Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters | Hacker News Reader

Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

swissinfo.ch

410 pointsmarcelsalathe568 comments

Switzerland is the only country in the world that implements direct democracy. You can really feel the difference to the rest of Europe. Swiss more often than not stand behind decisions made by their government. When talking about their politicians, the Swiss say "WE decided that ..." whereas e.g., Germans say: "THEY decided that ..."

If you look for a coding job in Europe, Zurich is a great place to live and is the only place where net-salaries are on par with the Bay Area: You can expect to get 7000 - 12000 CHF / month after taxes. If you are from the EU and thinking to move, you find my email address in my Hacknews profile. Also you can read here why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT: https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...

As already mentioned, you're ignoring a fact that even by working there for 10 years, it's close to impossible to buy a part of land and build a house anywhere near a city. Land and house prices are too high to stay there for live. It's only profitable to live there, make savings and buy 2-3 houses in Uk/Germany for it. Like two of my co-workers did.

In Zurich city it is not impossible to buy property, it is just very hard. Everything surrounding Zurich is affordable also for software engineers. I was looking into buying a three room apartment in Effretikon (20 min from Zurich by train) for 370k. I work here for 2 years and could afford the downpayment (20% of the buying price).

Parent was posting about buying a house with land. Your example is for a (small) condo - way cheaper than what he was talking about.

Edit: Parent was posting about buying a house in Switzerland - and that is really expensive in the surroundings of Zurich. Buying a condo is cheaper in any case - I just made a statement that you can't compare oranges to apples.

Buying a house with land in a city is a very american thing – which is why the focus on a small condo is a lot more realistic.

Imagine a city with everyone living in a small house with land, it’d be impossible to live in, as the distances would be far too large.

Have you seen Dublin? ;)

I think even in the US nobody really buys a house (with land) in the city, but in the suburbs. Big difference and much more similar to the 1 hour drive discussed above.

Most of Chicago, the third-largest city in the US, is single-family houses with yards. For that matter, when I lived in San Francisco back in 99-2001, I had a yard.

Toronto was/is like this too. It's a pretty big city similar to Chicago. All of the houses are >$1 million now in Toronto proper. Now the only thing being built are hundreds of cookie cutter condos right in the downtown core. So many were built in recent years that the price of condos actually went down for the first time in forever while house prices continued to rise.

You can get a decent house in a nice neighborhood on the north side of Chicago for around 200k.

As a person who's currently dealing with the market in Chicago I can say your data is out of date. Bungalows in virtually any decent north side neighborhood are more like 250-300k. The only exception is Belmont-Cragin which is so inaccessible it might as well be a suburb.

That being said, yeah, Chicago real-estate is still affordable for the middle class. I think Toronto is in a bubble (or somehow experiencing severely constricted supply) simply looking at the price of housing versus salaries in the region.

My sister just last year bought a house in Jefferson Park for around that, and her neighbor's house just went up for less than 200. I'm sure it's not the best house in the world, but it's a nice neighborhood walking distance from a blue line station.

I don't know about the particulars of their places. The only properties I've seen in Jeff Park for that cheap have been Bank Owned, in need of serious rehab, or have some other mitigating issue like being on a short lot.

My sister's place is almost as big as mine in Oak Park. We could haggle over whether nice houses cost 200 or 250k, but for starter homes (the kind you'd pay over 1MM for in SFBA) in the city itself, that's the range.

Obviously, if you're looking to buy in Lakeview or Logan Square or Lincoln Square, the numbers change. But I don't know why you'd want to do that.

As tptacek says, Jefferson Park is the bang for your buck winner in Chicago. My sister in law just bought for under 200 with a yard, and a decent 2 floor home. House next door was listed for 150 (incredibly small though), and these aren't garbage homes in a bad neighborhood over there.

I'd buy there too if I wasn't planning on leaving this city in the next year or so. Housing prices are not what make me want to leave here, the climate and congestion are.

Jeff Park was one of the first neighborhoods I lived in Chicago, and it has proved to be one of the best. Quiet, clean, friendly.

That might be realistic for a condo, but a single family home at that price would have to be a serious fixer-upper or have some other significant flaw (near gang areas, etc.). The types of homes most urban professionals would consider suitable are hard to find under $500k in Chicago. And if you're targeting one of the few decent public school districts, even that number is a stretch.

No, this is just not true at all. Sorry. Read the other branch of this thread.

For what it's worth: I paid nothing close to 500k in Oak Park, 5 minutes on foot from the Green Line, in one of the best school systems in the area.

I am not sure where your figures come, but as someone who looked seriously at eight houses in various neighborhoods of Chicago, you can find quite suitable houses in the $200-250k range.

I guess I should have specified that I'm thinking of 3+ bedroom homes. Here's what Zillow looks like for a wide drawing of north-side Chicago SFHs under $250k.

http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/3-_beds/0-25...

This is dominated by auctions and homes in very rough west-side neighborhoods. Yes, there are a small handful of exceptions which are typically very old homes that have not been updated in decades, but to act like above $250k is "weird" or out of the norm is just not in line with reality.

>>I paid nothing close to 500k in Oak Park...

Congratulations! I'm aware Oak Park has some affordable homes (but higher taxes) since much of my family lives there. But Oak Park is not Chicago and I was talking about Chicago. If I were going to live in one of the more remote Chicago neighborhoods that had $200k houses, I'd probably opt to live in Oak Park or Evanston since you'd get more for your money (sane school systems, etc.) without much more commute to the city center.

Oak Park is significantly more expensive than Chicago.

I don't think you can legitimately call Jefferson Park "remote" while saying you'd like to live in Evanston, which is much farther from the center of the city.

Jefferson Park is a straight shot down Milwaukee from the center of the city, and a pretty good chunk of every restaurant or bar you'd want to go to is along that shot. It's also got a Blue Line station, with better service than the Purple Line. For that matter, Jefferson Park is bisected by I-90. Have you ever had to commute between downtown (or anywhere else) and Evanston? It's a nightmare: you're a 20 minute drive from any major commuter road.

(I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago and moved to Evanston, and then Lakeview, when I was 18).

Bringing this all back to the point of the thread: a decent house in a nice neighborhood in Chicago will cost you $200, maybe $250 if you're optimizing. Well within reach of anyone in our industry. You can spend more. You can spend $500, or even a million. But it would be weird to do that. The fact that there are family-oriented neighborhoods in Chicago that people have barely heard of with all the conveniences of (say) Jefferson Park is the reason you can get such good deals on houses here. Chicago is just a well-designed city.

I guess there are a lot of weirdos in Chicago by your estimation. Virtually every decent north-side neighborhood in Chicago (including Jefferson Park) has a median sales price above your $250k point and that includes all types and sizes of homes:

http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Illinois/Chicago-heat_map/

But by European standards, Chicago is a small city of about 100,000 people surrounded by an enormous commuter town.

Which standards would those be?

The standards of the "City" ending where you go from city style buildings (multiple people per building, density high enough that it’s fully walkable, etc) to suburban or rural style buildings (seperate, one or two family homes, unusable by foot)

Chicago is one of the most walkable cities in the country. Moreover, the stuff people actually want to go to --- the various bar and restaurant districts, &c --- are in the residential north side of the city, not downtown, which basically shuts down at 6PM.

Almost every neighborhood in the city has a mix of freestanding single family homes, townhouses and 3-flats, and dense apartment buildings.

Are most other big cities like the loop after business hours? I'm always shocked at how deserted it is on weekends, and evenings aside from the odd theatre traffic.

Most big cities after business hours are full of life, full of people out going to bars, clubs, other events, etc.

If you go outside in the downtown of most 200k+ cities, on any normal day, you’ll find lots of people there.

On the other hand, the residential suburbs will be dead.

This isn't true in the U.S. Downtowns all across the country are dead at night.

Well, I can’t really compare – I’ve never been in the US.

But I’m gonna assume the relaxed zoning in the EU, and the resulting mix of commercial, residential, and offices, often even in the same building, leads to the people having a reason to go downtown.

Thats part of it, the other part is simple market economics. It is hard for the things that people want to do at night (clubs, art galleries, restaurants and bars) which are much lower margin businesses to compete with the large financial and governmental institutions that dominate places like the Chicago loop, lower Manhattan or downtown Dallas.

These leads to a pretty common pattern where just outside of the financial/governmental centers of US cities there exist neighborhoods that are mixes of residential, cafe's, nightlife, "creative businesses" or retail. For instance, the Chicago loop is literally surrounded by such places.

But the lack of activity in a financial district has very little correlation to the density of the city. Manhattan is obviously a walkable and dense place to live but lower manhattan (wall street) can feel down right empty after hours.

I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.

> I have much less experience in European cities, but my experience in Dublin, Amsterdam and Frankfort are not much different than this.

I only visited cities which don’t really have high-margin businesses, so that’s maybe why I never noticed that.

I don't think it's so much the financial uses pushing out restaurants and retail but rather housing that's being pushed out.

In Toronto the Financial District doesn't go completely dead, but the 4million square foot underground mall shuts down, and it's just a few ground level businesses that stay open. It's still more lively at night than the typical suburb, but not as bustling as the adjacent neighbourhoods or as the Financial District during the day when there 200,000 office workers there (vs just a few thousand tourists and residents within walking distance at night). From what I heard it's not as dead at night as the Chicago loop.

Relative to NYC, not that many people live in downtown Manhattan either, and there isn't that much stuff open there at night. I'm not sure what conclusions there are to draw from nightlife in the loop.

People have been moving out of the urban core in U.S. cities for the last 50 years. This has hit mid-sized U.S. cities particularly hard. While enough businesses may have stayed behind to maintain a central business district, the residents chose to live elsewhere and commute in.

The St. Louis region, where I live, has nearly 3 million people (about half of which are inside the I-270/255 loop, for some context on a map), but only around 3000 residents in its primary Downtown neighborhood (and another 4000 or so in the adjacent Downtown West). These two neighborhoods have a population density that's lower than the city average (and much lower than in the most dense neighborhoods).

By the way, this actually represents a bit of a comeback for the neighborhood. There were only 800 residents Downtown in 2000. Warehouse-to-loft conversions became popular about 15 years ago, which has reversed the trend, at least for now.

"Urban core" has little to do with it. "The loop" in central downtown Chicago hosts pretty much nothing but large office buildings. It's dead after 6PM because nobody is there. Where are they? Other parts of the urban core of Chicago.

Sorry. "Urban core" is ill-defined enough to be almost meaningless and I was using it alternately to mean Downtown and to mean it in the sense you do, which was bound to cause confusion. I was trying to point out that the St. Louis Downtown isn't even dense by the standards of other places in its urban core (in the sense you mean).

That's my fault.

London is interesting, in that the square mile (financial district) while being very busy (even at night) during the week, due to workers drinking and socialising after office hours, is absolutely empty at weekends. On Sundays the streets are absolutely deserted, which makes it a great time to film apocalyptic zombie movies - see '28 Days Later' for an example.

I don't know about most, but downtown Manhattan is very similar at night.

Some places like downtown Dallas are even more empty.

I live in a neighborhood of 25k people in Chicago that precisely matches that standard. It is surrounded on 3 sides by similar neighborhoods (and a lake on the other). Those style neighborhoods are the norm in Chicago. Further, there are many Chicago suburbs that match that description.

To pick a random European city, let's compare Chicago to Amsterdam: http://swontariourbanist.blogspot.com/2015/01/amsterdam-area.... Amsterdam's metro region has about 670,000 people living in neighborhoods above 20,000 people per square mile.

Chicago has between 1.1-1.3 million people (twice as many) living at that density or higher: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Z3ai_T6K_40/T4I6B9akQDI/A.... It's actually more than that, because this data excludes satellite cities, which the Amsterdam figure above includes.

Another point of comparison. Chicago the city has 2.7 million people at about the same weighted density (19k/sq-mi) as the Amsterdam metro, which has 1.7 million people.

EDIT: these are not my charts. They're from this thread: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=198004.

Those cumulative density charts for population density are the best representation I've ever seen of that stat. Did you make those charts?

Chicago has 1.12 million people living in census tracts above 20,000 people per square mile, the satellite cities are more in the 10-15k/sq mi range. http://swontariourbanist.blogspot.ca/2014/03/toronto-and-chi...

Chicago quickly drops off past the 20k/sq-mi range too, which is basically typical rowhouse density. It only has 88,000 people living in >50k/sq-mi census tracts, mostly stretched out along the northern waterfront. Amsterdam has almost twice as many at 162,330.

Amsterdam isn't even that dense by European standards, although Swiss cities are probably similar. The densest cities are in southern Europe, ex Valencia has about 800,000 residents over 20k/sq-mi, and 400,000 residents living at 50k/sq-mi densities and it's not even a big city. https://chartingtransport.com/2015/11/26/comparing-the-densi...

But back to the original point... Chicago has fairly dense areas within a short commute of downtown - but those mostly have 2-3 flats and bigger apartments, and the few single family homes are quite expensive. For more affordable SFHs with a decent school and crime situation, I think you'd have to go to neighbourhoods that would be considered "suburbs" by European standards even if they're within city limits.

San Francisco is even more expense, the better neighbourhoods have SFHs at $2m+. More far flung areas like Sunset would be more like $1m which is still not exactly cheap and it's getting to be a long commute (40-50min each way by transit).

I think we're getting pretty close to "No True Scotsman" territory when we start designating neighborhoods --- inside the city limits of a metro statistical area with vast, sprawling suburbs --- as themselves suburbs, despite being on trunk CTA train routes, on one of the city's main drags, because "European cities would call those neighborhoods suburbs".

I'm getting the impression that Europeans would "call them suburbs" because they have affordable single-family houses in them, which makes this debate pretty disingenuous.

What I mean is that in many European cities, the suburbs will be pretty similar to Jefferson Park or Outer Sunset in terms of the commuting situation and walkability. Although in Switzerland the suburbs are still much more expensive. Elsewhere in Europe it's generally not so bad.

That's neither here nor there. The question is whether you can have houses with yards in walkably-dense cities. Southern European cities may be denser, but nobody would say Amsterdam is not walkable.

Chicago neighborhoods like Edgewater are in the 30-35k/square mile range, and are full of little single family homes with yards. That's well into walkable territory.

The standard Chicago city lot is only about 25' wide though. The houses are very close together, with a tiny front yard and a slightly large back yard but only a narrow strip on either side.

That's a big part of what makes them not suburban. I like the narrow lots. Why would I need more than the typical Chicago lot?

He only thing I don't like is that I feel like I live in a bowling alley because all the homes are long and narrow.

Antenna towers.

Less lawn care. :-) That said, there are large pockets on the northwest side that have lot sizes comparable with some near suburbs.

Los Angeles used to be approximately like that. We're still emerging from that kind of pattern and distribution.

I think, taken as a whole, the greater LA area is still sort of like that.

Some people think it is impossible to live in.

I'm pretty sure LA is still a sprawl and density has increased very little. Even in Santa Monica, and the rest of beach areas, there are plenty of single family homes. Not sure if they make up the majority of residential land, but sure feels that way.

I've never understood why people believe/feel that buying land and/or a house is the pinnacle of... something. Sure, it gives the person a feeling of control and stability. But rooting oneself in one labor market (vs. being mobile) decreases one's employment options and therefore their salary. It's also very risky, as it's the equivalent of putting one's eggs in one basket and leaves their financial wellbeing in the hands of the real estate market.

Renting is, unfortunately and quite inaccurately, viewed as "throwing money away." The real estate industry does a great job brainwashing people that they should buy, buy, buy, that buying a house is a great investment and a very good way to build wealth. İt's probably one of the greatest lies perpetuated in modern times.

In reality, the truth lies somewhere in the middle between "rent in throwing money away" and "it's a great lie that buying a house is a very good way to build wealth."

I've heard it said that real estate is a risky investment.

On the other hand, it's really hard to raise a family of four in a mutual fund.

I don't understand what you mean. Raise a family of four on a mutual fund?

Why do you feel that you need a mortgage in order to raise a family of four? Why not rent?

It's kind of a joke or a proverb I guess since both houses and funds are investments with a certain risk but houses also double as a place where you and your family can live ;-)

Because moving a family of four is extremely disruptive for everyone, and it's very rare to have more than a year's security with a lease, even with a good relationship with the landlord. Not only that, but if your kids are school age, there's serious pressure to find a new rental in the same school area, which makes shopping for a new home that much harder.

>>and it's very rare to have more than a year's security with a lease, even with a good relationship with the landlord.

Huh? Landlords prefer stability as much as tenants. Very rarely will they say no to a multi-year lease. They may want to add the option of rent re-evaluation after the first year, but from a landlord's perspective it is very difficult to find good tenants, therefore the longer those tenants stay the better.

No landlord I have ever had has ever agreed to a 2-year lease. There's no "huh" about this point: if you rent, your tenancy continues at the pleasure of the landlord. That's not a fun place to be if it's important to you to provide a stable address for your kids for the next 10 years --- and that is usually pretty important.

People don't necessarily buy then suffer the consequences of being rooted. Rather, one may be rooted because of family, preference, or because their job market is one place. Then they want to buy because if you are rooted, you might as well have greater control over your dwelling. If I rented my occupancy would be at the whim of my landlord, which is OK for apartments in the US, as apartment landlords generally have no reason to kick out tenants summarily (except in unstable markets, like perhaps the Bay Area.)

But most single family home landlords are small time operators who can't be counted on to provide long term occupancy. I would find such an arrangement untenable.

For those who want to be mobile I completely agree that renting makes sense, but for many folks being rooted leads to ownership, rather than ownership leading to being rooted.

Perhaps it is the result of choosing to take a historical price chart and say, "look the value goes up" rather than any sort of analysis. It is amazing to me so many people take out huge loans (mortgage, car, college) without doing the math on the final price after compounding.

If the economy is growing faster than your interest rate and the population is increasing as well and its really hard to build new housing, then by all means buy your house and maybe even take out a loan to do so! If not, maybe still buy, but there is little urgency.

The American Dream was narrated by banks in the USA as a way of fighting "the Red terra" and to make the populace wear the yolk of a mortgage. People with mortgages generally don't protest or strike.

As American hegemony spun the globe so did the "own your acres".

> to make the populace wear the yolk of a mortgage. People with mortgages generally don't protest or strike.

You know when I mention this to my co-workers they grimace. We call mortgages and a family the 15-30 year jail sentence.

This is ridiculous.

Here in Europe we have been taking mortgages to buy property long before the USA was born, in fact since the Renaissance.

It certainly is a long-term contract, but nobody really considers it a "yolk." After a number of years your debt is paid and you can keep living in your place without paying anything else.

The alternative is to keep paying rent forever, well into retirement. Which one do you think is smarter?

I don't know, I find the "yolk" of a mortgage to be eggcellent!

yoke http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/yoke

And on the opposite, I never understood how people can not own a house and waste money on renting for decades. Where market for houses in western countries is very limited due to stupid regulations and every year a few millions of people move to that country causing renting prices to increase by XX% each year. It decreases my financial stability. Losing a job for less than a month is a financial disaster, I still to have to pay for car-fuel, insurance, life insurance, pay bills. On the other hand, having a house without mortgage, yes, keeps me in one place, but value of my house due to the same reasons is increasing for my benefit, not for my landlords benefits.

If losing a job for less than a month is a financial disaster, you're probably not in the market for a house anyway. It's perfectly possible to rent for decades and have years of runway in savings.

Also, the burden of being rooted, and of having to maintain a house, could be such a significant detraction to quality of life that it totally makes up the difference.

Also, at least in my case as a relatively young American, living in a house is pretty much to opposite of the lifestyle I see myself wanting for at least the next decade.

>Also, the burden of being rooted, and of having to maintain a house, could be such a significant detraction to quality of life that it totally makes up the difference.

Yea, so I'm renting a house where my agreement states that I am not allowed to fix or improve the flat myself. All changes must be agreed and made by agency. Current faults in the flat include: leaking water from toilet flush since seal is broken, reported 2 weeks ago, reminded 3 times. Water bill is on me. I would be happy if I could fix it myself, I would save money on water, calls made to the agency and not have the noise of leaking water, it's annoying. Aver salary in my city is ~£22k, and average rent just hit £720 per month, if we add bills and council tax, it's ~£850 which is more than halt of average salary. Hopefully I work in IT-financial sector and my salary is higher. I would be much happier to buy a house and be rooted to this city than to depend on renting agencies and increasing population which pushes renting prices a lot.

I'm making savings now to save for a house, if I get a mortgage for 20 years, my average cost of it will be £440 which is 2/3 of my rent...

Sure, but you shouldn't be surprised to hear that many rental experiences are much more positive than that, or that many people's situations lead them to totally difference conclusions. I've listed a bunch of reasons. You wrote "I never understood how people can not own a house and waste money on renting for decades" above, and my response is "It's easy to understand. Take my perspective as one of the millions of examples."

My experience (UK) is that landlords screw people over where they can - they want to make money but actually have a social responsibility for housing conditions. Most people I know live in horrible conditions for a little less rent or increasingly so more precarious and even less stable house shares. Maybe that's an English problem though.

The interesting question being posed in these threads is a lifestyle choice: ownership or flexibility, lay your roots down or remain agile.

If you have enough money to pick and choose that's great. Otherwise home ownership may be the only route out of a precarious and unstable existence.

>>Yea, so I'm renting a house where my agreement states that I am not allowed to fix or improve the flat myself.

That's the beauty of renting: if you don't like your current agreement, you can find another place with more preferable terms. Plenty of landlords allow tenants to change/improve the property.

Whereas when you buy a house, you are stuck with the same neighbors (and sometimes the same HOA) for a much longer period of time.

Why not just rent out your property to somebody else so you no longer have to pay the mortgage on it, then move somewhere else?

As an owner you get whatever agreement you wish to make with yourself.

However, you are right, it's slightly harder to move from owned property to owned property, so in many jurisdictions, property owners have significantly more rights about neighboring land usage than do renters.

For example, I once had a neighbor who was running an illegal business out of their house and causing all kinds of chaos. I presented evidence to the courts that their business was causing real estate market depreciation and was "damaging" the value of my property. The judge ordered them to cease immediately or pay me $50k in assessed depreciation. They shut down their business, put their property up for sale and were gone within a month, they paid my court costs as well. I had on my side, the HOA, local Sheriffs, county zoning inspectors, county ordinances, state ordinances and the agency responsible for handling business registrations. The actual time in court was less than 1 hour. My property value rebounded the full amount and my new neighbors were great.

On the other hand, when I was renting, I once had a neighbor with a serious drug addiction problem, who was stabbed once by a homeless man he let into his apartment so they could do heroin together. Even though he presented a clear danger to the entire community, it took 90 days to have a community hearing to evict him from the property. I could have left sooner, but would have had to pay a penalty to break the lease early and by this point local rents had gone up about 10%. So I would end up paying more to live, and be out the penalty of two months rent. I had on my side approximately nobody. When he was finally evicted, he was replaced by another recovering drug addict who occasionally lapsed and we'd find high in the stairwell. This was in a very nice area I might add -- and the county had selected our building as a pilot "integration program" for people coming out of non-violent criminal and drug rehabilitation programs. They had hoped that being around a nice environment might help them out.

True, but you leave out the cost and hassle of moving regularly. Most landlords know that people don't want to be relocating each year, so they can slowly increase rent year-over-year.

> That's the beauty of renting: if you don't like your current agreement, you can find another place with more preferable terms.

Not where I live. Rental market is WAY too tight.

Surprisingly, I seem to be in the minority here: I consider the lack of freedom and NOT being rooted that comes with renting to be much more of a burden. To me a huge advantage of buying a house is that I know where I'll be living next year and 5 years from now. I don't have to worry about my scummy landlord raising rents by 30% every year "because they can". I don't want to burden my kid with having to find a new set of friends every year because we have to move to a different school district again. If I want to build a deck or knock down a wall or install surround sound in the living room, I can do so tomorrow without having to ask permission.

Then keep on doing what you are doing. You are the one who started this discussion on buying land and building houses. We were talking about Switzerland.

It's only a waste if you don't put the difference to work in some way.

Owning a house outright is great (I'm 1/3 of the way there) but for most, a 30-year mortgage is no more of a wise decision than a rental. You're just swapping landlord for bank.

> You're just swapping landlord for bank.

And even if you pay off your mortgage you still don't technically own it due to yearly property taxes.

One thing I really hated about living in an apartment was that the landlord would show up twice a year with very little warning to inspect the fire alarms etc. As a security person, having all the keys to my home and neighbors homes sitting in a nearby office wasn't very reassuring of my safety or privacy.

The bank on the other hand doesn't care what you do with your alarms or anything else as long as their payments keep showing up.

Not only do taxes pass through to renters, very often they are substantially higher. In New York, for instance, there is a substantial school tax credit for homeowners not available to rental properties. In addition, some cities have a homestead property tax rate that is substantially lower than the commercial tax rate applicable to rental properties.

Exactly. You are either renting the money or the house. You might as well put your equity into a diversified mutual fund. However, there are massive nonfinancial benefits of owning a home, don't forget

I can drill holes in the walls wherever I want!

Seriously though, renting sucks compared with owning, for all those nonfinancial reasons you mention.

Assuming you can rent or buy an equivalent property, in most markets, the monthly outlay is approximately the same. There's very few circumstances where a renter has such an excess of money that they could make any meaningful gains off of alternative investments.

Over time this changes, assuming the renter and the owner have incomes that increase, rent also increases on the same property over time (usually on about par with inflation, but sometimes faster), while the owner's mortgage stays fixed. As a percentage of income, it's the owner who's more likely to have excess income they can be investing elsewhere.

After 30 years (or repayment of their mortgage if sooner), the owner's property is as close to free as you can get and they can invest all of the money the renter is now spending.

You are forgetting that your down payment ( and equity )is tied up in the house, when it could be invested elsewhere.

If you run the numbers and assume a market rate of return on most investments, it's very hard to turn the relatively small amount of money a down payment is into a net gain after 30 years.

that statement is simply false

feel free to run the numbers and present here

The mortgage interest is deductible, and for many people the one thing that makes it possible to itemize deductions rather than take the standard. That's an advantage that renting doesn't have, all else being equal.

> waste money on renting

How is renting wasting money? Are you not living in the unit? You're gaining 100% benefit by paying rent and receiving a roof over your head.

You must mean a waste by losing out on building equity?

That's a crap shoot in itself. A hot housing market and equity can go into the toilet at anytime due to very irrational market conditions. Look at the housing markets of Las Vegas or Miami for examples.

If you look at a place to live as an investment vehicle you are simply looking at it wrong. A home which is paid for is a place you can live without fear of not being able to make the next rent payment.

A mortgage is a bit of a jail sentence. Saving money and purchasing a place to live is the right way to do it.

No one will tell you that because they dont make money from you putting your money in the market.

But the same could be said about money in the bank: it is insurance against not being able to make the next rent payment.

Saving money is the right thing to do---putting all of your savings into immovable property may not be.

A place to live where you can grow food without someone taking it away eliminates the homeless situation.

There is no other investment offering that security. Ask Etrade if you can have a place to live and food to eat if all your trades go wrong :)

It's very simple actually.

Consider, for brevity, a mortgage where the monthly or yearly payment, including taxes, is equal to the rent you would be paying for the same place.

Then live in the place and go about your life for several years, until the mortgage is paid for.

Option 1, you took the mortgage. Now you own a house and you are not due any more payments. You can keep living there and use the excess income for other purposes, or you can sell the house and upgrade, or whatever.

Option 2, you kept renting. You are still under a landlord, you are still due monthly payments, and you still don't own anything more that what you started with, after all those years.

In this very real sense, rent is wasted money.

The difference in costs are several factors between rent & mortgage+taxes+insurance+maintenance+appliances.

I have better places for moneys(some investment, some wasteful) and I get to move whenever I please... although, I have had to move when it didn't please me, too.

You do incur a lot more costs as a property owner than as a renter, which you should bear in mind.

Over the life of your average 20-25 year mortgage you should expect to have to replace numerous appliances, encounter a couple of catastrophic and unexpected issues (leaking roof, etc.), and after 10 years the decor will be outdated and shabby.

To get optimum resale value you will have to sink a lot of time/money into remodelling (the money you will likely recover, but not the time/effort), then you have the stress of trying to sell the place.

You are also bearing the risk of a downturn in the housing market, and could end up in negative equity.

As a renter you have greater flexibility, much greater certainty over your outgoings, etc.

All of those costs are simply amortized over the rental agreement. I'm not sure why people who rent seem to think landlords are appliance/maintenance charities.

Not necessarily. When the capital gains from simply sitting on a property are so great, I'm sure a lot of landlords are actually making a net loss on a renting operation, and don't care all that much.

Regardless, the point is that a lot of people see the mortgage repayments equalling the rent and don't think about the extra costs of ownership.

Landlords don't have infinite cash reserves. They still need to cover costs or minimize losses if they're betting on capital gains from property sale at some later date. Most renters pay for the maintenance and taxes of the property they live in, it's just not itemized for them and the costs are generally amortized and distributed among multiple tenants. Landlords are generally not charities, if you got lucky enough to find one who is, be very thankful.

You are correct that rent != mortgage and shouldn't be compared too close. Renting is a 100% loss, while mortgage is <100% depending on where you are in your repayment plan -- allowing the owner to recoup some of their housing costs after time.

After the mortgage is paid off, the renter still continues to loose 100% of their housing costs while the owner has only care and maintenance (and taxes) of the property to account for.

Rental prices are what the market will bear. These may or may not be strongly correlated to the landlord's ownership.

Two very relevant examples of when the "amortization" argument won't apply:

- a rising market in which the landlord bought a long time ago. Their purchase price was way below the area's current market value. So they can cover their expenses while you still pay less in rent than what a modern-day mortgage would be.

- a home buying market that's expecting continued pricing appreciation. Homeowners can (and will) rent out property at a loss with the expectation it'll be made up in a higher sale value years down the line. Whether or not this actually happens, of course, depends on their ability to accurately predict the future.

There's also the inverse case of declining markets, when landlords can end up over the heads financially and simply can't charge the rates they need to cover their mortgages, because the entire area has turned south.

There are very real financial risks to landlords. They can't just charge whatever they want. It really depends on the state and future of their market.

Correct. When rents get too far ahead of mortgages, people simply buy property instead.

In your first example, the landlord is amortizing expenses by charging rent above their ownership costs. It doesn't have to be at or higher than then current new mortgage rates.

The second example does happen. However, if the landlord's bet is wrong, and they have the runway to float the extra expenses for a while, they can simply wait for rents to rise and over decades make it back and begin amortizing then. Or they can sell and hope to make it back.

Property owners have many more financial options with their property than do renters.

Not at all. Rental costs are most strongly influenced by supply-and-demand of housing, whereas sale costs are mostly influenced by supply-and-demand of credit.

Not true, rental costs will go as high as possible until buying becomes more attractive. Buying costs are based on supply and demand of housing and credit. That's why it's more expensive to buy a house in San Francisco than in Kansas City, Missouri even if the credit markets are effectively the same in both cases.

Under normal market conditions, borrowing money becomes expensive as monetary supply decreases. However, very active central banking systems the last couple decades has changed the story on this.

I was waiting for someone to mention that. Home ownership is expensive and makes you inflexible. Also, consider property taxes (which will scale with inflation) and the fact home owners insurance is more expensive than renters.

And besides finance you need to consider if you want the responsibility of owning a home. Cutting the grass, shoveling snow, cleaning gutters, fixing things, painting, etc. It's a lot of work.

Owning makes sense for some people but there are a lot of benefits to not having to spend your life taking care of a building.

Taking care of the building is actually a lot of fun for some people!

No doubt and didn't mean that as a slight to people who take pleasure in maintaining their property. In fact I admire lovely landscaping and can see myself wanting to do that one day perhaps.

Another counter-point: when you buy a house, even while the mortgage isn't paid off, you can immediately start renting parts of it and end up in a situation where your mortgage payments are equaled or exceeded by your rental income. I also believe that this is taxed differently from normal income, especially so if you're renting rooms in a house you live in vs. owning rental property.

In the Bay Area at least, a single-bedroom apartment is easily $2000 a month. If you play your cards right, a single-family home in a desirable neighborhood for tech workers or others can be had for under $1m with 4 reasonably-sized bedrooms, a garage, and a yard. You can then rent out 2 of the bedrooms at $1400/month each and end up with your mortgage payment from your tenants each month. There are still maintenance costs and very significant property taxes (~single-tens of thousands per year on such a property), but you also build equity, which you can later sell (minus the mortgage interest). Depending on the mortgage, you could also use this situation to over-pay mortgage payments in order to pay off the property faster and reduce the amount spent on interest if that works out to a better investment opportunity than anything else you could do with the same money (any early payoff penalties included).

It does seem to me that renting is a mixture of paying for convenience and throwing money away, given the above scenario and considering how after 5 years, the home owner ends up with ~$150k in equity assuming the housing market stays flat (it doesn't in the Bay Area, e.g. http://www.paragon-re.com/3_Recessions_2_Bubbles_and_a_Baby ) , taxes, maintenance, and interest included, you should still come out ahead with the house. Once you also factor in that renting gets you 8-20%+ increases in rental price per year, while the house value appreciates on the low end of that range over the same amount of time (and also that you can raise the rent for your lodgers accordingly), you really start to see why houses in the Bay Area are attracting foreign investors and starting bidding wars above asking price for nothing-special properties.

Edit: lastly, the point I feel everyone neglects: unlike other investments, your first property has the additional advantage and value that you can live in it, so comparisons to other investments become quite different. Sure, you could take your down payment and put it into ETFs, and on paper the yearly average gains might look similar, but if you suddenly lose your job, the ETFs won't provide a place to sleep at night.

Landlording poses significant risks which you also must take into account. Thus if your net worth is 500k and all of it is in a rental unit, what happens if your renter floods the house or damages it in some other way?

What happens when your renter quits paying rent and starts legal proceedings based on a grievance, real or perceived? Now you cannot sell the house nor are you collecting rents.

Lastly see my other comments. Any investment that pays dividends gives you a place to sleep. The fact that you live in your investment is uniformly a downside, as it hinders liquidity. The fact that you can rent is again not relevant. Most financial investments begin to return a percentage immediately. Renting rooms is just less liquid and more risky than investing in a balanced portfolio.

I think it's important to not conflate being a landlord (investment and business) with buying a home to live in.

The Bay Area is but a single market and not representative of all markets. There are many more markets that haven't seen similar growth. The Bat Area is the exception.

If you are paying off a home and you lose your job, if you've leveraged yourself like many home buyers have then you might lose your home! Especially if you lose your job because the economy tanked and home prices have ranked leaving you underwater owing more than the home is worth. And then the bank takes the home back and your entire investment is wiped out. Look to 2009 for an example of this. And rents dropped significantly at that time.

The opportunity cost of tying up a solid down payment needs to be considered too. 200k down could be used in other places too.

I think most people who buy with 20% or less down don't understand how leveraged and dangerous their position is.

Lastly if buying a home was a good way to get rich then we'd have a whole lot more wealthy people.

It's not a bad thing at all and for certain people in certain positions it's a good thing. If you can buy with cash and have at least 40% of your bankroll left afterwards then yeah it makes sense. If you plan on staying in a place forever (laying down roots) and can afford 30% down and still have 2 years of mortgage payments in a cash savings account it makes sense.

I feel like a lot of people buy homes because they just think that's what you do. A home has meaning to a lot of people. But the opportunity costs and risks are large and the rewards are generally a wash with renting long term in most markets with the exception of places that get a 30 year boom or other rare real estate lottery scenarios.

There are ways to win but 10% down and a 30 year mortgage is rarely it.

This cannot be overstated. I think many of us see the mortgage, taxes, and insurance are less than rent and call it a win. We are vaguely aware of the money pit and getting out issues but they are hard to predict and easier to sweep under the rug. This conversation should always be accompanied with, "Assume $5k per year for maintenance," or some related concrete number based on condition and size, so we force ourselves to deal with a number instead of brushing it off. Also, real numbers for seller's closing costs.

Still, I think for most markets in the US anyway, buying does make economic sense if you plan to stay in it for several years and enjoy or don't mind taking care of a building, to use peer's phrase.

This calculator is excellent, btw: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calc...

>Consider, for brevity, a mortgage where the monthly or yearly payment, including taxes, is equal to the rent you would be paying for the same place.

That's hardly always true

And if it is, you should do the maths and consider if you can afford becoming a landlord, because it means there's potentially room for yields well above normal (but beware the likely incoming flood of other landlords once people realise).

The maths rarely work out the way you outlined:

If the mortgage is equal to the rent, then potential landlords are leaving money on the table. That rarely happens for long. Typically most landlords in competitive markets will leverage and take up interest-only mortgages to the extent were rent only barely covers interest and maintenance, and make most of their money on capital gains.

For most people a repayment mortgage and maintenance and appropriate insurance should end up more expensive than renting for that reason.

It is possible to come out financially on top by owning, not least if you're willing to do maintenance yourself etc., but it's not nearly as clear-cut.

I've done very well buying, basically out of luck because I happened to buy on a tracker mortgage briefly before the interest rates crashed after the financial crisis, but if I'd foreseen that change I'd have been filthy rich instead of just a bit better off on my mortgage. But a tracker mortgage adds risk, and it could just as well have gone the other way. I took that risk because I could afford it.

For me, the main economic benefit is that it is a hedge against unforeseen rapid changes in housing costs. If the area I live in suddenly gets drastically more popular than nearby areas, then I can still afford to live here. The cost is that I take a risk with respect to making it harder to move, but with a son in school locally that is not something I'd consider lightly anyway, and that if interest rates swings the wrong way I may still end up paying more overall.

The algorithm to make money as a landlord is pretty simple.

1) mortgage the property you wish to rent out

2) rent it out

3) wait until rents increase and earn profit (mortgages do not increase while rental rates do)

Not sure about point 3. Normally mortgage costs do increase - in line with interest rates. Even with a fixed-rate mortgage, there is usually a term for that rate, which is generally substantially less than the lifetime of the mortgage, often as little as two years, and rarely more than five. This is certainly the situation in the UK, do things work differently in the US?

Yes they do. The most popular mortgage here is a 30 year fixed rate.

In a great many housing markets, there are several kinds of mortgages. But basically the fall into two types, fixed and variable (go up and down with then current market rates) -- there's some hybrid loan products and some non ursury types, but this is basically how they break down.

The most popular kind of mortgage is one where the rate is "fixed" or locked at the then current market rate, and it won't change regardless of market forces. The great benefit of these kinds of mortgages is that the repayment terms operate without respect to any inflationary forces or changes in lending markets. Repayment is typically 15, 20 or 30 years.

Historically, and I intend this to mean for something like 99% of history where these types of mortgages have existed, this means that by the end of the loan period, the monetary amount per repayment period (say monthly) is the same, but it's actually cheaper per repayment period in then future real currency. In other words, in 30 years, you're paying for housing at nominal currency values from 30 years prior. Given historic inflation rates, at the end of a typical 30 year loan, this can be around 50% per payment period discount over then future real currency value.

My understanding is that in the U.K., a "fixed rate" mortgage is what we in the U.S. would probably call an "Adjustable Rate Mortgage" or ARM with a fixed 2 year rate (though I believe the closer approximation for an ARM in the U.K. is a discount rate mortgage).

There are also variable rate mortgages, in some markets those are the only types available, in others they exist to cover higher risk borrowers but in others they offer some kind of monetary benefit to the borrower. Depends.

While mortgage rates under such systems can increase, it's not generally normal for them to over decades. For example, in the U.K. over the last 30 years, it's been the general trend for the rates to decrease. (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/iadb/Repo.asp)

Even if the rates do increase at some slow rate, the average of the mortgage payment is still likely to become cheaper over decades than the then future rental price. Following general inflationary trends, rents in most markets have doubled in the past 30 years, while a person who took out a mortgage on a house 30 years ago will be paying much less or will have payed off the property by now and has no specific monthly housing costs.

Yeah. It's market-specific, to be sure. Homes in the Western US markets, especially California, have risen at a quick pace, in part because of zoning laws which prevent cheap expansion of the overall housing inventory.

Another important reason homeownership pays off well for many is that the investment is leveraged.

Also, in the US, entities like Fannie Mae combined with tax deductions amount to a government subsidy for home buyers. You can borrow $400K to buy a house at a very attractive interest rate and, on top of that, claim a tax deduction for the interest payments. But what rate will you get if you want to borrow $400K to place a leveraged bet on the price of gold or oil or Apple stock?

Do not forget maintenance, insurance & taxes that go along with that monthly nut. People used to always tell me I was throwing my money away on rent(until the "Great Recovery"), but I've never had to pony up thousands of $$$ for a new a/c unit or replacement appliances. As always, YMMV.

Why do you think your rent isn't simply amortizing those costs? The landlord isn't a utility/maintenance charity.

Many cities place artificial constraints on rent increases, for example which prevents full amortization.

Doesn't matter. Landlords who are in the business of renting aren't a charity. Somebody will be paying for those expenses and it's the goal of the landlord to make it not them.

Most of these kinds of arguments seen to stem from some kind of fantasy that renting is a smart choice because look at how we're pulling one over on landlords with all that free stuff they have to give me.

But no rental market can survive when landlords are losing their shirt to paying for other people's expenses.

And yet rental markets are full and robust everywhere which means landlords make money on the exchange, otherwise the entire rental market would be controlled by rapidly impoverished idiots, which is obviously not the case.

Landlords make money in several ways simultaneously, but providing charity to renters is not one of them.

Strawman much? I never said nor intimated I was pulling anything over anyone. Property owners assume the burden of maintenance & costs of ownership. Those costs are reflected in the amount of money I give them for the privilege, not the "right", of residing on their property. When I leave, I have NOTHING to show for it.

In European cities like London, Paris or Zurich, the supply of housing is so constrained that, barring something catastrophic like a war or a global financial crisis, prices will never drop that much for that long. In fact, it's quite a big economic problem — there's little reason for the majority of people to put their savings into anything other than property, because it tends to be so reliable.

And somewhere like London, renting a whole property is often just as expensive or more expensive that paying the equivalent mortgage would be. So you wouldn't even save any money by renting.

In a great many places, the rental rates are set to be about the same as if somebody just purchased the property and were about to pay mortgage payments.

In the short term, the renter makes out, because the owner has to assume taxes and maintenance, but over the long term, the existing mortgage doesn't increase while rent does and the property owner starts to cover those costs and then starts to make money off of the property. Once the mortgage is paid off, the rental money is pure profit.

I've lived in Switzerland for a decade. My rents have never gone up. They have gone down once though, because the law here mandates tying of rent to interest rates and when they are lowered, you can write to your landlord and demand a reduction.

Unfortunately there are caveats. Last time I tried that, my landlord claimed that my rent was already lower than the market average for my area and thus I didn't qualify for the reduction.

It's very simple, even outside of equity earning and the ups and downs of the housing market, once you pay off your mortgage, you now have a place to live that's fairly close to free (other than maintenance, utilities and taxes). If your home is large enough, you can even turn it into a revenue generating asset by renting out portions or all of it.

Rents also tend to go up with inflation, once you enter into a mortgage agreement, mortgages do not and thus you end up paying less over time (in real dollars) to live than if you rent. Since most people's income goes up, this means that renting tends to stay at about the same percent of income over a person's lifetime while it becomes less and less of a part of somebody's income who has purchased.

See my post above. Once you pay off the mortgage it is equivalent to paying yourself out a percentage of cash investment. In NYC that number is approximately 4.5%. That is pretty good but not great considering the risks of ownership.

Except I think you are assuming the renter is starting out with a large cash reserve they can invest and the owner doesn't have that at the start and must accrue that value over their mortgage period.

To compare correctly you must assume both people are starting the same

Home ownership via a mortgage is a leveraged investment. If you're renting, you usually don't have access to leverage for an investment like that. Further, when you're renting, you don't normally have much of an impetus to save extra and accrue interest; whereas a mortgage acts as a forced saving scheme. You must save (build up equity) or else the bank will foreclose on your property!

My big reason for giving up on renting is the control. I ended up being forced to move twice after landlords sold the building I happened to be living in. It was a frustrating experience. This is much less likely to happen with my own house (natural disasters, eminent domain, etc.).

> How is renting wasting money?

My parents paid off a $200k mortgage in 15 years. When they sell the house and move, they will get $200k - breaking even.

Meanwhile, I've been renting for 15 years and will never get that money back. It's just a loss.

This sounds like my parents telling me how stupid I am for renting here in Barcelona for the last 8 years. Property prices have dropped by over a third, and I am spending less on rent than the prices are dropping by every year.

Re: renting is wasting money.

Think of the math this way. A $1mil condo in New York generates approximately 45k/yr income, or 4.5% return on investment per year in rents. Subtract taxes and amortization and ask yourself, can you get similar returns elsewhere? You could for example purchase an index fund with the same $1mil and contribute the gains towards rent. Either way you are living "for free."

It is however risky not to diversify. So if the $1mil is all you have and it is all in the house, you are in danger. Additionally, property is not very liquid. In the downturn it would be difficult to exit. For these reasons, I believe house ownership only makes sense as a portion of one's assets. Renting makes solid financial sense otherwise.

In the conversation of rent vs. own people often forget to take the opportunity costs into account.

To make your plan work, you'd have to have around $1mil in investment dollars that you'd place into various investments to make the "free" rent money. Since you're relying on those investments to provide shelter, they're just as illiquid as owning property (except with property you can make money off of it).

The best plan here is to keep $800k in investments, move to rural nowhere and buy a huge house for $200k cash and live off the investment income entirely and not bother working. You can then rent off portions of the property (a bedroom, a basement, airbnb etc.) to surge your income if you need it.

If you don't have $1mil up front to start, like most people, building equity in the place you live makes far more financial sense over time than does renting because you both get to live there and because it doubles as an investment. Starting from the same lack of a million dollars, renting only covers cost of living and does not provide for any investment opportunity.

The amount is irrelevant, since you are making the same percentage on whatever sum investment. I think you are using a non-technical definition of liquidity: I can convert ETFs or stocks into cash almost immediately. So for example, it is easy to scale down or to move money from stocks to bonds. The house is immovable property in all senses of the word. It is difficult to convert to cash or to move (in case of political upheaval, for example).

Your last point ignores the significant costs associated with 1. amortization and 2. the liquidity problem. First, given a neutral market, the house decays in value: appliances need fixing, floors, heaters, boilers etc. We are just used to rising prices due to speculation, but nothing guarantees the upward trend. Second, consider the cost of converting cash into house and the other way around: mortgage fees, interest, buying and selling fees, plus real estate taxes.

The New York Times has an excellent calculator on buying vs. renting. The math just does not support your conclusions. Buying wins out after 10-15 years GIVEN an upward real estate market. With any downturns, renting wins out indefinitely. Include the risk of investing into a single instrument (all you money is in the house) plus the stresses of ownership (shit goes wrong all the time and costs you money) and the picture is not so clear at all.

To make your original scheme work (investment earnings pay for rental costs), you investments are de facto illiquid, otherwise you have no way to pay for housing without breaking from the scheme. You also need to make more from your investments than renting currently costs because over time rental prices are likely to go up and your investment return will need to increase.

You are right that property ownership is more illiquid, but supposing I had a million dollars invested making me a better than 4.5% return, why would I pay rent when I could just buy a house with that money instead? At the end of the mortgage period I'd have my original investment plus ownership of real property, while the renter would only have their investment dollars and would have to continue the investment-for-housing scheme for the rest of their life.

> First, given a neutral market,

This is a false assumption as markets are almost never neutral. It's impossible to be a market oracle, but historic trends show a general upwards movement in most well functioning economies. It's a better than chance bet that most markets are thus net positive. You are correct though that nothing guarantees this upward trend.

The New York Times calculator is pretty good, but misses the simple fact that you need to live somewhere forever and not just for the period of a mortgage. Thus any comparison should be made with how long you expect to live.

The picture is very clear, you will likely need housing longer than 10-15 years, and if that's true, then buying property nearly always wins over renting.

A person with $1 million available to put into an index fund is the 1%, and advice for them is not really applicable to the general population. For "normal" people, buying a house can be a good idea because you can deduct the interest from your income. It also gives you much more stability in terms of monthly housing payments if you get a fixed-rate mortgage (unless rent control is an option). Finally, you also "get back" a portion of your mortgage payments when you sell the house. You never get your rent money back.

Rent/buy is not a simple analysis, there is no one right answer. If you ever (for medium-large values of "ever") find yourself in a situation where there's one obvious right answer for all cases, you probably did something wrong.

Fortunately, at least for homes it's also a solved problem. Take your data to the below calculator, and get on with your life.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calc...

See above. The amount is irrelevant. Deducting interest is good. However, you must take into account the costs of amortization, real estate taxes, and the costs of borrowing money. Check the NYT calculator. Owning wins out in an up market and only after a decade or so. It is much more difficult the absorb the costs of real estate transaction for those not in the top 1%. Rental is a reasonable financial strategy for any income bracket.

In Canada you may also qualify for tax credits when buying a home. That combined with low rates creates house horniness that's hard to resist.

Who's going to lend me $1m so I can play the stockmarket?

You could absolutely borrow on margin to play the stock, although you would probably need to have more than the typical home mortgage 20% to get the loan.

Is that really something that is available to the ordinary man/woman in the street? (Genuine question, I have no idea ..)

ordinary people can borrow 50% on margin

Here's the classic blog post on this topic

http://assayviaessay.blogspot.com/2014/04/rent-or-buy.html

Try the New York Times "rent vs buy calculator" if you really can't understand that it might be financially better to rent. Also try setting up a budget and some savings - losing your job for less than a month should never be a financial disaster (and if it is you can't afford to buy a house).

http://jlcollinsnh.com/2012/02/23/rent-v-owning-your-home-op...

In the US, we get a tax savings for owning rather than renting. Also renting includes a required profit for the owner. When you rent, your monthly bill includes everything the owner has to pay (mortgage, taxes, utilities), plus their profit. When you buy, you pay mortgage, taxes, and utilities, but no extra for profit. Also, you get to deduce the local taxes you pay on your national taxes, so overall you pay less.

Also, when you own, you can do what you want without having to ask permission. on top of that - no noisy neighbors that are too close!

Just because someone else is profiting from you doesn't mean you are wasting money.

Let's say you save $100k. You can either buy a house, or put the money in the stock market. If you put it in the stock market, you get a return but that return ends up going to your landlord's profit. If you but the house you get no return but don't pay the landlord's profit.

In other words, it's an investment. If you believe that the RE market has better ROI, and don't mind being rooted, then go for it. If you believe the stock market has better ROI and you prefer to be mobile, do the stock market.

Also consider that dividend income from the stock market gets taxed each year before it can be reinvested. So, it does not compound as rapidly as the untaxed "yearly dividend" (aka price appreciation) of the house.

OTOH, as you say, the easy mobility associated with renting can be quite valuable to some workers. It's like, "what opportunities and profits am I foregoing by being tethered to a house here in this job market?" etc.

I think it's all very complicated and situation-dependent, as you point out. We need to predict the housing market, interest rates, the job market for our particular specialty, changes in tax laws etc in order to make an optimal decision. We're all forced into the role of economic forecaster just to make the most fundamental decisions about life.

Pilot's who pour everything into their planes have a staying: you can sleep in your plane but you can't fly your house!

I guess people have different aspirations in life.

While I feel neutral about your post, I upvoted it to counter the downvotes. It seems to follow the HN guidelines and merely presents your side of the issue, so I can't see any reason for it being downvoted other than people not liking your opinion, which doesn't seem fair to me.

While I agree with you financially, when you have kids, buying property is a safer vehicle to leave something behind for them. Sure, if the rent is low enough and you invest the difference of what you'd be paying for a mortgage, you may grow a much bigger capital in 25-35 years. However, most people are risk averse or simply do no understand how investing works, hence: they buy real estate.

Because if you look over a 20-30 year period of home ownership you build equity in your home and get a pretty significant tax benefit as well (mortgage interest deduction).

If you were to have kids, think about the financial security owning a home provides them.

What financial security? I take it you have completely forgotten about the 2009 crash?

I was thinking that one would have paid off all mortgages by the time the children inherit the house.

I own and rent.

I own a house worth about £300k with a mortgage of £140k. The mortgage repayments are £500 per month.

I wanted to upgrade my house to somewhere larger in a nicer area but didn't want to wipe out my savings to raise a deposit. So I made the decision to rent somewhere instead.

It feels like the best of both worlds. I get all the upside of a big house without any liability for something going wrong (boilers, high end kitchen equipment, etc). I've rented the house I own to some tenants and the profit from the rent I make goes towards my rented house.

Best case scenario - one day I'll own my old house outright and continue to rent. I might even buy another house to rent out at some point. Worst case - the market goes tits up I stop renting and return to the house I own where my mortgage is very affordable.

> But rooting oneself in one labor market (vs. being mobile) decreases one's employment options and therefore their salary.

True, but in most places outside the US (at least certainly in mainland Europe) moving great distances for a better job opportunity is unusual.

The main appeal of owning real estate vs. renting is the long-term and intergenerational perspective. At some point it'll be paid off and the housing cost will be extremely low - and the children will inherit something of value.

It's a financial calculation like everything else. Don't assume they do it for purely emotional reasons.

I chose to buy because:

1. It's significantly cheaper after tax deductions compared to renting in my area.

2. This is the highest paying area for the software labor market in the world, and I've looked compared to last 10 years. I don't really see anywhere else that would get better than the SF bay area.

3. It solidifies your housing costs. When prices are rising relatively rapidly, it can be a money saver, and over the long term, it's definitely a very large money saver because it locks your price in. That is a risky bet to make for sure.

You can end up with a housing bubble and being underwater for 5 years, or you could end up in somewhere like london or vancouver, where it goes up and stays up and by the time that 'bubble' pops, your 50 years old. But that is the same risk you take when you chose whatever profession you have as a career or by leaving your down payment savings in stock & bonds.

4. You have to compare against what your down payment would make in the stock market comparatively.

5. When you move away to better opportunities, you can just rent it, especially if rental prices have gone up a %5-%10+ since you bought and would cover the management fees. Maybe life will bring you back again, especially if you left from a pretty good market already.

6. If you save a lot of money, trading a fraction of your savings in down payment for a discounted housing cost for the rest of your life can be a good one time investment.

> Renting is, unfortunately and quite inaccurately, viewed as "throwing money away."

I hate this mentality, and it seems pervasive worldwide. As I said in another comment in this thread, I like to see rent as paying for a housing service: I pay a monthly amount in exchange for a roof plus a lot of annoying things I'd have to take care of myself (and spend money on) if I were a homeowner: broken appliances, water heater issues, heating issues, etc. It's quite a list.

"Service" is sort of key in the way I see it, and is the reason why I only rent from apartment companies and not from landlords. There are so many stories about downright insane landlords out there that I don't want to take my chances dealing having to deal with those.

"You just pay about 70% you would pay for the rent and the house is yours in 30 years! But you need to fix all issues yourself and comply a lot of third party rules how everything has to look and work".

I dont get it ether, this sounds like the worst deal not even including the fact that i might do not want to live there in 30 years.

Or you can buy studio in the city and huge farm house with land 1 hour drive away... Then weekends spend in your farm house and weekdays in your studio... It would be close enough to pop in in week days also. 1 hour drive aint bad.

That would be the best of city living (practical, all amenities in walking distance, low maintenance, social), and the best of rural living (bucolic, silent, spacious, reserved).

It's much better to separate it out than try to combine it in one suburban house.

How do you account for all the wasted space when the houses aren't in use? The extra costs?

Airbnb

It's accounted for in the value of the land and the farmhouse, which the owner has paid for.

Same way you account for the time your car is not being driven - you consider the total cost of ownership vs benefits and your ability to afford it.

This is a bad analogy missing the point that ZeroFries was making. A car's lifespan is mostly determined by mileage. When a car is not being driven its condition and value is largely unchanged. It is not analogous to a vacant house. If you drive a car twice as much of the time it will have to be replaced nearly twice as soon.

>A car's lifespan is mostly determined by mileage.

This is far less true in regions with snow. Assuming you drive the vehicle in the winter, a non-trivial contribution to "wear and tear" on the car is rust which occurs even if the car isn't driven a lot. (Cars are far better in this respect than they used to be but rotted out fluid lines etc. is still very much a thing.)

I'm in the snowbelt and well aware of this. Mileage (at a given city/highway mix) is still the biggest factor presuming the car is getting some minimum duty cycle. I said "mostly," not that the number of winters is nontrivial.

If you only drive 5,000 miles a year, sure, but that's not typical.

Beyond using 10k/yr as a rule of thumb for average duty cycle mileage is a horrible indicator of vehicle wear. Engines are worn by cold start cycles, transmissions are worn by shifting, brakes get worn by stopping and suspension components get worn by potholes, etc.

Newish used cars with ~200k on them are usually good buys because often times it's someone who used it for work (salesperson, etc.) and just ground out the highway miles (which are nearly free from a wear and tear perspective)

Except I never made the claim that nominal mileage objectively indicates vehicle wear. All I'm claiming, is that mileage is the largest factor. It doesn't matter if your driving wears out a car in 300,000 miles and my driving burns out a car at 80,000 miles. Your miles are your miles and my miles are my miles.

If we somehow manage to magically share a car, it's not going to last a lot longer than if we're wearing out our own cars at our respective rates (mine faster than yours).

But you reinforce the point that the car sitting in the parking lot or garage is not simply an over-provisioned resource by reason of being idle. If your usage patterns are so different than mine it's unrealistic to expect a configuration where we would be able to share a car.

Car-sharing has many benefits, but a car is still worth more than two half-cars.

A two hour daily commute is like 12% of your waking hours crumpled and thrown away. That sounds like hell.

Two hours is a long time! Sit around for the two hours doing nothing, you'll see.

Two-hour weekly commute.

I'm not saying its the case in Switzerland, but I get a ton of work done on my occasional three hour train commute. Driving definitely sucks though.

I have done hour each way commutes for many years, and while I don't miss it, it's not nearly that much of a waste. It's not "sit around doing nothing" (though, I wish I had two hours a day to sit around doing nothing - it'd be fantastic). It's time people spend listening to music, reading, napping, catching up on e-mail, playing games.

As much as I like currently not having a commute, it was certainly not time that was "crumpled and thrown away".

You obviously didn't drive if you were reading, napping, catching up on email, playing games (at least I certainly hope not). At least within the US, a typical commute (with the exception of very large cities such as NYC, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, which have large public transportation systems) involves spending time driving their own car, which essentially prohibits any activity other than listening to music, and maybe talking on the phone. So yes, it's wasted time for most of us.

You can also get away with podcasts and audiobooks, which have really prevented me from seeing it as a simple waste of time.

+1 for Podcasts and Audiobooks. I get through ~2 books a month and a host of podcasts. It's not an ideal use of time, but if scheduled correctly it can at least be additive.

A two hour commute (assuming one hour each way) is very very common. I did it for years when I lived in the suburbs and worked downtown. About an hour door-to-door each way, with the train ride being about 45 minutes of that.

Average US commute is 25 minutes (one-way).

http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/al...

I did that exact commute for 8 years. I've never been so happy as when I was finally able to ditch it. The new commute is 20 minutes (one way), with WFH days and hours flexible enough that I can usually avoid rush hour.

I did it for years too and I would never do it again, no matter what the pay is. I guess it is a matter of options and taste, but I find commute and working in an office every day quite close to living in hell.

2 hours typical for workers in NYC that live outside from neighboring burbs.

I currently commute 2 hours each way. It's not as bad as it sounds. If you happen to be able to afford to live close to work, consider yourself lucky.

Do you do anything in particular to make use of the time during the commute besides just concentrating on driving, listening to music, or daydreaming? I struggle with long commutes since I inevitably feel like I'm wasting the time.

Music, NPR

As someone who did this for some time. Get out.

I, like you probably, think that it's not "too bad", but once you're away from this practice, you'll realize that you were wasting so much valuable time.

I work remote and my voluntary commute (could work from the house) is 7 minutes to an office in town where I work every day. My colleagues Live around the Bay area and pay exorbitant amounts and/or drive 1.5-2 hours each way into the office. My quality of life is much better on that front.

The opportunity cost of a four hour commute is nuts though. That's half a fulltime work shift!

My commute is a little less than that - but I don't sit around doing nothing! It's time to work without interruptions.

I know a couple people in NYC who do something like this. It works fine for two smallish niche groups: well-off childless couples who prefer not to spend much time in their city, or very well-off couples with children.

Single people don't want to spend their weekends alone in a farmhouse, and 3+ person families don't want to live the bulk of their time in a studio apartment. Meanwhile, that 300-500k dollar farmhouse could put your kids through private school or good colleges.

300-500k seems really high for a farmhouse unless it comes with a lot of land.

Within weekend distance of NYC?

EX: http://mls.catskill4sale.com/idx/details/homes/b253/34760/4-... 200k, 10br house ~2h from NYC depending on traffic. Basically as soon as you step past reasonable daily commutes prices really fall.

Would anyone really consider that a farmhouse, when it has only 0.68 acres of land?

Because you only care about the farmhouse and not the land.

You can rent land to farmers. Depending on the land and location in NY, you can rent it for $20-$80 an acre.

USDA agricultural statistics service

https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/E0F5EB36-3313-3D7B-...

forget YOU commuting to the city - with 10 bedrooms you can provide free rooms for YOUR employees to come to you :-) (assuming you own a startup and have employees)

It has four bedrooms, not ten. You can't reasonably fit ten bedrooms in 2912 square feet of living space.

3,000 sq feet is 20.8 rooms at 12' by 12'. Sure larger rooms, walk in closets, or wasted hallways could eat that up. But the real issue is there are only 2 bathrooms.

Or that a Doner Kebab in Zurich is 20 dollars and up. That's US salary alright bit US price of living? Hell no

As a regular Zürich Döner eater, I'd be curious to see these fabled 20$ equivalent Döners. Mine are always in the 10/11CHF range (~$11).

In Munich you pay 4.00 - 4.50 EUR. That pretty much erases any advantage of Zurich vs German salaries.

It's more like 5.50 EUR

those were a bit higher prices mentioned, but generally prepared food in Suisse is super pricey (especially if you pay bills for more than yourself only), and in the same time food leaves much to be desired when compared to some neighbors (France, Italy).

most common things expat complain here about - 1) going out becomes a rare experience if you are not single - just too expensive compared to anywhere else in the world; 2) the need for adjustment to swiss ways of doing everything (ie strict rules of living in apartments, massive bureaucracy and so on) - you need to change, they won't; 3) finding accommodation is often as hard as landing a job (which is often super hard, too much global competition) - they just don't build new housing, so prices went through roof and your resume and salary and skin color and nationality and no-pets-no-small-kids and everything needs to be perfect, otherwise goodbye. since there are 100-200 other people applying for same place; 4) having kids is prohibitively expensive, international schools are either paid by your employer or you put your kid to (good) public ones. You need to be seriously well-off for kids, or compromise on couple of things.

I live in Geneva, I love it here, but I am not here for salary. You can get much more value for your salary elsewhere in Europe for doing same job as here. Munich, London and couple of other places would work better. But I am a mountain freak, having Chamonix as 45 minute drive from apartment is priceless for weekends and having France 2 kms away makes spending a bit more bearable.

Sounds just like SV!

> you're ignoring a fact...it's close to impossible to buy a part of land

What does that have to do with s3nny's post? I can't afford to buy a house in the area I work.

Not being able to buy a house near work is pretty common for younger people these days across the world.

Not wanting to buy a house seems pretty common for younger people, at least in my experience (in various parts of the US).

I think young people realize that the suburban dream was just that.

But is a condo affordable? When people say "buy a house" that can be a euphemism for "own my dwelling".

Young people almost always change their mind about that once they have kids. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Buying a house doesn't necessarily mean buying in the suburbs. We've got kid and live in the city, and we know other families that do as well. Probably still a minority, but a growing trend. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that people with kids lived in cities too.

This is a weird comment. Is this a Baltimore thing? American cities are full of families. With the possible exceptions of San Francisco and Manhattan, they are mostly families, aren't they?

Sorry, I meant we're in the minority of families that live in a city, not that a minority of people in the city are families. The latter is true, as you point out: 57% of Baltimore households are families.

Downtown and surrounding areas in Seattle seem devoid of families with kids. My wife and I live in Bellevue but wanted to move to Seattle. We tried finding people at our workplaces who lived there and had kids, to ask about schools and such, but found no one. Everyone seems to move to farther neighborhoods or to the suburbs once they have kids here.

Depends if you mean with kids or not. Most college educated families with kids in Chicago move out of city limits post kids to avoid the bomb that is Chicago Public Schools.

Do you have stats to back that up?

Is it origin/master or origin master?

It depends on the command of course

My wife and I are young parents (not 30 yet and our kid is going to be 8 soon) and don't have plans to buy a house, at least not in the next 10 or so years.

We like the mobility renting affords us. We can switch jobs and move closer to work. Plus, we can switch school districts if we want or feel the need to.

Also, we like not having the stress of being homeowners. A lot of people see renting as throwing money away. We see it as paying for a housing service where a lot of annoying stuff is taken care for us.

But part of not wanting to buy comes from the sheer expense. My wife and I could buy in D.C., but it seems financially irresponsible. But if prices were what they were when my parents moved here in 1990 (less than half, even adjusting for inflation), we'd probably pull the trigger too.

Why do would I want to buy part of the land, specially in a foreign country?

Then rent.

The price of food in Switzerland was insane when I was there.

If you're referring to restaurants, that is because the waitress makes around 4000 CHF per month; if you're referring to food in supermarket that is because the clerk behind the counter gets 25 CHF / hour and not 7 EUR like in Germany.

So higher cost of living results in higher prices. Strange that. /s

Higher pay too.

So you're suggesting what, gardening? Gardening is great, but it's not responsive to, "the price of food in Switzerland was insane..."

My sister in Geneva sources a lot of her food out of a community garden.

In Switzerland, imported and unprocessed food is surprisingly cheap. Veggies are maybe 20-30% more expensive than Germany.

Processed food like frozen pizza is expensive as a substantial amount of (manual?), well-paid labour goes into convenience food.

In Switzerland, imported and unprocessed food is surprisingly cheap. Veggies are maybe 20-30% more expensive than Germany.

I must be misunderstanding something, because these two sentences seem to contradict. In Germany itself, "unprocessed food" is more expensive than in most of the rest of the world.

According to Eurostat food prices in Germany are at the EU-15 average and slightly above the EU-28 avarage with fruits and vegetables slightly below.

Sure, in most of the rest of the world food is pcheaper but that compares to even lower income levels.

I don't know how much supermarket clerks earn, but German minimum wage is 8.5 eur/h.

Not only that, but Switzerland puts import fees on quite a number of food items. For instance, Swiss meat farmers are heavily protected, and that shows when you check the prices for meat in the supermarket or in a restaurant. A steak can cost three times as much as over the border in Germany.

I cant talk for anyone but this is something we highly value in this country. You pay more but you usually get always good quality. Its not a hit or miss like in the surrounding countries.

I don't know about Zurich, but Bern is damn beautiful place to be at. Expensive, as all Switzerland is though.

And the Bethlehem area of Bern is affordable and accessible via tram.

Yes, the salaries are higher, but Switzerland is crazy expensive, especially in big cities.

What do you mean by direct democracy? Is it a cultural trait or are you actually talking about a system that enforces/delivers direct democracy?

Some superficial research will answer your question..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy

But essentially a direct democracy is one where the people effect policy instead of electing representatives to do so on their behalf

http://direct-democracy.geschichte-schweiz.ch/

The story of Switzerland's direct democracy is exaggerated. There is no such thing as a complete direct democracy, even if a few individual questions are decided by popular vote.

The only questions you can decide by referendum is things that either have no budgetary consequences or things that set a long term political direction (join the EU, basic income, ...).

Anything that has a shorter horizon needs to be tightly coupled to the budget and you can only adopt a complete budget, not decide on individual questions. Once you accept that you only choose between budgetA and budgetB for the next year/term - you also accept that those who write those budgets as propositions are "parties" and you have arrived at parliamentary, not direct, democracy. Most democracies already have referendums on things like this, but still aren't "direct democracies".

In short - the Swiss have just slightly more referendums than the rest, but they too have a parliament with parties that propose complete, coherent budgets. I like the idea of slightly more referendums but no country that has a budget with thousands of expenses and thousands of different taxes could be governed only direct votes on each of them (perhaps most importantly because no one is interested in voting on thousands of issues).

What are you talking about? Giving every Swiss a basic income definitely has budgetary consequences...

There was no actual complete proposal for how to do it. The vote was on whether to look into implementing it.

So does definitely joining the EU or NATO too - which is why I explicitly listed those as the exceptions as long term political issues. You don't join the EU or adopt BI for a term. Those issues would be referendums in most all EU countries.

That's quite an ignorant view. The solution is simple: keep a reserve, put everything into the budget and don't spend the money if it gets rejected. For example, my local community has liquid assets of about 50 millions and no debt. So if there is a vote on a new school for 20 millions that gets rejected, the 50 millions stay there for future ideas. It's quite simple, really. I find the idea that a budget must always be fully used somewhat strange.

"Keep a reserve" is the hard part. Most countries are in debt. Even if you have a reserve to begin with we can disregard it as a temporary luxury - long term the budget must be in balance or the reserve will disappear.

If you vote for "2% raised taxes" or "expand railway network" only the combination (yes, yes) and (no, no) can balance the budget. People would likely vote against the tax increase but for the infrastructure investment.

And even if you could afford it - how do you prioritize it against something else that was also accepted through referendum?

It's quite common to have both bundled together when voting on ballot measures. In the East Bay there was recently a proposition to expand public transport via a temporary increase in sales tax called measure BB.

You might not be the right person to ask this, but maybe somebody else from Switzerland will be able to.

I'm starting a coding internship in Geneva in about two months and I was wondering whether you would have any advice about renting apartments in the area. For example, should I be trying to find apartments in France, or am I better off sticking with Switzerland. Should I be getting in touch with estate agents in the area via phone? Are there any good sites which contain apartment listings? I will be staying there for 12 months so any advice would be much appreciated.

The real-estate market in Geneva can be pretty daunting. Low supply, high demand, wary landlords...

* I wouldn't bother with France unless you're willing to drive and waste a lot of time in traffic jams. Annemasse is the exception, but it's pretty sketchy imho.

* On the other hand, living in the countryside can be a good option. Public transportation works better than if you cross the border, and biking to work can be reasonably doable.

* Living a bit further in Vaud, near a train station, is a good option too.

* Most apartments belong to estate companies (régies immobilières), not individual landlords. Contacting them directly is definitely the way to go.

* https://www.scrapeo.com (disclaimer: it's run by friends of mine, you can scroll down and see the websites they're scraping if you prefer).

Yeah, from my (admittedly brief) research into apartment listings it does seem rather daunting. I would like to cut down on the amount of travel I need to do every morning, to and from work. But at the same time I am pretty used to it already I guess.

I will look into those places and that website, thank you very much!

Just a quick bit of advice. Getting a flat from an agent is very hard if you're not friends with them. I've seen this first hand. Bizarrely it can be just as cheap getting an air b&b for a few months at a time. Also it is absolutely worth looking in to a place across the border in France, it's cheaper, not that far away, and public transport is pretty good. I've been here for 6 months or so, but leaving soon... its really not the city for me.

> Getting a flat from an agent is very hard if you're not friends with them.

I find that rather odd, any ideas why it is that way? Is there really so few flats on the market? I would think that estate agents would be happy to help anyone find a home...

I have tried to email a number of estate agents and all I got was automated responses. Some in French, despite the fact that I wrote the email in English. They all mostly said the same thing: "Our website has many listings, please look there".

> Bizarrely it can be just as cheap getting an air b&b for a few months at a time.

While that may work, I would much rather stay in the same place.

> Also it is absolutely worth looking in to a place across the border in France, it's cheaper, not that far away, and public transport is pretty good.

Hrm, France is looking very nice too. I guess it all depends on where I find a place first.

> I've been here for 6 months or so, but leaving soon... its really not the city for me.

May I ask why it's not the city for you?

> I find that rather odd, any ideas why it is that way? Is there really so few flats on the market? I would think that estate agents would be happy to help anyone find a home...

Vacancy rate in Geneva proper is about 0.4%. As usual in such situations, why bother with a foreigner who isn't going to stay long when you likely know friends/acquaintances (Geneva is a small world :) looking for a place?

This is so compelling! I'd like to experience such a place.

However being from some part of this planet I googled a few keywords and came across this: https://www.vice.com/read/guide-to-european-racist-leagues

The website features a lot in HN so but I don't know about the quality of their journalism. Anyway, you never know till you try...

This seems to be a joke article... I quote:

Germany:

The Evidence At the time of going to press, a comprehensive reading of the past hundred years of German history showed no documented incidents of any racial bias.

Racism Rating 0/5

ehh???

What could possibly give you that impression?

Sometimes I wonder how people can be so oblivious to satire and sarcasm.

Just dropped you an email. Thanks!

The parent posts this pretty regularly, and I followed up with him. Turns out if you are a US citizen it's not going to happen. Not sure why he keeps posting here as a majority of people are in the US, with no warning given.

Was mildly annoyed at having my time wasted.

> "If you are from the EU and thinking to move"

Ok, looks like he's added that new phrase. I stand corrected.

You are quoting from the disclaimer section. It led with:

>If you look for a coding job in Europe

> if you are a US citizen it's not going to happen.

May I ask why?

Countries don't offer jobs to foreigners unless they are desperate. Even when they do, there's a lot of red tape.

Total after tax compensation is still better in the bay area although when you compare total compensation at companies like Google and Facebook. So if your in the USA already it's would be a minor downgrade and a huge move. Immigration timelines are also about similar with about 10+ years necessary to become a swiss citizen like in the USA.

It's definitely an easier move for an EU citizen to do than the USA although from a family and immigration standpoint. But immigration wise it isn't hard to get an H1B or L1 visa since the hiring company will handle all of it. From there applying for a green card is pretty automatic. For canadian's and australians, it's even easier to immigrate, almost the same amount of work as moving to switzerland for an EU citizen.

Indian and Chinese people have a hard time with green cards in the USA because there is per country lineups. The immigration 'lines' for those 2 countries are much longer than any other nationality because of their population sizes. Switzerland or somewhere else in the EU might be more attractive from that standpoint, although I don't know if they implemented something similar there.

Cost of living wise CH is definitely more expensive. Housing costs are also close in SF and CH.

This may not come as a suprise to people from the US, but my sister (who lives and works near Zurich) says you have to pay everything yourself. Dentist, doctor, they just got a child and the father got one day off work if i got it correctly, and she only a couple of weeks. Still children stay at home untill they are 5 or something, you just have to pay someone privatly if you want to work.

The list goes on and on and on, so from this Bay Area like salery there is only something left if you're young, without children and healthy.

This is not exactly true. Doctor is paid by your health care but you usually pay the fees before you get them back (if you can, otherwise you just send it to them and done). Dentists are included in a health care plus plan which you only get when you are already healthy, its not expensive like $40+ a month. You are right that mothership holidays is not that long, in my experience most people just take a month or two off unpaid.

If there is anything you can not afford there is a huge social infrastructure to help you out. There is no reason your kids should miss one something.

Also dont forget that these salaries include 4 weeks and more paid holidays.

All of these things are not included in american health care & social plans ether so i dont know why i even write that comment right now.

> You can expect to get 7000 - 12000 CHF / month after taxes

I get barely 6000 after taxes after working here for almost three years. I'm not Zürich area, but still. Out of curiosity, in which branch are you?

> When talking about their politicians, the Swiss say “WE decided that …” whereas e.g., Germans say: “THEY decided that …”

Whereas the Australians say: “Look what those bastards have done now …”

The amount of net-saleries don't tell you much about the standard of living you will have in a certain place. The expenses can be so radically different, especially if you think of ever having a family. Also work hours differ a lot.

I have worked at Universities and IT in the US, Switzerland, and Austria. Austria has almost free kindergardens, schools, and higher education. In CH (basel area) I paid 70USD/day/child kindergarden fee. In the US it's quite normal to start saving for your kids education when they are born.

US health care is a mess. Even after paying tons of money you have to set money aside for all the times you get screwed over by insurgence companies refusing to pay certain parts of a procedure. If you are honest with yourself you have to subtract this all from your pay check and/or add this when you live in an area that has fail-proof health insurance for under 400 USD/month/family.

CH's living expenses are generally very high and most people starting a job there underestimate this. If you think a 40 USD pizza at a normal looking place is insane, you are one of them.

Just throwing some pointers out that salaries must be compared in context ...

Coming from Switzerland, this is not at all surprising. No one expected this initiative to pass. It was really more of an attempt to get a conversation started, and it's succeeded in that.

As a (tentative) supporter of basic income, I'm already quite happy that something like a fifth to a quarter of voters went for it.

Doesn't the fact that the margin on the no vote was so high put a damper on the enthusiasm for supporters? Or do the Swiss routinely vote over and over again on rewordings of the same idea?

It does put a damper on things, but yeah, it's not uncommon for more or less the same thing to come up every decade or two. Evergreen topics include immigration reform, nuclear power, and whether Switzerland needs an army.

Ahhh. Well, it will be interesting to see how the economy evolves over the next decade and how that might affect a future vote. If tons of Swiss middle class lose their jobs and move down to low class it could be a dramatic reversal.

Mandatory health insurance is another good example:[1]

In 1890 the constitution was changed by popular vote to give the federal government the authority and duty to establish a health care system, either voluntary or mandatory.

A project for mandatory accident and health insurance passed the parliament in 1899, but a referendum was requested and the proposed law was rejected by popular vote in 1900.

A new law was passed in 1911, keeping the mandatory accident insurance but leaving the states free to make health insurance voluntary or mandatory. This law survived a referendum in 1912.

Attempts at revising the health insurance law failed in the 20's, 40's and 50's.

A popular initiative for mandatory health insurance failed the vote in 1974. A counter-project submitted by the government, with mandatory coverage for large risks only, also failed the vote.

Finally, another popular initiative for mandatory health insurance is deposited in 1986. The government prepares an indirect counter-project, resulting in a law that includes mandatory health insurance. The law is adopted by the parliament in March 1994, but a referendum is requested. Both the initiative and the referendum on the law are submitted to a popular vote in December 1994. The initiative fails by 76.6% "no" while the counter-project passes by 51.8% "yes".

[1] http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D16608.php

Well, it was 2500 bucks.

Maybe 1500 would get more people to vote for it, or something else chagned, etc.

Thing is that Switzerland is a super-expensive country. 1500 would not actually be enough to live on. You can get 4000 working at the till at a supermarket.

The idea of basic income is not to replace jobs. The idea is to give you the basics of living and food. Then you can take on additional work of some kind to improve your overall income.

You could live with 1500 if you really wanted to. Its not impossible.

If you do not need any housing (or maybe am ok with a very remote small room)

It wasn't 2500 bucks. The text Switzerland voted on today said something like:

> 1. The Confederation has to implement a basic income.

> 2. This basic income has to be sufficient to live in dignity and participate to public life.

> 3. The basic income amount and financing are regulated by law.

Nothing regarding the exact amount. Swiss people were asked to vote on an idea, not on a specific amount.

Which is exactly what made me turn against it. I want to know what I vote for, leaving it open like that will in the best case lead to a completely watered down compromise and in the worst case a complete mess. The social security system needs to get simplified at the same time. An initiative committee for UBI needs to sit down and come up with a tenable solution, at least for the basic parameters (both spending and financing).

It's exactly how it should be! We generally, like in this case, vote for a change of the constitution. The constitution should not contain specific monetary values like this that need to be regularly adapted anyway, nor would it make sense for people to vote on specific values. We should vote on general ideas and the government, together with specialists, impels implements them. Otherwise it's some kind of micromanagement by the masses.

No because you have to look at were we came from. 10 years ago people either didn't know what it even was or was against the idea. Only small groups of people here and there even thought it as a potential solution.

Now countries like Finland is looking into it.

I am pretty confident we are going to end up there, but like many other major changes in society it takes time and thats fine.

Question, how does Switzerland avoid becoming more polarized country with so many referendum questions each year?

Do you think there is a risk passing a referendum resolution that passed just by a small margin?

I have been thinking about this since the result of Austrian presidental elections, and how more polarized the politics in Europe is becoming, while trying to figure out if there is a way how to move politics to a a place where it would strive for finding society-wide consensus and compromise on most issues.

It can be pretty polarized unfortunately. For example, in 2002, an (in my opinion, pretty extreme) anti-immigration referendum was defeated with a margin of 4208 votes. https://www.admin.ch/ch/d/pore/va/20021124/index.html

> Question, how does Switzerland avoid becoming more polarized country with so many referendum questions each year?

As a Swiss, I would say a high number of referenda works against polarization. This Sunday, we had to vote on five national questions and additional local ones. This high number of questions makes it very unlikely that you agree on everything even with your family and best friends. Thus, we automatically learn to disagree without getting polarized.

My grand-father always encouraged his children to vote even though he knew they nomrally had different opinions and "neutralized" his vote. To him, voting at all was much more important than what the vote was, as long as you vote for what you honestly believe is right. I fully share this view.

That bit about your grandfather is incredibly mature. I wish we saw this sentiment more often in the US.

A referendum resolution did pass with a small margin and it was controversial. Said initiative was the "initiative contre l'immigration en masse", or in English "Against mass immigration". It was accepted by 50,3% of Swiss voters and 12 Swiss Cantons outright and 5 cantons counting half towards the vote (out of 26). It is controversial, as the implementation of said vote means bringing back immigration quotas for all EU citizens, meaning Switzerland would need to leave the Schengen area. To the EU this means Switzerland would be rejecting a whole set of bilateral agreements, so the implementation of this particular vote is causing a headache for the Swiss government.

That said, further referendums on the question of immigration, for example automatically expelling convicted foreigners after their sentence is complete were fairly convincingly rejected. From the Swiss I know, most consider the referendum process to be fairly normal and routine. They receive information booklets presenting both sides of the argument, the view from the government and the view from any political parties who are interested. They make their decision and they decide.

It is difficult to explain I think unless you've seen it in action. I am from the UK and we are currently in the middle of the Brexit/Remain campaign. There's not an iota of fact or reason in the current debate and our politicians do things like predict WWIII if we leave and waves of Turkish immigrants if we remain. The whole thing is moronic and embarrassing. There are without a doubt some stupid things said/done here (the black sheep poster by the SVP for example) but the level of political discourse is no way near the level of stupidity in the UK IMO. If you're imagining Trump-esque campaigns every few months, it's basically the polar opposite. Unless you speak the local language and know what you're looking at, you'd hardly notice. At best you will see billboard or two amidst the other adverts and perhaps receive an information leaflet in the post. That's it. Perhaps the Swiss guy or girl above might say it is more obvious perhaps, if you have more Swiss friends than I do or watch a lot of TV, but I don't think, from what I have seen, that it is anywhere near as vitriolic as any other country I know.

Source: I'm British and I live in a French-speaking Canton (in spite of my username).

Question, how does Switzerland avoid becoming more polarized country with so many referendum questions each year?

In the US, many vilify their political opponents as crazy and/or morally inferior. This has happened around referendums. We also try to get civic organizations to adopt politicized codes of conduct and have politicized social media campaigns to kick people out of civic organizations. I hope Switzerland doesn't have those horrors.

I guess they should add a minimum margin for the referendum to pass a resolution.

That would give an advantage to those who reject the resolution.

> Question, how does Switzerland avoid becoming more polarized country with so many referendum questions each year?

From my experience even young people are able to have healthy discussions about "difficult" topics and then just proceed with life.

This topic clearly led to some interesting discussions where some had very radical thoughts to, but i saw no friendships breaking so far.

As someone who lived in a while in Austria it is completely different there. I've seen people punched in the face for less aggressive political motives in the public.

Who is this basic income aimed at in Switzerland? Somehow I can't picture homeless people living on the streets of Bern but like anywhere else I'm sure there are homeless there people too.

One of the reasons why it was rejected, is because the supporters were slightly too idealistic. The elephant in the room is obviously, who would be eligible for the BI.

Most of the supporters and some of the initiators of the initiative, that I've spoken with, were strongly for a idealistic implementation, meaning everybody physically located in Switzerland would be eligible. While the number one argument against a BI was that exactly this absolute unconditionality would be a recipe for a disaster, especially given the current migration situation in the EU.

The Swiss are notoriously risk averse, so any proposal that does not take into account any possible side effects, usually gets rejected with a margin just like this one.

To have a realistic chance of acceptance, I think the 'unconditional' needs to be dropped. Add a conditional on citizenship, flesh out the financing some more and just try again. The problem here is that a "national basic income" instantly catapults you politically very far right, even though it's a very leftist position.

I hope that if your BI is only for citizens and since this is presumably financed by taxes, you are going to grant a big tax exemption to non Swiss nationals, since they (according to your plan) will have no chance of benefiting from BI. What other ramifications this can have is difficult to foresee.

The nice things about simple plans is that they are simple: once you start complicating matters, it gets really messy.

A citizens-only BI is just an example to maximize the difference to the current rejected proposal and setup a spectrum of possible implementations. There'd be probably some reasonable solution in the middle, where after working and paying taxes for n years makes you eligible for an BI.

Actually, I'd be in favor of a pragmatic vesting form, where the BI-payout is not binary, but you'd become eligible for a bigger share gradually over time, not just for non Swiss nationals, but especially for Swiss nationals. So that we youngsters won't just get a big payday, but it could be tied to a vesting scheme connected with your total taxes ever payed. Meaning, after taking on some small jobs and earning money the hard way first, even young (Swiss) people would have to 'earn' their BI.

I think this is a nice demonstration of how well direct democracy can work.

The argument against direct democracy (referendums on any subject any sizeable group wants to put on vote) is that people will be economically irresponsible and vote themselves popular, expensive goodies with no regards of financing or cost.

This shows otherwise.

What if I told you that it was the people who forced the government to be fiscally responsible: https://www.efv.admin.ch/efv/en/home/themen/finanzpolitik_gr...

Many countries in Europe, including Switzerland, were ramping up debt. In Switzerland this was stopped by the people via a vote in 2001. In the eurozone it took the debt crisis.

> This shows otherwise.

Switzerland is one the most highly educated and richest country on earth. Do you think the results of direct democracy would be equally responsible in Egypt, Syria or Bolivia? (I'm half-Syrian).

Maybe it is the richest country because of direct democracy ...

it's a mixed bag. I know in my home country (Slovakia), if they had same vote as Swiss few years back, people would vote for some ridiculous bad stuff. One example out of many - extending minimum paid vacation per year from 4 weeks to 6. Swiss population said NO, because of the financial consequences to employers. Now tell me, how many countries out there would end up with same result given this option?

Quality attracts and breeds more quality. Somehow, they manage to pull it off for last 800 years, in one way or the other.

Wait - direct democracy is good when it comes to social issues but bad when it comes to economic ones?

The argument against direct democracy is that the population isn't very informed. Not necessarily that they are selfish.

Even in the US, voters often tend to vote against their own self interest. E.g. people that stand to benefit from social programs often vote for conservatives against social programs.

Could it be that those people think that more social programs would only be in their self-interest in the short term, and are taking a longer view (as appears to have just happened in Switzerland)?

Why is anyone who votes against short-term self-interest automatically uninformed?

This.

However, I think the prevailing thinking will lean more and more towards voting for the free stuff. Someone else is paying for it, right?

I think it showed that 20-25% of people did exactly that. Probably correlates highly with the number of people that would have benefited from a direct income. I don't think this proved what you wanted to prove at all.

I wish I would live in a country where essential political decisions like that are made by the people and not by some professional political elite in a far away capital.

Sorry to burst your bubble but direct democracy doesn't work everywhere by default.

And why do you think so?

The majority of population isn't in place to make honest, rational choices unaffected by feelings, culture, religion (I wanted to state educated, but education doesn't necessarily mean that the choice would be on the rational side) and media influence.

And do you think Switzerland is different?

No I don't need to, they've shown they're different.

Can I turn the question around : do you think this would work in USA, India and Brazil (random countries, nothing specific)?

I honestly think e-democracy would work everywhere after a few years of total chaos.

This is controversial, but I think any nation can have direct democracy adapted to the nation's culture. It's just that the Swiss have more than a hundred years experience with direct democracy and have learnt for the most part to be diligent in their decisions.

>The majority of population isn't in place to make honest, rational choices unaffected by feelings, culture, religion

In a real democracy, they're not supposed to either. If their culture, religion, etc is important to them, it should definitely affect their decisions, and that's the democratic way. Same for their feelings.

Democracy is not about voting what's "right" (who is to say? you?) but about getting what the majority wants. And there's nothing unhonest about letting culture, religion and feelings affecting your vote.

What you describe as your ideal democracy where people only make "rational choices" is rather the old republican idea of sages who know better than the people (like the "founding fathers" in the US) and encode some norms forever.

"Rational" used in this sense, is totally normative -- "what I think is rational" or "what those experts say it rational and good for you", and in the end undemocratic.

I think it's true-ish in the same way that representative democracy doesn't work everywhere either. Many post-communist countries like Russia are an easy example. Obviously the working of a system depends on the social contract being considered legitimate by the population. Concretely this means that for direct democracy to 'work' you'll need a population that has experience and a self-confidence to be the ones that turn up and vote about a bunch of issues they'll need to understand. That's something that can't be implemented overnight. But similarly even representative democracy can't be implemented overnight. That's the dynamic nature of the social contract.

Something I admire about the Swiss btw.

There's no bubble. I agree with you. That's why I am in favor of small countries or at least largely federal structures. And obviously against large undemocratic bureaucratic constructs like the European Union.

The downside are populistic decisions like the Swiss minaret referendum. Now we have the sentence «The construction of minarets is prohibited.» in the constitution. (https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/...)

I think such regulations should be decreed as a law and not as a constitution norm if at all. But if everybody has a say you get bikeshedding in the constitution.

I agree, but that's not really an argument against direct democracy, but rather in favor of a slightly differently constructed constitution - basically there should be a unchangeable core of norms, and no additions that defy the purpose of those norms should be possible. Religious freedom in that case.

Technically, it's not against religious freedom - after all, you can still practice, at home!

>The construction of minarets is prohibited.

Hardly surprising. Nobody wants to be awoken at ungodly hours by that howling.

While I agree about the howling, that was already not allowed. The referendum was only about the physical minarets. Unfortunately the church clocks make just as much noise in Switzerland.

At least both are short noises at predictable times. I'm very sensitive to noise, but neither church bells here nor the muezzin calling for prayer five times a day in my vacations in islamic countries have ever bothered me.

On the other hand, I wish somebody would actually enforce anti-noise laws against my trash-techno neighbor at night ;)

* > I'm very sensitive to noise, but neither church bells here nor the muezzin calling for prayer five times a day in my vacations in islamic countries have ever bothered me.*

Then I don't think you can characterise yourself as "very sensitive to noise". Perhaps very sensitive to certain kinds of noise, but not noise in general?

I think that's obviously implied. If there was a general sensitivity to every kind of noise anywhere, you wouldn't be able to live. If I said "I have a food allergy", you wouldn't assume I don't eat because I'm allergic to food in general, or would you?

So what did you mean by saying "I'm very sensitive to noise [but not noises of type X and Y]"? How does that not imply a general issue with obtrusive noises?

I've heard of plenty of people who don't have particular sensitivities to noise but find those two types of noise obtrusive.

It's not funny or considerate to assume that there are no Muslims in the HN community...

Or that he's not polite enough to be considerate.

I would vote for a ban on regular church bell noise as well if I had the choice. In Germany they also ring at ungodly hours in the morning for most programmers. Just as you wouldn't be able to pass a ban on a mosque's call for prayer in Turkey, you'll have a hard time enforcing a ban on church bells in Europe. That's the reality and I wish religious freedom would extend to not being bothered by any other religion's ritualistic call for prayer/mass.

How is this in the USA? Outside certain districts in Boston, NY or the bible belt, I have this feeling there isn't regular church bell ringing going on, is there? Given the many flavors of Christianity in the US and their possibly differing schedule, this could easily turn into an annoyance, I would guess.

I'm an atheist and I personally don't mind the sound of church bells. As part of general western culture, we associate them with certain things. Stuff like weddings, and to me, I always think of medieval Europe when I hear them. Monasteries, monks, those sorts of things.

However, in contrast, a giant megaphone blaring quite "whiny" or "whingy" (for lack of a better way of describing it) gibberish doesn't evoke anything remotely that normal. The sound itself, without any sort of religious connotation is annoying. I suppose I would find it just as annoying if the sound of church-bells were played over a megaphone, 5 times a day.

I have experience with both and I certainly don't find anything comforting in church bell ringing, and frankly I'm sure people in Turkey (atheists included) are used to muezzins and generally not annoyed by it, just as I am to church bells and live with it because I have no choice. That said, I believe that the way you describe it is how you perceive it, but from my experience I wouldn't call it whiny/whingy. It's short, in Arabic, and basically a singing version of call to prayer. Just as church bells have some form of tune to them, so does the muezzin's call to prayer. If we are to name what one might find personally comforting, I wouldn't mind daily gospel music played for the neighborhood by the local church, but I'm sure someone will find that discomforting as well. And to be clear, I am not a Christian.

My main objection is that if you have religious freedom, then either all churches/mosques/temples get the same freedom to call to prayer or none does. The exclusivity of church bells in Europe and muezzins east of Europe is the basic conflict of fairness here. So, realistically, given that we cannot allow them all, including pagans, satanists (death metal?), the most logical conclusion would be to generally disallow, with exceptions where the population insists on it.

In the Bible Belt, at least, I'd suspect that the majority of the population does not live close enough to a church to hear its bells.

Spain is a quite religious country as far as western Europe goes, and problems with church bells are rare. Most cities and towns I know have by-laws prohibiting noise over a certain amounts of dB during the night (typically 0:00 to 8:00 or so), churches just respect it and don't ring bells during that time. There have been cases of some churches insisting on ringing bells in the night, losing in court and being forced to stop.

Not sure "ungodly" is the mot juste here... :p

Anyway I've personally always found the call to prayer quite musical and beautiful.

You can say this about any level of democracy though (that its downside is populistic decisions, or, more precisely, decisions that you or I think are wrong.) It's easy to find a country where most decisions are made by elected leaders and they chose leaders you or I find terrible, who proceeded to make a lot of bad decisions. I don't see an argument either for more or less direct democracy here (though I guess with some data and given a belief of what decisions are "good" one could construct an argument.)

The US population for instance prohibited alcohol and then undid the prohibition, and I think the least that can be said in favor of this process is that since then there's seemingly a consensus in the US wrt prohibition. I'm not sure such consensus is achievable when elected officials enact laws, not to mention when a Supreme Court reinterprets the constitution to de-facto enact a law.

Overall, to me it seems that decisions will be made and reversed no matter what's your process, and it seems that referendums are a great way for the population to "own" the decision - not just affect it but feel responsibility for it.

Also I'd guess that more direct democracy would reduce both stability and corruption (people are more likely to change the status quo, harder to bribe, and not as likely to form 2 or some other small number of groups voting together on every issue as professional politicians.) It seems that we have a lot of both stability (presumably a good thing) and corruption (presumably a bad thing) and it doesn't look like a terrible gamble to attempt to reduce both.

I'm not so sure about corruption and cronyism. Perhaps a Swiss person could comment here, but from reading some Friedrich Duerrenmatt novels the picture isn't that rosy either over there.

Yes, that's a thing in Switzerland. http://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/politische-literatur/stochern-im-e... (German).

Even the 'Ndrangheta from Italy has a branch. http://www.thelocal.ch/20160317/mafia-suspects-refuse-to-lea...

As a Swiss, I feel like there is much less corruption than in other countries, even though we have less strict laws against corruption. The reason for that is simple: Switzerland has a very decentralized and democratic system, ensuring that power is widely dispersed. And there is no point in bribing or otherwise influencing a politician without power. It's the power that corrupts. If you take it away, there is also less corruption.

As a Swiss I agree with the above. I think it also helps that there is no concentration of the executive power in any single person. The Federal Council ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Council ) is made of 7 people from different parties who have to agree and work together. I think this is much better than the system in place in much of the world where executive power is concentrated in a single person who is effectively an elected king with a few restrictions.

It depends on the social class. For the high-level classes, corruption is not frowned upon.

There was a politician that forwarded state secrets to Kazakhstan and got bribed. The thing is if you apologize and publicly declare that it was a mistake to get caught, no one bats an eye. She's now head of the parliament. The unofficial rule is, just don't overdo it...

The political system in Switzerland is known to increase stability, not reduce it.

The way I see it, this is down to two factors:

1. Since Switzerland does have multiple parties and all of the bigger ones a represented in the federal council, there is more compromise and decisions made by consensus. This in turn leads to less dramatics shifts after a term is up and some politicians are replaced. In contrast in the US, where you could have a democratic president and parliament coming in after a term of a republican majority and president (or vice versa). It seems likely, that the new powers to be would set about undoing some decisions made by their predecessors. At the very least you'd have a rather dramatic course change at hand.

2. It is very easy to collect enough signatures for a referendum (50000 signatures within 100 days of the law being passed in parlament) and for every change to the constitution there is a mandatory referendum (no signatures needed, it will brought to a public vote). This means that any controversial law can be brought to a public vote. Which more or less prohibits sudden drastic changes and promotes more incremental change, which brings more stability.

On the other hand, there might be something to the Idea, that direct democracy reduces stability. Basically it is the flip side of 2. above: it is also quite easy to gather 100000 votes to establish a popular initiative. The parties have picked up on that and often introduce controversial initiatives to further their election campaigns. There are not many safeguards in place, so unfortunately there was an increase in badly drafted amendments in recent years. Different parties have brought forward initiatives that contradicted other parts of the constitution.

Your first point is IMO too often understated. The fact that our executive branch comes from most parties in the parliament, instead of a barely-reaching 50% coalition like in most countries is a huge factor.

It has nothing to do with the direct democracy thing, but the most surprising is this so-called "magic formula" is only a tradition and there is nothing in the law that prevents a parliamentary coalition from voting an executive branch representing only 50% of the parliament.

I'd wager that there is some connection to the direct democracy thing: once you'd have any sizeable party in opposition they could abuse the referendum system to bring the legislative process to a near standstill.

It might be not the only reason for the way the executive branch is set up, but IMO it's an important part of the system as it is.

I would actually sign under such prohibition. Few years back my city (in Poland) rolled in regulations prohibiting churches to ring the bell for mass with exception to one 1000 years old cathedral located in "church's town" (de facto small island owned and containing only buildings operated by the church).

Mosques were already prohibited from making an audible call to prayer. The new law was explicitly and only banning them from being visible. It's more like if your city was introducing a new law today that banned the existence of church towers.

California is another example of frequent referenda producing poor governance. Part of the problem is that you accumulate another 1-5 new initiatives every election, none of which are designed to work together; after a few decades you have a big mess of conflicting mandates in the state constitution.

Agreed. And it's so easy for uninformed residents to vote "Sure, let's issue more more and more bonds for x, y and z" without having the ability or will to make a sound decision about the state's budget.

From a Brit perspective (where we tend to have fewer referenda on bigger issues) the other downside appears the sheer, incredible nastiness of referendum campaigns when instead of campaigning to convince people they're a competent government, the campaign leaders (usually the same elites) are prepared to say literally anything to frighten people into voting a particular direction. Not to mention of course the first casualty of any referendum campaign on anything remotely complex is the truth.

I mean, currently the UK referendum on EU withdrawal arguments seem to have peaked around "leaving the EU will knock £62000 off the value of your house and please Putin and ISIS" vs "women will be at risk of sex attacks from foreigners if we don't leave"[1]. I'm not familiar with the Swiss situation but doubt the constitutional changes around minarets were fought over the merits of Islamic architecture or nuanced arguments about zoning.

[1] There are slightly subtler arguments being used, but virtually none of them are based on fact either.

> I'm not familiar with the Swiss situation but doubt the constitutional changes around minarets were fought over the merits of Islamic architecture or nuanced arguments about zoning.

It is a misconception to believe that these are the only valid types of arguments against minarets.

There are many that value their own culture and want to keep it that way without necessarily viewing other cultures as inferior.

I'm not sure how having [already legally silenced] minarets affects the culture of Swiss people that don't attend mosques in the slightest apart from its visual impact on the surrounding area. (I'm not sure minarets or lack thereof affects anyone's culture that much tbh)

Frankly I'd have thought enshrining the principle of intolerance of the symbols of a particular religion in the constitution represented a more substantive cultural change, but then I'm not Swiss.

It would be a visible symbol that Islam is part of mainstream culture which it is not. It is part of other cultures and these cultures have very different views on social norms and order, laws and politics.

If you incorporate tribalism into a national constitution, all it does is amplify tribalism in society. Whatever social problems exist between unassimilated immigrants and locals will get worse, not better. A constitution is probably the single least constructive place possible in which to wage culture wars. It should be steering the country towards helping different cultures coexist, not feeding into both the xenophobia of one group while formalizing the outsider status of another one.

I tend to agree that the constitution is the wrong place, it should probably be a law.

But this has nothing to do with xenophobia, it's about the social order and norms that we have and that we will have in the future.

I like the freedoms I have and I don't want to give them up, neither do I want the Muslim living in Europe to give up his. Everyone can practice their religion and have their political views but with time they or their next generation will tend to assimilate, it's only natural.

I believe that allowing immigrants to remodel our society and culture in any way they desire will not have the effect that we'll merge and solve cultural issues. Instead they will build and create according to their own culture (which is also natural), live among themselves concentrated in some parts of the cities which will then turn into ghettos with high unemployment and this would in turn create radicalism on both sides.

There are already districts in some German cities where ethnic Germans are at risk if they enter. To me, this is clearly not the way to go.

well, it seems pretty clear to me, but let's assume this in an honest question, and pardon me for my honesty - these are my own observations from living here:

- generally europe is christian. swiss are very traditionalists, and religion is very important here. they are extremely tolerant to other cultures (that's why UN is in Geneva for example), but only to the point where they don't feel their own culture threatened. Obviously, with islam, and islam only, based on plenty of bad experience in their neighbors (ie France, Germany) they decided as they did. Over time, they don't regret their decision. Personally, even as atheist, I tend to agree on this topic. Overall attitude in Europe is same right now and many wish they could have similar vote.

- would you go and build a church in Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia? (Actually I've visited old churches in Isfahan in Iran, with thriving christian community, humbling experience). Not many would even think about this. Personally I don't find it shocking that dominant religion is preferred somewhere. You can practice anything you want at home, just no official religious places are allowed to build. Bear in mind that those that were already built are still standing, this applies only to new construction. Very Swiss approach.

it's something around being tolerant to others only to the point where your own identity and core principles are not threatened. very mature and clever approach.

> would you go and build a church in Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia?

No, but being too scared to do something doesn't make it moral - it just makes it enforced. I don't support these countries' overt hostility to and breaches of human rights, but I'm not going to risk my life to fix it either.

Out of interest, why is populistic commonly used as a pejorative? It seems to be the best friend of democracy.

It's used in a negative sense when liberals don't like the outcome of a direct democratic decision.

And also every other political group, in any situation. And, in this context, eg the dangers of pure democracy, almost every political thinker that's ever existed.

Because democracy and "people voting" are all fine and dandy until the outcome is one you don't like. So "populist" gets thrown out when the outcome is the majority deciding on something that is seen as "wrong", but popular. It's quite a disconnect from the definitions themselves. As most people think democracy means "everyone get's a say, and the leading opinion is the one that the ruling-body should take".

On the other hand, when people complain about "populism", they expose another problem with democracy I've long complained about. Opinion gets swayed by all sorts of reasons, actions and emotions.

E.g. In the Brexit vote, the vote-stay side is trying to use fear and no-doubt some will be swayed by that. Does that mean that they actually want it? Would they have voted it if they weren't exposed to that influence? Must we keep the voters in a sterile-bubble until they decide? What about making informed decisions? Who decides what is fear-mongering vs informing the voters?

Next up, you have influential persons. This can be everyone from your local community activist, your overbearing and opinionated family member, to public figures such as actors and artists. You can see it now with Donald Trump's campaign. Every single person that has any wide "reach" to the public is using it to promote their view of Trump, whether good or bad. I call them vote-multipliers; their singular vote means a whole lot more than yours or mine, no matter how valid or factual our arguments are. When opinion and emotion sways voting, the "one-person one-vote" mantra doesn't hold up anymore.

I mean, we have to recognise that democracy can, and (in some cases) does, produce bad results (to a given definition of bad). For democracy to truly work, people need to vote based on more than just something being good for them. If you are not a slave, slavery probably benefits you (again, this can be argued against, but at least in a short term simple view of things), etc...

Generally the term seems to be used by people worried about knee-jerk reactionary voting, "it's what I want, therefore force everyone to do it", or "it's good for me, so yes, even if it is bad for others".

> In the Brexit vote, the vote-stay side is trying to use fear

Both sides are using fear almost exclusively. The in side claim the economy will collapse without the EU, the out side claim it's doomed if we stay in, and these are hardly the only examples - the out side shamelessly perpetuates the 'all immigrants are criminal freeloaders who want to take over' that is basically pure racism, the in side will gladly paint anyone who wants to leave as a racist.

It's really terrible, and is hardly surprising - the exact same thing happened in the AV referendum, where the two major parties (who use AV internally) came out with what was essentially 'you are too stupid for AV, stick with nice simple FPtP'.

Populism is just another name for the very basic feature of democracy: giving everyone the right to vote means that the country is effectively governed by idiots, because they always outnumber smart, reasonable people.

Not sure if being sarcastic or not. Do you believe that holds up on a purely statistical basis?

Poll after poll decade after decade has shown the average American to be quite ignorant. The fact we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy is lost on the vast majority of the citizens. Only 40% can name the three branches of government, and far less than that can correctly describe the powers enumerated to the branches by the Constitution.

http://www.alternet.org/story/90161/ignorant_america%3A_just...

Easily! First we can agree that about 50% of the population has an IQ below 100. Let's call them idiots for the arguments sake. Then remaining 50% will most certainly have different views on things, let's say we can agree that at least another 10% have views so radically different from ours that we can call them idiots. That's at least 60% idiots rights there. QED

"Populist" in the pejorative sense usually implies exploiting public discontent with or distrust of the status quo to propose something far worse.

Dictatorships tend to be populist. Theocracies tend to be populist. For example, the Islamic regime is highly populist. Chavez was populist. Golden Dawn is populist. Nigel Farage, Marie le Pen are populist politicians. Etc etc.

It might demonstrate that ~50% of the population currently agrees with the current message of a person or group of people

I'm not sure that's a downside, unless you prefer hearing prayer 5 times a day. I fled Bosnia during the war, but I visit it occasionally and each time it appears more religiously extremist than the last. All other countries should take a look at what has happened there and consider the importance of implementing cultural integration in addition to economic integration when accepting large incoming migrant populations.

When you hire for a company you want your dream team to have a diverse background of ideas and experiences but that doesn't mean you let them work on the goals and products they worked on at their previous employer with whatever processes they want.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not sure the specific minaret law is a downside from my experience, but that is not to say that your overall point on populist reforms is invalid. I was just focusing on the specific law.

> I'm not sure that's a downside, unless you prefer hearing prayer 5 times a day

Is/Was prohibited anyway in Switzerland, so this vote didn't change anything on that fact. Though this argument has been used during the campaign before the vote.

A good point. I'm not familiar with the switzerland law or referendum.

You deal with that by restrictions of noise. Outlawing minarets to stop noise is like banning vodka to stop alcohol drinking. It doesn't make any sense.

It is very common in many places to restrict highly visible outside advertisement (e.g. the Hollywood sign would not have happened in Switzerland). Visual attention-grabbing is considered just as much as annoying as noise. It seems very reasonable to not exclude religious communities from that rule.

I do agree however, that things like minarets should better be left to a general building code addressing the problem of architectural shouting contests without explicitly mentioning religion. The stupidity of having the literal phrase (well, in german) "it is forbidden to erect minarets" in the constitution should serve as a warning to anyone who praises direct democracy all too blindly.

I really don't get it why cases like that are solved with a polar vote (change or no change), not with approval voting offering more than two possible results on different levels of compromise. There seems to be a tiny glimse of it (only on the wiki in german: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Ja_mit_Stichfrage ) but that is just three way between no change, proposal and one administrative counter-proposal, which still leaves the door wide open to polarism.

Yes, Approval Voting with multiple options would have been better. They did this in Landerd, Holland last year, where voters had six options to select from with regard to how to restructure the municipality (e.g. merge with various bordering municipalities). I believe one of the options was "Status Quo". Voters could select any number of options.

As long as church bells are also prohibited, I don't see the problem.

Allowing any religion to advertise itself in any form should be prohibited as it is intrusive to all.

What if someone invented a religion that told everyone to use airhorns every hour?

Different religions have different effects on society. There is no fundamental reason why they should all be treated the same.

As a Swiss let me give you my opinion of this. First I will say that I voted against this.

Lets be honest here, the 'minaret' issue is extremely minor one. I does not effect large numbers of people and it does not effecte them in a particularly strong way. Based on first principle I voted against it, but was not the most important issue for me or for Switzerland.

Most of the time the results Switzerland gets to usually are really good. Many things that passed in other countries did not pass in Switzerland.

I think that the argument that Swiss democracy is bad because of this minaret example, is extremely weak. If that the best argument you can bring against the Swiss system, then its doing something right. You can't find cases of gross misjudgment or fiscal or social issues or anything like that? I can find stuff like that in most other countries.

The Swiss system can also be used to remove stuff from the constitution. So this minaret stuff need not be there forever.

Edit: One addition I would make to the system is that if a law is rejected by a 'human rights' evaluation group, it needs to pass with 2/3 majority.

> Lets be honest here, the 'minaret' issue is extremely minor one.

Not at all. It violates the very idea of freedom of religion. I doubt a ban on building of churches would be approved and this shows that a more popular group can (and does) trample on fundamental human rights of other smaller groups.

ok let's get down back to earth and reality - it's their country, they are a bit hardcore christians, and since they don't bow to anybody but themselves, they can choose to do whatever they deem good for their society. Most armed and most free nation said it's opinion and I have to agree with them on this one. One's freedom ends where other's begins.

If similar vote would be done now in countries around europe, results would be pretty similar.

I am pretty sure the ISIS guys being pretty hardcore Wahhabis Muslims doesn't exactly makes us comfortable with mass executions, does it? One's freedom may end where other's begins but how far can the other deny freedoms to one and still claim it's an exercise of other's freedom?

These lines are blurry to the point of invisibility, that's why they had public vote (and for other reasons). See, what I find perfectly OK for given situation, you don't. Majority decided as they did. There might be a million Swiss citizens which agree with you, another million (or two) who don't care much but the rest expressed their opinion.

Majorities decided for Nazism and we can all see it was a stupid decision. Having massive popular support only makes an idea popular, not right.

I guess it's a good thing mosques aren't minarets. I see this as a good compromise between "we want to allow others to practice their religion" and "we want to preserve our own cultural heritage". Not knowing the back story of why that line is in the Constitution, I hope it's there as this type of concrete example; practice your religion, build your mosque, but meet Switzerland halfway architecturally speaking.

Also, your metaphor is incorrect; this is banning bell towers not banning churches.

> this is banning bell towers not banning churches.

Would a ban on bell towers become part of the Constitution? I seriously doubt it. A ban on minarets, one that actually made sense and didn't look like religious intolerance, would belong in construction codes or zoning laws.

Perhaps you should move to Iran. The people there wanted sharia law and they got it.

It's your lucky day, wikiHow has step by step instructions:

How to Move to Switzerland

http://m.wikihow.com/Move-to-Switzerland

Switzerland is notoriously tough to emigrate to unless you have a great deal of seed capital to start your own business.

... or if you have an EU citizenship, in which case you can just get there, get visa, settle and start searching for a job. In that order.

Incorrect order, sir. You can move there, live there on 3-month tourist visa, look for work in the meantime, and once somebody will hire you, you will receive proper work permit (visa). You can re-enter, but it's a damn expensive place to live and not earn.

Unless you are from 10 new EU countries, then getting work permit isn't automatic but you deal with limited queues per year, per canton. Once depleted (which goes fast), bye. And employer has to prove to officials that there is no one Swiss or with existing permit to do this job, which adds a lot of bureaucracy.

It gets deeper, far from easy simple situation. But it's true that EU citizens have certain advantages.

The downside is that the people who vote are not necessarily informed about what they are voting.

Yes but I also want to know how many millions were spent on advertisements trying to persuade "the people" one way or another by the political elite.

Because the first referendum that should be called for in a country that has 1:1 voting on issues is to end all political advertisements.

Call it defeatist if you like, but the last thing you should want is that kind of spending getting forced underground. You said it yourself, "one way or another".

The money is there, it "wants" to get spent, the more openly that happens, the less harm will be done. If you don't give it a channel it will find one.

Maybe direct democracy works in a small scale, and by "small" I mean a few dozen people in a town.

Referendum is no panacea. A legislative body can tweak legislation and debate it and compromise. When voting on a referendum there is no such compromise. It's just a binary choice.

Communism is the same way. What works on the communal farm doesn't scale out to a nation-state.

What if you were a discriminated minority, and important decisions specifically affected you were put to a referendum?

Oops, 60% of the populace thinks you're a nuisance who should just shut up and put up (and ideally just go away).

Sure, sucks. But anyway, would you like to live in a place where the majority of people don't like you? It's going to be a fact with our without referendums or laws.

If you get a different result under representative democracy, the minority must be assumed to have more actual (real world) power than mere headcount indicates.

In that case, direct democracy is indeed broken, but the reason is not "discrimination" against those who are actually pretty powerful, but eventual instability from the system's inability to act as a predictive proxy for more direct (less civilized) resolution.

I got up early this morning because I'd missed the date to vote by post. Somehow it feels like your vote matters more when you go cast it in person :-)

20% is not a bad result, I think they expected around 15%. A lot of people would've gone "Fuuuuuuu I voted for that" if it'd been accepted.

As technology advances, I would assume that work will become more scarce. Taking this scenario to the extreme will mean that the majority of the world will at some point will be unemployed in the future. Some form of basic income will result.

I found it funny how most major news outlets made a big deal of this

Yeah, there's your answer. It seems the Swiss are conservative with how they spend their money

Offical now, cantonal majority cannot be reached (12 no, 11 to go) http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/results-votes-june-5th-2016-in-s...

Taking a long-term view, 23% in favor is strong progress for an idea that was once considered outrageous.

Let's see the trend in future referendums. You could argue that basic income may be impractical today. But over the next 10, 20, 30 years, the world will change dramatically.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think the time is right just yet for basic income. When AI is to the point that most skilled jobs can be automated and humans don't really need to work, then we can start giving people money.

YC is taking the long term view, which is great. But what concerns me is the way in which Basic Income is already getting heavily politicised. Politicians are already using it to attract voters (front page of UK Guardian today, Labour party are "considering" a basic income). We are still very much at the research stage.

Change the title? It's misleading to imply the results are final.

Pretty clear trend at ~20% across a number of their regions. Unless the uncounted regions are drastically different than the rest of the country I'd say this one is easy to call.

They are drastically different. These are rural, conservative, catholic and weakly-populated regions.

Well, as it turns out not that drastically different.

Good thing for the majority to reject this ridiculous idea. There is no such thing as a free dinner.

It's too early to say that. The urban cantons did not finish counting, especially Zurich, Basel, Bern and Geneva. I'd expect that there will be 30% yes votes, but of course there are always surprises.

Would agree if the final result we already know where not 80%. At 55% we may have had a surprise, not in that case.

EDIT: Moreover, provisional results for ZH shows 75% no (French) (http://www.20min.ch/ro/news/suisse/story/Revenu-de-base--les...)

Now it's definitive. The cantonal majority says no, which kills the referendum.

Wisdom of the Crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems

Let me start by saying this is one of the most important topics to discuss.

I would argue that UBI itself will have unexpectingly positive effect on productivity by removing the bias causing people to justify unnecessary work because they need to make a living. This will give individuals the confidence to take the time and pursue further more value for society. There will always be laziness, of-course, but we try to achieve freedom for a change.

It seems like the submitter meant to link to the "story" of the same title (http://www.swissinfo.ch/directdemocracy/vote-june-6_basic-in...) rather than editorializing a voting results page.

It seems like a lot of modern politics is not "we should have more" but instead "you guys should have less". I think the election result is an outcome of more and more people thinking along the latter lines.

To bad. Would have been fun watching Switzerland try something new.

This was a proposal long on rhetoric and short on concrete action steps. Future referendums that are more substantive may be treated differently by voters.

Wonder what majority Swiss will say if they want to pay taxes or not?

Would a UBI potentially hurts switzerland main businesses?

it would hurt many businesses in long run and country overall. they work in different ways

Is this d3.js?

Why is Basic Income such a popular topic on Hacker News?

It's the social policy equivalent of blockchain circa 2013.

I believe it is probably because most people here are programmers.

If you are a wildly successful programmer you are automating the work of others, and putting them out of job.

Most of them though are working for the man and dream of a world in which they are free to do whatever they want, their dream job, without the risk that is involved on it (not being able to support yourself and your family).

So what they ask for is a "safety Net" that dilutes the risks onto others.

It did not work in the past, with communism, but they believe with the advances in automation, it could work today.

Personally I believe in "testing everything" before actually doing it.

Because hackers tend to believe in the idea that automation and advanced AI causes a reduction of jobs and the destruction of middle class. This leads to a lot of rich people who control the AI and robots and a lot of poor who can't find jobs.

To counteract this, Basic income is a good idea because it allows for low risk job switching, furthering education and a small bureaucracy but extensive social safety net.

Some say UBI has no connection to technology. It is just about eliminating welfare administrative costs and making people contribute to their communities in other ways.

am pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.

Exactly. Most hackers are in the middle class. Hence, whether you'll get basic income or not, you'll still move in the low class then, won't you?

It would be very interesting to see a through analysis of that :)

Some candidates:

- Open Source, and other forms of commons based production

We are allready comfortable with separating economic value created, from economic incentives to create. Commons based peer production, as Bekler calls it, is less apparent in other areas of the economy.

- Open Minded Systems thinking

I guess, as mostly engineers, we have a natural tendency to approach things as a systems engineering problem. Assuming basic income makes sense from that angle, perhaps were more likely to identify it as such.

- Front row seats to the future

We have a privileged position in seeing where the world I heading wrt technology and its consequences. Thus were probably a few steps ahead in predicting the social issues to be solved in the future.

Die, basic income.

Of course, leftist supporters of democracy will say this does not count and wasn't "democratic".

> Die, basic income.

Please stop posting unsubstantive ideological comments to Hacker News. We don't want this level of discussion here. If you can't make a point thoughtfully, please don't post until you can.

The name-calling undermines your argument too. It's surprising to me how people who post comments like this don't seem to realize that they're diminishing their own cause in the mind of the reader.

What solution do you suggest instead?

Not happy with the headline. They voted no for an "unconditional" basic income. I think that is a huge difference, especially when a majority of the voters also want immigration reform.

My understanding is that basic income can only be "unconditional." If there are conditions attached to it, what might be they?

While that's how I read it, perhaps the condition would be citizenship. I.e. they don't want to simultaneously allow more people into their country and also give everyone in their country a lot of money for fairly obvious reasons. However, the article doesn't give translations of the actual measures so it's hard to say.

That's because the referendum is open ended. The referendum text: «The confederation provides for an introduction of an unconditional basic income.» It's a very short text.

https://bedingungslos.ch/de/pages/initiativtext (German)

The referendum committee made a non-binding proposal to give Fr. 2500 and if someone already earns Fr. 2500 they would not get additional money. The details would still need to be worked out by the parliament. In Switzerland being founded on consensus this means that after a «yes» a huge discussion would start how to implement the basic income. But it seems that the referendum is going to be rejected.

Interesting, thanks.

That is exactly what I had in mind re: my original comment. Seeing from other comments there would be an earnings threshold. That, to me, is not "unconditional."

I'm probably running afoul of language/translation shear...

No you are right. For me it's not «unconditional» neither. However the commitee's proposal is not legally binding. Parliament would have needed to work out the exact details.

One basic-income like proposal is that it's available to those who are willing to work for others. I.e., society owes you enough income to survive, but in turn you owe society the fruits of your labor.

The values of those obligations may not match up - i.e. unskilled people maybe paid $7.25/hour for labor worth only $3 - but at least it's a reciprocal situation with shared obligations. I.e., we're all in this together.

We are not there yet. If we had perfect law enforcement and security then maybe. There is a reason real estate in the middle of some cities is cheap (crime). Of course perfect law enforcement has its own problems (like when nazi's in power).

But yeah, I don't understand why we need protectionism on the internet.

They might have conditions on income, property ownership, citizenship etc. In Cyprus (where I live) the recipients must agree to give unrestricted access to their bank accounts and the application form is quite long (15 pages IIRC). There are people (elderly mainly) that are unable to complete the application.

It's conditional yet it's still called "Minimum guaranteed income".

It is premature but inevitable: automation, stagnant growth, migrations and deflation are all pushing towards universal basic income. Not 2k euros/month but enough to allow surviving and decency.

Welfare without limits is incompatible with Open Borders

Remains to be seen who will want to actually do the (needed) jobs when staying at home is enough

I am in favour of Basic Income, but it's not such clear cut

Given that open borders will help hundreds of millions escape dire poverty, whereas basic income will (at best) reduce some administrative costs and allow some people to live a life of leisure, how do you justify this preference?

Do the prospective brown people who might want to escape dire poverty (i.e., gain access to clean running water, flush toilets, and adequate food) just not count? Even if they counted only as 3/5 of a person, the numbers would still be drastically in their favor.

> how do you justify this preference?

One is helping the ones that are already in the country, the other one isn't.

I'm not against helping, but there is a limit.

How do you propose to help "millions" when a lot of them can't even read http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrian-read-englis...

> Do the prospective brown people who might want to immigrate just not count?

Sure. Let's open the doors so we have more harassment of women, homosexuals and increased Anti-semitism.

Which is funny, because some of my ancestors came from the same region that is in trouble today (maybe they were "Infidels" and were kicked out because of that, who knows)

Why are people "already in the country" more deserving than those outside? Why is this a meaningful moral distinction rather than "already in the right religion" or "already of the right race"?

I propose helping the millions by not using violence to prevent them from performing labor for willing employers (an action which makes both them and the employer better off). That's all.

Sure. Let's open the doors so we have more harassment of women, homosexuals and increased Anti-semitism.

If we have adequate law enforcement, isn't this a problem that will rapidly solve itself? The solution is simple: immigrant assaults a homosexual, has his possessions confiscated, goes do jail and is then permanently deported on exit.

The ones who don't commit crimes can continue to peacefully trade with locals.

If you want to impose collective punishment over statistical disparities in crime, should we also collectively punish Black Americans due to their high crime rate?

> Why are people "already in the country" more deserving than those outside?

In average, they aren't. But life isn't fair. You might as well ask why those that came are deserving of help and not others, and your ability to help before it gets detrimental to the collective.

> I propose helping the millions by not using violence to prevent them from performing labor for willing employers (an action which makes both them and the employer better off).

I don't disagree with this, and I'm sure several do that under the table already. But it seems some have a "rosier" idea of what you'll get http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Exakt/Falsche-Versprechen-lock...

> If we have adequate law enforcement, isn't this a problem that will rapidly solve itself? The solution is simple: immigrant assaults a homosexual, has his possessions confiscated, goes do jail and is then permanently deported on exit.

If it worked like this I would be satisfied. But it's usually not so effective.

If you support unfair collective punishment and protectionism, why limit it to nationality-based groups?

Why not restrict work opportunities for Black Americans also? And to protect "us" from the high rate of crime committed by Blacks, why not force them to live on the other side of town where they are less likely to harm "us"?

(I put "us" in quotes, since I don't consider "us" to refer to any morally meaningful group.)

Good. I suggest you go to your local animal shelter and adopt a cat. But then you'll be favouring one over the other.

Even better, adopt all the cats they have there, lest you support unfair collective punishment.

A better analogy would be that I adopt a cat and threaten people with violence for adopting the other cats.

I didn't say an employer must hire all (or any) anyone. I just said that if a Canadian is willing to pay a Tamil to cook her food, we shouldn't threaten these people with violence to prevent them from engaging in this peaceful trade.

In any case, taking as a given your previous premises (that unfair protectionism is ok based on statistical properties), you seem to have no rational problem with bringing back racial segregation?

I think it's so funny that you're implying I'm racist, but I guess that's what happens when they are firmly rooted in their biased convictions

I'll just add that as a note, Canadians are the worse case of "I'm not racist, but" that I've ever seen.

Canadian immigration process is severely biased towards things like education level, criminal background and language knowledge. So unfair, right?!

I'm not implying your racist. I suspect you aren't.

I'm just pointing out that you don't seem to have a rational reason not to be - your reasoning supports racism just as well as nationalism. This simply means your position is unreasoned - merely a collection of arbitrary views held together by emotion, tribalism, mood affiliation and similar things. That's all.

If you dispute this diagnosis, can you state a principled reason to oppose violence against blacks economically competing with whites, but support violence against Indians economically competing with Americans?

You're overthinking this.

You can argue that the notion of country or state should not exist but that means of organization will happen regardless, with different levels of openness, because people is people and end up in groups.

In the end, modern countries that were created because people have affinity with each other have lasted more than in the cases they haven't.

Of course it's not rational, because people. And people in one groups will usually favour those in the same group (starting with the family)

And in the IT world you'll probably find a lot of Indians that were selected in favour of native US blacks, because of what they know (and how much they charge to employ that knowledge, of course)

Your snide comments imply that those who disagree with you are racist. Not exactly your highest quality contribution to HN.

Those that disagree with him are racist. They're explicitly valuing the lives of some people over others simply because of where they were born.

Technically that's not racism (in the original sense of bias due to race), since the people being discriminated against due to an accident of their birth might be white.

Of course, if we adopt the modern left's definition of racism (which includes actions which have statistically disparate impacts) then this pretty clearly is racism.

There is a pretty good case that a vacuum of talent created by the brain drain in poor countries makes it extraordinarily difficult for those countries to reform their governments and develop in to functional economies.

If those countries wish to keep their slaves inside, they are free to build their own Berlin wall or other barriers to exit.

Meanwhile, back in civilization, people aren't property. Similarly, I'm an American working for an Indian company attempting to disrupt multiple US industries. I have no plans to remain remotely attached to the US once our demographic issues start to collapse. Should the US create some sort of barriers to my exit?

...once our demographic issues start to collapse.

It's probably a mistake for me to respond to something so vague, but do you think this will happen in USA before most of the rest of the world? Unless you "escape" to Africa, I don't see anywhere better-suited for riding out the Great Aging, in the long term.

There are two sorts of demographic issues.

The first is a mere shift in demographic profiles. This leads to a desire for more consumption and a reduction in production - nothing capitalism can't handle. Prices will change a bit, that's all.

The second is a kleptocratic wealth transfer from the young to the old. Witness contemporary Greece, Detroit, Italy, and similar locales. Then look at many US localities (Texas being one of the few exceptions [1]) and recognize what the future contains.

The latter makes me very afraid, and that's what I seek to escape. Not all countries are set up for that.

In terms of mitigating the impact of the first, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillipines all have relatively favorable age profiles. Singapore can also maintain a good age profile via immigration - given how well governed they are, I expect that to occur.

[1] Although Texas is well governed and has a solid economic future, it's unfortunately tethered to NY and CA by being in the US. Further, it's unclear that Texas' good governance will continue given how much immigration it's getting from the rest of the US.

Racist immigration policies are perfectly reasonable if you are a relatively small country whose culture would be at risk from large numbers of people from alien cultures.

What makes them reasonable? Do you subscribe to some sort of corporatist ideology, where the needs/rights of some vague swiss-german corporate outweigh the needs/rights of individual humans?

If so, I'm curious about something. There are 2^{6 billion} possible subsets of humanity. Any individual human is a member of 50% of them. This makes it impossible to treat all corporates equally, so how do you determine which corporates have these rights and which don't?

(I use "corporatist" in the original sense, where a "corporate" is simply some collective of humans rather than specifically a state registered limited liability corporation. I'm also very deliberately NOT mentioning a scary associated word.)

In a given country at a given time, the set of people who are citizens of that country will have a given set of cultural norms, speak a particular language, have a particular understanding of the relation between the government and the people and the law. The immigration of enough people from outside that set will change those attributes, and therefore change how the country is run, which may be displeasing to the original set of people.

You seem to be assuming that cultural attributes are randomly distributed across the world in your second paragraph.

If enough local people engage in political activism or other cultural activities, then those attributes may also change. Those changes may be displeasing to people who favor the original values.

Therefore, should we also ban political activism? If not, why not?

I'm assuming nothing about cultural attributes. I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally.

And if it is justified morally, I also can't see why one can't use the same justification to suppress various local cultural movements which might also change how the country is run and displease a bunch of people.

> I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally.

So what you're saying is that people in Syria should not resist the invasion by ISIS.

Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion

Of course they should resist the use of violence by others.

I'm merely suggesting the French shouldn't violently resist people coming to France and peacefully selling weinershnitzel and saurkraut to people who enjoy these things.

I don't think you'll get any principle out of this beyond something like "my preferences are the best preferences."

In general the right of people to do as they please as long as they aren't infringing on the rights of others isn't considered a mere "preference."

That would work if deciding which things are and are not rights was not itself a preference. You can say that you have some axiom which informs your decisions, but you may have some difficulty proving that this axiom is superior to all others, or all others known (and in which logical framework?).

In practice, this usually ends up selecting for the preference to simply not care about any of the above.

>> Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion

All rumours about French people resisting Nazis are greatly exagreggated.

Local cultural movements are probably violently suppressed all the time. See activities of China, nsa, etc... In corporations, see various actions and words listed under "career limiting moves".

It's possible that by providing a fraction of the population with greater luxury than an equal allocation of resources would allow for, those people are able to achieve greater advances in technology than otherwise, which lead to better results in the long run.

Or more pithily: Maybe we need gardens to cultivate civilisation.

That said, I am very aware that this is probably a post-rationalisation for my tribal intuition that nearby people are more important than distant ones.

This is a plausible argument, and a favored one among some neoreactionaries. But those folks point out that if we accept the "garden" premise, many folks currently in the garden (non-Asian minorities, various lower class white people) should be ejected.

Do you have any argument against this? Coming up with arguments to keep out foreigners is easy. Coming up with arguments that don't also suggest kicking out blacks/hispanics/west virginia is tougher.

Just playing devils advocate.

You can't kick people out because of existing contracts / promises based on citizenship.

Currently borders are leakier for big corporations / the rich, then they are for the individuals / poor. Corporations do have walled gardens across borders. A google employee is better off than a us citizen on average regardless of physical location in Palo Alto or Hyderabad.

If you did have open borders, you would probably end up with more privatized cities where all the land is spoken for by rich people. Eventually countries would be replaced by cities or corporations... I think we are kind of headed that way anyway in effect.

I don't see how ejecting anyone follows from the premise?

The idea is just vaguely that wealth imbalances between arbitrary groups could be beneficial overall. That in itself doesn't specify anything about the size of those groups, or who should be in them.

And if we were setting out to create such arbitrary divisions, geography seems like a fairly practical way to do it. It's easy to keep people in separate areas separate, whereas segregating currently integrated races would be a significant undertaking.

Agreed about open borders. I'd rather focus more on removing the limitations for complete emigration. Ubi might be marginally better than the slew of welfare programs currently in existence but it doesn't solve much more than removing political inefficiencies. "Let's solve government inefficiency with another government program."

I really can't follow this logic. If anything, at least automation and deflation are strongly pushing towards everything getting much cheaper. So soon, 2k/month will be plenty!

Everywhere less and less jobs vs more and more people unemployed because of automation and stagnation. Industrial and immaterial output you can't sell because priced out of the market. Wages going down. It will be cheaper to give 10 euros/month where the poor live now than 2k euros/month (or 300 euros/month as for Italy plan) after they migrate to rich countries. Every place has its own cost of basic life and a grandtotal needed not to starve. It is 300 euros/month in Italy, it may be 500 euros/month in Switzerland (instead of 2k/month), it is half the daily benefit given in the UK, it may be 10 euros/month in Congo. You allow this universally or millions will come from poorer to richer countries destroying their welfare state.

But the swiss have guaranteed health care right?

I'd like to see the USA get basic healthcare guarantee someday.

If you are a human being, you get $2000 per year in healthcare regardless of proof of income, etc. Just being a human being in need.

I hope the Bernie Sanders movement now focuses on the 26 states that are preventing health insurance for millions of people instead of trying to change the USA from the top down.

Healthcare is guaranteed in Switzerland in the sense that you are forced by law to have insurance (you can get subsidies if you're poor enough, though). And the basic insurance coverage may not be up to USA standards (you may share the hospital room with five other patients, for example).

What are these USA standards you are talking about (just curious)?

I don't know, which is why I said "may". I think part of the higher spending in healthcare the US may be due to a higher level of service (which in fact may not be really needed in some cases). Of course there are many other reasons (for example, doctors are paid much better in the US: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/how-much-do-doc... ).

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