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I was thinking about how the economy has been actively makes less sense and gets divorced more and more from reality year after year, AI or not. It's the simpl

I was thinking about how the economy has been actively makes less sense and gets divorced more and more from reality year after year, AI or not. It's the simple fact that the ability of assets to generate wealth has far outstripped the abiliy of individuals to earn money by working. Somehow real estate has become so expensive everywhere that owning a shitty apartment is impossible for the vast majority. When the world's population was exploding during the 20th century, housing prices were not a problem, yet somehow nowadays, it's impossible to build affordable housing to bring the prices down, though the population is stagnant or growing slowly. A company can be worth $1B if someone invests $10m in it for 1% stake - where did the remaining $990m come from? Likewise, the stock market is full of trillion-dollar companies whose valuations beggar all explanation, considering the sizes of the markets they are serving. The rich elites are using the wealth to control access to basic human needs (namely housing and healthcare) to squeeze the working population for every drop of money. Every wealth metric shows the 1% and the 1% of the 1% control successively larger portions of the economic pie. At this point money is ceasing to be a proxy for value and is becoming a tool for population control. And the weird thing is it didn't use to be nearly this bad even a decade ago, and we can only guess how bad it will get in a decade, AGI or not. Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a fully-written manifesto, but I have trouble expressing these ideas in a concise manner.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
> And the weird thing is it didn't use to be nearly this bad even a decade ago, and we can only guess how bad it will get in a decade, AGI or not. The last 5 years have reflected a substantial decline in QOL in the states; you don't even have to to look back that far. The coronacircus money-printing really accelerated the decline.
ac29 2y ago
> Somehow real estate has become so expensive everywhere that owning a shitty apartment is impossible for the vast majority. Approximately 2/3s of homes in the US are owner occupied.
- yen223 2y ago
  It's interesting that the figure is similar in Australia, but from the POV of the people. Approximately 2/3rds of Australians live in an owner-occupied home.
orangecat 2y ago
Somehow real estate has become so expensive everywhere that owning a shitty apartment is impossible for the vast majority. That's to be expected when governments forbid people from building housing. The only thing I find surprising is when people blame this on "capitalism".
zahlman 2y ago
> When the world's population was exploding during the 20th century, housing prices were not a problem, yet somehow nowadays, it's impossible to build affordable housing to bring the prices down, though the population is stagnant or growing slowly. In Canada, the population is still growing at a fairly impressive rate (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/can...), and that growth tends to concentrate in major population centres. There are advocacy groups that seek to push Canadian population growth well above UN projections (e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative "aims to increase Canada's population to 100 million by 2100") through immigration. In Japan, where the population is declining, housing prices are not anything like the problem we observe in North America. There's also the supply side. "Impossible to build affordable housing" is in many cases a consequence of zoning restrictions. (Economists also hold very strongly that rent control doesn't work - see e.g. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-eviden... and https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-notes/2023/rent-control-vs-rent-stabilization-a-new-name-for-a-failed-concept/ https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-notes/2023/re... ; real "affordable housing" is just the effect of more housing.)

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

> And the weird thing is it didn't use to be nearly this bad even a decade ago, and we can only guess how bad it will get in a decade, AGI or not. The last 5 years have reflected a substantial decline in QOL in the states; you don't even have to to look back that far. The coronacircus money-printing really accelerated the decline.

ac29 2y ago

> Somehow real estate has become so expensive everywhere that owning a shitty apartment is impossible for the vast majority. Approximately 2/3s of homes in the US are owner occupied.

yen223 2y ago
It's interesting that the figure is similar in Australia, but from the POV of the people. Approximately 2/3rds of Australians live in an owner-occupied home.

orangecat 2y ago

Somehow real estate has become so expensive everywhere that owning a shitty apartment is impossible for the vast majority. That's to be expected when governments forbid people from building housing. The only thing I find surprising is when people blame this on "capitalism".

zahlman 2y ago

> When the world's population was exploding during the 20th century, housing prices were not a problem, yet somehow nowadays, it's impossible to build affordable housing to bring the prices down, though the population is stagnant or growing slowly. In Canada, the population is still growing at a fairly impressive rate (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/can...), and that growth tends to concentrate in major population centres. There are advocacy groups that seek to push Canadian population growth well above UN projections (e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative "aims to increase Canada's population to 100 million by 2100") through immigration. In Japan, where the population is declining, housing prices are not anything like the problem we observe in North America. There's also the supply side. "Impossible to build affordable housing" is in many cases a consequence of zoning restrictions. (Economists also hold very strongly that rent control doesn't work - see e.g. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-eviden... and https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-notes/2023/rent-control-vs-rent-stabilization-a-new-name-for-a-failed-concept/ https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/research-notes/2023/re... ; real "affordable housing" is just the effect of more housing.)