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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35577 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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It seems to me a lot of the issues the US is going through stem from the fact the US hasn't had a proper crisis since the Great Depression. A good crisis that wipes the slate clean by destroying existing debts and wealth would fix a lot of things:

  • property prices and the appreciation assumption

  • student loans

  • intergenerational wealth gaps

  • social security spending

All of these things can be fixed if the stock market takes a nosedive and the dollar loses 90% of its value. In addition, it will make American exports extremely competitive, so the recovery should be relatively quick; also, this will hurt the PRC more than it hurts the US.

  • -12

dollar loses 90% of its value

Over what period? If we were to look at the value of a dollar in 1930, or 1970, todays dollar buys much less.

It should be obvious that I meant rapid inflation, say, over less than a year.

The serious version of this post is the work of Mancur Olson, whose most layman-accessible book is the posthumously published Power and Prosperity.

The middle part of the book (which is largely a summary of his earlier academic work) explains how special interests organise in any sufficiently long-lived regime that isn't anarchy (which Olson refers to as rule by roving bandits) or despotism (rule by a stationary bandit). The key point is that the process takes time - it involves forming bonds of trust between people who are professional rivals in their day jobs, collectively agreeing (usually informally, without the possibility of government enforcement) to spend resources on the public-for-the-people-in-the-interest-group good of power-seeking activity, and institution-building to actually do it. So any regime that has been place for a long time without a clean-out of special interests will become sclerotic.

Olson specifically calls out the poor economic performance of the UK in the post-WW2 era as an example. Most countries had experienced either the Great Depression or WW2 as crises leading to the formation of a new regime which could ignore most of the old special interests. The UK "won" both crises (we mitigated the impact of the Depression with expansionary monetary policy leading to a housebuilding boom, and avoided invasion during WW2) so the elite was able to return to the status quo ante without an effective reset. (Olson died before the relative success of the UK in the post-Thatcher era became visible, but if you think that Thatcher carried out a partial purge of special interests, then this is a point of confirmation).

The last part of the book is about the economic institutions of Stalinism and the way it deals with the tend to sclerosis. Olson explains why the size and complexity of the Soviet state meant that it was beyond one-man control, and thus inevitably tended towards nomenklatura oligarchy, and thus to a regime which allowed the organisation of special interests. The solution to this problem was purges, which not only removed existing informal special interest organisations, but also cultivated a sense of paranoia among the nomenklatura which made forming new ones difficult. By the time Brezhnev came to power, the system needed purging but the top leader was too weak to purge it, so the Soviet Union became increasingly sclerotic until it collapsed.

In any case, the signs of special interest driven sclerosis in modern America are obvious - the most relevant special interests being suburban NIMBYs, public-employee unions, the military-industrial complex and the for-profit healthcare industry. I don't think a 90% stock market dive would be enough to purge them - it would take something at least as revolution-like as the New Deal. Note that all these groups work on both sides of the partisan divide and culture war (if you count cop unions as part of the public-employee complex) - this means that even if Ron de Santis is the competent populist bomb-thrower that Trump ultimately turned out not to be, neither he nor a left-wing equivalent is likely to solve the problem through normal partisan politics.

I've had similar views in the past, and seeing all these replies made me reconsider that.

But I think there's still a there here; we're compelled by the idea of cataclysm, of armageddon, of burning it all down or hoping the system collapses under its own weight/contradictions/sins/bullshit because it turns civilization on its head and makes all your problems with it disappear. No taxes, no HOAs, no slimeball politicians, no 9-to-5...apocalyptic visions are just a mass-psychological acknowledgement that our systems are built on literal paper, on intangible principles and agreements.

Destroying wealth is bad.

Furthermore, the problem isn't with the US economy but the political end of things. It's bad laws, bad media, bad education, bad governance, bad foreign policy, bad redistribution. Taking a hacksaw to the one healthy part of the patient is not going to solve the problem.

Some theorize that bad laws, media, education, and all those other things stem precisely from our wealth. Sure, maybe getting rid of the wealth won't get rid of those things, but all the problems we have are rooted in our current material context. Change the context, change everything.

This reads to me like a nation-scale version of the broken window fallacy.

I don't know if some sort of epic crisis would be beneficial or not, but on a broader level I think its fairly obvious that leisure and abundance makes people unhappy. We are built for the struggle, not the relaxing. Our minds are constantly scanning for threats and opportunities. We form coalitions to fight enemies that don't exist. We amplify small differences to supply the enemies we are subconsciously certain must exist somewhere. We're evolved for challenges we almost never face. Its not a coincidence our most coddled classed of humans are also our most miserable. We're a violent species with no one to kill to solve our problems. The culture 'war' is a luxury conflict.

Would you prefer a crisis to wipe the slate clean or a concerted effort to clear out the rot?

I would prefer fully automated luxury gay space communism, but it's as unreachable as a concerted effort to clear out the rot when "the rot" holds all the cards.

This feels only deserving of low effort responses since it proposes burning everything down and then ???? Everything is better. Without using any theory or explanation.

Seen these arguments before. And they don’t work and this is particularly poorly explained. But even the manifesto versions just turn into long Joker type rants.

A crisis doesn't necessarily mean burning everything down. It could mean a realignment of the global economy - to one where the US is no longer a consumer and borrower, but a producer and creditor. Thing is that this is probably not that necessary. The state of the US economy is actually fairly good compared to Europe or the UK (which is a disaster). China is catching up, but it's difficult to envision Americans accepting a huge drop in living standards and consumption.

The UK economy isn't doing that badly. We have full employment despite importing close to a million immigrants in the last year.

We're not doing as well as the US, but that's true of basically every large country.

That’s not what he proposed.

And to not be a consumer/debtor nation we would need to give up reserve dollar status

100% agree with this. Especially love that “social security spending” was thrown in there. Somehow an economic collapse is being proposed as a solution rather than fixing SS by raising the tax and/or raising retirement age.

This will never, ever happen, social security will just get bailed out through money printing over and over again. It’s probably small potatoes though compared to the government bailing out municipal debt.

Ya fixed SS payments are a bit of a problem for a deflationary environment.

My favorite version of these arguments is when it comes from deep-value, distress investors types, Baupost group. They don’t have a market edge but like to sit in cash and want the fed to let it burn occassionally so they can buy cheap and then they want the fed to reflate after they’ve bought. Keeps them from needing to dig into structurally fucked shit like commercial real estate

The macro is particularly bad here as he asks for a 90% falls in the dollar. If you cause a debt deflation spirals the dollars gonna boom.

Don’t increase tax on employment. Increase the retirement age and decrease the payouts (eg impose some means testing).

Right, my point was more that social security has many levers that can be used to increase its long term stability. Levers that would seemingly be easier to handle than an economic collapse.

The price of property in Manhattan famously didn't move much per square foot between the 1890s and 1950 or so in absolute dollar terms, and cumulative inflation was over 150% across the same period. People lived entire long lives with NYC real estate as an asset in serious real-term decline (and note this was well before the grime and squalor of the 1970s and 1980s).

The source you link to starts in the 1910s, not 1890s. It also indicates that prices rose substantially during "the grime and squalor of the 1970s and 1980s" -- much faster than inflation -- and that prices have been negative since the 2000s. And, prices rose 140 pct from the 30s to the 50s, so the only period in which prices did not move in absolute dollar terms was the 1910s to 1940s.

Of course, the source has limited value because it gives data only for entire decades. We have no idea whether the prices cited are those from the beginning of the decade, the end, some cherry picked point, or even if the answer is different for different decades.

Finally, Manhattan prices are irrelevant. Real estate prices in the US barely exceeded inflation from 1970 to 2012] and most of the increase since then has been driven by low interest rates; monthly mortgage payments did not rise after 2012.

OK, but why are you suddenly referring to rent, when your initial comment was about asset prices? Your source mentions both rent and purchase price per square foot, but you cited it only for the latter.

And using the range 1970 to 2012 seems weird, given that the latter date marks the absolute trough of the deepest real estate crash in many decades.

Yes, but only because it was the result of the biggest real estate bubble in decades. I chose 2012 because my point is that current high prices are a function of the last ten years, and that that has been driven in part by low interest rates. We can choose another date if you'd like. The source I linked to says that the real estate price index was 60.8 in 1970 and peaked at 162.6 in 2022. This calculator indicates that that is an increase of just under 2 percent per year.

I wish people would specify land when talking about real estate and not housing. Interest rate changes do not effect construction costs - that’s labor and materials etc. But areas with scarce land rates do effect peoples ability to pay or more specifically you could run a land rent dcf to find the npv of land.

Low rates do not flow into npv in places like Houston. They just build a bigger city. It’s basically just construction costs in Houston, so if it costs 500k to build a house in Houston then housing gets cheaper. You now pay 500k but your mortgage is cheaper.

In Cali since they essentially banned construction. Peoples ability to pay is driven by rates. So if people could pay 5k then then the price of the home is the npv of 5k a month.

We're in some kind of weird permanent middle class now whose life circumstances aren't really affected by income and employment.

Yeah. It's insane how common this trend is, where having somebody who decided to buy a decent property sometime in the last 50 years essentially guarantees a certain baseline of salubrity.

Even more insane in Australia where the house you live in isn't factored into your means-testing for the pension, which results in myriad cases of pensioners running their cash balances to 0 and then living on beans in a several million dollar house they bought for pennies 50 years ago solely for the sake of being able to pass said house onto their children when they die.

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