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Comment by OnlineGladiator | Hacker News Reader

I just wonder how many unfair (and in this case, quite frankly bullshit) collisions there are codified in law that we rarely encounter. I don't believe the laws are perfect, or that they even can be perfect (especially since you're often catering to different groups with conflicting interests, and oftentimes more than just two). But as our populations grow, our bureaucracies slow, and more and more problems like this will manifest. I fear it's going to become more like trying to argue your case against Google for why your YouTube video was taken down without explanation - tough shit, good luck.

I have an unfounded fear that overpopulation is humanity's greatest threat, and I think we're way past capacity.

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Are you talking about global overpopulation, or overpopulation in particular countries or cities?

Globally, we have more than enough to eat. And apart from the US exporting it's legal system everywhere (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...), there's not too many spillover effects in terms of laws from one place to another.

When looking at different locales, generally denser places are more desirable. Hence their land rents and prices are higher. After taking higher rents into account, it's a mostly a wash and down to personal preferences---but that just tells you that the prices are mostly in line with reality.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

About laws: that's one of the reasons we have human judges. As for perfection: for most purposes laws first and foremost have to be predictable in their effect. (Which this one here apparently was not in practice in this case.)

One of the densest countries on earth, Singapore, has one of the most efficient legal systems, especially in that regard.

Maybe he's talking about density in relation to administrative areas? If you have a small administrative area then it's more likely that an individual's complaints will be heard. Eg a problem a person has in Iceland is more likely to be rectified than if the person were from the France.

Perhaps? But that has not much to do with overpopulation as commonly understood.

I'm all in favour of subsidarity, too. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)

It's usually not considered when talking about overpopulation, but this has basically already happened. The US population has quadrupled in the last 100 years. The populations of most countries have significantly increased, but the size of the administration that actually creates laws and tries to solve problems for the people has not increased much.

People mostly solve their own problems.

The number of laws and regulations seem to have increased quite a lot. I can dig up some statistics, if necessary. But just remember the reams of pages from the Patriot Act etc.

The number of civil servants (and other people employed by the government) seems to have increased a lot, too. (GDP increased a lot, and the size of government increased even faster.)

The number of people in your House of Representatives was basically flat. That's true. Though they only vote on the legislation, the actual law writing is outsourced. (Similar to how you still have only one president, but the executive has grown nonetheless.)

Not sure about the number of judges. Would be interesting to dig up some statistics about the number of judges per capita over time.

Perhaps not coincidentally, almost all of the increased land rent that comes with increased density is captured by the Singaporean state, since it is the ultimate landowner ("privately owned" land is actually leased from the state on a 99 year basis).

This means that as an area becomes more desirable, more people move there, land rent goes up, and the state earns more and more capital to build/maintain infrastructure and bureaucracy that is proportional to its population.

Contrast with the Bay Area (only used as an exemplar of basically all of America/the western world), which is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a budgetary shortfall of $6.3B.

It appears that high Singaporean rents go back into paying for a society worth living in, while high San Franciscan rents go into the pockets of a handful of landlords (who of course contributed nothing to San Francisco's explosion of productivity over the last few decades).

That's really interesting. So Singapore basically has almost a georgist type thing going on? Do they collect much revenue in other ways or just predominantly rely on rent?

It's not that Georgist in practice. See https://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/Annual-Reports/Corporate-In... for where government revenue comes from.

Income taxes provide more than taxes connected to land.

Singapore is however probably the closest thing you can find to an implementation of orthodox economics' prescriptions. (Especially since Hong Kong introduced minimum wage laws.)

I'm not sure if the 99 years aren't too long for that too bite properly. Modern Singapore is less than 60 years old.

I'd buy the logic more, if the leases were for eg 10 years at a time. (Or if there were charging a land value tax.) But do see https://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/Property/Property-owners/Wo...

Singapore is an outlier in so many ways, it's hard to say what essential and what's accidental when comparing to eg California.

For example, NIMBYs seem to have almost no power here. In return for putting up with construction sites everywhere all the time, we get fancy modern infrastructure.

And between 2012 and now, residential rents seem to have come down by about a quarter. Mostly because much more housing supply came online.

Yeah, it's hard to disaggregate causality here and this picture might change over time. Given the state of most western metropolises, though, it's worth considering whether we want to be highly paid sharecroppers forever.

Well, in economic analysis, we can always separate the roles of landowner and sharecropper.

If we have to have any government, then we need to finance that government. Given the government the role of landowner and renting out the land to the highest bidder is the least bad way we know to do that financing. (That's what Georgism is all about.)

If you buy land (and there's not a huge property tax or land value tax), than you are sharecropper and landowner in personal union. But the price you paid for the land was just the capitalised present value of those future land rents. So you don't even get much out of owning the land. In equilibrium, you could have invested in other assets just as well.

In any case, I like living in Singapore. And I especially like that I don't have to buy an owner-occupied home to avoid capital gains taxes, like in most other countries.

Absolutely. To clarify my above statement (can't edit), the "we" in my comment "it's worth considering whether we want to be highly paid sharecroppers forever," is referring to we Americans/westerners/who do not live in a Georgist-like state.

https://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/Annual-Reports/Corporate-In... says that Singapore isn't that Georgist. At least on the face of it, when measured by where the tax take comes from.

Living here, I think we could levy a land value tax, and decrease eg person income taxes or VAT. But I can't complain too much in practice.

It’s a whole different argument as to San Francisco productiveness. Is twitter productive? I’d call it a waste of time.

I absolutely agree. "Productivity" in my comment means that it creates/accrues capital.

When someone uses a term without qualification, it's a reasonable first assumption to go with the meaning of the corresponding Wikipedia article, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity

Productivity is a technical term in economics. It connects to people's subjective judgement in the aggregate (ie San Francisco is only considered productive if people want what they produce) but doesn't care that one person in particular doesn't like what they do.

For comparison, I don't like 'Light Beer', but a big brewery figuring out how to make more Light Beer from less malts still counts as a productivity improvement.

This sounds a lot like how this Vox video [0] describes the situation in Hong Kong. Except without the intentionally established scarcity to keep prices and thus gov revenue up, leading to shitty living conditions.

I'm not sure there is a way to perfectly set up incentives in the first place. The more important aspect seems to be culture: public officials actually wanting to serve the citizens & do good.

[0] https://youtu.be/hLrFyjGZ9NU?t=173

> which is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a budgetary shortfall of $6.3B.

The state has a large surplus and the City and County of San Francisco has a projected deficit of an order of magnitude less than that amount, and the US budget deficit is on the rough scale of two orders of magnitude larger. What dysfunctional government are you referring to?

Ah, sorry about that. Late night commenting is never advisable. I was taking this number from here (https://www.statedatalab.org/state_data_and_comparisons/city...) and is actually meant to be the debt rather than a budget deficit. Looking into the source more it seems like it may not be the best (link: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Truth_in_Accounting).

From the voter information pamphlet (link: https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en/overview-san-francisco...) it appears that official figures for the city's debt is in the $2.29B range, not including "the San Francisco Community College District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART)."

I revise my above statement to "[San Francisco] is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a city debt of at least $2.29B."

In any case, even if San Francisco had zero debt, it would still be a dysfunctional government. One need only walk through the Mission to see that.

> Globally, we have more than enough to eat.

We are paying for it though. The primary cause of wildlife-loss/species-endangerment is from habitat loss for farming/ranching. Even so much as burning rain-forests to grow soy (to feed cattle) and palm-oil. People don't want just any old calories, they want expensive/inefficient/tasty meats!

Perhaps. Though that's quite a different discussion from the one about how some laws are silly and implemented even sillier.

I dont think the law can be modeled as a logically consistent set of rules, because there are so many laws that its always possible to apply correct deductive arguments to arrive at different "correct" conclusions which contradict each other.

A much better model is to view the legal system as a tool used by the rich and powerful to exert their domination over the oppressed classes. This has historically always been what the law was for, going back all the way to ancient Rome. This is also what makes the concept of a "rule of law, not of man" such a revolutionary concept.

You were right until the second paragraph. Law is a set of easy to apply rules that let us enforce some semblance of our moral/ethical code cheaply and therefore do it at scale. The laws of any given society mostly match its morals. Of course some powerful people and entities get laws that cater to their pet issues but that's the exception, not the norm.

I question how "easy to apply" the law is. It's necessary to have a set of facts before deciding "what the law says", however one of the (many) reasons it's so difficult to apply the law in practice is that establishing "the facts" for real world situations is hotly contested by lawyers for each side.

> I fear it's going to become more like trying to argue your case against Google for why your YouTube video was taken down without explanation

I think that's a perfect analogy. EULAs and other corporate policies are likely just as full of loopholes as government regulations and source code (they're all written by people.)

Difference is that EULAs are written by the corporation's they protect, whereas laws are written by the corporation's whom they contain loopholes for.

If it makes you feel any better, America is the third largest country yet its governance is undoubtedly one of the more functional ones. The inverse link between the efficiency of bureaucracy and its scale might not be as clear.

This has nothing to do with overpopulation, I'm not sure where you are getting that bizarre connection. If you read the article you can see that it is predatory foreclosure and tax policies that give too much room for the county treasurer to do whatever they want.

It's not about overpopulation as much as high population. The more people to be managed, the higher the abstraction level. And the higher abstraction level, the more against-common-sense things happen that can't be sorted out.

With human judges why do you say these can't be sorted out?

It seems this is how the legal system sorta fundamentally works (in America).

Laws are challenged in court and struck down all the time no?

Maybe, but it sucks that the guy that lost his home has gone through 3 courts already - and there is no law on his side. Remember too that courts can't strike down laws unless they violate other presumably more powerful laws. Courts would rather say that the fix is with the lawmakers.

All that being said, I'm pretty sure if this was 1890 they would have just given back the guys house.

Sounds like the proper reaction is to keep responsibility down at the lowest level that can handle it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)

And, if necessary, break up political units (like counties and states, or even countries) into smaller pieces?

Perhaps the correct reaction is that the US has pushed responsibility down to levels smaller than can handle it already.

Well, you'd have to separate accidental incompetence from what the specific level can truly handle.

In terms of numbers of people, many US states are bigger than entire European countries. And American counties and cities aren't really smaller in terms of people than they used to be throughout history (or are they) or what we have in other countries in general.

American local government is unlike any other system I know. The most insane thing is police departments - each County has a completely independent police department, within a county each city will have their own police department, even many universities have police department of their own! Within ten miles of my house I think there are 8 police jurisdictions. Besides the silly amount of overhead introduced by having tiny "cities" with police departments making up several percent of their population (https://www.nj.com/news/2017/12/new_jersey_smallest_towns_wi...) this introduces obvious difficulties of coordination and communication - a few years ago there was a serial rapist who spread his crimes over multiple police jurisdictions so nobody identified the pattern until, by complete coincidence, a husband and wife who worked in different police departments talked to each other about a case she was working on. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/17/netflix-unbelievable-c...

Next you have school districts, which are approximately 90% designed in order to segregate black kids from white kids, and the other 10% of justification is a race-blind desire to not pay for other kids to go to school, just your own. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16004084/s...

Did you read the article? This has nothing to do with 'high population' 'over population' or whatever feeling you get from the headline. He went to court multiple times and even though the courts agreed that he had been abused they couldn't correct the problem. This is a county that contains suburbs.

Population is expected to level off around 9 billion. The more educated women are, the less children they tend to have. We are approaching having a birth rate that doesn't necessarily replace the existing population.

>The more educated women are, the less children they tend to have.

I think this is due to women having to enter the work force and repay student loans vs. educated women choosing to not reproduce because of education.

That doesn’t make much sense. Educated women have choices that women in subsistence farming cultures who need to have ten kids to keep the farm going don’t have.

but it's not overpopulation what you've just describe but over-computation. Too many variables in too many combinations all of which cascade fail hard. We aren't keeping up with the feedback loop well enough of dysfunctional regulation loops.

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