6 ms·

I see you're greyed, but I think you're getting at a deeper point. There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues

I see you're greyed, but I think you're getting at a deeper point. There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. There are only so many places in good schools, whether it be good public districts or private (fee-paying) schools. You now have to compete with your friends for places there. The introduction of fake scarcities was needed when we discovered how to produce more wealth than we could possibly actually need (about 280k per person in the US, per recent NYtimes article). This way you still work to enrich capital owners instead of enjoying the fruits of your labour.

isoskeles 7y ago
> There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. If it's illegal to build new homes, that's certainly not a free market or "capitalism."
- NoGravitas 7y ago
  Capitalism is government by the owners of capital; under capitalism markets are normally distorted to the benefit of owners of capital (sometimes individually, sometimes as a class). The state is one tool used for this.
leetcrew 7y ago
tbh I don't think this is very compelling. my coworkers are certainly my competition for raises/promotions, but the company is large and successful enough that everyone I'm friendly with could get a raise and there would still be money to give me one too. outside of work, the scale just makes this an irrelevant question. sure, maybe there are 10,000 apartment units I would like to live in and 20,000 people who also want them. my five good friends in the area don't really move the needle wrt how much I need to bid to actually get a nice apartment. the incentive is there, but it's too weak to be worth paying attention to.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  I don't literally mean your specific friends. I suppose what I mean is "peers". My point is very simple - if you have 10,000 people and 1,000 homes, you must compete with those 10,000 people. 10 of them might even be your friends, competing for that same home. If we allowed building 9,000 more homes, you no longer have to compete just to get a roof over your head (though you may still do so to get a _nicer_ home) and you have the ability to tell your boss where to shove it when he asks you at 8:30 AM Monday why you didn't answer his Sunday night email. But we don't allow building more homes, at least in California, where homebuilding has fallen far, far, FAR below population growth. If you aren't on Slack all the time, you'll miss out on promotions to your coworker (who, I concede, may not literally be your pal) who will then outbid you for the house you want. Additionally, where you _are_ allowed to build housing tends to be a long ways from jobs (see: suburban sprawl) so you have the double whammy of work pressure to never really sign off, and a long commute.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    I think understand your point, I just feel that the scale mismatch is so large that it doesn't really matter that much in day-to-day socializing. I understand that I'm in competition with n other people to get a specific apartment, but I'm not likely to actually encounter any of these people unless it's in the waiting room at the leasing office. I agree that I'm competing with people like me and my friends for housing, food, etc. I just don't see that as necessarily an impediment to helping, being kind to, and/or befriending strangers. it's an important issue, but orthogonal to what we are discussing here imo. maybe it affects your social interactions differently.
stickfigure 7y ago
There are hundreds of thousands of homes and tens of thousands of school slots. The chance that you were denied a resource specifically because one of your friends got it is so incredibly low as to be irrelevant. If you actually feel that the presence of your friends is keeping you from achieving life goals... your problem is much, much deeper.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  s/friends/peers then....
BubRoss 7y ago
This sounds a lot like people living in New York all their life and saying that the planet is overpopulated and that there is no space left. What you are saying might apply to the bay area, but it doesn't apply to almost anywhere else. No one is entitled to live in the most desirable places on earth. You could live almost anywhere else and not have the same problems.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Well, that's a fair point, though I would suggest "bay area" could be "city with good jobs and strict controls on housing creation through zoning, density maximums, parking minimums, etc.". You're completely right though. I'd had enough and moved to a dirt cheap house in the middle of a field in the country. Not having a mortgage or rent does wonders for the ability to not check emails/Slack on weekends.
  - zepto 7y ago
    I’m curious why the good jobs don’t spread our from these areas. A good job by definition makes more money for the corporation than it does for the employee. You’d think that the constraints of places like the Bay Area would cause corporations to employ people in other places. Why is this not happening?
NoGravitas 7y ago
Yes, this is extremely insightful. Our society should be, at any post-1960 tech levels, effectively post-scarcity. Murray Bookchin discussed this in [Post-Scarcity Anarchism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Scarcity_Anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Scarcity_Anarchism) in 1971.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  post-scarcity of what? we do have enough food in aggregate, but do we have the logistics to actually get it to everyone? would food for everyone look anything like what I actually want to eat? don't we already use too much energy? we're certainly not post-scarcity wrt NYC apartments.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    That's the point though. Housing is constrained by policy, not any intrinsic limitation. NYC is an imperfect example but imagine if you wanted to tear down houses in Berkeley and put up apartments to meet demand. You're forbidden from doing this by law.
HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
You could, you know, live somewhere that's not so crowded. If you choose not to take advantage of what mobility you have, well, don't act so surprised.
Porthos9K 7y ago
There are only so many "good jobs", too.

isoskeles 7y ago

> There are only so many homes, and it's often illegal to build new ones. Now your colleagues and friends are your competitors for the same homes. If it's illegal to build new homes, that's certainly not a free market or "capitalism."

NoGravitas 7y ago
Capitalism is government by the owners of capital; under capitalism markets are normally distorted to the benefit of owners of capital (sometimes individually, sometimes as a class). The state is one tool used for this.

leetcrew 7y ago

tbh I don't think this is very compelling. my coworkers are certainly my competition for raises/promotions, but the company is large and successful enough that everyone I'm friendly with could get a raise and there would still be money to give me one too. outside of work, the scale just makes this an irrelevant question. sure, maybe there are 10,000 apartment units I would like to live in and 20,000 people who also want them. my five good friends in the area don't really move the needle wrt how much I need to bid to actually get a nice apartment. the incentive is there, but it's too weak to be worth paying attention to.

CalRobert 7y ago
I don't literally mean your specific friends. I suppose what I mean is "peers". My point is very simple - if you have 10,000 people and 1,000 homes, you must compete with those 10,000 people. 10 of them might even be your friends, competing for that same home. If we allowed building 9,000 more homes, you no longer have to compete just to get a roof over your head (though you may still do so to get a _nicer_ home) and you have the ability to tell your boss where to shove it when he asks you at 8:30 AM Monday why you didn't answer his Sunday night email. But we don't allow building more homes, at least in California, where homebuilding has fallen far, far, FAR below population growth. If you aren't on Slack all the time, you'll miss out on promotions to your coworker (who, I concede, may not literally be your pal) who will then outbid you for the house you want. Additionally, where you _are_ allowed to build housing tends to be a long ways from jobs (see: suburban sprawl) so you have the double whammy of work pressure to never really sign off, and a long commute.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I think understand your point, I just feel that the scale mismatch is so large that it doesn't really matter that much in day-to-day socializing. I understand that I'm in competition with n other people to get a specific apartment, but I'm not likely to actually encounter any of these people unless it's in the waiting room at the leasing office. I agree that I'm competing with people like me and my friends for housing, food, etc. I just don't see that as necessarily an impediment to helping, being kind to, and/or befriending strangers. it's an important issue, but orthogonal to what we are discussing here imo. maybe it affects your social interactions differently.

stickfigure 7y ago

There are hundreds of thousands of homes and tens of thousands of school slots. The chance that you were denied a resource specifically because one of your friends got it is so incredibly low as to be irrelevant. If you actually feel that the presence of your friends is keeping you from achieving life goals... your problem is much, much deeper.

CalRobert 7y ago
s/friends/peers then....

BubRoss 7y ago

This sounds a lot like people living in New York all their life and saying that the planet is overpopulated and that there is no space left. What you are saying might apply to the bay area, but it doesn't apply to almost anywhere else. No one is entitled to live in the most desirable places on earth. You could live almost anywhere else and not have the same problems.

CalRobert 7y ago
Well, that's a fair point, though I would suggest "bay area" could be "city with good jobs and strict controls on housing creation through zoning, density maximums, parking minimums, etc.". You're completely right though. I'd had enough and moved to a dirt cheap house in the middle of a field in the country. Not having a mortgage or rent does wonders for the ability to not check emails/Slack on weekends.
- zepto 7y ago
  I’m curious why the good jobs don’t spread our from these areas. A good job by definition makes more money for the corporation than it does for the employee. You’d think that the constraints of places like the Bay Area would cause corporations to employ people in other places. Why is this not happening?

NoGravitas 7y ago

Yes, this is extremely insightful. Our society should be, at any post-1960 tech levels, effectively post-scarcity. Murray Bookchin discussed this in [Post-Scarcity Anarchism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Scarcity_Anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Scarcity_Anarchism) in 1971.

leetcrew 7y ago
post-scarcity of what? we do have enough food in aggregate, but do we have the logistics to actually get it to everyone? would food for everyone look anything like what I actually want to eat? don't we already use too much energy? we're certainly not post-scarcity wrt NYC apartments.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  That's the point though. Housing is constrained by policy, not any intrinsic limitation. NYC is an imperfect example but imagine if you wanted to tear down houses in Berkeley and put up apartments to meet demand. You're forbidden from doing this by law.

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago

You could, you know, live somewhere that's not so crowded. If you choose not to take advantage of what mobility you have, well, don't act so surprised.

Porthos9K 7y ago

There are only so many "good jobs", too.