8 ms·

Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for e

by nwah1 9y ago

Production just requires land and labor. Capital is output from previous production used as input again, and it is nice to have but not strictly necessary for employment of labor. Labor can be applied whenever labor has access to land. So the question is why can't people just go to work? Grow their own food to feed themselves, if need be? The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal, and not because they all forgot how to farm. It is simply that farm labor couldn't pay the rent of land anymore. The mechanisms by which the unimproved value of land rises and falls is the key mechanism that we must understand in order to understand wages and the rate of unemployment. Real wages are not a number. They are the lifestyle you can obtain. They are what is left over after you've paid your taxes and your right to exist in a particular location. (Increasingly, healthcare and education are prerequisites to getting by in the same way.) Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent. When there's no rent-free land, rents rise and fall based on the ability to pay. People getting free money have more ability to pay, and landlords will definitely notice. Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. Higher demand doesn't just stimulate supply. The supply curve is vertical.

Chris_Jay 9y ago
Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B9EHSqWgFV7LNUxEVXk0S0ZiMlk/preview https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...
- trs80 9y ago
  403 forbidden.
  - Chris_Jay 9y ago
    My bad. https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projects/the-rural-incubator https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...
- stronglikedan 9y ago
  > there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. IMHO, one very insurmountable reason is that you could never convince everyone that an urban center is worth living in. Quite a few people just don't enjoy that lifestyle.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I think you read that wrong. Paraphrasing what you said: Some people not liking to live in cities is an insurmountable reason that land in city centers is the only land worth living in. First, your response doesn't make sense (and I think it's just because it's a misreading of the comment you replied to). Second, I agree, there are people (myself included) that wouldn't enjoy living in an urban center. But that doesn't address what I think the comment was getting at, which is that land in urban centers is more desirable to a greater number of people than land outside of them.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. There's actually a very fundamental reason why land perceived as being worth living in becomes an urban center, and remote work doesn't change most of the climate, water, resource distribution, etc., reasons why particular sites are much more attractive for human habitation.
- mncharity 9y ago
  > Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers. Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution. Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopefully)... perhaps it's easy to not notice these if you're not tracking the tech? Easy to think "remote work, so video conferencing, so limited impact - far better to do open plan offices"? Instead of "the practice and spatial constraints of software development will change dramatically over the next half decade".
  - memebox3v 9y ago
    Or for that matter self driving cars. You could commute for 5 hours a day, spend 2 hours in the office and go home again. All while being productive. That greatly increases the commutable range. Then you have the prospect of self driving Motor homes, moving with the work becomes that much easier.
    - kaybe 9y ago
      How will we be able to do this without fossil fuels?
    - mncharity 9y ago
      People take commuter buses with wifi, from Pennsylvania to NYC, with a 2 to 4 hour round trip. A few commute Boston to NYC on Amtrak Acela, with a 7-ish hour round trip (you can stand up and walk around, get coffee, etc).
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    I don't understand what problem VR/AR is solving in your hypothetical.
    - falcor84 9y ago
      Not the OP, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently. The problem is that telecommuting is currently very limited by technology. You can currently only transport your voice and a single video view, while collaborating over a single view from a monitor. You end up missing on very many of the modalities available in the real world. But my vision of what work and study could be like with good VR is The Magic School Bus. Assume that every time you an your colleagues wanted to do work on any domain, you would be transported into a hi-fi all-senses-included representation of that domain, which provides a perfect sense of presence. That technology is still quite far away, but once we're there, it would be significantly better than just being in a room with them. And the world would be forever changed.
- neural_thing 9y ago
  Can you provide a working link please? This is something I've been thinking about a lot, would like to learn more about what you are thinking.
  - Chris_Jay 9y ago
    oops, thanks for the heads up. https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projects/the-rural-incubator https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...
lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
This would be a wonderful thesis if it didn't ignore the fact that in the world (and the US in particular) there's a lot of land. So much land that you could fit the entire world's population twice into Texas alone assuming major city densities (assuming 67k /mi^2 and 268000 mi^2 per cursory googling gives some 18B).
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Roughly none of that land is freely available. It's also pretty clear that some sort of resource footprint is more interesting than apparent living density. Just food requires more than a few hundred square feet per person and we consume a lot more than food.
  - coryfklein 9y ago
    > Roughly none of that land is freely available. You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/2091095382_zpid/54_rid/0-10000_price/0-39_mp/globalrelevanceex_sort/32.586164,-98.868713,29.274421,-102.823792_rect/7_zm/0_mmm/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      I actually said roughly, I didn't go back and edit that in or anything. If you want to do brass tacks or whatever, buy it and scrape out a living to prove that cheap scrub desert makes a point about land being available.
      - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
        What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless? Obviously water and other resources are going to be an issue, but as a labour multiplier, AI and robotics have huge potential.
trhway 9y ago
>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. SpaceX is going to change it.
- nwah1 9y ago
  If things worked out according to the rosiest predictions, that would raise what classical economists called the "margin of production" and would thus raise wages for as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality. Although, you'd be surprised how quickly a commons can be enclosed. Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic.
  - trhway 9y ago
    >Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic. originally i did mean space, yet even the cheap globally available internet the Musk plans to build using SpaceX would noticeably increase availability of "connected" (an important aspect of "proximity") land.
  - AlanSE 9y ago
    > as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality For any reasonable near-term (centuries scale) prospect, there are no serious space or material constraints to outer space. Quality is a different subject, I want to get into that. > Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value Density of development is fundamentally different in microgravity. Our cities are all 2-dimensional. We can create a space station that hosts a "metro" area of stupendous population where everyone is in fairly quite commuting time of each other. Of course, we have to return to the "quality" aspect. More work is required up-front to get this sort of thing working. On Earth, we already have many resources that we take for granted for which we would have to devote effort to producing in space. Consider, Oxygen, fresh water, soil, etc. But couldn't the same thing have been said about virtually every component that went into creating the industrial revolution in the first place? The production of one thing requires support of another industrial product. Enormous production chains are created. Coal products are used in blast furnaces to make steel. Steel is used to make rail tracks to transport coal. Coal is burned to power steam engines to remove water from coal mines. Steal is used to produce those steam engines. Before long, steam engines are used to move coal over the tracks. All of this network goes to create manufactured goods, which make farming more efficient to support more people. In a superficial sense it would kind of sound easier to stay at prior population levels and live with the less efficient farming that didn't have this wild, confusing, and unsustainable web of dependencies. Why haven't we made progress toward a space-based industrial network of production? You can hardly say we've tried. Through the Shuttle era, launch economics hardly budged. Space programs were turned into science & jobs programs. Manned exploration beyond Earth orbit stopped, and all robotic (indirect) interaction with the rest of material in our solar system ground to a crawl. A major rover like Curiosity takes years to drive as far as the manned lunar rover did in a day, at a tremendous time and resource cost. Actual exploitation of space resources has so little actually invested in it. The main value we derive from space now is a perch from which to spy on and locate the citizens of Earth. Spending on space is not, at all, focused on something you can "development". Nor has it been. The one time we passed an international law on space resources (the Outer Space Treaty), we came up with incoherent and inaction-able drivel that undeveloped (and presently useless) resources were the property of everyone, and that only governments are really use them.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ozborn 9y ago
"The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal" Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts It's not unique to England either, it's just well documented there. Generally speaking the process of removing subsistence hunters, herders and farmers off of land they have historically lived off takes place with violence - not because they can't pay the rent anymore. Additionally, the claim on the land of the people who are generally doing the displacing is usually questionable at best... This isn't a matter of history either, taking land held in common by indigenous people with little if any recompense is a process that continues today in many parts of the world.
- SilasX 9y ago
  >>The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal >Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts I don't think that's disputing the parent's point. Seizing land isn't "banning farming" any more than repoing my car is "banning driving". To respond to the general point: if yeoman farming were actually more productive per unit input, then even enclosure wouldn't be enough to stamp it out. Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue: the new owners would see the offer price as being better than the capitalized returns they could make, and some bank would have seen the business plan and interest payments as being enough to merit a loan.
  - ozborn 9y ago
    "if yeoman farming were actually more productive per unit input, then even enclosure wouldn't be enough to stamp it out." I'm not making the claim that yeoman farming is more productive. I do claim however that such laws are sufficient to crush indigenous agriculture because enclosure is a violent and effective process for doing so. "Seizing land isn't "banning farming"" Enclosure laws aren't a ban (no society has ever banned farming to my knowledge), but they effectively put some farmers out of work if they engage in a particular type of subsistence agriculture. That is farmers that utilize a community owned shared hunting ground/pasture/cropland on land without a title recognized by the state. "Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue" Your typical indigenous person or tribe who is having their land enclosed or confiscated doesn't have the capital to buy it back, assuming they are even have the knowledge, language and legal framework on how to go about with that process. They are likely not even interested in agriculture for the purpose of making money, and if they were, do you really imagine people like the Orang Rimba are going to buy back their land? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430 It's going to be palm oil plantations no matter how effectively they were using the land - assuming anyone is even measuring.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent. Its not giving people money, its redistributing it. The total amount of money chasing land rents won't change by the full amount redistributed, so the whole amount won't go into increased rents. Who can rent how much will change, and that's pretty much (in the reductionist view you advance where all purchase of economic output amounts to land rent) the point. > Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. This is false. Humans have been making new land for a long time, and aren't about to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation
- nwah1 9y ago
  Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and locations are the same. If you did make an island off the coast of Manhattan, then you'd only be able to do so through the ownership rights of the location. Titles are granted by the government, usually at a price, but sometimes as a handout to special interests. The US Federal Government leases the rights to deep sea oil rigs. If you obtained such a handout to build an island off Manhattan, that would be a transfer from the commons into private hands... but not a net increase in locations.
TheCoelacanth 9y ago
You could easily take away the exact opposite conclusion from that. The source of funding for the money you are giving away should be 100% of all land rents.

by nwah1 9y ago

Chris_Jay 9y ago

Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B9EHSqWgFV7LNUxEVXk0S0ZiMlk/preview https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...

trs80 9y ago
403 forbidden.
- Chris_Jay 9y ago
  My bad. https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projects/the-rural-incubator https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...
stronglikedan 9y ago
> there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. IMHO, one very insurmountable reason is that you could never convince everyone that an urban center is worth living in. Quite a few people just don't enjoy that lifestyle.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  I think you read that wrong. Paraphrasing what you said: Some people not liking to live in cities is an insurmountable reason that land in city centers is the only land worth living in. First, your response doesn't make sense (and I think it's just because it's a misreading of the comment you replied to). Second, I agree, there are people (myself included) that wouldn't enjoy living in an urban center. But that doesn't address what I think the comment was getting at, which is that land in urban centers is more desirable to a greater number of people than land outside of them.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers. There's actually a very fundamental reason why land perceived as being worth living in becomes an urban center, and remote work doesn't change most of the climate, water, resource distribution, etc., reasons why particular sites are much more attractive for human habitation.
mncharity 9y ago
> Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers. Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution. Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopefully)... perhaps it's easy to not notice these if you're not tracking the tech? Easy to think "remote work, so video conferencing, so limited impact - far better to do open plan offices"? Instead of "the practice and spatial constraints of software development will change dramatically over the next half decade".
- memebox3v 9y ago
  Or for that matter self driving cars. You could commute for 5 hours a day, spend 2 hours in the office and go home again. All while being productive. That greatly increases the commutable range. Then you have the prospect of self driving Motor homes, moving with the work becomes that much easier.
  - kaybe 9y ago
    How will we be able to do this without fossil fuels?
  - mncharity 9y ago
    People take commuter buses with wifi, from Pennsylvania to NYC, with a 2 to 4 hour round trip. A few commute Boston to NYC on Amtrak Acela, with a 7-ish hour round trip (you can stand up and walk around, get coffee, etc).
- dwighttk 9y ago
  I don't understand what problem VR/AR is solving in your hypothetical.
  - falcor84 9y ago
    Not the OP, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently. The problem is that telecommuting is currently very limited by technology. You can currently only transport your voice and a single video view, while collaborating over a single view from a monitor. You end up missing on very many of the modalities available in the real world. But my vision of what work and study could be like with good VR is The Magic School Bus. Assume that every time you an your colleagues wanted to do work on any domain, you would be transported into a hi-fi all-senses-included representation of that domain, which provides a perfect sense of presence. That technology is still quite far away, but once we're there, it would be significantly better than just being in a room with them. And the world would be forever changed.
neural_thing 9y ago
Can you provide a working link please? This is something I've been thinking about a lot, would like to learn more about what you are thinking.
- Chris_Jay 9y ago
  oops, thanks for the heads up. https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projects/the-rural-incubator https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago

This would be a wonderful thesis if it didn't ignore the fact that in the world (and the US in particular) there's a lot of land. So much land that you could fit the entire world's population twice into Texas alone assuming major city densities (assuming 67k /mi^2 and 268000 mi^2 per cursory googling gives some 18B).

maxerickson 9y ago
Roughly none of that land is freely available. It's also pretty clear that some sort of resource footprint is more interesting than apparent living density. Just food requires more than a few hundred square feet per person and we consume a lot more than food.
- coryfklein 9y ago
  > Roughly none of that land is freely available. You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/2091095382_zpid/54_rid/0-10000_price/0-39_mp/globalrelevanceex_sort/32.586164,-98.868713,29.274421,-102.823792_rect/7_zm/0_mmm/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I actually said roughly, I didn't go back and edit that in or anything. If you want to do brass tacks or whatever, buy it and scrape out a living to prove that cheap scrub desert makes a point about land being available.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless? Obviously water and other resources are going to be an issue, but as a labour multiplier, AI and robotics have huge potential.

trhway 9y ago

>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. SpaceX is going to change it.

nwah1 9y ago
If things worked out according to the rosiest predictions, that would raise what classical economists called the "margin of production" and would thus raise wages for as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality. Although, you'd be surprised how quickly a commons can be enclosed. Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic.
- trhway 9y ago
  >Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic. originally i did mean space, yet even the cheap globally available internet the Musk plans to build using SpaceX would noticeably increase availability of "connected" (an important aspect of "proximity") land.
- AlanSE 9y ago
  > as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality For any reasonable near-term (centuries scale) prospect, there are no serious space or material constraints to outer space. Quality is a different subject, I want to get into that. > Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value Density of development is fundamentally different in microgravity. Our cities are all 2-dimensional. We can create a space station that hosts a "metro" area of stupendous population where everyone is in fairly quite commuting time of each other. Of course, we have to return to the "quality" aspect. More work is required up-front to get this sort of thing working. On Earth, we already have many resources that we take for granted for which we would have to devote effort to producing in space. Consider, Oxygen, fresh water, soil, etc. But couldn't the same thing have been said about virtually every component that went into creating the industrial revolution in the first place? The production of one thing requires support of another industrial product. Enormous production chains are created. Coal products are used in blast furnaces to make steel. Steel is used to make rail tracks to transport coal. Coal is burned to power steam engines to remove water from coal mines. Steal is used to produce those steam engines. Before long, steam engines are used to move coal over the tracks. All of this network goes to create manufactured goods, which make farming more efficient to support more people. In a superficial sense it would kind of sound easier to stay at prior population levels and live with the less efficient farming that didn't have this wild, confusing, and unsustainable web of dependencies. Why haven't we made progress toward a space-based industrial network of production? You can hardly say we've tried. Through the Shuttle era, launch economics hardly budged. Space programs were turned into science & jobs programs. Manned exploration beyond Earth orbit stopped, and all robotic (indirect) interaction with the rest of material in our solar system ground to a crawl. A major rover like Curiosity takes years to drive as far as the manned lunar rover did in a day, at a tremendous time and resource cost. Actual exploitation of space resources has so little actually invested in it. The main value we derive from space now is a perch from which to spy on and locate the citizens of Earth. Spending on space is not, at all, focused on something you can "development". Nor has it been. The one time we passed an international law on space resources (the Outer Space Treaty), we came up with incoherent and inaction-able drivel that undeveloped (and presently useless) resources were the property of everyone, and that only governments are really use them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ozborn 9y ago

"The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal" Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts It's not unique to England either, it's just well documented there. Generally speaking the process of removing subsistence hunters, herders and farmers off of land they have historically lived off takes place with violence - not because they can't pay the rent anymore. Additionally, the claim on the land of the people who are generally doing the displacing is usually questionable at best... This isn't a matter of history either, taking land held in common by indigenous people with little if any recompense is a process that continues today in many parts of the world.

SilasX 9y ago
>>The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal >Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts I don't think that's disputing the parent's point. Seizing land isn't "banning farming" any more than repoing my car is "banning driving". To respond to the general point: if yeoman farming were actually more productive per unit input, then even enclosure wouldn't be enough to stamp it out. Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue: the new owners would see the offer price as being better than the capitalized returns they could make, and some bank would have seen the business plan and interest payments as being enough to merit a loan.
- ozborn 9y ago
  "if yeoman farming were actually more productive per unit input, then even enclosure wouldn't be enough to stamp it out." I'm not making the claim that yeoman farming is more productive. I do claim however that such laws are sufficient to crush indigenous agriculture because enclosure is a violent and effective process for doing so. "Seizing land isn't "banning farming"" Enclosure laws aren't a ban (no society has ever banned farming to my knowledge), but they effectively put some farmers out of work if they engage in a particular type of subsistence agriculture. That is farmers that utilize a community owned shared hunting ground/pasture/cropland on land without a title recognized by the state. "Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue" Your typical indigenous person or tribe who is having their land enclosed or confiscated doesn't have the capital to buy it back, assuming they are even have the knowledge, language and legal framework on how to go about with that process. They are likely not even interested in agriculture for the purpose of making money, and if they were, do you really imagine people like the Orang Rimba are going to buy back their land? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430 It's going to be palm oil plantations no matter how effectively they were using the land - assuming anyone is even measuring.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent. Its not giving people money, its redistributing it. The total amount of money chasing land rents won't change by the full amount redistributed, so the whole amount won't go into increased rents. Who can rent how much will change, and that's pretty much (in the reductionist view you advance where all purchase of economic output amounts to land rent) the point. > Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore. This is false. Humans have been making new land for a long time, and aren't about to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation

nwah1 9y ago
Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and locations are the same. If you did make an island off the coast of Manhattan, then you'd only be able to do so through the ownership rights of the location. Titles are granted by the government, usually at a price, but sometimes as a handout to special interests. The US Federal Government leases the rights to deep sea oil rigs. If you obtained such a handout to build an island off Manhattan, that would be a transfer from the commons into private hands... but not a net increase in locations.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago

You could easily take away the exact opposite conclusion from that. The source of funding for the money you are giving away should be 100% of all land rents.