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It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all

It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? And it’s not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing costs continually outstripping wage growth weren’t obvious and growing year on year. Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people? Is there any free will or are we just doomed to follow this course to who knows where? Can’t we figure out what we actually want as societies, and make policy that matches it?

reducesuffering 3y ago
It seems to me much more about group incentives than some nefarious lockstep plan. Existing homeowners incentives are liking things as they are and increasing wealth on paper. What’s more interesting is what changed since the ~60s inflection, since before, things were built. People literally experienced NYC grow into a megalopolis. I’d say it’s more likely that more democracy was the problem in stifling things, when every environmental review and city council meeting blocked things and threw out city mayors that were pro building. China is totalitarian and they are the ones who manage to rapidly build cities and bullet trains out of nothing.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > It seems to me much more about group incentives than some nefarious lockstep plan. Yes, probably, but isn’t this worse? Group incentives favour those that already have capital (material and political), which creates a feedback-loop increasing the rich-poor divide until… what exactly? What’s the end-state? A return to feudalism? Bloody revolution? It just seems like there was a “once upon a time” where politics was about “this is the society we want”, and they tried to build it. Now it seems we’ve all just given up. Meaningless! Meaningless! Let’s deconstruct society until we can argue that a future of 1% home ownership is somehow better.
leoedin 3y ago
It's an interesting observation. I'm part of a few UK and Canadian regional subreddits, and the topics of conversation are often very similar. House prices are too high, we need to build more, the government is favouring boomers, the economy is stagnating, we need more manufacturing and less real estate speculation etc. What's particularly interesting is that often in the UK ones people paint Canada as being far better. The Canadian ones seem to idolise the US. It's clearly a global structural issue. Low interest rates are a pan-national commonality - and they can take a lot of blame for part of the situation we're in now. But they don't explain housing shortages. Population growth probably plays a big part - housing is always going to be lagging population growth. The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese population. "Things were better in the 70s/80s/90s" probably partly just means that the ratio of houses to people was better. The population of most major western cities was falling or flat through much of the 70s and 80s - leading to the situation where my parent's generation all seem to have snapped up large, well located houses for not very much money. I'm fully supportive of the idea that, with all things equal, if we build more houses then supply and demand will drop prices. But if you allow unchecked population growth (which in the UK and Canada seems to be primarily caused by immigration) then the amount of building required is effectively infinite. I've visited the Toronto area from the UK more or less every year since I was a child, and the overwhelming story is one of huge development. The change in the suburbs of Toronto over the past 30 years has been vast and unlike anything I've seen in the UK. Yet that clearly hasn't been enough to stop house prices going crazy as well. The net effect, though, is that there's miles and miles of sprawl and 6 lane streets dominated by cars. The answer definitely isn't to build more of that. The population of Canada has grown by 40% in the last 30 years. Population growth combined with an ageing population and the kind of rights purchasing a house gives you in the west create increasing inequality driven by land. That seems to be the underlying issue that's driving city house values up everywhere. There are possibly some answers. In the UK in the 60s-80s we built entire new cities, with the land purchased by the government at agricultural value so that the entire uplift was captured by the developers rather than speculators.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Which Canadian subreddits idolize the U.S? Generally both countries have pretty similarly horrible development patterns with a tiny amount of exceptions. My impression is that the U.S just does sprawl and car-centricity to an extreme, like Toronto, but I can't say I've come across anywhere more compelling.
nradov 3y ago
Sure we can. But many of the younger people most negatively impacted by housing policy don't bother to vote at all. Or if they do vote they do so based on social issues. I've never seen housing availability come up as the #1 issue in any voter survey.
jareklupinski 3y ago
> Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people? less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land natural resources aside, land only really has the value that other people are willing to pay for it, like currency. so if you want the "growth of your asset", the only thing you can really do is convince people the land is worth more than what you paid for it, for whatever reasons you dream up globalisation just made everyone's marketing messages go 'round the world
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  > less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of humans has increased almost 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right?
  - jareklupinski 3y ago
    that's true, market forces like supply and demand affect everything in the economy, and while we've grown, our landmass has remained static. which parts of the land are worth more than others though, I think the article does a good job of providing examples too: people living closer to each central city had higher wages, which meant they could pay more for the land pieces... so they did, which meant they had to ask more when selling in order to 'break even' or 'realize on their investment' i guess the bigger question is: why did we tie our need for shelter into the economy? in order to achieve constant growth (ensure someone isnt left 'holding the bag'), we have to either be willfully ignorant of a growing population, or maintain a fantasy of there always being viable room for ever more people i hope we start colonizing the moon or even mars before we have to deal with fallout from the above...
anovikov 3y ago
I can't see a problem here. It only happens because (slightly) more than half of voters are happy with their housing situation and prefer it stay the way it is (that is, perpetually increasing prices, so they can earn equity => retire). They consciously vote for people who ensures just that. There is no failure of democracy here, but rather a good indication of it's strength.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  It's true that the people are getting what they're voting for, but I wouldn't call this "not a failure of democracy", when the voters are causing their society to decay and die slowly because of their own short-sightedness. However, we haven't exactly seen better systems of governance, plus not all democratic societies are filled with such short-sighted idiots like we see in the US, and those societies are doing much better long-term and stability-wise.
  - anovikov 3y ago
    How is this short-sightedness? Voters are voting for what's best for them, and it is indeed best for them. There are only two ways of fixing it: cancel democracy (in a dictatorship no one gives a damn about what people want, and developers make max profit by building everything they want), or cancel market economy, so the housing can't be sold or bought and the Party distributes it as it sees fit. Both looks to me worse than what we have today. Cruel explanation: there is no way of organising society that's good for more than a half of people.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Nice false dichotomy you got there.
danaris 3y ago
It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and decide that's a good idea, and people following everything from scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies that came out around the time, to philosophical works published around the time, to all of the above that were old but re-popularized around the time. You can just as easily ask "why was there a rise of right-wing nationalist and fascist sentiment throughout the Western world in the mid-to-late 2010s?" There's no grand conspiracy to any of it, and looking for one is likely to lead you down exactly the road that far too many conspiracy theorists have gone recently. And, um, closely related, be aware that the "lizard people rule the world" thing isn't just a funny joke. It's deeply and inextricably rooted in a raft of antisemitic tropes, slurs, and propaganda going back...I forget exactly how long, but at least many decades. In fact, in general, when you encounter any conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy group of people secretly ruling the world, the chances are nearly 100% that you can trace it back to a version where that "shadowy group" is explicitly Jews. This is a big part of why conspiracy theorists have a tendency to find themselves in a pipeline to fascism.
- teddyh 3y ago
  The entire world was (and still is, to some extent) horribly racist. Every nation, institution and venerable principle you hold sacred has horrible racism lurking in its very bones, if you dig deep enough. You can’t, therefore, dismiss anything on that basis alone. Argue with an issue on its merits alone; to attack the supposed secret origin of an issue is equivalent to an ad hominem argument. Also, alternative explanation of the lizard people thing: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600>
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    What if the entire world is mostly rational, and it is the HN crowd / snowflakes from the richest US suburbs who are bonkers?
  - danaris 3y ago
    Ah, yes; the good old "everything is impure, which means that everything is equally bad, so it doesn't matter if I do/support bad things, because I have no choice!" Yeah, no. That doesn't fly. There's a massive difference between, say, "the fact that I am a person of European descent living in upstate NY is only possible because of the genocide of and racism against generations of Native Americans; therefore, my entire existence is predicated on structural racism" and "many, many groups have vilified Jewish people for centuries for a variety of reasons (that are out of scope of this discussion); that vilification has led to ostracism and genocide on numerous occasions and still does to this day, frequently based entirely on completely false stereotypes; the propagation of those stereotypes still to this day leads real people to choose to ostracize and murder Jewish people; "lizard people who rule the world" is one of those stereotypes, and participating in its propagation does actual, measurable harm to Jewish people."
breakingrules 3y ago
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cassepipe 3y ago
Recommend this book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/164-democracy-against-capitalism https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/164-democracy-agai...
groestl 3y ago
> did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? Not US, and for reasons, the housing crisis is not _that_ bad where I live, but: in principle our country is exactly like our parent's generation imagined it. It's perfectly aligned with their interests. Where they'd hike to a hut in the mountains once, there is now a paved road, so they can still drive to the hut, even though they're not able to walk anymore. Somewhere else they built a cable car, for exactly the same purpose. They have houses. They have cars. They dominate every political institution there is. They voted to keep the conscription, so enough poor young people who alternatively chose community service would be available when they need care, eventually. They go on vacations three times a year. And heaven forbid they'd need to give up _anything_ they once had. Political parties that suggest anything like that would have no chance in elections. > Who is actually in control here? I think they are.
- tormeh 3y ago
  This is definitely it. It's a question of demographics. The developed world used to be for young people because people there were mostly young. Now decisions are taken by and for old people, and those of us who aren't are afterthoughts. A good example of this is the age at which our constitutions were drafted vs how old politicians are now. This is also the case in Norway but I think the US is a more relatable example on HN: Biden is twice the average age of the delegates in 1787.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    The millenial generation is now the largest cohort in the United States. The issue is that generally, it takes a while for a cohort to build up political power.
    - ttymck 3y ago
      Especially when political power is almost exclusively financial.
    - jahewson 3y ago
niyikiza 3y ago
EY wrote a good book about that very topic: "Inadequate Equilibria -- Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck" https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/
badpun 3y ago
> did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? It might have been a combination of circumstances and intellectual tides turning. The 70ties saw stagflation everywhere, which led to a decade of economic problems that couldn't be fixed with existing, socialist policies. Finally, voters everywhere (starting with Thatcher in UK ) decided it's time to try something else. Part of it might also have been a disillusionment with big leftist ideas in general - in the late seventies, there was enough reliable information coming from USSR and China to make it clear that anything resembling communism (a holy grail for much of the left back then) is an unmitigated disaster. People started to realise that capitalism, much like democracy, might be bad, but is better than all the alternatives.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  The interesting thing is that Russia and China are capitalistic now, and they both manage to output a huge amount of high rise housing for sale. Makes one wonder whether capitalism is actually compatible with democracy.
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    If you believe Karl Marx then the answer is no: capitalism is incompatible with democracy, because of the basic human nature. If you allow people to vote, they will vote to take money from the rich and give it to them for free. Or for government to create money out of thin air, and give them away.
    - badpun 3y ago
      Karl was proven wrong recently by the Swiss though, who voted against UBI in a referendum.
rootusrootus 3y ago
> since the 70s Is part of the problem that we think the 70s was normal and not the outlier? https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... Certainly there have been a couple recent bubbles, but even as recently as 2012 we were basically within the bounds of the long-term normal. I'd like to say it's a supply problem, and demographics does support that argument to some extent, but the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > I'd like to say it's a supply problem It is to the extent that various laws and regulations prevent or strongly disincentivize new construction, yes. > the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy It does. Mortgage loans have always been one of the primary places that governments choose to put newly printed money. The ostensible purpose of this is to make it easier for people to own homes, but what it actually does is bid up home prices to the point where consumers are no better off than they were before, but financial institutions and other corporate interests make a nice extra profit. It's similar to the way the easy availability of financial aid for college has not actually made it easier for people to go to the college of their choice (indeed, admission rates to many colleges have sharply declined as financial aid becomes more available), it's just transferred more wealth to the colleges from taxpayers.
Aerbil313 3y ago
Hahaha. Man wants to be fit, swears on his diet routine, sees a chocolate bar on the kitchen table literally 3 seconds later and reverses his decision. Is he under the control of his rational mind? Will? Does an alcoholic choose to continue to drink alcohol after he is an addict? There is will, and there is will. Pretending that this doesn't apply to whole societies and that today's secular societies are not driven mostly by a deterministic mechanism consisting of human nature combined with the environment (technology + physical world) is a fool's act, and the ubiqiotus internet commenter attitude. Man yelling at the clouds, clouds of human nature and environment.
hibikir 3y ago
It's not really the entire world: See Spain [1]: Until the financial crisis in 2007, the country liberalized building, often quite dense as opposed to plain sprawl. See, for instance, the growth in the towns surrounding Madrid around train stations. The crisis slowed it down massively though, in part because a lot of builders lost their shirts, as the building became massive overbuilding. But when demand goes up enough, it's still possible to build, and build high. In my home town in Spain, people can still afford homes. If there's an issue, it's still just jobs instead. So yes, this is all something that is politically solvable in the west. We just need a unified legislative recipe, and strong advocacy. Other lobbying groups manage to get through very unpopular legislation. Why not for something that would actually help? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N
- asdff 3y ago
  Some latin american cities are starting to make even nyc look small. I expect in 30 years that a lot of latin america will look like southeast asian cities while American cities look the same as they did 30 years ago for another 30 years.
panick21_ 3y ago
It not nearly as universal as you think.
pontifier 3y ago
There's a pattern I've noticed of outsourcing code requirements. Most municipalities seem to adopt the international building code, and then because that code book is updated all the time, and none of the local officials actually understand it, they start to require that applicants prove that they meet the code. Planning commissions start to believe that they need to control everything that everybody does, but they shouldn't. Because everything is a shifting target, and proof is almost impossible, everything gets road blocked. For the most part, I agree with building codes. They serve a purpose by ensuring that unsafe buildings aren't created. But they've become so esoteric, that meeting them is an exercise in futility. I can't wait for the day that a "safe building" AI just watches everything, and tells people what to do. That way even unskilled labor can do work, and the work will be up to a safe standard. Code officials are the worst sort of power tripping bureaucrats. I can't wait for them to be eliminated.
tormeh 3y ago
There's an essay written on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
rcarr 3y ago
It definitely seems to be more of an Anglosphere problem than elsewhere. I've been learning other languages with the long term view of permanently escaping the Anglosphere in the next 5 years, unless I finally manage to land a job that pays enough to allow me some stability.
- khuey 3y ago
  Yes, the homevoter mentality is much worse in the English speaking countries than it is in continental Europe or in developed East Asia.
- diveandfight 3y ago
  > Anglosphere In my opinion, this is an underutilized term that could be used to group trends/behaviors and consequently policy decisions.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  There may be entire regions without this problem, but it is absolutely not restricted to the Anglosphere.
asdff 3y ago
In all these systems where "the world over" we have the same end result, what do we have in common? Shareholders, for profit companies, consultancies, an entire sector of the economy is just consultancies. Its death by a thousand cuts set up by the incentives. You don't know what the hell you are doing, so hey lets act like you do by bringing in a consultancy who does know what they are doing because that's their job. In effect, you get to be bad at your job but be good at your job since you rubber stamped "bring in a consultant" on the project. Then what about these consultants? Well, they don't need to actually solve the problem either. They just make various plans and present a slide deck to management at the end and collect a check. Whether the plan works or not doesn't even matter here, because the consultants got paid already and are on to the next job, the manager looks good because they brought in a consultancy, and if shit fails in the next three years well its no ones fault, because management will act like they did everything right bringing in the consultancy and will cut other staff first. Consultancyism is everywhere these days. Its the next big thing in emerging markets which is even scarier and only a fig leaf away from imperialism with the terms of how some of these deals are struck, always to the benefit of capital with the people seen as a resource for extraction or exploitation. Consultancyism probably also encourages an unhealthy mercenary outlook on life. Never taking pride in projects because they are never your projects in your community, they are just jobs elsewhere to make some money.
- steve_gh 3y ago
  Disclosure: I am a very senior data science consultant in an infrastructure management consultancy Consultancy can be a good thing - or a bad thing, depending on which consultants are brought in, and why. It is one of the oldest tropes that consultants are brought in to tell people what they already know - and there is some truth in it. But when it comes down to it, consultants are asked to do this job because they are external - and they can tell truth to power without being seen as having an internal political agenda. As consultants, we are brought in by clients to provide skills that they don't have in house. There tend to be two reasons for this. Either they want us for a short period to do a specific task which wouldn't be worth them recruiting for, or they are looking for a longer term relationship - in which case we can offer them access to a wider pool of talent than they would get by recruiting in. Finally, I have worked with a great number of talented folks at all stages of their careers. Almost without exception, every one of them has been passionate about their work, and determined to do the best job possible for the clients. And a number of them have left us to work directly for clients. [edited for typos]
hadlock 3y ago
Something like 10-50 of the population worldwide, depending on where/how you measure, moved from rural areas to cities since WW2. This completely upended the large scale population density situation that had existed for millennia. Also, as I'm sure anyone in California or Texas will tell you, there are 1) only so many good places to build and/or 2) so far someone is willing to commute. There is lots of land available to build on 4 hours from San Francisco at pretty reasonable prices (I looked at a 2.5 acre triangle of land with a seasonal creek on it for $40,000), but nobody will pay $900/sq ft for a house that far from their office, even if they WFH 4 days a week.
- pas 3y ago
  almost trivial to build upward, yet it's prohibited by zoning. also, people getting surprised by the continuation of urbanization is ridiculous (but also a complete fucking tragedy).
marcosdumay 3y ago
Whether or not there is real democracy anywhere (I'd say "no"), there has been a deep cultural homogenization imposed by the media since the 70s. And a really strong deviation from fact-based bottom-up world modeling. It's technically possible that people just decided to vote the same way in half of the world for decades. Besides, the local plutocracy wanting the same things everywhere isn't easy to explain either.
DeathArrow 3y ago
> Can’t we figure out what we actually want as societies, and make policy that matches it? Not in a democracy, not when respecting free market and property. But they are able to do it in China.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
> It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. Cities were pretty similar to how they are now for all of human history except a brief period where things were weird after WW2 - see A Farewell to Alms and everything by Ricardo. The US has one of the lowest Price to Rent ratios in the entire world. And it's not like the US is rosey. There's really no where to look on the planet for somewhere that's doing things right beside maybe Singapore (which is a single city and has somewhat socialized the entire housing market) and Japan (which suffered through a lost 30 years and has a pretty rapidly declining population - possibly mainly as a result). In both cases, I'd argue the US has a better housing market than either of those places. And again, it's still pretty sucky in most places in the US.
dontlaugh 3y ago
It’s just the natural development of capitalism, as its internal contradictions generate worse and worse crises. The ruling class (the ones that own most capital) are disincentivised from changing the system, since any effective change would require them not be the ruling class anymore. The way out is revolution, where the working class become the ruling class. We may yet see that in our lifetimes in several countries.
imtringued 3y ago
>Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people? Nobody. If you wanted to point fingers though, then the reason nothing gets done is because "grandma". Not because grandma is some evil conspirator but rather because this is used to silence arguments by saying "you are hurting the weak, don't you feel ashamed?" Honestly, I don't believe there is a solution that can be achieved through democratic vote because the only people that are being hurt are people who don't get to vote, aka children who will need a home in the future or migrants who are about to move. Some form of private land trust will have to do a georgist experiment and reimburse tenants as some form of UBI. 50% of the profits will be reinvested, 50% reimbursed.

reducesuffering 3y ago

It seems to me much more about group incentives than some nefarious lockstep plan. Existing homeowners incentives are liking things as they are and increasing wealth on paper. What’s more interesting is what changed since the ~60s inflection, since before, things were built. People literally experienced NYC grow into a megalopolis. I’d say it’s more likely that more democracy was the problem in stifling things, when every environmental review and city council meeting blocked things and threw out city mayors that were pro building. China is totalitarian and they are the ones who manage to rapidly build cities and bullet trains out of nothing.

lll-o-lll 3y ago
> It seems to me much more about group incentives than some nefarious lockstep plan. Yes, probably, but isn’t this worse? Group incentives favour those that already have capital (material and political), which creates a feedback-loop increasing the rich-poor divide until… what exactly? What’s the end-state? A return to feudalism? Bloody revolution? It just seems like there was a “once upon a time” where politics was about “this is the society we want”, and they tried to build it. Now it seems we’ve all just given up. Meaningless! Meaningless! Let’s deconstruct society until we can argue that a future of 1% home ownership is somehow better.

leoedin 3y ago

It's an interesting observation. I'm part of a few UK and Canadian regional subreddits, and the topics of conversation are often very similar. House prices are too high, we need to build more, the government is favouring boomers, the economy is stagnating, we need more manufacturing and less real estate speculation etc. What's particularly interesting is that often in the UK ones people paint Canada as being far better. The Canadian ones seem to idolise the US. It's clearly a global structural issue. Low interest rates are a pan-national commonality - and they can take a lot of blame for part of the situation we're in now. But they don't explain housing shortages. Population growth probably plays a big part - housing is always going to be lagging population growth. The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese population. "Things were better in the 70s/80s/90s" probably partly just means that the ratio of houses to people was better. The population of most major western cities was falling or flat through much of the 70s and 80s - leading to the situation where my parent's generation all seem to have snapped up large, well located houses for not very much money. I'm fully supportive of the idea that, with all things equal, if we build more houses then supply and demand will drop prices. But if you allow unchecked population growth (which in the UK and Canada seems to be primarily caused by immigration) then the amount of building required is effectively infinite. I've visited the Toronto area from the UK more or less every year since I was a child, and the overwhelming story is one of huge development. The change in the suburbs of Toronto over the past 30 years has been vast and unlike anything I've seen in the UK. Yet that clearly hasn't been enough to stop house prices going crazy as well. The net effect, though, is that there's miles and miles of sprawl and 6 lane streets dominated by cars. The answer definitely isn't to build more of that. The population of Canada has grown by 40% in the last 30 years. Population growth combined with an ageing population and the kind of rights purchasing a house gives you in the west create increasing inequality driven by land. That seems to be the underlying issue that's driving city house values up everywhere. There are possibly some answers. In the UK in the 60s-80s we built entire new cities, with the land purchased by the government at agricultural value so that the entire uplift was captured by the developers rather than speculators.

brailsafe 3y ago
Which Canadian subreddits idolize the U.S? Generally both countries have pretty similarly horrible development patterns with a tiny amount of exceptions. My impression is that the U.S just does sprawl and car-centricity to an extreme, like Toronto, but I can't say I've come across anywhere more compelling.

nradov 3y ago

Sure we can. But many of the younger people most negatively impacted by housing policy don't bother to vote at all. Or if they do vote they do so based on social issues. I've never seen housing availability come up as the #1 issue in any voter survey.

jareklupinski 3y ago

> Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people? less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land natural resources aside, land only really has the value that other people are willing to pay for it, like currency. so if you want the "growth of your asset", the only thing you can really do is convince people the land is worth more than what you paid for it, for whatever reasons you dream up globalisation just made everyone's marketing messages go 'round the world

throwaway894345 3y ago
> less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of humans has increased almost 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right?
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  that's true, market forces like supply and demand affect everything in the economy, and while we've grown, our landmass has remained static. which parts of the land are worth more than others though, I think the article does a good job of providing examples too: people living closer to each central city had higher wages, which meant they could pay more for the land pieces... so they did, which meant they had to ask more when selling in order to 'break even' or 'realize on their investment' i guess the bigger question is: why did we tie our need for shelter into the economy? in order to achieve constant growth (ensure someone isnt left 'holding the bag'), we have to either be willfully ignorant of a growing population, or maintain a fantasy of there always being viable room for ever more people i hope we start colonizing the moon or even mars before we have to deal with fallout from the above...

anovikov 3y ago

I can't see a problem here. It only happens because (slightly) more than half of voters are happy with their housing situation and prefer it stay the way it is (that is, perpetually increasing prices, so they can earn equity => retire). They consciously vote for people who ensures just that. There is no failure of democracy here, but rather a good indication of it's strength.

midoridensha 3y ago
It's true that the people are getting what they're voting for, but I wouldn't call this "not a failure of democracy", when the voters are causing their society to decay and die slowly because of their own short-sightedness. However, we haven't exactly seen better systems of governance, plus not all democratic societies are filled with such short-sighted idiots like we see in the US, and those societies are doing much better long-term and stability-wise.
- anovikov 3y ago
  How is this short-sightedness? Voters are voting for what's best for them, and it is indeed best for them. There are only two ways of fixing it: cancel democracy (in a dictatorship no one gives a damn about what people want, and developers make max profit by building everything they want), or cancel market economy, so the housing can't be sold or bought and the Party distributes it as it sees fit. Both looks to me worse than what we have today. Cruel explanation: there is no way of organising society that's good for more than a half of people.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Nice false dichotomy you got there.

danaris 3y ago

It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and decide that's a good idea, and people following everything from scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies that came out around the time, to philosophical works published around the time, to all of the above that were old but re-popularized around the time. You can just as easily ask "why was there a rise of right-wing nationalist and fascist sentiment throughout the Western world in the mid-to-late 2010s?" There's no grand conspiracy to any of it, and looking for one is likely to lead you down exactly the road that far too many conspiracy theorists have gone recently. And, um, closely related, be aware that the "lizard people rule the world" thing isn't just a funny joke. It's deeply and inextricably rooted in a raft of antisemitic tropes, slurs, and propaganda going back...I forget exactly how long, but at least many decades. In fact, in general, when you encounter any conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy group of people secretly ruling the world, the chances are nearly 100% that you can trace it back to a version where that "shadowy group" is explicitly Jews. This is a big part of why conspiracy theorists have a tendency to find themselves in a pipeline to fascism.

teddyh 3y ago
The entire world was (and still is, to some extent) horribly racist. Every nation, institution and venerable principle you hold sacred has horrible racism lurking in its very bones, if you dig deep enough. You can’t, therefore, dismiss anything on that basis alone. Argue with an issue on its merits alone; to attack the supposed secret origin of an issue is equivalent to an ad hominem argument. Also, alternative explanation of the lizard people thing: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600>
- thriftwy 3y ago
  What if the entire world is mostly rational, and it is the HN crowd / snowflakes from the richest US suburbs who are bonkers?
- danaris 3y ago
  Ah, yes; the good old "everything is impure, which means that everything is equally bad, so it doesn't matter if I do/support bad things, because I have no choice!" Yeah, no. That doesn't fly. There's a massive difference between, say, "the fact that I am a person of European descent living in upstate NY is only possible because of the genocide of and racism against generations of Native Americans; therefore, my entire existence is predicated on structural racism" and "many, many groups have vilified Jewish people for centuries for a variety of reasons (that are out of scope of this discussion); that vilification has led to ostracism and genocide on numerous occasions and still does to this day, frequently based entirely on completely false stereotypes; the propagation of those stereotypes still to this day leads real people to choose to ostracize and murder Jewish people; "lizard people who rule the world" is one of those stereotypes, and participating in its propagation does actual, measurable harm to Jewish people."

breakingrules 3y ago

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cassepipe 3y ago

Recommend this book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/164-democracy-against-capitalism https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/164-democracy-agai...

groestl 3y ago

> did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? Not US, and for reasons, the housing crisis is not _that_ bad where I live, but: in principle our country is exactly like our parent's generation imagined it. It's perfectly aligned with their interests. Where they'd hike to a hut in the mountains once, there is now a paved road, so they can still drive to the hut, even though they're not able to walk anymore. Somewhere else they built a cable car, for exactly the same purpose. They have houses. They have cars. They dominate every political institution there is. They voted to keep the conscription, so enough poor young people who alternatively chose community service would be available when they need care, eventually. They go on vacations three times a year. And heaven forbid they'd need to give up _anything_ they once had. Political parties that suggest anything like that would have no chance in elections. > Who is actually in control here? I think they are.

tormeh 3y ago
This is definitely it. It's a question of demographics. The developed world used to be for young people because people there were mostly young. Now decisions are taken by and for old people, and those of us who aren't are afterthoughts. A good example of this is the age at which our constitutions were drafted vs how old politicians are now. This is also the case in Norway but I think the US is a more relatable example on HN: Biden is twice the average age of the delegates in 1787.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  The millenial generation is now the largest cohort in the United States. The issue is that generally, it takes a while for a cohort to build up political power.
  - ttymck 3y ago
    Especially when political power is almost exclusively financial.
  - jahewson 3y ago

niyikiza 3y ago

EY wrote a good book about that very topic: "Inadequate Equilibria -- Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck" https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/

badpun 3y ago

> did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? It might have been a combination of circumstances and intellectual tides turning. The 70ties saw stagflation everywhere, which led to a decade of economic problems that couldn't be fixed with existing, socialist policies. Finally, voters everywhere (starting with Thatcher in UK ) decided it's time to try something else. Part of it might also have been a disillusionment with big leftist ideas in general - in the late seventies, there was enough reliable information coming from USSR and China to make it clear that anything resembling communism (a holy grail for much of the left back then) is an unmitigated disaster. People started to realise that capitalism, much like democracy, might be bad, but is better than all the alternatives.

thriftwy 3y ago
The interesting thing is that Russia and China are capitalistic now, and they both manage to output a huge amount of high rise housing for sale. Makes one wonder whether capitalism is actually compatible with democracy.
- Detrytus 3y ago
  If you believe Karl Marx then the answer is no: capitalism is incompatible with democracy, because of the basic human nature. If you allow people to vote, they will vote to take money from the rich and give it to them for free. Or for government to create money out of thin air, and give them away.
  - badpun 3y ago
    Karl was proven wrong recently by the Swiss though, who voted against UBI in a referendum.

rootusrootus 3y ago

> since the 70s Is part of the problem that we think the 70s was normal and not the outlier? https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... Certainly there have been a couple recent bubbles, but even as recently as 2012 we were basically within the bounds of the long-term normal. I'd like to say it's a supply problem, and demographics does support that argument to some extent, but the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy.

pdonis 3y ago
> I'd like to say it's a supply problem It is to the extent that various laws and regulations prevent or strongly disincentivize new construction, yes. > the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy It does. Mortgage loans have always been one of the primary places that governments choose to put newly printed money. The ostensible purpose of this is to make it easier for people to own homes, but what it actually does is bid up home prices to the point where consumers are no better off than they were before, but financial institutions and other corporate interests make a nice extra profit. It's similar to the way the easy availability of financial aid for college has not actually made it easier for people to go to the college of their choice (indeed, admission rates to many colleges have sharply declined as financial aid becomes more available), it's just transferred more wealth to the colleges from taxpayers.

Aerbil313 3y ago

Hahaha. Man wants to be fit, swears on his diet routine, sees a chocolate bar on the kitchen table literally 3 seconds later and reverses his decision. Is he under the control of his rational mind? Will? Does an alcoholic choose to continue to drink alcohol after he is an addict? There is will, and there is will. Pretending that this doesn't apply to whole societies and that today's secular societies are not driven mostly by a deterministic mechanism consisting of human nature combined with the environment (technology + physical world) is a fool's act, and the ubiqiotus internet commenter attitude. Man yelling at the clouds, clouds of human nature and environment.

hibikir 3y ago

It's not really the entire world: See Spain [1]: Until the financial crisis in 2007, the country liberalized building, often quite dense as opposed to plain sprawl. See, for instance, the growth in the towns surrounding Madrid around train stations. The crisis slowed it down massively though, in part because a lot of builders lost their shirts, as the building became massive overbuilding. But when demand goes up enough, it's still possible to build, and build high. In my home town in Spain, people can still afford homes. If there's an issue, it's still just jobs instead. So yes, this is all something that is politically solvable in the west. We just need a unified legislative recipe, and strong advocacy. Other lobbying groups manage to get through very unpopular legislation. Why not for something that would actually help? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N

asdff 3y ago
Some latin american cities are starting to make even nyc look small. I expect in 30 years that a lot of latin america will look like southeast asian cities while American cities look the same as they did 30 years ago for another 30 years.

panick21_ 3y ago

It not nearly as universal as you think.

pontifier 3y ago

There's a pattern I've noticed of outsourcing code requirements. Most municipalities seem to adopt the international building code, and then because that code book is updated all the time, and none of the local officials actually understand it, they start to require that applicants prove that they meet the code. Planning commissions start to believe that they need to control everything that everybody does, but they shouldn't. Because everything is a shifting target, and proof is almost impossible, everything gets road blocked. For the most part, I agree with building codes. They serve a purpose by ensuring that unsafe buildings aren't created. But they've become so esoteric, that meeting them is an exercise in futility. I can't wait for the day that a "safe building" AI just watches everything, and tells people what to do. That way even unskilled labor can do work, and the work will be up to a safe standard. Code officials are the worst sort of power tripping bureaucrats. I can't wait for them to be eliminated.

tormeh 3y ago

There's an essay written on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

rcarr 3y ago

It definitely seems to be more of an Anglosphere problem than elsewhere. I've been learning other languages with the long term view of permanently escaping the Anglosphere in the next 5 years, unless I finally manage to land a job that pays enough to allow me some stability.

khuey 3y ago
Yes, the homevoter mentality is much worse in the English speaking countries than it is in continental Europe or in developed East Asia.
diveandfight 3y ago
> Anglosphere In my opinion, this is an underutilized term that could be used to group trends/behaviors and consequently policy decisions.
marcosdumay 3y ago
There may be entire regions without this problem, but it is absolutely not restricted to the Anglosphere.

asdff 3y ago

In all these systems where "the world over" we have the same end result, what do we have in common? Shareholders, for profit companies, consultancies, an entire sector of the economy is just consultancies. Its death by a thousand cuts set up by the incentives. You don't know what the hell you are doing, so hey lets act like you do by bringing in a consultancy who does know what they are doing because that's their job. In effect, you get to be bad at your job but be good at your job since you rubber stamped "bring in a consultant" on the project. Then what about these consultants? Well, they don't need to actually solve the problem either. They just make various plans and present a slide deck to management at the end and collect a check. Whether the plan works or not doesn't even matter here, because the consultants got paid already and are on to the next job, the manager looks good because they brought in a consultancy, and if shit fails in the next three years well its no ones fault, because management will act like they did everything right bringing in the consultancy and will cut other staff first. Consultancyism is everywhere these days. Its the next big thing in emerging markets which is even scarier and only a fig leaf away from imperialism with the terms of how some of these deals are struck, always to the benefit of capital with the people seen as a resource for extraction or exploitation. Consultancyism probably also encourages an unhealthy mercenary outlook on life. Never taking pride in projects because they are never your projects in your community, they are just jobs elsewhere to make some money.

steve_gh 3y ago
Disclosure: I am a very senior data science consultant in an infrastructure management consultancy Consultancy can be a good thing - or a bad thing, depending on which consultants are brought in, and why. It is one of the oldest tropes that consultants are brought in to tell people what they already know - and there is some truth in it. But when it comes down to it, consultants are asked to do this job because they are external - and they can tell truth to power without being seen as having an internal political agenda. As consultants, we are brought in by clients to provide skills that they don't have in house. There tend to be two reasons for this. Either they want us for a short period to do a specific task which wouldn't be worth them recruiting for, or they are looking for a longer term relationship - in which case we can offer them access to a wider pool of talent than they would get by recruiting in. Finally, I have worked with a great number of talented folks at all stages of their careers. Almost without exception, every one of them has been passionate about their work, and determined to do the best job possible for the clients. And a number of them have left us to work directly for clients. [edited for typos]

hadlock 3y ago

Something like 10-50 of the population worldwide, depending on where/how you measure, moved from rural areas to cities since WW2. This completely upended the large scale population density situation that had existed for millennia. Also, as I'm sure anyone in California or Texas will tell you, there are 1) only so many good places to build and/or 2) so far someone is willing to commute. There is lots of land available to build on 4 hours from San Francisco at pretty reasonable prices (I looked at a 2.5 acre triangle of land with a seasonal creek on it for $40,000), but nobody will pay $900/sq ft for a house that far from their office, even if they WFH 4 days a week.

pas 3y ago
almost trivial to build upward, yet it's prohibited by zoning. also, people getting surprised by the continuation of urbanization is ridiculous (but also a complete fucking tragedy).

marcosdumay 3y ago

Whether or not there is real democracy anywhere (I'd say "no"), there has been a deep cultural homogenization imposed by the media since the 70s. And a really strong deviation from fact-based bottom-up world modeling. It's technically possible that people just decided to vote the same way in half of the world for decades. Besides, the local plutocracy wanting the same things everywhere isn't easy to explain either.

DeathArrow 3y ago

> Can’t we figure out what we actually want as societies, and make policy that matches it? Not in a democracy, not when respecting free market and property. But they are able to do it in China.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

> It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. Cities were pretty similar to how they are now for all of human history except a brief period where things were weird after WW2 - see A Farewell to Alms and everything by Ricardo. The US has one of the lowest Price to Rent ratios in the entire world. And it's not like the US is rosey. There's really no where to look on the planet for somewhere that's doing things right beside maybe Singapore (which is a single city and has somewhat socialized the entire housing market) and Japan (which suffered through a lost 30 years and has a pretty rapidly declining population - possibly mainly as a result). In both cases, I'd argue the US has a better housing market than either of those places. And again, it's still pretty sucky in most places in the US.

dontlaugh 3y ago

It’s just the natural development of capitalism, as its internal contradictions generate worse and worse crises. The ruling class (the ones that own most capital) are disincentivised from changing the system, since any effective change would require them not be the ruling class anymore. The way out is revolution, where the working class become the ruling class. We may yet see that in our lifetimes in several countries.

imtringued 3y ago

>Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people? Nobody. If you wanted to point fingers though, then the reason nothing gets done is because "grandma". Not because grandma is some evil conspirator but rather because this is used to silence arguments by saying "you are hurting the weak, don't you feel ashamed?" Honestly, I don't believe there is a solution that can be achieved through democratic vote because the only people that are being hurt are people who don't get to vote, aka children who will need a home in the future or migrants who are about to move. Some form of private land trust will have to do a georgist experiment and reimburse tenants as some form of UBI. 50% of the profits will be reinvested, 50% reimbursed.