4 ms·

Again, the article is proposing things like allowing the market to build new housing. So, according to your framing of the issue, doing this would hurt "wealth

Again, the article is proposing things like allowing the market to build new housing. So, according to your framing of the issue, doing this would hurt "wealth creators" that sit on a house they inherited (in a growing location by chance), and reward wealth destroyers, like people who build new housing for people to live. Does this framing seem more useful than the article's? It's easy to develop a knee-jerk reaction to bad economic ideas that are frequently justified by "fairness", which IMO is such a fuzzy term as to be pretty much useless. But this does not seem to be a collection of those ideas, but instead reasonable ones based on examining cause-effect relationships and where current regulations may be leading to negative outcomes. Do you really mean to object to this? Rather than price being determined by "wealth creation", I think a more nuanced view is price is determined by supply and demand. But that the real wealth of countries in the long run is determined by productivity (units of output per unit of labor), and that these things may be correlated but not perfectly so (shortages and inflation make prices go up but don't create wealth). Anyway, the article doesn't seem to be a call for dramatic expansion of government but rather a call to examine cause-effect relationships and to use existing policy tools in a smarter way, including removing harmful regulations, in the interest having economic opportunity be more widespread. I think this is exactly the sort of thinking we need, and rejecting it because it sounds a bit superficially similar to bad economic thinking is a mistake. Bad economic ideas are likely to be the alternative.

WalterBright 6y ago
I carefully wrote "free market". Government can (and does) set all sorts of conditions that impede the free market from operating.
- throwaway34241 6y ago
  I still think it is useful to make a distinction between prices and wealth creation, even taking the government out of it. For example, the economics of much of human history are basically agricultural societies. The US was in a better position because of a virtually unlimited supply of capital (land), but in many other countries the model was the serfs work the land, and pay rent to the nobility who own it (and who in most cases inherit it from their parents). Such a system doesn't really require a violation of free markets. In this scenario, is it really correct to say that the nobility are the real "wealth creators"? They neither created the productive asset (land) or are working to produce the goods (food). If you accept that income = wealth creation, the nobility can simply create more wealth by raising the rent on the serfs (as long as they can survive). And they would be creating less wealth if they give the serfs a break. This is where I think a different definition of wealth creation makes more sense, that focuses on productivity (which determines the total size of the pie, for a given amount of labor). So different farming techniques that produce more from the same land would increase wealth. Or capital investments in farming equipment that raise productivity. And if the same amount of goods is being produced but only the rent changes, that is not producing or reducing wealth, simply changing the distribution.

WalterBright 6y ago

I carefully wrote "free market". Government can (and does) set all sorts of conditions that impede the free market from operating.

throwaway34241 6y ago
I still think it is useful to make a distinction between prices and wealth creation, even taking the government out of it. For example, the economics of much of human history are basically agricultural societies. The US was in a better position because of a virtually unlimited supply of capital (land), but in many other countries the model was the serfs work the land, and pay rent to the nobility who own it (and who in most cases inherit it from their parents). Such a system doesn't really require a violation of free markets. In this scenario, is it really correct to say that the nobility are the real "wealth creators"? They neither created the productive asset (land) or are working to produce the goods (food). If you accept that income = wealth creation, the nobility can simply create more wealth by raising the rent on the serfs (as long as they can survive). And they would be creating less wealth if they give the serfs a break. This is where I think a different definition of wealth creation makes more sense, that focuses on productivity (which determines the total size of the pie, for a given amount of labor). So different farming techniques that produce more from the same land would increase wealth. Or capital investments in farming equipment that raise productivity. And if the same amount of goods is being produced but only the rent changes, that is not producing or reducing wealth, simply changing the distribution.