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Considering that the amount of computing that could be rented for the price of a house every month could now be bought for $20, this isn't surprising. What's s

Considering that the amount of computing that could be rented for the price of a house every month could now be bought for $20, this isn't surprising. What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

maxerickson 3y ago
Housing shortages are due to policy, not hoarding. With good policy, total wealth is probably going to increase.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Totally agree, although my comment on the topic reeks of anger aha, yours is admiringly restrained.
Auracle 3y ago
Land/space are limited. I live where most on HN would consider very rural - the closest town is 600 people and a town of 20,000 is about 30 minutes from me. Even when I was buying a home back in 2011 there were basically no good plots of land for sale. What was there was about $10,000 an acre. I eventually got my house for $180,000 and it’s on 15 acres, meaning my 3,000 square foot house was basically only $30,000 when you account for the land price. Obviously building vertically helps in cities, but that comes with its own costs as well. It’s supply and demand and supply is limited by the surface area of the earth. In the short term countries could absolutely help themselves by limiting immigration. Population growth has outpaced new housing for the last 20 years in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/ https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced... There were 2.7 million illegal border crossings in FY 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517 1.6 million housing units were built in 2021: https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity-in-2021-ends-on-strong-note_o#:~:text=An%20estimated%201%2C595%2C100%20housing%20units,of%20Housing%20and%20Urban%20Development https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity.... Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year. It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.
- johnklos 3y ago
  It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property, coupled with an out of control healthcare system, stagnant wages while corporate profits are huge, and lobbyists keeping politicians from meaningfully changing anything. I couldn't take you seriously, anyway. 2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units, but you're trying to imply that each of those illegal border crossings took a housing unit or something like that. Perhaps people on Facebook are that dumb.
  - somewhat_drunk 3y ago
    >2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units Only if you assume all 2.7 million people are now homeless. Price is a function of supply and demand. Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices. You could argue that the system-wide effect is minimal, but you would need data to do that, which you haven't provided.
    - johnklos 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - mech987987 3y ago
        You two are talking past eachother. You did not address his argument.
      - idopmstuff 3y ago
        > The issue is that the person to whom I responded was trying to imply that the number of illegal border crossings being larger than the number of new housing units is somehow a gotcha. It's not. It's not a "gotcha" - it's a significant amount of additional demand, which, given how supply and demand work, drives up prices. > You fail basic common sense, too. Does every household have one person? How many people per household affects the degree of the problem, but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you have 2.7m people coming in and you assume that for this population you average five people to a household, that's still roughly 1/3 of the new housing units being generated that are needed to house them. That's an enormous increase in demand, which pushes housing costs up. To be clear, I think this is a problem of too little housing supply more than too much immigration (though I do oppose illegal immigration and have a strong preference for it ceasing entirely), but either way the problems suggested by the post that you're replying to are very clearly real.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
This. A cheap lamp on a table does little good when I can afford neither the table, the roof above it, nor the food to serve at that table.
- sgift 3y ago
  Each time people start asking pointed questions about wealth distribution and the economic system you can almost count down the hours until one of these newspapers makes a "oh, look how much more of x you can get now than before". And I get it. It's great that everyone can have a TV for 1/100 of what it cost in 1950 or whatever, but it does not solve the very obvious issues. People have problems paying rent, they have problems paying groceries. They see that they have to work more and more just to make the next month. And no cheap TV will help them do that, no matter how many "oh, but all is so much better now" articles are written.
  - colpabar 3y ago
    My favorite is when fox news puts out pieces about how not-so-bad it is to be poor because some large percentage of poor people have refrigerators or some other home appliance.
  - pipes 3y ago
    Until the very recent inflation increase, food has been cheaper than ever. It's been making up less and less of household budgets for decades. https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-years-food-prices-have-fallen-by-82-percent https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-yea...
    - redblacktree 3y ago
      Now do housing.
      - jjoonathan 3y ago
        Just buy 3 fewer iPhones every month, problem solved!
chung8123 3y ago
Things that can be produced and consumed all over seems to have been averaging down (from US perspective) but things that cannot be done somewhere else or have strong limits on their production (services, housing) have inflated a lot. We had inflation with a pool of items I think.
- lumb63 3y ago
  Globalization over the last several decades has greatly reduced inflation and allowed the first world to “gain” far more wealth than would have actually happened otherwise. For instance, 70 years ago, more American cars were built in America. The money that consumers paid for cars went to American companies. This caused increased demand for (American) workers, which increased workers’ wages, and thus their spending power, and thus increased the price of goods. Their pay increased sufficiently to allow them to maintain, and in fact improve, their quality of life, because the inflation was driven by wage growth. Compare to a globalized world. The money Americans spend on cars today mostly ends up in foreign nations. The demand for the produce of foreign companies pushes up wages in foreign countries, and causes inflation there. Americans get items for cheaper than they could be produced in their own nation, due to labor cost differences. The rub is that they’re not fueling their own economies, which leaves workers unable to afford items which cannot be produced elsewhere.
  - bumby 3y ago
    That strikes me as true. I would argue that it increases consumption, but not necessarily "wealth". But with it comes the uncomfortable truth that what's bad for America might also mean it's good for other parts of the world.
  - pipes 3y ago
    You are really drifting in to largely discredited mechantilism there, the belief that money should not flow out of the nation. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mercantilism.asp#:~:text=Mercantilism%20was%20a%20form%20of,sought%20to%20support%20domestic%20employment https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mercantilism.asp#:~:tex....
kortilla 3y ago
Homeless people have cell phones. Why do you think great advancements bringing down the price of computing would solve housing?
- barelyauser 3y ago
  I don't understand why this post is being downvoted. What is the point of more compute if everyone will get locked out of the "wealth pool" because they can no longer produce any value?
  - primroot 3y ago
    I agree, but let's not forget that the more (semantically) obvious reason why people get locked out of wealth has more to do with not being able to take it than with not being able to produce it.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  I was thinking about this recently. People will get evicted before not paying their cell phone bill, now. This would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    The price of a cell phone bill will make no difference to someone in an eviction situation and a cell phone is pretty much essential to participate in society today. Rich people can virtue-signal all day long about how they live without a phone, but if you're poor and a potential employer or benefits office asks you for a phone number to process your application you can't afford to risk losing or delaying the opportunity.
    - jollyllama 3y ago
      >Rich people can virtue-signal... I understand that it makes sense in a lot of cases.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
badpun 3y ago
> What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food. 1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed. 2. Roughly two thirds of Americans own a home. That stands in contradiction with your claim that most Americans cannot afford to own a home.
- bumby 3y ago
  #2 changes a lot when you consider that roughly 70% of US household debt is mortgage debt [1] and that the price of a home is much higher (on a relative basis) than it used to be.* That is to say, most Americans have a mortgage but don't really own a home. There's a maybe subtle but important difference between saying "most Americans own a home" and "the system now allows more Americans to take out debt to mortgage a home." If you disagree, consider if you would consider circumstances no different if we created a novel debt system for people to leverage their purchase of food while food prices increase by multiples; they may even be able to get more food than previously, they just carry disproportionate debt on it. * I think this also needs to be put in the context of houses are also bigger than they used to be, but there is also a higher percentage of two-income households. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-mortgage-debt/ https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-...
  - badpun 3y ago
    > 70% of US household debt is mortgage debt I wonder what percentage of that was mortgage taken on an already paid off (or partly paid off) home in order to be able to buy consumer trinkets.
    - bumby 3y ago
      I've wondered the same. It seems like the norm is to use home equity as a revolving line of credit, which obviously creates some weird incentives like keeping home values inflated.
bumby 3y ago
>What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food. My personal opinion is that this hasn't changed much because human psychology hasn't changed much. We are a status-driven species and, lacking other measures, we revert to the easily quantifiable: wealth, house size, education credentialism, etc. to derive our place.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)
- ryeights 3y ago
  You must be incredibly out of touch if you think $40 a month is a reasonable budget for “great food.” 2 weeks worth of ham and cheese sandwiches alone would eat up the majority of that figure.
  - ltbarcly3 3y ago
    Ham and cheese are both notoriously expensive though, and not especially healthy. One day of filet mignon would eat up the whole budget, but thats not an argument against what I said. As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
    - ryeights 3y ago
      I’m a bit confused then… what exactly do you propose the average American should put in their sandwiches—your suggestion—at a $40/mo budget? Eggs and lentils?
      - ltbarcly3 3y ago
        Anyone in the US can go to a library and borrow a cookbook for free. If you are out of ideas you can do that too.
        derefr 3y ago
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
Even if we look at only the resource of light, you'll find that over a billion people are still using kerosene lanterns, primarily in places with low electricity access. That's around 10 billion liters of kerosene still being used per year. It's more expensive, dangerous, unhealthy, and wasteful than a cheap LED light, but without electricity, it's still the best choice.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Solar panel and led is cheap and pretty durable. I'd think batteries to run part of the night would be biggest issues at this point.
  - Schroedingersat 3y ago
    A laptop powerbank cost about as much as those and will run enough lighting to read for days. Lower cost than that, there are C-grade prismatic cells. Usb/12V adapters exist for a single cell as well, although i'm not sure if they are in that form factor.
userabchn 3y ago
Is "wealth" the right comparison when you are talking about affording rent and food? I think it is spending that matters. There is an approximately fixed amount of land in the world, an approximately fixed amount of housing and food that can be produced per year. Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it's just a number and doesn't affect anyone else unless he spends it, using it to consume a portion of the world's available resources and thus increasing the price of them for everyone else.
ryan93 3y ago
If there was no restriction on what or where you could build that would change. Everyone can afford food in the US. Google “rice and beans”
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
How is that surprising? Those systems are what made that progress possible in the first place. Unless we stop advancing as a species I don't think they will ever go away.

maxerickson 3y ago

Housing shortages are due to policy, not hoarding. With good policy, total wealth is probably going to increase.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Totally agree, although my comment on the topic reeks of anger aha, yours is admiringly restrained.

Auracle 3y ago

Land/space are limited. I live where most on HN would consider very rural - the closest town is 600 people and a town of 20,000 is about 30 minutes from me. Even when I was buying a home back in 2011 there were basically no good plots of land for sale. What was there was about $10,000 an acre. I eventually got my house for $180,000 and it’s on 15 acres, meaning my 3,000 square foot house was basically only $30,000 when you account for the land price. Obviously building vertically helps in cities, but that comes with its own costs as well. It’s supply and demand and supply is limited by the surface area of the earth. In the short term countries could absolutely help themselves by limiting immigration. Population growth has outpaced new housing for the last 20 years in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced-home-construction-for-20-years/ https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced... There were 2.7 million illegal border crossings in FY 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517 1.6 million housing units were built in 2021: https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity-in-2021-ends-on-strong-note_o#:~:text=An%20estimated%201%2C595%2C100%20housing%20units,of%20Housing%20and%20Urban%20Development https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity.... Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year. It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.

johnklos 3y ago
It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property, coupled with an out of control healthcare system, stagnant wages while corporate profits are huge, and lobbyists keeping politicians from meaningfully changing anything. I couldn't take you seriously, anyway. 2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units, but you're trying to imply that each of those illegal border crossings took a housing unit or something like that. Perhaps people on Facebook are that dumb.
- somewhat_drunk 3y ago
  >2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units Only if you assume all 2.7 million people are now homeless. Price is a function of supply and demand. Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices. You could argue that the system-wide effect is minimal, but you would need data to do that, which you haven't provided.
  - johnklos 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - mech987987 3y ago
      You two are talking past eachother. You did not address his argument.
    - idopmstuff 3y ago
      > The issue is that the person to whom I responded was trying to imply that the number of illegal border crossings being larger than the number of new housing units is somehow a gotcha. It's not. It's not a "gotcha" - it's a significant amount of additional demand, which, given how supply and demand work, drives up prices. > You fail basic common sense, too. Does every household have one person? How many people per household affects the degree of the problem, but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you have 2.7m people coming in and you assume that for this population you average five people to a household, that's still roughly 1/3 of the new housing units being generated that are needed to house them. That's an enormous increase in demand, which pushes housing costs up. To be clear, I think this is a problem of too little housing supply more than too much immigration (though I do oppose illegal immigration and have a strong preference for it ceasing entirely), but either way the problems suggested by the post that you're replying to are very clearly real.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

This. A cheap lamp on a table does little good when I can afford neither the table, the roof above it, nor the food to serve at that table.

sgift 3y ago
Each time people start asking pointed questions about wealth distribution and the economic system you can almost count down the hours until one of these newspapers makes a "oh, look how much more of x you can get now than before". And I get it. It's great that everyone can have a TV for 1/100 of what it cost in 1950 or whatever, but it does not solve the very obvious issues. People have problems paying rent, they have problems paying groceries. They see that they have to work more and more just to make the next month. And no cheap TV will help them do that, no matter how many "oh, but all is so much better now" articles are written.
- colpabar 3y ago
  My favorite is when fox news puts out pieces about how not-so-bad it is to be poor because some large percentage of poor people have refrigerators or some other home appliance.
- pipes 3y ago
  Until the very recent inflation increase, food has been cheaper than ever. It's been making up less and less of household budgets for decades. https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-years-food-prices-have-fallen-by-82-percent https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-yea...
  - redblacktree 3y ago
    Now do housing.
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      Just buy 3 fewer iPhones every month, problem solved!

chung8123 3y ago

Things that can be produced and consumed all over seems to have been averaging down (from US perspective) but things that cannot be done somewhere else or have strong limits on their production (services, housing) have inflated a lot. We had inflation with a pool of items I think.

lumb63 3y ago
Globalization over the last several decades has greatly reduced inflation and allowed the first world to “gain” far more wealth than would have actually happened otherwise. For instance, 70 years ago, more American cars were built in America. The money that consumers paid for cars went to American companies. This caused increased demand for (American) workers, which increased workers’ wages, and thus their spending power, and thus increased the price of goods. Their pay increased sufficiently to allow them to maintain, and in fact improve, their quality of life, because the inflation was driven by wage growth. Compare to a globalized world. The money Americans spend on cars today mostly ends up in foreign nations. The demand for the produce of foreign companies pushes up wages in foreign countries, and causes inflation there. Americans get items for cheaper than they could be produced in their own nation, due to labor cost differences. The rub is that they’re not fueling their own economies, which leaves workers unable to afford items which cannot be produced elsewhere.
- bumby 3y ago
  That strikes me as true. I would argue that it increases consumption, but not necessarily "wealth". But with it comes the uncomfortable truth that what's bad for America might also mean it's good for other parts of the world.
- pipes 3y ago
  You are really drifting in to largely discredited mechantilism there, the belief that money should not flow out of the nation. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mercantilism.asp#:~:text=Mercantilism%20was%20a%20form%20of,sought%20to%20support%20domestic%20employment https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mercantilism.asp#:~:tex....

kortilla 3y ago

Homeless people have cell phones. Why do you think great advancements bringing down the price of computing would solve housing?

barelyauser 3y ago
I don't understand why this post is being downvoted. What is the point of more compute if everyone will get locked out of the "wealth pool" because they can no longer produce any value?
- primroot 3y ago
  I agree, but let's not forget that the more (semantically) obvious reason why people get locked out of wealth has more to do with not being able to take it than with not being able to produce it.
jollyllama 3y ago
I was thinking about this recently. People will get evicted before not paying their cell phone bill, now. This would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  The price of a cell phone bill will make no difference to someone in an eviction situation and a cell phone is pretty much essential to participate in society today. Rich people can virtue-signal all day long about how they live without a phone, but if you're poor and a potential employer or benefits office asks you for a phone number to process your application you can't afford to risk losing or delaying the opportunity.
  - jollyllama 3y ago
    >Rich people can virtue-signal... I understand that it makes sense in a lot of cases.
- HWR_14 3y ago

badpun 3y ago

> What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food. 1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed. 2. Roughly two thirds of Americans own a home. That stands in contradiction with your claim that most Americans cannot afford to own a home.

bumby 3y ago
#2 changes a lot when you consider that roughly 70% of US household debt is mortgage debt [1] and that the price of a home is much higher (on a relative basis) than it used to be.* That is to say, most Americans have a mortgage but don't really own a home. There's a maybe subtle but important difference between saying "most Americans own a home" and "the system now allows more Americans to take out debt to mortgage a home." If you disagree, consider if you would consider circumstances no different if we created a novel debt system for people to leverage their purchase of food while food prices increase by multiples; they may even be able to get more food than previously, they just carry disproportionate debt on it. * I think this also needs to be put in the context of houses are also bigger than they used to be, but there is also a higher percentage of two-income households. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-mortgage-debt/ https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-...
- badpun 3y ago
  > 70% of US household debt is mortgage debt I wonder what percentage of that was mortgage taken on an already paid off (or partly paid off) home in order to be able to buy consumer trinkets.
  - bumby 3y ago
    I've wondered the same. It seems like the norm is to use home equity as a revolving line of credit, which obviously creates some weird incentives like keeping home values inflated.

bumby 3y ago

>What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food. My personal opinion is that this hasn't changed much because human psychology hasn't changed much. We are a status-driven species and, lacking other measures, we revert to the easily quantifiable: wealth, house size, education credentialism, etc. to derive our place.

ltbarcly3 3y ago

Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)

ryeights 3y ago
You must be incredibly out of touch if you think $40 a month is a reasonable budget for “great food.” 2 weeks worth of ham and cheese sandwiches alone would eat up the majority of that figure.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  Ham and cheese are both notoriously expensive though, and not especially healthy. One day of filet mignon would eat up the whole budget, but thats not an argument against what I said. As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
  - ryeights 3y ago
    I’m a bit confused then… what exactly do you propose the average American should put in their sandwiches—your suggestion—at a $40/mo budget? Eggs and lentils?
    - ltbarcly3 3y ago
      Anyone in the US can go to a library and borrow a cookbook for free. If you are out of ideas you can do that too.
      - derefr 3y ago

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

Even if we look at only the resource of light, you'll find that over a billion people are still using kerosene lanterns, primarily in places with low electricity access. That's around 10 billion liters of kerosene still being used per year. It's more expensive, dangerous, unhealthy, and wasteful than a cheap LED light, but without electricity, it's still the best choice.

pixl97 3y ago
Solar panel and led is cheap and pretty durable. I'd think batteries to run part of the night would be biggest issues at this point.
- Schroedingersat 3y ago
  A laptop powerbank cost about as much as those and will run enough lighting to read for days. Lower cost than that, there are C-grade prismatic cells. Usb/12V adapters exist for a single cell as well, although i'm not sure if they are in that form factor.

userabchn 3y ago

Is "wealth" the right comparison when you are talking about affording rent and food? I think it is spending that matters. There is an approximately fixed amount of land in the world, an approximately fixed amount of housing and food that can be produced per year. Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it's just a number and doesn't affect anyone else unless he spends it, using it to consume a portion of the world's available resources and thus increasing the price of them for everyone else.

ryan93 3y ago

If there was no restriction on what or where you could build that would change. Everyone can afford food in the US. Google “rice and beans”

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

How is that surprising? Those systems are what made that progress possible in the first place. Unless we stop advancing as a species I don't think they will ever go away.