7 ms·

A lot of these problems that you mention: housing, and education, for example, are actually greatly caused by government intervention into free markets. Governm

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.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I don't disagree with you, but Linux is an enormously complex piece of software. I also never said all software was free. Of course some software is paid for. But how much of the software you use is free? My bet is quite a bit. Including HackerNews and browser you access it with. Quite a bit of paid software is built by all free dev tools. This didn't use to be true - good compilers were very expensive. At least a couple grand in modern dollars.
        dwaltrip 5y ago
        You said “software costs $0” without caveats. Not “some software”. You are now trying to pretend you didn’t take such a hard stance. It’s ok and good to admit when you say something wrong. I really respect when people do that. P.S. I’ve been trying to get into less silly arguments like this on the internet… alas I couldn’t help myself here.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        Consider "people like ice cream". True or false? It's true even if you reply that your friend Fred doesn't like ice cream. That's why the word "all" exists. If I meant 100% of people like ice cream, I would have said "100%" or "all" people like ice cream. This is basic English semantics. > silly arguments It becomes a silly argument when one party decides to treat English with an overly literal interpretation as a rhetorical tactic.
        dwaltrip 5y ago
        Hmmm... I think there is an implicit "most" in these sentences. Most people like ice cream, so I agree it is pedantic to argue that "people like ice cream" is false. When writing my comment, I guess I had an assumption that most software costs more than $0. After thinking about more, I'm not sure that is true. It think it is probably the case that most software is free to use. Interesting to think about. However, there is a wrinkle in your analogy, which I think may be a driver of some of the intense debate in this comment thread. It's rare for someone to "hate" ice cream -- I actually can't think of anyone I know who does. But it's very common to find software that costs A LOT more than $0. So, in a sense, "software costs $0" is much less true than "people like ice cream". As of right now, I think I'm still on the side of it being more false than true. But I'll admit it is more nuanced than I thought. Regardless, I recant the harshness from my previous comment. Thanks for thoughtfully explaining yourself. I do agree with another sibling commenter that you could have been clearer in your original statement :)
- alar44 5y ago
  This is just patently false. The company I work for, roughly 200 people, spends roughly $10k/month on software. Personally, I spend maybe $50/month.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    $50 a month per employee per month sounds very cheap to me. It rounds to zero considering you’re probably doing things with the software that would be impossible without it. Unless you have astonishingly and uniformly high quality employees you probably couldn’t get to half the quality or efficiency you have with software without it. $50 per person is less than four hours of minimum wage labor per employee.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    And yet if you used Linux, the operating system would be free. Linux is very heavily used in industry. I read now and then about how paid software relies heavily on the free stuff, and how those vendors should donate to the people writing the free stuff.
    - alar44 5y ago
      There's no way we'd be able to use Linux. We might be able to make it work, but we'd be then kissing vendor support goodbye. That's suicide.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "Like software - it's declined to $0." Juxtapose this statement with the one further downthread: "What do the most ambitious do in the US? Go into software or Wall Street." How can there be money to be made in something that costs zero dollars. That is a rhetorical question, i.e., no answer is being requested.
  - hhjinks 5y ago
    But it's not a very good rhetorical question. Money can be made in something that costs zero dollars by harvesting user data and utilizing it correctly, for example to sell ad space, or sell directly to other interested parties. It is literally the strategy of some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
      The question evoked exactly the points I wanted to evoke. Not bad for a rhetorical question. Harvesting user data. Sell ad space. Sell user data to interested parties. This as a "strategy". Biggest "tech" companies. Thank you. Is this practice really best-described as "software". Is the (free) software merely a Trojan Horse for something else. The commenter could have written "What do the most ambitious do in the US? Go into harvesting personal data from people's use of computers and online ad sales, or Wall Street." This would have been more accurate in terms of describing the money-making aspect.
      - hhjinks 5y ago
        Oops, I interpreted it the other way around, that you can't make money off something that is free because you don't take any money for it. My bad.
  - SkittyDog 5y ago
    I think this guy is a troll... Take a look through his comment history. He's prolific, but seems inclined to say ridiculous stuff to get under people's skins.
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  Neither of those statements is true... Are games priced at $0? Will Amazon give you AWS for free? Do Apple and Google let you use all their mobile apps for free? Sure, FOSS is a thing... but plenty of software ain't FOSS. Re: regulation... Plenty of software is regulated by law. Ever heard of PCI compliance? Banking? Insurance? Tax prep? Medicine? Military? Flight avionics? ... All of those industries are heavily regulated by law, and some ofbthose regulations govern their software, too.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > Are games priced at $0? Plenty are, like the one I wrote: https://classicempire.com/ https://classicempire.com/ Doom, one of the most famous and played games of all time, is also free. https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/doom/ https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/doom/ > AWS is a hardware service. > Do Apple and Google let you use all their mobile apps for free? Do you see the word "all" in your sentence? I didn't say "all". You modified what I wrote. > All of those industries are heavily regulated by law And the software under those regulations is expensive. See a pattern there?
    - SkittyDog 5y ago
      Most game are not priced at zero... And games are definitely not a regulated part of the software industry in America. Also, your original statements are both phrased in a way that implies "all". You failed to qualify blanket statements by saying (e.g.) "some". So if you don't want to admit you're wrong, fine: You're doing a poor job of communicating your thoughts. As to evidence of that, just count the number of replies you got that came to the same conclusion I did about an implied "all" versus an implied "some". Not like it matters, anyway... The counter-example if games alone pretty much kills your whole argument about regulation being correlated with higher prices. I think you are clearly a very smart person, and a very good programmer, who is suffering from the Dunning Krueger Effect in relation to the topic of Economics. Regulation can effect costs, but it's far from the only factor, and it's not even necessarily an important factor depending on the situation.
      - 5y ago
baron816 5y ago
I agree, but getting rid of supply restricting regulation isn’t enough. Edit: I would argue that for healthcare, we would be better off with a fully government run system (though there are other better alternatives too). Humans just aren’t able to make good decisions about healthcare, and markets function nearly as well as they do for something like food, for example.
hanniabu 5y ago
Let's not act like houses would be built properly without these regulations
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Housing code and zoning laws are different. Code is what makes sure a house is built "properly": materials, structural requirements, ventilation, septic, etc. Zoning is what ensures how large a parcel size should be, how close the nearest shop can be, and how tall a building can be.
pat2man 5y ago
There is a Freakonomics podcast (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-cities-still-so-expensive-ep-435/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-cities-still-so-exp...) that addresses this head on. Essentially there used to be a lot of cheap housing that was quite unsafe. By making slums illegal we made housing expensive. And the one potential solution to this (building more housing) has been politically unfeasible.
- watwut 5y ago
  Appartment complexes are zoned out from large parts of America and they are not slums nor unsfe.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pech0rin 5y ago
  The problem here isn't safety concerns the problem is zoning. Look at Tokyo for example, they are able to build all the time at the highest safety level for earthquakes, etc. Berkley CA for example doesn't allow a lot of different types of buildings. Its not out of safety, its out of rich people not wanting to look at apartment buildings or having their quaint little town turned into high rise apartment complexes.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    If Tokyo's model was so terrific and worked so well, you'd be able to list lots of cities that emulate it. Instead, you can only point to Tokyo. Their apartments, by the way, are way too tiny for most Western tastes. "A typical three bedroom apartment for a Japanese family would be around 70 sqm (753 sq.ft)." That's smaller than most American 1-bedrooms. Average cost is about 877,000 yen/sq m which is a little bit above $700/sq ft, which isn't exactly cheap, either. https://www.rethinktokyo.com/blog/zoe-ward-japan-property-central/99-new-apartment-supply-tokyo-2017-was-under-100sqm/tokyo https://www.rethinktokyo.com/blog/zoe-ward-japan-property-ce...
    - 5y ago
agumonkey 5y ago
It's a bit sad then. Construction code is meant to rise the level of quality but also lower the cost since manufacturers can match regular quality levels at larger scale (in theory).
- bushbaba 5y ago
  In California you pay roughly 75k/SFH in permit fees for new construction just to be approved. That’s before any work on the house starts. Yeah…
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    riot
  - coffeeling 5y ago
    Permits are one thing if they are inevitably granted, and another if they actually limit people's ability to do things: "we'll say no even if you meet standards and can pay".
barry-cotter 5y ago
Things that require labor get relatively more expensive as capital and labor become more abundant. This would be true even without government intervention though that doesn’t help. The below document goes into much more detail. > WHY ARE THE PRICES SO D*MN HIGH? > Health, Education, and the Baumol Effect https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high_v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a... > The Baumol effect is easy to explain but difficult to grasp.44 In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010. Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experi- enced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the av- erage hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approxi- mately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising impli- cation: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive.
imtringued 5y ago
There is no such thing as a free market under capitalism only a capitalistic market. Yet you are here and are complaining about the capitalistic market. Governments are giving all sorts of concessions to capitalists namely the homeowners and real estate corporations. The latter benefit from the democratic legitimacy that the former give them.
- astrange 5y ago
  Homeowners are better described as feudalist; their value appreciation doesn’t come from capital investment (although they pretend it does), it comes from hoarding land, which is the only thing you can hoard since you can’t make any more of it. Unfortunately everyone read Marx instead of Henry George and so we’re stuck talking about two factors of production instead of three.

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.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I don't disagree with you, but Linux is an enormously complex piece of software. I also never said all software was free. Of course some software is paid for. But how much of the software you use is free? My bet is quite a bit. Including HackerNews and browser you access it with. Quite a bit of paid software is built by all free dev tools. This didn't use to be true - good compilers were very expensive. At least a couple grand in modern dollars.
      - dwaltrip 5y ago
        You said “software costs $0” without caveats. Not “some software”. You are now trying to pretend you didn’t take such a hard stance. It’s ok and good to admit when you say something wrong. I really respect when people do that. P.S. I’ve been trying to get into less silly arguments like this on the internet… alas I couldn’t help myself here.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        Consider "people like ice cream". True or false? It's true even if you reply that your friend Fred doesn't like ice cream. That's why the word "all" exists. If I meant 100% of people like ice cream, I would have said "100%" or "all" people like ice cream. This is basic English semantics. > silly arguments It becomes a silly argument when one party decides to treat English with an overly literal interpretation as a rhetorical tactic.
        dwaltrip 5y ago
        Hmmm... I think there is an implicit "most" in these sentences. Most people like ice cream, so I agree it is pedantic to argue that "people like ice cream" is false. When writing my comment, I guess I had an assumption that most software costs more than $0. After thinking about more, I'm not sure that is true. It think it is probably the case that most software is free to use. Interesting to think about. However, there is a wrinkle in your analogy, which I think may be a driver of some of the intense debate in this comment thread. It's rare for someone to "hate" ice cream -- I actually can't think of anyone I know who does. But it's very common to find software that costs A LOT more than $0. So, in a sense, "software costs $0" is much less true than "people like ice cream". As of right now, I think I'm still on the side of it being more false than true. But I'll admit it is more nuanced than I thought. Regardless, I recant the harshness from my previous comment. Thanks for thoughtfully explaining yourself. I do agree with another sibling commenter that you could have been clearer in your original statement :)
alar44 5y ago
This is just patently false. The company I work for, roughly 200 people, spends roughly $10k/month on software. Personally, I spend maybe $50/month.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  $50 a month per employee per month sounds very cheap to me. It rounds to zero considering you’re probably doing things with the software that would be impossible without it. Unless you have astonishingly and uniformly high quality employees you probably couldn’t get to half the quality or efficiency you have with software without it. $50 per person is less than four hours of minimum wage labor per employee.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  And yet if you used Linux, the operating system would be free. Linux is very heavily used in industry. I read now and then about how paid software relies heavily on the free stuff, and how those vendors should donate to the people writing the free stuff.
  - alar44 5y ago
    There's no way we'd be able to use Linux. We might be able to make it work, but we'd be then kissing vendor support goodbye. That's suicide.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Like software - it's declined to $0." Juxtapose this statement with the one further downthread: "What do the most ambitious do in the US? Go into software or Wall Street." How can there be money to be made in something that costs zero dollars. That is a rhetorical question, i.e., no answer is being requested.
- hhjinks 5y ago
  But it's not a very good rhetorical question. Money can be made in something that costs zero dollars by harvesting user data and utilizing it correctly, for example to sell ad space, or sell directly to other interested parties. It is literally the strategy of some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    The question evoked exactly the points I wanted to evoke. Not bad for a rhetorical question. Harvesting user data. Sell ad space. Sell user data to interested parties. This as a "strategy". Biggest "tech" companies. Thank you. Is this practice really best-described as "software". Is the (free) software merely a Trojan Horse for something else. The commenter could have written "What do the most ambitious do in the US? Go into harvesting personal data from people's use of computers and online ad sales, or Wall Street." This would have been more accurate in terms of describing the money-making aspect.
    - hhjinks 5y ago
      Oops, I interpreted it the other way around, that you can't make money off something that is free because you don't take any money for it. My bad.
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  I think this guy is a troll... Take a look through his comment history. He's prolific, but seems inclined to say ridiculous stuff to get under people's skins.
SkittyDog 5y ago
Neither of those statements is true... Are games priced at $0? Will Amazon give you AWS for free? Do Apple and Google let you use all their mobile apps for free? Sure, FOSS is a thing... but plenty of software ain't FOSS. Re: regulation... Plenty of software is regulated by law. Ever heard of PCI compliance? Banking? Insurance? Tax prep? Medicine? Military? Flight avionics? ... All of those industries are heavily regulated by law, and some ofbthose regulations govern their software, too.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Are games priced at $0? Plenty are, like the one I wrote: https://classicempire.com/ https://classicempire.com/ Doom, one of the most famous and played games of all time, is also free. https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/doom/ https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/doom/ > AWS is a hardware service. > Do Apple and Google let you use all their mobile apps for free? Do you see the word "all" in your sentence? I didn't say "all". You modified what I wrote. > All of those industries are heavily regulated by law And the software under those regulations is expensive. See a pattern there?
  - SkittyDog 5y ago
    Most game are not priced at zero... And games are definitely not a regulated part of the software industry in America. Also, your original statements are both phrased in a way that implies "all". You failed to qualify blanket statements by saying (e.g.) "some". So if you don't want to admit you're wrong, fine: You're doing a poor job of communicating your thoughts. As to evidence of that, just count the number of replies you got that came to the same conclusion I did about an implied "all" versus an implied "some". Not like it matters, anyway... The counter-example if games alone pretty much kills your whole argument about regulation being correlated with higher prices. I think you are clearly a very smart person, and a very good programmer, who is suffering from the Dunning Krueger Effect in relation to the topic of Economics. Regulation can effect costs, but it's far from the only factor, and it's not even necessarily an important factor depending on the situation.
    - 5y ago

baron816 5y ago

I agree, but getting rid of supply restricting regulation isn’t enough. Edit: I would argue that for healthcare, we would be better off with a fully government run system (though there are other better alternatives too). Humans just aren’t able to make good decisions about healthcare, and markets function nearly as well as they do for something like food, for example.

hanniabu 5y ago

Let's not act like houses would be built properly without these regulations

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Housing code and zoning laws are different. Code is what makes sure a house is built "properly": materials, structural requirements, ventilation, septic, etc. Zoning is what ensures how large a parcel size should be, how close the nearest shop can be, and how tall a building can be.

pat2man 5y ago

There is a Freakonomics podcast (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-cities-still-so-expensive-ep-435/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-cities-still-so-exp...) that addresses this head on. Essentially there used to be a lot of cheap housing that was quite unsafe. By making slums illegal we made housing expensive. And the one potential solution to this (building more housing) has been politically unfeasible.

watwut 5y ago
Appartment complexes are zoned out from large parts of America and they are not slums nor unsfe.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pech0rin 5y ago
The problem here isn't safety concerns the problem is zoning. Look at Tokyo for example, they are able to build all the time at the highest safety level for earthquakes, etc. Berkley CA for example doesn't allow a lot of different types of buildings. Its not out of safety, its out of rich people not wanting to look at apartment buildings or having their quaint little town turned into high rise apartment complexes.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  If Tokyo's model was so terrific and worked so well, you'd be able to list lots of cities that emulate it. Instead, you can only point to Tokyo. Their apartments, by the way, are way too tiny for most Western tastes. "A typical three bedroom apartment for a Japanese family would be around 70 sqm (753 sq.ft)." That's smaller than most American 1-bedrooms. Average cost is about 877,000 yen/sq m which is a little bit above $700/sq ft, which isn't exactly cheap, either. https://www.rethinktokyo.com/blog/zoe-ward-japan-property-central/99-new-apartment-supply-tokyo-2017-was-under-100sqm/tokyo https://www.rethinktokyo.com/blog/zoe-ward-japan-property-ce...
  - 5y ago

agumonkey 5y ago

It's a bit sad then. Construction code is meant to rise the level of quality but also lower the cost since manufacturers can match regular quality levels at larger scale (in theory).

bushbaba 5y ago
In California you pay roughly 75k/SFH in permit fees for new construction just to be approved. That’s before any work on the house starts. Yeah…
- agumonkey 5y ago
  riot
- coffeeling 5y ago
  Permits are one thing if they are inevitably granted, and another if they actually limit people's ability to do things: "we'll say no even if you meet standards and can pay".

barry-cotter 5y ago

Things that require labor get relatively more expensive as capital and labor become more abundant. This would be true even without government intervention though that doesn’t help. The below document goes into much more detail. > WHY ARE THE PRICES SO D*MN HIGH? > Health, Education, and the Baumol Effect https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high_v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a... > The Baumol effect is easy to explain but difficult to grasp.44 In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010. Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experi- enced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the av- erage hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approxi- mately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising impli- cation: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive.

imtringued 5y ago

There is no such thing as a free market under capitalism only a capitalistic market. Yet you are here and are complaining about the capitalistic market. Governments are giving all sorts of concessions to capitalists namely the homeowners and real estate corporations. The latter benefit from the democratic legitimacy that the former give them.

astrange 5y ago
Homeowners are better described as feudalist; their value appreciation doesn’t come from capital investment (although they pretend it does), it comes from hoarding land, which is the only thing you can hoard since you can’t make any more of it. Unfortunately everyone read Marx instead of Henry George and so we’re stuck talking about two factors of production instead of three.