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Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

• Finnucane 8y ago
  I don't know about you, but one of the reasons I am accumulating less stuff is that I already have plenty of stuff, more than I can comfortably fit in my house. I need to get rid of stuff before I can get more stuff.
  • mhb 8y ago
    That has nothing to do with TFA, but good to know.
  • chriswarbo 8y ago
    "My house" is rented, so everything I own is a liability. I'm currently getting ready to move again (to find work), and selling off some of the few things I accumulated since the last move (~3 years ago) since there won't be any space for them.
  • l_camacho84 8y ago
    We are starting to recognize that we don't need alf the things we buy. We are getting to the point that we don't own things, things own us. A sugestion, if you want to get rid of stuff, do it because you don't need the oject, not to get more stuff.
• ModernMech 8y ago
  > The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship. Then rents went up, education became more expensive, wages went stagnant, the rich got richer, and suddenly owning property and buying "stuff" to fuel the insatiable furnace of capitalism doesn't seem like such a great life goal. If that means we're not participating in "the system", well... maybe it's time to change the system. Also, I think it strange the author questions what the death of property ownership means for capitalism, and then cites various examples of capitalism in action that are working to corrode property ownership -- e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc. The rise of subscription services over shrink wrapped software or hardware to which you own the rights arose directly from capitalism.
  • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    To help change the system, we could build The Machine: http://tlalexander.com/machine/ http://tlalexander.com/machine/
    • glitchc 8y ago
      The Machine doesn't fix the problem. Just some problems off the top of my head: 1) Some groups will just use the resources of the Machine, while others will work on improving The Machine. Over time, Machines in some areas will be vastly more capable than other areas. This will create haves and have-nots, urge migration and give rise to a system very similar to the current worlds (first-, second-, third-). 2) In your utopia, the corporation has no incentive to build a long-lasting Machine, especially since the Machine can build it's own parts. The corporation may also upgrade Machine capabilities (a new XBox/PS) that make it desirable to upgrade, forcing the town to pony up more money or resources. And what about the people who work at those corporations? Do they not live like the folks with the Machine? Why do they have to work, for money presumably? Again, haves and have-nots. 3) Resources in a local area are finite. What happens when the water runs out? 4) If the Machine removes the need for money, how do the townsfolk pay for the Machine? How does it all start? You are a technological optimist. Like other technological optimists, there is a basic human psychological need that is not being acknowledged in this solution. That is, the desire to be better than your fellow man: Whether this is at an individual level, family level or society level is less relevant, but so long as this need exists, no amount of technology can fix the problem, as any new technology can be bent to increase, not decrease, disparity.
      • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
        Nothing can “fix the problem”, but I propose that putting the essential machinery of production in to common ownership can help. In the stories I write, no one can force someone else to “pony up” for upgrades, and everything is open source. Much of my writing is meant to be a thought experiment. I think it may be an improvement if groups of people support one another voluntarily, and share in common ownership of critical factors of production. My writing is a way to explore a class free society (economic class that is) free of wasteful consumerism. It is not necessarily meant to be a literal plan. However you ask about resource consumption: society already uses resources at an unsustainable rate. I claim The Machine will improve on our resource consumption by reducing consumerism and needless consumption. But the fact that a society with the machine may still be unsustainable does not mean it isn’t an improvement. The Machine only fails if you expect that I am proposing a solution to all problems, which is not the case. Humans will still have inequality, but I don’t claim to totally solve that. I think The Machine could help reduce inequality, but it depends on how we use it. Anyway, I’m a bit rushed and I’m sorry I haven’t provided a clearer reply. I just wanted to give you some kind of answer. Thanks for reading my work!
• hello_error 8y ago
  Headlines now tell us how to feel, and that’s a bad thing.
  • mcphage 8y ago
    Well now I’m feeling doubly bad.
    • hello_error 8y ago
      Well you should, mr McPhage; you’re a virus after all.
      • mcphage 8y ago
        Just a virus of the mind
• amelius 8y ago
  It may be better for the environment to not own stuff, but instead use services. For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence". However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible. EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages: - Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a service costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more transparent market leads to better competition. - Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.
  • paulintrognon 8y ago
    Interesting, but in your example how would the food be delivered to your home? But maybe a delivery service once a week or so is better than every individual taking their car to the supermarket? Interesting topic anyway.
    • EADGBE 8y ago
      They're only speaking of a service to keep food and beverages at a certain temperature. No delivery. That's another service. And another line item on your revolving monthly expenses.
  • brightball 8y ago
    They really just have an incentive to make sure that on average you pay more than enough to make them a profit over the expected lifetime of your fridge. They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors. You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience. The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down.
    • thaumasiotes 8y ago
• Someguywhatever 8y ago
  >We used to buy DVDs or video cassettes; now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix This I don't care about really. Although I remember Richard Stallman wrote a satirical article about there being no libraries and having to pay to read anything (as in pay to read per page or something kind of ridiculous) now his article doesn't feel so ridiculous anymore. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html The SCARY thing, the thing that he doesn't really predict is that nobody will own anything and nobody will be allowed to read anything but also nobody will care about it either. They'll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever.
  • jerf 8y ago
    "They'll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever." Is that really it, though? I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans." That doesn't seem all that plausible. Personally, I am happy streaming things I don't care to own. At this point, most of the things I watch, I want to watch once. The world is so abundantly overflowing with good video content that I have little reason to return back to something. Those few things, I frequently will buy. Some of my "season DVDs" I'm quite glad I hung on to... some of them were on Netflix for a while, but are no longer, and are still fairly expensive to buy. If the stream services went away, ultimately I'd be slightly inconvenienced. Music, by contrast, I tend to listen to a given track/album that I like quite a bit, and I take possession of. YMMV. I'm very music oriented compared to most people. And Stallman's arguments about software are yet again something different; there are reasons for having the source and using open source that have no media equivalent, because software isn't just media, it's a machine.
    • gervase 8y ago
      I think the argument would be more along the lines of, "I marginally dislike the concept that I no longer own these products, but I absolutely hate the other team, which therefore deserves my attention to a much greater degree." They're not necessarily related semantically, but in terms of allocation of attention (a finite resource), they are competitive.
• ryandvm 8y ago
  As someone who has given away a couple thousand dollars worth of crappy music from the 80s and 90s, I can say for certain that I am glad I don't own it anymore. A Spotify subscription that allows me to listen to practically any song that was ever recorded is of far more utility than a pathetically limited personal music collection.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    I'm glad it's all on a hard disc these days rather than having to flip through CDs or vinyl all the time, but I still like knowing that the bits are under my control. Ongoing availability is a lot better with music than video to be sure. And I might feel differently if I didn't already own GBs of favored music. But I still wouldn't feel comfortable just flushing all my music and trusting in Apple, Spotify, or Amazon to permanently provide me with everything I want.
  • magduf 8y ago
    Why on earth would you pay $ per month to have access to music you like, when you can just have it in MP3/Ogg form, stored on multiple devices (PC, phone, backup HD) and be able to listen to it at any time you want for free?
    • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      Assuming you buy it in the first place and you buy the storage/server and you pay for the backup then it isn't free. I just switched to Apple Music so I don't have to deal with all that stuff.
    • jonknee 8y ago
      From my point of view, why on Earth would you bother to have music in MP3/Ogg form where you have to manage it and plan what you want to listen to? Spotify is a paradigm shift for music consumption and I would never want to go back to collecting manually.
      • jumelles 8y ago
• mud_dauber 8y ago
  It's simple. Less stuff equals more freedom. Freedom to move. Freedom from debt. Freedom from "keeping up with the Joneses". Freedom from soul-crushing jobs.
  • _ah 8y ago
    I think it's more subtle than that. Needing less stuff gives freedom. Renting stuff instead gives less freedom... you have many of the same expenses as ownership, but if you ever stop paying your useful stuff disappears. Owned objects of utility provide insurance to ride out times with limited income.
    • EADGBE 8y ago
      Agreed. As least there's an asset with owned items.
      • ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        But you had to buy them! It's not a fair comparison.
        • EADGBE 8y ago
          You're paying for them none-the-less. In nearly every case over time, you'll pay more to rent it than own it.
    • mud_dauber 8y ago
      Agreed. That’s a fair rebuttal.
      • keithpeter 8y ago
        When I read the OA, I thought of how many possessions a typical farm worker would own in (say) 1890 and compare that to now. UK: I'm just old enough to remember visiting a great-grandmother who lived in a cottage without electricity and who regarded the cold water tap and separate water heater as luxuries. And the great aunt who still cooked on a range. Their houses were dark and sparse. Both paid rent for their houses by the way.
• ilamont 8y ago
  Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text. Fifteen years ago, people typically owned the books and magazines they were reading. Much less so now. The statements about books are not accurate. Ebook sales are still just a fraction of print sales in many genres - NPD data indicates ebooks are less than 20% of total unit sales for nonfiction, children, and young adult titles (self-published ebooks excluded). Total ebook unit sales were 162 million in 2017 from the 450 publishers tracked by NPD, down from 180 million units in 2016. Source: Publishers Weekly, "Ebook sales fell 10% in 2017" https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/76706-e-book-sales-fell-10-in-2017.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content...
  • seibelj 8y ago
    Anecdotal, but every reader I know (including me) flirted with ebooks and then switched back to paper. For me, it’s less strain on my eyes, it always works even without electricity, I can lend it out to friends easily, and I like to expand the aesthetic of my bookshelf. I’m also more likely to reread all or part of a physical book. Ebooks are simply inferior.
    • ghaff 8y ago
      As long as it's mostly just flowing text, I much prefer ebooks. A lot of my long form reading happens when I travel and a tablet or a Kindle Paperwhite works much better than a book in poorly-lit planes or hotel rooms. Sure, there's an aesthetic to certain books but that doesn't apply to the random paperback or even popular hardcover novel. And I appreciate the decrease in clutter. I recently donated a bunch of older "classic" paperbacks that are works I can download for free or near-free anytime I want.
    • zrail 8y ago
      Counter-anecdata: I have purchased and read far more ebooks than I have paper books in the last decade. I currently use a Kindle Paperwhite at a somewhat large type size which has completely relieved my eye strain. Also after having moved my books between four apartments and our current house, the next time we move I’m prepared to just toss the lot of them.
• apo 8y ago
  Stuff is cheap. Attention is dear. This trend will continue for a long time.
• miqueloc 8y ago
  So, generating less waste is a reason to be nervous? fuck off. The only problem here is the immense power (out of control) of those companies, not everything going to the cloud.
• vcolano 8y ago
  I'd agree young Americans are less interested in owning their media and there does seem to be a general trend away from materialism and towards spending any extra income on experiences over objects. However, I reject the notion that the younger generations are less interested in owning property. Young people do want to have a stake in the system, but most places young people are living (especially where they're moving to) it's nearly impossible for most of them to get into the property/housing ownership game to begin with due to housing price inflation and stagnant wages. If you took millenials and plopped them in the economic context that the young generations of the 50s (or even 70s/80s) had I think this would be a very different story.
  • Jagat 8y ago
    I have a few wild hypotheses on this 1. "Experiences over objects" is driven by the need to share it on social media. Photos at the Eiffel Tower garner more likes than a new BMW car. 2. Peer pressure: Experiences of others being shared on social media and garnering likes causes the follower to do the same. 3. Being raised by relatively wealthy parents with all the stuff, and being disillusioned by hoarding and ownership of stuff. 4. Cheaper and more accessible transportation coupled with a general increase in per capita income. 5. Real estate is expensive now, and being forced to live in small rental units, you've learnt to spend time outdoors.
  • white-flame 8y ago
    One shift in owning vs streaming media is that so much is accessible now. In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available. I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though). The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.
• torstenvl 8y ago
  The issue is that ownership used to constitute a form of wealth, but now it constitutes a relentless financial drain. When I got stationed in Northern Virginia, I thought about buying a condo. But almost everywhere I looked, there were absurd HOA fees, some as much as $400/mo. Considering I could rent a room for $750/mo, it didn't make sense to buy. If RENT < HOAFEES + MTGINTEREST, you're better off investing the money instead of pouring it into equity. As for physical possessions, they all cost money (in rent!). Sure, I could own my own kayak and ATV. But it'll cost me $150/mo for a storage unit to keep them in. So until such time as I spend $1800/year on quad and kayak rentals (not even counting the amortized purchase prices), its more financially sound for me to rent them. There are exceptions. I own my truck, which I bought used, and I know I'll drive it for years and years until it's beyond fixing. In the long run, it's cheaper than renting.
  • grogenaut 8y ago
    If how+mortgage is even slightly more than rent you still end up doing well as soon as you are able to clear the agent and closing costs in recouping. Renting is easier to move for sure. But stay there 3 years and the story may be different. Stay there 8 years and you're making out well over rent. But being statitioned I can see why you might not. Then again I have friends with rentals in 5 cities for the same reason. Still not as easy as a truck. I drive mine into the ground too. Not just to figure out if selling a used one or getting the trade-in is the most effective use. Buying new car way less effective than buying a good in shape 16 year old accurately for $1700 currently. I value more varied vehicles over one nice one. it's also nice to say well this one didn't start today oh well how bout this one.
    • ModernMech 8y ago
      > it's also nice to say well this one didn't start today oh well how bout this one. It's also nice not to give zero fucks about a dent or scratch. Some people get so worked up keeping their cars perfect, like its jewelry or something.
      • grogenaut 8y ago
• dijit 8y ago
  I share the observation that we are living in a "rent economy" of the things we pay for, especially intellectual property or creative works. I've noticed it happening slowly over time, but there are dangers[0] even if you believe you "own" your media. There are no good solutions, people are willing to trade ownership for convenience because /mostly/ you're getting the same value- why do you care if you can't access that song you liked in 30 years? Personally; I fight this notion as much as possible; if I buy digital media- it's backed up. I do not give my custom to anyone who wishes to own my digital rights (thus, I avoid DRM) and, where possible, I buy physical copies of goods. However, I work in an industry which is moving towards providing "service", namely; I work in video games. And we have a new concept: "Game as a service", the idea being that the game lives and grows and dies, rather than being a static art which is subject to the non-decay or altering hand of time immemorial. Thus, the games we played in 1995 can be played to day, but the games we played in 2010 are much less possible, and the games we play in 2018 will be impossible to play 10 years on. I don't have a particular point, I'm more frustrated with the state of affairs. Also: Apple Music can sincerely fuck off. [0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
  • ModernMech 8y ago
    I'm exactly the opposite. I'm happy that all my media is digital. If it's gone one day, I'll find new media to love and enjoy. If it's something I can't live without, I might hang on to it for a while, but I've been around long enough now that I know something I "can't live without" today is just another thing that will be forgotten and replaced eventually. I've found that every physical thing I own has an ongoing cost. Firs there is the obvious cost of physically storing the thing. Then there is the labor cost of cleaning it and keeping it nice. Then there is the mental cost of remembering where it is. And finally there is a cost of worrying about it. What if the house burns down? You spend a lot of time and money and effort preventing and planning for such an event that may never occur at all. And for those of us who have lost everything that way, coming to the realization that it's all just stuff feels like anti-gravity. It's like living on Jupiter your entire life and then moving to the Moon.
    • 8y ago
• imgabe 8y ago
  Well, it's trivial to strip the DRM from Kindle books and and back them up.
  • emodendroket 8y ago
    So what? How many people know that, and of the people who do, how many bother to do it? Even among those who do, the legality of what they're doing is unclear. I don't see how it changes anything the article says.
    • imgabe 8y ago
      The point is you don't have to leave it up to Amazon whether or not you own something.
      • emodendroket 8y ago
        The author is talking about a societal shift whose consequences are difficult to foresee; one person electing to only use CDs, DVDs, flip-phones, and the like makes little difference to the broader trend.
        • imgabe 8y ago
          I didn't say anything about exclusively using CDs, DVDs, etc. I'm talking about removing DRM. Amazon et al do not get to unilaterally enforce their notions of ownership. Consumers can take control of the things they buy if they choose to.
          • emodendroket 8y ago
            The author is talking about a societal shift whose consequences are difficult to foresee; one person electing to [strip DRM from media they purchase in violation of US law] makes little difference to the broader trend.
• DanAndersen 8y ago
  There's a strange conflation in the article between "owning things" and "owning land." I think there is something fundamentally different about the two, in that having a patch of ground for which you are responsible for can help build a sense of self-reliance, investment in the future, skin in the game. Accumulating a wall-full of VHS tapes doesn't do that. I don't much mourn the lack of ownership of a lot of worthless junk that doesn't bring fulfillment or human flourishing. The late 20th century West let itself fill garages and storage units with consumerist nonsense. But it's important to recognize that the corporate consumerist system is all too willing to mutate, to adapt to people's changing tastes and to offer them a product they feel is liberation. If you've heard "Don't buy things, buy experiences," then you've heard this new advertising. Companies are all too willing to make you think that an "authentic" vacation around the world will bring happiness and meaning in the form of selfies. Restaurants play up the 'foodie' advertising to make consumption of their product seem like a life-altering experience. The companies realize they can sell the same thing again and again digitally to customers who binge-watch Netflix and pride themselves on cutting the cord and not vegging in front of the TV like their parents did. And at the end of the month you find yourself subscribed to so many services, so many pseudo-addictions, you wonder where your money is going. Rather than buying things or buying experiences, consider what you can make yourself or find for free. There is already more than enough media content out there to last many lifetimes; why not look for old material that has stood the test of time? Why not build a skill and learn the value of becoming self-reliant in some small way?
• tootie 8y ago
  > Perhaps we are becoming more communal and caring in positive ways I think I this is a big one. There's a very degree of trust that public services and even private ones will be there whenever we need. Not just things like reliable hospitals and electrical grid, but also one-day shipping on whatever we need. There is no longer a need to keep things on hand.
• dfxm12 8y ago
  >the erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property. I don't understand the author's premise. The author is largely lamenting that people are buying services over goods, but that doesn't show a dwindling loyalty towards capitalism in the slightest. I might think it strengthens loyalty to capitalism, as many of these services require an ongoing relationship with the market. I'm also unsure about how "private property" is a traditional American concept and the author does a poor job explaining why changing loyality to it is a reason to be nervous...
• elicash 8y ago
  > The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. Why is the fact that people without property were not given the right to vote because they "didn't have a stake" as our nation was founded being lifted up as a good thing? It's such a bizarre thing to say that this ideology was a good one. The author can't really believe that renters have less a stake in the system as property owners?
  • munificent 8y ago
    The author isn't talking about voting rights, they are talking about incentives. When you own property, you care more about the place where that property exists because what affects the surroundings directly affects the value of your possession. That incentivizes you to care about and invest in your neighborhood, community, state, and country. If you aren't tied to the place, it's easier to just jump ship and say "not my problem" when something goes awry. You have fewer incentives to put effort into long-term projects that improve the community since you're less likely to be there to reap the benefits. In other words, renters are less likely to plant trees, but a neighborhood with trees is better for us all over the long term.
    • elicash 8y ago
      > The author isn't talking about voting rights, they are talking about incentives. They're talking about the ways in which non-property-owners were viewed at this country's founding, as not having a stake in the system. That argument was absolutely made in regards to voting rights and is the reason so many were denied this basic right. It's a very dangerous idea. But let's explore it. Renters have just as much a stake in the system as property-owners. They just have DIFFERENT stakes and incentives. Let's use your tree example. Maybe you are correct that renters are less likely to plant trees. That's not because they have less a stake in a system, but because the stakes for renters is different. For example, they may have to pay for the local government to plant the tree as taxpayers. Or maybe they don't like the way the tree looks. Or maybe they're worried wind will blow it over and onto their car. Or it obstructs a view. There's absolutely a stake in the system. True, they might oppose it because they may not get to ever enjoy the shade as it grows, if they move. Or maybe they want the rent to stay as low as possible. But that's still not an argument they have less of an interest -- just the opposite, it shows they have DIFFERENT interests.
• drewmassey 8y ago
  I think there is a difference between “owning stuff” and “owning assets” that this post is clouding. It is the owning of assets - that are worth more than what you paid for them - that seems to form the backbone of American entrepreneurship in the way that the author wants the owning of “stuff” to do in his setup. There is of course value (to me) in owning a library of books - but for different reasons than, say, owning intellectual property or real estate.
  • User23 8y ago
    Owning a library is a fun example, since some books are assets by your definition. I have several in my library that cost multiples of what I paid for them. One was recently destroyed in a move and that was quite the bummer.
• zurn 8y ago
  Nervous because we might wreck the planet with overconsumptiona little later than thought?
• lerie82 8y ago
  I disagree and don't think the author knows what is going on in "the real world" today. I still read books that I buy from the bookstore and would NEVER own a kindle. In fact I don't know many people who do own a kindle. My grandma owns one, she doesn't even use it anymore. I still own and buy DVD's. I watch more videos on prime, netflix, and get movies from various other sources. However, when you don't have internet (or a TV with a USB), DVD's are still there. Owning a car is still necessary in most places, and is still sought after by teenagers and adults alike. I don't use a cell phone. I have one but its been dead in a drawer for over two years. I don't feel the need to have people be able to reach me 24 hours a day, it's a nuisance, and people are relying on it way to much these days. The article is just a rant, an opinion of people (because there is an editor AND an author for some reason..) who don't know how to adapt and can't even see how to adapt to a changing world full of technology.
• anovikov 8y ago
  The 'idea of private property' is about private ownership of means of production, which is what definition of capitalism is. Basically it is about idea of owning capital privately and start your own business employing that capital, with a goal to increase that capital. It is not about owning 'stuff'. And in that sense, it is not going anywhere. So i think it is an empty reason to worry.
• March_f6 8y ago
  1.) How does the market (in the most basic sense) make any meaningful distinction between "owning" a rack of DVDs and "owning" a Netflix subscription? Both are transactions where resources are being traded for "goods". 2.)The idea of spending more resources on experiences rather than goods has become more pervasive over the years so the trend of people owning less stuff would make sense. 3.)This is a little more in the weeds but it's funny to think about how a society's definition of wealth changes over time and how that might affect consumer behavior.
  • michaelt 8y ago
    Both are transactions where resources are being traded for "goods". When people own a rack of DVDs, film industry revenue rises when more good films are released, and falls when fewer good films are released - it's not a fixed-sum competition. When people own a netflix subscription the industry is in a fixed-sum competition. The industry makes $X per subscriber per month, whether the average movie is Citizen Kane or The Emoji Movie.
    • wetpaws 8y ago
      I cancelled my Netflix subscription due to the lack of good movies. Pretty sure they track it carefully.
    • tyrust 8y ago
      Treating "the industry" as a single entity doesn't make sense. Netflix takes that $X per subscriber per month and splits it up between all its different licensing contracts with different publishers. From the publishers' POV it's not all that different. In the past if they released good movies more people would buy more tickets, tapes, DVDs, etc. to view them; today, Netflix is willing to pay more to host better movies. I don't think that Netflix would pay the same for Citizen Kane and The Emoji Movie (now, which one they would pay more for I can't answer, but their analytics probably can make a guess :)).
• justinrstout 8y ago
  This article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims and is very light on actual data. For example a blatant assertion like "Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text." has no support in the article itself. For what it's worth I know only a few people that use e-books; the majority purchases and reads plain old paper books. Likewise, "...now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix...now Spotify and YouTube are more commonly used to hear our favorite tunes....". This is unsubstantiated. Nearly all of the video content I want to watch is not available on Netflix; and anything that is is liable to disappear at any time. Just last month I purchased VHS tapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays to get content I wanted, so if the writer isn't going to go to the effort of researching and presenting information, then my anecdotal experience completely contradicts this thinkpiece.
• AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Oh goody, another article telling me why everything I do as a Millennial is wrong. Here's what we were told as children: "My gosh, you always want more toys, more comics, more videogames. Don't you ever get enough? What's wrong with you!" As teenagers/young adults: "Look at all this crap you've collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you're barely an adult! You'll never have space for all this when you move out into a tiny apartment. What's wrong with you!" As adults: "Why aren't you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What's wrong with you!"
  • squozzer 8y ago
    As someone whose cohort is either X or Boomer depending on the meaning of 1965, the "millenials are dumb" argument will pass once your successor generation is old enough to make adult mistakes. Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.
  • chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    While I don't know that I agree with Tyler Cowen's original article, I don't think this is a particularly fair reading of it. Should we never question whether a societal trend is good or bad, because doing so can never come from any place other than "let's wave our canes at the younger generation?"
    • AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
      The point is certainly worth considering. I would personally consider myself more interested in truly owning the things I buy more than the average person, insofar as I regularly purchase and rip my own CD's so that I control the format, strip all of my Kindle books of DRM using Calibre, and contribute to the development of free software and free/libre operating systems so that I can be in complete control of my PC's hardware. With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely: 1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you. 2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system. 3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership. To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them. Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.
• desireco42 8y ago
  If true, this is great news, for americans and for the environment. Life is easier when you don't have too many things. Now people go to extremes, like they always will, but overall, this is very good trend. I think people will lead healthier lives when they are not oppresed with owning stuff and paying credit cards.
• nemo44x 8y ago
  It's only a single example but vinyl record ownership has continuously increased dramatically over the last few years and continues to do so. Maybe if you make an object worth possessing against the digital version, they'll be an audience for it? The important discussion should be not about American's losing their idea of private ownership but about American's learning the idea of owning their information and data about them. I don't care that I stream media, use SaaS for email or don't own a car but rather rely on ride share and public transit. But what I do care about is the companies that provide these services are brokerages for data about me. I'm not aware of a single American politician who has as a prime issue the idea of private data ownership. That we can make laws that ensure that any data gathered about you belong to you and that companies are privileged to use it and do not get to dictate terms around it. That if you want to do business in a way that includes personal data of any kind then there are laws you have to follow that greatly restrict what you can do with that data. That upon request every single data point about a person can be disclosed to that person and how you've used that data and an audit trail with regards to that information. Civil Rights for private data could be a thing.
• mnm1 8y ago
  This article confuses the issue of preferring walking, biking, and mass transit to owning a car with the issue of software freedom. The former is still based on ownership of sneakers and bikes. More importantly, it's not the same issue as proprietary software licenses that prevent users from running software as they see fit. I think RMS would be happy to see such a piece about the importance of software freedom in such a mainstream publication. It's too bad that they didn't fully research it and tie these issues back to the disappearance of general computing from our lives, but it's great to see this issue getting wider exposure in the mainstream media even if it is slightly dumbed down for the masses. RMS has been writing about this issue for decades (1) and it most certainly is one of the biggest issues of our time. (1) https://www.fsf.org/ https://www.fsf.org/
• Teknoman117 8y ago
  I sometimes worry about how many Kindle books I own. eBooks are extremely convienent (except maybe the need to consume power to view them), but as this article points out, the ownership problem is concerning. All it takes is my Amazon account getting stolen, or Amazon exercising some right they've given themselves to take the book away. What I'd really like to see is a push for "drm-less" books, so you wouldn't be tied to Amazon's systems in order to read something you've bought rights to access.
  • jonknee 8y ago
    FWIW it's fairly simple to make your own DRM-less version of Kindle books you have purchased.
    • emblaegh 8y ago
      Is that legal though?
      • jonknee 8y ago
        Probably not, but I have no personal problem with backing up my own content and it's not like there's an actual legal risk for doing so.
    • Teknoman117 8y ago
      I was avoiding mentioning this, not just because of the questionable legality in some counties, but rather because it's more of a workaround. All Amazon has to do is sufficiently alter the encryption mechanisms for new books. Same thing goes with Spotify. Tools exist to strip the encryption from the offline cache (they are either encrypted mp3 or vorbis, don't remember), but it's a workaround. I suspect it's why they killed off libspotify, which sucked because I used that to make a hackjob spotify client for RPi...
      • jonknee 8y ago
        Well my point is you can make that backup now for any books you already purchased and if they change it in the future you can decide to not buy any more books. Spotify doesn't let you buy any music so I have never wanted to strip its DRM and haven't even looked into how to do it.
• SamUK96 8y ago
  What this is about is the increasing financialisation of the world's economy, in other worsds, consumers don't buy a "fridge" and own a fridge and have dominion over it (classical unfinancialised markets), they instead subscribe to a service that cools their food. This on HN and in other wealthy techno-cratic circles is more-often known as "$something-as-a-service" (or just "XaaS"). It's a trend that is in my honest opinion one of the more increasingly troublesome and negative aspects of modern human civilisation. Xaas has a nasty side-effect of concentrating wealth and power to fewer and fewer individuals, it creates a much deeper power structure, since one finances another who finances another who...and so on, and the more you financialise the more you can financialise - an unstable equilibrium, or "positive feedback loop". With classical unfinancialised markets, it is a more Slack(the app)-like flat structure, where products are exchanged and ownership is transfered. Everyone becomes an owner. Power, wealth, and resources diffuse similar to that of the heat equation. We can see this nasty effect in the housing markets, for example. The current situation where the law and society in general allows a growing number of ownership-hoarders who buy up many houses in an area and lets them out to their fellow underlings is a rather dangerous and volatile setup, and historically does not end well for anyone, but especially those up top.
• _bxg1 8y ago
  The article identifies some problems but totally misses their actual source. The problem isn't that we own less stuff, it's that the ownership is replaced by a dependency on a handful of corporations which we have no ability to influence or appeal to. The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. The problem with our recent trend is that we aren't getting communal ownership in return; we're getting nothing but convenience. Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money.
  • ictoan 8y ago
    In other words, monopoly.
    • pc86 8y ago
      Nothing in the parent comment indicates or requires a monopoly. At all.
      • _bxg1 8y ago
        It does, partially. While it's no replacement for democracy or other forms of cooperative stakeholding, the one avenue we have for influencing companies we grow to depend on is through our business. Monopolies remove that sole piece of leverage.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • apozem 8y ago
      That is absolutely the end goal of all these network-effect companies. Uber wants to be a monopoly on transportation, Google a monopoly on search, Spotify a monopoly on music consumption, etc.
• paultopia 8y ago
  The classical notion that property is a kind of independence, which this article implicitly draws on, has always felt wrong to me. Rather, property feels to me like vulnerability. When you own things, they can be stolen, they can be destroyed by extreme weather (a real consideration living in the Midwest---for folks in CA, think of the fires), they can randomly stop working, they can be devalued by market crashes. If you rent, all those risks are someone else's problem, and the price premium is really just a form of insurance against that.
  • nepeckman 8y ago
    The other side of this is when you rent, you're beholden to the company you're renting from. If the car-as-a-service company says "Car service is now $10 more per month" you have to pay that. If the company says "We are no longer offering $your_favorite_car as a renting option", you no longer have access to your preferred vehicle. Given the overhead involved in setting up a car-as-a-service company, I'm willing to bet that competition will be low, and company leverage to hike prices will be high.
    • ryandrake 8y ago
      Also, if the car service says, “Our opaque machine learning algorithm determined that you violated our terms of service. We cannot tell me ou how, and your account is closed. You cannot appeal and this conversation is over.” Well you’re out of luck. Hopefully it’s not the only car-as-a-service company out there.
  • burlesona 8y ago
    I think this is key. Property ownership comes with both opportunity costs and liability. When people have choices, sometimes they prefer to avoid those downsides to ownership for economically rational reasons. I think a lot of older generation Americans grew up obsessed with ownership, particular of cars and houses, as crucial symbols of status and success. In my conversations with them I often hear them portray these as indicators rather than just symbols. So it’s not just that owning a home impresses your parents, it’s that you’re not an adult until you own your own home. At the end of the day I think it’s hard for each generation to understand how much the world has changed and how much the culture of next generation has changed as a result. And they’re uncomfortable with this change, maybe understandably. Therefore it’s understandable, though IMO misguided, for them to point at changing preferences and behaviors and mistake these as causes of the negative societal shifts they see, rather than understand them as being effects of the societal changes that have happened already. Easiest case in point, the first generation of car-using adults suddenly experienced a massive glut of “useful” land and housing, and then a subsequent era of high inflation, thus it was very easy for them to buy a home and those who did prosepered at the expense of the banks as their mortgages hedged a bunch of value against inflation. The second generation (the boomers) didn’t get quite as good of a deal, but it was still pretty easy for them to own a comfortable home with a reasonable commute, and they experienced long runs of appreciation, so their belief that this was the “best way to live” was validated. But for the kids of the boomers (millennial), urban sprawl had already consumed most of the best near-city land, while the rural economy has been stagnant. Thus the trade-off to follow the old recipe is a brutal commute or else house prices that are out of reach for most of us. Many also came of age in the recession. Therefore it should not be surprising that the Millenials did not find it viable to be obsessed with ownership, and that they would have backlashed against it in some ways including this preference for finding ways to enjoy things without incurring capital costs, as the so-called “sharing economy” has emerged to offer. It may be that the Millenial generation is much less wealthy in the end. But that seems to me mostly the fault of the Builders and the Boomers and the result of the choices they made, and that the “renter” mindset is more a result of their lower wealth and harder economic prospects rather than the cause.
• LUmBULtERA 8y ago
  I own very few things. No house. No Car. But I own a lot of equities. As to why the author thinks I have no "stake in the system" because I don't own shit is beyond me.
  • sailfast 8y ago
    This is an excellent point. The only reason I could think of was a potential implied subtitle: "the reason to be nervous is that if we stop buying things then those equity values go down" (which is honestly what I first thought when reading the headline)
• sailfast 8y ago
  I have to laugh a little bit here. Cowen is implying by his tone and his use of "Americans" that people are making this choice willingly. If you don't have the capital to own, or it becomes too difficult to manage the things you own, it gets harder. I don't think ownership is a problem for people with plenty of capital, it's just a lot more scarce than it used to be for most of the population. Kindle books are cheaper and tinier, therefore I sacrifice a bit of rights for practicality - otherwise Amazon may not put out the books for fear of piracy, or the publisher wouldn't grant the rights. (mix of convenience plus moving / inventory costs / cheaper purchase cost) Additionally, companies that provide these services have no incentive to give consumers additional rights to these devices and happily remove these rights - sometimes without a reason at the time - and fight them in court. I totally agree with him that a consumer rights movement needs to gain steam ASAP to counter potentially misinformed abdication of consumer rights, and to establish solid baselines that is better for consumers. This needs to happen at a grass roots level and then wallets need to fix the behavior. As for the lack of capital / buying things - much bigger question but I wish Mr. Cowen would at least acknowledge it.
• superkuh 8y ago
  Here is a non-computational paywall (ie, you run untrusted code on your computer or you don't get to see) mirror of the article text: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-12/american-ownership-society-is-changing-thanks-to-technology https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic... And here's a mirror of just the article raw text: https://pastebin.com/bqBWgDPk https://pastebin.com/bqBWgDPk
• crazygringo 8y ago
  This is beyond ridiculous. The crux of the article is: > Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship. Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport. What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several. And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you. If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.
  • _bxg1 8y ago
    > Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport. You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone. The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.
    • paulpauper 8y ago
      but you need electricity, hence a service
      • _bxg1 8y ago
        And the people (via the government) regulate electricity, so that electricity companies don't gain an inordinate amount of power over society. We just don't have that kind of legislation yet for the sudden influx of service-style companies that have popped up in recent years.
• mikestew 8y ago
  It seems to me the author does a lot of hand-wringing over the loss of ownership of things I didn't particularly care if I own or not. I think back to Thoreau's "don't own anything that eats or needs painting". I had DVDs because I might want to watch the movie again. But if I were to never see Caddyshack ever again, I could live with that, so now I might just buy it on iTunes. Apple has shown themselves worthy enough in my eyes to trust that I will always have access to Caddyshack. But here's the kicker before some of you get your dander up: if Apple were to somehow screw me Microsoft-style and my movie just disappears, for the pittance I paid I don't care. Because it beats boxes of DVDs taking up space in the attic. We’ll have ovens and thermostats that you set with your voice, and a toilet and bathroom that periodically give you the equivalent of a medical check-up. Until we are required to have such things, I do not care that I have the option. I have a Nest, I have Hue lights, I've gone to the trouble of hacking together a HomeKit server that can talk to the cameras. You know what? All of that shit could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't care much. Oh, I was all excited when I got the gear, it's handy, and I would be inconvenienced by the disappearance. But the novelty of that stuff wore off fast for me, and I don't consider it a requirement in my life. And I think that's key: as long as we can do without your subscription whatever, the author's hand-wringing is a bit overdone.
• fallingfrog 8y ago
  Everything this guy illustrates in this article as frightening and subversive, I see as positive. Americans confuse control with love; that's why we say things like "you belong to me" and "I only hurt you because I love you". That's why we substitute possessions for relationships. It's a thoroughly poisonous attitude. The most bizarre statement is when he says "The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system." It's pretty obvious to me that a deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system; to flip that relationship around and make it a moral statement is frankly a little scary. People really think like this? Look, what Americans need is to spend more time with their friends, their children, their spouses, their families. Not to spend time collecting fancy cars or other hollow pursuits. This is a lunatic point of view.
  • metalliqaz 8y ago
    > "The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system." It's technically true. It's clear that the original law of the land assumed that only landowners had a stake in running things. I didn't get the impression that the author claimed this was a moral truth. Rather, I thought he was saying that the resulting culture made the country prosperous and productive. As more and more groups started owning things, they became enfranchised into the system.
    • ubernostrum 8y ago
      It's clear that the original law of the land assumed that only landowners had a stake in running things. The Roman Republic had a rule that to serve in the army you had to be a landowning Roman citizen (with a minimum-value requirement for the property). Largely for this reason: if you owned land, you had a stake, something to fight for. It didn't work out so well, because -- and it's up to you if you see parallels here -- the Roman Republic was also incredibly corrupt, and its wealthy/powerful classes used every trick they could come up with to commandeer productive land, leaving Rome in a situation where there weren't enough eligible citizens to form a useful army. The further, and longer-lasting, consequence was that Gaius Marius reformed the system, creating essentially a standing force of professional soldiers, rather than a landowners' militia that had to be re-recruited and re-trained for every war. This was a big boost to Rome's military capability, but also resulted in soldiers having loyalty to their general (who would pay/reward them) rather than to Rome. And that played a part in the eventual change from Republic to Empire. So do keep in mind that a "rights for property owners" system can in theory expand rights as more people gain property. But can also reduce them and concentrate power as unscrupulous people work the system to accumulate property in their hands instead of others' hands.
• mywittyname 8y ago
  A lot of this "stuff" are one-time-use items for the majority of people. I very rarely read a book for a second time nor do I rewatch television shows. When I do, reread a book or rewatch a movie, I usually end up paying for it again because I lost the original or I saw the movie in a theater. The good thing about the digitization of this content is the fact that it will be more likely to be preserved in the long term. There are tons of books that are out of print and movies that were produced before DVDs that will never be released. This is going to be much less of an issue going forward. So, while you may need to pay for access again if you haven't watched a movie in 20 years, at least you'll be able to obtain it like you would any other movie.
  • CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
    I fear it will be the complete opposite. Once Netflix decides something is no longer worth streaming to your country there is no way to get at it again. Compared to the possibility of going to a second hand market looking for a dvd-set I’d say the situation will be worse for old movies.
    • mywittyname 8y ago
      Your fears are completely unfounded. Digital content is so much easier to maintain than older methods of archiving. The stuff you "buy" from services like Amazon or Steam is going to be around for a very long time. I have digital content that's almost 20 years old now and I still have access to all of it.
      • CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
        I was thinking more of the content you don’t “buy”. Have had plenty of experience with things being gone when I wanted to see it. I also don’t “buy” things from these vendors because they keep popping up and going away, being bought and closed or merged. Have no interest having my “owned” stuff being tied to a particular company keeping in existence. I actually ended my Apple Music subscription thinking I would be better if buying things from iTunes I listen to over and over. But they tried their very best to make that a non-option and now I actually don’t know what to do. At this point Murfie Music seems like the only option that makes sense, but I’m assuming the music industry will manage to make them illegal sooner or later so not to keen on that either.
• paulpauper 8y ago
  He makes a lot of generalizing, and his track record is pretty poor. He said many years ago America is in a stagnation. hardly. The stagnation is in countries such as Turkey. not America. The S&P 500 is at record highs, Tesla and Facebook and AI technology..all sorts of cool stuff and innovation..quite the opposite of stagnation. Consumer spending at record highs too, so evidently people are still buying. Maybe instead of buying knick-knacks and do-dads they are buying services and subscriptions instead.
• Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  This shouldn't be a surprise. Ownership comes with maintenance costs, and maintenance requires time. Americans work more than most developed nations [1] and work more than they used to. American commutes have also increased [2] steadily over the last 30 years. Given that, is there any surprise that Americans are less willing to own, and maintain, their things than they used to be? [1] https://nypost.com/2017/09/03/americans-work-harder-than-any-other-countrys-citizens-study/ https://nypost.com/2017/09/03/americans-work-harder-than-any... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-american-commute-is-worse-today-than-its-ever-been/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-a...
  • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    The first point is untrue. The OECD measures hours worked per member nation. You can see the results here [1]. The United States is just about square in the middle. We work 1,789 hours per year. The OECD average is 1,763. That's 26 hours less per year, or 30 minutes a week, or less than 5 minutes a day. These hours are also way down from the past and contributing to income inequality. In the 60s most men, regardless of education, worked about 50 hours a week [2]. The article shows an informative graph on hours worked by income quintile. The bottom 20% of society works, by far, the fewest hours in all of society. The 20-40% quintile works substantially more than the bottom, but less still than the rest of society. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_hours_actually_worked_per_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho... [2] - https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-before/ https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-befor... (media article, but based on study which is cited with relevant numbers and figures shown)
    • Karrot_Kream 8y ago
      The US is one of the hardest working highly-developed countries. According to [1] for 2015, the US #13/35 (in the top 37%, so not the middle) on the list on the OECD ranking of average hours worked per worker. In 2015, the US had a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.920 tied for #10/188 in the ranking of HDI [2]. The only 2 countries with a higher HDI than the US that works more hours in 2015 than the US is Ireland and Iceland. Iceland in 2015 had a population of 329,425 [3] and Ireland in 2015 had a population of 4,688,464 [4], while the US had a population of 321,773,631 [5]. Given that Iceland has an extremely low population compared to the US, Ireland is the only country of comparable population and HDI where the workers work _more_ than US workers. In contrast, Mexico works the longest hours according to the OECD ranking, but is #77/188 on the HDI ranking list [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_hours_actually_worked_per_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho... [2] - http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI [3] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/iceland/2015/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/iceland/2015/ [4] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/ireland/2015/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/ireland/2015/ [5] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2015/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
• qiqing 8y ago
  First point: Excerpt: "The great American teenage dream used to be to own your own car. That is dwindling in favor of urban living, greater reliance on mass transit, cycling, walking and, of course, ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft." The teenage dream is not to own the car but to get to where they want to go, e.g., autonomy to see their friends, go to activities. When the consumer says they want a quarter of an inch drill bit, what they actually want is a quarter of an inch hole in a particular wall. The author doesn't seem to appreciate the difference. Second point: The right to repair or alter devices you own, e.g., farmer hacking their own tractors -- that part I agree with.
  • NathanCH 8y ago
    It was the teenage dream not long ago. Getting a cellphone then getting a car were life goals in high school.
• Animats 8y ago
  America is becoming poorer. It used to be that Beijing had bicycles and motorbikes clogging the streets, and few cars. Now it's all late-model cars, while the US moves to bicycles, motorbikes, and mini-apartments.
• metalliqaz 8y ago
  This piece failed to provide the conclusion that was promised in the title.
• TuringNYC 8y ago
  I'll chime in with anecdata of 1: for our family it is purely about convenience and the lack of space (due to increasing real estate costs.) Books for us are about space. Growing up, having a full-wall bookshelf was one of my favorite things. It had sentimental value, it was a family gathering place, each ripped page or blemished cover had a story. We now dont have space for a second full-wall bookshelf. We've completely stopped purchasing books and just use Kindle or the library. It works, it just doesnt have the love of a physical books. But we also dont have the space for physical books. Living in Brooklyn, going from a 2BR to 3BR meant another $500,000 in cost. We now living outside DC, which is less expensive, but still not enough to have room. So we rent. Music and movies are for convenience. For me, most music and movie CDs/DVDs never carried as much sentimental value. It is great not having to carry around disks and having temporary access to a much larger library. We subscribe to Apple Music and have never looked back.
• ryandrake 8y ago
  I’m surprised at the criticism here and I think the critics are missing the author’s point. He’s not saying, “buy more stuff you don’t need” or even, “possess more stuff.” He’s saying, “you ought to own the stuff you possess.” Which I didn’t think was a controversial opinion but I guess I stand corrected. I might be an outlier. I make a deliberate effort to own instead of rent. My commute is enormous because I moved to a place I can afford to own a house, rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own. I’ve never leased a car because I value the ability to repair and upgrade it myself. I don’t rely on streaming services for media, which could one day disappear without replacements. I do my own taxes. I don’t even eat at restaurants often. I feel that relying on services is risky coupling, unnecessarily involving another party in my success/outcome/enjoyment of the product. If I have the MP4 on my hard drive, Netflix can’t wake up one day and decide I can’t watch it anymore. I’ll only (grudgingly) subscribe to a service if there is no other realistic option, such as with Internet service.
  • kartan 8y ago
    > “you ought to own the stuff you possess.” That is the base that Richard Stallman created for the open source movement. You should own your own hardware, and the only way of fulfilling that is to own the software that makes it run. And I also thought that this is common sense at least for the past generation of developers. I am not so sure how much the message has been lost, but it is not so strong as it used to be.
    • zrobotics 8y ago
      I think the current fad of everything being offered 'as a service' has changed many people's minds. Can't find a link, but I've seen people on this website claim that electron apps that are just a web page (and thus don't work offline) are better for Linux on the desktop than actual native applications. Sure, they do mean that cross-platform is essentially free, but you have to rely on someone else's computer for them to work. Which is one of the big reasons I'm so desperate to move away from fusion360 for personal projects. I'm fine with closed source provided the model isn't that restrictive, I certainly have no problems with sublime text. Edit:I needed to be clearer, I know fusion isn't electron, but I've had no luck at all using it offline. Very rarely will it work. And unless things changed in the last 6 months, the Github desktop app can't commit locally without an internet connection.
• vt100 8y ago
  The value of intellectual property and financial assets has replaced more physical ownership of assets like farmland and livestock. We invest in the S&P500 and spend our dividends at the supermarket instead.
• vt100 8y ago
  It's because the value of intellectual property and financial assets has displaced direct physical ownership of assets like farmland and livestock. We own S&P500 tracker ETFs instead and spend our dividends at Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh etc.
• bunderbunder 8y ago
  > The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. That notion presumably had something to do with why, in a nation with a population of well over 5 million, fewer than 40,000 people participated in the first US Presidential election. Everyone who lives in the country has a stake in the system, by virtue of the fact that they are subject to its laws and their lives are impacted by its policies.
• cryptozeus 8y ago
  I see tge point here. When I was renting apartment, I was not really involved with what was happening in the area or local housing community but now that i own a house, I regularly take part in local development meetings. We all have say in what gets build and what does not. Same can be applied to car rental vs owning a car.
• brandonmenc 8y ago
  Back in the 90s, I used to spend a sizable chunk of my high school and college income on physical media - music CDs in particular. And I couldn't even return them if they sucked. I'm now able to own more other, actually useful stuff because I pay just a couple dollars a month to stream literally everything ever recorded. This is so much better.
• AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. The conclusion that you have a "stake in the system" if you are a property owner is 180 degrees backward and that is apparent in his own logic. If you don't physically own something you are using, like in his examples of music, or books, then you are relying on "the system" to ensure it will be there and are heavily bought in. Such a reliance is not necessary if you own it outright. Consider that, if you want to ensure without question that you won't lose access to something, then you buy it outright. How this contradiction isn't clear is baffling. Owning something removes you from the group/system that could support it. For example, shared real estate vs owned real estate. If I own a piece of land that I live on, I can do whatever I want on it and there is nobody to tell me I can't and I don't have to consider anyone else. If I instead share ownership of the land I live on, then I have to take consideration for the others on the property. I think if there is a complaint here, it should be that there is a power imbalance between leasees and owners in today's world. As a user of spotify, uber etc... you're beholden to the owners of the content and platform to allow your paid access to it, which they can revoke at any time for any reason, with little recourse from the user. That is actually what America was built on and is simply an extension of hundreds of years of rent seeking. We should be moving to more intentional distributed ownership (I'm not invoking blockchain here) of capital and property. Not, simply becoming renters to the capital class.
• daxfohl 8y ago
  This seems to be the antithesis of the lesson taught in Rich Dad Poor Dad. Stuff is a liability. Even in "owning" it you're still beholden to it. You have to maintain it, store it, protect it, make sure nobody injures themselves with it and sues you. You don't own it, it owns you. Rental, in many areas, is an improvement. Own the couple things that matter to you, rent the rest. Perhaps it's not so much that Americans own less stuff, but rather the supply of stuff has grown so much that we became overwhelmed with too much ownership and have resorted to rents on more and more of those items by percentage. Cellphones are an interesting side point, as they don't fully fit into either classification (own or rent). They kind of take on the worst of both. In fact, perhaps there's a market for a phone that's more purely "rent". Given the state of technology and the speed of change, I don't know if there's any real market for a purely "own" phone, unless it's like an ultra-secure dumb phone, in which case yeah there's probably a market for that too.
  • PTPells 8y ago
    Your stuff owning you...neat inversion. For you personally, what questions do you ask yourself when deciding whether to "rent" or "buy" something? How have those questions changed with time?
  • jpindar 8y ago
    I own the hardware of my phone, and it would still be useful to me if I decided not to pay for cell service. I suppose Google could force push an Android update that would brick it, but is it likely that they'd do that? And would that keep me from flashing new firmware?
• safgasCVS 8y ago
  "The main culprits for the change are software and the internet" Stopped reading after that. This guy has a very loose understanding of what real people's lives are like. Throw Occam's razor out the window - the reason people own less stuff is not because they might have less money - no its because "society" has changed its "values" or some other air-headed notion ppl who live in airconditioned offices dream up. The reason Americans own less stuff is because for 80%+ of the population wages haven't seen an increase in 3 decades and are up to their eyeballs in debt. "But GDP is so high!" - but nothing. What matters is the money that average people take home and for that they havent seen their income rise but they have seen the cost of education and healthcare go through the roof. If you're the kind of person who thinks like this guy you're probably in the camp who thinks Trump got elected because "Far-Right Racists/Russian Hacking /The Patriarchy" Sorry for the rant. I get an Inspector Dreyfus twitch when I read this sort of stuff by supposed 'smart' people
• mmagin 8y ago
  Ironic that Tyler Cowan's book The Great Stagnation was the first book I read on Kindle.
• jancsika 8y ago
  There's no mention of FLOSS philosophy. Those are philosophies that emphasize control of the software and data on those devices by the users of the devices. Even a cursory understanding of licensing of Wikipedia content is an anti-dote to the loss of ownership the author describes. If you download the current state of Wikipedia that data is yours under a very liberal license. No one can call foul and remove it from your machine. By ignoring these important concepts the author's piece makes it sound as if digitization itself is somehow making people forget the importance of ownership. Anyone else find this odd and disappointing?
• jacinabox 8y ago
  Keynesians want to encourage spending in order to keep wages high. That's because an increase in spending causes an increase in aggregate output. However, it's unlikely that the employee will benefit. In the first place, if the marginal propensity to consume is less than 50%, and therefore the Keynesian multiplier less than two, then an increase in consumer spending will not pay for itself in wage growth. Further, the gap between spending and wage growth is increased because wages form a small component of the unit cost of any good. If spending on a good increases by some amount, then the wages increase derived from that spending will be much less. As usual it might be concluded that people are better off saving their money than spending it on things they don't need or want.
• scrumption 8y ago
  I love how this blatant neoliberal propaganda piece attempts to brand the gig economy and perpetual licensing of streaming content in lieu of CDs and other physical media ownership as "communal" (certainly they didn't mean anything by that wording?) when it's clearly a natural progression of the rent-seeking motive that capitalism is literally based on. "All the bad parts of %ideology% aren't real %ideology%!" Gee, where have we heard that before. Also great to see them deliberately misuse "private property" when discussing ownership of personal property.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >Some social problems are blatantly obvious in daily life, while others are longer-term, more corrosive and perhaps mostly invisible. Lately I’ve been worrying about a problem of the latter kind: the erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property. The "traditional American concepts" where the pioneering spirit and individualism (and of course various forms of protestantism and religious nuttery and so on). Not consumer capitalism. It took a lot of advertising and nudging to turn the more independent 1920s and 30s American into a consumer, and even more to turn him into a consumer of today's proportions.
• hyperpallium 8y ago
  Serfing the internet.
• jopsen 8y ago
  Extreme consumerism trends downwards in a few obscure commodities and someone proclaims the end of private property. Give me break, collections of books, DVDs and CDs have always been largely worthless. Cars was never an investment tool. Real estate, stocks, bonds is property with at least some value. Put stats on that before arguing that private ownership is in decline. (I'm not saying it isn't) I'm merely saying consumerism was never about private ownership, or am I missing something?
• systematical 8y ago
  This 30-something year old couldn't be happier owning little. I sold my house and nearly everything I own with the exception of clothes, car and a few other miscellaneous items. That stuff is just weight. I rent furnished rooms now, pay less, and can move around easier. Sure I sacrificed some, but I'm debt free and can always buy again. This author sounds reactionary. The sky isn't failing, its just a different hue of blue today.
• RickJWagner 8y ago
  IMHO, the smart phone has a lot to do with this. The phone acts as a communication device, a GPS, a flashlight, a camera, a music player, a library, etc. etc. It's also the end-all entertainment device. It's natural to own less stuff. There's too much interesting stuff right there in your palm.
• temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  It's amusing and/or alarming, depending on your mood, that someone like Cowen, a believer in the market's solutions, can sound so similar to Stallman on this issue. Stallman pounds the same talking points over and over, but he founded a movement and released products that espoused the change he wanted to see in this world. Yet despite the tangibility of his works, the market and field is flooded with clickwraps, SaaS, and mandatory arbitration. And this extends beyond infotech, where as the article notes, rentier things are proliferating. In many cases in the real world, the economics of the rent-based solutions are the only ones that make sense for the consumer, because alternatives require steep barriers to entry that are hard to surmount. This is the case when prices on land and houses require loans and money down, or when comparable services don't exist due to requirements in capital, expertise, and IP. Sometimes this price is artificially low (Google, Facebook, Uber) or artificially high (mobile data), but it's hard to compete with free, and hard to start a cellphone network. In one case, giant corporations are dumping at a fictitious price to encourage an ecosystem, while in the other, giant corporations are buying into a moat of intellectual property while paying large bills on the immense infrastructure that enables their service model. When fewer people can afford to become meaningful shareholders, or band together to start alternatives, the more likely they are to be on the passive end of this transition. This is what we're seeing now.
• owly 8y ago
  Before Amazon Kindle, Netflix, Spotify, etc; I always was puzzled by people’s need to own things. Why? I used, and still do, this thing called... The Library! Why pile up stacks of books requiring many bookshelves when you can borrow anything your heart desires. Libraries are better than Amazon or Netflix actually. There have been several instances when I’ve borrowed European TV series which are not easily available on any streaming service. Seriously, how many of your DVDs have you watched more than twice? You can always borrow it again anyway.
  • jumelles 8y ago
    I too adore libraries, but not everyone has access to one, much less a library with a large collection.
• mehrdadn 8y ago
  This is insightful. I want to also mention that it's not just ownership of property that's disappearing, though: the concept of owning wealth also seems to be disappearing. So much -- including the nation's foundation now -- is based on loans, credit, and in general paying with money that you don't actually have. It seems like an entirely different financial/economic model from the one we mentally have in mind, and that seems like another reason to be nervous -- I don't know enough to know if it can be sustainable.
• plaidfuji 8y ago
  I wanted to watch Fellowship of the Ring recently. Would've been happy renting it, but the cheapest streaming option available to me was to "buy" it from Amazon for $10. This infuriated me so much that it almost drove me back to piracy, but I eventually caved and paid the $10. It's LOTR, of course I'll want to watch it again. I immediately felt a deep shame, like I was the biggest sucker on the planet. But I thought to myself, what was the alternative? Buy the friggin BluRay? I don't want a pile of plastic boxes like it's the 00s and I don't have a player anyway. I just want THE FILE . IN FULL HD. Not the right to stream the file from Amazon's servers when I happen to have a good connection and a device with their App. Just the video file please. This article is spot on.
• _iyig 8y ago
  I've been nervous about "owning" cloud-based media since Amazon deleted Kindle-purchased copies of 1984 [0]. Even today, media you "own" on services like Amazon can disappear when the cloud provider's license for this content expires. In my opinion, it is far better to purchase a Blu-Ray or CD copy of media titles you wish to retain, rip them to disk, and stream them to the device of your choice via Plex or Kodi. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  While I get it that some people want to own and control things, I have made peace with the idea of not really ‘owning’ digital media. I protect against account loss and loosing everything my splitting ebook and audible book purchases across Amazon, Google Play, and Apple. This is a little inconvenient if I want to reference my notes in a book and have to remember which digital library to look in. I also favor getting digital media from my library. It cost $200/year to belong to our local library in Illinois but the number of ebooks and audio books available is fantastic. I have also started buying my very favorite movies in Google Play. This probably does not make much sense, but I like to ‘own’ my very favorite movies. The world of digital entertainment is fantastic and the cost is very low compared to other costs of living.
• partycoder 8y ago
  There is an overlap between ownership and access. Reduced access is bad. Reduced ownership is bad only if it leads to reduced access. - I have a lot of books here at home that I haven't read in a long time. If I didn't own them that would not affect me in any way, since their resell value is very low. My exclusive ownership of these books makes them highly inefficient. Same goes for a lot of stuff that people own but hardly ever use. Owning fewer things is not necessarily bad.
• bluishgreen 8y ago
  Recently I gave away my linux compute machine and use AWS instead. I can dial up to 400GB of RAM/100 cores when I need to run a major compute job, and dial down to a machine which is 10 cents an hour for 99.0% of my compute time. I get the benefit of owning a 10,000$ machine for a fraction of the cost, approx 80$ a month. "The erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property" If the lament here is for the mountain of garbage that each individual generates in the name of private property, color me not-amused. Think of those broken old DVDs that were used at most once or twice. Think of those cars that sit on parking lots and garages 99% of their lives. Wounding the earth to extract all that resource and burying our future in a carbon cloud. And for what! To hold on to some vague notion of private property like a comfort blanket. The future is one we have not seen before, of all powerful trillion dollar companies. But the recent past is a hell scape which led to global warming and other atrocities. We should be willing to walk boldly into this unknown future if only for the promise of reducing waste and possibly a better climate future.