The room the economy can't see(wilsoniumite.com) |
The room the economy can't see(wilsoniumite.com) |
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.
This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.
Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
Heck, I have friends who are slightly younger than me who made durable friendships in League via matchmaking.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)
I have online friends from matchmaking, but it's certainly much harder. I'm not underestimating it, but my language might have been too strong.
Consider the average young person's discord group.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"..?
[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...
[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...
>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.
And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes
It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).
We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
"The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor!
Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.
The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.
The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.
I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.
I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.
So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.
I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.
If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
Something deeply wrong here. Both that this level of antisocial behavior is expected, and that liability would be placed on people who were not meaningfully responsible for it but just happen to have their name on the lease.
> regulation
I suspect what people are actually scared of in America is not regulation (from the legislature) but litigation, which is not the same thing even if it can have the same effects.
An example of how to destroy a community through outside litigants pursuing the culture war is what's happened to the Women's Institute, a pretty old organization, in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/14/womens-insti...
This is litigation itself as a form of antisocial behavior.
I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.
Of course it does! It is possible to have a system where everyone is unhappy, yet incentivised to keep making things worse.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
or https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...
Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.
That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!
Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.
But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.
UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale.
There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.
Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.
Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right?
The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
Oh, people don't want affordable food but a 20-buck burrito and a 100k truck of ridiculous size?
Please tell me what's different than what I am seeing right now without UBI?
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a swell idea. The population exploded.
Then you couple this with the technological revolution and the necessity of training huge amounts of the population for specialists jobs if they want to make a living and suddenly a boat load of kids doesn't make any sense at all. And it's getting to the point of the squeeze that having any kids doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people.
Think about what etiremnent savings means in the real economy. It means I have to store enough food to feed myself for 30 years. It means I have to store enough furniture too. And enough gasoline. And enough of everything else.
This is obviously not possible. So instead I store other things I hope I'll be able to exchange for gasoline and food. But no matter what form it takes, I have to store an absolutely enormous amount of stuff. Whether it's physical goods or abstract financial rights. There is no way for everyone to do this without creating massive economic distortion of some kind. Whatever people store is going to massively increase in value (house deeds! shares!) and crash later when they exchange it for food and gasoline.
But there's a simple alternative, we add a 20% tax and distribute it to people in the form of pensions. This is called a pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Optionally the scheme can keep some kind of weight value for each person based on how much tax they paid or any other metric. Since it doesn't store assets it doesn't distort the economy nearly as much. But, it's vulnerable to a future generation simply cutting it off. When the scheme turns on there's a generation who didn't contribute but still benefit and when the scheme turns off there's a generation who contributed and didn't benefit. This can't happen to people who store real assets because the assets are firmly owned by them, and the society can't easily just decide they aren't.
We can do an intermediate solution if we let people buy a share of future tax income as a financial asset. It doesn't distort the economy too much and your contributions are firmly your property. Treasury bonds are this.
Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.
No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.
Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
Looking at their website it's hard to tell. Their calendar doesn't show any activities like that, but maybe you have to be plugged into the congregation to know. They appear to be a very left-leaning Evangelical organization now. I didn't even know there was such a thing.
If you want UBI without massive inflation then you have to suck back in most of the money you've produced.
Of course, you can then do that pretty sensibly so that you don't have cliff edges like we do at the moment.
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 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.
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)
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.
“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman
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.
Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?
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.
Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.
The reality is that people in middle-age just tend to look backwards and reflect on what could have been. Some prove happy with what they have, and others are sure the grass would have been greener some other way. What they decide has more to do with the moods their personality gravitates towards and the current state of their life as they start reflecting.
Specific details of the road there -- like kids vs not -- are not all that determinative.
I'm way older than 50, and don't miss having kids at all.
Don't half ass it, brace the full absurdity of the universe.
The only purpose why we are here is to take entropy from an ordered state to one of maximum disorder.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
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).
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 appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.
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.
But your choices are more limited than you might think. Ultimately what's available to you is decided by the economic machinery upstream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trash incinerators are very smelly. You are contradicting yourself. I don’t get it.
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?
What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?
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.