dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
But we don't have to get this absurd
Why did you get this absurd then? Kind of feels like you started this off with a nice strawman to anchor on a certain tone.
"Oh you want to build housing? What if it was a shanty town?!?!?!? Anyway let's talk about this."
Because there's two debates we can have.
- Is it even possible to have a line where adding people below it makes the town richer or poorer?
- Oh wait actually of course there is, now lets just debate over where the line is
If I don't include the absurd Connestoga huts example people get lost in believing that everyone you add to a town that's not a homeless alcoholic like Million Dollar Murray enhances it with their unique specialness. But it's pretty clear even just poor people that aren't mentally ill and are simply of modest means would also make it poorer. If you accept that, then you should be open to the idea that the line might be higher than "Connestoga Charlies" and it may in fact be people of median means.
A quick google tells me that NYC spends $36,293 per student per year which is 91% above the national average. That's $3000 a month at the highest end. Also not entirely sure why we're focusing on educational costs specifically here.
Now look up the national average. It is almost always an enormous amount of cost per household with kids that is almost certainly not paid by the median household.
The point of mentioning this is to give an example of how even modest families that aren't blatantly poor or problematic are more costly than the revenues they directly produce. You should be thinking "fuck, these hard working people who pay their taxes and aren't an obvious drain on society are actually a net drain on society" (at least if we look at direct receipts/expenses).
Your argument seems to ignore the fact that NYC, SF, Chicago, LA, London, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Ruhr corridor, etc are all massive economic engines and the most productive and prosperous places in all of human civilization.
I do. But at least these places in the US were built over centuries over a variety of different economic and political climates. Lets talk about today. In case we haven't noticed, NYC isn't going out of its way to build housing that people earning $70,000/year median income can afford ("market rate" bros in shambles). If you go to any town or city's subreddit where some new development is approved you find rage that these are not anywhere close to affordable and appear to just be catering to the affluent.
I doubt the city council has economists explicitly standing up showing slide decks with a line between dead weight citizen and productive contributor near the top, but they are clearly internalizing this on some level.
You completely neglect the fact that more people = more demand for stuff and more people to work at jobs to supply that stuff = more 1%s who own the new businesses that supply the stuff so even if you want to fixate on the progressive tax brackets you'll get more of that too. Plus more 10%ers to be accountants and lawyers to support the new businesses, etc
How do we look at it? What tools do we have to measure this? This just seems like a hand-wavey way of smuggling in "Connestoga Charlies are all net contributors, too!" :hugging_face: but you were skeptical of me even bringing that type of person up at all so I assume you believe, again, there's a line somewhere. Where is it?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I mean... it's kind of the best explanation that fits.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
My basic math argument is: the marginal elasticity is sufficiently small, and the existing equilibrium is sufficiently far from public service collapse, that marginal changes should not produce a catastrophic phase transition.
Let's say for the sake of argument that sounds fine, but does this make a dent in housing affordability? I'm not sure the people arguing for build build build aren't imagining they're solving the problem of housing is so fucking expensive.
I keep thinking there's a NoTrueYIMBY fallacy.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I'm actually not sure this is correct. The steel-man case for YIMBIsm is for market rate new construction, not incentivizing a bunch of Connestoga huts.
I didn't say YIMBYism was about building lower income housing.
I've been enjoying asking basic math questions to destroy dearly held beliefs and I would like to continue. This one requires more intuition than cold basic math though, but it's in the same ballpark.
Let's talk about housing. Housing's so fucking expensive. Especially in desirable places! YIMBYs (or maybe abundance democrats) argue we should build more housing. A lot more. But what kind of housing? Who are we trying to help?
Well. Take a town of 150k people. A one bedroom in a decent part of mine is approaching $1600 a month and inventory is also frustratingly low across the board. Before we get to my actual point lets focus on an absurd toy non-solution first. Let's build 1,000,000 Connestoga huts across town and charge $450 a month in rent. This eliminates a lot of housing pressure but anyone but the most hardcore libertarian would recoil in horror at the thought because it would mean the town would be flooded with poor single people. Per capita tax revenue would plummet while per capita demand on public services would likely increase. Traffic would explode. Parks would be overrun with trash. Police would respond to calls by lottery. This would turn the town into a nightmare.
But we don't have to get this absurd! My contention is, because of progressive taxation, public services are diminished even if you build housing that the median income family can afford!
Looking at federal income tax, the top 1% pay almost 50% in federal income tax. The top 10% pay about 75%. State and local income taxes are structured in similar progressive style. What about sales tax? More tax is paid by people who spend more, and things that are considered essential (like food and cheaper clothes) are usually exempt. Property tax? Lots with higher assessed value and luxuries are taxed at higher rates. Public service spending is carried by the affluent.
For another intuitive look at this, a family with two kids in public school will consume $3000-7500 per month(!) in state expenditure. Public education costs alone dwarf the entirety of taxes most families pay (of which only a small amount is even earmarked for education).
Not just education. The Medicare and Medicaid we all know kicks in at the federal poverty line, but the thresholds for some kind of subsidies are high enough that a family can earn as much as $85,000 in a city like NYC and still qualify for some assistance.
This means every municipality has an economic incentive to refuse newcomers that aren't making potentially 90%ile household income. This means sure, build housing, but only 90%ile housing, or become poorer.
I would like to be wrong about this! It's frightening to think of every newcomer to your town as making it per capita poorer unless they're very affluent!
One weakness in this rationale is we don't have a solid accounting of all of the transfers. E.g. if 90% of education was funded through federal and state revenues, you could imagine purpose building a town just to have a lot of schools so that people with small kids move to it and pull funds from the rest of the country and state. But I think that number is more like 60% and a lot of the "state" funds are likely a matter of appropriation and will be distributed ~right back to where they came from.
I'm kind of surprised nobody else is pointing this out! Am I hitting on some truth neither side really cares to acknowledge because it doesn't support their favorite platitudes or am I just smart enough at economics to twist myself into a gnarly retarded knot?
EDIT: oh! one argument that I've heard from a grimacing YIMBY is that he is forced to admit I am correct, but that's why we can't do this on a local level. Instead we must mandate more housing be built on a nationwide basis (e.g. a federal #NoZoneZone authoritarian order) so any one town or city would be protected from all of the poor not affluent people rushing to it at once and ruining it. This seems like a solution but I am still not convinced I am describing a true real and local deficiency.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
adding proof of work tests for bots (Anubis) might be in our future
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I'm aware. I still don't think it's all that unfair to have fun with "blood boys" imagery when we're talking about the guy who sounds like a Metal Gear Solid villain.
Again, I say this as someone who kind of likes him! I'd actually like to have thought of half of the cyberpunk things he's invested in, or had my shit together enough to apply to be a Thiel fellow.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I was riffing off the blood boys thing primarily!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead),
I would think there'd be no difference, ideally.
If there is a difference I would expect it's because the flow control heuristic on a single stream is a bit wrong and not properly saturating your link. That, or by opening multiple streams you are recruiting more resources on the remote end to satisfying you (e.g. it's a distributed system and each stream hits a different data center)
Mostly I would Google it ask ChatGPT to Google it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I kind of like Thiel, but you have a point. If it came out in five years that Peter Thiel had been abducting wayward teenage boys and keeping them in a lovingly accurate recreation of a 13th-century Burgundian dungeon under his mansion, I’d be mildly surprised but not shocked.
Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.
Speaking of which, why is Marc Andreseen in the running to be the Antichrist again? I feel like I missed something. If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...
I am pretty pessimistic that even the median earner is tax positive (pays more than they cost) and because of progressive taxation cities that incentive anything less than above the 90%ile to relocate become per capita tax revenue poorer.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
Just cracked open Verner Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The hook was he has fun insights on how a civilization deals with software that's thousands of years old.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
Neat. And I'll be sure to remind my city council that the Connestoga villages they built for the homeless aren't code compliant.
Some degenerate case where a cute town of 150k goes crazy building Connestoga hut villages and a million single people move in that are attracted by the $500/month rent
Traffic goes from easy to abysmal.
All public parks overrun with trash and dirtbags.
Average tax revenue per person craters so police and other services become unavailable.
People paying all of the taxes move away.
Town basically becomes a refugee camp.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
They do in my state, which has a high minimum wage. And is where I hear them campaigning about unionizing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
I wonder if "build more housing!" is the "decriminalize drugs!" of the latest generation and once we finally kick that into high gear we'll reap a bunch of unintended side effects that are horrible but nobody wanted to think about at the time.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
It really just sounds like they want a minimum wage increase so that barista served coffees cost $20. But that has other problems.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
Starbucks used to be a well regarded employer. I think what changed was the macroeconomic conditions. They went from being a novel third place coffee house with charming exposed duct work and chill vibe to being kind of a place that serves something you can get at five other stores in the vicinity and they want you out the door ASAP.
Perhaps they can be blamed for not having a monopoly on the chill coffee shop vibe forever, but the fact remains most coffee shops don't make much money. No barista anywhere is buying a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
After tariffs I don't think I can handle becoming an expert on rare earth metals this year too. I'll just go to production with your opinion.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1mo ago
To be clear I'm not saying the CEO of Starbucks earned his pay. That's a separate topic. I'm saying it really has nothing do with how much baristas are being paid. The localized economics of the individual Starbucks location matter much more and the union, which presumably wants to improve pay for baristas, is barking up the wrong tree by making the conversation about the CEO's pay. The reason baristas aren't paid more is because the work they're doing is not that valuable, and no amount of collective bargaining will make value spontaneously appear.
I am not saying you cannot criticize the CEO's pay package. I'm simply saying his high pay is not at any realistic expense of the rank and file employee. It's irrelevant to the economics of the Starbucks barista's local monkeysphere. You may as well be complaining that athletes get paid too much for playing sportsball.
No.
Those people are obviously problematic looking enough that it's not even worth debating. I mean some people will debate it but that's not interesting to me.
The point of my post is to advance the premise that even (e.g.) well-meaning white families with jobs who follow the law and don't have high medical burden might also be social dead weight.
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