How much does a cable like that cost?
I feel like governments should be funding healthcare, housing and connectivity instead of missiles thousands of miles away from their borders.
I feel like governments should be funding healthcare, housing and connectivity instead of missiles thousands of miles away from their borders.
The standard economic answer is that governments should at most finance public goods. But nothing of what you mentioned is a public good. (Well lobbing missiles at foreigners perhaps is a public good, but not one that's necessarily worth funding. Just like a light-house in the middle of nowhere might not be worth funding.)
Standard economics are a simplistic model that fails hard to account for the effects of their own simplifications. No one sees physicists saying that a bouncy ball will bounce forever because it loses a negligible amount of energy in each bounce, but we see economists talk about a magical system where they get pretty much every assumption wrong and don't account for how it makes the model deviate from reality. (I had a list of aspects where the assumptions go wrong, but it's a bit too long to fit in the margin of this post)
Things like the Gini coefficient is over 100 years old and it showed that the economy could be doing great based on averages, despite it only being true for a few, yet there's still no push away from metrics that misrepresent how most people are doing.
Well, maybe they are also ignored scientists that we all know have ideas on how to improve things, but are powerless too.
Things obviously going downhill for 40+ years, but maybe working as intended, - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality
> Things obviously going downhill for 40+ years, [...]
Global economy inequality has decreased markedly over the last few decades. More and more people have it better than ever before.
If housing price increase outpaces wage growth (which it does), with GDP growth being concentrated in very few pockets, this leads to decreasing living standards for most of the population, at least in this aspect.
Sure we have developers in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc plopping down houses >$300-500k, but can the average person afford them? Yes I agree building codes in places like California make houses expensive, but the current market in the United States does not incentivize building affordable housing.
Because the building codes drive up the costs!
When more supply goes on the market, existing stock goes lower in price - when there is enough supply.
That is how it always has been.
Even old ‘shotgun shacks’ are too expensive because zoning restrictions (and too much easy money) has caused everyone to inflate everything.
> When more supply goes on the market, existing stock goes lower in price - when there is enough supply.
Yes, that's part of why the housing stock today is nicer than the housing stock 200 years ago: over time the average newly built home was always better than existing houses.
These are all areas with similar levels of ‘desirable is constrained’. Or perhaps worded better as ‘people want the top x percent, not just the same thing in bulk’.
Most of the other things you’re talking about, it’s easier to scale up production without hurting desirability.
For instance, if commute/neighborhoods/climate literally didn’t matter, everyone complaining about housing costs would just move to Rural Kansas or North Dakota and problem solved for dirt cheap.
Instead everyone is complaining about how nice new housing in city-of-choice-close-to-work is unaffordable.
Well of course it is - people are restricting building to keep it nice (by their standards), which is why folks want to move there, which is restricting supply - and with easier money (historically) that is causing increased bidding and increased costs.
What has become more and more expensive is the get-a-piece-of-paper-at-the-end part of education.
That being also the most regulated part of education, I wouldn't necessarily blame in on 'markets' or 'capitalism'.
1. Herd immunity and clean air from that Wikipedia link fall under public goods. Both of those are a subset of healthcare.
2. Basic human needs: many people would argue healthcare, housing, and connectivity should be universally accessible as a moral imperative
3. Broader social benefits. If people have these 3 things, they can be more productive.
4. "bread and circuses" is drawing a false equivalence between basic needs and entertainment/luxury goods. That's just bad argumentation.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean that the superset is automatically a good expense.
> 2. Basic human needs: many people would argue healthcare, housing, and connectivity should be universally accessible as a moral imperative
You can give poor people money, so they can spend that on their basic human needs as they see fit.
> 3. Broader social benefits. If people have these 3 things, they can be more productive.
The benefits of extra productivity mostly accrues to the individual. And again, they can use money to buy these three things.
That comment specifically listed "connectivity" as something he thought governments should fund, and only complained about governments funding weapons.
Governments can give money to poor people. Poor people can use money to buy goods and services.
(We don't need the government to provide housing etc to rich people. Rich people can help themselves, if we let them.)
What should we call such a thing though? This interconnected network of computers. How about the Inter-Conn-Net-of-Computers. Maybe someone could help me shorten that name.
(You can also buy stuff over the Internet these days, sure. And you can buy internet access with money, too. Isn't money wonderful?)
How do goods get to the store for purchase? Does any of that need the Internet? Like when the merchant pays for goods using a credit card?
For better or worse the Internet is critical infrastructure for modern society these days, it's not just scrolling on TikTok.
I suggested to give money to poor people. Not weird stamps and a list of approved goods in some approved store.
But yes, just like you can use money to buy food (a critical component of staying alive), rich or poor alike can also use money to buy internet access.
I'm not sure what your point is?