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harryhon People are realizing that degrowth is bad

That's not what the current curve actually looks like though. The rate of increase is declining every year. There are a number of developed economies that already have shrinking populations.

There are a couple of different population projections out there and, of course, predictions about the future are hard. But all of them show a population peak around 2100 of maybe 10-12 billion people.

harryhon People are realizing that degrowth is bad

Developed economies are already not on an exponential path (as is made clear in the linked post if you would bother to read it). You are reasoning from a false premise.

harryhon Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal

For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power

This is not true. The enormous rise in wealth of the world in the 20th/21st centuries has coincided with large increases in personal freedoms as well.

At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.

The trend is consistent with other datasets:

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

harryhon Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal

History has shown us that as societies get richer / more productive people work less. Here is a graph of this in the US:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/US...

This makes sense. As people get richer, they use some of their wealth to "purchase" more leisure time. There is no reason to think this won't happen in China, just like it has happened in other places.

I think your fear is unfounded.

harryhon WeWork Book: The $10T Mirage

Yes, fiscal policy is important as well. It's also probably true that the federal government has overdone it a bit as we're now seeing supply side driven inflation. These sorts of things are rarely handled perfectly.

harryhon WeWork Book: The $10T Mirage

Appropriate management of the money supply by the Fed also created the best economic circumstances for the middle and working classes in 20 years.

harryhon Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

There is some truth in this post, but it's also important to understand that in most of the places with very large lots, it is illegal to subdivide the lots and build denser housing. If greater density was legalized, it would almost certainly be built and inhabited in a great many places.

harryhon Where has all the productivity gone?

As you can see from my link, life expectancy at birth was around 67 in 1950. There has been an 18% increase since then.

You continue to make claims that are inconsistent with the data.

harryhon Where has all the productivity gone?

Frankly, as a parent, I think "fewer dead children" is a pretty big deal. Perhaps one of the biggest improvements in human welfare that one would hope to see in society.

harryhon Where has all the productivity gone?

As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century

In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.

harryhon A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

Diplomacy works like this.

harryhon I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

Er. Oops. My bad. See my EDIT note.

harryhon I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

It sounds like there are some pension benefit lock in effects that might make job switching costs higher than one would like.

harryhon I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

He was featured anonymously.

Though it's possible that there is enough information (age, tenure, gender) in the article to identify him. A bit hard to say.

He'd also have a pretty clear cut case with the NLRB if he was fired or otherwise punished for talking to the press about labor conditions (which isn't to say that this doesn't happen sometimes anyways).

EDIT: Er, nevermind. I misread it as being told to Mark McCarter thinking he was the Vice journalist. But he's actually the factory employee and Lauren Gurley is the journalist. I'm an idiot. TY ALittleLight for pointing out my mistake.

harryhon A theory that “elite overproduction” leads to political instability (2020)

I have no idea who JD Vance is

He wrote Hillbilly Elegy which was a NYTimes #1 bestseller, an Oprah book club pick, and sold over a million copies.

It also go made into a movie by Netflix.

He's now running for Senate in Ohio where he stands a decent chance of winning (though Josh Mandel is probably the current frontrunner).

harryhon 60% of Millennials Earning over $100k Live Paycheck to Paycheck

The annual mortgage on a 1.2M loan (80% of 1.5) is 70k or so. That's perfectly reasonable on a 500k/year salary. Not sure why you'd call that insane.

harryhon Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

I don't see what people being exhausted has to do with population growth.

harryhon Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

except for the part of an economic system that requires unending growth

This is such a tired phrase. Like if we had socialism or communism or some other -ism it wouldn't matter.

But that's just not true. The issue is math and the fact that prime age working people (25-55ish) are the ones that, for the most part, make stuff. If you have a shrinking population then the % of the population that makes stuff gets a lot smaller so everyone has to be poorer. No "economic system" can change that.

harryhon Cryptocurrency Bear?

The use case for buying groceries on the internet was clear (getting food without having to go pick it up yourself). It was just a question of things getting big enough for the economics to work.

The use case for distributed ledgers is not at all clear, after over a decade of tinkering.

You could be right, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.

harryhon Never mind the 1 percent: Let's talk about the 0.01 percent (2017)

An investor with dollar signs who buys 20 houses in order to rent them out doesn't affect housing costs all that much. It just shifts stock from owner occupied housing to renter occupied housing.

harryhon Fiscal-Driven Inflation

5% inflation per month would mean 80% inflation per year. Nominal GDP growth is about 3 or 4%.

So your statement implies that a typical American family is losing over 40% of its purchasing power year over year.

This is, quite obviously, not the case.

harryhon Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

A lot of the discussion of "health" in the US is actually coded conversation about physical attractiveness.

harryhon Changes at Basecamp

For the record, it's 49% support according to Gallup.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-mat...

And based on the trend, it will cross 50% imminently (if it hasn't already).

harryhon Biden eyeing tax rate as high as 43.4% in next economic package

> The top US capital gains tax is 20%. The 3.8% is a separate tax

A tax on, among other things, capital gains. See:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/questions-and-answers-on-the-ne...

"8. What is included in Net Investment Income?

In general, investment income includes, but is not limited to: interest, dividends, capital gains..."

harryhon Biden eyeing tax rate as high as 43.4% in next economic package

> The US has the lowest effective individual capital tax rates in the world outside of tax shelter countries.

The capital gains rate in the UK is 20%.

https://www.gov.uk/capital-gains-tax/rates

The top capital gains rate in the US is 23.8% + state taxes.

harryhon Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

When I started at Microsoft in 2000 I believe my initial salary was 62k just as another reference plus some stock options (honestly I can't remember the details of that part). This was a very good comp package for a new college grad.

harryhon Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

Before it was a gift phone it was $1,000. They changed that in....2008ish maybe. I can't remember the exact year.

harryhon Dear Zuckerberg, We're writing to urge you to cancel Instagram for children [pdf]

COPPA allows children until 13 to share personal info. They just need a parent's permission to do so.

harryhon The myth of excess vacant housing distracts from solutions

What's so special about housing that you need an extra special tax like this? We don't have it for cars or machinery or other kinds of capital goods.

I'll answer my own question: the root problem of too high rents is that governments:

1) have outlawed the construction of enough new housing to meet demand.

2) many places (CA especially) have property taxes that are drastically too low (and in CA's case, radically unfair).

Vacancy taxes are a bad hack. As you note in your comment you have to build in all kinds of grace periods or exceptions and even these can often be easily gamed or ignored.

Cities will be much better off if they fix the real underlying problems.

harryhon The myth of excess vacant housing distracts from solutions

- Maybe they want to move into it later.

- Maybe they haven't found a suitable tenant yet.

- Maybe they are holding it open for a friend or family member.

- Maybe they want to do some renovations before renting it out.

- Maybe they want to sell the property and it's easier to sell without an existing tenant.

I can think of lots of reasons.