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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.

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An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.

Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.

> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.

Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.

Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.

Allowing local government to restrict what can be built and where has been a double edged sword. Yes it's good that you can't build noisy, smelly, or potentially polluting activities near where people live. But we have gone far beyond that, in ways that harm our communities, require people to own a car to get through daily life, and leave people sleeping in the street.

Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.

> if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air

Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?

Why VAT? It's a regressive tax that hurts poor people more than rich people.

Not in this case, it doesn't - at least per the other articles in this series.

Well, how about the freedom to invade a country you don't like? Or how about that country's freedom to invade your country?

One person's freedom always ends at the point where another person's begins. That's not exactly a new observation.

> Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.

> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?

The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones.

Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.

Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.

All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.

Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.

The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

I do not disagree.

I disagree.

I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.

It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.

Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.

People regularly have conflicting incentives.

Isn't the solution just to take the market out of real estate?

At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement."

There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time.

If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)

If people can move freely, and there's no price mechanism to allocate housing and construction, there will be problems. So "taking the market out of real estate" is a very big ask. In the USSR you couldn't freely move to another city, you needed to get government approval on the basis of a job change. People complained about this registration system all the time.

There's still a cost. Cost of living in the most popular places is that they're slums, because everyone is building everything. The slum factor will cancel out whatever was making them popular.

Yes it is, but history has proven the state can't be trusted to do better either.

You got the diagnosis right but I’m not convinced voting would change anything - even though it’s definitely true that it could matter, most of the structural issues are upstream of the ballot aka who gets to be on the ballot in the first place is the real problem

“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman

Who gets on the ballot is determined by voting.

I'm not going to lie, I'm not deluded enough to think voting will (often) bring change quickly. I don't even have a lot of hope in the likelihood of it working. However, it's not nothing and it's something everyone can and should do.

Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.

>Who gets on the ballot is determined by voting.

That’s not even remotely true political parties determine privately who they will fund to put on the ballot underneath their particular party

The public is not invited to vote in those outside of certain primaries and even then the people who are proposed for the primaries are chosen from the party members

Ballot access for third-party or non-affiliated typically require a petition to apply and that threshold is again set by party members in office

>Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.

Voting is the lowest possible bar or participation for political engagement

Organizing and agitating are the day to day efforts people should be doing but aren’t because they prefer to have money

The party itself is made up of the people. It isn't hard to join and get influence. Local elections in particular are easy, they are looking for help. Local elections make for people they look for to run in higher elections

I’ve organized with the DSA the last few years, and I caucused for Ron Paul in 2008.

I promise you you will have zero success getting Claudia De-La Cruz (who I voted for and was on the ballot in VA) put on the DNC or RNC ballot.

So no, you can’t just get on a ballot as a candidate by showing up. You need to be a party loyalist and there are no independent parties that voters show up for.

Hell even “down ballot” have to stick to the party line.

I mean, this is a very good philosophy to have.

The trouble is, the people who are most vocal about "no poors allowed" emphatically do not subscribe to it, and the people who are most likely to have power over these things do not subscribe to it (there is some, but not perfect, overlap between these groups).

And it's kinda tricky to go over their heads and get rules put in place at the next level above them (ie, the level that sets the rules they have to follow) that can effectively prevent this sort of thing.

Pay UBI only at the level needed to live in the place with no jobs and cheap housing.

segregating poor people into their own area is a sure way to make them stay poor. i believe there is evidence that the best way to help people out of poverty is to let them live in mixed areas where they have a chance to associate with people who are better off than them. i believe the primary reason is that even if you work hard to improve your life, as long as everyone around you remains poor then you are limited or are self limiting in how much you can actually achieve.

I mean, one of the main takeaways from the article was that "there is a market for X" is something fundamentally different and sometimes even the opposite of "X is a good thing".

This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?

Does Sweden have a problem with local land use restrictions? They have done a lot to liberalize their economy over the last few decades

Municipalities have far-reaching power in deciding what gets built where. Getting things built can take quite a long time.

also just as importantly (or moreso for cases of individual rooms used for social/hobbyist clubs like this) would be 'empty building taxes' to prevent the eventuality of landlords preferring to rent out fewer properties over reducing the cost of vacant ones because * housing is necessary for survival so people cannot afford to baulk at the prices of artificial scarcity, making the optimal price effectively arbitrarily high without regulation * landlords are generally not infinitesimal entities in a vacuum, and generally stand to lose existing customers who are still on the expensive contracts if they cheapen their unoccupied offerings although such a solution would just move the problem one layer further up (stop building properties to have them be vacant) and the solution is land tax

Not an American, so maybe I'm underestimating the insanity of US zoning laws, but I always thought "residental ares" means "no businesses". Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.

But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.

"this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices"

Well, ok, but then how are property prices artificially driven up by planning restrictions?

Is this just about not allowing more compact housing like condos or high-rises?

The key to understanding all of this is that a huge set of Americans 'want' to pay more as an exclusionary benefit.

With section 8 (fed housing welfare) rules, any multifamily structure has a better than not chance of becoming slum housing in a time frame less than the average span of homeownership.

Which is both about property values and not wanting to live in/near section 8 residents.

"Planning" and zoning aren't the problem, they're the enforcement mechanism. (Since police and other public enforcement of quality of life issues has been all but neutered in the name of equity/civil-rights/whatever.)

Same reason for the seemingly inexplicable popularity of HOAs that everyone seems to hate.

High prices are one of many resultant 'enforcement' prongs.

> Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.

I dont get the rationale with those two. What it is, to make living less comforta ble for residents? Doesnt everybody wants a grocery store and cafe nearby?

In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.

This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.

They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one:

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...

Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)

On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.

I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...

I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.

> I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.

That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.

Zoning codes have some uses, doesn't mean they're still net positive value. Maybe the current situation is so bad that letting a pig farm or a coal power plant be build right in the middle of a residential neighborhood is actually a better tradeoff than whatever we have now.

In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.

i don't know if this is the case everywhere in europe but i understand that at least in germany instead of zoning the local government approves the purpose of each building individually. so instead of deciding this is a commercial zone, they decide how many shops and businesses they allow in that area, and what kind of businesses they are. and once a building has a specific business use, then it can't easily be changed. so in effect that is very fine grained zoning. this is as flexible as the people in the government who make the decisions.

> That objection applies to the other options as well.

True.

> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.

What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.

I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.

Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.

Every system can be captured by wealthy interests. Markets are not unique there. Once in a rare while someone not wealthy captures a system - but they inevitably use that capture to become wealthy so it doesn't really matter.

Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.

"I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own."

Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.

You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.

Why do I care about a trash incinerator? The truth is I don't.

I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.

I don’t follow. Your first sentence says you do not care about trash incinerators, presumably next to your house. Your second sentence says you care about the smell.

Trash incinerators are very smelly. You are contradicting yourself. I don’t get it.

But if someone invented a new type that didn't smell, it should be allowed. Regulate consequences, not causes. The power substation down the road is disguised as a brick house, because the rule was ultimately about maintaining the look of the area and not about forbidding power substations.

Much better explanation-thank you!

> Regulate consequences, not causes.

a noble sentiment but most often these cannot be separated.

That's up to the property owner not the government. Can he invent a trash incinerator that doesn't smell or can't be?

Regulating consequences comes with a unmanageable increase in oversight by pushing the burden of proof onto understaffed, underfunded, and in some cases non-existent oversight bureaus, many of which are also subject to partisan political manipulation. This is literally the same mechanism that has permitted countless toxic substances to be pushed into the retail stream as responsibility for proof-of-safety is placed on underfunded government agencies instead of the manufacturer with no bottleneck to putting the product on the market. So while the idea might appeal to some ideologies it falls on it's face more or less instantly upon introduction to the real world.

I agree. To expand your point, that requires upstream regulation of trash incinerators (and road safety, which I'll ignore because developed economies mostly have that at least nominally in place), to make sure it's not a noxious neighbor. Where that doesn't exist, there will be pressure for (blunt force and inefficient) zoning codes to keep the smelly stuff away.

That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)

There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.

I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.

Depends which objection you mean...

But your choices are more limited than you might think. Ultimately what's available to you is decided by the economic machinery upstream.

the average American cannot afford a $500 surprise expense.

what freedom, or choice, does that translate to?

e.g. I either go without power or food, or I don't get a brutally painful tooth pulled

Markets create the illusion of choice between monopolies.

I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.

Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.

You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.

Markets used to be hundreds or thousands of people who were roughly peers and they still work well in that situation. When I go to the riverside market on Saturday to buy fabric for a project, there are 10 different fabric stalls. On this one little river bank alone! Each one of them has a different selection and they all want me to buy their fabric. This is the only thing that people used to think of as a market, and it probably does work well. Since that time, however, the term has been twisted beyond comprehension.

I feel like in this case, the “Amazon or Netflix” example is particularly bad because I feel like I’m actually drowning in streaming providers.

You will also typically have the option to simply opt out, although this is getting less rare.

I think my point is that there are typically still many options, but the best options are controlled by few players.

> I feel like in this case, the “Amazon or Netflix” example is particularly bad because I feel like I’m actually drowning in streaming providers.

It's a fake choice, because they carry mutually exclusive catalogs, and entertainment choice is not particularly substitutable (e.g. if I want to watch "Star Wars" and it's not available on services I'm subscribed to, I'm not going to be satisfied with all the rich selection of things they carry that is still not "Star Wars").

Lots of that in the economy, that's where the most money seems to be made. Smartphones are my go-to example: plenty of nearly identical options to choose from, choice entirely set up by vendors, with little to no way of users to voice their feedback. A supply-driven market. You get to choose from what's made available, not what is possible.

It doesn't feel like a fake choice when I sit down on the couch and flip between 5 services trying to find something to watch, and on a weekly basis I will watch something on almost all the services. The content nowadays is generally fine, and it is difficult to pick something when everything is pretty close, and every now and then there is something really good, so maybe competition is working here to raise the bar for all services? Not sure.

Saying entertainment is not substitutable is kind of crazy. It is very rare that I will only ever want to watch one specific thing, and if that happens, I have the choice to rent it, or buy it or pay for one month of a service. To me as a consumer...that great.

The market for smartphones is mostly driven by lack of options in OS, not hardware. Each of the big players offer plenty of hardware choices at different price points. But if you don't like the OS, harder to get away from that. Competing on OS is very difficult though.

> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.

Are you making your own choices?

Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?

To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?

You say that as if there is any alternative. Every other system as well has people who are good at psychology spreading propaganda.

Oh I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just saying if they aren't really your choices, why is making them valuable to you? Sure, you have 30 different choices of peanut butter to pick from, but you always pick the same one, because it's what your mom used when you were a kiddo, or because you don't like the oil separating ones, or because the chunky makes you feel like it's healthy even though it's loaded down with as much sugar as a Coke.

What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?

I have changed my peanut butter choice - when science started realizing trans fat was a problem I switched before the law changed to reflect science. I have also tried various of the 30 different options in other situations and found the one I personally like best. The value isn't just that I can make a choice, it is also that other people really do make different choices.

You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.

It’s funny you defend your independence by giving explanations of how you changed your peanut butter buying habits. The point was we don’t care what kind of peanut butter you buy; it’s not a meaningful kind of choice to have.

First, whether something is meaningful or not, depends on the subject.

Independence here isn't about whether your mind exists in a parallel world - devoid of external inputs - it's whether your input is required for an action to happen or not. They didn't simply comply with a choice from above, they experimented and came with an option that works for them. It doesn't matter whether that's a common choice or not, but who held the final authority in it.

In centralized systems, your input is, in theory, basically irrelevant/in practice, completely irrelevant unless you happen to the central authority.

There is no alternative[1]. Or in other words, Omelas is more believable if there is a kid in a hole.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative

they said the same thing about the divine right of kings

how could there be an alternative? surely without god or a king everything would fall apart!

Because the alternative to a market (a system where people make choices with the stuff they own) is a system where people are dictated to use stuff they don't own.

The divine right of kings touched on a lot of things, like governance, ownership, origin of law, etc. Decentralization/centralization focuses on ownership before anything else.

HN in a nutshell -- all in on capitalism and divine right of kings.

Not op, but my answer would be yes.

The very need for psychiatrists is, in a sense, an example for that. This is a case of companies trying to do their best to convince you to engage with them, because, otherwise, you likely wouldn't. Also, you never get stuff you don't "need". Games you don't want to play? Never happens, even in addictive games. Consume art that makes you feel nothing? Feel nothing how? Worst case scenario, you thought it would make you feel something, but it didn't. In all of these cases, the worst that happened is that you were made to wrongly belive that they would sate you, but your prediction was wrong, so you improve it for next time. Remember, even hypnosis can't overrule individual will, only brainwashing (which isn't a thing yet).

Take the opposite approach, central planning. In central planning, you are given little to no choices. You will be assigned the resources and roles you need according to the central planner. Even if the planner is democratic, your influence is reduced to a single vote, which is guaranteed to be erased by the law of large numbers. And that's ignoring external factor to you that are in control of the central planner: the psychlogists you mentioned still exist, but now they work for the planner instead.

We can argue that people are currently led into making poor choices in the market, but to conclude that this means no choice is being made is wrong. In a market, we can improve people's choices. In centralized systems, "people's choices" aren't a thing.

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

Any industry or economic activity where extractive financialisation takes priority over productive economic activity that delivers human value.

Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.

This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.

Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids.

Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).

These are good examples and it’s even worth noting that the net impact of these can be a huge boost to the market. But it is a local and greedy optimizer. It doesn’t think “would having public transit improve the economy long term” it thinks “could I make enough on fares to justify the investment” (which is almost always no, at least relative to other investments). This is the nature of positive externalities. They are value that the market is unable to weigh in its decision making.

Yes, as you say the market is a local (both in space and time) and greedy optimizer.

Long-term payoffs that increase the value of all participants in society, such as education, healthcare, infrastructure (roads including public transportation, water, electricity, ...), are demonstrably better served by government than by business.

I’d have thought that ‘the free market doesnt make subways’ is a market coordination problem, not an externality one?

Meaning, I think that ticket sales can a good job of capturing the costs and benefits of transportation - the benefits to the consumer and the costs to the producer. It’s worked well in other areas of transportation, like passenger boats and planes, and the market mostly works well in those areas.

So I’d have guessed that issue with subways, different from planes and ships, is that you have to buy the rights to large portions of underground land in order to build your lines in contiguous fashion. It’s hard for private developers to get the rights to these lands, if one landowner refuses to sell, it can block the construction of an entire line. This is why rail, dam, and highway projects tend to be coordinated by the state. They all suffer this problem, which doesn’t apply to transport by air or sea, as air and sea lack similar private property issues to trip over.

Healthcare.

City transit-it transports more people than taxis and uber put together. The trade off is public transit is slower (in my case 35 minutes by link-rail vs 15 minutes by car, and probably 20 minutes if I were to take an uber)

let's reverse the question. Where are markets expected to be optimal?

> definition of 'perfect competition' perfect competition, in which there are large numbers of identical suppliers and demanders of the same product, buyer and sellers can find one another at no cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market.

And that perfect competition provides the price signals that allow the market to be more competitive.

The less that holds true, the less efficient the market is going to be.

What is the price signal on education?

What is the price signal on public infrastructure?

What is the price signal on rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts?

Electric service to the home, streets, policing, fire and rescue.

The way you say "outcompeted" makes it seem like you're evaluating efficiency in both cases, but isn't direction the more important criteria?

It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things.

The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.

Somewhat of a weird example…the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous, or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start. Also in your example you have both cars without steering wheels.

> the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous

How silly, even autonomous vehicles have steering. They may be built without the wheel, but they have some kind of steering mechanism

> or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start

I hope your wheels never lose alignment and that you're pointed exactly where you want to go at the start.

It's not a weird example at all if you don't come up with crazy unrealistic situations that don't match actual cars or the metaphor.

The OP specifically referenced a steering wheel as it relates to weight, so that is what I went off of. Try to not overthink things.

Any steering mechanism adds weight. You haven't removed the problem.

My point is just that progress is a vector, is has direction, and our economic theories generally ignore this and treat it as a scaler: if the number is going up then things must be good. When actually, the number going up just means that we're moving quickly in an arbitrary direction that has nothing to do with our needs and very well may be undermining them.

By that logic, from my perspective - your family life, as we're practicing it today, it a car without a steering wheel.

The church down the street from me, that I have nothing to do with, is a car without a steering wheel. My local town, of which I'm only 1 member, is a car without a steering wheel.

Just because you see a system that you don't understand or control doesn't mean it's dangerous. The first instinct shouldn't be to centralize power.

Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.

Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.

What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.

>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out

The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.

I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.

The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.

Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.

> The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby

The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.

Ok video games then. I am not sure video gaming in person in a group setting is popular with modern youth. Same outcome to me.

You think that hanging out playing video games with friends lacks an appeal for young people?

Are you for real?

You don’t need to be rude.

I never said it lacks appeal but I would say that more folks prefer to game online with friends.

> Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces

I agree with this, but I think it reinforces GP's point that what's missing is time: slack in the day. I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood kids, and the critical enabler was that there were always adults around during the after-school hours. Not actively hanging out with us, or even closely supervising, but around. Some of them (mine, but only for a few years), were stay-at-home mothers, but by no means all. One family had a dad who got home early from work. Another kid we couldn't play at their house certain days, but we could others, because their parents had variable schedules.

There were also more kids around, because families back then had more kids than they do nowadays. I think that's also (not entirely, but to a significant degree) a consequence of adults having less time - across their life-cycles, and in their days - that isn't devoted to work.

No ones' parents did gig-work, or worked two jobs. Most parents were 9-5, or maybe 8-4 (or I don't know: I was a kid, and not paying attention to things like that), but no one went to "after school care", because there were always adults around after school got out.

Hell, I think the need for third-places (for kids) mentioned in the article is a down-stream effect of the increased time pressures on adults' lives - as is the disappearance of third-places for adults.

I don’t know if I can come to that conclusion. Certainly there some grain of a truth there but even when the parents are home kids are not out exploring. At least in America there is an obsession for experience maxing with kids. I don’t know if it’s a time problem or a shift in attitudes.

You're right about there being a change of attitude, particularly in the direction of mis-perceived risk - we see that in surveys about fear of crime relative to actual crime statistics - which makes parents way more leery about sending their kids outside to play on their own.

I think that's a huge mistake: there are child-development studies that suggest that it's important for kids to engage in (moderately) risk-taking play in order to develop accurate assessments of their own skills and calibrate their own internal risk models; other studies suggest that it's helpful for children's social development to spend time playing independently (of adults) in age-diverse groups of other kids. My opinion is that the parents who (e.g.) follow their kids around the playground, making sure they don't fall down and settling every squabble, are not being helpful - though not doing that sure got me dirty looks from other parents!

So, that's where at least some of the "kids aren't exploring outside" effect comes from. My own (GenX / "latchkey" / elder-millennial) cohort was arguably under-patented; now we ourselves have over-corrected with our kids. Maaaybe the idea that at-home entertainment is today more compelling or convenient has something to do with it, but I don't know: my generation was plenty compelled by TV and 8-bit Nintendo. I think we'd have spent just as much time on those as kids today spend on whatever they do on their devices now.

However, I think the primary drivers are:

1.) Fewer kids around, both per-capita and (related, but separable) per geographical area: you can't have a spontaneous neighborhood "gang" when other kids don't live nearby. Declining birth rates and increased sprawl force parents to be more involved in their kids' social lives, as transportation to / organizers of scheduled activities and formalized "play-dates". (Of course, this only increases the time-pressure on parents, and makes it even more difficult to imagine having more kids. It's a vicious cycle.)

2.) As you say, experience-maxxing. Some of this is great: parents in general seem to be way more (emotionally healthily!) involved in their kids lives than my parents' generation ever were.

(But one example: I think my parents might have attended one or two of my Little League or high school baseball games, ever. It didn't hurt my feelings at all: parents mostly didn't, and we kids mostly thought the families who came every time were kinda weird, and were a bit embarrassed for the teammates whose parents showed up. Today, I love how much support my kid and his peers receive at their games. It's fantastic. [Coming to watch practice though? Nah. That's a little too helicoptery. Parents, don't do that, unless you're volunteering to help coach the team.])

On the other hand, I think a lot of the other efforts parents make - structuring every afternoon and family weekend around doing something kid-friendly - isn't such a good thing: kids need a little boredom and a bit of independence to spark their creativity. But... For time-pressed parents, who genuinely and rightly crave interaction with their kids, those hours are precious: that's all the time you get, so the temptation to over-schedule is strong.

I think both of those factors reduce down (in large part) to time pressure. Having to work or train longer, and on top of that having to have more than one income, to be financially stable increases the (fractional) time investment, and then all of it compounds.

It's not a simple answer, but I think higher wages, better social and societal support for families, and denser built environments would all help to pull societies away from the current equilibrium. Developed countries are all well below replacement birth rates, while at the same time surveys indicate that most women have fewer children than they'd "ideally" want. There's something off kilter in the way we're living our lives, and I think it's downstream of the economic system we've collectively built.

(Sorry to hit you with these walls of text. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this since becoming a parent.)

Why do you think these are board games? The article is describing a youth club, for which there is no market as there is no profit to be made from it.

We have more time than ever. Adults just choose to use it arguing on the Internet instead of building a free 3rd space for teens.

All of those things you long for have been nuked by the economy too.

Source?

IDK if you're familiar with Church, but that's the most heavily used third space. And we grant it tax exempt status which it abuses to push bad laws.

Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.

i believe most of the demand for third spaces is for things that are free to use. parks, places to hang out, activities. these spaces are not profitable.

in germany this is handled by supporting youth organizations. sport, scouts and other activities. most of these groups get free access to government owned buildings. they get financial support for their equipment, etc, under the condition that any youth can join with only a nominal membership fee.

in a pure market economy none of these organizations or spaces would survive. they depend on government support.

For some of us, we found digital "third spaces". In a way, when we're arguing on HN, or the kids on Discord, are using it largely as a community centre on their screen.

It clearly shouldn't be the only option-- it's not going to service all types of interests and audiences. I attend the meetings of the local numsimatics club-- they get a room in one of the city offices when it's closed for the day, and do presentations and discussions. The demographics are weird, it's like under-15s and over-60s with very little in the middle, and I'm not sure there's the technical capability or the preference to do it over Zoom. (Trying to remember what they did during the pandemic, I think they just closed down for a year or so)

another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.

a pure market economy would never allow for the existence of a public park. they are on valuable land, cost a lot of money but don't make any profit at all.

We had youth clubs where I live when I grew up, but it never crossed my mind to go to them unfortunately I thought they’d be hostile places.

The market may be performing at a local maximum, if kids without third spaces grow up unproductive.

I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks.

And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes

It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.

the market is not spending that money. the community/goverment is.

How is that not a market, as long as we are voting?

good question. i actually agree with you. but free market is defined as "without government intervention", and some people defend that rigorously. i found this article where government involvement in a public parks fail: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarketEnvironmentali... driving that point home.

personally i believe for every story in that article where the government failed or did worse than private owners we can find just as many stories where private owners failed to act in the public interest and only government was there to support the public. this is not a question of the system, but of the motivation of the people involved. even some examples in the article only work because government set the rules that empowered the people to act against bad actors in the first place.

the article claims that government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits and i would counter that that is broadly not true in many places because people do expect the government to act in their interest and not doing so can and will backfire. even in a country like china where the government is more top down. but i digress.

so yeah, i agree that government and people are market participants. but i just had this argument in another thread where someone insists that i am a non-interested party in commercial property dealings if i am not a tenant or owner, while i kept arguing that as a person living in the city my interests are affected too if a property stays empty and therefore it's only right that the government gets involved.

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

you are so wrong. this is not ai.

Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.

Watching trust in online content of any kind disintegrate in realtime due to AI in a forum that on balance breathlessly touts AI is surreal.

You're conflating different things here. You would have to look very hard on HN to find someone who "breathlessly touts" the idea of publishing AI-generated blogposts under your own name.

In for a penny, in for a pound. "Well it's ok when I do it" doesn't wash.

i wish i could codify voice.

probably someone has.

i’m not beyond being fooled, but when there’s voice there’s a human.

this is especially true with certain types of awkward phrasings that LLMs love to correct but humans don’t.

one day my internal filter will fail, but not today.

Right, this is cyborg text. The opening is in human voice. I am acknowledging that. Then it ebbs and flows over llm rocks.

The piece would be maybe 6-8 grafs without claude, and much of claude is papered over.

I wonder if you may be seeing ghosts? At least to me, this sounded so clearly like an authentic human voice, at least the parts I've read (haven't finished yet).

This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.

I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?

It has very human aspects, such as the beginning. So people switch off. And then it has long stretches where it is bulked up by claude and opus-4.8’s obsession with “honestly true,” “narrower” claims, how concepts “rhyme” etc.

I guess it is also possible this person has internalized claude, but I think their writing pattern is: short pieces: fully human voice; long pieces: ai-supported.

As to my personal views, I am sad to have lost the emdash and the antithesis, among other things, to the llm-cliche dustbin.

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around.

Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.

How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?

That’s not really an LLMism. It’s a phrase that ordinary writers use and was perfectly fine, but LLMs started overusing it, so now you see it as a “tell.” People who haven’t read enough LLM-generated writing to see the pattern won’t notice anything wrong.

It's possible we're at the point now where it fools me, but I didn't see it that way. I think more evidence against would be the fact that the author discloses genAI usage in another article [0] and provides their own version of the same [1].

[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

The one they claim is in their voice [1] has zero of the tells I am referring to. You can compare and contrast it with your fully/generated reference 0 (although that is fable and I have little experience reading its writing it seems to use many similar comventions) and the title piece and see what I mean.

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

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