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Great response. Thanks for following up.
I think one disconnect here is that I don't entirely understand why you're so focused on the "average wealth" (so to speak) of a hypothetical city/town. I don't really care if my town's GDP (can substitute GDP with income, or net tax receipts, or whatever) per capita drops a small amount while the overall GDP goes up. The overall "line go up" benefits me greatly as the demand for the services my job provides will increase, and the supply of shit I can spend my money on will also increase. Also the amount of money I spend on housing should decrease, which means I can spend more money on funkopops or whatever. Also also ideally the provision of city services should both increase in scope and quality due to economies of scale.
That all being said yes, there is absolutely a line that if you fill up a city with impoverished people, it will go to shit. Detroit is I think a good example of this. Although the mechanism of action here was different, it had the same result of what happens when your tax base is of extremely low quality. And even then, after the exogenous shocks, it is bouncing back now I understand, kind of showing that cities are profound economic engines thanks in large part due to their scale alone. And also how lower residential and commercial rents present a much more vibrant ecosystem for capitalism to thrive.
I absolutely accept that, but I am not convinced on putting it so high we're including the "median taxpayer" so to speak.
I think if the median/average adult was a net economic drain, industrial society/economy would not work. The whole of human civilization works because adults create more value than they consume, which results in the ever expanding pool of infrastructure, knowledge, and productive capacity that we've been piling on top of itself for the last 10,000 years.
This may be true, given Western governments all love to run infinite deficits. This is however a top-level society problem. If our society is unsustainable, we need to fix that (it is, we do). But I don't see what that has to do with making building easier and cheaper. I would even posit that basically any fix to Western society's issues basically mandatorily has to include making building shit easier to help us un-fuck everything.
These people are stupid and don't understand how anything works. They are literally the "no take, only throw" meme.
This is a really interesting question I don't have a great answer to.
I definitely don't believe "Connestoga Charlies are all net contributors, too". As a resident of Toronto, sympathy for the homeless is at rock-bottom, even amongst the libs I inhabit this city with.
I was skeptical because tying YIMBYism to homeless people is 1) a pretty unfair comparison (I don't want to spam low income housing, I just want the free market to work) and 2) deeply ironic given homelessness is robustly connected to the fact we don't build enough housing.
I assume the metric I'm looking for (imagining? Inventing?) is "net economic contribution" which would be some blend of tax collection vs social spending, and some type of dollar/economic gain for the additional stimulation of the economy via demand for goods/services, and the additional stimulation of the economy from using one's labour to produce more goods/services for others. Then subtract any crime/chaos/suffering that one inflicts on others and society. Connestoga Charlies are obviously deeply negative here.
Instinctively, I think the line for when this "net economic contribution" is positive is actually pretty low. Presumably somewhere around "working near full time at minimum wage job".
While the laptop class (lawyers, accountants, consultants, finance, tech, etc) capture a huge % of the economic value of society, they obviously are not the primary drivers of the massive prosperity we enjoy. They instead exist because of it.
I say this as one of the laptop class, while my skills are economically valuable, they obviously contribute very little to the production of shoes or carrots, which is what our wealth ultimately actually comes from. My job would be worthless in a society that didn't have legions of people who put shingles on rooves or whatever (as that society would be starving and falling into anarchy), even if I contribute an order of magnitude more tax dollars than they do.
Ultimately, I think the "anti-YIMBY" people (I am not even sure if you are?) need to present their solution, not just nitpick YIMBYs. Because the status-quo of western construction/the ability to build shit in response to human needs is profoundly and fundamentally broken. This is causing massive issues across society. The status quo is unstainable, full stop (unless you disagree, but that's a different argument).
So given the status quo is fucked, and if you don't like the idea of "let people build things on their land that other people want/need", what do you propose to do about it?
The laptop class includes the software engineers who generate most of the marginal value which makes Americans richer than Europoors.
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