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Did you read the rest of the article where it established the fraction of wealth in the nation that is due to land? Why are all the dumpy and decrepit houses i

Did you read the rest of the article where it established the fraction of wealth in the nation that is due to land? Why are all the dumpy and decrepit houses in Silicon Valley worth 10x what they would be in the rest of the country? What is the value of the lane in Silicon Valley versus the market caps of the various companies there? If there's a trillion dollar company, and the houses around it go for 2 million each, and 80% of the value is in the land of those houses; that's only 400k houses to equal the market cap of the company. Also take note of the other analyses of the growth of inequality in the 21st century. The growing inequality isn't coming from stock market values, it's mostly coming from housing.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
No, I did not in fact read the whole thing. My life is too short. Only 400k houses? I don't think that supports your point very much. Apple, Amazon, or Google have land footprints that are far smaller than 400,000 houses. And, the growth in inequality is coming from land? The top 0.01% have what percent of their assets in land? And, which came first? Did they make their money on stocks and then buy the land to diversify? Or did they make the bulk of their initial money on the land?
- runnerup 5y ago
  > In its 2019 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week, Amazon listed its global real estate footprint at the end of 2018 at an astounding 288 million square feet of offices, warehouses, retail stores and data centers. That's 10.3 sq. miles. SF has a density of 17,246 people per square mile. Manhattan has a density of 75,000 people per square mile. Granted, most of Amazon's real estate are warehouses in sparsely-populated areas. Main point is that not all homes are houses. Many are high-rise condominiums/apartments.
- imtringued 5y ago
  According to dirk löhr a big chunk of stock market valuation is based on real estate and ultimately land. Once you include other land like monopolies like spectrum or patents you're looking at more than 60% of the value of a given stock being tied up in those things. Bill gates owns a huge amount of farm land. Land is still one of the biggest factors of production and the biggest driver of inequality in the 21th century.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > Once you include other land like monopolies like spectrum or patents you're looking at more than 60% of the value of a given stock being tied up in those things. Yeah, see, that's part of my point. Why just do land, and not "other land like monopolies like spectrum or patents"? Or domain names? Some of those are pretty valuable... > Bill gates owns a huge amount of farm land. Sure he does. How did he get the land? Well, he made a ton of money on Microsoft stock, and eventually he sold some of it, and bought land. How much of his money did he make via stock, and how much via land? (Granted, he had the stock longer...)
- epistasis 5y ago
  By the "growth in inequality" what I'm really talking about is the share of the economy that's distributed to capital rather than labor. Section 1.4 presents extensive documents that land represents a majority of the assets in nearly all advanced economies. And not agricultural land, residential land. This comes from Piketty and others. It also shows the analysis that other tacked on to Piketty to show that the increase in the share of the economy returning to capital comes from housing. Finally, the linked article compares the size of the LVT to a 100% tax on all billionaires, and it turns out that the billionaires don't have that much of a share of the economy. It took decades for their billionaires to build their wealth, but that wealth would only fund about a year of US gov expenditures. Whereas the LVT serves to almost fund every year in perpetuity. (Though I also support additional taxes too) To actually alleviate inequality, we don't need to just tax the billionaire capitalists, we also need some amount of tax on the multimillionaires that have also been taking money away from labor through increased returns to their housing assets. All this is to say is that perhaps your intuitions about the economy might not be right, and if you evaluate some of the data here, you might come away with a radically changed view of who has all the wealth in our nation, and where it is held (largely in land).

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

No, I did not in fact read the whole thing. My life is too short. Only 400k houses? I don't think that supports your point very much. Apple, Amazon, or Google have land footprints that are far smaller than 400,000 houses. And, the growth in inequality is coming from land? The top 0.01% have what percent of their assets in land? And, which came first? Did they make their money on stocks and then buy the land to diversify? Or did they make the bulk of their initial money on the land?

runnerup 5y ago
> In its 2019 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week, Amazon listed its global real estate footprint at the end of 2018 at an astounding 288 million square feet of offices, warehouses, retail stores and data centers. That's 10.3 sq. miles. SF has a density of 17,246 people per square mile. Manhattan has a density of 75,000 people per square mile. Granted, most of Amazon's real estate are warehouses in sparsely-populated areas. Main point is that not all homes are houses. Many are high-rise condominiums/apartments.
imtringued 5y ago
According to dirk löhr a big chunk of stock market valuation is based on real estate and ultimately land. Once you include other land like monopolies like spectrum or patents you're looking at more than 60% of the value of a given stock being tied up in those things. Bill gates owns a huge amount of farm land. Land is still one of the biggest factors of production and the biggest driver of inequality in the 21th century.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > Once you include other land like monopolies like spectrum or patents you're looking at more than 60% of the value of a given stock being tied up in those things. Yeah, see, that's part of my point. Why just do land, and not "other land like monopolies like spectrum or patents"? Or domain names? Some of those are pretty valuable... > Bill gates owns a huge amount of farm land. Sure he does. How did he get the land? Well, he made a ton of money on Microsoft stock, and eventually he sold some of it, and bought land. How much of his money did he make via stock, and how much via land? (Granted, he had the stock longer...)
epistasis 5y ago
By the "growth in inequality" what I'm really talking about is the share of the economy that's distributed to capital rather than labor. Section 1.4 presents extensive documents that land represents a majority of the assets in nearly all advanced economies. And not agricultural land, residential land. This comes from Piketty and others. It also shows the analysis that other tacked on to Piketty to show that the increase in the share of the economy returning to capital comes from housing. Finally, the linked article compares the size of the LVT to a 100% tax on all billionaires, and it turns out that the billionaires don't have that much of a share of the economy. It took decades for their billionaires to build their wealth, but that wealth would only fund about a year of US gov expenditures. Whereas the LVT serves to almost fund every year in perpetuity. (Though I also support additional taxes too) To actually alleviate inequality, we don't need to just tax the billionaire capitalists, we also need some amount of tax on the multimillionaires that have also been taking money away from labor through increased returns to their housing assets. All this is to say is that perhaps your intuitions about the economy might not be right, and if you evaluate some of the data here, you might come away with a radically changed view of who has all the wealth in our nation, and where it is held (largely in land).