8 ms·

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

by 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.
kubb 4mo ago
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in... I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
  - Rygian 4mo ago
    > I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective. That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Zoning codes have some uses, doesn't mean they're still net positive value. Maybe the current situation is so bad that letting a pig farm or a coal power plant be build right in the middle of a residential neighborhood is actually a better tradeoff than whatever we have now. In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.
      - em-bee 4mo ago
        i don't know if this is the case everywhere in europe but i understand that at least in germany instead of zoning the local government approves the purpose of each building individually. so instead of deciding this is a commercial zone, they decide how many shops and businesses they allow in that area, and what kind of businesses they are. and once a building has a specific business use, then it can't easily be changed. so in effect that is very fine grained zoning. this is as flexible as the people in the government who make the decisions.
clickety_clack 4mo ago
An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.
- cousin_it 4mo ago
  Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless. Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    > There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless. I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it. Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
    - cousin_it 4mo ago
      You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom. Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up. That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
infecto 4mo ago
Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.
- multjoy 4mo ago
  What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space. >t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
  - infecto 4mo ago
    I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization. The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article. Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
    - frameset 4mo ago
      > The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.
      - infecto 4mo ago
jstummbillig 4mo ago
I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks. And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.
- em-bee 4mo ago
  the market is not spending that money. the community/goverment is.
  - jstummbillig 4mo ago
    How is that not a market, as long as we are voting?
    - em-bee 3mo ago
      good question. i actually agree with you. but free market is defined as "without government intervention", and some people defend that rigorously. i found this article where government involvement in a public parks fail: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentalism.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentali... driving that point home. personally i believe for every story in that article where the government failed or did worse than private owners we can find just as many stories where private owners failed to act in the public interest and only government was there to support the public. this is not a question of the system, but of the motivation of the people involved. even some examples in the article only work because government set the rules that empowered the people to act against bad actors in the first place. the article claims that government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits and i would counter that that is broadly not true in many places because people do expect the government to act in their interest and not doing so can and will backfire. even in a country like china where the government is more top down. but i digress. so yeah, i agree that government and people are market participants. but i just had this argument in another thread where someone insists that i am a non-interested party in commercial property dealings if i am not a tenant or owner, while i kept arguing that as a person living in the city my interests are affected too if a property stays empty and therefore it's only right that the government gets involved.
svnt 4mo ago
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
- throwaway98797 4mo ago
  you are so wrong. this is not ai.
  - svnt 4mo ago
    Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak. > Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
    - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
      Watching trust in online content of any kind disintegrate in realtime due to AI in a forum that on balance breathlessly touts AI is surreal.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
        You're conflating different things here. You would have to look very hard on HN to find someone who "breathlessly touts" the idea of publishing AI-generated blogposts under your own name.
        forgetfreeman 4mo ago
doctorpangloss 4mo ago
another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.
- em-bee 4mo ago
  a pure market economy would never allow for the existence of a public park. they are on valuable land, cost a lot of money but don't make any profit at all.
pjc50 4mo ago
Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.
armchairhacker 4mo ago
The market may be performing at a local maximum, if kids without third spaces grow up unproductive.
zeristor 4mo ago
We had youth clubs where I live when I grew up, but it never crossed my mind to go to them unfortunately I thought they’d be hostile places.

by ixtli 4mo ago

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.

kubb 4mo ago

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

bluGill 4mo ago
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in... I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
- Rygian 4mo ago
  > I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective. That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Zoning codes have some uses, doesn't mean they're still net positive value. Maybe the current situation is so bad that letting a pig farm or a coal power plant be build right in the middle of a residential neighborhood is actually a better tradeoff than whatever we have now. In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.
    - em-bee 4mo ago
      i don't know if this is the case everywhere in europe but i understand that at least in germany instead of zoning the local government approves the purpose of each building individually. so instead of deciding this is a commercial zone, they decide how many shops and businesses they allow in that area, and what kind of businesses they are. and once a building has a specific business use, then it can't easily be changed. so in effect that is very fine grained zoning. this is as flexible as the people in the government who make the decisions.

clickety_clack 4mo ago

An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.

cousin_it 4mo ago
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless. Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  > There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless. I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it. Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
  - cousin_it 4mo ago
    You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom. Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up. That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

infecto 4mo ago

Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.

multjoy 4mo ago
What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space. >t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
- infecto 4mo ago
  I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization. The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article. Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
  - frameset 4mo ago
    > The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.
    - infecto 4mo ago

jstummbillig 4mo ago

I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks. And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.

em-bee 4mo ago
the market is not spending that money. the community/goverment is.
- jstummbillig 4mo ago
  How is that not a market, as long as we are voting?
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    good question. i actually agree with you. but free market is defined as "without government intervention", and some people defend that rigorously. i found this article where government involvement in a public parks fail: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentalism.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentali... driving that point home. personally i believe for every story in that article where the government failed or did worse than private owners we can find just as many stories where private owners failed to act in the public interest and only government was there to support the public. this is not a question of the system, but of the motivation of the people involved. even some examples in the article only work because government set the rules that empowered the people to act against bad actors in the first place. the article claims that government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits and i would counter that that is broadly not true in many places because people do expect the government to act in their interest and not doing so can and will backfire. even in a country like china where the government is more top down. but i digress. so yeah, i agree that government and people are market participants. but i just had this argument in another thread where someone insists that i am a non-interested party in commercial property dealings if i am not a tenant or owner, while i kept arguing that as a person living in the city my interests are affected too if a property stays empty and therefore it's only right that the government gets involved.

svnt 4mo ago

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

throwaway98797 4mo ago
you are so wrong. this is not ai.
- svnt 4mo ago
  Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak. > Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
  - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
    Watching trust in online content of any kind disintegrate in realtime due to AI in a forum that on balance breathlessly touts AI is surreal.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
      You're conflating different things here. You would have to look very hard on HN to find someone who "breathlessly touts" the idea of publishing AI-generated blogposts under your own name.
      - forgetfreeman 4mo ago

doctorpangloss 4mo ago

another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.

em-bee 4mo ago
a pure market economy would never allow for the existence of a public park. they are on valuable land, cost a lot of money but don't make any profit at all.

pjc50 4mo ago

Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.

armchairhacker 4mo ago

The market may be performing at a local maximum, if kids without third spaces grow up unproductive.

zeristor 4mo ago

We had youth clubs where I live when I grew up, but it never crossed my mind to go to them unfortunately I thought they’d be hostile places.