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Had medical care, education, child care, and housing followed a cost curve similar to food over the last 40 years [1], no one would be complaining. A big reason

Had medical care, education, child care, and housing followed a cost curve similar to food over the last 40 years [1], no one would be complaining. A big reason why those things have become so expensive is because the country chose to make them expensive. Housing had to be a “good investment”. Elite schools were priced for the elite. Health care became a rent seeking operation in far too many ways to count. It absolutely kills me that the Democrats haven’t brought up immigration as a way to tackle inflation. The left made immigration all about race, but there’s a huge supply side benefit to having more people who are able to produce more goods and services in the country. Immigrants are often the ones who build houses, and look after our sick, children, and elderly. The country would be a better, more affordable place with more people to help out. [1] https://images.app.goo.gl/N7rBSDDseMyiBTQb8 https://images.app.goo.gl/N7rBSDDseMyiBTQb8

ciphol 5y ago
> Elite schools were priced for the elite. Note that most people don't go to elite schools. In particular, the middle class (almost by definition) doesn't go to elite schools.
bcoughlan 5y ago
Because exploiting foreigners to work all the tough low-paid jobs that nobody wants to do is how we created racial disparities to begin with...
antifa 5y ago
> The left made immigration all about race This is some weird gaslighting.
lamontcg 5y ago
> It absolutely kills me that the Democrats haven’t brought up immigration as a way to tackle inflation. What we need is wage inflation to readjust prices and you're talking about how to continue to keep wages suppressed, which would not help the people who have fallen out of the middle class. Immigration isn't going to decrease the prices of housing, except for providing cheap labor, which is just exploitation. I actually agree with more permissive immigration standards (because ultimately I believe in a world without borders and free movement of people that we need to get to eventually), but you're trying to cheap immigrant labor as a club against the working class to keep prices down. That is an upper class concern. At this point wages must rise so that people can afford things again, or else the massive decades-long asset bubble really needs to fall. And its possible that we do have a worker shortage now caused by the effects of the pandemic which are going to allow workers to have bargaining power. That kind of inflation is what we desperately need, and trying to prevent it via importing cheap labor is an argument that the elite would make. And this is likely to be an actually extraordinarily unpopular opinion on this forum. Everyone is terrified of inflation and is about to explain to me why a wage-price spiral would be terrible for everyone and hurt the working class (but as long as wage inflation outpaces commodities inflation and asset bubbles in housing that is good in the long run for the working person, while all other roads are just terrible pain for workers short term and long term). That's why I think the central bank will throw the brakes on hard at some point and pop the asset bubble and create a truly massive economic crash (unless other policy measures suffice to get wage inflation back under control again, like dramatically increased immigration).
bloodyplonker22 5y ago
A lot of these problems that you mention: housing, and education, for example, are actually greatly caused by government intervention into free markets. Governments are adding all sorts of restrictions for building new houses, thus driving the prices up. The federal government is providing guaranteed loans to students for college, so colleges can charge whatever ludicrous price they want knowing that the loan will always be paid, even if the student defaults.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  A corollary is looking at the prices of things that have declined the most. Like software - it's declined to $0. And it's completely unregulated.
  - iancmceachern 5y ago
    I use software that costs $10k+ per seat, every day. I recently reviewed some that was $50k a seat. There are companies that have workforces if hundreds using this software to design our modern world every day. I don't get this comment.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Your boat might be expensive, but it's floating in a sea of free software.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ https://www.linux.org/pages/download/
      - iancmceachern 5y ago
        https://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/ https://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/ https://www.ansys.com/ https://www.ansys.com/ https://www.solidworks.com/ https://www.solidworks.com/ Comsole, Matlab, etc. If you want to do complex product design competitively there is no substitute for software packages like these. Yes, there are open source alternatives, but they are not competitive, not tome efficient for the folks using it (it's cheaper to just buy the commercial packages because they save more than their cost in labor during the design process). If you can spend 10k to get your product to market 2 months quicker, that's a no brainer when your burn rate is millions a month.
SamReidHughes 5y ago
I am baffled. Immigration "tackles" inflation by driving down working-class wages. That benefits the upper-middle class. And also, driving up the rent and increasing traffic.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
  I'm in agreement here. I really dont understand why people think immigrants help the middle class.
  - unglaublich 5y ago
    Only people in upper class believe that more "low skilled" labor will help the middle and lower class. Take Jeff Bezos. He doesn't like to pay salaries to warehouse employees, but his employees will not give up the few dollars per hour that keep them from starving and homelessness. Now, we flood the "low skilled" labor market. What if there are twice as many workers available? Sure, someone will be willing to swap unemployment for a job with a somewhat lower salary? Now, instead of companies competing with each other for labor... we have workers competing with each other for jobs! That's fantastic news for the upper class! They will work for peanuts, because otherwise they'll starve and have to live in a car in a poor neighborhood... checkmate!
    - astrange 5y ago
      No such thing as competing for jobs necessarily, because you can’t run out of jobs as long as there’s demand. More people = more businesses = more demand. (If immigrants made you poorer then so would your neighbors having children, and the way to get richer would be killing your coworkers.) Thinking you can run out of jobs is an artifact of the US’s bad monetary/industrial policy from 2000-2020, but if you look around you’ll see that’s over. We’re in a full employment economy now.
      - diordiderot 5y ago
        > as long as there’s demand. So how could we generate more demand?
unglaublich 5y ago
Hold up, the costs of all these services you mention does NOT come from labor cost. It comes from a pursuit of profit of investors and owners. While on the other hand your income as a person ONLY depends on the competition you have from other qualified persons. What does it help if you flood the labor market more than it already is? Prices may go down 20%, but if your salary goes down 50%, does it really help? The oversupply of labor is the root cause of the problems you mention, not the solution!
- astrange 5y ago
  This is the “lump of labor fallacy”. You can’t just talk about supply and demand with labor because people are customers and generate their own demand. And it certainly does come from labor costs; services like healthcare naturally get relatively even more expensive as everything else becomes more productive, because you have to pay the healthcare workers more to stop them from leaving for more productive industries. (Baumol’s cost disease)
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    I worked a short while on a Esta -- not allowed really but the tax office didn't complain -- in SF making more money as a new grad (6k USD/month + housing) than I will ever make where I live. Later I realized I was acctually wage dumping ... Make no mistake what would happen if there was a free flow of programmers to the US. "We" will undercut the locals.
    - astrange 5y ago
      Yes, I would make even more money than I already do because I’d sell goods and services to them, and I could address unmet demand from our existing customers. Surely even under the immigration is bad model, it wouldn’t apply to programmers who can do their work remotely. Our having a Beijing team hasn’t made me less employed.
      - rightbyte 5y ago
bluehorseray 5y ago
Haha I would love to hear how the left made immigration all about race as opposed to the right.
- water8 5y ago
  All the left is, is identity politics. That's why you elected a rich old senile white dude to head your patriarchy
  - antifa 5y ago
    Which part of "identity politics" was it when Biden got on national television to tell everyone he wanted to fund, not defund, the police? Incoherent and politically illiterate rants like yours aren't really appropriate.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      Democrats have better party discipline than Republicans do, but that leads to weird outcomes like the people who most distrust the police voting for the author of the crime bill. There seems to be a tacit understanding that elections are for a political machine and not an individual person, so Biden can poll poorly and would still get votes.
      - water8 5y ago
        "political machine and not an individual person" Not true at all for Republicans ie Trump vs Neocons. Trump became bigger than the political machine that originally wanted Jeb.
  - bluehorseray 5y ago
    I feel like the left has historically been simply pro immigration, and then somehow race was brought into the conversation. I won't name the party I think responsible.
    - 5y ago
water8 5y ago
Adding more labor would drive down demand and hurt wages even more. This is econ101 stuff. The Democrats are working for the elite class now just look at how they backed the "working class" truckers
- astrange 5y ago
  Economists don’t agree with this because they took the classes after 101 ;) Supply and demand models aren’t used for labor because they don’t fit, because people generate their own demand. It’s better to look at search and monopsony models instead - but more importantly, they make the models and change their minds after observing real world data, which is why surveys of economists say immigration and minimum wage laws etc. are good.
- wk_end 5y ago
  Adding more people to a country means there’s more demand, because there’s more people, and people demand stuff. This is also Econ 101 stuff. Consider that as America’s population boomed between, say, 1860 and 1960, from 30M to 150M, instead of everyone becoming 5X poorer as they split the pie among more people, the country got vastly richer and more prosperous - the pie got bigger.
  - water8 5y ago
    You need money to have demand. 5 billion broke people creates zero demand. You can't just dilute the labor pool and claim you're strengthening the mixture. You're just adding more options for the employer which means less positions for you
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dillondoyle 5y ago
I am fully on board with more immigration. A LOT more. But I don't think it would solve those problems you rightly point out. I do think it would solve issues like entitlement insolvency. And also just generally increase our tax base. Immigrants are net positive on the economy. The policies are firmly steeped in racism. Just look at Ukraine. People from below our border have also been facing hell. Not as large scale or with big booms. But more sadistic and vicious.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Agreed on the immigration: the Democrats had a great opportunity to go against the Republicans and solve our labor shortages at the same time (they aren’t the problem, they are the solution!). Whenever I see homeless camps and compare them to the people who used to line up in front of Home Depot looking for jobs, the latter was much more appealing than the former.
- creato 5y ago
  Do you think the latter somehow makes the former disappear?
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    No, not at all. Those people in the camps are incapable of doing any kind of work, really: you can't show up high on drugs or drunk to work and expect it to work out. The people at homedepot, they aren't documented, but they want to work.
pinephoneguy 5y ago
Housing and pay diverged because we opened the border in the middle of the last century: supply for labor went way up along with demand for housing and other essential services. Combine that with some poor decisions by the Fed and you have high inflation with low wages. I don't know why you think immigration would have any other effect, the results have been extremely clear if you look at historical data.
- n8ta 5y ago
  1,041,570 people became legal permanent residents in 1910 and 1,031,765 did the same in 2019. What are you talking about 'flood gates' ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
  - pinephoneguy 5y ago
    Yes, note how the immigration diverges from the domestic population growth in the late 60s, the same time house price growth diverges from wage growth. >What are you talking about 'flood gates' ? You tell me, I didn't write that.
loldk 5y ago
mellavora 5y ago
> The country would be a better, more affordable place with more people to help out So in other words, a constantly growing population. in a finite space with finite resources. I see a problem here. I'm pro immigration, "free movement of goods and labor" is a basic human right. I'm more pessimistic about our whole economic system which is built on the assumption of a growing population.
- astrange 5y ago
  Economic growth means nothing except that you trade money faster. It doesn’t use more resources - actually it uses less as you transition from goods to services. The US uses less of many resources than it did in the 60s, and that’s still true if you account for offshoring.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I am going to need a source to believe that the consumption of a country of 180M in 1960 is less than the consumption of a country of 330M in 2022. Just looking at changes in life expectancy and the amount of resources consumed in the final years/months/days of life in 1960 vs 2022 would lead mento throw out the claim.
    - astrange 5y ago
      https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-... https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-ago-its-true-4864115 https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-... Resources aren’t used per person, and having more working people gives us more brainpower, the only thing that can invent ways to use less of them. It was probably the worst when we’d just invented industrialization, yes; we were still nearly Malthusian but also had horribly polluting wood and coal fires everywhere. Technology improvements have let us move away from that.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
raxxorrax 5y ago
Housing can be a good investment or insurance, but you need to tax those that own properties they don't use to live in. Otherwise housing will get to a price beyond its real worth when people look for ways to invest their liquid assets. We had negative interest rates for government bonds... And renting out has quite the good returns, in my country it is a complete industry that exploits people that need to rent because they just don't have any capital. Nobody should ever rent because it does not build capital. It can be a sensible solution if you actually do have a lot of capital. I doubt that is too widely spread. Immigration can be positive or negative for the lowest income class. They don't have the expectations of the domestic population and can severely decrease income in low-income jobs and they increase competition here. "They build houses" is not really too realistic in my opinion. It is mostly beneficial for the better off classes that actually can pay for care. Sure, the middle class does benefit from cheap labor which immigration provides... But not to the degree large capital owners do.

ciphol 5y ago

> Elite schools were priced for the elite. Note that most people don't go to elite schools. In particular, the middle class (almost by definition) doesn't go to elite schools.

bcoughlan 5y ago

Because exploiting foreigners to work all the tough low-paid jobs that nobody wants to do is how we created racial disparities to begin with...

antifa 5y ago

> The left made immigration all about race This is some weird gaslighting.

lamontcg 5y ago

> It absolutely kills me that the Democrats haven’t brought up immigration as a way to tackle inflation. What we need is wage inflation to readjust prices and you're talking about how to continue to keep wages suppressed, which would not help the people who have fallen out of the middle class. Immigration isn't going to decrease the prices of housing, except for providing cheap labor, which is just exploitation. I actually agree with more permissive immigration standards (because ultimately I believe in a world without borders and free movement of people that we need to get to eventually), but you're trying to cheap immigrant labor as a club against the working class to keep prices down. That is an upper class concern. At this point wages must rise so that people can afford things again, or else the massive decades-long asset bubble really needs to fall. And its possible that we do have a worker shortage now caused by the effects of the pandemic which are going to allow workers to have bargaining power. That kind of inflation is what we desperately need, and trying to prevent it via importing cheap labor is an argument that the elite would make. And this is likely to be an actually extraordinarily unpopular opinion on this forum. Everyone is terrified of inflation and is about to explain to me why a wage-price spiral would be terrible for everyone and hurt the working class (but as long as wage inflation outpaces commodities inflation and asset bubbles in housing that is good in the long run for the working person, while all other roads are just terrible pain for workers short term and long term). That's why I think the central bank will throw the brakes on hard at some point and pop the asset bubble and create a truly massive economic crash (unless other policy measures suffice to get wage inflation back under control again, like dramatically increased immigration).

bloodyplonker22 5y ago

A lot of these problems that you mention: housing, and education, for example, are actually greatly caused by government intervention into free markets. Governments are adding all sorts of restrictions for building new houses, thus driving the prices up. The federal government is providing guaranteed loans to students for college, so colleges can charge whatever ludicrous price they want knowing that the loan will always be paid, even if the student defaults.

WalterBright 5y ago
A corollary is looking at the prices of things that have declined the most. Like software - it's declined to $0. And it's completely unregulated.
- iancmceachern 5y ago
  I use software that costs $10k+ per seat, every day. I recently reviewed some that was $50k a seat. There are companies that have workforces if hundreds using this software to design our modern world every day. I don't get this comment.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Your boat might be expensive, but it's floating in a sea of free software.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    https://www.linux.org/pages/download/ https://www.linux.org/pages/download/
    - iancmceachern 5y ago
      https://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/ https://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/ https://www.ansys.com/ https://www.ansys.com/ https://www.solidworks.com/ https://www.solidworks.com/ Comsole, Matlab, etc. If you want to do complex product design competitively there is no substitute for software packages like these. Yes, there are open source alternatives, but they are not competitive, not tome efficient for the folks using it (it's cheaper to just buy the commercial packages because they save more than their cost in labor during the design process). If you can spend 10k to get your product to market 2 months quicker, that's a no brainer when your burn rate is millions a month.

SamReidHughes 5y ago

I am baffled. Immigration "tackles" inflation by driving down working-class wages. That benefits the upper-middle class. And also, driving up the rent and increasing traffic.

ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
I'm in agreement here. I really dont understand why people think immigrants help the middle class.
- unglaublich 5y ago
  Only people in upper class believe that more "low skilled" labor will help the middle and lower class. Take Jeff Bezos. He doesn't like to pay salaries to warehouse employees, but his employees will not give up the few dollars per hour that keep them from starving and homelessness. Now, we flood the "low skilled" labor market. What if there are twice as many workers available? Sure, someone will be willing to swap unemployment for a job with a somewhat lower salary? Now, instead of companies competing with each other for labor... we have workers competing with each other for jobs! That's fantastic news for the upper class! They will work for peanuts, because otherwise they'll starve and have to live in a car in a poor neighborhood... checkmate!
  - astrange 5y ago
    No such thing as competing for jobs necessarily, because you can’t run out of jobs as long as there’s demand. More people = more businesses = more demand. (If immigrants made you poorer then so would your neighbors having children, and the way to get richer would be killing your coworkers.) Thinking you can run out of jobs is an artifact of the US’s bad monetary/industrial policy from 2000-2020, but if you look around you’ll see that’s over. We’re in a full employment economy now.
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      > as long as there’s demand. So how could we generate more demand?

unglaublich 5y ago

Hold up, the costs of all these services you mention does NOT come from labor cost. It comes from a pursuit of profit of investors and owners. While on the other hand your income as a person ONLY depends on the competition you have from other qualified persons. What does it help if you flood the labor market more than it already is? Prices may go down 20%, but if your salary goes down 50%, does it really help? The oversupply of labor is the root cause of the problems you mention, not the solution!

astrange 5y ago
This is the “lump of labor fallacy”. You can’t just talk about supply and demand with labor because people are customers and generate their own demand. And it certainly does come from labor costs; services like healthcare naturally get relatively even more expensive as everything else becomes more productive, because you have to pay the healthcare workers more to stop them from leaving for more productive industries. (Baumol’s cost disease)
- rightbyte 5y ago
  I worked a short while on a Esta -- not allowed really but the tax office didn't complain -- in SF making more money as a new grad (6k USD/month + housing) than I will ever make where I live. Later I realized I was acctually wage dumping ... Make no mistake what would happen if there was a free flow of programmers to the US. "We" will undercut the locals.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Yes, I would make even more money than I already do because I’d sell goods and services to them, and I could address unmet demand from our existing customers. Surely even under the immigration is bad model, it wouldn’t apply to programmers who can do their work remotely. Our having a Beijing team hasn’t made me less employed.
    - rightbyte 5y ago

bluehorseray 5y ago

Haha I would love to hear how the left made immigration all about race as opposed to the right.

water8 5y ago
All the left is, is identity politics. That's why you elected a rich old senile white dude to head your patriarchy
- antifa 5y ago
  Which part of "identity politics" was it when Biden got on national television to tell everyone he wanted to fund, not defund, the police? Incoherent and politically illiterate rants like yours aren't really appropriate.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Democrats have better party discipline than Republicans do, but that leads to weird outcomes like the people who most distrust the police voting for the author of the crime bill. There seems to be a tacit understanding that elections are for a political machine and not an individual person, so Biden can poll poorly and would still get votes.
    - water8 5y ago
      "political machine and not an individual person" Not true at all for Republicans ie Trump vs Neocons. Trump became bigger than the political machine that originally wanted Jeb.
- bluehorseray 5y ago
  I feel like the left has historically been simply pro immigration, and then somehow race was brought into the conversation. I won't name the party I think responsible.
  - 5y ago

water8 5y ago

Adding more labor would drive down demand and hurt wages even more. This is econ101 stuff. The Democrats are working for the elite class now just look at how they backed the "working class" truckers

astrange 5y ago
Economists don’t agree with this because they took the classes after 101 ;) Supply and demand models aren’t used for labor because they don’t fit, because people generate their own demand. It’s better to look at search and monopsony models instead - but more importantly, they make the models and change their minds after observing real world data, which is why surveys of economists say immigration and minimum wage laws etc. are good.
wk_end 5y ago
Adding more people to a country means there’s more demand, because there’s more people, and people demand stuff. This is also Econ 101 stuff. Consider that as America’s population boomed between, say, 1860 and 1960, from 30M to 150M, instead of everyone becoming 5X poorer as they split the pie among more people, the country got vastly richer and more prosperous - the pie got bigger.
- water8 5y ago
  You need money to have demand. 5 billion broke people creates zero demand. You can't just dilute the labor pool and claim you're strengthening the mixture. You're just adding more options for the employer which means less positions for you

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dillondoyle 5y ago

I am fully on board with more immigration. A LOT more. But I don't think it would solve those problems you rightly point out. I do think it would solve issues like entitlement insolvency. And also just generally increase our tax base. Immigrants are net positive on the economy. The policies are firmly steeped in racism. Just look at Ukraine. People from below our border have also been facing hell. Not as large scale or with big booms. But more sadistic and vicious.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

Agreed on the immigration: the Democrats had a great opportunity to go against the Republicans and solve our labor shortages at the same time (they aren’t the problem, they are the solution!). Whenever I see homeless camps and compare them to the people who used to line up in front of Home Depot looking for jobs, the latter was much more appealing than the former.

creato 5y ago
Do you think the latter somehow makes the former disappear?
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  No, not at all. Those people in the camps are incapable of doing any kind of work, really: you can't show up high on drugs or drunk to work and expect it to work out. The people at homedepot, they aren't documented, but they want to work.

pinephoneguy 5y ago

Housing and pay diverged because we opened the border in the middle of the last century: supply for labor went way up along with demand for housing and other essential services. Combine that with some poor decisions by the Fed and you have high inflation with low wages. I don't know why you think immigration would have any other effect, the results have been extremely clear if you look at historical data.

n8ta 5y ago
1,041,570 people became legal permanent residents in 1910 and 1,031,765 did the same in 2019. What are you talking about 'flood gates' ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  Yes, note how the immigration diverges from the domestic population growth in the late 60s, the same time house price growth diverges from wage growth. >What are you talking about 'flood gates' ? You tell me, I didn't write that.

loldk 5y ago

mellavora 5y ago

> The country would be a better, more affordable place with more people to help out So in other words, a constantly growing population. in a finite space with finite resources. I see a problem here. I'm pro immigration, "free movement of goods and labor" is a basic human right. I'm more pessimistic about our whole economic system which is built on the assumption of a growing population.

astrange 5y ago
Economic growth means nothing except that you trade money faster. It doesn’t use more resources - actually it uses less as you transition from goods to services. The US uses less of many resources than it did in the 60s, and that’s still true if you account for offshoring.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I am going to need a source to believe that the consumption of a country of 180M in 1960 is less than the consumption of a country of 330M in 2022. Just looking at changes in life expectancy and the amount of resources consumed in the final years/months/days of life in 1960 vs 2022 would lead mento throw out the claim.
  - astrange 5y ago
    https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-... https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-ago-its-true-4864115 https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-... Resources aren’t used per person, and having more working people gives us more brainpower, the only thing that can invent ways to use less of them. It was probably the worst when we’d just invented industrialization, yes; we were still nearly Malthusian but also had horribly polluting wood and coal fires everywhere. Technology improvements have let us move away from that.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

Housing can be a good investment or insurance, but you need to tax those that own properties they don't use to live in. Otherwise housing will get to a price beyond its real worth when people look for ways to invest their liquid assets. We had negative interest rates for government bonds... And renting out has quite the good returns, in my country it is a complete industry that exploits people that need to rent because they just don't have any capital. Nobody should ever rent because it does not build capital. It can be a sensible solution if you actually do have a lot of capital. I doubt that is too widely spread. Immigration can be positive or negative for the lowest income class. They don't have the expectations of the domestic population and can severely decrease income in low-income jobs and they increase competition here. "They build houses" is not really too realistic in my opinion. It is mostly beneficial for the better off classes that actually can pay for care. Sure, the middle class does benefit from cheap labor which immigration provides... But not to the degree large capital owners do.