7 ms·

Or better yet, reduce prices all around. Think of all your expenses and look at ways to systematically reduce them for everyone. Start with food, get a meal do

Or better yet, reduce prices all around. Think of all your expenses and look at ways to systematically reduce them for everyone. Start with food, get a meal down to less than a dollar. Rent is high because everyone wants to move to certain dense areas, while moving away from more spacious/rural areas. This is unsustainable. Offer incentives for people to move elsewhere, including jobs programs and subsidizing mass transit to less dense/rural areas. Offer mass transit everywhere to reduce transport costs.

rorykoehler 8y ago
>This is unsustainable On what basis do you make this claim? I would have thought the opposite to be true.
- mozumder 8y ago
  Because people need to be located where they are most efficiently utilized in the economy. Everyone wants to live in New York or San Francisco, but the jobs are going to be distributed around the country. How are people going to construct a bridge in Ohio if everyone is in New York City? Jobs are still a local thing.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    If everyone lived in New York or San Francisco, there wouldn’t be any need to construct a bridge in Ohio in exactly the same way there’s no need to build one over the Onyx River in Antarctica.
    - mozumder 8y ago
      Doesn't work that way, since jobs are independent of labor pool location. A good example would be tourism, where companies draw people to places with no population. Also, companies that decide to build a factory in the middle of nowhere to take advantage of something else, like cheaper land or electricity. And suddenly you need to build a bridge in Ohio to get to that factory.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        If those jobs are "needed" then wages will rise, and the market will solve the problem. If wages don't rise for those jobs, then they weren't needed.
        mozumder 8y ago
        Right, and now you just raised inflation, raising prices for everyone and punishing most the poor and elderly on fixed income, since they rely disproportionately on commodity goods and services. If you want a successful economy, you have to plan for it: find where resources are going to be utilized, and build from there.
        stale2002 8y ago
        You've increased prices for SOME goods, but you've massively massively reduced prices for all others. Urban sprawl is extremely expensive, and the high costs on infrastructure effects the poor the most. If housing and infrastructure were cheaper, because we've built more stuff in cities, then the poor beneift the most due to the lower housing costs (which makes up most of their expenses).
        mozumder 8y ago
        So, do people not understand that all jobs, and demand for people, aren't going to be located in a single point in space? Why have two cities of New York and San Francisco? Why not just one city of New York? Increasing commodity prices raises the price of all good, not just some goods, because that's how economics works. Every cost is transferred somewhere else. So, not sure why you want to raise the price of all goods...
        stale2002 8y ago
        No, we don't need only a singular city. But the status quo of what we are currently in is way way to far on the wrong end of thing. So once San Francisco and new york rent prices aren't literally 5 time larger than rent prices in the countryside THEN we can worry about the issues you bring up. But as long as rent prices ARE 5 times larger in the city, I will not worry a single ounce about the issues you brought up. You are engaging in the extremism fallacy. It would be like if a bunch of people were in the desert, and everyone was dieing due to dehydration, and then you came along and said "Well, you know, if you drink too much water, then you can die of water poisoning! Why aren't you worried about water poisoning!?!?!?". Yes, water poising can kill people if you drink 10 gallons of water every day. But we are in a freaking desert and people are dying due to dehydration, so why the hell are you talking about something so ridiculously as water poisoning!?!
  - markkanof 8y ago
    Everyone wants to live in New York or San Francisco? This is not true.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
But why does everyone want to move to dense urban areas? You assume that there’s some small, easy-to-offset group of factors, like public transit or “jobs programs,” and that if the government just did something with these things, it would equilibrate population dynamics appropriately. I’m not convinced. I think people are more driven by status symbols and glamor. Living in a city is considered relatively more “high status” and a “glamorous” lifestyle. Even poor people in cities are glamorized as having greater access to sex, subculture groups, participation in civic functions like meaningfully large protests, proximity to celebrities or wealthy people. I think it’s plausible to argue that as developed societies progress, competition between people becomes increasingly focused on intangible social status, and one side effect is that people become more and more willing to sacrifice material comforts to crowd into cities for the chance to possibly compete for higher social status. It wouldn’t matter if you incentivized people with cheaper housing, “jobs programs,” or anything else, “Ruralness” itself would be such a direct negative thing, in terms of social convention, that people would pay to avoid it, in the form of impossible rents, overcrowded infrastructure, etc. I conjecture you’d need a generational propaganda campaign to glamorize rural living, combined with some huge changes in how employment is structured, before anything could even start to incentivize meaningful redistribution of population to rural areas. The jobs programs thing is especially tricky, because there is a chicken and egg problem with modern employment and rural areas. It’s not just a matter of retraining people, because they’ll still want to move to cities independently of jobs, and then employers will want to be located in cities to have high-status clans of employees and to be colocated with other high-status people. Jobs training doesn’t really solve anything unless you change the underlying culture such that employers can participate in some virtue signalling by locating there. It’s why you might see start-ups in Grand Rapids, MI, but you don’t see Google opening a new 500-engineer research lab there. The people who want those engineering jobs want a life with status signalling only found in big urban centers associated with cultural progressiveness. I’m not saying any of this to argue one way is better or is right. Only that I think any theory about why people accumulate in dense cities has to be primarily based on social status effects that exist by convention and not by any material factor.
- bigmanwalter 8y ago
  We are social beings. We live in a society. Being close to others is not a status symbol, it is what makes us, us. I eat at nice restaurants because the food is delicious. I enjoy the culture. I enjoy a wide variety live music. These are not status symbols, these are the essence of a joie de vivre. I enjoy walking to my local shops and boutiques, not for the status but because it is genuinely enjoyable of its own merit.
xapata 8y ago
Deflation causes problems. Better to inflate wages in correspondance with prices.
- mozumder 8y ago
  It only really causes a problem if you don't prepare your economy for it. Prices should really only drop for commodity products and basics, so that one can live for $100/month. You should still offer incentives for people to spend more, such as offering higher end real-estate and products, or just bringing in more people into your economy.
  - xapata 8y ago
    What mechanism causes this deflation for commodities and basics? How much of the economy is basics?
    - mozumder 8y ago
      Efficiency and automation reduces commodity prices. Just transporting food is a huge cost. Get transport costs down and you reduce food costs.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    I causes people to delay spending and horde rare goods (gold etc) it also has massive problems if say 90% of your populations mortgages are underwater see Japan
closeparen 8y ago
Everyone in dense areas is the only sustainable settlement pattern. The energy alone needed to maintain existing levels of sprawl cannot go on much longer.
- mozumder 8y ago
  Mass transit eliminates the energy problem. Two far away cities connected to each other via high-speed rail might as well be next-door-neighbors.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Sure, between two cities. Not so useful for rural-to-city commuting.
    - djajshgsjja 8y ago
      I think we can all agree that if the costs of high-speed transit were low enough to support hubs in every city city with spokes going to all nearby suburbs, all sorts of problems would be solved.
      - closeparen 8y ago
        Suburbs are unlikely to support everyone walking to the train station unless they were explicitly designed for it. You’d need immense parking lots/garages at the suburban stations (which most transit advocates oppose and are trying to remove), blanket coverage with local bus service (expensive and structurally difficult in a suburb), or to remake the local streets around bicycling. Plopping down a station without a last-few-miles solution doesn’t get you much.
        mozumder 8y ago
        Suburbs (and small towns) can implement local bus circulators for last-mile solutions to connect with central stations.
Nokinside 8y ago
Large cities have higher productivity than smaller cities. Smaller cities have higher productivity than rural areas. Generally speaking cities' productivity is proportional to their size This happens because cities achieve agglomeration economies through the clustering of activities, labor pooling and knowledge spillovers. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7977.pdf http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7977.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
tfehring 8y ago
It's probably cheaper and certainly more environmentally friendly to keep building upward in urban centers than to build mass transit to exurban areas. Urban areas already provide significant subsidies to exurban ones via taxes and cross-subsidies - see, e.g., [0] and [1]. The comparatively high cost of living in high-density areas is driven by a combination of those transfers and pricing distortions created by local governments, not by the fact that high-density housing is inherently less cost-efficient (and I'd argue that the opposite is true). [0] https://medium.com/by-the-bay/financing-suburbia-6076dae990f8 https://medium.com/by-the-bay/financing-suburbia-6076dae990f... [1] https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.html https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.h...
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  It's certainly not cheaper, for developers, to build highrise aparments in the city than upscale tract homes on tiny lots in an exurb. And environmental impacts and the responsibility for transportation are both externalities easily pushed to someone else. This is what actually happens.
  - tfehring 8y ago
    >It's certainly not cheaper, for developers, to build highrise aparments in the city than upscale tract homes on tiny lots in an exurb. Why's that? At the margin, at least, it seems unlikely that this is the case - it's probably quite a bit cheaper to add an additional floor to a 50 unit/floor high-rise (when it's being constructed, not after the fact) than to build 50 detached single-family homes in an exurb, for example. It's true that externalities can be, well, externalized, but that doesn't mean the difference in absolute costs shouldn't be considered. At the end of the day, someone still has to foot the bill.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    It costs a very small amount compared to the actual value that they create. Adding more houses in a place nobody wants to live is worth very little. Adding more apartments to a place EVERYONE wants to live is VERY valuable. I want developers to be doing the thing that everyone wants.
ben_w 8y ago
> Start with food, get a meal down to less than a dollar. I know food prices vary a lot from place to place, but in the UK right now (at current exchange rates) you could eat for a bit over $1 per day, never mind per meal. I’ll grant you that’s student meals, a balanced mixture of rice lentils and vegetables, but it’s all your protein, vitamin and caloric needs.
- i_am_nomad 8y ago
  Seconding this. I was amazed at how inexpensive good, fresh food was in the UK when I visited recently.
- walshemj 8y ago
  1$ is 75p and I doubt that you can have a fully balanced meal on just rice and vegetables or th at you could do this for 75P double it to 1.50 maybe but wouldn't be a very good long term diet.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Rice: 3535 kcal/67g protein for £0.45 Lentils: 3530 kcal/258g protein for £1.75 Together they form a complete mix of all the important protein subtypes. Mix 9:1 because lentils have a lot more protein and rice is a lot cheaper. Scale down intake to match calorie requirements. @2500 kcal/day: £0.29 rice, £0.125 lentils. Vegetables: 5 portions for £0.45 (Government recommends 5 portions per day for healthy diet). Total: £0.855 per day for recommend daily male calorie consumption. £0.76 for women. $1.13 for men. $1.00 for women. Close enough.

rorykoehler 8y ago

>This is unsustainable On what basis do you make this claim? I would have thought the opposite to be true.

mozumder 8y ago
Because people need to be located where they are most efficiently utilized in the economy. Everyone wants to live in New York or San Francisco, but the jobs are going to be distributed around the country. How are people going to construct a bridge in Ohio if everyone is in New York City? Jobs are still a local thing.
- ben_w 8y ago
  If everyone lived in New York or San Francisco, there wouldn’t be any need to construct a bridge in Ohio in exactly the same way there’s no need to build one over the Onyx River in Antarctica.
  - mozumder 8y ago
    Doesn't work that way, since jobs are independent of labor pool location. A good example would be tourism, where companies draw people to places with no population. Also, companies that decide to build a factory in the middle of nowhere to take advantage of something else, like cheaper land or electricity. And suddenly you need to build a bridge in Ohio to get to that factory.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      If those jobs are "needed" then wages will rise, and the market will solve the problem. If wages don't rise for those jobs, then they weren't needed.
      - mozumder 8y ago
        Right, and now you just raised inflation, raising prices for everyone and punishing most the poor and elderly on fixed income, since they rely disproportionately on commodity goods and services. If you want a successful economy, you have to plan for it: find where resources are going to be utilized, and build from there.
        stale2002 8y ago
        You've increased prices for SOME goods, but you've massively massively reduced prices for all others. Urban sprawl is extremely expensive, and the high costs on infrastructure effects the poor the most. If housing and infrastructure were cheaper, because we've built more stuff in cities, then the poor beneift the most due to the lower housing costs (which makes up most of their expenses).
        mozumder 8y ago
        So, do people not understand that all jobs, and demand for people, aren't going to be located in a single point in space? Why have two cities of New York and San Francisco? Why not just one city of New York? Increasing commodity prices raises the price of all good, not just some goods, because that's how economics works. Every cost is transferred somewhere else. So, not sure why you want to raise the price of all goods...
        stale2002 8y ago
        No, we don't need only a singular city. But the status quo of what we are currently in is way way to far on the wrong end of thing. So once San Francisco and new york rent prices aren't literally 5 time larger than rent prices in the countryside THEN we can worry about the issues you bring up. But as long as rent prices ARE 5 times larger in the city, I will not worry a single ounce about the issues you brought up. You are engaging in the extremism fallacy. It would be like if a bunch of people were in the desert, and everyone was dieing due to dehydration, and then you came along and said "Well, you know, if you drink too much water, then you can die of water poisoning! Why aren't you worried about water poisoning!?!?!?". Yes, water poising can kill people if you drink 10 gallons of water every day. But we are in a freaking desert and people are dying due to dehydration, so why the hell are you talking about something so ridiculously as water poisoning!?!
- markkanof 8y ago
  Everyone wants to live in New York or San Francisco? This is not true.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

But why does everyone want to move to dense urban areas? You assume that there’s some small, easy-to-offset group of factors, like public transit or “jobs programs,” and that if the government just did something with these things, it would equilibrate population dynamics appropriately. I’m not convinced. I think people are more driven by status symbols and glamor. Living in a city is considered relatively more “high status” and a “glamorous” lifestyle. Even poor people in cities are glamorized as having greater access to sex, subculture groups, participation in civic functions like meaningfully large protests, proximity to celebrities or wealthy people. I think it’s plausible to argue that as developed societies progress, competition between people becomes increasingly focused on intangible social status, and one side effect is that people become more and more willing to sacrifice material comforts to crowd into cities for the chance to possibly compete for higher social status. It wouldn’t matter if you incentivized people with cheaper housing, “jobs programs,” or anything else, “Ruralness” itself would be such a direct negative thing, in terms of social convention, that people would pay to avoid it, in the form of impossible rents, overcrowded infrastructure, etc. I conjecture you’d need a generational propaganda campaign to glamorize rural living, combined with some huge changes in how employment is structured, before anything could even start to incentivize meaningful redistribution of population to rural areas. The jobs programs thing is especially tricky, because there is a chicken and egg problem with modern employment and rural areas. It’s not just a matter of retraining people, because they’ll still want to move to cities independently of jobs, and then employers will want to be located in cities to have high-status clans of employees and to be colocated with other high-status people. Jobs training doesn’t really solve anything unless you change the underlying culture such that employers can participate in some virtue signalling by locating there. It’s why you might see start-ups in Grand Rapids, MI, but you don’t see Google opening a new 500-engineer research lab there. The people who want those engineering jobs want a life with status signalling only found in big urban centers associated with cultural progressiveness. I’m not saying any of this to argue one way is better or is right. Only that I think any theory about why people accumulate in dense cities has to be primarily based on social status effects that exist by convention and not by any material factor.

bigmanwalter 8y ago
We are social beings. We live in a society. Being close to others is not a status symbol, it is what makes us, us. I eat at nice restaurants because the food is delicious. I enjoy the culture. I enjoy a wide variety live music. These are not status symbols, these are the essence of a joie de vivre. I enjoy walking to my local shops and boutiques, not for the status but because it is genuinely enjoyable of its own merit.

xapata 8y ago

Deflation causes problems. Better to inflate wages in correspondance with prices.

mozumder 8y ago
It only really causes a problem if you don't prepare your economy for it. Prices should really only drop for commodity products and basics, so that one can live for $100/month. You should still offer incentives for people to spend more, such as offering higher end real-estate and products, or just bringing in more people into your economy.
- xapata 8y ago
  What mechanism causes this deflation for commodities and basics? How much of the economy is basics?
  - mozumder 8y ago
    Efficiency and automation reduces commodity prices. Just transporting food is a huge cost. Get transport costs down and you reduce food costs.
- walshemj 8y ago
  I causes people to delay spending and horde rare goods (gold etc) it also has massive problems if say 90% of your populations mortgages are underwater see Japan

closeparen 8y ago

Everyone in dense areas is the only sustainable settlement pattern. The energy alone needed to maintain existing levels of sprawl cannot go on much longer.

mozumder 8y ago
Mass transit eliminates the energy problem. Two far away cities connected to each other via high-speed rail might as well be next-door-neighbors.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Sure, between two cities. Not so useful for rural-to-city commuting.
  - djajshgsjja 8y ago
    I think we can all agree that if the costs of high-speed transit were low enough to support hubs in every city city with spokes going to all nearby suburbs, all sorts of problems would be solved.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Suburbs are unlikely to support everyone walking to the train station unless they were explicitly designed for it. You’d need immense parking lots/garages at the suburban stations (which most transit advocates oppose and are trying to remove), blanket coverage with local bus service (expensive and structurally difficult in a suburb), or to remake the local streets around bicycling. Plopping down a station without a last-few-miles solution doesn’t get you much.
      - mozumder 8y ago
        Suburbs (and small towns) can implement local bus circulators for last-mile solutions to connect with central stations.

Nokinside 8y ago

Large cities have higher productivity than smaller cities. Smaller cities have higher productivity than rural areas. Generally speaking cities' productivity is proportional to their size This happens because cities achieve agglomeration economies through the clustering of activities, labor pooling and knowledge spillovers. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7977.pdf http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7977.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

tfehring 8y ago

It's probably cheaper and certainly more environmentally friendly to keep building upward in urban centers than to build mass transit to exurban areas. Urban areas already provide significant subsidies to exurban ones via taxes and cross-subsidies - see, e.g., [0] and [1]. The comparatively high cost of living in high-density areas is driven by a combination of those transfers and pricing distortions created by local governments, not by the fact that high-density housing is inherently less cost-efficient (and I'd argue that the opposite is true). [0] https://medium.com/by-the-bay/financing-suburbia-6076dae990f8 https://medium.com/by-the-bay/financing-suburbia-6076dae990f... [1] https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.html https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.h...

temp-dude-87844 8y ago
It's certainly not cheaper, for developers, to build highrise aparments in the city than upscale tract homes on tiny lots in an exurb. And environmental impacts and the responsibility for transportation are both externalities easily pushed to someone else. This is what actually happens.
- tfehring 8y ago
  >It's certainly not cheaper, for developers, to build highrise aparments in the city than upscale tract homes on tiny lots in an exurb. Why's that? At the margin, at least, it seems unlikely that this is the case - it's probably quite a bit cheaper to add an additional floor to a 50 unit/floor high-rise (when it's being constructed, not after the fact) than to build 50 detached single-family homes in an exurb, for example. It's true that externalities can be, well, externalized, but that doesn't mean the difference in absolute costs shouldn't be considered. At the end of the day, someone still has to foot the bill.
- stale2002 8y ago
  It costs a very small amount compared to the actual value that they create. Adding more houses in a place nobody wants to live is worth very little. Adding more apartments to a place EVERYONE wants to live is VERY valuable. I want developers to be doing the thing that everyone wants.

ben_w 8y ago

> Start with food, get a meal down to less than a dollar. I know food prices vary a lot from place to place, but in the UK right now (at current exchange rates) you could eat for a bit over $1 per day, never mind per meal. I’ll grant you that’s student meals, a balanced mixture of rice lentils and vegetables, but it’s all your protein, vitamin and caloric needs.

i_am_nomad 8y ago
Seconding this. I was amazed at how inexpensive good, fresh food was in the UK when I visited recently.
walshemj 8y ago
1$ is 75p and I doubt that you can have a fully balanced meal on just rice and vegetables or th at you could do this for 75P double it to 1.50 maybe but wouldn't be a very good long term diet.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Rice: 3535 kcal/67g protein for £0.45 Lentils: 3530 kcal/258g protein for £1.75 Together they form a complete mix of all the important protein subtypes. Mix 9:1 because lentils have a lot more protein and rice is a lot cheaper. Scale down intake to match calorie requirements. @2500 kcal/day: £0.29 rice, £0.125 lentils. Vegetables: 5 portions for £0.45 (Government recommends 5 portions per day for healthy diet). Total: £0.855 per day for recommend daily male calorie consumption. £0.76 for women. $1.13 for men. $1.00 for women. Close enough.