Comment by sniffers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sniffers | Hacker News Reader

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I could absolutely argue capitalism is a contributing factor, primarily due to alienation and increased demands on labor. Income inequality pushing families to have less spare capacity and money to help their kids.

But I think the root causes here are more cultural. When I was coming up decades and decades ago we valued highly educated people, Americas rocket scientists and such. Over time, however, people started thinking education wasn't masculine, that it wasn't cool. Then social media hit the scenes and people started amplifying some of our worst instincts -- anti vaccine, anti intellectualism, pro conspiracy. What used to be your fringe neighbor became someone who could influence online.

Add the Vietnam, the gulf war, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, and you've got generational trauma of sending generations of youth off to fight. That interrupts a lot of education and when those folks become parents they have different values towards education.

Plus, as you describe, schools are a commons. We systematically under pay and under value teachers, while over paying and over valuing admin.

And there is an anti collectivist culture in the US now. In labor and in community, there's much less "let me give up my time for the community" and much more "how can I get mine" mindset.

I think it's really complicated and a lot of different factors play a part. I don't think there's a single root cause, and it's going to take a while to unwind.

> And there is an anti collectivist culture in the US now. In labor and in community, there's much less "let me give up my time for the community" and much more "how can I get mine" mindset.

Well. We doubled the labour pool with women entering it full-time, but we didn't double the value created. We increased it further with blind-eyeing illegal immigration. Both of those lower wages and increase costs, which mean there's less time available (if only one of you works, then the other has a lot of free time to build community).

I'll avoid moron-baiting by stating the obvious that women entering the workforce isn't a bad thing, etc etc, but it does have a certain economic effect, and it doesn't stop at the women who want to work. It pulls everyone in, as house prices are up-bidded by double incomes.

What costs increased because of immigration? If anything immigration helps keep labor costs down in agriculture, restaurants, hospitality, and construction.

Housing...

Anything with limited supply...

There are over 15 million vacant homes today in the United States. Housing is unequivocally an investing issue, not an immigration one.

In any market if you increase demand without increasing supply, prices will increase.

For something like housing there are a lot of factors; construction supply chain, construction labor, permitting processes, zoning, private equity/speculation, tax rates, inter-state immigration, inter-country immigration, etc.

If you have people immigrating into a localized area faster than housing supply increases, it will increase the price of housing.

If you have vacant homes somewhere else in the country than the places people want to be (or where the immigrants are going) then it will have no downward pressure on pricing. There is nothing meaningful in a point that assumes the entire country is one market, as if supply/demand isn't tightly coupled specific locations.

> Housing is unequivocally an investing issue, not an immigration one.

Lots of them are holiday homes, not investments. But the fundamental economic driver that makes them investments is ever-increasing demand.

Immigrants help with housing - because a lot of builders are immigrants. In my Seattle/Bellevue area - any time I needed help with anything housing related it was either Latinos or Ukrainians or Eastern Europeans. By housing related I mean plumbing, electrical, re-building a deck. The outside of the house next door was repainted (and some of its siding replaced) by Latinos. The roofers on a house on my walk spoke Spanish. Same with the workers who were doing a remodel.

When I installed French drains the guy that inspected and calculated the bid was American. The guy that dug the ditches and connected the house drains was Latino (I need to add that the Latino's English was better than mine. He used to be elementary teacher in Everett and switched to construction. He explained to me the term "lingua franca" :)).

In my neighbourdhood I also see a lot of Chinese laborers working in construction (the population of my neighbourdhood is probably 50% Chinese, and the rest either Korean or Japanese or South East Asian or Indian.)

I hardly ever see US born people working in construction around me.

This is a good point, and I agree! Though when supply growth is bottlenecked by zoning, permitting,etc and not labor, immigration could still result in higher prices.

However if immigration disproportionately adds to construction labor supply, and if construction labor supply is the primary bottlebeck for housing supply growth, then immigration would indeed lower the price of housing.

To be clear I'm not anti immigration, I'm not Republican and I'm not even American.

I just saw a question (which I realize in hindsight was politically charged) that seemed to ignore some basic economic principles, and for some reason today I felt compelled to respond.

It's also worth noting that the comment I replied to was edited after I replied to it.

> What costs increased because of immigration? If anything immigration helps keep labor costs down in agriculture, restaurants, hospitality, and construction.

Why would that be true? I'm talking about legal immigration, not illegal.

> We doubled the labour pool with women entering it full-time, but we didn't double the value created.

How can you say that? GDP _grew_ by adding more workers to the workforce.

You didn't even bother making an argument about households being forced to have double-incomes in order to sustain their standard of living. You just think the cause is women entering the workforce and the effect is cost of living increases.

> You didn't even bother making an argument about households being forced to have double-incomes in order to sustain their standard of living.

What about when I said this?

> It pulls everyone in, as house prices are up-bidded by double incomes.

But we have done capitalism for centuries and this includes the time when education was high and also the rise before, so the problems now can be hardly caused by capitalism per se.

We have had capitalism since the late 1700s, or early 1800s. But I think you and I would agree it's not been a uniform experience across that time. Capitalism evolves and adopts new ideas, and experiences different opposition in different places. Since the early 70s in the US, there's been a very different regulatory and cultural environment for capitalism in the US.

Yes, but this only proves my point, that the problem is indeed not capitalism, but regulatory and cultural environment.

Nature uses the same mechanisms that make up capitalism. In other words, capitalism is the most natural system for distributing resources. Note I'm not saying best, or optimal, because best and optimal depend on some subjective value system (that distinguishes good from bad). My point is just that capitalism closely mimics patterns in nature.

Some of the communists seem to think that capitalism is unnatural, probably because it produces novel outcomes in human civilization, or maybe because it seems new to humanity (I'd argue humans have been using capitalist systems a lot longer than 300 years)

You can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Don't confuse mercantilism and trade with capitalism. They are outwardly similar, but very different internally.

The fundamental feature of capitalism is the inversion of commodity -> money -> commodity relationship into money -> commodity -> money.

I don't think that's the distinction that matters, more-so the relative development of financial systems and degree of state intervention. Ultimately it boils down to whether you're defining capitalism as a spectrum from proto to modern or as a system with properties surpassing thresholds reached in modern time (post-mercantalism).

My point was more so that the underlying mechanisms of capitalism, when abstracted and measured on scales, show up in many places in nature and throughout human history.

So it's useful to debate how we can improve our capitalist system, but to do away with it all together is naive and unnatural and unlikely to lead to better outcomes, as it's doing away with distributed competition and coordination algorithms necessary for evolutionary advancement and increasing complexity.

We can pick this apart in detail and squabble over taxonomy/semantics but I would just find it interesting and enriching, and unlikely to be invalidating.

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