Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

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From my experience, looking solely from economic point of view leads to extreme optimization on wrong aspects.

Yes, we might move to smaller homes in much denser housing models to increase housing. With that perspective, we can just build glorified chicken coops for humans too, however no one would like to live that cramped.

Optimization for economic indicators tend to erode the things humans enjoy. High quality goods? Too expensive to produce and lasts too long to be economically viable. Low-density neighborhoods with nice, open spaces? Inefficient land use, long commutes, etc. In return, when a person wants to enjoy life, it becomes impossible, because enjoyment becomes economically not optimal (or viable).

The current system is a trade-off between comfort and economic indicators. There can be other ways, I think. Maybe increasing working from home to reduce commute where possible, moving work to neighborhoods instead of moving people to work, etc.

I do not know dynamics of USA very well in this regard, but it looks like this situation is the result of "money first" philosophy (i.e. strong capitalism), instead of being human first.

When people see people as "expendable workforce", they can normalize "putting" people into glorified chicken coops.

> High quality goods? Too expensive to produce and lasts too long to be economically viable.

I think that's a false dichotomy. Free markets typically produce higher-quality goods and services than non-free markets because quality is part of the dimensions among which firms compete. Throughout history, quality of goods in all kinds of areas have gone up when government restrictions were loosened and competition was allowed.

Preventing a free market in housing benefits exactly one group: Those who are lucky/rich to already have such a nice big house.

I'm not saying that the housing market should be regulated, however a Dutch model may improve things a lot.

What I'm telling is, when I buy the same thing with x% of my income, in two different time frames, the latter item is of inferior quality, even if it's the same brand and model. This is because everything is optimized for economic turnover now.

The previous dishwasher we had never seen a wrench in 20 years, it's only serviced to changed a brittle hose after two decades. Current one's water pump/heater/dryer unit is changed after ~10 years. Again, it's a long time, but its life span is shorter. Let's see how long this (original) replacement will last.

The paper quality of the notebooks I get (yes, I write a lot) is always getting lower, despite price is going up. A good quality notebook is now more expensive than a tome of high quality printer paper.

Higher end electronic devices (or goods in general) get more expensive in terms of relative income every year, and they almost keep the same quality of their previous selves. Optimization means less parts, less repairability, shorter life spans and more profits.

Free market optimizes for maximum money movement (pressure), maximum profits for minimum costs. The goods become inevitably better (because the baseline improves inevitably), but slower than it should be. This improvement is due to integrated parts which has to be above a certain quality threshold to even work.

I remember reading a comment about textile production:

> Older textiles were much more durable because older machines were not able to lower quality this much. Now we can, so we do.

> With that perspective, we can just build glorified chicken coops for humans too, however no one would like to live that cramped.

I fear that when there's a lack of better options and the alternative is being homeless, people will indeed very much live like that.

For a sobering view of just how bad things are in certain parts of the world, here's a video about the apartments in Hong Kong: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qj7KtWhGrAE

And that affects "just" a few hundred thousand people. I'd say it's very dystopian regardless.

> here's a video about the apartments in Hong Kong: ...

I know. "glorified chicken coops" is an implicit reference to these apartments. It's a very dystopian direction, and we're heading towards it, yes.

The bizarre thing it isn't even capitalism/money first. The housing system in the USA is far from the optimal free-market capitalistic structure. It revolves around a people first approach of the right people controlling the regulations, the permitting office, and tyranny of more comfortable majority.

If you let brute-force raw capitalism run roughshod I would build a japanese style capsule megavault and trick a bunch of college kids into thinking it's the cool thing, selling them each 100% ownership of their personal pod for $X. I could probably buy a shitty old warehouse and fill it with these capsules and you could own your own fucking capsule in a coop for maybe ten grand and aside from whatever services your coop votes to buy you wouldn't owe jack to a landlord.

Make it a bunch of young professionals with money and you create a vibrant service industry around your vault.

Could HN pull this off and seed such a vault? Once there is one successful vault, people will copy it and the housing crisis could be a thing of the past.

Where would be a good place to start such a vault?

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