5 ms·

AI will do the same thing that every other productivity improvement has in history: increase the price of land. Real estate is still (and will always be) real b

AI will do the same thing that every other productivity improvement has in history: increase the price of land. Real estate is still (and will always be) real because not only do you need land to grow food, you need land to do any type of work on, you need land to eat on and to sleep on.

mistrial9 3y ago
false - abandoned land, towns, whole cities.. are common and easy to find. That means the value of the land and improvements went sharply and drastically down
- pc86 3y ago
  I can point out dozens of "sharp and drastic" crashes in stock prices, but that doesn't mean investing in the stock market is a bad idea.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Where to start… 1) Abandoned cities are extremely rare throughout all of history. Most medium to large cities outlive the countries in which they were founded. 2) Even if this were the case, it doesn’t actually disprove the claim. All that’s evidence of is that occasionally, some forces can overcome positive pressure on prices. Yes systemic failure can sometimes (very rarely) knock a city out of existence, but this is very obviously extremely rare. Even Detroit is dramatically more expensive than it has ever been. The price of an acre in Wyoming is higher than it’s ever been. 3) That’s still assuming that abandonment is a definite sign of falling land prices, which isn’t true at all. Vacancy results from the inability to produce more value on the land than the land costs. Sometimes this is because the prices rise and sometimes because the cost of production rises, but never because the price of land went down: that would just mean more profit which means more reason to stay.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    ok - casual terms got the negative response.. so we define "common" .. You have legitimate points yes... but I can tell you that California has some of the most expensive real estate anywhere, and there are abandoned towns here.. abandoned rail stations, old homes.. all of that.. you can say "oh this statement is not supported" with rebuttal, but the rebuttal has "stock market goes up" built in.. this is not true over long periods of time generally due to war or other disaster. more profit - more reason to stay.. Somehow we are not acknowledging Walmart here. In the USA, small towns functioned on having stores and other services.. sixty years later.. whole towns are dying due to a nearby Walmart, where people drive an hour+ to shop. neither my statement or the rebuttal has all the relevant parts.. under construction. dynamic systems
- hackerlight 3y ago
  If we get actual AGI, the price of land will go up relative to other things in the economy. This is because the other stuff will become cheaper to produce. If we keep the money supply fixed, that means the price of land will rise in an absolute sense.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    No, it will go up because the only constraint on land price is “how much value can you produce per square foot.” AI, like the drill press or cotton gin, will increase how much value you can produce per square foot. Landlords will reap the bulk of the benefit, we will still have people in completely destitute poverty and the bulk of people living roughly paycheck to paycheck. It may also go up in relative terms, but yes it will go up in absolute terms too. Very self evident: how is it that people paid for a place to live 1,000 years ago, and now there’s been all this technological productivity gains (several billion-fold?), and yet people still spend 30%+ of their productive output on a place to live?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > how is it that people paid for a place to live 1,000 years ago, and now there’s been all this technological productivity gains (several billion-fold?), and yet people still spend 30%+ of their productive output on a place to live? Been thinking the same recently, but those specific numbers are a mix of wrong and misleading. For wrong: productivity per person has only gone up by a factor of about 50x-100x, not billions. For misleading: the homes were terrible back then. A thousand years ago (Beowulf-era Old English), a "hall" was simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls. In Anglo-Saxon England (the latter end of which was still 1000 years ago), simple single-room buildings, with a lone hearth in the middle of the floor for both cooking and warmth, were the usual homes of a lord of the manor and his retainers, with the entire community eating and sleeping in that single room. Even just keeping those places warm in winter was a major effort. (I've seen a few of these at different stages of development at https://www.wealddown.co.uk https://www.wealddown.co.uk, which just happened to be close to where I grew up as a kid; you may recognise some of the pictures from the first season of Good Omens). The fancy castles and complex manor homes we like to think of from Ye Olde Tymes weren't normal homes for individuals any more than the White House is today, and almost all the buildings that survive were (in addition to being lucky) important enough to be built upon over the thousand years between then and now.

mistrial9 3y ago

false - abandoned land, towns, whole cities.. are common and easy to find. That means the value of the land and improvements went sharply and drastically down

pc86 3y ago
I can point out dozens of "sharp and drastic" crashes in stock prices, but that doesn't mean investing in the stock market is a bad idea.
ethanbond 3y ago
Where to start… 1) Abandoned cities are extremely rare throughout all of history. Most medium to large cities outlive the countries in which they were founded. 2) Even if this were the case, it doesn’t actually disprove the claim. All that’s evidence of is that occasionally, some forces can overcome positive pressure on prices. Yes systemic failure can sometimes (very rarely) knock a city out of existence, but this is very obviously extremely rare. Even Detroit is dramatically more expensive than it has ever been. The price of an acre in Wyoming is higher than it’s ever been. 3) That’s still assuming that abandonment is a definite sign of falling land prices, which isn’t true at all. Vacancy results from the inability to produce more value on the land than the land costs. Sometimes this is because the prices rise and sometimes because the cost of production rises, but never because the price of land went down: that would just mean more profit which means more reason to stay.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  ok - casual terms got the negative response.. so we define "common" .. You have legitimate points yes... but I can tell you that California has some of the most expensive real estate anywhere, and there are abandoned towns here.. abandoned rail stations, old homes.. all of that.. you can say "oh this statement is not supported" with rebuttal, but the rebuttal has "stock market goes up" built in.. this is not true over long periods of time generally due to war or other disaster. more profit - more reason to stay.. Somehow we are not acknowledging Walmart here. In the USA, small towns functioned on having stores and other services.. sixty years later.. whole towns are dying due to a nearby Walmart, where people drive an hour+ to shop. neither my statement or the rebuttal has all the relevant parts.. under construction. dynamic systems
hackerlight 3y ago
If we get actual AGI, the price of land will go up relative to other things in the economy. This is because the other stuff will become cheaper to produce. If we keep the money supply fixed, that means the price of land will rise in an absolute sense.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  No, it will go up because the only constraint on land price is “how much value can you produce per square foot.” AI, like the drill press or cotton gin, will increase how much value you can produce per square foot. Landlords will reap the bulk of the benefit, we will still have people in completely destitute poverty and the bulk of people living roughly paycheck to paycheck. It may also go up in relative terms, but yes it will go up in absolute terms too. Very self evident: how is it that people paid for a place to live 1,000 years ago, and now there’s been all this technological productivity gains (several billion-fold?), and yet people still spend 30%+ of their productive output on a place to live?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > how is it that people paid for a place to live 1,000 years ago, and now there’s been all this technological productivity gains (several billion-fold?), and yet people still spend 30%+ of their productive output on a place to live? Been thinking the same recently, but those specific numbers are a mix of wrong and misleading. For wrong: productivity per person has only gone up by a factor of about 50x-100x, not billions. For misleading: the homes were terrible back then. A thousand years ago (Beowulf-era Old English), a "hall" was simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls. In Anglo-Saxon England (the latter end of which was still 1000 years ago), simple single-room buildings, with a lone hearth in the middle of the floor for both cooking and warmth, were the usual homes of a lord of the manor and his retainers, with the entire community eating and sleeping in that single room. Even just keeping those places warm in winter was a major effort. (I've seen a few of these at different stages of development at https://www.wealddown.co.uk https://www.wealddown.co.uk, which just happened to be close to where I grew up as a kid; you may recognise some of the pictures from the first season of Good Omens). The fancy castles and complex manor homes we like to think of from Ye Olde Tymes weren't normal homes for individuals any more than the White House is today, and almost all the buildings that survive were (in addition to being lucky) important enough to be built upon over the thousand years between then and now.