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Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid.

Unfortunately, for money to prove it's worth, too many things must be made scarce. It is this scarcity driven by the people who already have money and their servants in the system that are going to drive the current collapse, if it is happening (and I certainly think it is).

What's mocking about the entire thing is that to retire with a 401k is to join the rent-seeking class. I imagine there is some dark society that could exist where all the food was produced with automation and all that existed otherwise was ownership of that and other automation, producing nothing of value other than the already specious concept of wealth.

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> There are no real shortages of food or shelter at this time. We should be able to support a very large number of people working on human development: scientists and technologists, medical professionals and even wide-spread service jobs, especially if better paid.

But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone? We need people to grow the food, collect it, distribute it, arrange it on shelves or serve it in restaurants. We need people to build homes (and implicitly the materials that need to be dug up or obtained from somewhere), sell them, renovate them, maintain them. And what about the huge infrastructure that goes around doing all this, the roads, the water treatment plants, the garbage collection? Who's gonna do all that? Oh, right, we have food and shelter, that's enough, I forgot.

If the proportion of people who want to do science/progressive stuff is larger than what is sustainable to do all that I was listing above as well, wouldn't you say that becomes a problem?

What's your point? The amount of people and labour needed to do those things are much much less than it once was. However we've since employed a massive amount of labour to chase profits and producing stuff that aren't necessarily needed, while still maintaining a system of scarcity for essentials.

From the perspective of someone living in 1400 A.D.? Yes, food gets to us by magic.

In 1400, ~80% of the population tilled fields with horses and oxen, planted by hand, sorted the wheat from the chaff themselves before grinding the wheat into flour and baking it in an oven heated by an actual fire running from wood (and other flammables) that they collected themselves.

Now we have robots (in the broadest sense of the word) available to assist us with ploughing, sowing, harvesting, transporting, sorting, milking, shelf stacking, ordering, home deliveries, and cooking — the first half of that list is why agriculture is no longer employing 80% of the population.

Similar developments are ongoing in all areas, and that progress is the output of the scientists’ labour.

True, in fact direct agricultural labor accounts for fewer than a million jobs in the U.S.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/agricul...

One place where technology is struggling to make an impact is in housing. Even ignoring the farcical inflation of land prices in some municipalities, the price of a building itself has not decreased in cost similar to other durable goods.

This is in part due to consumer choice

1 bigger buildings

2 better buildings (impoved sealing, more equipment, etc)

But also due to other factors

1 inability to replace skilled labor

2 ecological costs

3 increased code requirements

The profit/investment motive is fundamentally behind the scarcity of affordable housing.

There's also the "protect-my-pie-ism" that skilled labor unions engage in. We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes, but they're outlawed in a lot of places because of the pipefitters' lobbies. Same goes for a lot of other building codes under the guise of safety - the system is deliberately made inefficient to protect jobs.

Personally, I blame the system of incentives created by late-stage capitalism. It's more beneficial to litigate your job to a safe place than to learn a new or more efficient method of accomplishing the same job.

> We have cheap alternatives to heavy metal pipes

Wait, are you saying America uses lead pipes, not PVC or copper?

That is precisely what I am saying. It's not everywhere, but there are places (like NY) where it is illegal according to building codes to use pvc. Because any old schmo can work with pvc (although, the law is written as if it's a safety hazard)

But that would just make it somewhat more expensive to build. The problem is that the supply is always kept insufficient. If, for example, the government would build good quality housing according to need, the housing market would implode. To build according to need was the default in here in Sweden before ~1990.

Making it more expensive translates to a lack of supply - the government has far more limited resources than huge real estate development firms. The pipes thing is just an example. Of course, this is one of a great many factors that make it nigh-impossible to get affordable government housing built. Not the least of which is the actual expense of land vs. cash-strapped local governments (who are broke because our tax system sucks and we spend what little money we do have on subsidies for businesses.)

It's a systemic issue - the incentives that we have lead to a governmental inability to function at all levels. Pick any random piece and you can find a reason that it's hard to do meaningful work.

Sorry but to imagine that labour costs and unions are somehow responsible for the housing shortage is just a strange distraction. We had labour unions in Sweden with good working conditions & benefits etc etc all along that period. The goal to inflate the price of housing is the main issue.

You're absolutely right - that is the main issue. I'm not suggesting for a moment that fixing labor union litigation would fix housing. It wouldn't.

I was using the pipes as an accessible example of what is a single piece of a very, very large mosaic.

The assertion I intended to make was precisely this: That it is impossible to point to a single bad actor (although, you are likely correct in pointing out the most egregious of them). The core issue (IMO, the thing to fix) is that the system of incentives that surrounds the developers, contractors, politicians, homeowners, and everyone else involved rewards slicing the pie over making more pie. Adding value, when it's easier to litigate your way into aquiring a larger share of existing value, is pointless from any individual's standpoint.

Take a look at the debacle that surrounded the Stuyvesant Town housing projects - this is a case where this sort of pie-slicing quite nearly made it through, but was struck down by the courts. I use this example because due to it's failure the techniques involved are clearly visible:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/01/america...

...my central assertion is that the pipes and deals like this are motivated by the same underlying socioeconomic factors. And too many lawyers.

Do you have a good example of removing the profit/investment motive and the result being enough housing for everyone?

Yes, Sweden ~1990. There was an agency responsible for adapting housing availability after need. If there was a shortage, it was acted upon. Then the whole homeownership wave, markets etc came.

That's fascinating! Is there anything I could read about this? I would love to hear more about a rich first-world country being able to meet literally everyone's housing needs fully and in a timely manner without using a market economy.

This is a good start: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme

Reading the description there, it seems to rest heavily on profit motives. Perhaps I have missed something?

I would love an example of housing for everyone in locations that meets their needs, achieved in a timely manner, in a way that removes profit and investment motives.

> it seems to rest heavily on profit motives

What part are you referring to?

> I would love an example of housing for everyone in locations that meets their needs, achieved in a timely manner, in a way that removes profit and investment motives.

Well, on the other hand, is there something inherent in housing that requires those motives?

> What part are you referring to?

A lot of the program seems to have rested on subsidies and incentives, which are nice ways of saying you're relying on a profit or investment motive.

> Well, on the other hand, is there something inherent in housing that requires those motives?

Aside from that it requires scarce resources to produce and maintain and is rival in nature? I suppose not. Though that does put it in the company of quite a few other goods and services.

> A lot of the program seems to have rested on subsidies and incentives, which are nice ways of saying you're relying on a profit or investment motive.

I mean that's just an implementation issue. To scale fast at that time, the government paid already existing corporations to build but kept ownership of the completed buildings. The point is that it's still a state venture and the profit motive/investment, "free market", was essentially suspended. So without this kind of government program the market, because of profit/risk/investment motives, won't build this.

This is why I focused my point around the cost of the structure. The costs of land (made expensive by policy) and capital (made cheap by policy) are much more complex.

But regardless of that, even if you buy cheap land in a low regulation county/state and use all non-union labor, the building cost is still more expensive than it would be if buildings had the reduction of costs that other durable goods have had over time.

Some of this is clearly regulatory, i.e. codes. Some is clearly consumer choice, note the failure of prefab and tilt up to catch on. Some is clearly ecology, note the disappearance of native large timber from most residential construction.

Many architects and builders have tried their hand at designing homes and construction processes that reduce the costs of buildings but if they have to build to modern codes, expectations and ecological standards they mostly see marginal improvements. There are just a lot of fundamental costs involved with site constructed buildings that meet modern standards.

Sure, there's additions. But I would be careful to deduce consumer choice from what is most risk-free/profitable, a.k.a. the market. Cheap, decent quality "projects" would also be rented out in no time. But the profit margin and risk assessment isn't in favour of that.

I had to look up the link, but you reminded me of this:

...It doesn't look anywhere close to market-ready, but goddamn what a gamechanger once it is.

Building the load bearing structure is a quite small part of the cost of building a home these days. Probably less than 10%. I'm afraid robots laying bricks won't be a game changer in housing.

Interesting and related: how 3D printing may be leveraged

https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Archive/Story-Article-...

> But "just having food and shelter" is by no means the thing to be overcome. Or do you think that food and shelter just appears like magic in front of everyone?

Yeah, essentially. We need so few people dedicated to this line of work because of the wonderful scientific, technological and logistic discoveries of the past century. The fact that we have people that starve today is a failure of culture and politics and nothing more. With such a rich soil in which to build an advanced society, the fact that we haven't produced the creativity to produce a more advanced society is not exactly alarming. It says more about the human mind and condition than anything else.

Uhm, we already do all of that stuff that you mentioned with a tiny subset of the population working on all of it, hence the concept of a 'service' economy. We could replace 'service' with any number of alternative concepts that could advance humanity far more significantly.

Here is a parable I made in 2010 about such a problematical society with ultimately just one top rent-seeker owning all the automation: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

A related longer article expanding on such ideas: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

I just read Andrew Yang's "The War on Normal People" from 2018 that covers a lot of the same ground as in that article and in a clearer and more persuasive way (but does not outline quite as many possible solutions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Normal_People "Focusing on domestic issues, the book discusses technological change, automation, job displacement, the U.S. economy, and what Yang describes as the need for a universal basic income (UBI). Yang argues that "as technology continues to make many jobs obsolete, the government must take concrete steps to ensure economic stability for residents of the United States," including the provision of a UBI, which is one of three central policies of Yang's 2020 presidential campaign."

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