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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 wrote a comment expressing some confusion about what point you're trying to make. Then I deleted it and read Yudkowsky's Tweet and things are much clearer. I only say that to point that your comment is very confusing out of context and I don't think you've done a good job of summarizing his argument.
His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance. He specifically mentions people having to grovel and smile all day at work.
What I think this gets wrong is that people do have the power to avoid those jobs. If you don't like faking a smile at a customer, you can work in a warehouse or on a construction site. If you don't like having a boss, you can freelance in many different fields. You can work as a taxi driver. You can find a nicer boss.
These jobs are also not that different than how people lived in the past. Most people didn't live on their own farms, working for themselves. They usually worked on a farm owned by someone else, or they worked as a servant. Some people even worked in towns and dealt with customers.
So we can observe how people trade off these things and see how much they value them. And it turns out that most people put up with a lot of stuff that seems awful so that they can live in bigger houses and own nicer cars. Not everyone does this. Lots of people value their freedom enough to work low-paying jobs that offer flexibility.
As for your argument that NIMBYism prevents more poverty, I don't agree. When given the choice, people tend to move to really big densely populated cities. They have a choice, so if their quality of life were worse in the city, they wouldn't move there. Yes, some things are worse there. We are not yet so rich that you don't have to make your life worse in some way that poor people in the past didn't have to deal with, but it's still an overall increase in the quality of life, despite the traffic congestion and annoying people.
Consider that you can at any time go join an Amish community and live like you're in the 18th century, but with a few conveniences of the modern world. But almost no one chooses to do this.
I don't believe that this is in fact true; they don't take converts.
IIRC they do, but it's rare and takes a substantial time commitment
Also some communities are substantially more open to it than others. What I'd be curious to know is what marriage prospects look like for converts.
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