7 ms·

Imagine 130M Washing Machines

75 points by RickJWagner 10mo ago

fny 10mo ago
A tangential thought: say AI makes a huge dent into labor. Wages will collapse across the board. Who is left to profit from?
- Nextgrid 10mo ago
  > Who is left to profit from? That's already the case where most of the economy is AI-related stock market speculation rather than being based on actual investment fundamentals.
- soared 10mo ago
  There is a more feasible future IMO that paints AI as the washing machine, calculator, computer, spreadsheet, automation, etc. Jobs AI can complete don’t lead to people getting let go, but rather those people sit on top of the AI who can do their job much better (sometimes at larger scale, sometimes not). Better outputs for the same cost (well wage+AI costs) -> more purchasing power, more efficient business, etc. I don’t know if this is how AI will go, but this exact thing happened to me with deep learning. I did stupid math to optimize algos in 2012, but in 2022 deep learning was 100x better than me. I just babysat the AI, as it (and llms) still can’t talk to clients, understand business/culturual nuances, navigate an org, politic, innovate, etc
  - throwaway173738 10mo ago
    I think a few people will live like kings while the rest of us live in Terrafoam.
- foobarian 10mo ago
  Money is just a proxy for value add. When automation replaces the labor, the only remaining value add may be withholding violence. I hope we don't get there
rvz 10mo ago
There are billions of computers, but only a few computers can run very large local LLMs. So instead, imagine billions of laptops (or phones) available in store that have local LLMs installed which allows you to have intelligence-like chatbot features available with the equivalent performance of Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT-5 if not better and they are far smaller. Thank you for telling us that efficient + performant multi-modal local AI models is the endgame; a bonus if they are smaller to fit in phones.
- zamadatix 10mo ago
  Centralized vs distributed feels like a largely orthogonal matter. E.g. phones are great at being clients, even for things which they could technically be the server for today, but they make pretty bad servers in terms of resource tradeoffs. Because of this, I think the endgame cares little about where the LLM runs as much as how much it costs for those devices to use one (which can be more than just money too - e.g. on phones it's battery, bandwidth, latency, privacy, or whatever else could be valued/scarce). That it's specifically on device is just one method of how to meet some of these attributes, not the exclusive method to use it. Even as a techie tinkerer my dream is not that every device I have run its own LLM - it's that I can point them to where to find the LLM (and swap that at will). The dumber I can make my edges the more they can end up doing overall.
- fenwick67 10mo ago
  I'm skeptical of this. Users are not going to want to sacrifice on the quality or performance of the model for a warm fuzzy feeling about it running locally on their phone. Outside of hobbyists I can't imagine this really taking off for the same reason secure scuttlebutt never had a chance of beating Facebook. The only exception I can imagine is very sensitive topics, AI girlfriends or maybe image processing
philipwhiuk 10mo ago
> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million. Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment. > progressive consumption taxes When someone proposes one, let me know.
- thenanyu 10mo ago
  Presumably, the percentage of taxation is a function of the price of the item? You can have a different curve or base rate for different harmonization codes.
- 1980phipsi 10mo ago
  >> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million. > Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment. I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either... Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing machines are often included as part of a rental (or the apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that have to do with landlords?). And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have a vacation home and rent it out part of the year. >> progressive consumption taxes > When someone proposes one, let me know. They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would benefit existing rich people.
- strken 10mo ago
  The word "consume" is important. Billionaires might own a million average family homes, but that's not the same thing as actually using the home. A normal family will eventually lease the house and use it, unless it's left vacant. I'm not sure vacant property investment holds up in a world with radically higher numbers of houses getting built. The billionaires either stop investing and let house prices drop, or they keep investing until they run out of money, at which point they have no choice but to stop. This only holds up for houses themselves and not for land, but hey, you can solve that with a land tax.
tokai 10mo ago
>On many distributional issues, I’m to the left of the Democrats. Which could still land you squarely on the economic right.
Workaccount2 10mo ago
The easiest surefire way to lift the bottom of the economy right now is to go on a mass home building spree. If people had their rents cut in half, it would solve most other money problems they complain about (shy of those who will just inflate their lives into being money constrained again). Of course this will come mostly at the expense of regular middle-class homeowners, who will see the enormous paper gains of their properties in the last 5-10 years be decimated. Red or Blue, I don't care who, hates losing money and will emphatically vote against this happening.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  Indeed. If you destroy housing costs [1], medical costs with single payer [2], and energy costs with renewables [3], that gets you to Abundance everyone so desperately opines about. But too much of the country is driven by the inefficiency (rent seeking, broadly speaking), that is the US system and the economy. That is all the country builds anymore. We collectively know what the foundational problems are, there is simply no political will to course correct. Increased supply will disempower the extraction system. AI replaces jobs people need to survive, but does not fix anything I've enumerated; in some cases, it even makes the problem worse (algorithmic price fixing [RealPage] and price discrimination [Instacart], for example). I would like to imagine a world with enough housing for every human, affordable, accessible medical care for all, and cheap clean energy deployed at scale. When is AI going to deliver that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 (housing cost citations) [2] Health Care Costs and Affordability - https://www.kff.org/health-costs/health-policy-101-health-care-costs-and-affordability/?entry=table-of-contents-how-has-u-s-health-care-spending-changed-over-time https://www.kff.org/health-costs/health-policy-101-health-ca... - October 8th, 2025 [3] U.S. electricity prices continue steady increase - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 - May 14th, 2025
  - card_zero 10mo ago
    I don't understand POSIWID at all. "Purpose" is inherently good intention and moral judgement.
siavosh 10mo ago
Productivity will go up, competition will go up, profits will go down, unemployment will go up, wages will go down, a crisis will occur, consolidations and monopolies will emerge, hyper inequality will then break a system incapable of compromise. But sure, there will be a lot of washing machines.
petermcneeley 10mo ago
in-vogue trite. The question for these thought-writers at this stage is simply incompetence or malic.
NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. This is a weird one. I don't think the problem with rich people is that they consume luxury goods. That's actually a good thing overall. Let them have their megayachts, megacars, golden toilets, etc. Someone has to build those. I think the problem is when they use their unlimited funds to purchase stuff they shouldn't own. Newspapers, TV stations, social media, etc. That kind of power, often flaunted openly (see the bezos scandal when they literally wrote something along the lines of "if you screw with us we have wapo at our disposal") is not something that should be in the hands of one person. Or a family. That's way way way more dangerous to society than them snorting caviar off of models' bodies, or eat gold leaf you won't believe they're not burgers with truffles on top.
- unstatusthequo 10mo ago
  Do we think news outlets owned by the government or the “warm collective” would be any better at unbiased reporting or not disseminating fake news or unjust influence? Is there any organization or entity structure today that is trustworthy enough to even handle those sorts of organizations. It appears fraud is rampant in our government, so why trust them any more than some random dude? Frankly it seems the odds might be better with one random guy not being on the take.
  - joshgachnang 10mo ago
    I think the odds are better if it's not a random guy who also already has a bunch of power (e.g. Bezos with his considerable influence buying up and weaponizing WaPo). I personally think that consolidation of power is a reasonable thing to prevent. I'm not sure how you could block someone like Zuckerberg who started his own new media, other than the government, which as you pointed out has its own issues.
  - NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
    I'll be honest, I'm not an expert on this, and I don't have a perfect solution. I just think we should try to do something, even if it's not perfect. There are some professions with codes of conduct. Some are internal, some ar legislated (i.e. fiduciary duty for lawyers, financial advisors, etc). We also have some concepts like public utility and public interest. Maybe we should look there (again, ask the experts I'm sure there are people who study this for a living). Maybe slowly bring in duties for "public interest" related fields. Maybe at the management level. Maybe come up with ownership structures that decouple power from financial incentives (a la voting shares vs. normal shares) and impose them for such businesses. I fully agree with you that gov ownership of media would be a disaster. I'm not proposing that in any way. Just ... better ways to do it than we do today.
smileysteve 10mo ago
A post about mis-generalization seems to make a huge mis-generalization, seemingly from a lack of diversity. The author recognizes that laundromats exist, but doesn't believe that washing machines are a luxury good (his yacht example of 60% owned by the top 1% likely applies somewhere around 60% to the top 30%). This indicates the author generalizes that high density living with shared appliances don't exist or apply to a large part of the population (that density doesn't shift statistics). A few thoughts, instead of taking 340m people, you need to account for 2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure, 30%+ as high density possibly sharing at the apartment/condo building or laundromat level. A small upper 1% that outsource to services. The infamous Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans don't pay income tax quote can be really shocking when you start thinking about the average American, and the wages that they earn compared to a higher income segment you might be in.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Laundromats exist, but there are 100 million according to my web search which puts his estimate in the right area even if he is off by 30 million. Most Americans would not call a washing machine a luxury good. Even in much poorer Mexico there are a lot of families living on $100/week that have a washing machine - they are an affordably luxury to many poor people.
  - smileysteve 10mo ago
    If the statistical "right area" is within 30%, then 60m is similarly in the correct area. But the context is most important, are AI's worst strategies worse than 30% off because of gross generalizations?
    - bluGill 10mo ago
      Depends on the context. Sometimes I need to be correct to withing 0.0000001%. Sometimes I can be off by 500% and still be close enough.
      - deleted 10mo ago
chris_va 10mo ago
The high level question of wealth concentration from new technology is an interesting question (and probably could have been just 3 sentences, since it is unanswered). The rest of the article has some easy to read anecdotes, but it's hard to know if they are at relevant/accurate. E.g. common mistake (arguably) that I see a lot: > In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht building industry. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of muddled thinking about distribution. Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. Mega-yachts are money pits. A rich person purchasing a mega-yacht is probably the fastest way to redistribute a monetary supply. Taxing it has some benefit, but reduces the incentive to buy mega-yacht... Now, monetary supply and productivity/wealth are not exactly the same thing, but this seems like a basic error.
- strken 10mo ago
  I think the whole point was that mega-yachts are money (or, from the perspective of the employee, effort) pits. Those employed shipbuilders and wait staff aren't building cruise ships and they aren't serving meals on them. The time and effort that went into those tasks will never reappear. The median person is better off if the rich either invest that money, lose it to tax, or give it to charity. The money/effort gets redirected away from mega-yachts and other consumption and it has to go somewhere.
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    That money often doesn't go to someplace the common person would fine more useful. A yacht made and stored outside the US is easy to hide from US taxes if you want one, if it is a status symbol you can find plenty of others, some of which are easy to make elsewhere thus moving money out of the US.
iso1631 10mo ago
> Matt Yglesias keeps telling us that America is richer than Europe because we have many more dryers Or perhaps America is poorer because they lack an outside space to hang clothes?
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Most Americans have space to hang clothes. They don't use it, but the space exist. Sometimes it is illegal to use that space to hang clothes, but they wouldn't even if the laws changed.
  - iso1631 10mo ago
    > Sometimes it is illegal to use that space to hang clothes Ahh, land of the free Based on my knowlege of New York apartment buildings, there are shared laundry rooms, thus New York City has fewer dryers per capita than Alabama. Clearly South Dakota is richer than New York City?
    - bluGill 10mo ago
      I don't know New York. I know where I live most apartments are shared laundry rooms, but a few list washer/dryer in the apartment as a feature.
  - foobarian 10mo ago
    I wouldn't relish doing that in the winter, having to work around weather, or having the day star's UV light destroy my clothes.
jrm4 10mo ago
So, this whole analysis strikes me as the worst of "economic thought?" The first bit of failure here is "equating well-offness to output," e.g. something that can be measured by GDP. Then it misses the other big deal, which is the utter weirdness caused by extreme on-paper wealth inequality, where the e.g. Elon Musk numbers reach levels of literal absurdity. Money, in a sense, doesn't matter. It's "goods and services." The big question should be, does the way we do "money" effectively help everyone trade goods and services in a reasonable way. That's the only real path to "happiness."
Taxiomato 10mo ago
[dead]
toss1 10mo ago
>>recall that central LA currently lacks the large stock of high-rise apartments that you see in cities like New York and Chicago. The author entirely overlooks that NYC and Chicago are not in earthquake-prone areas and LA is right next to a major geologic fault system. Yes, skyscrapers can be safely built to withstand earthquakes, but it tends to be at least expensive, which is counter to solving affordability issues. >>I favor a steeply progressive consumption tax. This is generally pointing in the right direction, but a progressive transaction tax on every transaction, including finance and investments would be far better. Easier to track, harder to evade, far less intrusive into peoples' lives required by income tax. and the rate and difference between rates would be so low that structuring deals to 'optimize' taxation brackets would be pointless. Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus. Make it progressive by setting tax rate tables based on transaction size, e.g., transaction <$10=0.01, <$100=0.1%, <$10k=0.2%, <$100k=0.3%, <$1MM=0.4%, =>$1MM=0.5% (plus big penalties for 'structuring' transactions to lower brackets). Not impressed with the article
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Sky scrappers are expensive. A single story building is the cheapest thing you can build anywhere - only when land is expensive is it worth going up instead of out. There is value in density so we build skyscrapers anyway, but for nobody is it the most economical way to get square feet.
  - SecondHandTofu 10mo ago
    Land IS somewhat expensive in LA though. Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer people need cars etc.
    - 10mo ago
bluGill 10mo ago
> The whole point of being rich is to get away from every single human being that doesn’t have to be nice to you. This is false. Most rich people don't want to get away from every single human. (if they did they can find plenty of places to backpack). They want to get away from a few crazy people who stalk them.
- AIorNot 10mo ago
  This comment is a total non-sequitor to the topic
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    That is a direct quote from the article, and thus cannot be a non-sequitor. It is used in reasoning and means the whole is standing on something false. You may decide the analysis is correct anyway, but it is fare to stop everything right there since there is a logic flaw.
- cousinbryce 10mo ago
  Sounds like you’ve failed to “…get away from every single human being that doesn’t have to be nice to you”
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    Whatever - I don't think many rich care about getting away from people in general. Most of them don't really care, and many of them like other people in general. The point of being rich can be the luxuries you can buy, a point system, buying a better afterlife, or any of hundreds of motivations. I'm sure some care about getting away from other people, but to say that is the point is false.
- throwaway173738 10mo ago
  You’re refuting a straw man. Re-read what you quoted.
nancyminusone 10mo ago
>P.S. Can you even imagine 130 million washing machines? >...more than three times around the Earth on the equator... Nah, that's the wrong way to go about it. The total length of your blood vessels would also circle the earth twice, but I'm sure you'd prefer them to stay safely inside your body. If each washer is 3 feet on a side, that's 6 square feet. You could easily stack them 4 high with an ordinary forklift. So that's around 7 square miles, or just 7 sections of a standard 36 section survey township. Where I live, there's enough farmland to fit all of them within a 2 mile radius, without disrupting much (well, unless you're a farmer). You'd nearly be able to fit all the dryers too.
- timerol 10mo ago
  3 feet times 3 feet is 9 square feet
  - nancyminusone 10mo ago
    Well that was a dumb mistake. 10.5 square miles then.
LeifCarrotson 10mo ago
> The key to higher living standards for average people is to produce lots more output, which requires more automation. Building and deploying that automation requires capital. As a result, it's largely the people who control that capital who benefit from it, not the individual workers whose productivity is increased by it. There were people who added value to a manufacturing process by being highly skilled welders (earning $30/hr) who can push MIG wire at 30 inches per minute. On a good day, they actually average 20 inches per minute OEE because they also need to load and unload the fixture, take lunch breaks, and so on. Those welders become (or are replaced by) weld-jig-operators, who can load a buffer of incoming parts, unload a buffer of completed parts, and replace emptied spools of wire, clean up the work area, and so on, while the $400k weld cell with a trio of ArcMate robots pushes 80 inches of wire per minute. Yes, that's a 4x productivity gain, but does the welder now earn $120 hour? No, the new operator now gets a pay cut back to $20/hr because you can train a replacement in a week (unlike a welder, who needs years of practice to manipulate a torch that skillfully). Meanwhile, the owner of the company profits at ~$100/hr, recoups their big capital investment after a year, and rakes in the profits after that to buy another yacht, or maybe a newspaper.
- zozbot234 10mo ago
  > because you can train a replacement in a week Guess what, this is a huge gain for the unskilled worker who can get trained in a week for that formerly high-skilled job. And then the capital owners are hugely incented to expand production and hire all those unskilled workers, pushing the wage floor up in the process.
- mNovak 10mo ago
  I agree that the worker becoming more productive due to some capital equipment generally won't see any benefit from doing so (unless it requires special skills to operate). But I think the argument is that the end consumer will eventually benefit from the increased productivity. In your example, yes, the factory owner can take their $100/hr of profit. But among the various factories, some owner might take $25 of that profit and instead undercut their competition to grow their order book. Other factories respond in kind, and the consumer is getting cheaper products.
layer8 10mo ago
> Why output is what matters Now imagine the amount of paperclips AI could make.
aidenn0 10mo ago
> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. While this is essentially tautological, I'm not sure you can practically tax the majority of luxury consumption. Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager)[1]. All of those differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax. If we were to successfully tax all the formal luxuries (which in and of itself becomes legislative whack-a-mole), the wealthy will have a strong incentive to shift much of their luxury consumption to informal luxuries. Plus, I find all of the focusing on "wealth tax" and "luxury tax" and such rather mystifying when we have an extremely regressive income tax in the US. The low tax rate for long-term unearned income in the US, combined with the fact that borrowing against assets does not realize any of the gains, makes effective tax rates for the 99.9 percentile much lower than the 90th percentile. It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth just by ensuring the losses due to inflation and taxes exceeds investment returns at the top tax bracket. 1: Or the difference in your kid applying to a college with your name on one of the buildings versus someone else's kid applying to that school
- zozbot234 10mo ago
  > Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager). All of those differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax. But businesses are incented to remove the most expensive disparities, lest they impact the company's market performance. Or maybe they keep the different treatment but expect to pay the CEO less as compensation. Either way it's win-win. > It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth ... Dynastic wealth is wealth that has provably sat unspent and unconsumed for generations. It's effectively frozen in place (except that every once in a while quite a bit of it gets donated to charity in exchange for a very, very expensive name placard on a building, or something). To the extent that this reflects a spreading of good social norms around the stewarding of those assets, there's not much of a reason to want to get rid of it in the first place.
  - aidenn0 10mo ago
    > Dynastic wealth is wealth that has provably sat unspent and unconsumed for generations. It's effectively frozen in place. To the extent that this reflects good social norms around the stewarding of those assets, there's not much of a reason to want to get rid of it in the first place. Wealth generates income that is used to grow more wealth and spend the balance on luxuries. Reduce the ability for it to do that and you reduce luxury consumption!

75 points by RickJWagner 10mo ago

fny 10mo ago

A tangential thought: say AI makes a huge dent into labor. Wages will collapse across the board. Who is left to profit from?

Nextgrid 10mo ago
> Who is left to profit from? That's already the case where most of the economy is AI-related stock market speculation rather than being based on actual investment fundamentals.
soared 10mo ago
There is a more feasible future IMO that paints AI as the washing machine, calculator, computer, spreadsheet, automation, etc. Jobs AI can complete don’t lead to people getting let go, but rather those people sit on top of the AI who can do their job much better (sometimes at larger scale, sometimes not). Better outputs for the same cost (well wage+AI costs) -> more purchasing power, more efficient business, etc. I don’t know if this is how AI will go, but this exact thing happened to me with deep learning. I did stupid math to optimize algos in 2012, but in 2022 deep learning was 100x better than me. I just babysat the AI, as it (and llms) still can’t talk to clients, understand business/culturual nuances, navigate an org, politic, innovate, etc
- throwaway173738 10mo ago
  I think a few people will live like kings while the rest of us live in Terrafoam.
foobarian 10mo ago
Money is just a proxy for value add. When automation replaces the labor, the only remaining value add may be withholding violence. I hope we don't get there

rvz 10mo ago

There are billions of computers, but only a few computers can run very large local LLMs. So instead, imagine billions of laptops (or phones) available in store that have local LLMs installed which allows you to have intelligence-like chatbot features available with the equivalent performance of Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT-5 if not better and they are far smaller. Thank you for telling us that efficient + performant multi-modal local AI models is the endgame; a bonus if they are smaller to fit in phones.

zamadatix 10mo ago
Centralized vs distributed feels like a largely orthogonal matter. E.g. phones are great at being clients, even for things which they could technically be the server for today, but they make pretty bad servers in terms of resource tradeoffs. Because of this, I think the endgame cares little about where the LLM runs as much as how much it costs for those devices to use one (which can be more than just money too - e.g. on phones it's battery, bandwidth, latency, privacy, or whatever else could be valued/scarce). That it's specifically on device is just one method of how to meet some of these attributes, not the exclusive method to use it. Even as a techie tinkerer my dream is not that every device I have run its own LLM - it's that I can point them to where to find the LLM (and swap that at will). The dumber I can make my edges the more they can end up doing overall.
fenwick67 10mo ago
I'm skeptical of this. Users are not going to want to sacrifice on the quality or performance of the model for a warm fuzzy feeling about it running locally on their phone. Outside of hobbyists I can't imagine this really taking off for the same reason secure scuttlebutt never had a chance of beating Facebook. The only exception I can imagine is very sensitive topics, AI girlfriends or maybe image processing

philipwhiuk 10mo ago

> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million. Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment. > progressive consumption taxes When someone proposes one, let me know.

thenanyu 10mo ago
Presumably, the percentage of taxation is a function of the price of the item? You can have a different curve or base rate for different harmonization codes.
1980phipsi 10mo ago
>> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million. > Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment. I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either... Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing machines are often included as part of a rental (or the apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that have to do with landlords?). And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have a vacation home and rent it out part of the year. >> progressive consumption taxes > When someone proposes one, let me know. They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would benefit existing rich people.
strken 10mo ago
The word "consume" is important. Billionaires might own a million average family homes, but that's not the same thing as actually using the home. A normal family will eventually lease the house and use it, unless it's left vacant. I'm not sure vacant property investment holds up in a world with radically higher numbers of houses getting built. The billionaires either stop investing and let house prices drop, or they keep investing until they run out of money, at which point they have no choice but to stop. This only holds up for houses themselves and not for land, but hey, you can solve that with a land tax.

tokai 10mo ago

>On many distributional issues, I’m to the left of the Democrats. Which could still land you squarely on the economic right.

Workaccount2 10mo ago

The easiest surefire way to lift the bottom of the economy right now is to go on a mass home building spree. If people had their rents cut in half, it would solve most other money problems they complain about (shy of those who will just inflate their lives into being money constrained again). Of course this will come mostly at the expense of regular middle-class homeowners, who will see the enormous paper gains of their properties in the last 5-10 years be decimated. Red or Blue, I don't care who, hates losing money and will emphatically vote against this happening.

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
Indeed. If you destroy housing costs [1], medical costs with single payer [2], and energy costs with renewables [3], that gets you to Abundance everyone so desperately opines about. But too much of the country is driven by the inefficiency (rent seeking, broadly speaking), that is the US system and the economy. That is all the country builds anymore. We collectively know what the foundational problems are, there is simply no political will to course correct. Increased supply will disempower the extraction system. AI replaces jobs people need to survive, but does not fix anything I've enumerated; in some cases, it even makes the problem worse (algorithmic price fixing [RealPage] and price discrimination [Instacart], for example). I would like to imagine a world with enough housing for every human, affordable, accessible medical care for all, and cheap clean energy deployed at scale. When is AI going to deliver that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 (housing cost citations) [2] Health Care Costs and Affordability - https://www.kff.org/health-costs/health-policy-101-health-care-costs-and-affordability/?entry=table-of-contents-how-has-u-s-health-care-spending-changed-over-time https://www.kff.org/health-costs/health-policy-101-health-ca... - October 8th, 2025 [3] U.S. electricity prices continue steady increase - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 - May 14th, 2025
- card_zero 10mo ago
  I don't understand POSIWID at all. "Purpose" is inherently good intention and moral judgement.

siavosh 10mo ago

Productivity will go up, competition will go up, profits will go down, unemployment will go up, wages will go down, a crisis will occur, consolidations and monopolies will emerge, hyper inequality will then break a system incapable of compromise. But sure, there will be a lot of washing machines.

petermcneeley 10mo ago

in-vogue trite. The question for these thought-writers at this stage is simply incompetence or malic.

NitpickLawyer 10mo ago

> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. This is a weird one. I don't think the problem with rich people is that they consume luxury goods. That's actually a good thing overall. Let them have their megayachts, megacars, golden toilets, etc. Someone has to build those. I think the problem is when they use their unlimited funds to purchase stuff they shouldn't own. Newspapers, TV stations, social media, etc. That kind of power, often flaunted openly (see the bezos scandal when they literally wrote something along the lines of "if you screw with us we have wapo at our disposal") is not something that should be in the hands of one person. Or a family. That's way way way more dangerous to society than them snorting caviar off of models' bodies, or eat gold leaf you won't believe they're not burgers with truffles on top.

unstatusthequo 10mo ago
Do we think news outlets owned by the government or the “warm collective” would be any better at unbiased reporting or not disseminating fake news or unjust influence? Is there any organization or entity structure today that is trustworthy enough to even handle those sorts of organizations. It appears fraud is rampant in our government, so why trust them any more than some random dude? Frankly it seems the odds might be better with one random guy not being on the take.
- joshgachnang 10mo ago
  I think the odds are better if it's not a random guy who also already has a bunch of power (e.g. Bezos with his considerable influence buying up and weaponizing WaPo). I personally think that consolidation of power is a reasonable thing to prevent. I'm not sure how you could block someone like Zuckerberg who started his own new media, other than the government, which as you pointed out has its own issues.
- NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
  I'll be honest, I'm not an expert on this, and I don't have a perfect solution. I just think we should try to do something, even if it's not perfect. There are some professions with codes of conduct. Some are internal, some ar legislated (i.e. fiduciary duty for lawyers, financial advisors, etc). We also have some concepts like public utility and public interest. Maybe we should look there (again, ask the experts I'm sure there are people who study this for a living). Maybe slowly bring in duties for "public interest" related fields. Maybe at the management level. Maybe come up with ownership structures that decouple power from financial incentives (a la voting shares vs. normal shares) and impose them for such businesses. I fully agree with you that gov ownership of media would be a disaster. I'm not proposing that in any way. Just ... better ways to do it than we do today.

smileysteve 10mo ago

A post about mis-generalization seems to make a huge mis-generalization, seemingly from a lack of diversity. The author recognizes that laundromats exist, but doesn't believe that washing machines are a luxury good (his yacht example of 60% owned by the top 1% likely applies somewhere around 60% to the top 30%). This indicates the author generalizes that high density living with shared appliances don't exist or apply to a large part of the population (that density doesn't shift statistics). A few thoughts, instead of taking 340m people, you need to account for 2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure, 30%+ as high density possibly sharing at the apartment/condo building or laundromat level. A small upper 1% that outsource to services. The infamous Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans don't pay income tax quote can be really shocking when you start thinking about the average American, and the wages that they earn compared to a higher income segment you might be in.

bluGill 10mo ago
Laundromats exist, but there are 100 million according to my web search which puts his estimate in the right area even if he is off by 30 million. Most Americans would not call a washing machine a luxury good. Even in much poorer Mexico there are a lot of families living on $100/week that have a washing machine - they are an affordably luxury to many poor people.
- smileysteve 10mo ago
  If the statistical "right area" is within 30%, then 60m is similarly in the correct area. But the context is most important, are AI's worst strategies worse than 30% off because of gross generalizations?
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    Depends on the context. Sometimes I need to be correct to withing 0.0000001%. Sometimes I can be off by 500% and still be close enough.
    - deleted 10mo ago

chris_va 10mo ago

The high level question of wealth concentration from new technology is an interesting question (and probably could have been just 3 sentences, since it is unanswered). The rest of the article has some easy to read anecdotes, but it's hard to know if they are at relevant/accurate. E.g. common mistake (arguably) that I see a lot: > In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht building industry. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of muddled thinking about distribution. Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. Mega-yachts are money pits. A rich person purchasing a mega-yacht is probably the fastest way to redistribute a monetary supply. Taxing it has some benefit, but reduces the incentive to buy mega-yacht... Now, monetary supply and productivity/wealth are not exactly the same thing, but this seems like a basic error.

strken 10mo ago
I think the whole point was that mega-yachts are money (or, from the perspective of the employee, effort) pits. Those employed shipbuilders and wait staff aren't building cruise ships and they aren't serving meals on them. The time and effort that went into those tasks will never reappear. The median person is better off if the rich either invest that money, lose it to tax, or give it to charity. The money/effort gets redirected away from mega-yachts and other consumption and it has to go somewhere.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  That money often doesn't go to someplace the common person would fine more useful. A yacht made and stored outside the US is easy to hide from US taxes if you want one, if it is a status symbol you can find plenty of others, some of which are easy to make elsewhere thus moving money out of the US.

iso1631 10mo ago

> Matt Yglesias keeps telling us that America is richer than Europe because we have many more dryers Or perhaps America is poorer because they lack an outside space to hang clothes?

bluGill 10mo ago
Most Americans have space to hang clothes. They don't use it, but the space exist. Sometimes it is illegal to use that space to hang clothes, but they wouldn't even if the laws changed.
- iso1631 10mo ago
  > Sometimes it is illegal to use that space to hang clothes Ahh, land of the free Based on my knowlege of New York apartment buildings, there are shared laundry rooms, thus New York City has fewer dryers per capita than Alabama. Clearly South Dakota is richer than New York City?
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    I don't know New York. I know where I live most apartments are shared laundry rooms, but a few list washer/dryer in the apartment as a feature.
- foobarian 10mo ago
  I wouldn't relish doing that in the winter, having to work around weather, or having the day star's UV light destroy my clothes.

jrm4 10mo ago

So, this whole analysis strikes me as the worst of "economic thought?" The first bit of failure here is "equating well-offness to output," e.g. something that can be measured by GDP. Then it misses the other big deal, which is the utter weirdness caused by extreme on-paper wealth inequality, where the e.g. Elon Musk numbers reach levels of literal absurdity. Money, in a sense, doesn't matter. It's "goods and services." The big question should be, does the way we do "money" effectively help everyone trade goods and services in a reasonable way. That's the only real path to "happiness."

Taxiomato 10mo ago

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toss1 10mo ago

>>recall that central LA currently lacks the large stock of high-rise apartments that you see in cities like New York and Chicago. The author entirely overlooks that NYC and Chicago are not in earthquake-prone areas and LA is right next to a major geologic fault system. Yes, skyscrapers can be safely built to withstand earthquakes, but it tends to be at least expensive, which is counter to solving affordability issues. >>I favor a steeply progressive consumption tax. This is generally pointing in the right direction, but a progressive transaction tax on every transaction, including finance and investments would be far better. Easier to track, harder to evade, far less intrusive into peoples' lives required by income tax. and the rate and difference between rates would be so low that structuring deals to 'optimize' taxation brackets would be pointless. Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus. Make it progressive by setting tax rate tables based on transaction size, e.g., transaction <$10=0.01, <$100=0.1%, <$10k=0.2%, <$100k=0.3%, <$1MM=0.4%, =>$1MM=0.5% (plus big penalties for 'structuring' transactions to lower brackets). Not impressed with the article

bluGill 10mo ago
Sky scrappers are expensive. A single story building is the cheapest thing you can build anywhere - only when land is expensive is it worth going up instead of out. There is value in density so we build skyscrapers anyway, but for nobody is it the most economical way to get square feet.
- SecondHandTofu 10mo ago
  Land IS somewhat expensive in LA though. Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer people need cars etc.
  - 10mo ago

bluGill 10mo ago

> The whole point of being rich is to get away from every single human being that doesn’t have to be nice to you. This is false. Most rich people don't want to get away from every single human. (if they did they can find plenty of places to backpack). They want to get away from a few crazy people who stalk them.

AIorNot 10mo ago
This comment is a total non-sequitor to the topic
- bluGill 10mo ago
  That is a direct quote from the article, and thus cannot be a non-sequitor. It is used in reasoning and means the whole is standing on something false. You may decide the analysis is correct anyway, but it is fare to stop everything right there since there is a logic flaw.
cousinbryce 10mo ago
Sounds like you’ve failed to “…get away from every single human being that doesn’t have to be nice to you”
- bluGill 10mo ago
  Whatever - I don't think many rich care about getting away from people in general. Most of them don't really care, and many of them like other people in general. The point of being rich can be the luxuries you can buy, a point system, buying a better afterlife, or any of hundreds of motivations. I'm sure some care about getting away from other people, but to say that is the point is false.
throwaway173738 10mo ago
You’re refuting a straw man. Re-read what you quoted.

nancyminusone 10mo ago

>P.S. Can you even imagine 130 million washing machines? >...more than three times around the Earth on the equator... Nah, that's the wrong way to go about it. The total length of your blood vessels would also circle the earth twice, but I'm sure you'd prefer them to stay safely inside your body. If each washer is 3 feet on a side, that's 6 square feet. You could easily stack them 4 high with an ordinary forklift. So that's around 7 square miles, or just 7 sections of a standard 36 section survey township. Where I live, there's enough farmland to fit all of them within a 2 mile radius, without disrupting much (well, unless you're a farmer). You'd nearly be able to fit all the dryers too.

timerol 10mo ago
3 feet times 3 feet is 9 square feet
- nancyminusone 10mo ago
  Well that was a dumb mistake. 10.5 square miles then.

LeifCarrotson 10mo ago

> The key to higher living standards for average people is to produce lots more output, which requires more automation. Building and deploying that automation requires capital. As a result, it's largely the people who control that capital who benefit from it, not the individual workers whose productivity is increased by it. There were people who added value to a manufacturing process by being highly skilled welders (earning $30/hr) who can push MIG wire at 30 inches per minute. On a good day, they actually average 20 inches per minute OEE because they also need to load and unload the fixture, take lunch breaks, and so on. Those welders become (or are replaced by) weld-jig-operators, who can load a buffer of incoming parts, unload a buffer of completed parts, and replace emptied spools of wire, clean up the work area, and so on, while the $400k weld cell with a trio of ArcMate robots pushes 80 inches of wire per minute. Yes, that's a 4x productivity gain, but does the welder now earn $120 hour? No, the new operator now gets a pay cut back to $20/hr because you can train a replacement in a week (unlike a welder, who needs years of practice to manipulate a torch that skillfully). Meanwhile, the owner of the company profits at ~$100/hr, recoups their big capital investment after a year, and rakes in the profits after that to buy another yacht, or maybe a newspaper.

zozbot234 10mo ago
> because you can train a replacement in a week Guess what, this is a huge gain for the unskilled worker who can get trained in a week for that formerly high-skilled job. And then the capital owners are hugely incented to expand production and hire all those unskilled workers, pushing the wage floor up in the process.
mNovak 10mo ago
I agree that the worker becoming more productive due to some capital equipment generally won't see any benefit from doing so (unless it requires special skills to operate). But I think the argument is that the end consumer will eventually benefit from the increased productivity. In your example, yes, the factory owner can take their $100/hr of profit. But among the various factories, some owner might take $25 of that profit and instead undercut their competition to grow their order book. Other factories respond in kind, and the consumer is getting cheaper products.

layer8 10mo ago

> Why output is what matters Now imagine the amount of paperclips AI could make.

aidenn0 10mo ago

> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality. While this is essentially tautological, I'm not sure you can practically tax the majority of luxury consumption. Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager)[1]. All of those differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax. If we were to successfully tax all the formal luxuries (which in and of itself becomes legislative whack-a-mole), the wealthy will have a strong incentive to shift much of their luxury consumption to informal luxuries. Plus, I find all of the focusing on "wealth tax" and "luxury tax" and such rather mystifying when we have an extremely regressive income tax in the US. The low tax rate for long-term unearned income in the US, combined with the fact that borrowing against assets does not realize any of the gains, makes effective tax rates for the 99.9 percentile much lower than the 90th percentile. It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth just by ensuring the losses due to inflation and taxes exceeds investment returns at the top tax bracket. 1: Or the difference in your kid applying to a college with your name on one of the buildings versus someone else's kid applying to that school

zozbot234 10mo ago
> Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager). All of those differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax. But businesses are incented to remove the most expensive disparities, lest they impact the company's market performance. Or maybe they keep the different treatment but expect to pay the CEO less as compensation. Either way it's win-win. > It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth ... Dynastic wealth is wealth that has provably sat unspent and unconsumed for generations. It's effectively frozen in place (except that every once in a while quite a bit of it gets donated to charity in exchange for a very, very expensive name placard on a building, or something). To the extent that this reflects a spreading of good social norms around the stewarding of those assets, there's not much of a reason to want to get rid of it in the first place.
- aidenn0 10mo ago
  > Dynastic wealth is wealth that has provably sat unspent and unconsumed for generations. It's effectively frozen in place. To the extent that this reflects good social norms around the stewarding of those assets, there's not much of a reason to want to get rid of it in the first place. Wealth generates income that is used to grow more wealth and spend the balance on luxuries. Reduce the ability for it to do that and you reduce luxury consumption!