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Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before – Gilded age in SF compared to today
- dang 11y agoIf someone can suggest a less baity title (preferably using representative language from the article), we'd appreciate it.
- smt88 11y agoHenry George and the beginning of the Progressive Era (or some such thing)
- akud 11y agoParallels between gilded age sf and today?
- dang 11y agoOk, I've added that.
- jejones3141 11y agoPerhaps expand SF to San Francisco? I was expecting an article on science fiction.
- Hydraulix989 11y agoAre you sure you're on the right site? Lol.
- dang 11y agoUnfortunately there isn't room, since titles are limited to 80 chars on HN.
- slowmovintarget 11y agoCaught Between: Historical Comparisons of Technology-driven Economic Upheaval in the U.S.
- hacknat 11y agoI think the title is fair, because it is meant as a literary or rhetorical reference, not as a sensational headline meant to draw you in to some ho hum news article.
- dang 11y agoIt's pretty clearly meant as both.
- zem 11y agoquotes around "nothing like this has ever happened before", perhaps
- CiPHPerCoder 11y agoYes, I think that would be a helpful addition.
- rsync 11y agoBest and most interesting story I have ever read on TC.
- ScottBurson 11y agoKim-Mai Cutler is great. Here's one of her classics: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
- mklim 11y agoThat was a deeply informative read, thank you for linking it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Animats 11y agoYes, that's Henry George. The article ends with the comment that the automobile broke the land ownership monopoly by creating suburbia. It took about fifty years to fill out surburbia, but that's been done. Henry George's single tax plan has been implemented in two cities in the US. One is Fairhope, AL.[1] The Fairhope Single Tax Corporation owns most of the land in the town, including the downtown area, and rents it out on 99 year leases. The ground rent cover all property taxes, plus some public facilities the Single Tax Corporation runs. The corporation sets the rent based, as Henry George wanted, on the most productive use of the land. This encourages development. This just covers the land; you can build, and own the building, but must keep up the rent payments on the land to continue owning the building. What you can't do in Fairhope is buy land and wait for it to become more valuable. You cannot get a capital gain out of owning land there. So no one can become rich by owning land. [1] http://www.fairhopesingletax.com/ http://www.fairhopesingletax.com/
- venomsnake 11y agoWell the suburbs were made out of ticky tacky and they all looked just the same. Their adoption was also driven by racism. As long as people are interested in eating, drinking, partying, culture, socializing and having casual sex - cities as most desirable places to live are inevitable. The gentrification could be viewed as a very subtle form of segregation - that you could just price out people you don't want to mix with from the places you deem desirable.
- djhn 11y ago> As long as people are interested in eating, drinking, partying, culture, socializing and having casual sex - cities as most desirable places to live are inevitable. Eating, drinking, partying and casual sex are just that - culture. Culture is subject to change. And this isn't what drives urbanization. More simple optimization with regards to commute time and employment opportunities dominate this preference, except maybe in very select areas with high density of youth with enough money to have post-materialistic consumption behaviours.
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- Lazare 11y agoThe article is about (among other things) Henry George, and his ideas about a single land value tax being the best way to fund government. Interestingly, modern economics is quite favourable to his ideas. In particular, research on the economics of taxation has shown that land taxes are the most efficient taxes with the lowest deadweight losses. And when it comes to actual economists, Krugman "agrees that land value taxation is the best means of raising public revenue", but has questioned if it would raise enough; many other economists have suggested that it would. Rothbard (a leading an-cap/Austrian economist) attacked it, but I don't think many people ever agreed with him. Milton Friedman (a very widely respected economist of the Chicago school) said it was the "least bad" tax for raising government revenues. Hayek (another Austrian and also a Nobel prize winner), was an early proponent but later feared it would be unfair in practice. Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz are also on record as being in favour. Some of George's contemporaries suggested that distinguishing land from capital made no sense, but (as above) modern research has shown otherwise. And Marx hated the idea, viewing it as "Capitalism's last ditch". In other words, he was afraid it would work, and thus delay to inevitable onset of world socialism. (I think on balance that should be counted as a vote in favour of Georgism?) In short, it's an idea supported by research and with the backing of a glittering array economists from the far left to the far right (including several winners of the Nobel prize), a few prominent politicans (Churchill in Britain and two US presidents), numerous jouranlists and pundits, etc. And yet it's never been tried. (I don't count the few experiments at the local government level, since national taxes still applied.) Kind of odd. Of course, it would be an enormous change to enact, which I suppose explains it.
- paganel 11y agoWhen you think about it's the perfect tax: it's regressive (and the people in power love regressive taxes) and it effects the middle classes (and the people in power don't care one bit about the middle classes, no-one I've heard of has ever said to him: "My ideal in life is to improve the condition of the middle class!" while I've heard of lots of people saying to themselves and others: "I want to eradicate poverty!"). A land tax would be regressive because it would have a bigger effect on middle class people compared to the 1%, because for a person representing the middle class a house purchase (which includes the land the house sits on) it's gonna be the biggest ever purchase from his/her life, while for a hedge-fund manager worth $5+ billion an extra money that he would have to pay on his Hamptons house is a blip in the ocean. You mentioned a lot of economists, but you left out J.S. Mill, who at some point was strongly in favor of proportionally higher inheritance taxes. That kind of tax wold effect the hedge fund managers a little more, and it sounds fairer to the middle classes.
- TuringTest 11y ago"A missing piece of Perez’s work, that often goes underemphasized by the private investment community, is the role of government in creating an equitable framework that allows everyone to participate in benefits of technological change. This is not an argument in favor of big government for big government’s sake; it’s to point out that when technology changes the complexity or structure of society, citizens have to push public institutions to transform themselves too." This highlight explains something that the Californian investment mindset seems to ignore - capitalism is good at creating wealth, but it tends to concentrate a lot of power in the hands of a few; efficient government is needed to distribute that wealth, so that an enough amount is shared and most of society benefit from it.
- barney54 11y agoSo what is the difference between a land tax and property tax? After all I looked at my tax assessment recently and there is a value for the land and a value for the house itself?
- Lazare 11y agoGeorge advocated a land value tax; that is a tax on the unimproved value of the land. This might seem like a minor difference but it actually isn't, because taxes generally cause changes in behaviour. Sometimes those changes are desirable: Carbon taxes, "sin" taxes, etc. More often the change is undesirable (as when we tax investment, wages, or consumption). (And, very frequently, those changes in behaviour results in the actual burden of the tax shifting. Payroll taxes are levied on businesses, but nobody actually thinks they pay them.) Tax housing, and you'll get less housing. Since people like housing (that's why they build it), that's considered a Bad Thing. Tax land, and you'll...get the same amount of land. With a few very minor exceptions, the amount of land is fixed. No distortions, no deadweight costs, and no real ability to shift the economic burden of the tax.
- tomjen3 11y agoWhat? It is trivial to shift the economic burden. As en employer I only hire remote: my employees now have to waste space having a home office. As a home owner I want a garden, but I don't want to pay for it so I build it on top of my house and make a basement to put my car in - I now shifted something like 8/10 of my tax burden because I use less land.
- vidarh 11y agoYou have shifted the burden by giving up on a resource that is valuable to society around you. That may well be an equitable trade. The point is you won't get rid of the tax without giving something back to society in return. Now, I don't believe that this is sufficient as an alternative to all other taxes, but it does have many desirable properties, and your suggested behavioural changes are amongst them: Optimizing usage of land.