37 ms·

> It might not cause more houses to be built, because the physical situation hasn't changed. That’s an extraordinary leap. The entire purpose of pooled capita

by CPLX 4y ago

> It might not cause more houses to be built, because the physical situation hasn't changed. That’s an extraordinary leap. The entire purpose of pooled capital is to enable more productive investment. Sure, if the very premise of the system is negated in step one the results of your analysis of the system will be different. But your argument is sort of like saying what if water wasn’t wet.

roenxi 4y ago
In a free market what you say would also be my position, but we've got a non-free market where the people who own the military are jamming credit into the system like a cook stuffing a chicken and distorting the risks. We've seen interest rates well below the levels where investment needs to be productive. We've seen that the risk for a highly correlated drop in asset prices is being assumed by taxpayers and/or people vulnerable to inflation (the most recent example is the madness of the stock market shrugging off the effect of COVID policies). There is an interesting question to consider about what happens when that sort of distortion hits a market. In Australia the cases of high debt I've seen haven't generally been linked to construction.
- CPLX 4y ago
  I mean it’s not like we haven’t tried this. Without loans normal people don’t buy houses. At least not early in careers. How exactly would a regular wage earner save enough to compensate people for the thousands of hours of embedded labor it takes to build a house in a reasonable time? Where do they live in the meantime? We have tried subsistence living models. It’s not better. The problem isn’t that access to capital exists it’s the combination of excess capital with drastically restricted supply due to anti building policies, as well as general unequal distribution of resources.

37 ms·

> It might not cause more houses to be built, because the physical situation hasn't changed. That’s an extraordinary leap. The entire purpose of pooled capita

by CPLX 4y ago

roenxi 4y ago
In a free market what you say would also be my position, but we've got a non-free market where the people who own the military are jamming credit into the system like a cook stuffing a chicken and distorting the risks. We've seen interest rates well below the levels where investment needs to be productive. We've seen that the risk for a highly correlated drop in asset prices is being assumed by taxpayers and/or people vulnerable to inflation (the most recent example is the madness of the stock market shrugging off the effect of COVID policies). There is an interesting question to consider about what happens when that sort of distortion hits a market. In Australia the cases of high debt I've seen haven't generally been linked to construction.
- CPLX 4y ago
  I mean it’s not like we haven’t tried this. Without loans normal people don’t buy houses. At least not early in careers. How exactly would a regular wage earner save enough to compensate people for the thousands of hours of embedded labor it takes to build a house in a reasonable time? Where do they live in the meantime? We have tried subsistence living models. It’s not better. The problem isn’t that access to capital exists it’s the combination of excess capital with drastically restricted supply due to anti building policies, as well as general unequal distribution of resources.