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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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-...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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)

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