erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
24d ago
Google thinks it's the murder of Scott Amedure on The Jenny Jones Show.
The Chinese models are a few months behind the American models, and in AI, a few months is a lifetime.
Apartments are a necessarily evil but are considerably worse for human flourishing than even small houses, and if there are ways to address the failure of the housing market without building more of them, we should take them even at a significant premium, for the sake of our species' dignity.
There aren't. Pigeonhole principle; if you have housing for 1,000,000 people but 1,500,000 people want to live in the city, 500,000 of those will either be homeless or forced to live elsewhere, and the 1,000,000 winners will have to spend all their money bidding up against each other for the privilege.
Yes, houses with backyards are much nicer than apartments, all else being equal, but all else is not equal. Giving every family their own detached home and backyard is not possible. It's like trying to make sure all kids are above average. The fertility and quality of life hit from young adults not being able to afford housing is much larger than the fertility and quality hit from not having backyards. And since most people don't need a whole house to themselves, most people living in detached family housing end up becoming roommates, which is its own indignity against the human spirit.
The great-uncle comment by @The_Nybbler already covers some of the things companies would do to get around this; laying off higher-paid workers and hiring new workers at lower wages. Another likely consequence is that companies would be much less willing to give raises when times are good, because now raises are a much bigger commitment. And if a company is unwilling or unable to do these things, it might well go under because it simply is unprofitable at higher salaries.
Now, what happens to the newly unemployed workers? If they are willing to work at a lower wage, they can probably find new work soon enough, but now they have to eat the transaction cost of switching jobs; if they were willing to take lower wages in the first place, they could have just stayed with the same employer. Alternatively, if they are not willing to take lower wages, thinking themselves too good for them now that they have been employed at a higher wage, they end up in a sad imitation of Latrell Sprewell refusing a $21 million deal because "I have a family to feed", and the world has to do without their labor until they get desperate enough to change their minds.
This can all be avoided by simply letting real wages vary up and down, and the easiest way to do that is to inflate nominal wages less or more; that way, the number never goes down.
If the government is doing its job, the salaries will go down anyway, in real terms if not in nominal terms. That's why a small amount of predictable inflation is considered good for an economy; because it lets wages adjust without ever having to go down in nominal terms; you just grow some of them slower than others!
At that point, whether the job will still let you survive next year or not depends on how much your salary went up (if at all) compared to the price of other things; it is very much not guaranteed. Which is exactly the same as if the nominal wages had been allowed to go up or down without inflation; the mechanism is just hidden as a concession to human nature.
The alternative is that salaries never go down in real terms, which is actually really bad when you think about it? Solve for the equilibrium.
Most people, even often intelligent people*, approach economics with the mindset of a medieval peasant.
That is to say, they see it as a zero-sum, moralistic story. If the travelling merchant doesn't make anything but sells cloth for two ducats a yard while buying it for one ducat a yard, he's a greedy middle-man who doesn't do anything of value (although I'll still sell him my cloth because nobody else will buy it...).
I'm convinced this is the default way of thinking about things. Just as we hate the rich because he evolved as hunter-gatherers who had to share meat with our tribe-mates, we struggle to understand positive-sum interactions, prices as signals, and other essential economic concepts.
Agreed. Economics is as counterintuitive as quantum mechanics or general relativity. Except, of course, that most people have no reason to go around thinking about modern physics, but everyone must interact with the market.
Try explaining to people that wages are the price of work, and just as the price of meat must go up or down depending on whether there is shortage or a surplus of cattle, salaries should also go up or down depending on how the labor market is doing, and they will look at you like you are the villain of a fantasy novel. Hence, nominal rigidity, and the necessity of inflation.
I'm not a fan of the general impulse of 'things I value should be on the national curriculum because then other people would think like I do', I don't care about forcing kids to do art, music, literature, foreign languages etc.
But economics should absolutely be taught to children. We can't trust leaving our elites alone to understand economics since they've burned that trust on things like open borders and abolishing the police, so normal voters should understand (or at least be able to repeat as a maxim) that building houses causes house prices to go down, or that nothing in economics can be explained by 'greed'.
This would go about as well as forcing everyone to learn algebra does now. The course would be watered down until the average student could memorize enough answers to get a C without understanding the concepts, then immediately forget everything after graduation.
Maybe if you made it a general education requirement for college students, that would actually do something... although even they often fail to absorb the concepts.
erwgv3g34
27d ago
Voting used to be limited to white landowning males, which worked fine, except that inevitably some of those men saw a political opportunity in expanding the franchise to other groups in exchange for the implicit promise that they would vote for them, and after a few iterations of that game, here we are.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
And yet they were much skinnier than we are. In some sense, their diet must have been healthier than ours is; it must have lacked the orange soda.
Are you kidding me? There was a whole decade where anything to the right of Obama got deleted from Reddit and WordPress and YouTube and Twitter. Thought criminals were forced to flee to 4chan and invent alternatives planforms like Bitchute and Gab and The Motte just so we could keep talking to each other.
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