site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Not every capital allocation decision is beneficial. Housing in cities is famously supply-inelastic: if you increase the prices of houses by another factor ten, this will not result in much increase in the supply. If we magically prevented billionaires from investing in cities with high rents, I doubt that there would be bad consequences.

Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.

Some "capital allocation decisions" are actually better seen as consumption in disguise. When Bezos invested in Blue Origin, or Musk bought Twitter, that read to me as much as a consumption decision as some nerd buying Magic boosters. Sure, it is always possible that the cards will appreciate over time, but the real value for the buyer comes from the joy and prestige of ownership itself.

I think that it is good that people who for whatever reason are good with investing money have capital to invest, at least assuming the investments are done is broadly pro-social endeavors (which can be controlled through regulations to some degree). I do not however think that this is the only good use of money, and for example would be opposed to giving taxpayer money to successful investors so that they can invest even more.