9 ms·

The room the economy can't see

254 points by Wilsoniumite 4mo ago

RyanHamilton 4mo ago
It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ
cobbzilla 4mo ago
Volunteering is a great way to see lots of these rooms!
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  It is, but that doesn't help that room getting funded.
  - cobbzilla 4mo ago
    Volunteers fund lots of stuff! Throw them a buck or two, tell your friends, plenty of great things are community funded! If we can’t get a handout from on high it’s impossible? Have some passion! (and, realpolitik style, if you get an excited community together with some funds, it’s usually easier to get that handout to top it off!)
- _aavaa_ 4mo ago
  The article spends a good deal of time making the point that these rooms are getting more scarce since people can't afford to volunteer their time.
  - cobbzilla 4mo ago
    People below or near the poverty line can occasionally be found volunteering. I think it speaks more about what people value, how they value their time. How many people can’t afford an hour a week? An hour a month? There is almost always some unhealthy activity that takes up at least an hour of your time a month, why not substitute?
    - cobbzilla 4mo ago
      lol apparently and unironically downvoters have the most time to spare!
    - em-bee 4mo ago
      i think a big factor is also how you earn your income. if you have a badly paid but regular job and or even if you are unemployed but know that you can't find a job then you can use time when you are not working for other activities. on the other hand if you work as an uber driver or other gig job then every hour on the job counts and you are not going to volunteer time unless you are earning enough so that you feel you can afford it. how much that relates to your income depends on your lifestyle. and that also depends on what you were used to growing up. i can't think of any volunteering opportunity that only takes an hour unless it is something you can do at home or nearby. otherwise you also have to consider travel times, getting ready, etc. any activity no matter how short usually cost me a full afternoon or evening.
      - cobbzilla 3mo ago
        You can take calls for a crisis hotline from your home. There are many activities you can volunteer for short periods. If you start with a dismissive attitude it’s easy to find ways to not have time. If you start with love: “how could I help? there’s /something/ I can do, right?” then you’ll find the time. It is truly about what we value.
        em-bee 3mo ago
        i actually do a lot of volunteering, so it's not that i am looking for excuses. i just find that for anything i do, i have to be able to focus on it, and if i am struggling to make a living, then i just can't focus on anything else. because whatever i do i am thinking: i should not be spending this time here, i should be looking for work. and i am not just saying that, i am actively experiencing that right now. even while writing this comment i am thinking that i should really be looking for more work because i am not earning enough to cover expenses at the moment. and i did mention that things you can do at home are easier to volunteer for because they take less effort. so why do you think my attitude is dismissive?
smallmancontrov 4mo ago
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
- pixl97 4mo ago
  Valuable for Moloch.
PowerElectronix 4mo ago
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line). The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings. I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
- RealityVoid 4mo ago
  Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
- Zigurd 4mo ago
  You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers. When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right? The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.
kubb 4mo ago
That's the kind of space I've been missing in my youth. I love that Swedish kids have got it available to them.
mschuster91 4mo ago
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets. The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it. It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
- bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
  Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    > Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses. No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road. Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
api 4mo ago
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value. It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it. Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
- cousin_it 4mo ago
  Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized. I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    >Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.
    - cousin_it 4mo ago
ixtli 4mo ago
Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.
- Wilsoniumite 4mo ago
  In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
  - alex_suzuki 4mo ago
    This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.
    - Wilsoniumite 4mo ago
      They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one: https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsistence-work/ https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
      - alex_suzuki 4mo ago
        Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
      - kupfer 4mo ago
        On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.
alephnerd 4mo ago
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations. Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits. There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes. Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
- infecto 4mo ago
  I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer. I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
  - alephnerd 4mo ago
    Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now. HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Playing Minecraft with friends at a lan party in a social room is better than playing it at home.
  - alephnerd 4mo ago
    It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties. The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
latentframe 4mo ago
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
layer8 4mo ago
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
- derektank 4mo ago
  The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
  - layer8 4mo ago
    Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
  - atmavatar 4mo ago
    I would expect such a grant to be handled by local/city government, which should have the local knowledge you speak of.
krzat 4mo ago
Many open source efforts seem to belong to this category as well.
Davidzheng 4mo ago
Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?
- throwaway70345 4mo ago
  It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage. Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base. I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    But it has to be done by everyone at once. A single factory owner paying a higher wage doesn't see that benefit. It only works if all the factory owners do it.
phkahler 4mo ago
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
- BobbyJo 4mo ago
  Things now are completely different than 5 years ago /s
- thrance 4mo ago
  Proponents of UBI usually also suggest countermeasures to the (real) issues you pointed out.
- AndrewDucker 4mo ago
  Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
  - phkahler 4mo ago
    I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
    - AndrewDucker 4mo ago
      It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X. (I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
      - ponector 4mo ago
        There are multiple points against such comparison: 1. Minimum wage goes up - for some amount of people. Most are not feeling it as they are not on the minimum wage or not working. 2. Salary is not UBI, it is actually earned, taken from revenue.
Zigurd 4mo ago
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.
- thrance 4mo ago
  I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolutions, etc.
  - ieatcandlewax 4mo ago
    Those aren't freedoms, those are rights. Calling them freedoms is nonsensical
    - thrance 4mo ago
      They're positive freedoms (freedom to...). American political discourse usually only revolves around negative freedoms (freedom from...) but that doesn't mean the things I listed aren't freedoms.
someluccc 4mo ago
[flagged]
fzeindl 4mo ago
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain. But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
sublinear 4mo ago
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities. It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    Yeah the highest participation areas have significant poverty and lean conservative. My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571142>
  - em-bee 4mo ago
    they weren't complaining, they were expressing the expectation that their comment would be unpopular and thus downvoted a lot.
    - dredmorbius 3mo ago
      And that is explicitly what the guidelines are against. If you'd prefer an admonishment which specifically points to that, try: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213514> or <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14435528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14435528>. You can search/review others yourself with: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20downvotes%20complain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> (dang) or https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Asctb%20downvotes%20complain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> (sctb) or <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Atomhow%20downvotes%20complain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> (tomhow), with well over 100 examples in that set.
cobber2005 4mo ago
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza). [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
readgrounded 4mo ago
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Do you have a garage? Is it fully occupied by a car?
  - red-iron-pine 4mo ago
    they used to create bands in those
- armchairhacker 4mo ago
  It existed in my old town, although I think it got shut down. If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.
roenxi 4mo ago
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example. The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems. Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
- EliRivers 4mo ago
  "it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space" I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis. The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      What happened to Tornado Cash, Session, GrapheneOS and others is a soft ban on creating privacy tools.
- andrewflnr 4mo ago
vlovich123 4mo ago
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it. Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia. It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism. The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  UBI is in addition to whatever you can make from a wage and the B stands for not very high, just barely high enough to live.
  - vlovich123 4mo ago
    My point is that it doesn’t solve the room problem outlined in the post - someone who’s just relying on UBI isn’t going to be motivated to create this space because the space will exist regardless, they get UBI either way. That’s why the funding is necessary - it creates a market need through the coercion of pay. UBI will not magically incentivize self organization of social goods, only give marginally more freedom for personal goods.
    - em-bee 4mo ago
      there is no need for magic. it only takes a small part of the population that is motivated enough to get something going. education in the right direction is enough to instill that motivation.
nicbou 4mo ago
In my experience, the key element is slack. For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually. Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it. I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects. Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve. [0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
- michaelleland 4mo ago
  I'm a father of 7 children. I'm the youngest of 5 siblings and my wife is the youngest of 6 siblings. Both of our mothers had college degrees and jobs and chose to stay at home with the children, and neither of our fathers had anything other than middle-class incomes. My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing). We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
  - nicbou 4mo ago
    This is really cool! I am happy for you and your family. I don't mean to pry, but I'd love more details.
- 4mo ago
groan 4mo ago
This genre of posts should be called “the author has reached adulthood.” Not quite settled in, but no longer a clueless idiot, either.
- lukewarm707 4mo ago
  the 'adults' made the mess we are in. and refuse to fix it!
dzink 4mo ago
Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.
- grumpy_coder 4mo ago
  Unfortunately were I live... The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees. The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week. The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago) Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.
CraigJPerry 4mo ago
insta-subscribe, very well written. >> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet. There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it. But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble. Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread. And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.
goodmythical 4mo ago
Most churches I've been to have these? Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...
- jplusequalt 4mo ago
  You shouldn't need to subscribe to one groups ideas or another to have access to social spaces.
  - goodmythical 4mo ago
    Most of the churches I've been to are fairly open about the use of their spaces so long as you're not some sort of obnoxious. You don't have to BE a luthern to visit a luthern church, and that's true for the kids as well. Same for the Jehovah's, same for multi- and non-denominational churchs.
jplusequalt 4mo ago
I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell. UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale. There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  UBI would overhaul the economy, but it's not like that doesn't happen regularly, just not for the benefit of workers. It's got to be studied before being implemented on a wide scale but there's no reason to assume it's not possible. Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.
mindslight 4mo ago
The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy. Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number. That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world! Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.
- skybrian 4mo ago
  Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.
  - mindslight 4mo ago
    Sure, that is another avenue of economic erosion but I didn't focus on it because the "exempt" dynamic would seem to be the stronger dynamic. But if we actually fixed the flaws I listed, we would likely have to plug that hole of multiple jobs not counting towards the full time limit, especially if full time employment were defined as 15 hours per week (leaving plenty of time to stuff in a second or even third job in place of "visiting grandma") But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.
nekusar 4mo ago
Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago. He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism. This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name. Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.
the_sleaze_ 4mo ago
This is what religion is for, and what you refer to as THE ECONOMY is simply the hard wired human precondition stand in when you decide there is no God(s). "The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor! Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.
- hombre_fatal 4mo ago
  There should be a place for people, especially teens, to gather without a bunch of woo woo baggage. I found church incredibly isolating as a kid because we weren’t there just to be, we were there under this expectation that we were partaking in some superstition. The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.
  - the_sleaze_ 4mo ago
    I think you misunderstand, the 3rd space should be at a church. One in my community does this for teens where they just hang out and do homework after school for 2 hours.
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      It has been a few decades since I attended church, but in my teenage years they did none of this. The only time I saw the building in use was Sunday morning. Looking at their website it's hard to tell. Their calendar doesn't show any activities like that, but maybe you have to be plugged into the congregation to know. They appear to be a very left-leaning Evangelical organization now. I didn't even know there was such a thing.
Mezzie 4mo ago
One aspect of the financialization of everything/the 'economics over all' mindset that I don't see often discussed is that if you for whatever reason can't make the 'sound' financial choice, you just...drown. The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die. I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this. I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues. So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die. I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.
un-diletante 4mo ago
Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures. These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place? And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior. This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.
clapthewind 4mo ago
In India, by law, companies above a certain size are required to spend 2% of profit on social responsibility activities. So in my city, you see lots of things around adopted or funded by companies.
putzdown 4mo ago
This is a great article, and I've never seen the problem explained better. The solution doesn't make sense, though, and this is almost but not quite obvious in the article by virtue of how well it has stated the problem. The problem with basic income is that it provides people with cash but does not change the underlying supply-demand system. To get the lokal (the room) to work you needed more than cash: you needed a desire for teens to be happy and engaged, the will to help them get there, a sense of what might help them, leadership to set it up, attract them, and keep it going, and then, yes, money to pay rent. If all you provide is the money, you will get people spending more money on the usual things the economy "sees": phones, video games, amusing t-shirts. What you have around the lokal in the story is actually not merely basic income fed into the existing economy: you actually have a separate economy. The separate economy works differently because it sees differently, it has different demands, different desires. The society as a whole (as embodied here by the government, thankfully—though not all governments are predictably good-willed in this way) wants the teens to thrive, to provide for them, to pay for them, to guide them with modest leadership. Though individuals, and the regular markets, cannot think about the teenagers—they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the time, they have diffusion of responsibility, etc—the society can pool its interests and act upon its collective interest through the market. This may not be the only way to "cut across" the market, to do collectively what no set of individuals will do, but it's one way. So we definitely want to solve the problem: we want to organize, lead, preserve, and fund things that are of collective value but that the market cannot see. Giving individuals a basic income, however, doesn't accomplish that. I wish it did, but it doesn't. It puts the money into the usual demand centers—individuals needing to pay rent and transportation costs and go on dates and so forth—that live within the "blind" economy.
cameldrv 4mo ago
Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here. I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone. It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  see also: "Bowling Alone"
Seabiscuit 4mo ago
The article doesn't mention of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which explored pretty much the same idea, a.k.a. the value of the 'room', (which for Putnam was 'social capital'), and its rapid decline. Bowling Alone was published in 2000, looking back to 1950, and noted the massive, synchronous decline of civic participation in pretty much everything non-work-related across American society. Every kind of gentle, recurrent, voluntary activity you can imagine was on a pretty steep decline even before the smartphone or widespread adoption of the Internet
JohnMakin 4mo ago
It almost gets it. These positive externalities are supposed to be paid from the owners of capital, primarily via tax. This is how it very successfully worked for quite some time. However, most western societies have decided in the last few decades to believe two things - 1) The government and elected representatives (and thus, voters) cannot be trusted with the allocation of capital spent on social welfare and contradictorily, 2) The government and elected representatives can be trusted with the allocation of capital when it comes to the market and the owners of capital Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.
bitfis 4mo ago
At least we have the first trillionair
Asooka 4mo ago
This sounds like a gaming club. A small one, but a gaming club. Those exist, we have them all over. You pay for them in a variety of ways, in this case the way being forced seizure of wealth aka taxes. Other ways are via profit from sales of consumables (what the article alludes to) or membership fees. In all cases it is the parents that pay for them. It is absolutely possible for the market to build a non-predatory gaming club, but I concede it is easier when you can just get a government grant. It is entirely possible nobody in Stockholm can run a gaming room as a profitable business. Profitable businesses are hard even when they are simple. The rest of the article can basically be summed up with "work takes too much time and pays too little", which is absolutely true. I am not sure what the jab at stay at home moms or grandparents who help with childcare is supposed to be. Probably some other communist drivel. Grandma absolutely did not do unpaid childcare, she was insistent she had to teach us right and also got tons of labour and money from my parents. If the exchanges of money and labour between parents and grandparents in the context of childcare were measured, it would probably double the nation's GDP.
duxup 4mo ago
I like that article. One thing I notice is that very busy people, are often busy by choice. Yes they have work, but they're not slaves to working those extra hours... they choose to pick up that laptop at home because it is there. Folks after school, their kids are busy, because they signed the kid up for a dozen things. Not to say some people aren't super stuck in a cycle, the working poor with multiple jobs, I used to do that and it was exhausting. That's still a problem. But even people with choices seem to choose to be busy.
ergl 4mo ago
The market has been creeping into more and more facets of our lives, with delirious results: social networks are the market mediating family and friendship, dating apps are the market mediating meeting strangers, etc. I wouldn't expect that the answer to these problems would be letting the market mediate even more aspects of our lives.
robocat 4mo ago
Favours, status, time, attention, information, morals, desires: Individuals seem to run on invisible currencies, not money. Earning and spending money does influence our decisions, but to me most people seem to have other invisible drives. Even businesses have goodwill: a $ valuation of many non-financial values. I haven't done economics at university: is utility and externalities the only words that covers that concept?

254 points by Wilsoniumite 4mo ago

It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ

cobbzilla 4mo ago

Volunteering is a great way to see lots of these rooms!

mschuster91 4mo ago
It is, but that doesn't help that room getting funded.
- cobbzilla 4mo ago
  Volunteers fund lots of stuff! Throw them a buck or two, tell your friends, plenty of great things are community funded! If we can’t get a handout from on high it’s impossible? Have some passion! (and, realpolitik style, if you get an excited community together with some funds, it’s usually easier to get that handout to top it off!)
_aavaa_ 4mo ago
The article spends a good deal of time making the point that these rooms are getting more scarce since people can't afford to volunteer their time.
- cobbzilla 4mo ago
  People below or near the poverty line can occasionally be found volunteering. I think it speaks more about what people value, how they value their time. How many people can’t afford an hour a week? An hour a month? There is almost always some unhealthy activity that takes up at least an hour of your time a month, why not substitute?
  - cobbzilla 4mo ago
    lol apparently and unironically downvoters have the most time to spare!
  - em-bee 4mo ago
    i think a big factor is also how you earn your income. if you have a badly paid but regular job and or even if you are unemployed but know that you can't find a job then you can use time when you are not working for other activities. on the other hand if you work as an uber driver or other gig job then every hour on the job counts and you are not going to volunteer time unless you are earning enough so that you feel you can afford it. how much that relates to your income depends on your lifestyle. and that also depends on what you were used to growing up. i can't think of any volunteering opportunity that only takes an hour unless it is something you can do at home or nearby. otherwise you also have to consider travel times, getting ready, etc. any activity no matter how short usually cost me a full afternoon or evening.
    - cobbzilla 3mo ago
      You can take calls for a crisis hotline from your home. There are many activities you can volunteer for short periods. If you start with a dismissive attitude it’s easy to find ways to not have time. If you start with love: “how could I help? there’s /something/ I can do, right?” then you’ll find the time. It is truly about what we value.
      - em-bee 3mo ago
        i actually do a lot of volunteering, so it's not that i am looking for excuses. i just find that for anything i do, i have to be able to focus on it, and if i am struggling to make a living, then i just can't focus on anything else. because whatever i do i am thinking: i should not be spending this time here, i should be looking for work. and i am not just saying that, i am actively experiencing that right now. even while writing this comment i am thinking that i should really be looking for more work because i am not earning enough to cover expenses at the moment. and i did mention that things you can do at home are easier to volunteer for because they take less effort. so why do you think my attitude is dismissive?

smallmancontrov 4mo ago

> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"

pixl97 4mo ago
Valuable for Moloch.

PowerElectronix 4mo ago

It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line). The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings. I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.

RealityVoid 4mo ago
Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
Zigurd 4mo ago
You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
inigyou 4mo ago
It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers. When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.
pixl97 4mo ago
>The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right? The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.

kubb 4mo ago

That's the kind of space I've been missing in my youth. I love that Swedish kids have got it available to them.

mschuster91 4mo ago

Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets. The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it. It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.

bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  > Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better.. Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses. No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road. Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.

api 4mo ago

Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value. It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it. Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.

cousin_it 4mo ago
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized. I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.
  - cousin_it 4mo ago

ixtli 4mo ago

Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.

Wilsoniumite 4mo ago
In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
- alex_suzuki 4mo ago
  This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.
  - Wilsoniumite 4mo ago
    They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one: https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsistence-work/ https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
    - alex_suzuki 4mo ago
      Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
    - kupfer 4mo ago
      On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.

alephnerd 4mo ago

How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations. Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits. There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes. Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.

infecto 4mo ago
I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer. I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now. HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
inigyou 4mo ago
Playing Minecraft with friends at a lan party in a social room is better than playing it at home.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties. The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.

latentframe 4mo ago

This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize

layer8 4mo ago

We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.

derektank 4mo ago
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
- layer8 4mo ago
  Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
- atmavatar 4mo ago
  I would expect such a grant to be handled by local/city government, which should have the local knowledge you speak of.

krzat 4mo ago

Many open source efforts seem to belong to this category as well.

Davidzheng 4mo ago

Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?

throwaway70345 4mo ago
It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage. Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base. I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  But it has to be done by everyone at once. A single factory owner paying a higher wage doesn't see that benefit. It only works if all the factory owners do it.

phkahler 4mo ago

>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.

BobbyJo 4mo ago
Things now are completely different than 5 years ago /s
thrance 4mo ago
Proponents of UBI usually also suggest countermeasures to the (real) issues you pointed out.
AndrewDucker 4mo ago
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
- phkahler 4mo ago
  I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
  - AndrewDucker 4mo ago
    It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X. (I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
    - ponector 4mo ago
      There are multiple points against such comparison: 1. Minimum wage goes up - for some amount of people. Most are not feeling it as they are not on the minimum wage or not working. 2. Salary is not UBI, it is actually earned, taken from revenue.

Zigurd 4mo ago

Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.

thrance 4mo ago
I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolutions, etc.
- ieatcandlewax 4mo ago
  Those aren't freedoms, those are rights. Calling them freedoms is nonsensical
  - thrance 4mo ago
    They're positive freedoms (freedom to...). American political discourse usually only revolves around negative freedoms (freedom from...) but that doesn't mean the things I listed aren't freedoms.

someluccc 4mo ago

[flagged]

fzeindl 4mo ago

Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain. But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?

sublinear 4mo ago

I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.

alephnerd 4mo ago
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities. It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  Yeah the highest participation areas have significant poverty and lean conservative. My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)
dredmorbius 4mo ago
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571142>
- em-bee 4mo ago
  they weren't complaining, they were expressing the expectation that their comment would be unpopular and thus downvoted a lot.
  - dredmorbius 3mo ago
    And that is explicitly what the guidelines are against. If you'd prefer an admonishment which specifically points to that, try: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213514> or <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14435528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14435528>. You can search/review others yourself with: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20downvotes%20complain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> (dang) or https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Asctb%20downvotes%20complain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> (sctb) or <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Atomhow%20downvotes%20complain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> (tomhow), with well over 100 examples in that set.

cobber2005 4mo ago

This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza). [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

readgrounded 4mo ago

As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.

inigyou 4mo ago
Do you have a garage? Is it fully occupied by a car?
- red-iron-pine 4mo ago
  they used to create bands in those
armchairhacker 4mo ago
It existed in my old town, although I think it got shut down. If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.

roenxi 4mo ago

I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example. The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems. Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.

EliRivers 4mo ago
"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space" I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
- pixl97 4mo ago
  Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis. The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    What happened to Tornado Cash, Session, GrapheneOS and others is a soft ban on creating privacy tools.
andrewflnr 4mo ago

vlovich123 4mo ago

One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it. Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia. It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism. The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.

inigyou 4mo ago
UBI is in addition to whatever you can make from a wage and the B stands for not very high, just barely high enough to live.
- vlovich123 4mo ago
  My point is that it doesn’t solve the room problem outlined in the post - someone who’s just relying on UBI isn’t going to be motivated to create this space because the space will exist regardless, they get UBI either way. That’s why the funding is necessary - it creates a market need through the coercion of pay. UBI will not magically incentivize self organization of social goods, only give marginally more freedom for personal goods.
  - em-bee 4mo ago
    there is no need for magic. it only takes a small part of the population that is motivated enough to get something going. education in the right direction is enough to instill that motivation.

nicbou 4mo ago

In my experience, the key element is slack. For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually. Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it. I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects. Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve. [0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

michaelleland 4mo ago
I'm a father of 7 children. I'm the youngest of 5 siblings and my wife is the youngest of 6 siblings. Both of our mothers had college degrees and jobs and chose to stay at home with the children, and neither of our fathers had anything other than middle-class incomes. My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing). We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
- nicbou 4mo ago
  This is really cool! I am happy for you and your family. I don't mean to pry, but I'd love more details.
4mo ago

groan 4mo ago

This genre of posts should be called “the author has reached adulthood.” Not quite settled in, but no longer a clueless idiot, either.

lukewarm707 4mo ago
the 'adults' made the mess we are in. and refuse to fix it!

dzink 4mo ago

Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.

grumpy_coder 4mo ago
Unfortunately were I live... The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees. The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week. The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago) Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.

CraigJPerry 4mo ago

insta-subscribe, very well written. >> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet. There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it. But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble. Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread. And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.

goodmythical 4mo ago

Most churches I've been to have these? Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...

jplusequalt 4mo ago
You shouldn't need to subscribe to one groups ideas or another to have access to social spaces.
- goodmythical 4mo ago
  Most of the churches I've been to are fairly open about the use of their spaces so long as you're not some sort of obnoxious. You don't have to BE a luthern to visit a luthern church, and that's true for the kids as well. Same for the Jehovah's, same for multi- and non-denominational churchs.

jplusequalt 4mo ago

I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell. UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale. There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.

inigyou 4mo ago
UBI would overhaul the economy, but it's not like that doesn't happen regularly, just not for the benefit of workers. It's got to be studied before being implemented on a wide scale but there's no reason to assume it's not possible. Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.

mindslight 4mo ago

The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy. Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number. That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world! Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.

skybrian 4mo ago
Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.
- mindslight 4mo ago
  Sure, that is another avenue of economic erosion but I didn't focus on it because the "exempt" dynamic would seem to be the stronger dynamic. But if we actually fixed the flaws I listed, we would likely have to plug that hole of multiple jobs not counting towards the full time limit, especially if full time employment were defined as 15 hours per week (leaving plenty of time to stuff in a second or even third job in place of "visiting grandma") But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.

nekusar 4mo ago

Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago. He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism. This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name. Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.

the_sleaze_ 4mo ago

This is what religion is for, and what you refer to as THE ECONOMY is simply the hard wired human precondition stand in when you decide there is no God(s). "The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor! Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.

hombre_fatal 4mo ago
There should be a place for people, especially teens, to gather without a bunch of woo woo baggage. I found church incredibly isolating as a kid because we weren’t there just to be, we were there under this expectation that we were partaking in some superstition. The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.
- the_sleaze_ 4mo ago
  I think you misunderstand, the 3rd space should be at a church. One in my community does this for teens where they just hang out and do homework after school for 2 hours.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    It has been a few decades since I attended church, but in my teenage years they did none of this. The only time I saw the building in use was Sunday morning. Looking at their website it's hard to tell. Their calendar doesn't show any activities like that, but maybe you have to be plugged into the congregation to know. They appear to be a very left-leaning Evangelical organization now. I didn't even know there was such a thing.

Mezzie 4mo ago

One aspect of the financialization of everything/the 'economics over all' mindset that I don't see often discussed is that if you for whatever reason can't make the 'sound' financial choice, you just...drown. The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die. I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this. I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues. So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die. I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.

un-diletante 4mo ago

Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures. These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place? And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior. This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.

clapthewind 4mo ago

In India, by law, companies above a certain size are required to spend 2% of profit on social responsibility activities. So in my city, you see lots of things around adopted or funded by companies.

putzdown 4mo ago

This is a great article, and I've never seen the problem explained better. The solution doesn't make sense, though, and this is almost but not quite obvious in the article by virtue of how well it has stated the problem. The problem with basic income is that it provides people with cash but does not change the underlying supply-demand system. To get the lokal (the room) to work you needed more than cash: you needed a desire for teens to be happy and engaged, the will to help them get there, a sense of what might help them, leadership to set it up, attract them, and keep it going, and then, yes, money to pay rent. If all you provide is the money, you will get people spending more money on the usual things the economy "sees": phones, video games, amusing t-shirts. What you have around the lokal in the story is actually not merely basic income fed into the existing economy: you actually have a separate economy. The separate economy works differently because it sees differently, it has different demands, different desires. The society as a whole (as embodied here by the government, thankfully—though not all governments are predictably good-willed in this way) wants the teens to thrive, to provide for them, to pay for them, to guide them with modest leadership. Though individuals, and the regular markets, cannot think about the teenagers—they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the time, they have diffusion of responsibility, etc—the society can pool its interests and act upon its collective interest through the market. This may not be the only way to "cut across" the market, to do collectively what no set of individuals will do, but it's one way. So we definitely want to solve the problem: we want to organize, lead, preserve, and fund things that are of collective value but that the market cannot see. Giving individuals a basic income, however, doesn't accomplish that. I wish it did, but it doesn't. It puts the money into the usual demand centers—individuals needing to pay rent and transportation costs and go on dates and so forth—that live within the "blind" economy.

cameldrv 4mo ago

Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here. I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone. It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.

red-iron-pine 4mo ago
see also: "Bowling Alone"

Seabiscuit 4mo ago

The article doesn't mention of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which explored pretty much the same idea, a.k.a. the value of the 'room', (which for Putnam was 'social capital'), and its rapid decline. Bowling Alone was published in 2000, looking back to 1950, and noted the massive, synchronous decline of civic participation in pretty much everything non-work-related across American society. Every kind of gentle, recurrent, voluntary activity you can imagine was on a pretty steep decline even before the smartphone or widespread adoption of the Internet

JohnMakin 4mo ago

It almost gets it. These positive externalities are supposed to be paid from the owners of capital, primarily via tax. This is how it very successfully worked for quite some time. However, most western societies have decided in the last few decades to believe two things - 1) The government and elected representatives (and thus, voters) cannot be trusted with the allocation of capital spent on social welfare and contradictorily, 2) The government and elected representatives can be trusted with the allocation of capital when it comes to the market and the owners of capital Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.

bitfis 4mo ago

At least we have the first trillionair

Asooka 4mo ago

This sounds like a gaming club. A small one, but a gaming club. Those exist, we have them all over. You pay for them in a variety of ways, in this case the way being forced seizure of wealth aka taxes. Other ways are via profit from sales of consumables (what the article alludes to) or membership fees. In all cases it is the parents that pay for them. It is absolutely possible for the market to build a non-predatory gaming club, but I concede it is easier when you can just get a government grant. It is entirely possible nobody in Stockholm can run a gaming room as a profitable business. Profitable businesses are hard even when they are simple. The rest of the article can basically be summed up with "work takes too much time and pays too little", which is absolutely true. I am not sure what the jab at stay at home moms or grandparents who help with childcare is supposed to be. Probably some other communist drivel. Grandma absolutely did not do unpaid childcare, she was insistent she had to teach us right and also got tons of labour and money from my parents. If the exchanges of money and labour between parents and grandparents in the context of childcare were measured, it would probably double the nation's GDP.

duxup 4mo ago

I like that article. One thing I notice is that very busy people, are often busy by choice. Yes they have work, but they're not slaves to working those extra hours... they choose to pick up that laptop at home because it is there. Folks after school, their kids are busy, because they signed the kid up for a dozen things. Not to say some people aren't super stuck in a cycle, the working poor with multiple jobs, I used to do that and it was exhausting. That's still a problem. But even people with choices seem to choose to be busy.

ergl 4mo ago

The market has been creeping into more and more facets of our lives, with delirious results: social networks are the market mediating family and friendship, dating apps are the market mediating meeting strangers, etc. I wouldn't expect that the answer to these problems would be letting the market mediate even more aspects of our lives.

robocat 4mo ago

Favours, status, time, attention, information, morals, desires: Individuals seem to run on invisible currencies, not money. Earning and spending money does influence our decisions, but to me most people seem to have other invisible drives. Even businesses have goodwill: a $ valuation of many non-financial values. I haven't done economics at university: is utility and externalities the only words that covers that concept?