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Except those service workers probably now have significantly longer commutes. Their quality of life suffers. I don't know how broadly your definition of service
by steveax 10y ago
Except those service workers probably now have significantly longer commutes. Their quality of life suffers. I don't know how broadly your definition of service workers goes, but this affects teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc.
- twblalock 10y agoThat's not relevant to the arguments about economic growth, because clearly the places this happens are growing very fast in spite of this. This is one of the "affordable housing is a social good" arguments. That's fine, but it's not the kind of argument I was responding to.
- ahoy 10y agoI don't think the parent poster would disagree with you. What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy. I'm with you that it's a bad thing.
- davidw 10y agoGrowing at 10% instead of 20% is still "a negative effect". "That which is not seen" and all that...
- twblalock 10y agoWhat evidence is there that growth would increase in the areas with high housing prices if the housing prices were lower?
- davidw 10y agoLess deadweight loss in the form of rent, and more towards people doing productive things is one completely obvious one.
- twblalock 10y agoI asked for evidence, not what seems obvious. I already addressed this in my original post. It seems obvious that the displacement of workers would hurt the economy. However, it does not seem to actually happen -- the cities with the highest housing prices have the highest growth of any cities in the world.
- twblalock 10y ago> What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy. Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. High housing prices don't seem to hurt the economy. Quality of life arguments, whether they are right or wrong, are totally unrelated to that proposition.
- komali2 10y agoThe unfortunate thing is that common sense dictates that productivity should be going down with quality of life, but apparently, it isn't. Or at least, nobody has been able to demonstrate a correlation yet.
- odbol_ 10y agoYou're abusing the law of averages though. Yes, productivity might be fine for the most "economically productive" members of society (e.g. programmers, middle managers, aka the privileged.) For everyone else, aka the people on minimum wage, their productivity and quality of life is severely hampered. But since if one janitor is forced to quit their job because the 3-hour commute is no longer worth minimum wage, they can just go find another person desperate enough to work for minimum wage. These people are often ignored and have no real public voice/outlet to let their plights be known. But of course, plenty of rich programmers on a Hacker forum don't think anything's wrong, because nothing's wrong _for them_.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoQuality of life can go down while excess productivity has been captured by corporations and distributed to shareholders. As productivity went up over the last 40 years, we should've reduced the work week. [1] We didn't. And now we have corporations with trillions of dollars of cash they can't or won't invest [2], and tens of millions of workers who continue to slave away 40 hours a week. As odbol_'s sibling comment states, most of HN's demographic doesn't see this despair or care. [1] https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/productivity-and-real-wages.jpg https://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/product... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporations-hoarding-trillions.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporati... And the disappearing middle class: http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/484941939/a-portrait-of-americas-middle-class-by-the-numbers http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/484941939/a-portrait-of-americ...