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Comment by snidane | Hacker News Reader

Issues in real estate and land markets stand behind the biggest societal problems that the human population is experiencing in early 21th century. There is no economical school or theory which covers real estate and land markets.

All contemporary economic issues, including the ones mentioned in the article, are problems which are easy to describe, not those which are important to society (McNamara fallacy).

Economics as a discipline describes an idealized fictional human-like colony on Mars, locked in a greenhouse. It doesn't even attempt to describe humans living on Earth, so be careful how you interpret it.

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There absolutely is a whole area of study of the economics of housing and land use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_economics . In the US we have chosen not to implement any of the recommended policies. There are whole blogs dedicated to the interaction between economics and the built environment https://marketurbanism.com/

My favorite novel policy for addressing land markets is the Land Value Tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

A Land Value Tax of 100%, as part of Henry George's thinking, was the foundation of one of the oldest parties in Denmark. They had moderate success up until early 80's, and has been in government. My family was much involved in this, and I think it is a fine example of political influence on economic theory. At least here it was caught in between the classical political divide, as is not difficult to imagine from having as its primary position that "resources created by society should belong to society", 100% LVT and 0% tax on everything else. Both sides thought of them as opponents, and gradually georgist professors disappeared from academia

As prosperous and socialist as they might seem, Denmark also has the ugly determination of being #2 in the world's inequality index (only behind South Africa). Intentionally or not, the policies have had entirely the opposite effect.

The most common misconception of Denmark is that we are socialists, something that could not be farther from the truth. Take a look at COVID restrictions and compare to the individual states in the US. When speaking to young Danes that have been indoctrinated by non-danes online about how we are I usually go with the following examples: liberation of porn; Christiania; abolition of slavery. Porn was set free in Denmark to remove it from the black market. Initially CP was legal as well, and the idea was to set everything free and then regulate minimally if needed. Christiania is where weed is dealt in Copenhagen. It is an old military area that the bz movement broke into and took. We had observed the severe problems it had created in other European cities, and it was decided to take a laissez faire approach and try to contain in that area. Slavery was abolished gradually in Denmark. It had been observed in other countries that it could politically dangerous to keep it going. Thus we made a gradual move away where it was made illegal to acquire new slaves, but those already in slavery were not freed. The reason it was a gradual process over a period of years, was to make sure that the slaveowners had time to build a slave population that was self sustainable from breeding. Only acquiring new slaves was illegal.

Edit: I forgot the most important one. We have no minimum wage in Denmark.

It's nonetheless very high in happiness and life satisfaction surveys. Socialism with Scandinavian characteristics (including a healthy dose of economic freedom and overall openness, as in Denmark) still has plenty of things to recommend for it.

So would it be fair to say that land use is a "solved" economics problem, we just chose not to implement the proper policies that economists generally agree on.

Most economic problems are solved problems. The problem is that political priorities impact the actions taken to "solve" or even "identify" those problems.

Though in a way, that too is an economic problem...

>Economics as a discipline describes an idealized fictional human-like colony on Mars, locked in a greenhouse. It doesn't even attempt to describe humans living on Earth, so be careful how you interpret it.

I'm an economist, and this is not remotely true. It's not even true for economic theory (international trade, environmental economics).

Here are some economic articles about humans on earth:

Case and Deaton's Deaths of Despair paper: https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/15078.full_....

Duflo and Banerjee, Poor Economics

Easterly, The White Man's Burden

Autor et al's China Syndrome on the effect of trade with China: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18054/w180... and their subsequent papers on its effect on social outcomes (marriage, divorce, drug overdoses) and political extremism.

The idea that economists don't study real estate markets is also absolutely false. Google scholar "real estate economics" gives about 2.5 million results. There's the Journal of Urban Economics. There's Glaeser's book Triumph of the City. Et cetera.

> There is no economical school or theory which covers real estate and land markets.

You forgot about Georgism

I wouldn't categorize this as the biggest, unless you consider the US, or even urban/emerging US markets, as encompassing the whole world.

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