4 ms·

This is an interesting analogy because the roadrunner just runs without looking and everything works out fine. Wile E. Coyote only has problems because he is a

by ohyes 6y ago

This is an interesting analogy because the roadrunner just runs without looking and everything works out fine. Wile E. Coyote only has problems because he is aware of what a huge mistake he’s made. I don’t know what the behavior analogous to road runner is in an economic sense. Perhaps suspending capitalism? I can’t imagine anyone going along with that.

stormbrew 6y ago
A complete rent, mortgage, and property tax holiday/pause for the duration of the emergency, along with universal income assistance at the individual (not corporate) level. As is, only some of those things were done in some places, which almost certainly leads to conflict.
- chkaloon 6y ago
  Problem is, there's always two parties in every transaction. Holiday for the rent payer is a death knell for the landlord. Mortgage holiday is the same for the bank and its bondholders/depositors.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Is that a problem? Those landlords and banks have collateral -- the properties and mortgages themselves. I care a lot more about housing from a "how well does it house humans" perspective than a "how well does it generate income for landlords/capitalists" perspective. If landlords and mortgage lenders ended up having to sell their assets for pennies on the dollar, I'd imagine it would make housing a lot more affordable to people and spread more evenly.
    - chkaloon 6y ago
      And all the pensions and retirement accounts of teachers, firefighters, anyone with a 401k/403b/125 account are the ones propping up those mortgage holders and "capitalists". There is no imaginary backstop here, except the Fed for a little while. Eventually that will crumble as well.
    - krapht 6y ago
      The Great Recession was only a decade ago. Of course it's a problem, and we have recent evidence of what happens when you almost let the real estate and banking industries collapse.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Sometimes people are forced into becoming a landlord. They bought an affordable condo in an affordable city (think 5 digit prices). The market dies and they can't sell. They lose their job. They have to go back to school. So they move in with friends and rent out their place just to cover the mortgage they can't get out of. Bankruptcy would ruin their chance to dig themselves out. I really feel for both renters and small-time landlords. I've been in and/or known people who've been in tough spots on both sides. But I have limited empathy for those who have no empathy.
      - stormbrew 6y ago
        I've been in the position of owning a condo with an underwater mortgage with difficulty finding work. It was fucking awful and it made my life hell for years. When I finally sold it it was for less than 2/3rds the remaining value of the mortgage. I still had more viable options and was in a better place than most people living paycheque to paycheque are if they're renting and their ability to work is interrupted for months. All these situations are not equal, and if your 'empathy' tries to force them all into the same bucket, that's a problem.
        nitrogen 6y ago
        that's a problem. Especially in times like these, we should be trying to find common ground with one another, not putting up walls and saying "you aren't allowed to think you understand what I feel" or "your problems are insignificant because mine are worse".
        stormbrew 6y ago
        Recognizing that there are degrees and differences in hardship between people who own property and people who rent is not any of those things.
        nitrogen 6y ago
        We're in a thread where people are talking about just "canceling rent". If the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, the renter is out (and possibly the landlord too). If the renter doesn't pay rent, the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, and the renter is out. They're both in a bind. A landlord with a mortgage is not a property owner if the mortgage isn't paid. If they work together as human beings they might find a solution that works with the means of each party, but if they start a hardship contest then they both lose.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      what makes you think those houses would end up being bought to live in rather than scooped up en masse by even wealthier (aspiring) landlords with some spare cash? seems like the best case scenario would be a brief period where it's a great time to buy a house, followed by a return to the norm but with different landlords. that's not necessarily worse than what we have now, but I wouldn't expect anything to change long term without adjusting any of the other factors that make housing expensive.
  - ohyes 6y ago
    Exactly, that’s why I suggested suspending capitalism, but in which case what do you replace it with? We could of course just give everyone what they would have made, based on last year’s tax returns or whatever, of course this has its own problems (inequality, inflation, etc.)
  - toiletfuneral 6y ago
    trying to find a problem with 'death knell for the landlord' but I can't
  - stormbrew 6y ago
    And I addressed the two parties in that particular chain that don't have access to the central bank's reserves (rent and mortgage holding landlord). Landlords that don't hold mortgages don't need anywhere near as much assistance. In particular, the conflict I mentioned in the last sentence was directly alluding to the problem of only giving a rent holiday without a mortgage holiday to go with it. It's actually kind of hard to believe you read my really short post in its entirety, because you're arguing quite a strawperson here. For banks or lenders that don't have direct access to the central bank's reserves they will need to sort that out between themselves or possibly with further legislation, but it's a much much easier problem to solve than individual renters going insolvent en masse because their landlord is still demanding rent while they can't leave the house.
uoaei 6y ago
The parallel here, to me, is that the stock market is solely based on investors' perceptions of reality, not reality itself. As soon as investors realize that their investments are untenable, they will pull out, triggering an accelerating freefall until we hit terminal velocity. The economy is unhealthy but people can be convinced to ignore that because it's not easy to see the holistic conditions of the US economy on a day-to-day basis, and the way we summarize it in public discourse and media (looking at indices of the stock market) are assuaging any fears that may arise. Personally I find the analogy perfectly apt.
- ohyes 6y ago
  Right, but we don’t want that. How can we avoid that?
  - uoaei 6y ago
    The roadrunner is achieving prosperity. He goes far, fast. He keeps winning because he is obeying his animal spirits[1] -- literally running on roads. The coyote pursues prosperity, but rather than using his animal spirits, which would tell him to hunt like a coyote does, he instead repeatedly requisitions absurd contraptions that are manufactured by "Acme." We presume (because the cartoon is on TVs in America, and America's mythos is pervasive and ever-present) that Acme is a private company which uses the free market to drive its innovation and development cycles. Acme's advertising is presumably based on their mail-in order business, which at the time was heavily oriented toward homemakers and other "normal people." These contraptions invariably have negative unintended consequences, and yet Wile E Coyote turns to them in the next episode for the next great promise in technology, never learning his lesson. The metaphorical business cycle plays out in every episode: Coyote puts his trust in the Solution To His Problems; he spends money and time buying and setting up the contraption that will Solve His Problem; he deploys it, but because of external (usually environmental) conditions it fails; Coyote is worse off than before because he over-extended himself. Coyote in this case would be a small business owner or similar everyman who is trying to figure out and out-play the game to get rich. I guess the lesson here is to create an economy that is amenable to the localized, instinctive decisions made by each of its participants, and not to spend time on manufacturing conditions for success by setting up extremely efficient but otherwise very finicky systems, but rather to pursue it step by 3-toed step. The fancy contraptions (quantitative easing being an obvious and recent example) never end up working as intended and instead make life harder for workers in aggregate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)
rootsudo 6y ago
The problem is we're comparing the economy to cartoon fiction of a bygone era.
- ohyes 6y ago
  Are you saying that the economy isn’t just a complicated game that we play to distribute wealth and it had a merit beyond its utility to those playing it? It seems we should rethink the game if it falls over every few years and fails to serve the majority of the players.
  - rootsudo 6y ago
    Unless the game is designed on purpose to fall over so people can take advantage of it and enable a new level of wealth for themselves.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Clearly someone has yet to read Dorfman and Mattelart on Donald Duck
jotm 6y ago
Going with this analogy, what if the government partnered up with banks and offered huge loans to everyone, with minimal interest and the ability to postpone repayment for months/years. Since money is a human invention, if everyone pretends that these are not handouts but just a lot of debt, the economy can keep going and those loans will be repaid slowly or it will be a figure somewhere of how much debt the public is in.

by ohyes 6y ago

stormbrew 6y ago

A complete rent, mortgage, and property tax holiday/pause for the duration of the emergency, along with universal income assistance at the individual (not corporate) level. As is, only some of those things were done in some places, which almost certainly leads to conflict.

chkaloon 6y ago
Problem is, there's always two parties in every transaction. Holiday for the rent payer is a death knell for the landlord. Mortgage holiday is the same for the bank and its bondholders/depositors.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Is that a problem? Those landlords and banks have collateral -- the properties and mortgages themselves. I care a lot more about housing from a "how well does it house humans" perspective than a "how well does it generate income for landlords/capitalists" perspective. If landlords and mortgage lenders ended up having to sell their assets for pennies on the dollar, I'd imagine it would make housing a lot more affordable to people and spread more evenly.
  - chkaloon 6y ago
    And all the pensions and retirement accounts of teachers, firefighters, anyone with a 401k/403b/125 account are the ones propping up those mortgage holders and "capitalists". There is no imaginary backstop here, except the Fed for a little while. Eventually that will crumble as well.
  - krapht 6y ago
    The Great Recession was only a decade ago. Of course it's a problem, and we have recent evidence of what happens when you almost let the real estate and banking industries collapse.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Sometimes people are forced into becoming a landlord. They bought an affordable condo in an affordable city (think 5 digit prices). The market dies and they can't sell. They lose their job. They have to go back to school. So they move in with friends and rent out their place just to cover the mortgage they can't get out of. Bankruptcy would ruin their chance to dig themselves out. I really feel for both renters and small-time landlords. I've been in and/or known people who've been in tough spots on both sides. But I have limited empathy for those who have no empathy.
    - stormbrew 6y ago
      I've been in the position of owning a condo with an underwater mortgage with difficulty finding work. It was fucking awful and it made my life hell for years. When I finally sold it it was for less than 2/3rds the remaining value of the mortgage. I still had more viable options and was in a better place than most people living paycheque to paycheque are if they're renting and their ability to work is interrupted for months. All these situations are not equal, and if your 'empathy' tries to force them all into the same bucket, that's a problem.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        that's a problem. Especially in times like these, we should be trying to find common ground with one another, not putting up walls and saying "you aren't allowed to think you understand what I feel" or "your problems are insignificant because mine are worse".
        stormbrew 6y ago
        Recognizing that there are degrees and differences in hardship between people who own property and people who rent is not any of those things.
        nitrogen 6y ago
        We're in a thread where people are talking about just "canceling rent". If the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, the renter is out (and possibly the landlord too). If the renter doesn't pay rent, the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, and the renter is out. They're both in a bind. A landlord with a mortgage is not a property owner if the mortgage isn't paid. If they work together as human beings they might find a solution that works with the means of each party, but if they start a hardship contest then they both lose.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    what makes you think those houses would end up being bought to live in rather than scooped up en masse by even wealthier (aspiring) landlords with some spare cash? seems like the best case scenario would be a brief period where it's a great time to buy a house, followed by a return to the norm but with different landlords. that's not necessarily worse than what we have now, but I wouldn't expect anything to change long term without adjusting any of the other factors that make housing expensive.
- ohyes 6y ago
  Exactly, that’s why I suggested suspending capitalism, but in which case what do you replace it with? We could of course just give everyone what they would have made, based on last year’s tax returns or whatever, of course this has its own problems (inequality, inflation, etc.)
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  trying to find a problem with 'death knell for the landlord' but I can't
- stormbrew 6y ago
  And I addressed the two parties in that particular chain that don't have access to the central bank's reserves (rent and mortgage holding landlord). Landlords that don't hold mortgages don't need anywhere near as much assistance. In particular, the conflict I mentioned in the last sentence was directly alluding to the problem of only giving a rent holiday without a mortgage holiday to go with it. It's actually kind of hard to believe you read my really short post in its entirety, because you're arguing quite a strawperson here. For banks or lenders that don't have direct access to the central bank's reserves they will need to sort that out between themselves or possibly with further legislation, but it's a much much easier problem to solve than individual renters going insolvent en masse because their landlord is still demanding rent while they can't leave the house.

uoaei 6y ago

The parallel here, to me, is that the stock market is solely based on investors' perceptions of reality, not reality itself. As soon as investors realize that their investments are untenable, they will pull out, triggering an accelerating freefall until we hit terminal velocity. The economy is unhealthy but people can be convinced to ignore that because it's not easy to see the holistic conditions of the US economy on a day-to-day basis, and the way we summarize it in public discourse and media (looking at indices of the stock market) are assuaging any fears that may arise. Personally I find the analogy perfectly apt.

ohyes 6y ago
Right, but we don’t want that. How can we avoid that?
- uoaei 6y ago
  The roadrunner is achieving prosperity. He goes far, fast. He keeps winning because he is obeying his animal spirits[1] -- literally running on roads. The coyote pursues prosperity, but rather than using his animal spirits, which would tell him to hunt like a coyote does, he instead repeatedly requisitions absurd contraptions that are manufactured by "Acme." We presume (because the cartoon is on TVs in America, and America's mythos is pervasive and ever-present) that Acme is a private company which uses the free market to drive its innovation and development cycles. Acme's advertising is presumably based on their mail-in order business, which at the time was heavily oriented toward homemakers and other "normal people." These contraptions invariably have negative unintended consequences, and yet Wile E Coyote turns to them in the next episode for the next great promise in technology, never learning his lesson. The metaphorical business cycle plays out in every episode: Coyote puts his trust in the Solution To His Problems; he spends money and time buying and setting up the contraption that will Solve His Problem; he deploys it, but because of external (usually environmental) conditions it fails; Coyote is worse off than before because he over-extended himself. Coyote in this case would be a small business owner or similar everyman who is trying to figure out and out-play the game to get rich. I guess the lesson here is to create an economy that is amenable to the localized, instinctive decisions made by each of its participants, and not to spend time on manufacturing conditions for success by setting up extremely efficient but otherwise very finicky systems, but rather to pursue it step by 3-toed step. The fancy contraptions (quantitative easing being an obvious and recent example) never end up working as intended and instead make life harder for workers in aggregate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)

rootsudo 6y ago

The problem is we're comparing the economy to cartoon fiction of a bygone era.

ohyes 6y ago
Are you saying that the economy isn’t just a complicated game that we play to distribute wealth and it had a merit beyond its utility to those playing it? It seems we should rethink the game if it falls over every few years and fails to serve the majority of the players.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Unless the game is designed on purpose to fall over so people can take advantage of it and enable a new level of wealth for themselves.
selimthegrim 6y ago
Clearly someone has yet to read Dorfman and Mattelart on Donald Duck

jotm 6y ago

Going with this analogy, what if the government partnered up with banks and offered huge loans to everyone, with minimal interest and the ability to postpone repayment for months/years. Since money is a human invention, if everyone pretends that these are not handouts but just a lot of debt, the economy can keep going and those loans will be repaid slowly or it will be a figure somewhere of how much debt the public is in.