6 ms·

You want people to build, give them money. Folks aren't living in tents because it's fun. "For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" h

• jseliger 6y ago
  "Living in tents" is more a problem with restrictive zoning laws; zoning needs to be liberalized. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new-hsieh-moretti-paper-land-use-restrictions-economic-growth.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/ne...
  • aaomidi 6y ago
    So there isn't an issue with minimum wage stagnating compared to inflation?
    • marcus_holmes 6y ago
      yes there is, but it's a separate issue
    • scatters 6y ago
      Inflation is influenced by minimum wage. If wages rise but people are competing for access to an artificially restricted housing market, all that will happen is house price and rents go up to absorb the increase; the only people better off will be landlords and homeowners with a larger house than they need.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      If we don't allow the housing supply to match demand, no minimum wage will be enough.
  • verall 6y ago
    Yup, that's why Houston with it's "we couldn't even begin to care" zoning laws has solved homelessness.
    • readarticle 6y ago
      It’s partly the reason they’ve decreased their homeless population by 54% since 2011, yes. I’d probably point to the concerted efforts between the housing authorities and the regional VA office that, with combined HUD & VA funding, essentially ended homelessness among veterans in the city first though. Kinda unfair to compare them to other American cities tbh, it’s always easier to do stuff like this when you can actually build.
  • carapace 6y ago
    This too. I don't mean to be cheeky or flip, but I have to point out that changing laws also requires money, eh?
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  Workers are living in tents both because wages are miserable AND because police and building codes keep them from building small shacks and because land prices are disproportionately high.
• shuckles 6y ago
  Giving people money won’t solve this problem, per Ricardo’s law of rent.
  • kortilla 6y ago
    That’s not what that law means. If you keep giving money, it will make sense to build high rises that house more people.
    • shuckles 6y ago
      Four stories over podiums would alleviate much of high rents in California. Lack of willing and able renters is not why they’re not built. Holding fixed the legal supply of housing makes apartment pricing behave in the same way as land rents.
      • webmaven 6y ago
        Podiums?
        • shuckles 6y ago
          It refers to the common construction design of new, low-rise apartment buildings: four stories of light wood framing over a “podium” built on the ground of a much stronger (i.e. more expensive) material, usually concrete. It’s considered the most cost efficient building style as compared to true high rises which require steel construction per code. Once you are aware of it, my guess is you’ll see it everywhere.
          • carapace 6y ago
            Is this one? "The Westerly Condominium" https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Westerly+Condominium/@37.735826,-122.5047208,18z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x808f7d6f8c947c41:0x4440756995779b94!8m2!3d37.735826!4d-122.5047208 https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Westerly+Condominium/@...
• unishark 6y ago
  The blog post is comparing collective action of recent generations unfavorably to prior generations. Your complaint is that people are effectively being paid the same as those prior generations.
  • mytherin 6y ago
    People are not "effectively being paid the same as previous generations". Unlike wages, many primary necessities have grown in cost at rates much higher than inflation in the US (housing, education, health care).
    • unishark 6y ago
      Are you arguing against the above poster's link? Or against my summary of what it literally says?
    • DangitBobby 6y ago
      Don't forget food.
  • carapace 6y ago
    IANAEconomist, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. My general impression is that people haven't changed much, and the American "can-do" spirit is alive and well. There are some problems with zoning laws, and many folks are financially clueless or even irresponsible (don't have savings accounts and such), but to me the limiting factor seems to be capital. > Your complaint is that people are effectively being paid the same as those prior generations. I think you might have gotten confused by how the article uses "the same purchasing power" in a few places. It's actually saying (and again, I Am Not An Economist) is that gains from increasing productivity have not gone to the middle class. In any event, my point is that if people had more money they would build more. I don't find the "cultural stagnation" thesis very compelling.
    • unishark 6y ago
      It's not a foregone conclusion that gains from increased productivity go to the worker. Suppose someone builds an extremely advanced machine where all the worker needs to do is push a button, where in the past they needed ten years of training to do the same work with hand tools and the skills to do it were rarer, even if they produced less. The gains would rationally go to the person selling the machine. In fact this is what has happened and why Wintel etc sucked up a lot of the gains, creating so many of those rich people these kinds of articles complain about. Also this whole statistical view of people is flawed. For the kinds of jobs where increased productivity should go to the worker, perhaps it did, and we call them rich now and move the goalpost to exclude them. As for cultural changes, if you compare to other countries there are clear differences today. I think of government participation broadly as a "theraputic" institution. You contribute to something larger to make yourself feel good. This could mean building things or cleaning up trash etc. In the US however, for the last few generations this disproportionately means vote/protest for social progress agendas (in the eyes of the citizen), such as to impose "fairness" or lifestyle change. People's civic energy is basically channeled into just drama as the fight goes back and forth producing nothing.
• antepodius 6y ago
  If you give them money, and they have the mindset talked about in the article, won't they just rent a place to live? Good for them, but not building.
• incompatible 6y ago
  I think this is an old complaint about capitalism and a government that works to support capitalists, which dates from the 19th century. Most of the resources of society end up controlled by a minority of capitalists and the government, and capitalists generally find better profits from providing goods to the wealthy instead of the poor. Hence, we have construction of luxury apartments and hotels, while people in the same city are homeless. It's described in the works of Kropotkin, etc., and nothing has really changed. Whether his solution, anarcho-communism, is actually practical remains largely untested, but he makes a fair point that society could easily satisfy the basic needs of the entire population, if desired, even with late 19th century technology, and even more easily today.
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  If they had houses, would they build anything? I don't think so. In fact, horrible as it is, being homeless is a great incentive to build (source: I have been homeless). The realisation that everything I depended on to keep me safe and warm had failed, and that I could really only rely on myself to do that, was a life-changer. Giving people money will keep them dependent. People in that situation don't need handouts. They need the ability and opportunity to improve their situation themselves. For me, that was relaxed rules about hiring casual construction labour. I don't know what a homeless person would need now to improve their situation. But I'm willing to bet it's more likely to be the removal of constraints rather than handouts.
  • adrianN 6y ago
    Many homeless people have problems that prevent them from just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
    • marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I get that. But for a lot of those problems, the only person who can solve them is the person themselves. Addiction being the prime example; the only person who can stop you being addicted to something is you. Other people can help, sure, but at the end of the day it's your willingness to change that counts.
  • carapace 6y ago
    I was homeless to for a while (emotional and social problems, I'm feeling much better.) I get what you're saying. But that's you. I relied on all kinds of people, including several churches who gave free meals. God bless them. Eventually, one of my relatives died and left my mom some money and she paid for some therapy and some of it worked and I went on to be a more-or-less functioning adult, with a job and home and all that. YMMV > Giving people money will keep them dependent. There's a danger of that for some people, I agree, but I still think that dependent well-fed housed people are a step up from dependent hungry homeless people. > People in that situation don't need handouts. They need the ability and opportunity to improve their situation themselves. I say they need both: give them food and a place to live and education or training or therapy or whatever they need to develop the ability and find or create the opportunities. USA is a ridiculously wealthy nation, we could afford take care of our own if we just prioritized it. > being homeless is a great incentive to build I believe that people like to build. Look at kids, eh? LEGO bricks? Frankly I think it's severely messed up that our society uses homelessness as a stick to keep people in line. I.e. "Don't lose your job! You'll wind up on the street!"
• D_Alex 6y ago
  And yet, Chinese workers earn way less, but they are building like crazy. No, it's not money, it's something else. "Build Culture" is a good name for it, whatever it is.
  • d3nj4l 6y ago
    > Chinese workers earn way less Relative to cost of living and their median/top level income?
  • kazagistar 6y ago
    Its because they aren't expected to finance the building themselves. Its the insane expectation that the destitute will be able to drive economic development that keeps making the housing divide, amongst other class divides, so massive in the USA.
  • mempko 6y ago
    China took Japan's model and instructed it thousands of local banks to make loans for productive investment. So China financed a shit ton of companies and people to start building. It most certainly is a lack of money that prevents building. The best thing you can do for building is to give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way.