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A bug that seems to pop up again and again, here's an article about a crusader against land speculators who found it more profitable to leave land unused all th

A bug that seems to pop up again and again, here's an article about a crusader against land speculators who found it more profitable to leave land unused all the way back in the 1800s: https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing-Crisis/ https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing...

yourapostasy 8y ago
Yup, am familiar with the Georgist argument, thanks for introducing it into the discussion since many others reading undoubtedly have not heard of it. I'm sympathetic to it, but I believe the real issue was alluded to in the middle of the article you linked to. As much as economics has physics envy, I have yet to find a physics-grounded explanation of mainstream economics' treatment and classification of capital and assets. Even a walk through as crude as energy transfers in kWh ranges would be a start, because for me, physics is our currently-known ground truth. Instead, we get tautological definitions of classifications, and I'm no longer convinced they're as obvious and simple as economists make them out to be, because we see all these interesting side effects within the market that Georgism arose to address, like an emergent impedance mismatch in code architectures. This doesn't mean I want to toss out all economics, but some discerning skepticism about the descriptive (not to speak of predictive or prescriptive) modeling power of economics is in order, certainly at macro scales. What to do about all this? I think a start was expressed by Iain A Banks in his The Culture storytelling universe, where he said "Money is a sign of poverty." My take on that is all capitalists should be striving to achieve a world where money is a historical artifact, because money is only used as a tool to advance science sufficiently to unlock post-scarcity material and cognitive abundance. In other words, capitalists should be working to progressively put themselves out of a job as capitalists, driving down the cost of every material good to the point it is cheaper to subsume it as a general utility everyone pays for than to leave it outside the Cosean boundary. In practical, actionable terms today, I suspect this means forming inter-generational and intra-generational cooperatives as a defensive measure by the under-capitalized against predations (sometimes not even conscious or intentional) by the well-capitalized. That's a tough problem to solve.

yourapostasy 8y ago

Yup, am familiar with the Georgist argument, thanks for introducing it into the discussion since many others reading undoubtedly have not heard of it. I'm sympathetic to it, but I believe the real issue was alluded to in the middle of the article you linked to. As much as economics has physics envy, I have yet to find a physics-grounded explanation of mainstream economics' treatment and classification of capital and assets. Even a walk through as crude as energy transfers in kWh ranges would be a start, because for me, physics is our currently-known ground truth. Instead, we get tautological definitions of classifications, and I'm no longer convinced they're as obvious and simple as economists make them out to be, because we see all these interesting side effects within the market that Georgism arose to address, like an emergent impedance mismatch in code architectures. This doesn't mean I want to toss out all economics, but some discerning skepticism about the descriptive (not to speak of predictive or prescriptive) modeling power of economics is in order, certainly at macro scales. What to do about all this? I think a start was expressed by Iain A Banks in his The Culture storytelling universe, where he said "Money is a sign of poverty." My take on that is all capitalists should be striving to achieve a world where money is a historical artifact, because money is only used as a tool to advance science sufficiently to unlock post-scarcity material and cognitive abundance. In other words, capitalists should be working to progressively put themselves out of a job as capitalists, driving down the cost of every material good to the point it is cheaper to subsume it as a general utility everyone pays for than to leave it outside the Cosean boundary. In practical, actionable terms today, I suspect this means forming inter-generational and intra-generational cooperatives as a defensive measure by the under-capitalized against predations (sometimes not even conscious or intentional) by the well-capitalized. That's a tough problem to solve.