12 ms·

Scarcity Truthers

146 points by jseliger 4y ago

golemotron 4y ago
Important article. This is the biggest blindspot of our era. We've enculturated several generations into a zero-sum scarcity mindset because we feared growth. As population growth collapses, the change that we need in the zeitgeist is going to be jarring to most people.
jjmorrison 4y ago
Great article. This is always the tension on the political left. Adding restrictions to protect a group accidentally creates downstream effects of hurting this group. The right is no better and can tend toward abusive and unfair advantages. Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
- helen___keller 4y ago
  > Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT. It might be more accurate to say, scarcity issues are worst when neither party advocates for abundance. In housing, neither party advocates for densification nor deregulation on the front of zoning; instead party lines revolve around subsidized housing, mortgage industry regulation, etc. In medicine neither party talks about increasing the supply of doctors(or the ability for hospitals to deliver care more efficiently without being hamstrung by insurance), party lines are fought over who pays for it. In education the two sides might bicker over affirmative action and how Harvard decides which high school seniors get to attend; but not whether it’s OK that the worlds foremost university accepts only 2000 undergrads a year. None of these are easy problems to solve, but the common theme is that both parties accept the status quo. Housing is scarce, desirable education is scarce, medical care is scarce. On the other hand, food or gas prices start moving and it becomes a priority political issue for the current administration guaranteed. It’s night and day.
  - DenisM 4y ago
    One could conclude the entire point of such debate(s) is to make sure nothing of importance gets changed.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      This is the result we are seeing now. Nobody wants to fix the issue because then you wouldn't have the issue to berate the other side. It's better to campaign and raise money with that issue than to actually solve the issue.
      - DenisM 4y ago
        That's still a lot more charitable than my take. Imagine you are someone who does not want the healthcare problem to be solved. Wouldn't you want to pay both sides of the aisle to drum up pointless bickering?
        renewiltord 4y ago
        Haha, this reminds me of that James Roswell character https://www.protocol.com/policy/w3c-privacy-war https://www.protocol.com/policy/w3c-privacy-war Transparently stalling browser standards over privacy stuff but couched in different language.
        dylan604 4y ago
        Point of view I guess. I'm suggesting the politicians don't want to fix anything. You seem to be implying that private companies--BigPharma--are more interested in keeping conditions chronic with medication than curing people. They seem equally shit in my book
  - hamolton 4y ago
    For housing, like many issues, it's definitely partisan. One party is anti-density and one is a big-tent umbrella. Elizabeth Warren was on the podium saying, "build, build, build!" during primary debates, while both Trump & traditional Republicans grumble about liberals "destroying the suburbs."
hprotagonist 4y ago
https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abundance-the-myth-of-scarcity/ https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abund... Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity. Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you." But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness. As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives us the mandate to transform our public life. Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go. Walter Bruggemann, 1999
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  Great comment / quote. FWIW, I don't identify as Christian, but was raised as such by devout parents. The Bruggemann citation reminds me of a book "The Jesus I Never Knew" which, despite the cringe-inducing title, is worthwhile, as a non-religious look at the life of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. If Christianity had developed differently, in an alternate reality where its adherents modelled their behavior on that person's teachings, what a different world it'd be. A blogger named Andrew Sullivan coined a term "Christianist" to avoid conflating followers of Jesus' teachings with the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP. I hope the term catches on.
black_puppydog 4y ago
Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics. You seem (to me) to have two conservative-centrist parties in power, both with extremely neoliberal economics, and with slight differentiations on very emotional side shows like abortion and gun control.
- DrewRWx 4y ago
  Neither of those are side shows.
  - yifanl 4y ago
    They absolutely are not, but in the context of economic scarcity, I can see why they're put off to the side when comparing policy.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      The other way to view this is that america is a prosperous country, most americans recognize where that prosperity comes from, and instead are divided mainly be cultural issues. I suspect immigration actually has a lot to do with it. I have a theory that, in the long run, immigration prevents the development of a meaningful left-wing party in the U.S. The left of center party ends up getting co-opted by immigrants who are open to same change, but not that much. You can see this happening in the U.S. in real-time. Eroding support among hispanics may well cost Democrats the election in 2022. A notable fact about Hispanics is that they enjoy strong income mobility--typically moving up from the bottom to the middle within a couple of generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. If you're vastly better off than your grandfather who came here from Mexico, you may well be skeptical of efforts to change things too much.
  - droopyEyelids 4y ago
    They're more like a 'marketing scheme' than a sideshow.
  - simonh 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
This should generally hold for housing as well. Even though land is finite, we can build upward, so each individual new unit uses a negligible amount of land. Perhaps the author has forgotten that the land base required to support a given human population cannot be expanded upward? The minimum area of productive farmland required to support a rather subsistence-level diet (95% vegetarian say) is about a hectare - two football fields - per person, according to most studies I've looked at. Technology can mitigate some of these issues to some extent, and already have - extensive inputs of fossil fuels to agriculture in the form of fertilizer and diesel powered water pumps have doubled per-hectare productivity, but at the cost of fertilizer pollution and eventual exhaustion of groundwater supplies. Hence, we have to conclude that there really are hard ecological limits to human economic activity. Property developers and their affiliated investors have an unfortunate habit of ignoring these realities, and for their own pockets it might make sense - build some housing, ignore the demands on the surrounding area, sell the housing, take the money and run. Most communities can see through these efforts. Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment. P.S. If you want to examine 'artificial scarcity driving market prices' the place to start is the diamond industry.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > Tokyo-style tiny apartments It seems you perhaps haven't been to Tokyo, or haven't been to America. The typical Tokyo apartment today is larger, newer, and cheaper than the typical apartment in New York. That's the result of decades of housing construction policy, in both places, but in opposite directions.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    I researched your claim briefly. Doesn't seem very well-supported. https://japanpropertycentral.com/2020/02/apartments-in-tokyo-continue-to-shrink-in-size/ https://japanpropertycentral.com/2020/02/apartments-in-tokyo... > "Just under 40% of all new apartments were in the 70 sqm (753 sq.ft) range, while just 9.1% were sized between 80 ~ 100 sqm. The biggest shift is in the 30 ~ 50 sqm (323 ~ 538 sq.ft) sector where the total share has increased by 3.1 points to 10% in 2019." https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/why-the-size-of-an-nyc-apartment-gets-bigger-every-year/ https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/why-the-size-of-an-nyc-apartme... > "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975 square feet on average over the last five years — roughly a 5% increase... Despite much-hyped tiny housing trends, the vast majority of new development in the city over the last 20 years has been in the “luxury” sector (i.e., larger than average). Meanwhile, each year, unit combinations enlarge the average square footage of individual apartments, while shrinking the city’s housing stock." That's actually the opposite trend on size in both places, isn't it?
jeffbee 4y ago
Looking like evidence for a severe scarcity of editors.
- jkingsbery 4y ago
  Right. It could have more succinctly summarized just by quoting Hayek's: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men [or people, if you'd rather] how little they know about they imagine they can design."
tonetheman 4y ago
Where I live, housing scarcity is mostly drive by rich-investors and then in general supply chain issues. I am sure reasons vary locally all over the place. But at my location if you could stop investors from buying houses it would help a lot.
- jkaptur 4y ago
  The article addresses this.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The article simply shows this is not born out by evidence in certain cities. That doesn't mean it can't be true in others. In general, it seems pretty clear that if a city is attracting new people, the article is right: whatever else you do, keeping the housing supply limited will increase prices. The mistake NIMBYs make is typically to assume the city population won't grow if they prevent new housing stock, but this is not the case - even if a city has tight regulations on no new housing, adjacent communities will likely not, and will simply cause sprawl from there. However, there may be cities that are not seeing significant population growth, and are still seeing significant price increases, for various other reasons (tourism, realty as investment, gentrification, etc).
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Yes. Housing is expensive for the same reason bitcoin is expensive, not because of scarcity.
tsimionescu 4y ago
While I think much of the article is right, the amount of time spent on dismantling housing NIMBYism is somewhat unfortunate. The analysis is right to some extent, but there are also valid reasons to consider that urban sprawl should be limited, while also protecting historic city centers, and trying to make sure normal people can still afford housing close to or in the center of their cities. A very problematic tendency with a free housing market and free reign for development is that it ties the price of buildings to the price of the land they sit on. No one is going to, of their own accord, buy a piece of land in downtown Manhattan and build a low-income housing building there. So, free development does allow prices to overall go down even as the city grows larger, but at the cost of moving poor and middle-class people towards the periphery of the city. Land near the city center and other landmarks is naturally scarce, there is no way to create an abundance of physiccal space. That inevitably drives the price of that land up as the city expands. The only way to prevent the rich buying it all up and excluding everyone else from those areas is for the city to regulate the need for low-income housing being built or regulate the price itself. A better policy overall, though no one has managed it to any extent, would be to find a way of developing in a less centralized way - stop growing cities to this mega metropolis level, and somehow encourage the creation of more big-but-not-huge cities. Or, find a new way of organizing cities so that they are less centralized themselves. Abig part of this, I suspect, would be reducing centralization of companies as well. The huge behemoths we have today control a vast amount of resources, so their decisions of locations naturally force people to gather in the same city, and create high value space. If instead you had a much larger range of much smaller companies, there would be less need to have huge HQs with thousands of workers in the same building a la Apple's Infinity Loop 1. The best proof, I think, that this type of decentralized development can work at some scale lies in Europe. Even though individual European countries and cities have similar problems and tendencies to those in the USA, these are much more recent problems, and overall there are many times more large cities across the EU, and no mega metropolises like NYC or LA. And, many of these cities have city centers that are somewhat frozen in time for 100 or 200 years, not since the 70s, without reaching the ridiculous prices of San Francisco for example (though they might get there).
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  > there is no way to create an abundance of physical space. Sure there is. The sky is the limit, quite literally. A 10 floor building can fit 10x the amount of people that a single house can. We have the technology, we have people willing to put the time and effort into using it. The only thing stopping this is some nonsense law.
mbgerring 4y ago
The train de-rails about 2/3rds of the way through the article. You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless. If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction. If there are a large number of warehoused homes, and a vacancy tax successfully puts those homes on the market, then housing prices go down, and if they’re still high, the argument for building more homes is even stronger. You will have a bunch of progressives who have seen with their own eyes that increasing supply lowers prices. This confusing ideological misalignment also happened with AirBnB regulations. YIMBYs, in general, were against it, but the week that San Francisco’s law regulating AirBnB went into effect, a flood of new apartments showed up on Craigslist, nudging the overall price for new apartments down a few percentage points. Either you believe in supply and demand, or you don’t. We need new housing construction, and we also need to make it extraordinarily expensive to keep homes intentionally empty in cities with low vacancy rates.
- kansface 4y ago
  > You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless. I don't follow at all. The argument that vacancy taxes are pointless is that there just aren't many vacancies compared to the enormous housing shortage. We could tax vacant apartments 1M$/day and not move the needle on pricing.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot. The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster, and also to include clauses against leaving until a new tenant had signed to replace you.
    - LordDragonfang 4y ago
      Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there. Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene case there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands - or you can gift it to the federal government, which can sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather than contribute to the constriction of supply.
Barrin92 4y ago
I don't take issue with housing as a topic which is most of the article because there actually is scarcity issues, but I take a lot of issues with the idea in general summed up in the piece as "Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity" While I'm no fan of 'web3' or cryto I think the existence of artificial scarcity imposed on abundant digital resources not by a cartel but by ordinary people dispels that idea. Scarcity is in many ways the only way to create individuality and authenticity. We're already in a world of abundance in the West at least, our waistlines don't suggest that we lack in essential goods, with few exceptions. The idea that bigger pie = more stuff = world better has little pull any more even among people who aren't particularly well off. Another user is quoting a Christian theologian, and I've personally seen younger people be interested in religion again, mostly for that reason. The article also mentions healthcare in the US but ironically it seems to me that abundance lifestyles are by far the biggest drivers of healthcare costs. We could safe ourselves a lot of doctor and dentist visits if we cut down the soda and took the bike out for a ride. I don't think it can be overstated how much of our disease burden is related to our consumption. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and so on. Among the poor predominantly. It seems to me almost bizarre when one looks at countries like Singapore where national healthcare spending is 4% of the GDP, compared to 20% in the US that the issue is not having enough doctors. Rather than talking about the culture in which we live and how it's affecting us.
korse 4y ago
>Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity. Sadly, this isn't the case. Being rich is about more than having abundance. It is about having 'above average' abundance with the 'richness' level being determined by how far above average you are. Create a post scarcity society and the bar will move, likely with major societal consequences. I don't know if I'm ready for the paradigm shift.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I agree. Indeed, conspicuous consumption is often about showing off that you own things that are scarce (the more scarce, the better) and non-scarce items have little value in this context.
yunwal 4y ago
I feel like a huge amount (not all) of NIMBYism is also due to the total disregard for aesthetics or cohesiveness of new developments with existing neighborhoods. Look at new developments in Brooklyn https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62552986/11_Hoyt_rendering_1.0.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62552986/... vs. a Brooklyn Brownstone https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lXakKpLLBt65Mj0q-QKtmnoVLtQ=/0x0:3000x1996/1400x1050/filters:focal(1260x758:1740x1238):format(jpeg)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/51938401/brownstone_stock.0.jpeg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lXakKpLLBt65Mj0q-QKtmnoVLtQ=... If you live on a block with the former, and someone comes in wanting to build the latter, of course you're going to say no. Some might say that this is just a preference for low-density housing, and big buildings will just always look worse to some people, but I disagree. There are plenty of attractive churches, schools, and other high-density buildings that don't look out of place.
- orange_joe 4y ago
  Kind of an unfair statement because those buildings are actually in downtown Brooklyn, which is a dense downtown in its own right. I don’t think there are many brownstones in that area. The buildings in the more residential areas tend to be far less conspicuous, even if they don’t tend to strictly hew to the styles of early 20th century architecture.
- Mizza 4y ago
  That tower isn't even the worst example, though. Philly is flooded with this kind of crap now: https://billypenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DSC_0484-1024x576.jpg https://billypenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DSC_0484-10... Really low quality builds, random stupid rectangles, you can hear everything your neighbor does, yadda yadda yadda. The market is so ridiculous, they can build it as cheap as possible and somebody will snatch it up no matter what. A lot of them are quite big and use wooden frames, even though they're not really supposed to, because of a loophole with fire-retardant treated wood. There will likely be some major disasters in the next decade.
- xxpor 4y ago
  The brownstones were hated when they were built, because they didn't fit in the neighborhood! https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1436366508809150466 https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/14363665088091504... Your personal aesthetics shouldn't dictate what others do with their property.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> The problem with redistribution is that it cannot overcome an artificial cap on supply. Yes it can. Tax the unimproved value of the land, not the people who live and work there. "Redistribute" the wealth generated by the people who work in the city to the people who work in the city, not to the landlords and property owners. Make it pointless to sit and hoard property while you wait for other people to make it more valuable. Suddenly, the incentives are better aligned.
- stale2002 4y ago
  > Make it pointless to sit and hoard property I can assure you that property owners, in high cost of living areas, would love to "improve" their land, by building lots of tall buildings on that land, if it were legal to do so. Its the laws that prevent them from acting on their incentives.
Tycho 4y ago
Isn’t it a good thing that these coastal hubs become too expensive eventually and stop growing. Doesn’t it force the economy to re-centre on hubs in other locations and give the rest of the country a chance to flourish. Do we really want most of the country living in the shadow of a few megacities.
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  I predict a whole lot of tech work being done from the likes of Montana and South Carolina as remote becomes the norm and people can choose not to live in cities.
t_mann 4y ago
Interesting article! But two corrections are in order: "it is not like very many rich people have three apartments" - oh yes, they absolutely do - "or take nine years to finish undergrad" - let me tell you about a time and place in Europe that had effectively removed education scarcity with free college for everyone. People lurking in (sometimes multiple) degrees for close to a decade was so common that there was a word for it. Not that that was a terrible place to live, quite nice actually.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  I have close friends in Germany who worked on multiple degrees for years without progress. While I personally don't see that as ideal life choices and they would agree, it actually came at very little cost for the university. The reason they took so long is because they were hardly studying. This also means not submitting homework, usually not coming to lectures and taking up space there and more often than not, not even attending the exam, so there was nothing to grade either. In the case of my friends, it turned out the degrees they focused on initially weren't right for them in the end. But they were able to realize that on their own time and settle for something that suits them better and despite that aren't stuck with crippling debt.
  - t_mann 4y ago
    Working on the side was a big factor why people put less time into their studies. As waiters, in jobs actually relevant to their degrees (especially engineers), or administrative jobs in companies. I couldn't really name any way how that would have hurt the economy or the universities. But the US economy has been and is far more dynamic, so maybe it does have some impact.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      Doubt that has anything to do with the dynamism of the US economy - that’s all due to the US being much more business friendly, market size, few employer regulations, immigration, cultural values around entrepreneurship and dreaming big, a more level playing field, etc
tomohawk 4y ago
It's amazing how a city like New York has an abundance of food. All those restaurants and grocery stores. People can generally get what they need when they need it. It's a system so complex, no human can comprehend it. At best, you can apprehend it. Imagine if a food czar was put in charge of feeding New York equitably... There would be shortages and black markets and all kinds of crazy things.
ineptech 4y ago
Doesn't this problem essentially rise and fall with wealth inequality? If you have a plot of land and you can either build a McMansion for one family or an apartment building for 16 families, then (absent heavy-handed regulation) you're going to build whichever one is more profitable, right? And the story of the last ten years is that we build (relatively) more McMansions than we used to, because they are (relatively) more profitable than they used to be, because the rich have (relatively) more money than they used to. What am I missing?
- gradys 4y ago
  You're missing that in most high priced housing markets, you can't just build an apartment building anywhere you can build a single family home.
  - ineptech 4y ago
    That doesn't seem very relevant. Obviously there are places where you can realistically only build one or the other, but there's lots of places where you can build either, and if your goal is to increase housing density, those are the places you're interested in (regardless of what your method is). edit: and it's also obvious that density can be affected by zoning laws, but I was assuming those are held constant (because a, they kind of are constant in that they don't change much, and b, the present phenomenon of rents rising sharply since 2005 is, I think, not generally believed to be caused primarily by a change in zoning regulations)
    - codefreeordie 4y ago
      In most areas that have single-family houses, it is illegal to build 16-unit apartment buildings. In the places that most need more housing, this is the most true.
      - ineptech 4y ago
        I guess I should've used a more realistic example (one home vs a duplex, or a 16-plex vs four single-family homes) but I really thought the point would be obvious. I guess not, so I'll try again. You recognize that there are occasions when a developer has the option to build more density or less density on a specific piece of land, yes? I was using an exaggerated example (1 vs 16) to illustrate the more general concept of less-vs-more. I am arguing that, other things being equal, higher wealth inequality will lead to developers choosing to build less density, because an increase in wealth inequality implies that the rich have more to spend than the poor (relative to whatever previous period you're comparing to that had less wealth inequality).
musicale 4y ago
It's puzzling to me how some university hospitals and clinics seem to have greatly expanded without a commensurate increase in med school admissions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
musicale 4y ago
> Then a man named Bill Gates came along and he decided that they were going to give away a free encyclopedia with every damn bit of his personal computer software. Away went our $50 million a year. Now, we still sell the encyclopedias in libraries, making a few million per year doing that. But most of the wealth just went away and all that wonderful constructive product. Encarta was (and is?[1]) great, and I'm disappointed that Microsoft discontinued it. As much as I use wikipedia, I still think that shipping a decent curated encyclopedia with every computer/tablet/phone is a fantastic idea. One of my favorite features of macOS is that it still contains a built-in dictionary that you can access even if you're offline. Did Rhapsody/Mac OS X ever include the complete works of Shakespeare like NeXT originally did? Given the massive amounts of storage that we have today, I wouldn't mind having a built-in high-quality library of classics and reference works included in every phone, tablet, and PC. One of my favorite things about Raspbian is that it includes Mathematica and Sonic Pi. Perhaps there is an educational Linux distro that includes curated offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan academy, etc. as well as educational software? [1] Apparently you can still download Encarta 2009 from the internet archive.
- kragen 4y ago
  Kiwix has curated¹ as well as complete offline versions of Wikipedia, WikiSource, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg (including of course the complete works of Shakespeare), Khan Academy LearnStorm, various other Khan Academy focused collections, TED Talks, CrashCourse, Super User, MathOverflow, Server Fault, lots of other Stack Exchange sites, the OpenStreetMap Wiki, ArchWiki, Ask Ubuntu, etc. You can browse through their packages at https://library.kiwix.org/ https://library.kiwix.org/ and download things like individual books from Project Gutenberg without the Kiwix application. Or you can download the files, directly or via torrent. Kiwix hides them in .local/share/kiwix. The "standard" Kiwix app is a hypertext GUI with a built-in search engine, but you can also run it as a web server that serves up content on, for example, a local network, or just to your browser on the same machine. It's the same server running at the site above. Kiwix is packaged in a lot of Linux distributions, including Debian (Buster, Bullseye, Bookworm, and Sid) and Ubuntu. In addition to desktop Linux, Kiwix runs on Android. Maybe some proprietary OSes too, I forget. I don't know of an educational Linux distribution that comes with Kiwix already set up. Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. I don't know which ones are best. DebianEdu does package a bunch of education-related software, including both specifically didactic programs like Kgeography and non-didactic programs that can be useful for topics people commonly encounter in classes like Gpredict: https://blends.debian.org/edu/tasks/ https://blends.debian.org/edu/tasks/ If you just want a built-in dictionary to access offline, on Debian or Ubuntu, type "sudo apt install dict-gcide". I don't think there's a free equivalent of Mathematica, but there's a lot you can do with Jupyter, Matplotlib, Numpy, SciPy, and Sympy, or with Octave, or with R; in some areas these programs exceed Mathematica's capabilities. Pari-gp is pretty great for number-theory stuff. Sonic Pi looks pretty great, and it's free software. Popular alternatives include PureData. More old books than Project Gutenberg and WikiSource have would be pretty great too. The Internet Archive in particular has a huge quantity of books scanned; relevant to the dictionary topic, they were kind enough to let me use their equipment to scan the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary some years ago; each volume is a separate item of about 100 megabytes as PDF or DjVu, one example being at https://archive.org/details/oed9barch https://archive.org/details/oed9barch. It really rewards browsing, but looking things up in it is a bit of a pain: you need to first find the correct volume, then the correct page, then the correct column, and finally the position in the column where your desired entry starts. PDF readers are really not the ideal tools for that, particularly when they need a second or two to decompress each page image. At any rate, you could imagine topical, selected collections of Internet Archive scans of public-domain books; for mechanical engineering, for example, you might group together a public-domain version of the Machinery's Handbook (135 MB), Reuleaux's Kinematics of Machinery (86 MB), Reuleaux's The Constructor (40 MB), Roe's English and American Tool Builders (19 MB), Brown's 507 Mechanical Movements (18 MB), and Fox's The Mechanism of Weaving (32 MB), each using the best-quality scan available (ideally one of the Internet Archive's "Scribe" scans rather than the shoddy Google Books scans that are sometimes the only ones the Archive has available). Or maybe if you knew more about mechanical engineering than I do, you would make better choices than that. If you were going to distribute files like this to a bunch of people whose computers were going to be in close proximity, like students in a classroom, it might be a good idea to give each of them different parts of the library, instead of each getting the same standardized data set. I mean, maybe everyone's computer should have all of Shakespeare and the 2.25 GB "Best of Wikipedia", but if you distribute The Constructor to one person and The Mechanism of Weaving to another, along with some kind of file-sharing system to make local copies of files that you want to look at, then the total library available to the group can be a lot bigger than each cellphone's SD card. This is not functionality Kiwix provides at present. ______ ¹ God, I hate using the word "curated" this way. It trivializes the work done by museum curators to an absurd degree.
c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
>College: Elite colleges are failing every abundance-agenda test imaginable. They’re hardly expanding the total number of admissions; their share of total enrollment has actually been shrinking; and they’re admitting fewer of the low-income students who gain the most by attending elite colleges in the first place. Peter Turchin argues that we're overproducing elites and there aren't enough elite roles to go around. I'm inclined to agree. Think of all the elite business schools that are pumping out MBAs year after year.
netsharc 4y ago
Author seems to have a hard-on on blaming "progressives" for the problems, but their evidence seems to be just this: > This is doubly mysterious when we consider that artificial scarcity policies are often championed by self-described “progressives”, a label usually reserved for those concerned with improving the lot of the less fortunate. While the American Medical Association might be traditionally conservative, elite colleges are famously liberal, and restrictive housing policy is a hallmark of our bluest cities. Gee, I wonder if they have some bias there..
m463 4y ago
Iain M. Banks and the culture novels speak of post-scarcity... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
eru 4y ago
> Health care: The U.S. has fewer physicians per capita than almost every other developed country, [...] Interestingly, the U.S. has about twice as many firefighters per capita than other developed countries.
bojangleslover 4y ago
Great piece. > housing scarcity benefits homeowners by giving them the option of selling their home at an inflated price later and downsizing or moving to a cheaper locale for retirement If housing is fungible then the value of their downsizing destination will have also gone up. If your house price surges then that is good for you, unless you want to use this surge to buy a new house (like-for-like) which will have (maybe) also surged. Thoughts?
- karatinversion 4y ago
  That’s why it only benefits you if you want to downsize (you gain the inflated delta) or move to a cheaper location (you gain the inflated location premium).
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I live in a former socialist country (slovenia, then yugoslavia), where housing went from something cheap, something you got for free from the government, or (literally) built yourself over the weekends to something that is not affordable at all. Our current left parties blame the government not building enough housing, even though every government project is vastly overpaid (due to corruption). But the real reason for pricing increases is regulation. Back in the time you could buy a plot of land and build. Usually you started building first, then dealt with the papers, permits and all the related stuff... and people knew where the papers won't be problematic, and build housing on plots that were actually ok to build on. In every village, you could buy a plot of land at the edge of it, and just make a house there. You could also literally build the house yourself... usually yu hired someone to dig out the basement, but a lot of the actual work was done by future-owners themselves and their friends. Yes, some houses didn't have proper insulation, or stuff like that, but you had a place to live in. And now? Usually those same villages are the same size as they were before the breakup of yugoslavia, because you need a permit to start anything (and they're actually enforced), and local governments don't want to change zoning, because of NIMBY neighbours. You can't build/do anything by yourself anymore. We have huge areas of buildable land, empty, and in many places, the only way to build something is to buy an existing old house, tear it down, and build a multi-apartment building there, bringing the prices even higher. Add to this speculative investments and buying dedicated apartments/houses for airbnb, and the young(er) generations are fucked. (I'm not saying we should allow everything everywhere, but in places with not enough housing but enough land, we should rethink our zoning)
chabes 4y ago
No mention of how AirBNB has affected housing scarcity. Are we in denial about that still?
f7ebc20c97 4y ago
I disagree. It's just another housing bubble. That should be bleeding obvious from looking at the article's FRED chart. Scarcity was not suspended from 2007-2012 when the previous bubble collapsed and brought housing prices down to settle on long-term inflation as if the previous 10 years never even happened. Blaming NIMBYism instead of loose debt looking for a safe haven is either a well-funded political agenda or mass hysteria of bloggers getting wound up on each others' articles.

146 points by jseliger 4y ago

Important article. This is the biggest blindspot of our era. We've enculturated several generations into a zero-sum scarcity mindset because we feared growth. As population growth collapses, the change that we need in the zeitgeist is going to be jarring to most people.

jjmorrison 4y ago

Great article. This is always the tension on the political left. Adding restrictions to protect a group accidentally creates downstream effects of hurting this group. The right is no better and can tend toward abusive and unfair advantages. Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.

helen___keller 4y ago
> Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT. It might be more accurate to say, scarcity issues are worst when neither party advocates for abundance. In housing, neither party advocates for densification nor deregulation on the front of zoning; instead party lines revolve around subsidized housing, mortgage industry regulation, etc. In medicine neither party talks about increasing the supply of doctors(or the ability for hospitals to deliver care more efficiently without being hamstrung by insurance), party lines are fought over who pays for it. In education the two sides might bicker over affirmative action and how Harvard decides which high school seniors get to attend; but not whether it’s OK that the worlds foremost university accepts only 2000 undergrads a year. None of these are easy problems to solve, but the common theme is that both parties accept the status quo. Housing is scarce, desirable education is scarce, medical care is scarce. On the other hand, food or gas prices start moving and it becomes a priority political issue for the current administration guaranteed. It’s night and day.
- DenisM 4y ago
  One could conclude the entire point of such debate(s) is to make sure nothing of importance gets changed.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    This is the result we are seeing now. Nobody wants to fix the issue because then you wouldn't have the issue to berate the other side. It's better to campaign and raise money with that issue than to actually solve the issue.
    - DenisM 4y ago
      That's still a lot more charitable than my take. Imagine you are someone who does not want the healthcare problem to be solved. Wouldn't you want to pay both sides of the aisle to drum up pointless bickering?
      - renewiltord 4y ago
        Haha, this reminds me of that James Roswell character https://www.protocol.com/policy/w3c-privacy-war https://www.protocol.com/policy/w3c-privacy-war Transparently stalling browser standards over privacy stuff but couched in different language.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        Point of view I guess. I'm suggesting the politicians don't want to fix anything. You seem to be implying that private companies--BigPharma--are more interested in keeping conditions chronic with medication than curing people. They seem equally shit in my book
- hamolton 4y ago
  For housing, like many issues, it's definitely partisan. One party is anti-density and one is a big-tent umbrella. Elizabeth Warren was on the podium saying, "build, build, build!" during primary debates, while both Trump & traditional Republicans grumble about liberals "destroying the suburbs."

hprotagonist 4y ago

https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abundance-the-myth-of-scarcity/ https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abund... Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity. Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you." But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness. As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives us the mandate to transform our public life. Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go. Walter Bruggemann, 1999

chrisweekly 4y ago
Great comment / quote. FWIW, I don't identify as Christian, but was raised as such by devout parents. The Bruggemann citation reminds me of a book "The Jesus I Never Knew" which, despite the cringe-inducing title, is worthwhile, as a non-religious look at the life of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. If Christianity had developed differently, in an alternate reality where its adherents modelled their behavior on that person's teachings, what a different world it'd be. A blogger named Andrew Sullivan coined a term "Christianist" to avoid conflating followers of Jesus' teachings with the nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked the GOP. I hope the term catches on.

black_puppydog 4y ago

Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics. You seem (to me) to have two conservative-centrist parties in power, both with extremely neoliberal economics, and with slight differentiations on very emotional side shows like abortion and gun control.

DrewRWx 4y ago
Neither of those are side shows.
- yifanl 4y ago
  They absolutely are not, but in the context of economic scarcity, I can see why they're put off to the side when comparing policy.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    The other way to view this is that america is a prosperous country, most americans recognize where that prosperity comes from, and instead are divided mainly be cultural issues. I suspect immigration actually has a lot to do with it. I have a theory that, in the long run, immigration prevents the development of a meaningful left-wing party in the U.S. The left of center party ends up getting co-opted by immigrants who are open to same change, but not that much. You can see this happening in the U.S. in real-time. Eroding support among hispanics may well cost Democrats the election in 2022. A notable fact about Hispanics is that they enjoy strong income mobility--typically moving up from the bottom to the middle within a couple of generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. If you're vastly better off than your grandfather who came here from Mexico, you may well be skeptical of efforts to change things too much.
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  They're more like a 'marketing scheme' than a sideshow.
- simonh 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago

This should generally hold for housing as well. Even though land is finite, we can build upward, so each individual new unit uses a negligible amount of land. Perhaps the author has forgotten that the land base required to support a given human population cannot be expanded upward? The minimum area of productive farmland required to support a rather subsistence-level diet (95% vegetarian say) is about a hectare - two football fields - per person, according to most studies I've looked at. Technology can mitigate some of these issues to some extent, and already have - extensive inputs of fossil fuels to agriculture in the form of fertilizer and diesel powered water pumps have doubled per-hectare productivity, but at the cost of fertilizer pollution and eventual exhaustion of groundwater supplies. Hence, we have to conclude that there really are hard ecological limits to human economic activity. Property developers and their affiliated investors have an unfortunate habit of ignoring these realities, and for their own pockets it might make sense - build some housing, ignore the demands on the surrounding area, sell the housing, take the money and run. Most communities can see through these efforts. Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-investment. P.S. If you want to examine 'artificial scarcity driving market prices' the place to start is the diamond industry.

jeffbee 4y ago
> Tokyo-style tiny apartments It seems you perhaps haven't been to Tokyo, or haven't been to America. The typical Tokyo apartment today is larger, newer, and cheaper than the typical apartment in New York. That's the result of decades of housing construction policy, in both places, but in opposite directions.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I researched your claim briefly. Doesn't seem very well-supported. https://japanpropertycentral.com/2020/02/apartments-in-tokyo-continue-to-shrink-in-size/ https://japanpropertycentral.com/2020/02/apartments-in-tokyo... > "Just under 40% of all new apartments were in the 70 sqm (753 sq.ft) range, while just 9.1% were sized between 80 ~ 100 sqm. The biggest shift is in the 30 ~ 50 sqm (323 ~ 538 sq.ft) sector where the total share has increased by 3.1 points to 10% in 2019." https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/why-the-size-of-an-nyc-apartment-gets-bigger-every-year/ https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/why-the-size-of-an-nyc-apartme... > "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975 square feet on average over the last five years — roughly a 5% increase... Despite much-hyped tiny housing trends, the vast majority of new development in the city over the last 20 years has been in the “luxury” sector (i.e., larger than average). Meanwhile, each year, unit combinations enlarge the average square footage of individual apartments, while shrinking the city’s housing stock." That's actually the opposite trend on size in both places, isn't it?

jeffbee 4y ago

Looking like evidence for a severe scarcity of editors.

jkingsbery 4y ago
Right. It could have more succinctly summarized just by quoting Hayek's: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men [or people, if you'd rather] how little they know about they imagine they can design."

tonetheman 4y ago

Where I live, housing scarcity is mostly drive by rich-investors and then in general supply chain issues. I am sure reasons vary locally all over the place. But at my location if you could stop investors from buying houses it would help a lot.

jkaptur 4y ago
The article addresses this.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  The article simply shows this is not born out by evidence in certain cities. That doesn't mean it can't be true in others. In general, it seems pretty clear that if a city is attracting new people, the article is right: whatever else you do, keeping the housing supply limited will increase prices. The mistake NIMBYs make is typically to assume the city population won't grow if they prevent new housing stock, but this is not the case - even if a city has tight regulations on no new housing, adjacent communities will likely not, and will simply cause sprawl from there. However, there may be cities that are not seeing significant population growth, and are still seeing significant price increases, for various other reasons (tourism, realty as investment, gentrification, etc).
pessimizer 4y ago
Yes. Housing is expensive for the same reason bitcoin is expensive, not because of scarcity.

tsimionescu 4y ago

While I think much of the article is right, the amount of time spent on dismantling housing NIMBYism is somewhat unfortunate. The analysis is right to some extent, but there are also valid reasons to consider that urban sprawl should be limited, while also protecting historic city centers, and trying to make sure normal people can still afford housing close to or in the center of their cities. A very problematic tendency with a free housing market and free reign for development is that it ties the price of buildings to the price of the land they sit on. No one is going to, of their own accord, buy a piece of land in downtown Manhattan and build a low-income housing building there. So, free development does allow prices to overall go down even as the city grows larger, but at the cost of moving poor and middle-class people towards the periphery of the city. Land near the city center and other landmarks is naturally scarce, there is no way to create an abundance of physiccal space. That inevitably drives the price of that land up as the city expands. The only way to prevent the rich buying it all up and excluding everyone else from those areas is for the city to regulate the need for low-income housing being built or regulate the price itself. A better policy overall, though no one has managed it to any extent, would be to find a way of developing in a less centralized way - stop growing cities to this mega metropolis level, and somehow encourage the creation of more big-but-not-huge cities. Or, find a new way of organizing cities so that they are less centralized themselves. Abig part of this, I suspect, would be reducing centralization of companies as well. The huge behemoths we have today control a vast amount of resources, so their decisions of locations naturally force people to gather in the same city, and create high value space. If instead you had a much larger range of much smaller companies, there would be less need to have huge HQs with thousands of workers in the same building a la Apple's Infinity Loop 1. The best proof, I think, that this type of decentralized development can work at some scale lies in Europe. Even though individual European countries and cities have similar problems and tendencies to those in the USA, these are much more recent problems, and overall there are many times more large cities across the EU, and no mega metropolises like NYC or LA. And, many of these cities have city centers that are somewhat frozen in time for 100 or 200 years, not since the 70s, without reaching the ridiculous prices of San Francisco for example (though they might get there).

cuteboy19 4y ago
> there is no way to create an abundance of physical space. Sure there is. The sky is the limit, quite literally. A 10 floor building can fit 10x the amount of people that a single house can. We have the technology, we have people willing to put the time and effort into using it. The only thing stopping this is some nonsense law.

mbgerring 4y ago

The train de-rails about 2/3rds of the way through the article. You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless. If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse to block housing construction. If there are a large number of warehoused homes, and a vacancy tax successfully puts those homes on the market, then housing prices go down, and if they’re still high, the argument for building more homes is even stronger. You will have a bunch of progressives who have seen with their own eyes that increasing supply lowers prices. This confusing ideological misalignment also happened with AirBnB regulations. YIMBYs, in general, were against it, but the week that San Francisco’s law regulating AirBnB went into effect, a flood of new apartments showed up on Craigslist, nudging the overall price for new apartments down a few percentage points. Either you believe in supply and demand, or you don’t. We need new housing construction, and we also need to make it extraordinarily expensive to keep homes intentionally empty in cities with low vacancy rates.

kansface 4y ago
> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless. I don't follow at all. The argument that vacancy taxes are pointless is that there just aren't many vacancies compared to the enormous housing shortage. We could tax vacant apartments 1M$/day and not move the needle on pricing.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot. The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster, and also to include clauses against leaving until a new tenant had signed to replace you.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there. Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene case there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands - or you can gift it to the federal government, which can sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather than contribute to the constriction of supply.

Barrin92 4y ago

I don't take issue with housing as a topic which is most of the article because there actually is scarcity issues, but I take a lot of issues with the idea in general summed up in the piece as "Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity" While I'm no fan of 'web3' or cryto I think the existence of artificial scarcity imposed on abundant digital resources not by a cartel but by ordinary people dispels that idea. Scarcity is in many ways the only way to create individuality and authenticity. We're already in a world of abundance in the West at least, our waistlines don't suggest that we lack in essential goods, with few exceptions. The idea that bigger pie = more stuff = world better has little pull any more even among people who aren't particularly well off. Another user is quoting a Christian theologian, and I've personally seen younger people be interested in religion again, mostly for that reason. The article also mentions healthcare in the US but ironically it seems to me that abundance lifestyles are by far the biggest drivers of healthcare costs. We could safe ourselves a lot of doctor and dentist visits if we cut down the soda and took the bike out for a ride. I don't think it can be overstated how much of our disease burden is related to our consumption. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and so on. Among the poor predominantly. It seems to me almost bizarre when one looks at countries like Singapore where national healthcare spending is 4% of the GDP, compared to 20% in the US that the issue is not having enough doctors. Rather than talking about the culture in which we live and how it's affecting us.

korse 4y ago

>Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity. Sadly, this isn't the case. Being rich is about more than having abundance. It is about having 'above average' abundance with the 'richness' level being determined by how far above average you are. Create a post scarcity society and the bar will move, likely with major societal consequences. I don't know if I'm ready for the paradigm shift.

AlexandrB 4y ago
I agree. Indeed, conspicuous consumption is often about showing off that you own things that are scarce (the more scarce, the better) and non-scarce items have little value in this context.

yunwal 4y ago

I feel like a huge amount (not all) of NIMBYism is also due to the total disregard for aesthetics or cohesiveness of new developments with existing neighborhoods. Look at new developments in Brooklyn https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62552986/11_Hoyt_rendering_1.0.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62552986/... vs. a Brooklyn Brownstone https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lXakKpLLBt65Mj0q-QKtmnoVLtQ=/0x0:3000x1996/1400x1050/filters:focal(1260x758:1740x1238):format(jpeg)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/51938401/brownstone_stock.0.jpeg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lXakKpLLBt65Mj0q-QKtmnoVLtQ=... If you live on a block with the former, and someone comes in wanting to build the latter, of course you're going to say no. Some might say that this is just a preference for low-density housing, and big buildings will just always look worse to some people, but I disagree. There are plenty of attractive churches, schools, and other high-density buildings that don't look out of place.

orange_joe 4y ago
Kind of an unfair statement because those buildings are actually in downtown Brooklyn, which is a dense downtown in its own right. I don’t think there are many brownstones in that area. The buildings in the more residential areas tend to be far less conspicuous, even if they don’t tend to strictly hew to the styles of early 20th century architecture.
Mizza 4y ago
That tower isn't even the worst example, though. Philly is flooded with this kind of crap now: https://billypenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DSC_0484-1024x576.jpg https://billypenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/DSC_0484-10... Really low quality builds, random stupid rectangles, you can hear everything your neighbor does, yadda yadda yadda. The market is so ridiculous, they can build it as cheap as possible and somebody will snatch it up no matter what. A lot of them are quite big and use wooden frames, even though they're not really supposed to, because of a loophole with fire-retardant treated wood. There will likely be some major disasters in the next decade.
xxpor 4y ago
The brownstones were hated when they were built, because they didn't fit in the neighborhood! https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1436366508809150466 https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/14363665088091504... Your personal aesthetics shouldn't dictate what others do with their property.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> The problem with redistribution is that it cannot overcome an artificial cap on supply. Yes it can. Tax the unimproved value of the land, not the people who live and work there. "Redistribute" the wealth generated by the people who work in the city to the people who work in the city, not to the landlords and property owners. Make it pointless to sit and hoard property while you wait for other people to make it more valuable. Suddenly, the incentives are better aligned.

stale2002 4y ago
> Make it pointless to sit and hoard property I can assure you that property owners, in high cost of living areas, would love to "improve" their land, by building lots of tall buildings on that land, if it were legal to do so. Its the laws that prevent them from acting on their incentives.

Tycho 4y ago

Isn’t it a good thing that these coastal hubs become too expensive eventually and stop growing. Doesn’t it force the economy to re-centre on hubs in other locations and give the rest of the country a chance to flourish. Do we really want most of the country living in the shadow of a few megacities.

jimmaswell 4y ago
I predict a whole lot of tech work being done from the likes of Montana and South Carolina as remote becomes the norm and people can choose not to live in cities.

t_mann 4y ago

Interesting article! But two corrections are in order: "it is not like very many rich people have three apartments" - oh yes, they absolutely do - "or take nine years to finish undergrad" - let me tell you about a time and place in Europe that had effectively removed education scarcity with free college for everyone. People lurking in (sometimes multiple) degrees for close to a decade was so common that there was a word for it. Not that that was a terrible place to live, quite nice actually.

ajmurmann 4y ago
I have close friends in Germany who worked on multiple degrees for years without progress. While I personally don't see that as ideal life choices and they would agree, it actually came at very little cost for the university. The reason they took so long is because they were hardly studying. This also means not submitting homework, usually not coming to lectures and taking up space there and more often than not, not even attending the exam, so there was nothing to grade either. In the case of my friends, it turned out the degrees they focused on initially weren't right for them in the end. But they were able to realize that on their own time and settle for something that suits them better and despite that aren't stuck with crippling debt.
- t_mann 4y ago
  Working on the side was a big factor why people put less time into their studies. As waiters, in jobs actually relevant to their degrees (especially engineers), or administrative jobs in companies. I couldn't really name any way how that would have hurt the economy or the universities. But the US economy has been and is far more dynamic, so maybe it does have some impact.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    Doubt that has anything to do with the dynamism of the US economy - that’s all due to the US being much more business friendly, market size, few employer regulations, immigration, cultural values around entrepreneurship and dreaming big, a more level playing field, etc

tomohawk 4y ago

It's amazing how a city like New York has an abundance of food. All those restaurants and grocery stores. People can generally get what they need when they need it. It's a system so complex, no human can comprehend it. At best, you can apprehend it. Imagine if a food czar was put in charge of feeding New York equitably... There would be shortages and black markets and all kinds of crazy things.

ineptech 4y ago

Doesn't this problem essentially rise and fall with wealth inequality? If you have a plot of land and you can either build a McMansion for one family or an apartment building for 16 families, then (absent heavy-handed regulation) you're going to build whichever one is more profitable, right? And the story of the last ten years is that we build (relatively) more McMansions than we used to, because they are (relatively) more profitable than they used to be, because the rich have (relatively) more money than they used to. What am I missing?

gradys 4y ago
You're missing that in most high priced housing markets, you can't just build an apartment building anywhere you can build a single family home.
- ineptech 4y ago
  That doesn't seem very relevant. Obviously there are places where you can realistically only build one or the other, but there's lots of places where you can build either, and if your goal is to increase housing density, those are the places you're interested in (regardless of what your method is). edit: and it's also obvious that density can be affected by zoning laws, but I was assuming those are held constant (because a, they kind of are constant in that they don't change much, and b, the present phenomenon of rents rising sharply since 2005 is, I think, not generally believed to be caused primarily by a change in zoning regulations)
  - codefreeordie 4y ago
    In most areas that have single-family houses, it is illegal to build 16-unit apartment buildings. In the places that most need more housing, this is the most true.
    - ineptech 4y ago
      I guess I should've used a more realistic example (one home vs a duplex, or a 16-plex vs four single-family homes) but I really thought the point would be obvious. I guess not, so I'll try again. You recognize that there are occasions when a developer has the option to build more density or less density on a specific piece of land, yes? I was using an exaggerated example (1 vs 16) to illustrate the more general concept of less-vs-more. I am arguing that, other things being equal, higher wealth inequality will lead to developers choosing to build less density, because an increase in wealth inequality implies that the rich have more to spend than the poor (relative to whatever previous period you're comparing to that had less wealth inequality).

musicale 4y ago

It's puzzling to me how some university hospitals and clinics seem to have greatly expanded without a commensurate increase in med school admissions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

musicale 4y ago

> Then a man named Bill Gates came along and he decided that they were going to give away a free encyclopedia with every damn bit of his personal computer software. Away went our $50 million a year. Now, we still sell the encyclopedias in libraries, making a few million per year doing that. But most of the wealth just went away and all that wonderful constructive product. Encarta was (and is?[1]) great, and I'm disappointed that Microsoft discontinued it. As much as I use wikipedia, I still think that shipping a decent curated encyclopedia with every computer/tablet/phone is a fantastic idea. One of my favorite features of macOS is that it still contains a built-in dictionary that you can access even if you're offline. Did Rhapsody/Mac OS X ever include the complete works of Shakespeare like NeXT originally did? Given the massive amounts of storage that we have today, I wouldn't mind having a built-in high-quality library of classics and reference works included in every phone, tablet, and PC. One of my favorite things about Raspbian is that it includes Mathematica and Sonic Pi. Perhaps there is an educational Linux distro that includes curated offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan academy, etc. as well as educational software? [1] Apparently you can still download Encarta 2009 from the internet archive.

kragen 4y ago
Kiwix has curated¹ as well as complete offline versions of Wikipedia, WikiSource, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg (including of course the complete works of Shakespeare), Khan Academy LearnStorm, various other Khan Academy focused collections, TED Talks, CrashCourse, Super User, MathOverflow, Server Fault, lots of other Stack Exchange sites, the OpenStreetMap Wiki, ArchWiki, Ask Ubuntu, etc. You can browse through their packages at https://library.kiwix.org/ https://library.kiwix.org/ and download things like individual books from Project Gutenberg without the Kiwix application. Or you can download the files, directly or via torrent. Kiwix hides them in .local/share/kiwix. The "standard" Kiwix app is a hypertext GUI with a built-in search engine, but you can also run it as a web server that serves up content on, for example, a local network, or just to your browser on the same machine. It's the same server running at the site above. Kiwix is packaged in a lot of Linux distributions, including Debian (Buster, Bullseye, Bookworm, and Sid) and Ubuntu. In addition to desktop Linux, Kiwix runs on Android. Maybe some proprietary OSes too, I forget. I don't know of an educational Linux distribution that comes with Kiwix already set up. Speaking of OpenStreetMap, you can also download the OSM data and then use an offline map viewer like JOSM, Mapnik, or Tileserver, the latter two of which are web servers. I use OsmAnd~ on Android (available on F-Droid) but there are dozens of alternatives. I don't know which ones are best. DebianEdu does package a bunch of education-related software, including both specifically didactic programs like Kgeography and non-didactic programs that can be useful for topics people commonly encounter in classes like Gpredict: https://blends.debian.org/edu/tasks/ https://blends.debian.org/edu/tasks/ If you just want a built-in dictionary to access offline, on Debian or Ubuntu, type "sudo apt install dict-gcide". I don't think there's a free equivalent of Mathematica, but there's a lot you can do with Jupyter, Matplotlib, Numpy, SciPy, and Sympy, or with Octave, or with R; in some areas these programs exceed Mathematica's capabilities. Pari-gp is pretty great for number-theory stuff. Sonic Pi looks pretty great, and it's free software. Popular alternatives include PureData. More old books than Project Gutenberg and WikiSource have would be pretty great too. The Internet Archive in particular has a huge quantity of books scanned; relevant to the dictionary topic, they were kind enough to let me use their equipment to scan the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary some years ago; each volume is a separate item of about 100 megabytes as PDF or DjVu, one example being at https://archive.org/details/oed9barch https://archive.org/details/oed9barch. It really rewards browsing, but looking things up in it is a bit of a pain: you need to first find the correct volume, then the correct page, then the correct column, and finally the position in the column where your desired entry starts. PDF readers are really not the ideal tools for that, particularly when they need a second or two to decompress each page image. At any rate, you could imagine topical, selected collections of Internet Archive scans of public-domain books; for mechanical engineering, for example, you might group together a public-domain version of the Machinery's Handbook (135 MB), Reuleaux's Kinematics of Machinery (86 MB), Reuleaux's The Constructor (40 MB), Roe's English and American Tool Builders (19 MB), Brown's 507 Mechanical Movements (18 MB), and Fox's The Mechanism of Weaving (32 MB), each using the best-quality scan available (ideally one of the Internet Archive's "Scribe" scans rather than the shoddy Google Books scans that are sometimes the only ones the Archive has available). Or maybe if you knew more about mechanical engineering than I do, you would make better choices than that. If you were going to distribute files like this to a bunch of people whose computers were going to be in close proximity, like students in a classroom, it might be a good idea to give each of them different parts of the library, instead of each getting the same standardized data set. I mean, maybe everyone's computer should have all of Shakespeare and the 2.25 GB "Best of Wikipedia", but if you distribute The Constructor to one person and The Mechanism of Weaving to another, along with some kind of file-sharing system to make local copies of files that you want to look at, then the total library available to the group can be a lot bigger than each cellphone's SD card. This is not functionality Kiwix provides at present. ______ ¹ God, I hate using the word "curated" this way. It trivializes the work done by museum curators to an absurd degree.

c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago

>College: Elite colleges are failing every abundance-agenda test imaginable. They’re hardly expanding the total number of admissions; their share of total enrollment has actually been shrinking; and they’re admitting fewer of the low-income students who gain the most by attending elite colleges in the first place. Peter Turchin argues that we're overproducing elites and there aren't enough elite roles to go around. I'm inclined to agree. Think of all the elite business schools that are pumping out MBAs year after year.

netsharc 4y ago

Author seems to have a hard-on on blaming "progressives" for the problems, but their evidence seems to be just this: > This is doubly mysterious when we consider that artificial scarcity policies are often championed by self-described “progressives”, a label usually reserved for those concerned with improving the lot of the less fortunate. While the American Medical Association might be traditionally conservative, elite colleges are famously liberal, and restrictive housing policy is a hallmark of our bluest cities. Gee, I wonder if they have some bias there..

m463 4y ago

Iain M. Banks and the culture novels speak of post-scarcity... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

eru 4y ago

> Health care: The U.S. has fewer physicians per capita than almost every other developed country, [...] Interestingly, the U.S. has about twice as many firefighters per capita than other developed countries.

bojangleslover 4y ago

Great piece. > housing scarcity benefits homeowners by giving them the option of selling their home at an inflated price later and downsizing or moving to a cheaper locale for retirement If housing is fungible then the value of their downsizing destination will have also gone up. If your house price surges then that is good for you, unless you want to use this surge to buy a new house (like-for-like) which will have (maybe) also surged. Thoughts?

karatinversion 4y ago
That’s why it only benefits you if you want to downsize (you gain the inflated delta) or move to a cheaper location (you gain the inflated location premium).

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

I live in a former socialist country (slovenia, then yugoslavia), where housing went from something cheap, something you got for free from the government, or (literally) built yourself over the weekends to something that is not affordable at all. Our current left parties blame the government not building enough housing, even though every government project is vastly overpaid (due to corruption). But the real reason for pricing increases is regulation. Back in the time you could buy a plot of land and build. Usually you started building first, then dealt with the papers, permits and all the related stuff... and people knew where the papers won't be problematic, and build housing on plots that were actually ok to build on. In every village, you could buy a plot of land at the edge of it, and just make a house there. You could also literally build the house yourself... usually yu hired someone to dig out the basement, but a lot of the actual work was done by future-owners themselves and their friends. Yes, some houses didn't have proper insulation, or stuff like that, but you had a place to live in. And now? Usually those same villages are the same size as they were before the breakup of yugoslavia, because you need a permit to start anything (and they're actually enforced), and local governments don't want to change zoning, because of NIMBY neighbours. You can't build/do anything by yourself anymore. We have huge areas of buildable land, empty, and in many places, the only way to build something is to buy an existing old house, tear it down, and build a multi-apartment building there, bringing the prices even higher. Add to this speculative investments and buying dedicated apartments/houses for airbnb, and the young(er) generations are fucked. (I'm not saying we should allow everything everywhere, but in places with not enough housing but enough land, we should rethink our zoning)

chabes 4y ago

No mention of how AirBNB has affected housing scarcity. Are we in denial about that still?

f7ebc20c97 4y ago

I disagree. It's just another housing bubble. That should be bleeding obvious from looking at the article's FRED chart. Scarcity was not suspended from 2007-2012 when the previous bubble collapsed and brought housing prices down to settle on long-term inflation as if the previous 10 years never even happened. Blaming NIMBYism instead of loose debt looking for a safe haven is either a well-funded political agenda or mass hysteria of bloggers getting wound up on each others' articles.