you are limited or are self limiting in how much you can actually achieve.
> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.
Allowing local government to restrict what can be built and where has been a double edged sword. Yes it's good that you can't build noisy, smelly, or potentially polluting activities near where people live. But we have gone far beyond that, in ways that harm our communities, require people to own a car to get through daily life, and leave people sleeping in the street.
Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.
> Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.
> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?
The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones.
Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.
Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.
All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.
Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.
The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.
Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.
I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.
It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.
Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.
You got the diagnosis right but I’m not convinced voting would change anything - even though it’s definitely true that it could matter, most of the structural issues are upstream of the ballot aka who gets to be on the ballot in the first place is the real problem
“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman
I'm not going to lie, I'm not deluded enough to think voting will (often) bring change quickly. I don't even have a lot of hope in the likelihood of it working. However, it's not nothing and it's something everyone can and should do.
Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
That’s not even remotely true political parties determine privately who they will fund to put on the ballot underneath their particular party
The public is not invited to vote in those outside of certain primaries and even then the people who are proposed for the primaries are chosen from the party members
Ballot access for third-party or non-affiliated typically require a petition to apply and that threshold is again set by party members in office
>Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
Voting is the lowest possible bar or participation for political engagement
Organizing and agitating are the day to day efforts people should be doing but aren’t because they prefer to have money
The party itself is made up of the people. It isn't hard to join and get influence. Local elections in particular are easy, they are looking for help. Local elections make for people they look for to run in higher elections
I’ve organized with the DSA the last few years, and I caucused for Ron Paul in 2008.
I promise you you will have zero success getting Claudia De-La Cruz (who I voted for and was on the ballot in VA) put on the DNC or RNC ballot.
So no, you can’t just get on a ballot as a candidate by showing up. You need to be a party loyalist and there are no independent parties that voters show up for.
Hell even “down ballot” have to stick to the party line.
The trouble is, the people who are most vocal about "no poors allowed" emphatically do not subscribe to it, and the people who are most likely to have power over these things do not subscribe to it (there is some, but not perfect, overlap between these groups).
And it's kinda tricky to go over their heads and get rules put in place at the next level above them (ie, the level that sets the rules they have to follow) that can effectively prevent this sort of thing.
I mean, one of the main takeaways from the article was that "there is a market for X" is something fundamentally different and sometimes even the opposite of "X is a good thing".
In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.
Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
The way you say "outcompeted" makes it seem like you're evaluating efficiency in both cases, but isn't direction the more important criteria?
It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things.
The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.
Somewhat of a weird example…the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous, or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start. Also in your example you have both cars without steering wheels.
By that logic, from my perspective - your family life, as we're practicing it today, it a car without a steering wheel.
The church down the street from me, that I have nothing to do with, is a car without a steering wheel. My local town, of which I'm only 1 member, is a car without a steering wheel.
Just because you see a system that you don't understand or control doesn't mean it's dangerous. The first instinct shouldn't be to centralize power.
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...
I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
Markets create the illusion of choice between monopolies.
I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.
Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.
You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.
> I feel like in this case, the “Amazon or Netflix” example is particularly bad because I feel like I’m actually drowning in streaming providers.
It's a fake choice, because they carry mutually exclusive catalogs, and entertainment choice is not particularly substitutable (e.g. if I want to watch "Star Wars" and it's not available on services I'm subscribed to, I'm not going to be satisfied with all the rich selection of things they carry that is still not "Star Wars").
Lots of that in the economy, that's where the most money seems to be made. Smartphones are my go-to example: plenty of nearly identical options to choose from, choice entirely set up by vendors, with little to no way of users to voice their feedback. A supply-driven market. You get to choose from what's made available, not what is possible.
It doesn't feel like a fake choice when I sit down on the couch and flip between 5 services trying to find something to watch, and on a weekly basis I will watch something on almost all the services. The content nowadays is generally fine, and it is difficult to pick something when everything is pretty close, and every now and then there is something really good, so maybe competition is working here to raise the bar for all services? Not sure.
Saying entertainment is not substitutable is kind of crazy. It is very rare that I will only ever want to watch one specific thing, and if that happens, I have the choice to rent it, or buy it or pay for one month of a service. To me as a consumer...that great.
The market for smartphones is mostly driven by lack of options in OS, not hardware. Each of the big players offer plenty of hardware choices at different price points. But if you don't like the OS, harder to get away from that. Competing on OS is very difficult though.
Markets used to be hundreds or thousands of people who were roughly peers and they still work well in that situation. When I go to the riverside market on Saturday to buy fabric for a project, there are 10 different fabric stalls. On this one little river bank alone! Each one of them has a different selection and they all want me to buy their fabric. This is the only thing that people used to think of as a market, and it probably does work well. Since that time, however, the term has been twisted beyond comprehension.
Zoning codes have some uses, doesn't mean they're still net positive value. Maybe the current situation is so bad that letting a pig farm or a coal power plant be build right in the middle of a residential neighborhood is actually a better tradeoff than whatever we have now.
In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.
i don't know if this is the case everywhere in europe but i understand that at least in germany instead of zoning the local government approves the purpose of each building individually. so instead of deciding this is a commercial zone, they decide how many shops and businesses they allow in that area, and what kind of businesses they are. and once a building has a specific business use, then it can't easily be changed. so in effect that is very fine grained zoning. this is as flexible as the people in the government who make the decisions.
"I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own."
Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.
You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.
Why do I care about a trash incinerator? The truth is I don't.
I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.
I agree. To expand your point, that requires upstream regulation of trash incinerators (and road safety, which I'll ignore because developed economies mostly have that at least nominally in place), to make sure it's not a noxious neighbor. Where that doesn't exist, there will be pressure for (blunt force and inefficient) zoning codes to keep the smelly stuff away.
That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)
There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.
I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.
I don’t follow. Your first sentence says you do not care about trash incinerators, presumably next to your house. Your second sentence says you care about the smell.
Trash incinerators are very smelly. You are contradicting yourself. I don’t get it.
But if someone invented a new type that didn't smell, it should be allowed. Regulate consequences, not causes. The power substation down the road is disguised as a brick house, because the rule was ultimately about maintaining the look of the area and not about forbidding power substations.
> That objection applies to the other options as well.
True.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.
I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.
Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.
Every system can be captured by wealthy interests. Markets are not unique there. Once in a rare while someone not wealthy captures a system - but they inevitably use that capture to become wealthy so it doesn't really matter.
Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
Are you making your own choices?
Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?
To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?
The very need for psychiatrists is, in a sense, an example for that. This is a case of companies trying to do their best to convince you to engage with them, because, otherwise, you likely wouldn't. Also, you never get stuff you don't "need". Games you don't want to play? Never happens, even in addictive games. Consume art that makes you feel nothing? Feel nothing how? Worst case scenario, you thought it would make you feel something, but it didn't. In all of these cases, the worst that happened is that you were made to wrongly belive that they would sate you, but your prediction was wrong, so you improve it for next time. Remember, even hypnosis can't overrule individual will, only brainwashing (which isn't a thing yet).
Take the opposite approach, central planning. In central planning, you are given little to no choices. You will be assigned the resources and roles you need according to the central planner. Even if the planner is democratic, your influence is reduced to a single vote, which is guaranteed to be erased by the law of large numbers. And that's ignoring external factor to you that are in control of the central planner: the psychlogists you mentioned still exist, but now they work for the planner instead.
We can argue that people are currently led into making poor choices in the market, but to conclude that this means no choice is being made is wrong. In a market, we can improve people's choices. In centralized systems, "people's choices" aren't a thing.
Because the alternative to a market (a system where people make choices with the stuff they own) is a system where people are dictated to use stuff they don't own.
The divine right of kings touched on a lot of things, like governance, ownership, origin of law, etc. Decentralization/centralization focuses on ownership before anything else.
Oh I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just saying if they aren't really your choices, why is making them valuable to you? Sure, you have 30 different choices of peanut butter to pick from, but you always pick the same one, because it's what your mom used when you were a kiddo, or because you don't like the oil separating ones, or because the chunky makes you feel like it's healthy even though it's loaded down with as much sugar as a Coke.
What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?
I have changed my peanut butter choice - when science started realizing trans fat was a problem I switched before the law changed to reflect science. I have also tried various of the 30 different options in other situations and found the one I personally like best. The value isn't just that I can make a choice, it is also that other people really do make different choices.
You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.
It’s funny you defend your independence by giving explanations of how you changed your peanut butter buying habits. The point was we don’t care what kind of peanut butter you buy; it’s not a meaningful kind of choice to have.
First, whether something is meaningful or not, depends on the subject.
Independence here isn't about whether your mind exists in a parallel world - devoid of external inputs - it's whether your input is required for an action to happen or not. They didn't simply comply with a choice from above, they experimented and came with an option that works for them. It doesn't matter whether that's a common choice or not, but who held the final authority in it.
In centralized systems, your input is, in theory, basically irrelevant/in practice, completely irrelevant unless you happen to the central authority.
Any industry or economic activity where extractive financialisation takes priority over productive economic activity that delivers human value.
Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.
This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.
let's reverse the question. Where are markets expected to be optimal?
> definition of 'perfect competition' perfect competition, in which there are large numbers of identical suppliers and demanders of the same product, buyer and sellers can find one another at no cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market.
And that perfect competition provides the price signals that allow the market to be more competitive.
The less that holds true, the less efficient the market is going to be.
What is the price signal on education?
What is the price signal on public infrastructure?
What is the price signal on rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts?
City transit-it transports more people than taxis and uber put together. The trade off is public transit is slower (in my case 35 minutes by link-rail vs 15 minutes by car, and probably 20 minutes if I were to take an uber)
Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids.
Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).
These are good examples and it’s even worth noting that the net impact of these can be a huge boost to the market. But it is a local and greedy optimizer. It doesn’t think “would having public transit improve the economy long term” it thinks “could I make enough on fares to justify the investment” (which is almost always no, at least relative to other investments). This is the nature of positive externalities. They are value that the market is unable to weigh in its decision making.
I’d have thought that ‘the free market doesnt make subways’ is a market coordination problem, not an externality one?
Meaning, I think that ticket sales can a good job of capturing the costs and benefits of transportation - the benefits to the consumer and the costs to the producer. It’s worked well in other areas of transportation, like passenger boats and planes, and the market mostly works well in those areas.
So I’d have guessed that issue with subways, different from planes and ships, is that you have to buy the rights to large portions of underground land in order to build your lines in contiguous fashion. It’s hard for private developers to get the rights to these lands, if one landowner refuses to sell, it can block the construction of an entire line. This is why rail, dam, and highway projects tend to be coordinated by the state. They all suffer this problem, which doesn’t apply to transport by air or sea, as air and sea lack similar private property issues to trip over.
Yes, as you say the market is a local (both in space and time) and greedy optimizer.
Long-term payoffs that increase the value of all participants in society, such as education, healthcare, infrastructure (roads including public transportation, water, electricity, ...), are demonstrably better served by government than by business.
Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.
Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.
What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
> Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces
I agree with this, but I think it reinforces GP's point that what's missing is time: slack in the day. I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood kids, and the critical enabler was that there were always adults around during the after-school hours. Not actively hanging out with us, or even closely supervising, but around. Some of them (mine, but only for a few years), were stay-at-home mothers, but by no means all. One family had a dad who got home early from work. Another kid we couldn't play at their house certain days, but we could others, because their parents had variable schedules.
There were also more kids around, because families back then had more kids than they do nowadays. I think that's also (not entirely, but to a significant degree) a consequence of adults having less time - across their life-cycles, and in their days - that isn't devoted to work.
No ones' parents did gig-work, or worked two jobs. Most parents were 9-5, or maybe 8-4 (or I don't know: I was a kid, and not paying attention to things like that), but no one went to "after school care", because there were always adults around after school got out.
Hell, I think the need for third-places (for kids) mentioned in the article is a down-stream effect of the increased time pressures on adults' lives - as is the disappearance of third-places for adults.
I don’t know if I can come to that conclusion. Certainly there some grain of a truth there but even when the parents are home kids are not out exploring. At least in America there is an obsession for experience maxing with kids. I don’t know if it’s a time problem or a shift in attitudes.
> The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby
The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.
Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.
i believe most of the demand for third spaces is for things that are free to use. parks, places to hang out, activities. these spaces are not profitable.
in germany this is handled by supporting youth organizations. sport, scouts and other activities. most of these groups get free access to government owned buildings. they get financial support for their equipment, etc, under the condition that any youth can join with only a nominal membership fee.
in a pure market economy none of these organizations or spaces would survive. they depend on government support.
another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.
a pure market economy would never allow for the existence of a public park. they are on valuable land, cost a lot of money but don't make any profit at all.
good question. i actually agree with you. but free market is defined as "without government intervention", and some people defend that rigorously. i found this article where government involvement in a public parks fail: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentali... driving that point home.
personally i believe for every story in that article where the government failed or did worse than private owners we can find just as many stories where private owners failed to act in the public interest and only government was there to support the public. this is not a question of the system, but of the motivation of the people involved. even some examples in the article only work because government set the rules that empowered the people to act against bad actors in the first place.
the article claims that government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits and i would counter that that is broadly not true in many places because people do expect the government to act in their interest and not doing so can and will backfire. even in a country like china where the government is more top down. but i digress.
so yeah, i agree that government and people are market participants. but i just had this argument in another thread where someone insists that i am a non-interested party in commercial property dealings if i am not a tenant or owner, while i kept arguing that as a person living in the city my interests are affected too if a property stays empty and therefore it's only right that the government gets involved.
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
I wonder if you may be seeing ghosts? At least to me, this sounded so clearly like an authentic human voice, at least the parts I've read (haven't finished yet).
This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.
I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?
It's possible we're at the point now where it fools me, but I didn't see it that way. I think more evidence against would be the fact that the author discloses genAI usage in another article [0] and provides their own version of the same [1].
Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
You're conflating different things here. You would have to look very hard on HN to find someone who "breathlessly touts" the idea of publishing AI-generated blogposts under your own name.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around.
Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.
How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?
That’s not really an LLMism. It’s a phrase that ordinary writers use and was perfectly fine, but LLMs started overusing it, so now you see it as a “tell.” People who haven’t read enough LLM-generated writing to see the pattern won’t notice anything wrong.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
I'm a father of 7 children. I'm the youngest of 5 siblings and my wife is the youngest of 6 siblings. Both of our mothers had college degrees and jobs and chose to stay at home with the children, and neither of our fathers had anything other than middle-class incomes.
My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).
We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.
The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees.
The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week.
The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago)
Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here.
I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.
It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.
Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures.
These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?
And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.
This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).
The article doesn't mention of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which explored pretty much the same idea, a.k.a. the value of the 'room', (which for Putnam was 'social capital'), and its rapid decline. Bowling Alone was published in 2000, looking back to 1950, and noted the massive, synchronous decline of civic participation in pretty much everything non-work-related across American society. Every kind of gentle, recurrent, voluntary activity you can imagine was on a pretty steep decline even before the smartphone or widespread adoption of the Internet
One thing I notice is that very busy people, are often busy by choice. Yes they have work, but they're not slaves to working those extra hours... they choose to pick up that laptop at home because it is there.
Folks after school, their kids are busy, because they signed the kid up for a dozen things.
Not to say some people aren't super stuck in a cycle, the working poor with multiple jobs, I used to do that and it was exhausting. That's still a problem.
But even people with choices seem to choose to be busy.
In India, by law, companies above a certain size are required to spend 2% of profit on social responsibility activities. So in my city, you see lots of things around adopted or funded by companies.
People below or near the poverty line can occasionally be found volunteering.
I think it speaks more about what people value, how they value their time. How many people can’t afford an hour a week? An hour a month? There is almost always some unhealthy activity that takes up at least an hour of your time a month, why not substitute?
Volunteers fund lots of stuff! Throw them a buck or two, tell your friends, plenty of great things are community funded! If we can’t get a handout from on high it’s impossible? Have some passion!
(and, realpolitik style, if you get an excited community together with some funds, it’s usually easier to get that handout to top it off!)
This is a great article, and I've never seen the problem explained better. The solution doesn't make sense, though, and this is almost but not quite obvious in the article by virtue of how well it has stated the problem. The problem with basic income is that it provides people with cash but does not change the underlying supply-demand system. To get the lokal (the room) to work you needed more than cash: you needed a desire for teens to be happy and engaged, the will to help them get there, a sense of what might help them, leadership to set it up, attract them, and keep it going, and then, yes, money to pay rent. If all you provide is the money, you will get people spending more money on the usual things the economy "sees": phones, video games, amusing t-shirts. What you have around the lokal in the story is actually not merely basic income fed into the existing economy: you actually have a separate economy. The separate economy works differently because it sees differently, it has different demands, different desires. The society as a whole (as embodied here by the government, thankfully—though not all governments are predictably good-willed in this way) wants the teens to thrive, to provide for them, to pay for them, to guide them with modest leadership. Though individuals, and the regular markets, cannot think about the teenagers—they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the time, they have diffusion of responsibility, etc—the society can pool its interests and act upon its collective interest through the market. This may not be the only way to "cut across" the market, to do collectively what no set of individuals will do, but it's one way. So we definitely want to solve the problem: we want to organize, lead, preserve, and fund things that are of collective value but that the market cannot see. Giving individuals a basic income, however, doesn't accomplish that. I wish it did, but it doesn't. It puts the money into the usual demand centers—individuals needing to pay rent and transportation costs and go on dates and so forth—that live within the "blind" economy.
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers.
When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.
Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
>The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people
Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right?
The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.
You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.
I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolutions, etc.
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
> whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community
Something deeply wrong here. Both that this level of antisocial behavior is expected, and that liability would be placed on people who were not meaningfully responsible for it but just happen to have their name on the lease.
> regulation
I suspect what people are actually scared of in America is not regulation (from the legislature) but litigation, which is not the same thing even if it can have the same effects.
"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space"
I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis.
The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.
It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage.
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
But it has to be done by everyone at once. A single factory owner paying a higher wage doesn't see that benefit. It only works if all the factory owners do it.
Most of the churches I've been to are fairly open about the use of their spaces so long as you're not some sort of obnoxious.
You don't have to BE a luthern to visit a luthern church, and that's true for the kids as well. Same for the Jehovah's, same for multi- and non-denominational churchs.
These positive externalities are supposed to be paid from the owners of capital, primarily via tax. This is how it very successfully worked for quite some time. However, most western societies have decided in the last few decades to believe two things -
1) The government and elected representatives (and thus, voters) cannot be trusted with the allocation of capital spent on social welfare
and contradictorily,
2) The government and elected representatives can be trusted with the allocation of capital when it comes to the market and the owners of capital
Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.
The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy.
Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.
That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!
Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.
Sure, that is another avenue of economic erosion but I didn't focus on it because the "exempt" dynamic would seem to be the stronger dynamic. But if we actually fixed the flaws I listed, we would likely have to plug that hole of multiple jobs not counting towards the full time limit, especially if full time employment were defined as 15 hours per week (leaving plenty of time to stuff in a second or even third job in place of "visiting grandma")
But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.
I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell.
UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale.
There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.
UBI would overhaul the economy, but it's not like that doesn't happen regularly, just not for the benefit of workers. It's got to be studied before being implemented on a wide scale but there's no reason to assume it's not possible.
Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.
One aspect of the financialization of everything/the 'economics over all' mindset that I don't see often discussed is that if you for whatever reason can't make the 'sound' financial choice, you just...drown.
The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.
I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.
I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.
So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.
I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
My point is that it doesn’t solve the room problem outlined in the post - someone who’s just relying on UBI isn’t going to be motivated to create this space because the space will exist regardless, they get UBI either way. That’s why the funding is necessary - it creates a market need through the coercion of pay. UBI will not magically incentivize self organization of social goods, only give marginally more freedom for personal goods.
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a swell idea. The population exploded.
Then you couple this with the technological revolution and the necessity of training huge amounts of the population for specialists jobs if they want to make a living and suddenly a boat load of kids doesn't make any sense at all. And it's getting to the point of the squeeze that having any kids doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people.
My impression is that voluntarily child-free people have a very low regret rate, but there are dozens of conflicting studies on this. Interested if you have anything concrete to link to.
As has been pointed out by philosophers for a long time, there is no inherent meaning, beside what you yourself create. For some people, children. For others, art of some sort, or building a business that creates value. For some, pure hedonism, or building relationships and helping the people around them.
I'm way older than 50, and don't miss having kids at all.
Historically, before the twentieth century, the way it was mostly done was by living in extended families, and prehistorically, by living in small tribes. The whole family (grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and their children) worked together to take care of the family (or as I said, the tribe). It was the nuclear family and individualism, driven I'm guessing by economic forces, that destroyed all that.
Economic hot take: That scale of saving is impossible. It can't happen. The ends don't meet, the numbers don't match up.
Think about what etiremnent savings means in the real economy. It means I have to store enough food to feed myself for 30 years. It means I have to store enough furniture too. And enough gasoline. And enough of everything else.
This is obviously not possible. So instead I store other things I hope I'll be able to exchange for gasoline and food. But no matter what form it takes, I have to store an absolutely enormous amount of stuff. Whether it's physical goods or abstract financial rights. There is no way for everyone to do this without creating massive economic distortion of some kind. Whatever people store is going to massively increase in value (house deeds! shares!) and crash later when they exchange it for food and gasoline.
But there's a simple alternative, we add a 20% tax and distribute it to people in the form of pensions. This is called a pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Optionally the scheme can keep some kind of weight value for each person based on how much tax they paid or any other metric. Since it doesn't store assets it doesn't distort the economy nearly as much. But, it's vulnerable to a future generation simply cutting it off. When the scheme turns on there's a generation who didn't contribute but still benefit and when the scheme turns off there's a generation who contributed and didn't benefit. This can't happen to people who store real assets because the assets are firmly owned by them, and the society can't easily just decide they aren't.
We can do an intermediate solution if we let people buy a share of future tax income as a financial asset. It doesn't distort the economy too much and your contributions are firmly your property. Treasury bonds are this.
> Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..
Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.
No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.
Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
>Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns).
Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.
This sounds like a gaming club. A small one, but a gaming club. Those exist, we have them all over. You pay for them in a variety of ways, in this case the way being forced seizure of wealth aka taxes. Other ways are via profit from sales of consumables (what the article alludes to) or membership fees. In all cases it is the parents that pay for them. It is absolutely possible for the market to build a non-predatory gaming club, but I concede it is easier when you can just get a government grant. It is entirely possible nobody in Stockholm can run a gaming room as a profitable business. Profitable businesses are hard even when they are simple.
The rest of the article can basically be summed up with "work takes too much time and pays too little", which is absolutely true.
I am not sure what the jab at stay at home moms or grandparents who help with childcare is supposed to be. Probably some other communist drivel. Grandma absolutely did not do unpaid childcare, she was insistent she had to teach us right and also got tons of labour and money from my parents. If the exchanges of money and labour between parents and grandparents in the context of childcare were measured, it would probably double the nation's GDP.
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
Yeah the highest participation areas have significant poverty and lean conservative.
My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
Even the types of games I believe are shifting to less third spaces. Matchmaking is replacing the MMO beginner town where a lot of the socialization happens.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago.
He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.
This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.
Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.
>> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it
I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet.
There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it.
But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble.
Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread.
And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
There are multiple points against such comparison:
1. Minimum wage goes up - for some amount of people. Most are not feeling it as they are not on the minimum wage or not working.
2. Salary is not UBI, it is actually earned, taken from revenue.
It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms.
It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it?
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
You can’t just move assets of that scale around without knock-on effects.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
Yes, a UBI (really all government spending) re-allocates demand, either directly through taxes and transfer or by decreasing the purchasing power of the currency through inflation. At any point in time, there is more or less a set amount of productive capacity in the economy, and money is what allows it to be allocated.
one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why.
This is what religion is for, and what you refer to as THE ECONOMY is simply the hard wired human precondition stand in when you decide there is no God(s).
"The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor!
Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.
There should be a place for people, especially teens, to gather without a bunch of woo woo baggage. I found church incredibly isolating as a kid because we weren’t there just to be, we were there under this expectation that we were partaking in some superstition.
The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.
I think you misunderstand, the 3rd space should be at a church. One in my community does this for teens where they just hang out and do homework after school for 2 hours.
My megachurch growing up had all sorts of teen events including sand volleyball in the summer.
But there was always this underlying, uncomfortable "threat" that an adult would approach you to talk about your relationship with god or whatever since that's the whole motive of the place existing.
If you're not into that, then you feel out of place. Like being a straight guy at a gay bar who's only there for the happy hour. Or hanging out at a cafe without wanting to buy anything.
We need to come up with something without any motive other than "here's a place to just be".
It has been a few decades since I attended church, but in my teenage years they did none of this. The only time I saw the building in use was Sunday morning.
Looking at their website it's hard to tell. Their calendar doesn't show any activities like that, but maybe you have to be plugged into the congregation to know. They appear to be a very left-leaning
Evangelical organization now. I didn't even know there was such a thing.
Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.
An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.
This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?
Not an American, so maybe I'm underestimating the insanity of US zoning laws, but I always thought "residental ares" means "no businesses". Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.
But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.
> Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.
I dont get the rationale with those two. What it is, to make living less comforta ble for residents? Doesnt everybody wants a grocery store and cafe nearby?
"this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices"
Well, ok, but then how are property prices artificially driven up by planning restrictions?
Is this just about not allowing more compact housing like condos or high-rises?
also just as importantly (or moreso for cases of individual rooms used for social/hobbyist clubs like this) would be 'empty building taxes' to prevent the eventuality of landlords preferring to rent out fewer properties over reducing the cost of vacant ones because * housing is necessary for survival so people cannot afford to baulk at the prices of artificial scarcity, making the optimal price effectively arbitrarily high without regulation * landlords are generally not infinitesimal entities in a vacuum, and generally stand to lose existing customers who are still on the expensive contracts if they cheapen their unoccupied offerings although such a solution would just move the problem one layer further up (stop building properties to have them be vacant) and the solution is land tax
Does Sweden have a problem with local land use restrictions? They have done a lot to liberalize their economy over the last few decades
Municipalities have far-reaching power in deciding what gets built where. Getting things built can take quite a long time.
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
segregating poor people into their own area is a sure way to make them stay poor. i believe there is evidence that the best way to help people out of poverty is to let them live in mixed areas where they have a chance to associate with people who are better off than them. i believe the primary reason is that even if you work hard to improve your life, as long as everyone around you remains poor then you are limited or are self limiting in how much you can actually achieve.
Pay UBI only at the level needed to live in the place with no jobs and cheap housing.
> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Well, how about the freedom to invade a country you don't like? Or how about that country's freedom to invade your country?
One person's freedom always ends at the point where another person's begins. That's not exactly a new observation.
I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.
Allowing local government to restrict what can be built and where has been a double edged sword. Yes it's good that you can't build noisy, smelly, or potentially polluting activities near where people live. But we have gone far beyond that, in ways that harm our communities, require people to own a car to get through daily life, and leave people sleeping in the street.
Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.
> if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air
Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?
Why VAT? It's a regressive tax that hurts poor people more than rich people.
> Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.
> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?
The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones.
Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.
Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.
All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.
Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.
The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.
Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.
I disagree.
I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.
It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.
Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.
People regularly have conflicting incentives.
I do not disagree.
You got the diagnosis right but I’m not convinced voting would change anything - even though it’s definitely true that it could matter, most of the structural issues are upstream of the ballot aka who gets to be on the ballot in the first place is the real problem
“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman
Who gets on the ballot is determined by voting.
I'm not going to lie, I'm not deluded enough to think voting will (often) bring change quickly. I don't even have a lot of hope in the likelihood of it working. However, it's not nothing and it's something everyone can and should do.
Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
>Who gets on the ballot is determined by voting.
That’s not even remotely true political parties determine privately who they will fund to put on the ballot underneath their particular party
The public is not invited to vote in those outside of certain primaries and even then the people who are proposed for the primaries are chosen from the party members
Ballot access for third-party or non-affiliated typically require a petition to apply and that threshold is again set by party members in office
>Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
Voting is the lowest possible bar or participation for political engagement
Organizing and agitating are the day to day efforts people should be doing but aren’t because they prefer to have money
The party itself is made up of the people. It isn't hard to join and get influence. Local elections in particular are easy, they are looking for help. Local elections make for people they look for to run in higher elections
I’ve organized with the DSA the last few years, and I caucused for Ron Paul in 2008.
I promise you you will have zero success getting Claudia De-La Cruz (who I voted for and was on the ballot in VA) put on the DNC or RNC ballot.
So no, you can’t just get on a ballot as a candidate by showing up. You need to be a party loyalist and there are no independent parties that voters show up for.
Hell even “down ballot” have to stick to the party line.
I mean, this is a very good philosophy to have.
The trouble is, the people who are most vocal about "no poors allowed" emphatically do not subscribe to it, and the people who are most likely to have power over these things do not subscribe to it (there is some, but not perfect, overlap between these groups).
And it's kinda tricky to go over their heads and get rules put in place at the next level above them (ie, the level that sets the rules they have to follow) that can effectively prevent this sort of thing.
I mean, one of the main takeaways from the article was that "there is a market for X" is something fundamentally different and sometimes even the opposite of "X is a good thing".
In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.
They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one:
https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.
Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
The way you say "outcompeted" makes it seem like you're evaluating efficiency in both cases, but isn't direction the more important criteria?
It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things.
The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.
Somewhat of a weird example…the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous, or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start. Also in your example you have both cars without steering wheels.
> the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous
How silly, even autonomous vehicles have steering. They may be built without the wheel, but they have some kind of steering mechanism
> or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start
I hope your wheels never lose alignment and that you're pointed exactly where you want to go at the start.
It's not a weird example at all if you don't come up with crazy unrealistic situations that don't match actual cars or the metaphor.
The OP specifically referenced a steering wheel as it relates to weight, so that is what I went off of. Try to not overthink things.
By that logic, from my perspective - your family life, as we're practicing it today, it a car without a steering wheel.
The church down the street from me, that I have nothing to do with, is a car without a steering wheel. My local town, of which I'm only 1 member, is a car without a steering wheel.
Just because you see a system that you don't understand or control doesn't mean it's dangerous. The first instinct shouldn't be to centralize power.
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...
I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
Markets create the illusion of choice between monopolies.
I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.
Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.
You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.
I feel like in this case, the “Amazon or Netflix” example is particularly bad because I feel like I’m actually drowning in streaming providers.
You will also typically have the option to simply opt out, although this is getting less rare.
I think my point is that there are typically still many options, but the best options are controlled by few players.
> I feel like in this case, the “Amazon or Netflix” example is particularly bad because I feel like I’m actually drowning in streaming providers.
It's a fake choice, because they carry mutually exclusive catalogs, and entertainment choice is not particularly substitutable (e.g. if I want to watch "Star Wars" and it's not available on services I'm subscribed to, I'm not going to be satisfied with all the rich selection of things they carry that is still not "Star Wars").
Lots of that in the economy, that's where the most money seems to be made. Smartphones are my go-to example: plenty of nearly identical options to choose from, choice entirely set up by vendors, with little to no way of users to voice their feedback. A supply-driven market. You get to choose from what's made available, not what is possible.
It doesn't feel like a fake choice when I sit down on the couch and flip between 5 services trying to find something to watch, and on a weekly basis I will watch something on almost all the services. The content nowadays is generally fine, and it is difficult to pick something when everything is pretty close, and every now and then there is something really good, so maybe competition is working here to raise the bar for all services? Not sure.
Saying entertainment is not substitutable is kind of crazy. It is very rare that I will only ever want to watch one specific thing, and if that happens, I have the choice to rent it, or buy it or pay for one month of a service. To me as a consumer...that great.
The market for smartphones is mostly driven by lack of options in OS, not hardware. Each of the big players offer plenty of hardware choices at different price points. But if you don't like the OS, harder to get away from that. Competing on OS is very difficult though.
Markets used to be hundreds or thousands of people who were roughly peers and they still work well in that situation. When I go to the riverside market on Saturday to buy fabric for a project, there are 10 different fabric stalls. On this one little river bank alone! Each one of them has a different selection and they all want me to buy their fabric. This is the only thing that people used to think of as a market, and it probably does work well. Since that time, however, the term has been twisted beyond comprehension.
> I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.
Zoning codes have some uses, doesn't mean they're still net positive value. Maybe the current situation is so bad that letting a pig farm or a coal power plant be build right in the middle of a residential neighborhood is actually a better tradeoff than whatever we have now.
In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.
i don't know if this is the case everywhere in europe but i understand that at least in germany instead of zoning the local government approves the purpose of each building individually. so instead of deciding this is a commercial zone, they decide how many shops and businesses they allow in that area, and what kind of businesses they are. and once a building has a specific business use, then it can't easily be changed. so in effect that is very fine grained zoning. this is as flexible as the people in the government who make the decisions.
Depends which objection you mean...
But your choices are more limited than you might think. Ultimately what's available to you is decided by the economic machinery upstream.
the average American cannot afford a $500 surprise expense.
what freedom, or choice, does that translate to?
e.g. I either go without power or food, or I don't get a brutally painful tooth pulled
"I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own."
Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.
You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.
Why do I care about a trash incinerator? The truth is I don't.
I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.
I agree. To expand your point, that requires upstream regulation of trash incinerators (and road safety, which I'll ignore because developed economies mostly have that at least nominally in place), to make sure it's not a noxious neighbor. Where that doesn't exist, there will be pressure for (blunt force and inefficient) zoning codes to keep the smelly stuff away.
That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)
There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.
I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.
I don’t follow. Your first sentence says you do not care about trash incinerators, presumably next to your house. Your second sentence says you care about the smell.
Trash incinerators are very smelly. You are contradicting yourself. I don’t get it.
But if someone invented a new type that didn't smell, it should be allowed. Regulate consequences, not causes. The power substation down the road is disguised as a brick house, because the rule was ultimately about maintaining the look of the area and not about forbidding power substations.
Much better explanation-thank you!
> Regulate consequences, not causes.
a noble sentiment but most often these cannot be separated.
> That objection applies to the other options as well.
True.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.
I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.
Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.
Every system can be captured by wealthy interests. Markets are not unique there. Once in a rare while someone not wealthy captures a system - but they inevitably use that capture to become wealthy so it doesn't really matter.
Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
Are you making your own choices?
Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?
To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?
Not op, but my answer would be yes.
The very need for psychiatrists is, in a sense, an example for that. This is a case of companies trying to do their best to convince you to engage with them, because, otherwise, you likely wouldn't. Also, you never get stuff you don't "need". Games you don't want to play? Never happens, even in addictive games. Consume art that makes you feel nothing? Feel nothing how? Worst case scenario, you thought it would make you feel something, but it didn't. In all of these cases, the worst that happened is that you were made to wrongly belive that they would sate you, but your prediction was wrong, so you improve it for next time. Remember, even hypnosis can't overrule individual will, only brainwashing (which isn't a thing yet).
Take the opposite approach, central planning. In central planning, you are given little to no choices. You will be assigned the resources and roles you need according to the central planner. Even if the planner is democratic, your influence is reduced to a single vote, which is guaranteed to be erased by the law of large numbers. And that's ignoring external factor to you that are in control of the central planner: the psychlogists you mentioned still exist, but now they work for the planner instead.
We can argue that people are currently led into making poor choices in the market, but to conclude that this means no choice is being made is wrong. In a market, we can improve people's choices. In centralized systems, "people's choices" aren't a thing.
You say that as if there is any alternative. Every other system as well has people who are good at psychology spreading propaganda.
they said the same thing about the divine right of kings
how could there be an alternative? surely without god or a king everything would fall apart!
Because the alternative to a market (a system where people make choices with the stuff they own) is a system where people are dictated to use stuff they don't own.
The divine right of kings touched on a lot of things, like governance, ownership, origin of law, etc. Decentralization/centralization focuses on ownership before anything else.
There is no alternative[1]. Or in other words, Omelas is more believable if there is a kid in a hole.
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
Oh I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just saying if they aren't really your choices, why is making them valuable to you? Sure, you have 30 different choices of peanut butter to pick from, but you always pick the same one, because it's what your mom used when you were a kiddo, or because you don't like the oil separating ones, or because the chunky makes you feel like it's healthy even though it's loaded down with as much sugar as a Coke.
What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?
I have changed my peanut butter choice - when science started realizing trans fat was a problem I switched before the law changed to reflect science. I have also tried various of the 30 different options in other situations and found the one I personally like best. The value isn't just that I can make a choice, it is also that other people really do make different choices.
You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.
It’s funny you defend your independence by giving explanations of how you changed your peanut butter buying habits. The point was we don’t care what kind of peanut butter you buy; it’s not a meaningful kind of choice to have.
First, whether something is meaningful or not, depends on the subject.
Independence here isn't about whether your mind exists in a parallel world - devoid of external inputs - it's whether your input is required for an action to happen or not. They didn't simply comply with a choice from above, they experimented and came with an option that works for them. It doesn't matter whether that's a common choice or not, but who held the final authority in it.
In centralized systems, your input is, in theory, basically irrelevant/in practice, completely irrelevant unless you happen to the central authority.
What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?
Any industry or economic activity where extractive financialisation takes priority over productive economic activity that delivers human value.
Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.
This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.
let's reverse the question. Where are markets expected to be optimal?
> definition of 'perfect competition' perfect competition, in which there are large numbers of identical suppliers and demanders of the same product, buyer and sellers can find one another at no cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market.
And that perfect competition provides the price signals that allow the market to be more competitive.
The less that holds true, the less efficient the market is going to be.
What is the price signal on education?
What is the price signal on public infrastructure?
What is the price signal on rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts?
City transit-it transports more people than taxis and uber put together. The trade off is public transit is slower (in my case 35 minutes by link-rail vs 15 minutes by car, and probably 20 minutes if I were to take an uber)
Electric service to the home, streets, policing, fire and rescue.
Healthcare.
Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids.
Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).
These are good examples and it’s even worth noting that the net impact of these can be a huge boost to the market. But it is a local and greedy optimizer. It doesn’t think “would having public transit improve the economy long term” it thinks “could I make enough on fares to justify the investment” (which is almost always no, at least relative to other investments). This is the nature of positive externalities. They are value that the market is unable to weigh in its decision making.
I’d have thought that ‘the free market doesnt make subways’ is a market coordination problem, not an externality one?
Meaning, I think that ticket sales can a good job of capturing the costs and benefits of transportation - the benefits to the consumer and the costs to the producer. It’s worked well in other areas of transportation, like passenger boats and planes, and the market mostly works well in those areas.
So I’d have guessed that issue with subways, different from planes and ships, is that you have to buy the rights to large portions of underground land in order to build your lines in contiguous fashion. It’s hard for private developers to get the rights to these lands, if one landowner refuses to sell, it can block the construction of an entire line. This is why rail, dam, and highway projects tend to be coordinated by the state. They all suffer this problem, which doesn’t apply to transport by air or sea, as air and sea lack similar private property issues to trip over.
Yes, as you say the market is a local (both in space and time) and greedy optimizer.
Long-term payoffs that increase the value of all participants in society, such as education, healthcare, infrastructure (roads including public transportation, water, electricity, ...), are demonstrably better served by government than by business.
Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.
Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.
What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
> Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces
I agree with this, but I think it reinforces GP's point that what's missing is time: slack in the day. I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood kids, and the critical enabler was that there were always adults around during the after-school hours. Not actively hanging out with us, or even closely supervising, but around. Some of them (mine, but only for a few years), were stay-at-home mothers, but by no means all. One family had a dad who got home early from work. Another kid we couldn't play at their house certain days, but we could others, because their parents had variable schedules.
There were also more kids around, because families back then had more kids than they do nowadays. I think that's also (not entirely, but to a significant degree) a consequence of adults having less time - across their life-cycles, and in their days - that isn't devoted to work.
No ones' parents did gig-work, or worked two jobs. Most parents were 9-5, or maybe 8-4 (or I don't know: I was a kid, and not paying attention to things like that), but no one went to "after school care", because there were always adults around after school got out.
Hell, I think the need for third-places (for kids) mentioned in the article is a down-stream effect of the increased time pressures on adults' lives - as is the disappearance of third-places for adults.
I don’t know if I can come to that conclusion. Certainly there some grain of a truth there but even when the parents are home kids are not out exploring. At least in America there is an obsession for experience maxing with kids. I don’t know if it’s a time problem or a shift in attitudes.
> The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby
The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.
Ok video games then. I am not sure video gaming in person in a group setting is popular with modern youth. Same outcome to me.
You think that hanging out playing video games with friends lacks an appeal for young people?
Are you for real?
You don’t need to be rude.
I never said it lacks appeal but I would say that more folks prefer to game online with friends.
Why do you think these are board games? The article is describing a youth club, for which there is no market as there is no profit to be made from it.
We have more time than ever. Adults just choose to use it arguing on the Internet instead of building a free 3rd space for teens.
All of those things you long for have been nuked by the economy too.
Source?
IDK if you're familiar with Church, but that's the most heavily used third space. And we grant it tax exempt status which it abuses to push bad laws.
Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.
i believe most of the demand for third spaces is for things that are free to use. parks, places to hang out, activities. these spaces are not profitable.
in germany this is handled by supporting youth organizations. sport, scouts and other activities. most of these groups get free access to government owned buildings. they get financial support for their equipment, etc, under the condition that any youth can join with only a nominal membership fee.
in a pure market economy none of these organizations or spaces would survive. they depend on government support.
We had youth clubs where I live when I grew up, but it never crossed my mind to go to them unfortunately I thought they’d be hostile places.
The market may be performing at a local maximum, if kids without third spaces grow up unproductive.
another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.
a pure market economy would never allow for the existence of a public park. they are on valuable land, cost a lot of money but don't make any profit at all.
I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks.
And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes
It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.
the market is not spending that money. the community/goverment is.
How is that not a market, as long as we are voting?
good question. i actually agree with you. but free market is defined as "without government intervention", and some people defend that rigorously. i found this article where government involvement in a public parks fail: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentali... driving that point home.
personally i believe for every story in that article where the government failed or did worse than private owners we can find just as many stories where private owners failed to act in the public interest and only government was there to support the public. this is not a question of the system, but of the motivation of the people involved. even some examples in the article only work because government set the rules that empowered the people to act against bad actors in the first place.
the article claims that government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits and i would counter that that is broadly not true in many places because people do expect the government to act in their interest and not doing so can and will backfire. even in a country like china where the government is more top down. but i digress.
so yeah, i agree that government and people are market participants. but i just had this argument in another thread where someone insists that i am a non-interested party in commercial property dealings if i am not a tenant or owner, while i kept arguing that as a person living in the city my interests are affected too if a property stays empty and therefore it's only right that the government gets involved.
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
I wonder if you may be seeing ghosts? At least to me, this sounded so clearly like an authentic human voice, at least the parts I've read (haven't finished yet).
This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.
I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?
It's possible we're at the point now where it fools me, but I didn't see it that way. I think more evidence against would be the fact that the author discloses genAI usage in another article [0] and provides their own version of the same [1].
[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...
[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...
you are so wrong. this is not ai.
Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
Watching trust in online content of any kind disintegrate in realtime due to AI in a forum that on balance breathlessly touts AI is surreal.
You're conflating different things here. You would have to look very hard on HN to find someone who "breathlessly touts" the idea of publishing AI-generated blogposts under your own name.
In for a penny, in for a pound. "Well it's ok when I do it" doesn't wash.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around.
Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.
How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?
That’s not really an LLMism. It’s a phrase that ordinary writers use and was perfectly fine, but LLMs started overusing it, so now you see it as a “tell.” People who haven’t read enough LLM-generated writing to see the pattern won’t notice anything wrong.
In my experience, the key element is slack.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
I'm a father of 7 children. I'm the youngest of 5 siblings and my wife is the youngest of 6 siblings. Both of our mothers had college degrees and jobs and chose to stay at home with the children, and neither of our fathers had anything other than middle-class incomes.
My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).
We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
This is really cool! I am happy for you and your family. I don't mean to pry, but I'd love more details.
I live my life with no slack and no way to get any.
I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.
Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.
Unfortunately were I live...
The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees. The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week. The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago) Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
Valuable for Moloch.
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
I would expect such a grant to be handled by local/city government, which should have the local knowledge you speak of.
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
It existed in my old town, although I think it got shut down.
If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.
Do you have a garage? Is it fully occupied by a car?
they used to create bands in those
Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here.
I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.
It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.
see also: "Bowling Alone"
Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures.
These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?
And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.
This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
The article doesn't mention of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which explored pretty much the same idea, a.k.a. the value of the 'room', (which for Putnam was 'social capital'), and its rapid decline. Bowling Alone was published in 2000, looking back to 1950, and noted the massive, synchronous decline of civic participation in pretty much everything non-work-related across American society. Every kind of gentle, recurrent, voluntary activity you can imagine was on a pretty steep decline even before the smartphone or widespread adoption of the Internet
I like that article.
One thing I notice is that very busy people, are often busy by choice. Yes they have work, but they're not slaves to working those extra hours... they choose to pick up that laptop at home because it is there.
Folks after school, their kids are busy, because they signed the kid up for a dozen things.
Not to say some people aren't super stuck in a cycle, the working poor with multiple jobs, I used to do that and it was exhausting. That's still a problem.
But even people with choices seem to choose to be busy.
In India, by law, companies above a certain size are required to spend 2% of profit on social responsibility activities. So in my city, you see lots of things around adopted or funded by companies.
Volunteering is a great way to see lots of these rooms!
The article spends a good deal of time making the point that these rooms are getting more scarce since people can't afford to volunteer their time.
People below or near the poverty line can occasionally be found volunteering.
I think it speaks more about what people value, how they value their time. How many people can’t afford an hour a week? An hour a month? There is almost always some unhealthy activity that takes up at least an hour of your time a month, why not substitute?
It is, but that doesn't help that room getting funded.
Volunteers fund lots of stuff! Throw them a buck or two, tell your friends, plenty of great things are community funded! If we can’t get a handout from on high it’s impossible? Have some passion!
(and, realpolitik style, if you get an excited community together with some funds, it’s usually easier to get that handout to top it off!)
This is a great article, and I've never seen the problem explained better. The solution doesn't make sense, though, and this is almost but not quite obvious in the article by virtue of how well it has stated the problem. The problem with basic income is that it provides people with cash but does not change the underlying supply-demand system. To get the lokal (the room) to work you needed more than cash: you needed a desire for teens to be happy and engaged, the will to help them get there, a sense of what might help them, leadership to set it up, attract them, and keep it going, and then, yes, money to pay rent. If all you provide is the money, you will get people spending more money on the usual things the economy "sees": phones, video games, amusing t-shirts. What you have around the lokal in the story is actually not merely basic income fed into the existing economy: you actually have a separate economy. The separate economy works differently because it sees differently, it has different demands, different desires. The society as a whole (as embodied here by the government, thankfully—though not all governments are predictably good-willed in this way) wants the teens to thrive, to provide for them, to pay for them, to guide them with modest leadership. Though individuals, and the regular markets, cannot think about the teenagers—they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the time, they have diffusion of responsibility, etc—the society can pool its interests and act upon its collective interest through the market. This may not be the only way to "cut across" the market, to do collectively what no set of individuals will do, but it's one way. So we definitely want to solve the problem: we want to organize, lead, preserve, and fund things that are of collective value but that the market cannot see. Giving individuals a basic income, however, doesn't accomplish that. I wish it did, but it doesn't. It puts the money into the usual demand centers—individuals needing to pay rent and transportation costs and go on dates and so forth—that live within the "blind" economy.
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers.
When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.
Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
>The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people
Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right?
The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.
> The market doesn't have a will of its own
Of course it does! It is possible to have a system where everyone is unhappy, yet incentivised to keep making things worse.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
or https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...
You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.
I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolutions, etc.
Those aren't freedoms, those are rights. Calling them freedoms is nonsensical
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
> whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community
Something deeply wrong here. Both that this level of antisocial behavior is expected, and that liability would be placed on people who were not meaningfully responsible for it but just happen to have their name on the lease.
> regulation
I suspect what people are actually scared of in America is not regulation (from the legislature) but litigation, which is not the same thing even if it can have the same effects.
An example of how to destroy a community through outside litigants pursuing the culture war is what's happened to the Women's Institute, a pretty old organization, in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/14/womens-insti...
This is litigation itself as a form of antisocial behavior.
"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space"
I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis.
The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.
What happened to Tornado Cash, Session, GrapheneOS and others is a soft ban on creating privacy tools.
Churches are funded by donations, not sales. They're a prime example of what the article is talking about.
It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ
Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?
It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage.
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
But it has to be done by everyone at once. A single factory owner paying a higher wage doesn't see that benefit. It only works if all the factory owners do it.
That's the kind of space I've been missing in my youth. I love that Swedish kids have got it available to them.
Most churches I've been to have these?
Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...
You shouldn't need to subscribe to one groups ideas or another to have access to social spaces.
Most of the churches I've been to are fairly open about the use of their spaces so long as you're not some sort of obnoxious.
You don't have to BE a luthern to visit a luthern church, and that's true for the kids as well. Same for the Jehovah's, same for multi- and non-denominational churchs.
At least we have the first trillionair
Many open source efforts seem to belong to this category as well.
This genre of posts should be called “the author has reached adulthood.” Not quite settled in, but no longer a clueless idiot, either.
the 'adults' made the mess we are in. and refuse to fix it!
It almost gets it.
These positive externalities are supposed to be paid from the owners of capital, primarily via tax. This is how it very successfully worked for quite some time. However, most western societies have decided in the last few decades to believe two things -
1) The government and elected representatives (and thus, voters) cannot be trusted with the allocation of capital spent on social welfare
and contradictorily,
2) The government and elected representatives can be trusted with the allocation of capital when it comes to the market and the owners of capital
Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.
The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy.
Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.
That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!
Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.
Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.
Sure, that is another avenue of economic erosion but I didn't focus on it because the "exempt" dynamic would seem to be the stronger dynamic. But if we actually fixed the flaws I listed, we would likely have to plug that hole of multiple jobs not counting towards the full time limit, especially if full time employment were defined as 15 hours per week (leaving plenty of time to stuff in a second or even third job in place of "visiting grandma")
But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.
I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell.
UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale.
There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.
UBI would overhaul the economy, but it's not like that doesn't happen regularly, just not for the benefit of workers. It's got to be studied before being implemented on a wide scale but there's no reason to assume it's not possible.
Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.
One aspect of the financialization of everything/the 'economics over all' mindset that I don't see often discussed is that if you for whatever reason can't make the 'sound' financial choice, you just...drown.
The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.
I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.
I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.
So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.
I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
UBI is in addition to whatever you can make from a wage and the B stands for not very high, just barely high enough to live.
My point is that it doesn’t solve the room problem outlined in the post - someone who’s just relying on UBI isn’t going to be motivated to create this space because the space will exist regardless, they get UBI either way. That’s why the funding is necessary - it creates a market need through the coercion of pay. UBI will not magically incentivize self organization of social goods, only give marginally more freedom for personal goods.
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
>which is the central thesis here
No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a swell idea. The population exploded.
Then you couple this with the technological revolution and the necessity of training huge amounts of the population for specialists jobs if they want to make a living and suddenly a boat load of kids doesn't make any sense at all. And it's getting to the point of the squeeze that having any kids doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people.
There is no meaning of life if you don't have kids. Childless people realize this when they're around 50 and it's too late to have kids.
My impression is that voluntarily child-free people have a very low regret rate, but there are dozens of conflicting studies on this. Interested if you have anything concrete to link to.
As has been pointed out by philosophers for a long time, there is no inherent meaning, beside what you yourself create. For some people, children. For others, art of some sort, or building a business that creates value. For some, pure hedonism, or building relationships and helping the people around them.
I'm way older than 50, and don't miss having kids at all.
>There is no meaning of life
Don't half ass it, brace the full absurdity of the universe.
The only purpose why we are here is to take entropy from an ordered state to one of maximum disorder.
80% of women still have kids. They just only have one kid now.
Historically, before the twentieth century, the way it was mostly done was by living in extended families, and prehistorically, by living in small tribes. The whole family (grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and their children) worked together to take care of the family (or as I said, the tribe). It was the nuclear family and individualism, driven I'm guessing by economic forces, that destroyed all that.
Economic hot take: That scale of saving is impossible. It can't happen. The ends don't meet, the numbers don't match up.
Think about what etiremnent savings means in the real economy. It means I have to store enough food to feed myself for 30 years. It means I have to store enough furniture too. And enough gasoline. And enough of everything else.
This is obviously not possible. So instead I store other things I hope I'll be able to exchange for gasoline and food. But no matter what form it takes, I have to store an absolutely enormous amount of stuff. Whether it's physical goods or abstract financial rights. There is no way for everyone to do this without creating massive economic distortion of some kind. Whatever people store is going to massively increase in value (house deeds! shares!) and crash later when they exchange it for food and gasoline.
But there's a simple alternative, we add a 20% tax and distribute it to people in the form of pensions. This is called a pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Optionally the scheme can keep some kind of weight value for each person based on how much tax they paid or any other metric. Since it doesn't store assets it doesn't distort the economy nearly as much. But, it's vulnerable to a future generation simply cutting it off. When the scheme turns on there's a generation who didn't contribute but still benefit and when the scheme turns off there's a generation who contributed and didn't benefit. This can't happen to people who store real assets because the assets are firmly owned by them, and the society can't easily just decide they aren't.
We can do an intermediate solution if we let people buy a share of future tax income as a financial asset. It doesn't distort the economy too much and your contributions are firmly your property. Treasury bonds are this.
> Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..
Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.
No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.
Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
>Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns).
Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.
Good point, didn't think of it. And yeah, I don't know in general which goods should be more vs less free-market.
This sounds like a gaming club. A small one, but a gaming club. Those exist, we have them all over. You pay for them in a variety of ways, in this case the way being forced seizure of wealth aka taxes. Other ways are via profit from sales of consumables (what the article alludes to) or membership fees. In all cases it is the parents that pay for them. It is absolutely possible for the market to build a non-predatory gaming club, but I concede it is easier when you can just get a government grant. It is entirely possible nobody in Stockholm can run a gaming room as a profitable business. Profitable businesses are hard even when they are simple.
The rest of the article can basically be summed up with "work takes too much time and pays too little", which is absolutely true.
I am not sure what the jab at stay at home moms or grandparents who help with childcare is supposed to be. Probably some other communist drivel. Grandma absolutely did not do unpaid childcare, she was insistent she had to teach us right and also got tons of labour and money from my parents. If the exchanges of money and labour between parents and grandparents in the context of childcare were measured, it would probably double the nation's GDP.
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571142>
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
Yeah the highest participation areas have significant poverty and lean conservative.
My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
Even the types of games I believe are shifting to less third spaces. Matchmaking is replacing the MMO beginner town where a lot of the socialization happens.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
This underestimates how friendships are made by younger people even via matchmaking in lobbies depending on the game.
Heck, I have friends who are slightly younger than me who made durable friendships in League via matchmaking.
I think there's no zero friendship making power, but matchmaking is certainly less.
I have online friends from matchmaking, but it's certainly much harder. I'm not underestimating it, but my language might have been too strong.
Consider the average young person's discord group.
Playing Minecraft with friends at a lan party in a social room is better than playing it at home.
It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
There are reasons for that.
Then we should get rid of smartphones entirely for young people (under 16) and then you’re back to the previous paradigm.
Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago.
He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.
This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.
Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.
insta-subscribe, very well written.
>> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it
I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet.
There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it.
But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble.
Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread.
And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets,
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
There are multiple points against such comparison: 1. Minimum wage goes up - for some amount of people. Most are not feeling it as they are not on the minimum wage or not working. 2. Salary is not UBI, it is actually earned, taken from revenue.
UBI isn't positive for everyone either, above a certain income point people have to be paying more in tax to balance it.
The real issue isn't inflation, it's that UBI is too bloody expensive in practice.
Entirely true.
If you want UBI without massive inflation then you have to suck back in most of the money you've produced.
Of course, you can then do that pretty sensibly so that you don't have cliff edges like we do at the moment.
It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms.
It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it?
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
You can’t just move assets of that scale around without knock-on effects.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
Yes, a UBI (really all government spending) re-allocates demand, either directly through taxes and transfer or by decreasing the purchasing power of the currency through inflation. At any point in time, there is more or less a set amount of productive capacity in the economy, and money is what allows it to be allocated.
one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why.
Radical concept: you could provide UBI in the form of housing, food and transportation
Food and transportation is extremely cheap nowadays. Big bag of rice is couple dollars and a bicycle is a 100$.
Oh, people don't want affordable food but a 20-buck burrito and a 100k truck of ridiculous size?
If your city is bikable, that's terrific!
What's happens to the price of construction when the state suddenly commissions millions of homes?
when each home is a cardboard shack?
>that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation
Please tell me what's different than what I am seeing right now without UBI?
Proponents of UBI usually also suggest countermeasures to the (real) issues you pointed out.
Things now are completely different than 5 years ago /s
This is what religion is for, and what you refer to as THE ECONOMY is simply the hard wired human precondition stand in when you decide there is no God(s).
"The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor!
Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.
There should be a place for people, especially teens, to gather without a bunch of woo woo baggage. I found church incredibly isolating as a kid because we weren’t there just to be, we were there under this expectation that we were partaking in some superstition.
The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.
I think you misunderstand, the 3rd space should be at a church. One in my community does this for teens where they just hang out and do homework after school for 2 hours.
My megachurch growing up had all sorts of teen events including sand volleyball in the summer.
But there was always this underlying, uncomfortable "threat" that an adult would approach you to talk about your relationship with god or whatever since that's the whole motive of the place existing.
If you're not into that, then you feel out of place. Like being a straight guy at a gay bar who's only there for the happy hour. Or hanging out at a cafe without wanting to buy anything.
We need to come up with something without any motive other than "here's a place to just be".
It has been a few decades since I attended church, but in my teenage years they did none of this. The only time I saw the building in use was Sunday morning.
Looking at their website it's hard to tell. Their calendar doesn't show any activities like that, but maybe you have to be plugged into the congregation to know. They appear to be a very left-leaning Evangelical organization now. I didn't even know there was such a thing.