Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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> My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.

There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize.

"The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.

That's a good one. I propose "Efficient Market Fallacy". The Efficient Market is such a tempting idea with simple explanations for complex human behavior. The reality can be very broken, very inefficient, wasting many human lifetimes and with tons of horrific externalities in situations that basically amount to a kind of organized crime.

I propose "First Church Of The Invisible Hand".

It is called regulatory capture.

You've fallen victim to this very trap. Markets have clear failure modes that have nothing to do with regulatory capture.

Pollution is the clear example. Unless forced externally, producers will just ignore negative externalities.

And if more housing was built it would be snapped up by speculators - is a bit like building better roads =to reduce congestion.

Potential solutions to that: prohibit ownership of residential property (whether small scale, like single family up to 4-unit properties, or large scale, e.g. apartment complexes) except as a primary residence by foreign individuals or businesses that have foreign individuals as their true beneficial owners, and have additional taxes on properties that are not owner-occupied a substantial fraction of the year (say, 9 months).

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