My pet theory is that we could solve 80% of society's problems by providing affordable housing. Most other things that plague us are just symptoms of this one issue.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price.
As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.
It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.
And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.
We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.
An optimistic theory is that new high-value housing leads to good outcomes for everyone: developers make a better profit, the area becomes more appealing, wealthier families can upgrade to the new houses, the local government gets more real estate taxes, and the previous houses of the relocators can be bought by less wealthy families (repeat this last step down the wealth scale).
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
Sadly... they're kind of right.
The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
This increases the power of the labor class and would hopefully lead to better working conditions.
My pet theory is many of societies problems would significantly improve if we gave more people the ability to walk away.
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing. It won't take long for that cultural subpopulation to dominate.
Humans are not unlike microorganisms in a petri dish when one adds nutrients. All life is.
If you really believe this shit, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Humans are very much unlike microorganisms. Populations don't explode when their needs are met, quite the contrary.
Demographic transition in one culture does not imply universal demographic transition across the species. Because those who haven't yet transitioned will control population growth rates.
Now why did I say this? Because you opened by presuming that socialism would solve human wants. Which is nonsense. Nothing solves human wants.
I reiterate, the need for food, housing and medicine is not unlimited. The population is not infinite and humans have a limited need of these things. Do the math: finite×finite=finite
"Nothing solves human wants": what about prices? It seems like it does. It's a flawed solution that leaves some with nothing, but it does solve it. Now, what if we distributed the basic utilities on an as-needed basis. That too would solve "human wants" on those things, and would ideally leave none lacking.
Please don't quote "econ 101 and basic biology" at me without actually engaging with what I'm saying. You're ignoring material reality and using abstract nonsense to deter from the subject.
We see this quite clearly. Wealthy nations have much lower fertility rates. Wealthy individuals tend to have fewer kids. Even those pursuing large families have smaller families than they did in the recent past - my grandfather was the youngest of 12, when was the last time you met someone with 12 kids? Even Elon Musk, one of the richest people in human history whose net worth exceeds what a medieval peasant would make in their lifetime a million times over and who has an obsession with maximizing his reproduction has a number of offspring that would not be seen as exceptionally large by a medieval peasant, particularly when spread across multiple women.
Realistically, no one is going on a breeding frenzy because they can suddenly afford a 3 bedroom apartment.
> Humans are a K-selected species - the optimal strategy for passing on our genes is to invest as many resources as possible into the smallest viable number of offspring.
It's certainly fashionable these days in the West. I don't know that I would call it optimal. Optimal now for passing along genes is probably donating at a sperm bank after getting into a regionally swanky university. A joke, of course, but notice it stacks! Certainly the donating to the sperm bank plus what you profess dominates what you profess in isolation. Since I just improved the strategy, it wasn't optimal.
> People reproduced much more when food, medicine, and housing were much more scarce.
Yet the population was smaller. You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
We successfully produce more viable adults now in absolute terms than ever before, the number of live births notwithstanding. Otherwise, global population would drop. Which it hasn't. Definitely slower growth but not shrinking: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growth rate
That site says "The latest world population projections indicate that world population will reach 10 billion persons in the year 2060 and 10.2 billion in 2100."
> Humans are quite a bit different from micro-organisms
Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density. This species-wide growth, regardless of the optimal reproductive strategy for any single individual, is like a microorganism spreading across a petri dish. We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad. But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
Going back a step: My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine. Human beings aren't special. We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth. I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
You did not improve on the strategy.
> You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
Because per capita rates are all that matters. specifically your concern was "Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing." This requires individuals to have more children per capita.
Population growth has been dominated by demographic momentum. Because a few generations ago infant mortality fell, those generations that had high birthrates produced much larger subsequent generations than thir immediate predecessors. These later generations had much lower per capita birthrates but they were larger, so as you say, they have more aggregate children. Subsequent generations after this have very similar numbers of children, but these generations are replacing smaller generations from when the infant mortality rate was higher. Once you get far enough from industrialization that no one from before the infant mortality decrease is left to be replaced, the population stops growing, at least from births. In the developed world which is now well over 100 years from this transition, population growth is purely from immigration, and in fact without this immigration the populations would be decreasing (as it is in a few less desirable locales like eastern europe). East Asia which went through this transition about 60 years ago is plateauing now. World population growth is only continuing in parts of the world where infant mortality is still falling, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
You conveniently failed to mention in your link that it shows the world population dropping to 10.2 billion in 2100 after peaking in the 2080s.
> Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density.
False. Huge potentially inhabitable parts of the earth remain uninhabited and are unlikely to ever be inhabited, and population densities in most inhabited areas are falling. There are a few distinct areas, namely urban centers, where population density is large and increasing, but this only proves that population density is not resource constrained.
> We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad.
False. Resources are more abundant than ever, and our rate of production is growing faster than ever. Places with the most resources, the most petri dish available, have the lowest birthrates.
> But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
57 years based on the above projection
> We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth.
False. See above.
> I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
Because you were uninformed on the topic.
> My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine.
There very clearly is an end in sight for the need for higher levels of housing, food production, and medicine production. Specifically it's in decades, not centuries, barring some future demographic shift comparable to the reduction in infant mortality during industrialization.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
Yes, resource scarcity is a key factor underlying society's problems.
If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No.
We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
Probably among the least popular political ideas I can think up, though.
That's not what re-inflated prices. Basically, no houses were built from about 2007 to 2017, and then far too few houses were built. Meanwhile, loads of people immigrated to Ireland for jobs (mostly in tech and finance).
Then, because lots of people spotted that Irish property was a good investment, people started piling in using rents as their baseline for investment, driving rents up, which pushed prices up etc.
But fundamentally property prices are increasing in Ireland because of population growth and a lack of supply (driven by poor planning for water and services, along with a culture of property owners objecting to the opening of an envelope).
The extremely high cost of the Irish bank bailout was largely down to bad bank practices and not merely the fact that there was a property bubble.
The noughties Irish property crisis was largely driven by a speculative bubble, and there was not really a huge supply shortfall. Unfortunately, he _current_ one is supply-side. In 2023 Ireland built more housing per capita than any other OECD nation and it was close to the top last year, but, even optimistically, that is only stopping the shortfall from getting _worse_.
(A lot of this is down to catastrophically bad estimates made early last decade, which had Ireland returning to its traditional economic pattern of perma-recession, and draining the working age population off via emigration.)
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
> Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much.
It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Rough and dirty you could probably reverse back the amount by taking the change in Average house price-to-earnings ratios. Very basic estimate is from 4x earnings to 7x, which on the stock of US housing is about $20 trillion.