Life is fractal, but markets are square | Hacker News Reader

Life is fractal, but markets are square

invertedpassion.com

161 pointsparaschopra123 comments

Markets are the opposite of top-down linear design. Markets are full of feed-back loops and chaotic behavior.

Markets are the way for people to cease top-down planning and still get things done.

If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic crises.

As for suburbs - give them 500 years and then we can talk. You need time to accumulate all the changing pressures into something that looks organic - visit any old city in Europe :) All trees of particular species look the same when they start - after 100 years they usually look different because of the interplay between environment and them. Same with snowflakes and other traditional examples of fractals - including mountains and coast.

Suburbs are just starting, in a few centuries they will be as organic as old cities are.

Oh and regarding "linearity" of human inventions - it's much easier to make a mess than to make a good orthogonal design. If you don't limit yourself and write a code adding features as you need them you will end up with something that is very much organic, and that's not a positive - we call it "spaghetti-code" because when you try to change anything - it changes stuff in 100 different places.

Orthogonality in design isn't a byproduct of human limitations, it's a thing we constantly fight for, and we do that because it has advantages. You can easily optimize it and modify it for various purposes.

  If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic crises.

Well, maybe there would be no unwanted economic crises.

Try unexpected, because one man's economic crisis can very well be another man's creative disruption of a very large market.

To support your idea of market not being top-down, just picture an actual market and compare it to a big box store.

A big box store is top-down. Your entire shopping experience: the layout, products, pricing, etc... is the result of careful planning by a single company, with a well defined hierarchy. A market is much more organic, with independent sellers.

Markets are a way of getting things done without planning. Or rather, it depends on how widely you like to use the term "market." Languages aren't planned, but they still constantly evolve and develop to suit our needs... You can call that a market (some do) but I think that's a bad choice of words. A literal market is a very abstract metaphor for the process that creates language and calling it a "market" creates a tendency to think that quid-quo-pro relations between buyers and sellers are the canonical building blocks of emergent systems. That's dangerously limiting.

Suburbs though, and built environments generally are an example of how "markets" are the extremely different from eachother depending on what they're made of.

Suburbs are generally an example (imo) of markets grafting on economic branches (the houses, mostly) onto a (mostly) centrally planned trunk, roads, infrastructures, schools, parks, etc. Suburbs take a lot of infrastructure, and at least historically it's had been a push mechanism. Planners plan/build the services required to create demand for housing rather than pre-existing residents creating demand for services.

Big city real estate markets are very often characterized by (a) land scarcity making them attractive long term investment markets and (b) a basically stationary supply side. Supply reacts so slowly/weakly to price changes that the only thing way to equilibrium is prices... usually upward. The price of housing becomes the maximum people can pay, often the maximum a bank is willing to loan.

This is completely different to the market for services, the market for manufactured goods and such.

We do a lot of planning, whether deliberately or not. Even under the most ardent anti-matket systems (eg Maoist China in the 50s-60s) we do a lot of "market." It's basically unavoidable.

However, we are absolutely terrible at intentionally planning for emergence. Creating the planned infrastructure onto which unplanned emergence can occur. We don't even have the right terms to discuss it.

Whether we like that ideologically/politically or not, or whether we're good at it... it's a big part of how society and economy evolve.

The fairly arbitrary and made up^ corporate laws, IP laws and such are a very good example. Change them and we totally change the shape of the economy. They weren't planned though, they're designed by historical arbitrariness.

Philosophically, imo, a whole lot boils down to our inability to grapple with "not sure." Hard science can. We don't know if string theory is true. This is one of the great cultural achievements of science because it isn't part of human nature.

^In the sense that if we re-ran history, we'd expect totally different outcomes.

Intentionally planning for emergence is sort of a lost art these days. The most famous example is the Manhattan grid, where at its conception there were no zoning limits and it was lines on a map with no infrastructure built, it just kind of filled in by itself and constantly changed over the years (Midtown, for example, was originally a low-slung wealthy neighborhood for people escaping the crowded downtown area)

Part of the “problem” is that we demand so much in modern services which need to be placed ahead of time; this is not the 1800s where you could hoist up a tenement with no plumbing and electricity, no fire, police, hospital or schools to be seen.

There’s plenty of centralized planning in markets. Corporations are planning all the time.

some utopian idea of 'the market' resembles bottom-up processes yes. But the modern market (and given that the author chose to use chips as an example) does not.

The modern economy is to a very high degree planned, mind you not only by the state, but by corporations. The corporation itself is a top-down designed entity, internally displacing markets.

Everything that enables modern productivity gains occured in the context of streamlining, designing, and ordering production. The shift-worker at the conveyor belt at a 400k population company isn't exactly comparable to the medieval merchant on the local bazaar.

And I suspect that the author is implicitly critizing this, but there's a reason why this development took place. Even if the rigidly designed chair doesn't appear to be innovative, top-down design actually is. Even ardent capitalists like Schumpeter recognised that there is more inherent dynamism in large monopolies than there is in some natural, unordered market. You can't go to the moon by climing up trees as the saying goes, and that's why nature without design never made it there. The nation state, the modern company and all those institutions won because the incrementalism found in bottom-up design is inherently limited.

A particular corporation is top-down or at least it would like to be. But many corporations competing and cooperating is basically an ecosystem.

Meaningful markets account for a relatively small portion of modern economies.

Companies hate to compete and avoid doing so whenever possible. This can be as simple as ISP’s avoiding investment in areas with an existing ISP to complex backroom deals.

Internally, companies have full on top down planning just like governments. At larger companies this often results in silly levels of inefficiency.

> Internally, companies have full on top down planning just like governments. At larger companies this often results in silly levels of inefficiency.

This leads to Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm.

" for Coase the main reason to establish a firm is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism. These include discovering relevant prices (which can be reduced but not eliminated by purchasing this information through specialists), as well as the costs of negotiating and writing enforceable contracts for each transaction (which can be large if there is uncertainty). Moreover, contracts in an uncertain world will necessarily be incomplete and have to be frequently re-negotiated. The costs of haggling about division of surplus, particularly if there is asymmetric information and asset specificity, may be considerable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm#Transaction...

“Internally, companies have full on top down planning just like governments.”

They are basically run like communist states. 5 year plans, celebrating plan achievement and so on. It’s all there. The only difference is that their outside borders aren’t protected so they can’t become as delusional as a communist state can be.

> Meaningful markets account for a relatively small portion of modern economies.

There's no way that's true. Like, how many monopolies in America, say, can you even name? I've almost never in my entire life been in a situation when I literally only had one choice for a product or service, even in areas of so called natural monopolies.

Edit: Actually I can name some true monopolies: NBA, NFL, etc.

I would add, Patent protected drug companies, local electric company’s, railroads, water, cable TV, etc and arguably IP including Books, Movies, Games etc are true monopolies. Don’t forget governments as the Social Security, FBI, etc does not compete on an open market. Collectively, government spending is a huge portion of the economy.

OPEC (Oil) and De Beers (Diamonds) are not true monopolies, however they have enough control over supply to have pricing power.

But as I alluded to, Walmart’s 2.3 million employees don’t use markets internally to set prices for services. IT, Legal, HR, etc are not separate companies. Instead executives just allocate and get allocated money for a specific use.

It’s not obvious how you could measure such a wide range of hidden interactions collectively. But, market transactions have real overhead so it should be as not surprise it’s limited. After all your spouse will tell you to take out the trash rather than paying you to take out the trash.

That is not what monopolisation is:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

> Markets are the opposite of top-down linear design.

Markets are but corporations are private bureaucracies. Some of them gigantic. All but a few managed like a dictatorship. Adam Smith lived in a world in which a single person producing goods and selling them on a free market was something at least thinkable. We've come a long way since then.

What? On the inside, yes, the company is structured. The market is not that corporation, though; the interaction of that bureaucratic entity with other entities is the market, and that interaction is far less artificially constrained.

More bottom-up = more robust != centrally planned economies. This is what socialists don't understand.

There are certainly spill over externalities that the free market hasn't yet curtailed (like pollution) but government coercion should be our last resort to solve problems

> More bottom-up = more robust != centrally planned economies. This is what socialists don't understand.

You are not even wrong.

http://www.infoshop.org/an-anarchist-faq-i-4-how-could-an-an...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

Markets are most certainly top down. Markets don't exist without the nation state because they rely on nation state technology like money. In fact markets are explicitly created by governments.

Even within a market there is top down planning. What gets produced is decided by makers who use the feedback of the market to change what they make. The consumers usually have no say about what gets made and how it's made outside the narrow, low information way of the spot trade.

In othet words, people would not have created markets sans their explicit imposition by states. They are not a bottom up structure because no sane person would participate in them if they didn't have to.

Prior to markets were webs of debt relations. See 'Debt the first 5000 years' by David Graeber.

> Markets don't exist without the nation state because they rely on nation state technology like money.

Both money and markets predate the nation-state.

Markets are just people trading with each other. You get that naturally in any society with a concept of private property. People participate in them because the alternative is producing everything themselves and no one has the necessary skills to produce everything they might want. Money similarly develops on its own once the market grows complex enough to make the barter system inconvenient and people begin to practice indirect exchange with small set of universally marketable goods rather than trading directly for items they intend to use themselves.

That isn't the alternative. The alternative is people get in debt with each other, which is what happened historically. People simply didn't spot trade with their neighbors. The spot trade is a property of state created markets.

Trading in debt isn't an alternative to markets, it's a market with debt as the currency. Regardless, the "spot trade" as you put it is also older than nation-states, not something they created.

I good book I suggest is Debt the First 5000 Years by David Graeber. It will blow your mind.

I've seen it, and didn't find it very convincing. Graeber presents some interesting anecdotes regarding selected ancient social conventions, which may or may not be accurate[1], but—in my opinion—even taken at face value they don't really support his conclusions regarding the nature of debt. Perhaps the book would seem more compelling to someone who already shares the author's worldview.

[1] https://www.bradford-delong.com/2014/12/2014-11-24-mo-ann-le...

>Markets don't exist without the nation state because they rely on nation state technology like money

That's not true at all, in many cases markets exist in spite of nation states (think silk road and every other black market).

All of those came about after money, taxes, and state created markets came about. They are part of the whole. If you get rid of the state, the black markets will go away because taxes and money will go away.

> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state.

That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.)

> 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood.

That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history.

Nation states are a thing that is now so prevalent it's hard to even think about them. Nations, nation states & nationalism are such core political institutions that we think of them today as synonyms to "polity." Obviously the nation's is the polity and the polity is a nation state.

The whole world is carved into nation states politically today. It's so prevalent that we forget that it's new. Less than 100 years ago it was less than half the world. Before that it was rare.

In any case, I disagree that war is what made nation states. War always existed and nation states haven't always been the dominant type of state. I think democracy/liberalism/republicanism is a more likely culprit. The timing lines up, and so does the political group psychology.

You can argue that the printing press made nation states as it began to more tightly bind culture to the speakers of particular languages. People often forget that the concept of "nation" from the 19th-20th centuries is tightly linked to common culture, ethnicity, and language

> In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state

AKA the Golden Age fallacy

Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.

That's possible, but this area of archeology is still undergoing a lot of change in understanding. Göbekli Tepe is a recent example of organization around (presumed) religious lines without writing or math (maybe)[0]. The farming systems of the Egyptians were largely preformed by illiterate peoples with some wirting and math in the priestly classes and aristocracy [1]. The Inca used a very different system of combined writing and math in their quipu [2]. The quipu are still nearly undecipherable today and may have been just memory aides and not a true writing system at all.

In the end, there are very good arguments against the necessity of writing and math for 'civilization' to occur. It's a very active field still.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture

[2] https://www.ancient.eu/Quipu/

This is interesting, and you could also make the argument that without perfect records the early societies without writing might have been very widespread and we'd simply never know because no information was passed on to us.

Still, I think your examples support my sloppily presented idea more than they discredit them. So there is that.

I'm sorry that my examples led you to believe that your idea was supported. I meant no such thing.

What I did mean to say was that your idea is possible among a multitude of other ideas and that the field is still very active in this area; we can neither confirm nor deny that math and writing are necessary for civilization at this time; more data is required.

This would have been a lot faster if you had just made that argument in the first place.

I'm still waiting for a single counter example. We might rephrase my argument to the more honest: "We don't have concrete examples of this type of social structure without writing and some form of mathematics."

While you're here to quibble, could you perhaps look at the parent thread? This whole notion that markets and authoritarian social structures are the human default is at least as concerning as my statement, surely. There are many forms of this argument being displayed here; some quite subtly. If my statement is merely unverifiable, the idea that markets represent an asymptotically optimal modeling of society is positively counterfactual and you may have stake in correcting that.

Sounds like you might have a case of the fallacy fallacy :)

Or this could be the fallacy fallacy fallacy, an infinite regress of fallacy? :-)

I agree that interpretations about history are subjective. I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their protection against aggressors. In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states.

This book is full of examples of people coming together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...

> I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their protection against aggressors.

To a point. But as jacobush points out in a sibling comment to yours, those aggressors could be local as well as foreign: the myth of the benevolent king protecting the poor from rapacious nobles. Think of Richard II rallying the revolting peasants in the wake of Wat Tyler's death (ultimately to those peasants' detriment, alas). And arguably the main source of a monarch's legitimacy was religious: he (or she) was seen as ordained by God.

> In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states.

Well, yes. But providing a social safety-net for its most vulnerable people is also one of the main functions of a nation-state: it doesn't thus follow that nation-states formed for that reason.

A nation-state will likely be more able to defend itself than a looser, more heterogeneous polity, but it will also provide a better vehicle for aggression, and that aggression will typically be employed in pursuit of the interests of the powerful. When the Tudors laid the foundations of a nation-state in 16th century England, was it as a defensive measure, or to pursue dynastic interests in France and Scotland?

With a few exceptions (Switzerland comes to mind), the idea that a nation-state represents the conscious union of a people as a whole for defence against outsiders seems more like propaganda and national myth-making than an accurate recounting.

There were multiple factors. In medieval Europe much of a monarch’s legitimacy derived from church teachings about the divine right of kings.

> one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states

This is the synergystic existense between so-called leaders. They keep each-other in power, both using the threat of the other.

9 - It can be a little bit of both. Often the King sided with the peasantry against the feudal system. A fractal if you will hehe.

> That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.)

I'm not sure the author is implying anything other than this. It seems to me that you're presenting a compatible assertion as a contradiction.

> That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history.

The notion of humans forming communities predates the advent of monarchy. Both you and the author are trying to create "just so" stories around authoritarianism as a motivating factor for human culture.

While there are cases where we can find communities that are entirely synthetic (created from scratch by existing power structures for strategic reasons), this doesn't seem to hold as a general rule. Absolute authority tends to appear after prosperity.

It seems pretty unfair to accuse the author of just-so-ing a condition and then rebutting with an assertion that's like in kind.

> It seems to me that you're presenting a compatible assertion as a contradiction.

How is the domination of a large agricultural class by a much smaller military class (who were prepared to perpetuate that domination by violence, and did so) compatible with the assertion that before the advent of the nation-state, governments left people alone "so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area"? Unless, that is, you exclude that military class from the definition of "government" (which I don't think you can, as they provided governmental functions, in particular justice, law enforcement, and defence), or the agricultural class from the definition of "people".

> The notion of humans forming communities predates the advent of monarchy. Both you and the author are trying to create "just so" stories around authoritarianism as a motivating factor for human culture.

But we're not talking about communities and human culture in general; we're talking about the specific concept of the nation-state. And as far as I'm aware, there's little evidence of their creation by a group of people as a whole banding together for common defence (as suggested by the article), and plenty of their creation (gradually, over time) as a means of extending and entrenching the power of the people at the top: the promulgation of symbols and myths that support the idea of a single national identity, the quashing of rival power centres, and the uniformisation of laws and bureaucracy at the expense of local privileges.

But if you have evidence to the contrary, I'm happy to be corrected.

> How is the domination of a large agricultural class by a much smaller military class (who were prepared to perpetuate that domination by violence, and did so) compatible with the assertion that before the advent of the nation-state, governments left people alone "so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area"?

Because such classes did not develop in every area where humans passed through this keyhole?

> we're talking about the specific concept of the nation-state.

I think the author is using this term in a very broad and perhaps imprecise context compared to you, who appear to be locking it down to a very specific geographical and chronological region.

> Because such classes did not develop in every area where humans passed through this keyhole?

But they did in many areas, and the article specifically states "that's how the world was" (not "that's how some parts of the world were").

> I think the author is using this term in a very broad and perhaps imprecise context compared to you, who appear to be locking it down to a very specific geographical and chronological region.

To be fair, that's what the term was invented for. It's not supposed to be just a fancy alternative to "state", "country" or "polity".

> To be fair, that's what the term was invented for. It's not supposed to be just a fancy alternative to "state", "country" or "polity".

And "literally" isn't supposed to mean figuratively but here we are in a living (but not actually), evolving (but not literally) language trying to understand one another.

> But they did in many areas, and the article specifically states "that's how the world was" (not "that's how some parts of the world were").

It seems to me like if you're being a stickler about these terms but then handwaving the dissent we saw in China, the Pacific Islands, various European rebellions, Celtic tribes, and Norse communities? Well, then perhaps you are not fully respecting the term either.

The author's central point that organized societies existed before technology to make them top-down legible to rulers existed–that seems uncontroversial.

Are you really here to be rigid about terms and quibble, or are you here to discuss things like stigmergic organization, fractal aspects of behavior and how human algorithms and hierarchies mesh with that?

> It seems to me like if you're being a stickler about these terms but then handwaving the dissent we saw in China, the Pacific Islands, various European rebellions, Celtic tribes, and Norse communities?

I specifically mentioned peasant revolts in general, and Wat Tyler's in particular, in the post you originally replied to. And though I guess armed rebels are technically "pursu[ing] their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area", I admit I didn't think that's what the author had in mind.

> The author's central point that organized societies existed before technology to make them top-down legible to rulers existed–that seems uncontroversial.

(1) Is that really the author's central point? I totally didn't get that. (2) Where did I say that organized societies didn't exist before such technology?

> Are you really here to be rigid about terms and quibble, or are you here to discuss things like stigmergic organization, fractal aspects of behavior and how human algorithms and hierarchies mesh with that?

I'm here to argue that ahistorical assertions are neither helpful nor convincing.

Medieval Europe was a form of nation state....

In what way?

the top down organization of humans and labor, complete with warring states.

I'm rather unsure how this would NOT be considered similar to nation-state organization. Yes, a slightly smaller scale in some cases perhaps but there is still the over-arching governmental authority

edited to add: I love how people down-vote impulsively without context for argument

First, you didn't have the strong identification between the nation (in the older sense of "people") and the state. So rather than a single French people, say, there were several: Bretons, Normans, Gascons, etc. Second, you generally didn't have the centralisation and uniformity associated with the nation-state as we understand it today: the king's authority was limited or mediated in parts of his realm, bits of which (sometimes quite small bits) had their own time-honoured and diverse laws/rights/privileges. For example, the Bishop of Durham had quasi-regal powers within his diocese, and the great dukes and counts of France were all but sovereigns within their domains, sometimes with a barely nominal allegiance to the king.

It is apparent that we don't agree on what defines a group of humans to be a sort of 'nation-state'

At which exact point in history would you point to as the defining moment where 'nation-states' begin?

Do you judge all historical concepts purely by how they are in the current day?

Concepts develop over time, those societies are absolutely part of the beginning of current day nation-states no matter how diverse in culture they may have been (which is something we still see today)

In political science, the nation state is commonly understood as a (relatively) recent development and not a feature of medieval Europe. 15th century Spain is sometimes given as one of the first big steps toward the modern nation state, though it would take some time (centuries) for the phenomenon to spread and to develop into something like its modern form. Like anything there's not 100% agreement over where the boundaries are et c., but in common usage and ordinary context, that's what's typically meant. If you're using it some other way you'll be misunderstood unless you define your terms.

> It is apparent that we don't agree on what defines a group of humans to be a sort of 'nation-state'

It's a pretty well-defined term. Obviously you're free to use your own definitions, but I assumed the article was using it in its standard sense, and I did likewise.

I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish.

What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common term, either.

What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top and bottom?

I wonder if this is AI generated. Lots of interesting buzzwords, glued together in sentences that don't create a whole. Like that picture that looks familiar but you can't recognise any object in it.

Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely. Evolution is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as in the economy.

The author of the referenced post, Venkatesh Rao is a unique cat. The terms/concepts are from him and he's been building up a lexicon for years.

He deals in abstract concepts, and it's semi-humourous by intention. The most widely read but is a long series on a "nature of the firm" concept developed by analysing "The Office."

Top down, in this context, means something like Canberra. A city that was built from comprehensive designs created a priori and a formalized (legible, in Venkat's terms) decision making processes.

Bottom-up means something like language, which is created by people using an illegible (more or less meaning impossible to describe mechanically) and distributed decision making processes.

Personally, I think bits of it are quite brilliant.

“I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish.”

Precisely.

> What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common term, either.

I think this is poorly worded, but it reminds me of the sentiments expressed in the widely acclaimed "Seeing Like a State" by Scott and "Predictably Irrational" by Arielly that talk about how human cognition is wired on rather straightforward reward systems that tend to lead to local optimization and are bad at recognizing confounding.

> What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top and bottom?

These terms have much better history in political philosophy and economics, referring to the direction in which authority flows. In the economics context, this is often presented as the polarizing views of Marx (a strictly work-generates-the-value-bottom-up approach) vs Burke (who implied the desire of the wealth is the sole determining factor of value). In a political context this is a conflict between authoritarian strategies (e.g., statism, monarchism, etc) and anarchistic ones (see 1920's Spain or the Free Territories of the Ukraine on a similar time for well-documented and more modern examples).

These are a different axis than a lot of modern political discourse follows, but were quite important at the beginnings of the 1900s.

> Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely.

An interesting theory, but I suspect a lot of economists and a lot of biologists would require clarification.

> Evolution is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as in the economy.

This isn't a particularly useful or predictive insight. You're saying, "Algorithms exist to express both these systems."

Markets are very much fractal too. One should notice that there are companies of every size presumably distributed according to a power law. Pretty much the definition of a fractal. Seems like an ideologically motivated piece to badmouth markets which is popular. And if one is from the other side of the spectrum one would say that in many instances these big companies get incentivized by government regulation. On both sides there is too much of a knee-jerk reaction and too less appreciation that things vary greatly per sector and per case and in some cases one side of the opinion spectrum is correct and in other cases the other side.

My point is that the transactions in a market are always on a few dimensions (price, packaging, utility, etc.) while our daily experience isn't like that.

I agree with you that on a higher-level there's an emergent richness within the markets too (as captured by power laws) but it's less rich than the lived experience.

> price, packaging, utility

these are abstractions, you can invent similar abstractions for "our living experience" and reduce it to a few variables as well.

I don't get what's your point other than "markets bad, life good".

The point is that even reducing our lives experience to few abstractions like happiness makes them a limited view of what’s going on (via millions of years of our evolution)

If abstractions were successful at addressing issues, the self-help industry would have eliminated unhappiness.

Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. In that process, richness is lost.

Abstractions are leaky, both these about markets and these about lives. It's ok, we know they leak details, we use them to get results faster.

Markets are part of living, so it's not surprising that life as a whole is more complex than small part of it. But I don't see any qualitative differences, just a difference in degree.

And millions of years of evolution isn't a very good argument - because rate of evolution is much quicker for culture than for biology. Nature was stuck on unicellular life and in oceans for billions of years. We got from walking to driving, flying and interplanetary travel in a few thousand years.

What's going on behind all that richness in the universe might be very simple. We think it is actually very simple - a bunch of numeric fields and a few simple rules of how they interact.

> Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand.

I'm not sure what you mean by linear. People are certainly capable of thinking nonlinearly - for example people can understand recurrence.

Abstraction also isn't the only kind of thinking we can do. We can be exhaustive as well, it's just slow and often doesn't contribute much to the result so why do it.

> In that process, richness is lost.

What do you exactly mean by that?

that’s stereotyping (in my own personal lingo): imperfect models that help us cope with certain aspects of life while being detrimental/ignorant of others. our whole brains have evolved to handle the chaotic (fractal) world we inhabit, but our conscious brains must reduce that to something rational (limited to following logical rules) so as to be actionable.

you seem to see that as a bad thing. buddha would suggest that that’s just the way it is, so it’s best to accept it.

I guess the question is how many variables do you need to see chaotic behavior? I’m thinking of a Lorenz attractor where a few simple rules produce wildly chaotic outcomes.

We experience daily life many levels of abstraction up from what are (arguably) very simple atomic interactions. We could be looking at markets at this low-level, but at some higher level there’s an emergent phenomena happening that we’re largely unaware of — or incapable of fully comprehending.

/deep-thoughts

I loved the post!

I would rephrase the catchphrase: Life is fractal, but metrics are square

Two months ago I wrote this comment in a thread about the healing power of gardens/nature:

I've had a theory for some time now based on my own observations: A big part of why nature is so calming is the absence of repeating patterns. In our artificial life everything follows standardized forms and patterns. It's a sterile world. The most obvious example being rectangles and perfect 90 degree angles everywhere. But I would also count things like uniform colors, evenly spread (artificial) light, predictable sounds etc. That makes me think that somehow something like this absence of patterns - and the knowledge/assumption for our brain that they are not to be expected in nature - helps us. The beauty in this is that nature _is_ full of patterns. But on a different level, no two patterns are ever the same. When you look at a green tree you simply won't assume to find two leaves with the same color and shape

-> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343

A comment by patcon linked the following article:

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fra...

A fascinating read about fractal patterns in nature and how they feel “just right” to us

Thanks for linking the article and the comment. Both were fantastic reads.

Hi everyone.

Author here. There are multiple comments criticising the choice of word ‘markets’ so I’ll explain my motivation here.

Yes, both biology and free-market economy are unplanned. However, just because life had a billion years of headstart, biology is much more complex with several levels of emergent structure (ATP, mitochondria, cell, organ, organism, family, tribe). All such systems interact and influence each other in ways that we don’t fully understand (or perhaps can even hope to understand). This richness came about by a blind process of natural selection.

Markets, relative to biology, are much simpler because products and services are designed not by a blind process but motivated individuals. Perhaps, as someone else pointed out, I could have called it 'abstractions'. But the point is that what we produce in markets (like a chair) is limited by the human mind’s ability to understand and design for the complex system that’s a human. In that sense, I call markets square. Because they only address the richness of nature bluntly, the subtlety of nature is necessarily lost in market transactions because it is human mind that’s doing transactions.

If we give markets millions of years, yes, perhaps the “invisible hand” will create the same richness and subtlety in offerings and transactions that we see in nature. But I’m not so sure about this. Maybe our mind will prove to be a limitation in our ability to design solutions for complex systems.

The overall point of the essay is to do with our inability to comprehend complex systems, but our tendency to act as if we do.

Hope this clarifies.

In some senses, I think it might be worth avoiding "markets" as a canonical example.. for two reasons.

One is that the ground is not just well covered, it's been a major ideological battleground for at least the last 150 years. The invisible hand of the market has had countless brain cycles, books, and political sermons dedicated to exposing it. We're hyper-aware (and paranoid) of it. We've basically been inventing invisible hand detection devices, and everyone is sure that their device is the accurate one.

The second reason is that it's inevitably unclean as an example. Governments are usually taken as non-participants in markets, alternatives to markets and such. Reality is much messier. Governments are simultaneously participants, regulators and alternatives.

More importantly, there's a tendency to think of markets as being made of people, where in fact they're largely made of companies. Companies are institutions made of people, like (sometimes very like) governments... but they aren't people. They're another thing, another(aside from markets) way of organising economic activity.. Ronald Coase started his nobel-winning line of enquiry with the question "if markets are so great, why are companies run like totalitarian regimes?" As you say, markets are both top down and bottom up.. in a mesh of ways.

Most importantly... fresh examples help with fresh thinking. How about "languages" instead of markets. They're made by people, evolve in organic-like ways, are undirected.... The invisible hand is far less visible here. Most people have barely noticed its existence.

Some languages have institutions overseeing their development and doing top-down reforms.

For example Polish has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Language_Council and it had 2 reforms in last 100 years.

I think that we do eventually get there, but demand for ergonomic chairs isn't as high as normal chairs because we have a whole other set of systems going on inside us that we are not usually aware of that shape the choices we make. Aesthetics being one, i dare say sexually motivated!

I think that its the complexity of our own internal systems filtering information and our desires that is our limitation.

Bottom-up = evolved. Its smaller feedback loops. Quicker iteration - live testing. Try everything until something works.

Top-down = planned. Its a larger cycle, but still a feedback loop. You need to re-analyze a system before you can maintain it. It involves human interaction or systems built by humans. Make changes until it works.

Its usually foresight / unintended consequences that we miss that nature has already been there, done that.

Hey, have you read Bucky Fuller's stuff?

its funny how you have a non-linear graph to illustrate how we design things in ways that we can understand them.

I would hardly call this an essay. More like a powerpoint.

the design of the chair works despite all those non-linearities, so maybe its a better design than you think?

Perfect squares are an ideal that reveal fundamental truths about nature. Don't knock it.

We are actually pretty good at comprehending some complicated behaviors. Look at the social domain. Or outfielders catching fly balls.

'Markets' was a poor choice for the right hand side, as they are in fact bottom up. 'Naturally occurring structures are fractal, but human abstractions about them are square' would be much closer to the point, though not as catchy.

I do wish the author had gone with 'complex' and 'simple' instead of 'fractal' and 'linear'. I don't see anything particularly 'linear' about a chair, for example.

Regarding the 'top-down' vs 'bottom-up' dichotomy - I don't really see why one is better than the other. I agree that humans tend to begin with a concrete idea and iterate on their designs from there (a 'top-down' approach). The article seems to be driving at the notion that nature's emergent, bottom-up approach is somehow better. But beyond the observation that the amazon rainforest is more diverse than a monocultural man-made forest, I don't think they really substantiate why that is so.

Yes, I used the words in the title somewhat liberally.

I don’t think there’s anything universally good or bad about top-down planning. It boils down to context. Recognition of contexts where top down planning might fail is a desirable thing.

So is recognition of the limitations of bottom-up 'planning'. For all its impressive biochemistry, nature never managed to invent the wheel :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals

There's a difference between a wheel and a ball. A wheel has an axle.

nature didn’t evolve a wheel (at least it didn’t stick around, there were probably plenty of attempts) because environments aren’t uniform enough to use it as a primary mode of movement (which facilitates finding food, escaping danger, finding mates, etc).

This reads like a design manifesto. Reminds me of texts from the early 20th century (post-WWI, pre-WWII).

The logic seems cohesive up to about #7 philosophy and government. Maybe the digression to the authors other works is better made in a footnote?

I can take the conceit of ‘markets are square’, but only to the point where you show us something new that solves the problems described. Othesrwise, I feel the same as another commenter, the article descends into ‘faux-profound gibberish‘.

I don’t believe the narrative thrust gets past it’s shortcomings,

- the author’s facile contradiction ‘governments should leave people alone’ AND ‘nation-state was inevitable‘

- the author’s assumptions about fractals as complex and sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated that surprisingly few rules can lead to great diversity. Fractals are exactly this phenomena, but at a conceptually large scale. Makes the fractal argument seem like a McGuffin

- I don’t believe the Amazon org-chart is the best we can do (‘the map is not the territory ‘).

I really enjoyed this.

That said, The Godfather of fractal theory, Benoit Mandelbrot, wrote a book entitled “the Misbehavior of Markets” which is a deep dive into why markets exhibit fractal behavior (he even goes so far as to do the coastline zoom for stock market data).

Markets are as complicated as nature itself, and that complexity comes from scarcity. If you open a floodgate, there is a market for which water molecules will make it through first. Those nearest, those not in a grid lock, those in a solid vs liquid vs gaseous state, etc. If you add conscious decision making to processes bounded by scarcity, you get immeasurable complexity. The markets of the natural world brought the animal kingdom from amino acids. Natural selection is a market for gene participants to access scarce resources and propagate, and look what's come of it. Human language and slang is a shifting market for utility and signaling. Who you associate yourself with is a market bounded by extreme scarcity. Who makes you laugh, who listens, who you've known longest, who is physically nearest.

Freedom is markets and markets are complicated.

I think "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" [0] is a better restatement of this same basic idea.

Also, I don't think it's true that humans are "incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions" -- it's just that hard things are hard. If you can save yourself a huge amount of effort by using a first-order approximation, you should absolutely do that if you can get away with it. There's a reason civil engineers don't typically concern themselves with relativistic effects.

[0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Yes, I love the essay you mention.

Well, not understanding complex systems is ok when you are designing bridges. But first order approximation fails horribly while designing policies.

As a simple example, Indian subcontinent where people aggregated in clusters over many thousand years got divided into India and Pakistan via a simple almost linear boundary. Result: hundreds of thousands of people displaced and died during ensuing mass migrations.

I think about squares often, well rectangles really. Practically everything I see is a rectangle. I go to a rectangular building and poke little rectangles to fill my rectangular screen with glyphs bounded by rectangles and tesselating on the screen like rectangles would--and I see it all through my rectangular glasses. Why?

Well, recycles tesselate--so that's one property that rules out pentagons, say, as our shape of choice, but why not triangles? Or hexagons?

This question, I think, is similar to another one: why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Is there something more human about right angles than some other one? (look up the playfair's axiom, you'll see the angles I'm taking about)

It's everywhere. Prime numbers are those special ones that can't be expressed as a rectangle of dots on the page. Why do we define multiplication this way?

Is there something perhaps arbitrary and anthropocentric in our preference for right angles? If so it would explain why the distribution of the primes is so unpredictable.

I think it is because we live at the bottom of a gravity well and have an adaptation (building things) which makes that matter.

I also think that if we could rid our mathematics of that bias, it would sort of trickle up into other domains and allow our constructs to take on more richness, like you see in the fractal side of the fractal vs rectangle images presented in the article.

> why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones?

Because euclidean geometry is the geometry we experience at a human scale.

> Why do we define multiplication this way?

It's not actually multiplication though, it's just a convenient representation of the repetitive addition that is actually multiplication. It's a clear way to show to children that we've taking 9 dots 3 times to get 27. It's a tool to teach and interface to a mathematical concept.

Much the same as why we use rectangular screens instead of hexagons or anything else. It's the most convenient to manufacture and address because of how repetitive and similar each row is when you think about the arrays of pixels that make up the screen. Desks are mostly rectangles because it's easy to cut straight lines and they match well. Then when you have a lot of rectangular items it makes sense for the containers of those items (ie buildings) to be rectangular too so they fit and pack well without any weird gaps and wasted space.

Also I'm not sure where you're coming from with the "bias in our mathematics" most higher level math (as early as Calc3 when you start dealing with multivariate integrals one of the most important skills is converting from cartesian coordinates to spherical or cylindrical because it often drastically simplifies the problem) includes a lot of different coordinate switching to simplify representations to simplify the math of solving a particular equation or reasoning about a system.

I'm not convinced that it's solely our scale that makes euclidean geometry the preferred one. I think it also has to do with the fact the the ancient Greeks did their math with pointy sticks in beds of sand--beds that took on a certain shape due to environmental factors beyond just scale.

This caused us to associate the concept of orthogonality with a 90 degree angle, which is (in most cases) a property of the representations we use--not a property of the underlying mathematical objects. It's not a bias of the coordinate systems, it's a bias of how we conceive of the space, uh, coordinated by those systems.

And it's a convenient one--it evolved in our environment for a reason--it works well here. But so did the idea that the Earth was in the center of the universe.

I realize that it's a kooky theory, but it takes time to turn a kooky theory into a serious one, and so far I think it has some merits so I'm going to keep working on it.

Particularly, it would explain the seemingly arbitrary values of certain mathematical constants. If our concept of "straight line" or "flat surface" were to be not special at all, but just some weird quirk of how humans do things, then constants like pi would tell us less about circles and more about our own habits of perception, and I think that would be a much more satisfying way of framing things.

Or think about how the derivative of e^x is e^x. That's a cool property, but if you look at how the difference quotient is constructed you'll see that it implies axes on a flat surface set at 90 degrees to each other. So maybe what's special about e says more about the spaces implied by the coordinate system.

I realize that e is not _defined_ this way. That's where the theory needs work. Somehow our concept of the natural numbers is bound up with our perspective on flatness, and of how independent things ought to be represented and compared. I've yet to be able to construct something number-like that I can map to alternative values of e and pi for different geometries, but I think it can be done.

> Well, recycles tesselate--so that's one property that rules out pentagons, say, as our shape of choice, but why not triangles? Or hexagons?

Try to sleep on a triangular bed :) Try to read a triangular book or write a letter on a triangular page :) Try to watch TV on a triangular screen :) Try to hang clothes in a triangular cabinet :)

Notice how much space is wasted in the corners of these (preasumably 60 degree) triangles.

Our bodies are roughly rectangles and interact well with rectangular shapes. Our field of vision is a rectangle too.

And now we are using these top-down developed computers to try and simulate bottom-up phenomena (like pattern recognition) and call it AI (well Neural Networks to be specific)

What would a bottom-up developed computer be like? Can you elaborate on top-down/bottom-up in this context?

I don't think the question you posed makes sense.

If it was bottom up developed, it would be adaptive, and therefore not a computer as such. Adaptive systems manage to handle new input (or fail). The computer is only going to do what it's been programmed (however poorly) to do.

One of the things required for computation is predictable repetition - same inputs, same outputs. This is why error recognition/correction is so important for things like physical ram and ethernet packets - it's effectively trying to filter out any bottom up behaviour that could affect the environment of the computation/information transmission.

An ever so slightly different environment would affect the same inputs in a bottom up system - think along the lines of butterflies affecting weather systems by flapping their wings.

You could claim everything that happens is a result of 'some computation' but then you end up in semantic arguments how to define 'life' (or how to define what's 'computable', which is it's own entire problem). A couple of books from back in the day in my life relevant to this were these two, and they're still probably a good place to consider things from even today.

https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-life

https://kk.org/outofcontrol/

The Ur example of a bottom up computer would be the brain. It works on disparate unformatted inputs and can translate to a context appropriate output and while there's no programming language for the mind (unless you want to stretch a bit and say speech) you can instruct one in the particular ways you want input manipulated into outputs.

the brain, probably.

or a rock.

The essay does not support the summary (or conclusion). Markets are just as bottom-up as anything.

> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion.

Gardens and gardeners are one challenge to this assertion. A gardener can plan things and yet also be aware that much of what will happen is beyond their control and even sometimes their understanding.

The author has the right idea, but the wrong target. The problem is not that we have top-down planning; as he notes, that goes back as far as the beginnings of civilization itself. The problem is that, due to technology and the increasing concentration of wealth, top-down can now encompass vast scales that it could not in the past. A human-planted forest isn't a big deal when it's a handful of people planting a few acres. The tree mono-culture in the small patch gets absorbed over time in to the greater, more heterogeneous whole. But now one corporate entity can transform millions of acres in a short time. Corporations can blanket thousands of cities with scooters, release a new food product that instantly appears in millions of stores, or pepper the landscape with identical franchises virtually overnight. It this kind of massive centralization of power that should be drawing the author's criticism, not the mere notion of top-down planning.

Where exactly are markets mentioned? Look up the definition of laissez faire in relation to free markets.

The author confuses government with markets multiple times

Nice article, a few comments I would like to add

>If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful

Philosophers fail here because it is beyond thinking and experience based, so one can not file a paper saying I found it - even if it is correct, it will not have any impact on others.

>how can governments maximize it?

Governments need not maximize it, they just need to create fair conditions for everyone, people inevitably will get there themselves, exactly as it's stated later:

>A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being

>because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions

The word "mind" is not specific enough, what mentioned here is intellect. There are other dimensions to mind which are capable of much more than we can imagine.

> >If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful

I think the question is answered, in that it's shown that the question is misguided. It's the problem-solving aspect of our minds that earns to find meaning, even in things that don't inherently have it, which is most things. What is the meaning of this geopolitical event? What is the meaning of the big bang? If that little problem-solver inside us can't distinguish the validity of these questions, then you experience compulsive meaning seeking. So I agree with you, it's beyond "thinking".

The question has been answered over and over again. People asking this question don't want answers, they want a mystery to be in awe of.

This this a lot of r/iam14andthisisdeep buzzword bingo.

The significance between top-down vs. bottom-up has been compiled and showcased by Matt Ridley, in his book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge." It says most of human beings are incapable of comprehending evolutionary design like free market. It's true. OP labeled markets as an example of top-down phenomenon.

This reminds me a lot of the book The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley (author of the Red Queen). It's effectively an anthropological study that goes over how bottom-up self organizing systems occur even in human sub-cultures

This was a fantastically straightforward explanation of something that is very elusive to explain. It reminds me of Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building", but 500 pages shorter and less meandering.

Nice article. But I don't understand from where the 'markets' came in picture. Probably 'Life is fractal, but human understanding about it is square' btw Markets can also be bottom up...

No, the length of the coastline doesn't change depending on scale. The map is not the territory.

Also, you can have forests growing thanks to a conservationist top to bottom approach that do not look like a grid.

Whereas this may be useful for a social science class, I don't think it is useful for a more precise discussion.

PS: Why call this bottom up vs. top down? That terminology sounds imprecise and confusing to me.

it wouldn't be useful for a social science class because it is not precise enough.

Is "our inability to think fractally and nonlinearly" a linear or a nonlinear idea?

"And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery" - Whitman

This is littered with bland assertions

"4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or at best two dimensions (map),"

Really? And a chair, a 3D object, is your illustration of this?

> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs.

You can't demonstrate that humans cannot think linearly by showing an example where they didn't.

> Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion.

Except in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East (European colonization) and Europe (Congress of Vienna, changes after the world wars). Australia is a special case (with only one souvereign state), I don't know enough about Asia.

> 2/ This transformation of what looks like random, irregular structure into more orderly structure is because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions. We comprehend information linearly and hence our planning of the world around us is linear too.

Would you please stop insulting my species?

> 3/ This tendency of making sense of the world dooms apparently well-intentioned projects. When we plant a new forest to “save” our earth, we transform an earthly, fractal landscape into a two dimensional monoculture.

Foresters are perfectly capable of planting a mixed forest. When they didn't, it's either because the forest was planted a long time ago when monocultures appeared to be a good idea or for economic reasons.

> 4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or at best two dimensions (map),

I'm pretty sure my mind manages 3 dimensions. We also can deal with problems that have more dimensions, just not using spatial thinking.

> our designed objects ignore the messy intricacies of the real world.

Our designed objects ignore some messy intriaces because there are a lot of them.

> It’s apparent in all objects designed by humans, including the humble chair.

That humble chair is not excatly state of the ergonomic art.

> 7/ [...] Governments optimize what they understand and wellbeing, being a product of evolution, is a mix of factors is that cannot be intervened into in a top-down manner.

Doctors optimize what they understand and health, being a product of evolution, is a mix of factors that cannot be intervened into in a top-down manner.

The modern concept of a "nation" is relatively recent, it has only been invented in the 19th century. Governments that do things other than leaving people alone have existed for millenia. In fact, "not leaving people (completely) alone" is kind of what governments do.

The idea that governments should leave people alone is called "liberty" which is derived from a latin word with the same meaning. So if it's a revolutionary idea, that revolution must have a long time ago.

Organizing the state in a bottom-up manner, giving the lower levels of government more power than the upper ones, isn't a new idea either. The Holy Roman Emperors didn't really rule their empire, at least in modern history.

Also, the absence of a state is perfectly compatible with top-down government. The chief of your tribe won't leave you alone. Chance are you cannot even elect them, making the tribe more top-down than a democratic state.

> 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources.

Maybe the state was, this is not really specific to nation states in particular. However defense from enemies is far from the only role of the state. Even hardcore classical liberals agree that it should keep the peace, major infrastructure projects require a major organization and sometimes eminent domain, Robin Hoods and charities cannot replace a welfare state.

> Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood.

If you don't have any social life beyond interacting with the state, you probably should get help.

> 12/ [...] Perhaps nature is able to do it because it has no foresight.

No one forces you to use your foresight. Forsight isn't incompatible with bottom-up design/emergence either.

I really liked this post :)

This was neat, good job!

our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of seeing one wolf. but response to seeing 100 wolves and 200 wolves is probably about the same. point being - there's plenty of logarithmic thinking in our brains, so we're not that linear.

i fail to come up with similar example for exponential thinking, we probably really can't comprehend that.

Edit: typo

> our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of seeing one wolf.

I think it's closer to equal. One wolf is a danger, two wolves is a danger.

Especially when one wolf causes maximal fear, two wolves can't appear any more dangerous.

Maybe markets were once a useful way of communicating supply and demand for the greater good, but nowadays the way they're often used perverts that communication via exploitative usary.

Downvote me all you want but it's said that vacant homes outnumber homeless people by 6 to 1. That's a complete and utter failure of "the market" to communicate actual supply and demand.

(https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-home...)

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