7 ms·

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

epistasis 5mo ago
I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
- majormajor 5mo ago
  > I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US? Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
  - majormajor 5mo ago
    A bit more specifics, to follow up: GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed. Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life? If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago
  >I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is. I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    I think the direction goes the other way, people are NIMBYs so they come up with reasons to justify why it's OK to block other people from living close to them. The idea "oh but a richer person than me benefits" becomes the reason for blocking housing, eliding the fact that a poorer person benefits, the true thing the NIMBYs try to prevent. At least, that's true in my area. People that already have housing, are comfortable, start to rail against all this economic growth and say that we should block all change to buildings to prevent it. Anybody who is actually serious about providing more opportunity to those with less realized that we need more housing, where the jobs are. It's the homeowners and well-established that pursue degrowth and austerity.
    - trimethylpurine 5mo ago
      When they build apartments to increase the density the prices don't go down on the dense units. The builder sets the price and he is his own competition because an appraisal requires just 3 comps. He has 250 comps in his pocket because he built and set their price. The only thing it does to be anti "NIMBY" is aid in unchecked price hikes on "low cost" high density housing that none of us can afford.
- xboxnolifes 5mo ago
  I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%. A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    I see people who are comfortable and prioritize their needs, and ignore those with less, as if they don't matter and don't affect them. They cover up this disdain for those with less by trying to focus on the 0.1%, but stopping that apartment building doesn't stop the 0.1% from making money, they just invest in something else, so any concern about trying to stop the 0.1% is clearly fake.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- folkrav 5mo ago
  Growth only lessens their power if it benefits those without, which, even by the most optimistic takes, hasn't really happened since at least the 80s.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.
simonw 5mo ago
> increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity Why not? (I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)
- majormajor 5mo ago
  Being charitable here (though... when called a "dunce" it's hard sometimes to want to be charitable), the statement would be perfectly correct if slightly reworded to: "increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity" It would just help with some of them. But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that. (In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
  Abundance only solves scarcity if scarcity is the problem, but the actual problem is economic exclusion, which will always be able to outpace abundance because abundance has physical limits while exclusion does not.
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    Scarcity of housing is a severe problem, one that has caused the economic exclusion by preventing new people from entering the locations with lots of jobs. It really is housing and scarcity at the bottom of all the other symptoms we see.
azan_ 5mo ago
Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?
- materielle 5mo ago
  What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?
  - nostrebored 5mo ago
    i think the reason for your deluge of downvotes is that a society the promotes more things becoming affordable is one that prioritizes stability. universal access to housing, healthcare, and education that people want is only possible in a society that is immensely productive.
    - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
      Exactly. Those big ticket items that people are pissed off about are "things" too.
  - AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
    Welcome to the forever dissapointed club. The society you desire can’t exist unfortunately as much as I’ve thought it could and worked for it
    - tonyedgecombe 5mo ago
      There’s no utopia but that doesn’t mean you can’t bend society in one direction or another.
      - AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
        Nobody is talking about utopia Society has always (yes always) “bent” toward dominating hierarchies because individuals want the stability of being part of the dominating group.
adgjlsfhk1 5mo ago
The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apartments drop a ton.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  Building adequate housing also brings down the medium cost, by a lot. At worst, it prevents the median house from rising in price. Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density. Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    I lost money on the houses I've bought. This is because I factor in the cost of the mortgage, property taxes, real estate commissions, maintenance, insurance, etc. Houses are lousy investments.
    - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
      You may be the worst real estate investor I've ever heard of. If housing was actually a lousy investment Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't have real estate holdings and they're both in the residential market in a big way.
WarmWash 5mo ago
I guess I'll be the one to point out that the richest American demographic is the 50-95%. And the ~75-85% are the actual backbone of the economy, with their relentless spending. If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa. The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...
- ckw 5mo ago
  From GPT-5.5 via mostly FRED (e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M): Group Wealth Income/yr Spending/yr 50–95% ~$75–80T ~$11–13T ~$9–11T 95%+ ~$95–105T ~$7–9T ~$5–7T 75–85% ~$18–22T ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8T
wnc3141 5mo ago
There are extractive and inclusive economic institutions. democracies tend to guarantee the latter, we are rapidly pursuing the former.
- ambicapter 5mo ago
  I don’t know about that, I feel like one of the issues when one person-one vote democracies is that it means the greater population demographic (aka the Boomers) hold a relatively higher proportion of the vote and thus can majority rule everyone else.
  - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
    The mistake you're making here is in the assumption that voters have any meaningful input on policy. Given the overwhelming majority of policy at both the state and federal level is drafted by lobbyists this assumption seems questionable at best.
    - danaris 5mo ago
      But that's a feature of oligarchies more than it is of democracies.
      - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
        Evidence suggests the US has been a de facto oligarchy since at least 2014: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - wnc3141 5mo ago
      I think the designation of the US as a flawed democracy is fair. We have free elections, yet (particularly at higher levels of government) rarely see popular mandates translate to governance.
paulddraper 5mo ago
Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices. That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism. Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.
- forgetfreeman 5mo ago
  "Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).
  - paulddraper 5mo ago
    You’re saying that prices are bounded by construction costs. Sure, as with every other good. But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.
    - jjav 5mo ago
      > But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs. How much? Searching a bit suggests that net profit margin in housing industry is about 8.7% Consindering an investor can get ~3.75% in zero risk T-bills without lifting a shovel, that's about an extra 5% net profit to get involved in building housing. Which isn't nothing, it's a decent profit. But I also wouldn't call extra 5% a huge difference.
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    > In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification). This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up. Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) social housing builders smooth out the business cycle, because new housing is needed just as much when at the downturn of the business cycle as at the top, so it greatly helps provide stable employment and a stable workforce for housing construction, greatly improving housing. But the idea that new idea drives up housing prices in any way is, at best, a fiction. It's mostly a lie from landlords and homeowners to try to justify their continued extraction of profits from their idleness.
bottle_roket 5mo ago
Despite however Sam Seder or Hasan are seething about abundance, Ezra is right about needing to build more of everything. Yes there are also large problems around money and power that need to be resolved, but we do physically need more places to live in the areas people want to live.

epistasis 5mo ago

I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.

majormajor 5mo ago
> I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US? Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
- majormajor 5mo ago
  A bit more specifics, to follow up: GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed. Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life? If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
>I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is. I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  I think the direction goes the other way, people are NIMBYs so they come up with reasons to justify why it's OK to block other people from living close to them. The idea "oh but a richer person than me benefits" becomes the reason for blocking housing, eliding the fact that a poorer person benefits, the true thing the NIMBYs try to prevent. At least, that's true in my area. People that already have housing, are comfortable, start to rail against all this economic growth and say that we should block all change to buildings to prevent it. Anybody who is actually serious about providing more opportunity to those with less realized that we need more housing, where the jobs are. It's the homeowners and well-established that pursue degrowth and austerity.
  - trimethylpurine 5mo ago
    When they build apartments to increase the density the prices don't go down on the dense units. The builder sets the price and he is his own competition because an appraisal requires just 3 comps. He has 250 comps in his pocket because he built and set their price. The only thing it does to be anti "NIMBY" is aid in unchecked price hikes on "low cost" high density housing that none of us can afford.
xboxnolifes 5mo ago
I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%. A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  I see people who are comfortable and prioritize their needs, and ignore those with less, as if they don't matter and don't affect them. They cover up this disdain for those with less by trying to focus on the 0.1%, but stopping that apartment building doesn't stop the 0.1% from making money, they just invest in something else, so any concern about trying to stop the 0.1% is clearly fake.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  [flagged]
folkrav 5mo ago
Growth only lessens their power if it benefits those without, which, even by the most optimistic takes, hasn't really happened since at least the 80s.
WalterBright 5mo ago
> aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.

simonw 5mo ago

> increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity Why not? (I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)

majormajor 5mo ago
Being charitable here (though... when called a "dunce" it's hard sometimes to want to be charitable), the statement would be perfectly correct if slightly reworded to: "increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity" It would just help with some of them. But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that. (In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
smallmancontrov 5mo ago
Abundance only solves scarcity if scarcity is the problem, but the actual problem is economic exclusion, which will always be able to outpace abundance because abundance has physical limits while exclusion does not.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  Scarcity of housing is a severe problem, one that has caused the economic exclusion by preventing new people from entering the locations with lots of jobs. It really is housing and scarcity at the bottom of all the other symptoms we see.

azan_ 5mo ago

Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?

materielle 5mo ago
What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?
- nostrebored 5mo ago
  i think the reason for your deluge of downvotes is that a society the promotes more things becoming affordable is one that prioritizes stability. universal access to housing, healthcare, and education that people want is only possible in a society that is immensely productive.
  - cucumber3732842 5mo ago
    Exactly. Those big ticket items that people are pissed off about are "things" too.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
  Welcome to the forever dissapointed club. The society you desire can’t exist unfortunately as much as I’ve thought it could and worked for it
  - tonyedgecombe 5mo ago
    There’s no utopia but that doesn’t mean you can’t bend society in one direction or another.
    - AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
      Nobody is talking about utopia Society has always (yes always) “bent” toward dominating hierarchies because individuals want the stability of being part of the dominating group.

adgjlsfhk1 5mo ago

The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apartments drop a ton.

bombcar 5mo ago
This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.
epistasis 5mo ago
Building adequate housing also brings down the medium cost, by a lot. At worst, it prevents the median house from rising in price. Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density. Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  I lost money on the houses I've bought. This is because I factor in the cost of the mortgage, property taxes, real estate commissions, maintenance, insurance, etc. Houses are lousy investments.
  - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
    You may be the worst real estate investor I've ever heard of. If housing was actually a lousy investment Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't have real estate holdings and they're both in the residential market in a big way.

WarmWash 5mo ago

I guess I'll be the one to point out that the richest American demographic is the 50-95%. And the ~75-85% are the actual backbone of the economy, with their relentless spending. If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa. The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...

ckw 5mo ago
From GPT-5.5 via mostly FRED (e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M): Group Wealth Income/yr Spending/yr 50–95% ~$75–80T ~$11–13T ~$9–11T 95%+ ~$95–105T ~$7–9T ~$5–7T 75–85% ~$18–22T ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8T

wnc3141 5mo ago

There are extractive and inclusive economic institutions. democracies tend to guarantee the latter, we are rapidly pursuing the former.

ambicapter 5mo ago
I don’t know about that, I feel like one of the issues when one person-one vote democracies is that it means the greater population demographic (aka the Boomers) hold a relatively higher proportion of the vote and thus can majority rule everyone else.
- forgetfreeman 5mo ago
  The mistake you're making here is in the assumption that voters have any meaningful input on policy. Given the overwhelming majority of policy at both the state and federal level is drafted by lobbyists this assumption seems questionable at best.
  - danaris 5mo ago
    But that's a feature of oligarchies more than it is of democracies.
    - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
      Evidence suggests the US has been a de facto oligarchy since at least 2014: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - wnc3141 5mo ago
    I think the designation of the US as a flawed democracy is fair. We have free elections, yet (particularly at higher levels of government) rarely see popular mandates translate to governance.

paulddraper 5mo ago

Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices. That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism. Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.

forgetfreeman 5mo ago
"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).
- paulddraper 5mo ago
  You’re saying that prices are bounded by construction costs. Sure, as with every other good. But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.
  - jjav 5mo ago
    > But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs. How much? Searching a bit suggests that net profit margin in housing industry is about 8.7% Consindering an investor can get ~3.75% in zero risk T-bills without lifting a shovel, that's about an extra 5% net profit to get involved in building housing. Which isn't nothing, it's a decent profit. But I also wouldn't call extra 5% a huge difference.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  > In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification). This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up. Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) social housing builders smooth out the business cycle, because new housing is needed just as much when at the downturn of the business cycle as at the top, so it greatly helps provide stable employment and a stable workforce for housing construction, greatly improving housing. But the idea that new idea drives up housing prices in any way is, at best, a fiction. It's mostly a lie from landlords and homeowners to try to justify their continued extraction of profits from their idleness.

bottle_roket 5mo ago

Despite however Sam Seder or Hasan are seething about abundance, Ezra is right about needing to build more of everything. Yes there are also large problems around money and power that need to be resolved, but we do physically need more places to live in the areas people want to live.