Comment by Endama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Endama | Hacker News Reader

I find this really puzzling, as Americans, we seem to have this strange implicit assumption that the market should protect and reinforce culture. That is to say, that as demand increases for cultural artifacts, that the market should grow without affecting access to such artifacts.

It seems that when this assumption does not seem to play out, our reflex is to say that the markets are obviously failing and that policy should step in in order to preserve the integrity of the culture (i.e. we need to stop ruining our neighborhoods with all this development and letting all these _other_ people in!).

I feel like this is putting the cart before the horse. IMO (and I'd love to hear other people's opinion about this) cultures are emergent properties from markets. When people come together in order to trade goods and services, market forces will reward economies of scale to those who minimize costs associated with things like time to market, access to labor, etc. This increase in density with others leads to community development, which in turn leads to an exchange of collective values, shared cultural artifacts, etc.

From this perspective, the desire to limit market expansion is really an attempt to say which values are acceptable and places incumbents as cultural police for which values are allowed entrance. This seems entirely antithetical to the American ideal of being a nation of immigrants and/or being a culture of acceptance and tolerance.

This problem seems to arise due to the implicit power that money carries, especially when it hits communities in the US that have their own culture and have eschewed using money as a proxy for power (maybe it was lower income inequality in earlier decades). Whereas NYC has always been about money=power=lifestyle, that was never the case for many communities, and it's being thrust on a lot of people who never subscribed to that, who live in places where they want to do their own thing in a low key way without worrying about construction or ever increasing prices. I can sympathize with their unhappiness, and I feel that way about Denver when I visit the area where I grew up. I also have a lot of relatives in Austin and hearing about how it went from a fun small town to a place clogged by traffic with spiraling housing prices, but is still the only simulacra of "home" to them, does indeed sound unappealing.

Edit: rereading my comment, it doesn't quite articulate my point, which is that people who want to be outside of this big noisy money grabbing game, and just get to be people, are justifiably unhappy about market determined culture interfering with their lives.

I'm not arguing that it isn't uncomfortable, nor that people aren't justified in their unhappiness, I am arguing that the desire to use policy to express that unhappiness and uncomfortability upon the polity is wrong (I would even say it's selfish). Their comfort when "things were better" was built upon the market at the snapshot in time they enjoyed it. To demand that the market revert to that time is, by definition, regressive.

I mostly agree, but the point I'm making is that the people who made Austin a mecca for interesting culture moved there precisely because it was not a market oriented culture. So of course they're unhappy about the change in cultural orientation, and without money themselves, they have little recourse outside of policy (though they do have the ability to shape policy given the long term power structures there). And I'm not sure it's wrong to try to prop up established elements of the culture they like, though I do suspect it's untenable.

> I would even say it's selfish

> (previously) cultures are emergent properties from markets

Honest question: Do you think selfishness is a bad thing? As you seem to have such apparent respect for the primacy of markets, I would think not. Why then would you choose to jab people with this idea that they're being selfish? Is it because you think they would be against selfishness and are therefore being hypocrites?

(Disclaimer: I've lived in Austin for 16 years, and spent a lot of time here for four years before that while my brother was in school here, which gives me a thimbleful of street cred as a longtime resident compared to those who were here in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. But its long enough that I have seen a ton of change in the last decade in a half.)

There's a couple of threads of thought in your comment that are worth addressing separately.

> our reflex is to say that the markets are obviously failing and that policy should step in in order to preserve the integrity of the culture

The market is only good at doing one thing: finding local maxima to a profit curve. If whatever you're interested in can't be distilled to a profit metric somehow, the market is completely oblivious to it, and there are many intangibles we find valuable that fall into this category. When we're lucky, we have tools to link the thing to economic metrics. Other times we don't have good ways of doing so. An example of the former would be a carbon tax, which front-loads the full cost of introducing carbon to its initial purchase. You alluded to good examples of the latter in the form of cultural preservation, which is not as one dimensional as "gentrification" and includes all kinds of things like dying languages, musical heritage, oral tradition, and yes, places where Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin played early in their careers.

The reason I find this noteworthy is that you're positing the assumption that markets should protect culture and find it puzzling that people think this way. While I think there are people who do so, I think the opposite: most of us recognize that this neoliberal assumption is false and markets do NOT protect cultural heritage. Because for most of us cultural heritage is worth preserving, it needs non-market-driven measures to preserve it in some form.

The second thread of thought I have about your post is that culture is also fluid and necessarily must change over time, and those who seek to preserve the status quo indefinitely are fighting a misguided battle. Obviously this is at odds with my point above but fits in nicely with your emergent qualities point. However, I think you're putting a rosy shine on the practical details of how this plays out in the day to day lives of people actually participating in the market.

I think its best summed up by saying you're not entirely wrong: attempts to limit "market expansion" as a means of preserving some aspects of cultural heritage are a statement of values. However, refusal to do so is also a statement of values. In the latter case, you're saying that unrestrained trade is a thing to hold valuable in and of itself, which is a notion that I think many people are coming to see not as a virtue but a vice which needs reasonable constraints. Does that mean the city should subsidize money-losing businesses just because they're part of a cultural legacy in this town? Probably not, at least not with wild abandon. However, since we have no apparent problem with subsidizing big businesses through tax incentives, I don't think its out of the question to find ways of doing the same with small businesses that provide some cultural conscience to our town.

This is a wonderfully thought out and articulated counter-position. I applaud the thoughtfulness of your comment.

I agree with your statement that "cultural heritage is worth preserving, it needs non-market-driven measures to preserve it in some form". However, I think that given situations in which the choice between access to the market and the preservation of culture are fundamentally at odds with one another, access to the market must dominate. I think the downstream effects of the preservation choice are devastating and counterproductive. Let's take an extreme example, if 50% of a given, highly productive, landmass is marked as culture heritage, that would mean that suddenly the available supply to meet housing/commercial demands is now artificially constrained to the remaining half. If the supply does not adequately increase in density to meet this demand, prices shall no doubt increase and people will be priced out of that area. I think this is what is happening across a whole slew of cities across the US and is contributing to homelessness, increase in crime, loss of access to high quality education, etc.

I don't think that this is a zero-sum situation, nor that the example I just gave is the canonical experience. I'm just saying that if I was forced to make a tradeoff, I think the preservation of cultural heritage must be placed as a secondary (albeit very important) value.

> access to the market must dominate

The market itself is dependent on certain conditions for it to function. As a good example, take environmental efforts: solutions "price in" the externalities of pollution and "close off" the loopholes that were previously used to skirt around the pollution cleanup.

On the other hand, wind power is resisted by property owners who insist the energy company "price in" the intangible loss to their view, their property value, and they try to "close off" the loopholes the energy companies would use to skirt around a debate such as eminent domain or state mandates.

The entire conversation gets ratcheted up to 11 because neither side listens very much to the other. Small neighborhoods listen to each other -- it's easy to become acquainted with a few people -- but big cities are blind to those around them because we get overwhelmed by the number of people.

All I wanted to point out was that:

Markets rely on good communication to find an agreement everyone can be happy with. Save the environment? Build wind power? More people moving to Austin? These are more indications of miscommunication and misunderstanding than anything else (in my opinion).

This has further application to a lot of the news that appears on HN's front page each day.

I'm not naive: full rapport of all parties is unlikely. But I find this paradigm often can explain what would otherwise appear to be senseless destruction by well-meaning people.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, but I do disagree with the premise: market forces should not always have the dominant hand, if only because it will always be the dominant hand. A more fluid balance can and should be established. Sometimes the market needs should prevail, but I would argue that the balance we have today is far too imbalanced.

Your example is a good one of the extreme of that position; I think SF is the canonical example of what can happen if you do a poor job of prioritizing which parts of the local culture you're going to preserve, and market forces act on the rest. That points to one of things that I think the market is pretty ok at: pricing goods by demand. However, creating new supply to fill that demand in an unrestrained way would see many of the things I imagine SF residents love about the city like its extensive parklands fall to new development.

I do think a happy medium can be struck a lot of the time. In Austin we certainly have voices that want nothing to change, which are countered by voices who think the market is an all-powerful god who will lead us to the promised land of perfect pricing. But most of us fall into the middle. We like a few historical homes to be preserved, a neighborhood or two with a few extra zoning restrictions about how and what you can build that affects the character of the neighborhood, and looser restrictions in most other places. (We also have an advantage in that we're not surrounded on 3 sides by water, so its relatively easy to increase supply at the tradeoff of a commute.) But what we're not doing a good job of right now is working to ensure that those getting the wrong end of the gentrification stick aren't economically depressed and primarily communities of color. I think there's a lot of things that can soften that but right now the city is mostly paying lip service to the idea, and that has to change. Doing so would move us a lot closer to what I think is more of a balanced game between market forces and non-market-based values.

So, I alluded in my reply to OP that I suspect wealth/income inequality is hugely at play in many of these scenarios. Do you think that a more equal wealth distribution would allow citizens to use the market to balance their desire for culture with the needs of current residents and newcomers?

Preservation of what culture anyway?

You can't prevent people from buying existing housing, as one example, so what happens if you try and preserve the form by not constructing any new housing, is that wealthier people win that particular game of musical chairs...

... and you've changed the culture anyway, if not the form, because you have a new set of people there.

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