Still think TITNC3: Return of the Iceberg was peak

ya i guess...i feel like i know a fair amount of people from college and in my working life that like their careers and their sense of purpose (even ones with office jobs) though maybe they like them just enough to appear to like them, unlike me lol

 

I mean...yes? I don't see many realistic solutions to high housing prices beyond young people moving to places that are *not* on their most-desired list because they're affordable.

I want to be clear: The following is economic, NOT political.

Houses are commodities. You can't regulate them cheaper the same way you can't regulate any other commodity cheaper. We have gobs of regulations for healthcare and it's an expensive mess. The reasons for this are twofold and fairly simple: First, In highly regulated environments, firms find it more profitable to compete in efficiency of regulatory compliance rather than efficiency of production (this is the problem with your local hospital). Second, scarcity applies to all physical goods whether we like it or not - housing supply is X, demand is Y, and if those two are drastically out of balance pricing is going to swing hard towards one extreme or the other. That is what's going on now - housing construction was woefully insufficient to keep up with population growth over the last decade and it's starting to get acute.

There are other theorized options, but they don't work. Price controls? If you say item X can't cost more than $100 and someone out there is willing to pay $1000 for one, they simply buy 10x. Price controls + limited supply = rapid onset of shortages. This is why low-income housing assistance programs that are government run have wait lists that are literally YEARS long.

Taxing non-owner occupied homes heavily? Please. Landlording is a business and taxation of any business is simply a cost that gets passed on to the end consumer in the form of higher prices, so this is a great way to push rents even higher.

The best shot at making housing cheaper is the usual: Have supply outrun demand. There is no substitute for abundance. We have so much fucking corn in this country they don't know what to do with it. There's corn juice in your gas, everything is sweetened with corn syrup, we're using it for animal feed for livestock that...aren't really biologically intended to eat corn. And it's cheeeaaaaap. Wal-Mart can sell you 12oz of it frozen for a dollar, profitably. That covers all their costs of production and distribution and then some. That's what happens when supply overruns demand, and if you want housing to cost less that's the direction we need to move.

TLDR; Make houses more like corn.

 

10 people should not control more capital than 60% of the rest of the population. Until we as a society figure out how to deal with that, we're going to continue to have the same problems.

 

subsidize the shit out of it, got it.

 

We might need to continue this via DM, I'm sure the mods will let us know if that's the case. But pray tell: Why *shouldn't* 10 people control more capital than 60% of the rest of the population? Legitimate question.

 

Because it's clearly not working lol. It's just obviously not working. Unless you've got your head so far stuck in the sand that you still think it's 1958, it's just. not. working.

 

You're not wrong.

If the government guaranteed a purchase price paid to the builder for every house built, regardless of whether they found a buyer, that is largely the result you would get. That's how corn works - the FedGov says "We will pay you $X for every ton you produce that no one else will buy."

The economic incentive that creates? Produce as much corn as you can regardless of market conditions.

 

That is not an answer. *What* is not working? Define the problem.

 

If the .gov has to pay farmers to produce corn when there's no demand for it, that's a failure of the system.

 

I don't want to get banned again. The answer to that is, "a lot"

 

That depends on what the goal is.

Corn subsidies were originally implemented for essentially one general reason: To ensure stable food production capacity over time as a matter of national security. Commodity prices tend to be volatile. It's hard to run a farm if your revenue/budget swings 40% from year to year and it's hard to keep a society stable and purposeful if there are famines.

So the government isn't interested in corn, per se, they're interested in a reliably high level of farm production over time. Corn is just what they happen to get.

 

DM me. I firmly believe these are important conversations.

 

The easiest answer (under capitalism) would be to let the corn farmers fail until more viable crops emerged to fill market demands.

 

Telegram chat, do we want to let him into the freeforall?

@Iwilltaco @Boyk1182 @Caboose117 @TreeFortRichard @GarlicFarts @cartter469

@theesotericone is too cool for school, so he's not there

 

That's the most pure example of capitalist theory, yes, but purity of theory is (again) not the goal. A stable, productive, peaceful society is the goal. And at times, raw, unalloyed theory provokes an emotional response that disrupts those goals. Famine is again the easy example. People who have nothing to eat give a fiddler's fuck about how closely the laws in their system are to theoretical purity.

 

I'm not sure if we're on the same side or not at this point. We're both using a lot of multi-syllabic words and pretty decent sentence structure, but I'm paying attention to this with about 6 beers down and a video game going on my main monitor.

 

I think about it less in terms of "sides" and more in terms of "economic reality" and "popular fallacies". There are things known to be true in economics and a great many more things that people *believe* to be true in economics because some celebrity/politician/cause/ideology they like has sold it to them.

I enjoy debunking the popular fallacies. And I think it's beneficial for adherents of them to have them challenged.

 

The issue with housing in the US isn't lack of incentive to build. It's lack of labor to build the homes. I swing a hammer for a living and I promise you we'd build 3 more homes a year if we could find 5 more guys that know what they are doing. The simple fact is the skilled labor pool is shrinking just as fast as the supply chain. It ain't corn. lol

 

I agree. My personal theory is that this is the long tail of the last 50 years of talking as though the trades are for losers and every kid needs to go to college. It was a giant societal mistake and the chickens are just now getting home to roost. Sort of. I mean not really. They can't afford a house. They're roosting in their parents' basement.

The end result, however, is the same: Supply of housing is not keeping up with demand.

 

Pay the other hammer swingers more? You're not a hammer swinger, you're basically a project manager, and you're good at what you do. If you need labor to swing hammers and measure boards, pay the rate to attract people to do that and teach them on the job.

You build houses for the rich fucks. Charge them an extra $10k up front and they won't even care.