7 ms·

Guess who bought up real estate post-2009 crisis, when prices were at rock bottom? Wealthy individuals and corporations that had enough assets to withstand the

Guess who bought up real estate post-2009 crisis, when prices were at rock bottom? Wealthy individuals and corporations that had enough assets to withstand the storm and capitalize on a down market. Guess who will grab more market share post-COVID? Better yet, guess who wasn't affected by forced lockdowns and benefited during the worst of COVID? I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from small businesses to megacorps isn't being discussed more.

zarkov99 6y ago
I share the distress. Covid has accelerated the inequality that was already at record levels. For many in tech and other white colar work Covid is either a non-event or a net benefit, while for many others its life ruining. We better start preparing for a future where many, maybe most, people have no economic value.
- naveen99 6y ago
  Inequality is an increasing function of population size, so it probably went down some due to COVID. the reason is that for many things there is only value in being the best or within the top finite number in the population. Being top x percent isn’t good enough, even 0.1% with sufficiently large populations. For example: spectator sports, politics, movie stars, the first to discover relativity, semiconductors... and those finite toppers capture a larger and larger percentage of aggregate value as population size grows. In the limit all value is captured by an infinite number of toppers across an infinite number of dimensions to top. this also manifests in evolution where all but a finitely many mutants survive a catastrophic change in the environment and the rest perish.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    Yes, but I think that is not the whole story. The shift in value in the economy from things to bytes has massively amplified that tendency. Information production scales infinitely since information is free to copy. The work of one single genius that deals in information, and arguably sport and entertainment now do deal in information in that sense, as does politics, can be consumed by billions. So there are simply not enough jobs for anyone else. That is in contrast with say medieval societies. Even if you were the best farmer in the world, you output would be consumed by only a few people, leaving plenty of room for lesser farmers to make a living.
    - 0d9eooo 6y ago
      But it also fuzzes value. So what you end up with rather than "value" is network effects, people who are good at advertising, and random chaotic trends that blow like the wind. That is, it's not just enough to be the best, it's required to create the appearance of the best, or to capture whatever the whims of the network are. People are also not always very good judges of long-term value. For the longest time the response I'd get whenever I expressed some sentiment of supporting small business, all things being equal, was something along the lines of "well you should support whoever can deliver the good at the lowest price." Although that's true to some extent, in the long term it leads to personal costs as local services are gone, and there's less and less competition. Short-term benefits, long term costs and so forth. In general, I think there's far too little focus on maintaining healthy competition. The pendulum in public discussions often swings from public to private services and employment, which is a good conversation to have, but there's almost never a serious, critical discussion about increasing competition and what those barriers are. US society is full of things that stifle competition and they don't get 1/10 the attention they deserve. It seems as if when it's brought up, you're forced into these ultra-libertarian or anti-capitalist stereotypes. The other day I was looking for a cycle restoration shop. There's a great one and they should be thriving right now. But their business was destroyed in riots. Not the business owner's fault. You could make an argument that it's just one more downstream effect of a racist cop killing someone over a counterfeit bill, a very significant one. This effect has played out many many times across the country now I'm sure. But who will foot the bill? The Mpls police dept? It seems we used to have this intuitive understanding of "bad things happen to good people" and "the community should pitch in collectively to support these things" but it's fading away. The darwinian model is flawed, unless you're focuses solely on the net benefits to those who benefit, which is circular in its reasoning.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    The number of things you can be ranked on increases as the population size increases.
rjkennedy98 6y ago
Because it’s deliberate. The parasitic elite have been destroying the core of this country for almost half a century. The government (serving only the rich) doesn’t care about us and this virus is just another opportunity for them to gather more in their greedy arms.
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  >The parasitic elite have been destroying the core of this country for almost half a century Yet over that half a century the standard of living in the US has vastly increased, so much that the US poverty line is in the top quintile of world incomes. US Median household wealth adjusted for household size changes and inflation has increased 50%. That's a massive increase [1]. The middle class has shrunk; because more moved up and above it than went below it. The share of US households, again adjusted for proper effects, making over 100K has tripled since 1967 [2]. Not many first world countries saw this kind of growth for the people you claim are being destroyed. Care to point out which metric you are using to claim the core of this country is being destroyed? It's certainly not income. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-... [2] https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-become-richer https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-...
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    I'm not sure how this demonstrates your point. The rich get richer. US households have changed dramatically since 1967. There's participation of women in the workforce (up about 20% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf), housing prices have gone up about (~800% https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/) - home ownership being the hallmark of the middle class, and the wages of the middle class have increased about 300% although that's 1000% more than the average personal income. Once you obtain a home, you can springboard (in a generation or 5) into the wealthy class. Even at that rate, you're the poor elite making a measly $1m a year without working. The parasitic elite (in the US) have CRUSHED the working class by ensuring that entering the middle class is as difficult as possible, while the middle class have largely used property to boost themselves into their own generational wealth. The inflation has been due to US debt, which comes from Military spending, QE, etc. The public market has been dominated by large brands who have a slew of predatory practices (looking at you JPM Chase, Apple, Bank of America, etc). NIMBY policies (by the newly elevated middle class, clutching their pearls) and work centralization in dense urban settings, has hurt the whole situation...but there's hope with Covid, ironically. That's what I believe based on my own observation (and experience).
mensetmanusman 6y ago
A good discussion of pros and cons of consolidation should be included. E.g. economies of scale are almost always more energy / environmentally friendly (efficient). Lack of diversity, bad. Increased monopoly power, bad. Increased consolidation for following regulations, good.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > E.g. economies of scale are almost always more energy / environmentally friendly (efficient). This is just an argument for communism, and that does not work so well. Planning all the economy in a centralized way, private or public, is a bad idea. Capitalism is build in the idea of many producers trying to get to many consumers. When you only have one or a few producers it stops being capitalism.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Technically the distinction is between how the dominant position is maintained. Is it a defacto crime to try to compete or is it just impossible until you can do much better? There is a big difference in dynamics between trying to build from the start for the max size or an emergent system from growth.
- tdeck 6y ago
  In this case I don't see how consolidation of real estate ownership can yield any benefits in terms of efficiency. It seems like if anything it would lead to more sprawl as people are forced to move further from urban areas to buy affordable land.
Nasrudith 6y ago
That is essentially the ugly nature of recessions period. Those who buy it up for fire sale prices get the assets and the worst part is stopping it without funding the losers would only make it /worse/ for them. The only good I can see from restrictions there is barring profit from those who promote or cause recessions which is a very tall order to prove much less how to make illegal without ironically larger collateral damage. (You invested at the top? Lose your shirt and go to jail would be stupid tyranny.) Technically "wealthy" is a neccessary but not sufficent condition for "available assets sufficient to take advantage". The only way the buyers could lose long term is if the assets go down /even more/ which needless to say would be bad for everyone. Gross as it sounds I am not sure if there is a better solution possible right now other than "loot the proverbial corpses and move on". It isn't really news in itself.
- stainforth 6y ago
  We don't need to lay a red carpet for the wealthy to loot "proverbial" corpses.
bassman9000 6y ago
from small businesses to megacorps And megacorps are composed by people. People that have jobs and savings. Not grey abstract entities. Workers. E.g. tech workers. E.g. how much real state transfer will happen in the Bay Area in the following months?
icelancer 6y ago
>> I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from small businesses to megacorps isn't being discussed more. It's not discussed because people don't care. They are optimizing for one thing and one thing only currently: COVID case counts. Anything to get the number under what they think is a good number, all externalities be damned. In six months when they can't get their fair trade coffee from their local place, they'll wonder why it is and be sad. But they're as complicit as anyone else in having a zero-tolerance risk threshold with no accounting for externalities.
- voxl 6y ago
  Your take is dripping with bias. Everyone who had any sense wanted a lockdown with business stimulus, there is no reason these externalities needed to be bad in any capacity. Sacrificing lives because the Republican party is okay with it isn't on the common person.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    That's revisionism. A whole lot of people did NOT want a lockdown, or accepted it only because it was billed as only for two weeks. Once it became clear that the goalposts were rapidly moving and "two weeks", "flatten the curve" etc had been a lie, a huge number of people became disgusted with it. And please, if you'll accuse others of dripping with bias, attempting to paint this as a strictly left/right issue doesn't work. It's normally the left who claim to care about workers and small businesses, isn't it? Those are the people suffering the most.
    - darkarmani 6y ago
      > "flatten the curve" etc had been a lie, What? I guess you didn't see the body count in NYC and NJ?
- imtringued 6y ago
  The number of COVID cases is still growing incredibly fast and we are not far away from a million deaths.

zarkov99 6y ago

I share the distress. Covid has accelerated the inequality that was already at record levels. For many in tech and other white colar work Covid is either a non-event or a net benefit, while for many others its life ruining. We better start preparing for a future where many, maybe most, people have no economic value.

naveen99 6y ago
Inequality is an increasing function of population size, so it probably went down some due to COVID. the reason is that for many things there is only value in being the best or within the top finite number in the population. Being top x percent isn’t good enough, even 0.1% with sufficiently large populations. For example: spectator sports, politics, movie stars, the first to discover relativity, semiconductors... and those finite toppers capture a larger and larger percentage of aggregate value as population size grows. In the limit all value is captured by an infinite number of toppers across an infinite number of dimensions to top. this also manifests in evolution where all but a finitely many mutants survive a catastrophic change in the environment and the rest perish.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  Yes, but I think that is not the whole story. The shift in value in the economy from things to bytes has massively amplified that tendency. Information production scales infinitely since information is free to copy. The work of one single genius that deals in information, and arguably sport and entertainment now do deal in information in that sense, as does politics, can be consumed by billions. So there are simply not enough jobs for anyone else. That is in contrast with say medieval societies. Even if you were the best farmer in the world, you output would be consumed by only a few people, leaving plenty of room for lesser farmers to make a living.
  - 0d9eooo 6y ago
    But it also fuzzes value. So what you end up with rather than "value" is network effects, people who are good at advertising, and random chaotic trends that blow like the wind. That is, it's not just enough to be the best, it's required to create the appearance of the best, or to capture whatever the whims of the network are. People are also not always very good judges of long-term value. For the longest time the response I'd get whenever I expressed some sentiment of supporting small business, all things being equal, was something along the lines of "well you should support whoever can deliver the good at the lowest price." Although that's true to some extent, in the long term it leads to personal costs as local services are gone, and there's less and less competition. Short-term benefits, long term costs and so forth. In general, I think there's far too little focus on maintaining healthy competition. The pendulum in public discussions often swings from public to private services and employment, which is a good conversation to have, but there's almost never a serious, critical discussion about increasing competition and what those barriers are. US society is full of things that stifle competition and they don't get 1/10 the attention they deserve. It seems as if when it's brought up, you're forced into these ultra-libertarian or anti-capitalist stereotypes. The other day I was looking for a cycle restoration shop. There's a great one and they should be thriving right now. But their business was destroyed in riots. Not the business owner's fault. You could make an argument that it's just one more downstream effect of a racist cop killing someone over a counterfeit bill, a very significant one. This effect has played out many many times across the country now I'm sure. But who will foot the bill? The Mpls police dept? It seems we used to have this intuitive understanding of "bad things happen to good people" and "the community should pitch in collectively to support these things" but it's fading away. The darwinian model is flawed, unless you're focuses solely on the net benefits to those who benefit, which is circular in its reasoning.
- imtringued 6y ago
  The number of things you can be ranked on increases as the population size increases.

rjkennedy98 6y ago

Because it’s deliberate. The parasitic elite have been destroying the core of this country for almost half a century. The government (serving only the rich) doesn’t care about us and this virus is just another opportunity for them to gather more in their greedy arms.

ChrisLomont 6y ago
>The parasitic elite have been destroying the core of this country for almost half a century Yet over that half a century the standard of living in the US has vastly increased, so much that the US poverty line is in the top quintile of world incomes. US Median household wealth adjusted for household size changes and inflation has increased 50%. That's a massive increase [1]. The middle class has shrunk; because more moved up and above it than went below it. The share of US households, again adjusted for proper effects, making over 100K has tripled since 1967 [2]. Not many first world countries saw this kind of growth for the people you claim are being destroyed. Care to point out which metric you are using to claim the core of this country is being destroyed? It's certainly not income. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-... [2] https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-become-richer https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-...
- Supermancho 6y ago
  I'm not sure how this demonstrates your point. The rich get richer. US households have changed dramatically since 1967. There's participation of women in the workforce (up about 20% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf), housing prices have gone up about (~800% https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/) - home ownership being the hallmark of the middle class, and the wages of the middle class have increased about 300% although that's 1000% more than the average personal income. Once you obtain a home, you can springboard (in a generation or 5) into the wealthy class. Even at that rate, you're the poor elite making a measly $1m a year without working. The parasitic elite (in the US) have CRUSHED the working class by ensuring that entering the middle class is as difficult as possible, while the middle class have largely used property to boost themselves into their own generational wealth. The inflation has been due to US debt, which comes from Military spending, QE, etc. The public market has been dominated by large brands who have a slew of predatory practices (looking at you JPM Chase, Apple, Bank of America, etc). NIMBY policies (by the newly elevated middle class, clutching their pearls) and work centralization in dense urban settings, has hurt the whole situation...but there's hope with Covid, ironically. That's what I believe based on my own observation (and experience).

mensetmanusman 6y ago

A good discussion of pros and cons of consolidation should be included. E.g. economies of scale are almost always more energy / environmentally friendly (efficient). Lack of diversity, bad. Increased monopoly power, bad. Increased consolidation for following regulations, good.

Hokusai 6y ago
> E.g. economies of scale are almost always more energy / environmentally friendly (efficient). This is just an argument for communism, and that does not work so well. Planning all the economy in a centralized way, private or public, is a bad idea. Capitalism is build in the idea of many producers trying to get to many consumers. When you only have one or a few producers it stops being capitalism.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Technically the distinction is between how the dominant position is maintained. Is it a defacto crime to try to compete or is it just impossible until you can do much better? There is a big difference in dynamics between trying to build from the start for the max size or an emergent system from growth.
tdeck 6y ago
In this case I don't see how consolidation of real estate ownership can yield any benefits in terms of efficiency. It seems like if anything it would lead to more sprawl as people are forced to move further from urban areas to buy affordable land.

Nasrudith 6y ago

That is essentially the ugly nature of recessions period. Those who buy it up for fire sale prices get the assets and the worst part is stopping it without funding the losers would only make it /worse/ for them. The only good I can see from restrictions there is barring profit from those who promote or cause recessions which is a very tall order to prove much less how to make illegal without ironically larger collateral damage. (You invested at the top? Lose your shirt and go to jail would be stupid tyranny.) Technically "wealthy" is a neccessary but not sufficent condition for "available assets sufficient to take advantage". The only way the buyers could lose long term is if the assets go down /even more/ which needless to say would be bad for everyone. Gross as it sounds I am not sure if there is a better solution possible right now other than "loot the proverbial corpses and move on". It isn't really news in itself.

stainforth 6y ago
We don't need to lay a red carpet for the wealthy to loot "proverbial" corpses.

bassman9000 6y ago

from small businesses to megacorps And megacorps are composed by people. People that have jobs and savings. Not grey abstract entities. Workers. E.g. tech workers. E.g. how much real state transfer will happen in the Bay Area in the following months?

icelancer 6y ago

>> I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from small businesses to megacorps isn't being discussed more. It's not discussed because people don't care. They are optimizing for one thing and one thing only currently: COVID case counts. Anything to get the number under what they think is a good number, all externalities be damned. In six months when they can't get their fair trade coffee from their local place, they'll wonder why it is and be sad. But they're as complicit as anyone else in having a zero-tolerance risk threshold with no accounting for externalities.

voxl 6y ago
Your take is dripping with bias. Everyone who had any sense wanted a lockdown with business stimulus, there is no reason these externalities needed to be bad in any capacity. Sacrificing lives because the Republican party is okay with it isn't on the common person.
- thu2111 6y ago
  That's revisionism. A whole lot of people did NOT want a lockdown, or accepted it only because it was billed as only for two weeks. Once it became clear that the goalposts were rapidly moving and "two weeks", "flatten the curve" etc had been a lie, a huge number of people became disgusted with it. And please, if you'll accuse others of dripping with bias, attempting to paint this as a strictly left/right issue doesn't work. It's normally the left who claim to care about workers and small businesses, isn't it? Those are the people suffering the most.
  - darkarmani 6y ago
    > "flatten the curve" etc had been a lie, What? I guess you didn't see the body count in NYC and NJ?
imtringued 6y ago
The number of COVID cases is still growing incredibly fast and we are not far away from a million deaths.