8 ms·

I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a ha

I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots. Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both.

manfredo 8y ago
The complexity lies in the web of incentives that make up regional and local politics. The people most negatively affected have the least clout politically. The people with the most political influence have a vested interest in ensuring housing prices don't drop. So as a result, the optimal choice for a politician isn't the optimal choice for the city as a whole. Not to mention policies like rent control that can produce a huge sort term political gain, at the expense of making drastically harder to build more housing in the future.
rhacker 8y ago
How can we accomplish this without being a nanny state? I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. I don't know the answer, but I think I do know why you will go to your grave without it being solved - GOP vs Dems solution to this is the exact opposite, and we are permanently stuck. We can't go full bore on either solution (both of which can probably work to some extent) but instead we're 100% deadlocked for the rest of time.
- th0ma5 8y ago
  > I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. See them? Where? In articles? Friends?
  - rhacker 8y ago
    Friends, Family and billions of articles https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-unemployment-went-down-because-the-number-of-people-working-did/#4cd6d00408bc https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-une...
    - rconti 8y ago
      Literally the only mention of a social safety net in the linked article was "fewer people working means less income and wealth — as well as long-term economic stability creating pressure on social safety nets, such as they are." The wording implies that there is not much of a social safety net to begin with. Can you cite some of the actual programs? My understanding is the social safety net is the weakest it's been in many decades. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my "general feeling" seems at least as valuable as your general feeling. Unemployment insurance and temporary assistance are both that, temporary. Social Security Disability is, I believe, considered the most widely abused program simply because there aren't many others left to abuse.
- mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
  The US already acts as a nanny state for it's rich corporations.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ImRichKillMe 8y ago
  Yeah we are until we stop be too greedy to help people who need it. You talk about work but lets examine how much work the richest people actually do. Delegation doesn't count as real work. Having money to pay someone else to do work also doesn't count as real work.
- zanny 8y ago
  It takes less than a whole person to supply a common western standard of living to a person living in the west. This means it takes a subset of the population to provide for the well-being of the whole. This is why unemployment is such a problem today. The only demand for labor is for experienced, skilled labor that can innovate for capitalists to make them more money. The grunt work the average person would want done (new construction, infrastructure rennovation, etc) is wanted by people who don't have the capital to see it happen. The rest are a fraction of the population that keeps society running. We saw in this last century an approach to 1% of the population being responsible for the farming and raising of all the food we consume. Another percent will package and transport it. Maybe another percent will prepare and cook it if not for us doing it ourselves. The number of people employed in the industries of resource extraction and power generation, power line maintenance, home construction, furniture production, and so on... many of which are skilled professions that require educations many of the displaced don't have time or money to acquire... all combined aren't even close to a quarter the population. A lot of that productivity was exported overseas as well, exacerbating the problem. We aren't in a situation where you should look at the homeless and say "I'm so mad they aren't working because I don't have X or Y and they could make it / get it for me". You have everything you want. You can't think of anything you are willing to pay them to do with the skills they have. There is nothing for them to do anyone is willing to pay them for or invest in them to achieve.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  US already is a nanny state. Can you imagine a country spending so much money on spying their own citizens? You must be confusing yourself, or surely must be joking.
WesleyLivesay 8y ago
I don't think it is either too challenging or too complex for politicians and people to understand, the problem is one of incentives. Those with the resources that could be taxed and redistributed do not want to be taxed and have resources taken away from them. Since they have resources they can use some percentage of them to both influence politicians and influence other people. The people who do not have resources cannot do either of these things.
- deepsun 8y ago
  Which is pretty much what happened before Great Depression.
DanHulton 8y ago
I mean, I think you're missing a key factor here: politicians require money to be elected. The poor (the folks most affected by these issues) don't have the money to donate. The rich (the ones you propose taxing) do. Thus, the only ones who can get elected are catering to an audience that does not want this problems solved in this way (and indeed, one could argue, does not care to have it solved at all). Until the problem of money in politics gets fixed, your "simple" problem is largely unfixable.
- timb07 8y ago
  In a properly-operating democracy, politicians require votes to be elected; money helps, but isn't sufficient. The 1% may have 50% (or more) of the money, but they only have 1% of the votes. The 99% (or rather, those members of the 99% who vote as if they're in the 1%) need to exert their power at the polling booth.
  - kamarg 8y ago
    You're doing a disservice to those 99% or at least those of us that do vote by assuming this is the only issue that people vote on. There's a wide range of priorities between the 0% and 99.9% on the economic scale and what goes into most peoples' decision to vote for someone is almost always nuanced even if the newspapers and tv interviews try to make it look like everyone that voted for the "wrong" candidate only voted for them because of X issue.
  - 51lver 8y ago
    The 1% own the media companies which are happy to tell you what a winner looks like, and there is a general belief that voting with your heart is inferior to voting for a probable winner.
    - simplify 8y ago
      The latter problem would be solved with approval voting at least https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
  - 8y ago
sien 8y ago
It's difficult to fix housing supply because NIMBYs have so much power on local political activity. It's not just a US problem either. In Australia, Sweden, the UK, Germany, France and many other places housing is more expensive than it should be. If you want to do something go and get active in the YIMBY movement. https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement
- jahaja 8y ago
  NIMBY/YIMBY arguments seem just too convenient an excuse for me. It's almost if one has actively tried to find something that can plausibly explain the housing crisis but does not challenge the status quo of structural/systematic problems in any way shape or form. In Sweden the seemingly prime effect of these movements is to remove democratic influence to the benefit of construction companies, even though that only rarely is the cause of delays, and certainly not the root cause of the housing shortage. And here's an anecdote from Sweden from the early 90s: To get a cheap rental flat in high standard, albeit in a working class neighborhood, my parents were able to walk into the office of the municipal housing company and more or less pick a key from the wall and go take a look at it. If they liked, they got it. These were the days where the state still took an interests in providing housing to its citizens and planned, and built, accordingly. Now there's the market and a housing bubble consisting of too many expensive apartments that few can afford. To now suggest that the state should again start building cheap housing to a population where the middle-class is up to their neck in inflated mortgages is impossible. This is the real NIMBY.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    I recommend you look at the economic research on the issue of zoning restrictions on housing supply: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...
    - jahaja 8y ago
      I'd think it would be good manners to at least provide a summary that puts the report into the discussions context when linking to some pdf report.
rb808 8y ago
> I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Ugh, if it was that easy it would have been done already. Look at the recent wars over the best way to run an economy. Its never that simple. Perhaps European system is the best? Or maybe they just got wealthy by exploiting their colonies for the last few hundred years so they can afford to look after everyone for a while as their economies slowly strangle themselves into obsolescence. Or Perhaps California should be run more like Republican states - they have far fewer homeless. The solutions aren't obvious as you say.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  Easy things aren't done quite often. It's the ease itself that is the cause of delay. "We can do it later, it won't take long." Meanwhile, the impact of not doing continues to harm the person, company, community, world. But they keep delaying because it won't be hard, when the time is right.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Well, then Portugal (not invaded twice and smashed to pieces in a century) should be richer than Belgium and Holland (blown to bits, slaughtered and battlefields in ultra war) due to all three ruthlessly exploiting their colonial properties, but suffering different misfortune in the 20th century. And yet this is not so - oddly the liberal democracies (regardless of imperial wickedness) seem to be doing better than recent fascist kleptocracies. This is not a co-incidence; where people are safe and can plan they create positive outcomes. Where they have no idea what is going to happen next and are exposed to bandits they keep their heads down and look after themselves.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
chaostheory 8y ago
You're right. Homelessness is just a symptom of other problems. Another key thing to understand is that 80-90% of homeless people are no longer homeless after approximately 4-8 months. In other words, the current patchwork system of public programs and non-profits work. Only 10-20% of the homeless population is chronically homeless. The most common issues are related to mental health, drug addiction, or a combination of both. imo I don't feel that individual states or cities can really solve the problem since they all tend to play the game of "let's ship this troubled person away from here". A long term solution will need to involve the federal gov. It's also hard to solve due to the stigma and lack of understanding from the public at large when it comes to mental illness.
baybal2 8y ago
This is what's called gridlock or lack political willpower. While I am not an American, I'm feeling one tune constantly when I talk with American professionals in China, and it is something close to this: "I am given a terrible choice in between between living in a sad, stagnating, dysfunctional civil state with bureaucracy and fascist tendencies, or hell, but with full-blown and well run progressive fascist bureaucracy, and which is fun to live in"
cwperkins 8y ago
I know you may not think so, but its important to realize that your response is highly biased. Many people see this differently and personally I think the best solution is for communities to realize this is an issue and volunteer time and money to help solve it. Things like volunteering time to go teach young kids and teens to code, taking a weekend to help with habitat for humanity, at a soup kitchen or helping with a coat drive. I firmly believe it is as big a problem as it is because the average person sees it as an intractable that they cannot solve and in the city its even more pronounced because there's less of a sense of community and more of a sense of fending for oneself. We need LESS red tape to help cities develop affordable housing more quickly, INNOVATION to bring down the cost of housing (think modular housing) and a CAN DO attitude that this is a problem WE CAN fix. As JFK famously said "We choose to ... not because it is easy, but because it is hard." And that's the mentality we need. Tax and re-distribution may be PART of the answer, but not THE answer.
endtime 8y ago
Inequality isn't the right measure unless you make some assumptions that have, historically, not held (e.g. fixed total amount of wealth). All you care about is that the poorest people can afford somewhere to live. Toy example: If everyone can afford a home, and then Jeff Bezos increases his wealth by 1000x, inequality goes up but no one becomes homeless. I'm not saying wealth inequality is meaningless, but I think making it a primary concern creates an instance of Goodhart's law.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  We should measure and optimize for the the growth in wealth of the bottom X percent of citizens. Who makes up that portion may change, but that portion will consistently be the one that needs the most help.
  - endtime 8y ago
    That seems like a better metric to me as well. Though solutions which maximize this and also increase inequality are often unpopular (e.g. free markets).
AngryData 8y ago
Because then people would have to confront challenges to their highly propagandized views of economics and political standards. People would have to admit that the 'free market' isn't some catch-all solution to problems and that sometimes it is the cause of problems. They would have to admit capitalism itself isn't some naturally occurring and self-maintaining phenomenon and realize how easily it can be, and is, arbitrarily manipulated by people either good or bad. They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. They would need to recognize the full extent that the concentration of power and wealth has contributed to political corruption. Nobody wants to admit that their preconceived notions might be a bunch of bullshit they were purposefully fed, and not something they thought up and devised themselves.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  What "free market" are you talking about? The US has been moving rapidly towards being a highly regulated social democracy over the last 50 years. Central economic planning by local, state and federal government has steadily replaced the right to private contract and property. I recommend you look at the raw statistics on: 1. The absolute level of inflation adjusted social welfare spending per capita. 2. The percentage of GDP consumed by social welfare spending by the government. 3. The number of regulations in force. Between 1960 and 2018. It seems like the more social democracy fails, the more the alleged dominion of the free market is blamed. You would think from hearing all these laments about "neoliberalism" that we're in a free market paradise, when exactly the opposite is the case. >>They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. You can start by taking your own advice.
mdavis6890 8y ago
"Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both." >> The latter only. "Reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs" will not put a single additional person in a house, however noble that goal may be. There are more people in a given area than homes, so some people don't get to live in one. You can force those people to leave, or you can build homes for them, or you can let them be homeless.
reading-at-work 8y ago
> It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found. It's not just intuition, there's evidence to support it. I think building more housing is the quickest and more bipartisan solution, since tax and spending changes are magnets for political drama.
BurningFrog 8y ago
I understand how building more housing would improve a housing shortage. But I don't understand how reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, while not building more housing, would improve a housing shortage!
conanbatt 8y ago
Economics has come to explain and attack the particular problem of homelessness amongst rich areas in the late 1800's, with Henry George's Poverty and Progress. The economic field definitely has a simple recipe to attack the root cause of this issues, but its one that, in my opinion, is politically unfeasible, as it goes mostly against the middle class, and retired people as well as the rich. The solution is called LVT, land value tax, and its popular since adam smith, to modern day left-leaning econs like stiglitz, or right-leaning like Milton friedman.

manfredo 8y ago

The complexity lies in the web of incentives that make up regional and local politics. The people most negatively affected have the least clout politically. The people with the most political influence have a vested interest in ensuring housing prices don't drop. So as a result, the optimal choice for a politician isn't the optimal choice for the city as a whole. Not to mention policies like rent control that can produce a huge sort term political gain, at the expense of making drastically harder to build more housing in the future.

rhacker 8y ago

How can we accomplish this without being a nanny state? I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. I don't know the answer, but I think I do know why you will go to your grave without it being solved - GOP vs Dems solution to this is the exact opposite, and we are permanently stuck. We can't go full bore on either solution (both of which can probably work to some extent) but instead we're 100% deadlocked for the rest of time.

th0ma5 8y ago
> I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. See them? Where? In articles? Friends?
- rhacker 8y ago
  Friends, Family and billions of articles https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-unemployment-went-down-because-the-number-of-people-working-did/#4cd6d00408bc https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-une...
  - rconti 8y ago
    Literally the only mention of a social safety net in the linked article was "fewer people working means less income and wealth — as well as long-term economic stability creating pressure on social safety nets, such as they are." The wording implies that there is not much of a social safety net to begin with. Can you cite some of the actual programs? My understanding is the social safety net is the weakest it's been in many decades. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my "general feeling" seems at least as valuable as your general feeling. Unemployment insurance and temporary assistance are both that, temporary. Social Security Disability is, I believe, considered the most widely abused program simply because there aren't many others left to abuse.
mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
The US already acts as a nanny state for it's rich corporations.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ImRichKillMe 8y ago
Yeah we are until we stop be too greedy to help people who need it. You talk about work but lets examine how much work the richest people actually do. Delegation doesn't count as real work. Having money to pay someone else to do work also doesn't count as real work.
zanny 8y ago
It takes less than a whole person to supply a common western standard of living to a person living in the west. This means it takes a subset of the population to provide for the well-being of the whole. This is why unemployment is such a problem today. The only demand for labor is for experienced, skilled labor that can innovate for capitalists to make them more money. The grunt work the average person would want done (new construction, infrastructure rennovation, etc) is wanted by people who don't have the capital to see it happen. The rest are a fraction of the population that keeps society running. We saw in this last century an approach to 1% of the population being responsible for the farming and raising of all the food we consume. Another percent will package and transport it. Maybe another percent will prepare and cook it if not for us doing it ourselves. The number of people employed in the industries of resource extraction and power generation, power line maintenance, home construction, furniture production, and so on... many of which are skilled professions that require educations many of the displaced don't have time or money to acquire... all combined aren't even close to a quarter the population. A lot of that productivity was exported overseas as well, exacerbating the problem. We aren't in a situation where you should look at the homeless and say "I'm so mad they aren't working because I don't have X or Y and they could make it / get it for me". You have everything you want. You can't think of anything you are willing to pay them to do with the skills they have. There is nothing for them to do anyone is willing to pay them for or invest in them to achieve.
gnulinux 8y ago
US already is a nanny state. Can you imagine a country spending so much money on spying their own citizens? You must be confusing yourself, or surely must be joking.

WesleyLivesay 8y ago

I don't think it is either too challenging or too complex for politicians and people to understand, the problem is one of incentives. Those with the resources that could be taxed and redistributed do not want to be taxed and have resources taken away from them. Since they have resources they can use some percentage of them to both influence politicians and influence other people. The people who do not have resources cannot do either of these things.

deepsun 8y ago
Which is pretty much what happened before Great Depression.

DanHulton 8y ago

I mean, I think you're missing a key factor here: politicians require money to be elected. The poor (the folks most affected by these issues) don't have the money to donate. The rich (the ones you propose taxing) do. Thus, the only ones who can get elected are catering to an audience that does not want this problems solved in this way (and indeed, one could argue, does not care to have it solved at all). Until the problem of money in politics gets fixed, your "simple" problem is largely unfixable.

timb07 8y ago
In a properly-operating democracy, politicians require votes to be elected; money helps, but isn't sufficient. The 1% may have 50% (or more) of the money, but they only have 1% of the votes. The 99% (or rather, those members of the 99% who vote as if they're in the 1%) need to exert their power at the polling booth.
- kamarg 8y ago
  You're doing a disservice to those 99% or at least those of us that do vote by assuming this is the only issue that people vote on. There's a wide range of priorities between the 0% and 99.9% on the economic scale and what goes into most peoples' decision to vote for someone is almost always nuanced even if the newspapers and tv interviews try to make it look like everyone that voted for the "wrong" candidate only voted for them because of X issue.
- 51lver 8y ago
  The 1% own the media companies which are happy to tell you what a winner looks like, and there is a general belief that voting with your heart is inferior to voting for a probable winner.
  - simplify 8y ago
    The latter problem would be solved with approval voting at least https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
- 8y ago

sien 8y ago

It's difficult to fix housing supply because NIMBYs have so much power on local political activity. It's not just a US problem either. In Australia, Sweden, the UK, Germany, France and many other places housing is more expensive than it should be. If you want to do something go and get active in the YIMBY movement. https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement

jahaja 8y ago
NIMBY/YIMBY arguments seem just too convenient an excuse for me. It's almost if one has actively tried to find something that can plausibly explain the housing crisis but does not challenge the status quo of structural/systematic problems in any way shape or form. In Sweden the seemingly prime effect of these movements is to remove democratic influence to the benefit of construction companies, even though that only rarely is the cause of delays, and certainly not the root cause of the housing shortage. And here's an anecdote from Sweden from the early 90s: To get a cheap rental flat in high standard, albeit in a working class neighborhood, my parents were able to walk into the office of the municipal housing company and more or less pick a key from the wall and go take a look at it. If they liked, they got it. These were the days where the state still took an interests in providing housing to its citizens and planned, and built, accordingly. Now there's the market and a housing bubble consisting of too many expensive apartments that few can afford. To now suggest that the state should again start building cheap housing to a population where the middle-class is up to their neck in inflated mortgages is impossible. This is the real NIMBY.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  I recommend you look at the economic research on the issue of zoning restrictions on housing supply: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...
  - jahaja 8y ago
    I'd think it would be good manners to at least provide a summary that puts the report into the discussions context when linking to some pdf report.

rb808 8y ago

> I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Ugh, if it was that easy it would have been done already. Look at the recent wars over the best way to run an economy. Its never that simple. Perhaps European system is the best? Or maybe they just got wealthy by exploiting their colonies for the last few hundred years so they can afford to look after everyone for a while as their economies slowly strangle themselves into obsolescence. Or Perhaps California should be run more like Republican states - they have far fewer homeless. The solutions aren't obvious as you say.

Jtsummers 8y ago
Easy things aren't done quite often. It's the ease itself that is the cause of delay. "We can do it later, it won't take long." Meanwhile, the impact of not doing continues to harm the person, company, community, world. But they keep delaying because it won't be hard, when the time is right.
sgt101 8y ago
Well, then Portugal (not invaded twice and smashed to pieces in a century) should be richer than Belgium and Holland (blown to bits, slaughtered and battlefields in ultra war) due to all three ruthlessly exploiting their colonial properties, but suffering different misfortune in the 20th century. And yet this is not so - oddly the liberal democracies (regardless of imperial wickedness) seem to be doing better than recent fascist kleptocracies. This is not a co-incidence; where people are safe and can plan they create positive outcomes. Where they have no idea what is going to happen next and are exposed to bandits they keep their heads down and look after themselves.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

chaostheory 8y ago

You're right. Homelessness is just a symptom of other problems. Another key thing to understand is that 80-90% of homeless people are no longer homeless after approximately 4-8 months. In other words, the current patchwork system of public programs and non-profits work. Only 10-20% of the homeless population is chronically homeless. The most common issues are related to mental health, drug addiction, or a combination of both. imo I don't feel that individual states or cities can really solve the problem since they all tend to play the game of "let's ship this troubled person away from here". A long term solution will need to involve the federal gov. It's also hard to solve due to the stigma and lack of understanding from the public at large when it comes to mental illness.

baybal2 8y ago

This is what's called gridlock or lack political willpower. While I am not an American, I'm feeling one tune constantly when I talk with American professionals in China, and it is something close to this: "I am given a terrible choice in between between living in a sad, stagnating, dysfunctional civil state with bureaucracy and fascist tendencies, or hell, but with full-blown and well run progressive fascist bureaucracy, and which is fun to live in"

cwperkins 8y ago

I know you may not think so, but its important to realize that your response is highly biased. Many people see this differently and personally I think the best solution is for communities to realize this is an issue and volunteer time and money to help solve it. Things like volunteering time to go teach young kids and teens to code, taking a weekend to help with habitat for humanity, at a soup kitchen or helping with a coat drive. I firmly believe it is as big a problem as it is because the average person sees it as an intractable that they cannot solve and in the city its even more pronounced because there's less of a sense of community and more of a sense of fending for oneself. We need LESS red tape to help cities develop affordable housing more quickly, INNOVATION to bring down the cost of housing (think modular housing) and a CAN DO attitude that this is a problem WE CAN fix. As JFK famously said "We choose to ... not because it is easy, but because it is hard." And that's the mentality we need. Tax and re-distribution may be PART of the answer, but not THE answer.

endtime 8y ago

Inequality isn't the right measure unless you make some assumptions that have, historically, not held (e.g. fixed total amount of wealth). All you care about is that the poorest people can afford somewhere to live. Toy example: If everyone can afford a home, and then Jeff Bezos increases his wealth by 1000x, inequality goes up but no one becomes homeless. I'm not saying wealth inequality is meaningless, but I think making it a primary concern creates an instance of Goodhart's law.

cwkoss 8y ago
We should measure and optimize for the the growth in wealth of the bottom X percent of citizens. Who makes up that portion may change, but that portion will consistently be the one that needs the most help.
- endtime 8y ago
  That seems like a better metric to me as well. Though solutions which maximize this and also increase inequality are often unpopular (e.g. free markets).

AngryData 8y ago

Because then people would have to confront challenges to their highly propagandized views of economics and political standards. People would have to admit that the 'free market' isn't some catch-all solution to problems and that sometimes it is the cause of problems. They would have to admit capitalism itself isn't some naturally occurring and self-maintaining phenomenon and realize how easily it can be, and is, arbitrarily manipulated by people either good or bad. They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. They would need to recognize the full extent that the concentration of power and wealth has contributed to political corruption. Nobody wants to admit that their preconceived notions might be a bunch of bullshit they were purposefully fed, and not something they thought up and devised themselves.

CryptoPunk 8y ago
What "free market" are you talking about? The US has been moving rapidly towards being a highly regulated social democracy over the last 50 years. Central economic planning by local, state and federal government has steadily replaced the right to private contract and property. I recommend you look at the raw statistics on: 1. The absolute level of inflation adjusted social welfare spending per capita. 2. The percentage of GDP consumed by social welfare spending by the government. 3. The number of regulations in force. Between 1960 and 2018. It seems like the more social democracy fails, the more the alleged dominion of the free market is blamed. You would think from hearing all these laments about "neoliberalism" that we're in a free market paradise, when exactly the opposite is the case. >>They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. You can start by taking your own advice.

mdavis6890 8y ago

"Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both." >> The latter only. "Reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs" will not put a single additional person in a house, however noble that goal may be. There are more people in a given area than homes, so some people don't get to live in one. You can force those people to leave, or you can build homes for them, or you can let them be homeless.

reading-at-work 8y ago

> It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found. It's not just intuition, there's evidence to support it. I think building more housing is the quickest and more bipartisan solution, since tax and spending changes are magnets for political drama.

BurningFrog 8y ago

I understand how building more housing would improve a housing shortage. But I don't understand how reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, while not building more housing, would improve a housing shortage!

conanbatt 8y ago

Economics has come to explain and attack the particular problem of homelessness amongst rich areas in the late 1800's, with Henry George's Poverty and Progress. The economic field definitely has a simple recipe to attack the root cause of this issues, but its one that, in my opinion, is politically unfeasible, as it goes mostly against the middle class, and retired people as well as the rich. The solution is called LVT, land value tax, and its popular since adam smith, to modern day left-leaning econs like stiglitz, or right-leaning like Milton friedman.