bufordsharkley

12 ms·

61.
by bufordsharkley 9y ago
George himself is extremely readable. "Social Problems", or his enormously popular "Progress and Poverty" are good introductions. If that seems a bit too much, I recommend first essay in Robert de Fremery's "Ri
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
> there is an aristocracy of heirs who own rights to expropriate surplus labor time As a Georgist, I tend to view Marxist critiques such as this as fairly superficial. We agree that something wrong is happening, but a Georgist is able to
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
We enact zoning laws with consideration to what we're being taxed to live and work in a high-demand, low-density environment. If a tax on holding onto unimproved land is nearly zero, we're very likely to implement zoning laws bann
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
I'm reminded of Jane Jacob's statement about the economics of cities: "To seek 'causes' of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes." [0
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Well, outside of some extreme cases (such as professional sports), I think you see this in a "company town", where laborers could theoretically move, but usually lack the means to do so. (And increasingly can't afford the hig
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
This is related to one fundamental question: what alternatives do workers have? If their employer is a monopolist of labor, and the laborer has no ability to move and find employment elsewhere, their employer enjoys full rein to demand wh
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Well, the classic model of how this should work is: 1) Economy sags, people have little demand to borrow money for investment 2) Interest rates are lowered to spur investment 3) Investment takes place, economy recovers 4) People are much
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
An open question is how much the transition to the "knowledge economy" is changing how we work, and how we build our communities. Communities built solely around manufacturing are suffering today, while we see soaring demand for o
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
This effect was formalized by Joseph Stiglitz 40 years ago, with his "Henry George Theorem"[0]―namely that "aggregate spending by government on public goods will increase aggregate rent based on land value (land rent) more th
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
For what it's worth, I find the "landlords" explanation here extremely compelling. In the last year, I've happened upon the works of the 19th century economist Henry George (who identified landlordism as the root cause o
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by bufordsharkley 9y ago
Which isn't really an alternate hypothesis from the four discussed in the piece: > Economists are therefore scrambling to explain the change. There are, by my count, now four main potential explanations for the mysterious slide in l
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Cracking the Mystery of Labor's Falling Share of GDP(bloomberg.com)
73 points by bufordsharkley 9y ago|111 comments
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
> "A simple pen" is a nice example, but the real interesting question is what to do about common goods like natural resources and land. This very question is what is addressed with Henry George's concept of private propert
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
Really loved Unity for its clean presentation and its emphasis on tiling-through-keyboard-shortcuts, but it was clear I was in a minority. Sad about this, but not shocked.
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
This phenomenon is what drove Henry George to write "Progress and Poverty," nearly 140 years ago. To quote from the introduction: > But just as such a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are strivi
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
It creates a trade-off between living in high-infrastructure areas (cities) and paying for the infrastructure directly or indirectly through your taxes, or living in low-infrastructure areas (rural) and saving on your taxes. A related quest
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
Most of these have to do with inefficient use of land, and ultimately can be aided with the big kahuna of fixes: a land value tax.[0] It would work to push back against restrictive zoning policies (holding costs of land go up), and would cr
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
But why is this the case? Largely because land use (powerful local zoning + low holding costs for land) incentivizes sprawl over infill. Consider cities that do better for transit by building upward. This is usually a case of a more sane
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
> The people that said you wouldn't be able to afford an apartment in overcrowded SF were dead-on right. The people who predicted widespread traffic jams were right. One doesn't need be a Malthusian to have predicted this. This
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
> Unfortunately, not everyone gets to be born into the life of an urban westerner. As a Rawlsian, I'm fixated on this very problem, but I'm drawn to solutions that work to tear down the mechanism (in short, open borders) rather
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
It's simultaneously true that infinite growth isn't feasible, and yet true that most predictions on resource depletion haven't been borne out. We can make soil more productive, find new ways of creating potable water, create
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
A true Malthusian is a dangerous thing, in my opinion, insofar as they fully claim that the only way that we can all be rich is by limiting population. It's possible, at any rate, to accept most of the correlations in this article and
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
Community radio serves this for me-- people uniting over common interests, volunteering together to keep the outfit running, and interacting in unexpected ways. I feel very fortunate to have this in my life, and really wish there were more
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
"We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing." But why do we tend to create such restrictive zoning and approval processes
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
The way this works is a Land Value Tax (LVT)[0]. The land is still held by individuals, but they pay a use fee based upon the market value of the unimproved land. It's compatible with markets, capitalism, and in fact economists call it
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
One thing to point out-- the inefficiency of Prop 13 makes it much more difficult for families to grow. As this article[0] points out, only 30% of three-bedroom households in SF have any children at all. [0] http://sf.curbed.com&
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
And importantly, only enjoyed by homeowners who got the mortgage before the benefit of the tax deduction started getting capitalized into the value of the house.
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
As a Georgist, I would say that most unearned wealth ultimately results from private ownership of natural resources (namely land). When homeowners claim valuable land and hold onto it for decades, without paying the correct market rate for
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
To help the environment, it's important to avoid sprawl. And to avoid sprawl, you need building on the intensive margin (infill) to be more attractive than building on the extensive margin (sprawl). Land-use policy without LVT preclude
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by bufordsharkley 10y ago
It's a classic story of special interests-- they're inherently more motivated than those championing the common good. There are incremental solutions towards this, such as "split level" property tax in which the rates fo

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