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Notes -
On The Poverty Equilibrium vs NIBMYism
Big Yud recently posted an interesting thought, The Poverty Equilibrium. The most brutal possible summary is: despite an insane amount of technological progress over the last centuries, some people still toil all day in miserable jobs to provide for some urgent need and it's not clear why this is happening and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.
I have a not quite neat rebuttal. Maybe call it a partial agonist rebuttal: poverty kind of persists because of NIMBYism, but NIMBYism also prevents more poverty.
Lets take my town of Eugene Oregon as an example. Eugene has become a desirable place to live the last 10 years. It has moderate weather, rarely snowing but also rarely hitting the 100s. Is very bike friendly and it exhibits Portlandia levels of absurdity regarding organic and local food and products. You can exercise outdoors all year round, comfortably, and stunning natural beauty is a stones throw away. You're also surrounded by sensual hippies and violent crime is below average for the US, though there is the usual west coast share of scary homelessness and menacing.
Naturally, as a near-coastal elite city, building is heavily restricted and housing inventory is low so prices are high and home ownership is unreachable if you only make minimum wage ($14.70/hour). There are constant calls to build more affordable housing, but instead all that seems to get built are luxury apartments that don't alleviate housing shortages, regularly outraging the /r/Eugene subreddit.
EAs cry incessantly that NIMBYism is to blame for this state of affairs and if we would Just Fucking Build the cost of housing would plummet and gripping poverty would be solved.
One digression. Eugene has, wedged immediately against it, a town called Springfield. The quality of life is nearly identical, you have access to all of the luxuries I said above but maybe add 10 minutes of drive time. It's less bike friendly and the public spaces are a bit less nice. Alternatively, the police do enforce laws harder. Anyway, the cost of this almost-but-not-quite Eugene town is that housing is about 30% cheaper, into the range of comfortable if you make minimum wage. However, nobody wants to live there. Instead people treat living in Eugene like some human right and Springfield Oregon may as well be Springfield Missouri.
But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer. But it can also be argued in hand waving qualitative fashion: the population of the town is about 175,000. If we built 100,000 tiny houses that cost $400/month, the cost of housing would certainly plummet but the quality of life in town would collapse. Traffic, which barely exists here, would become awful, the public spaces would be full of much more homeless menacing, crime and littering would increase and the public services would be stretched thinner.
Aside from tragedy and also usual bad decisions that contribute to poverty (addiction, bad with money), poverty persists because it's actually pretty hard for some people to leave their town if it becomes unaffordable (family obligations, can't find a job in cheaper towns). Similarly, there are not robust ways to accommodate more poor people without making the entire town poorer. I can see how Kowloon Walled City can accommodate high population density but living there seems pretty unappealing compared to quiet quaint little Eugene. Could a 100x increase in utility fix this? Probably! If building was radically cheaper, I could imagine beautiful Sim City style arcologies that have these peaceful pockets of small towns that can support millions of people. But until then, NIMBYism is good actually and prevents poverty from spreading.
If you want Kowloon Walled City in America, on the other hand, what's stopping us? Plenty of room in Nevada. We can build a tech bro metropolis around it. Hell, I'd visit. I'd probably even buy an apartment there that's vacant 50 weeks a year.
I’m not following… absent some additional assumptions (e.g., that the median income in your town is initially >= top 10% income for the US), how does inviting people who make less than the top 10% make your town poorer? The part about the top 10% of taxpayers providing 70% of tax receipts seems irrelevant.
sorry the median income in Eugene is irrelevant to this. I just meant to say everyone who you invite to your town that makes less than $100k consumes more in taxes than they pay
You have to account for all the surplus value they generate that gets captured by their employers, landlords, and uncompetitive or exploitative local industries like food.
I have a hard time appreciating this POV. It sounds pleasant but how is this quantified?
Example: a family of 4 moves to my town, attracted by affordable housing. Dad works full-time delivering pallets of sugar water for $20/hour. Mom picks up DoorDash shifts while kids are at
daycareschool for some extra bucks. So, lets say their household income is $45,000/year.Their two kids consume approximately $6000/month in public school funds alone, or $72,000/year. That's just going by their kids in school.
Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school, to say nothing of all of their other socialized costs (roads, police, fire, sanitation, etc)? Am I looking through the wrong lens here? Because I can't see how society is ever ahead in this scenario.
Yes. While this may be the price tag, there is no way in hell it takes $6000 per month to teach a single child. For this money you could literally hire a governess for each child (well, +/- the sudden spike in demand for teachers), and operating at scale is supposed to make things cheaper.
It's not reasonable to substitute some idealized, hyper efficient cost for what education actually costs. Could it be cheaper? Obviously. But $6k a month (or whatever) is what it currently actually costs.
As a side note, you are right about "for that much money you could ___", and that's why taxes are collected at gunpoint.
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Relax. It's only $3000 month per kid. It's $6000 per month for two kids.
Isn't that still a decent salary for a governess?
Yes, I didn't like public school to begin with but learning how ludicrously expensive it actually is is what radicalized me on homeschooling.
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