It's the uncertainty of the bird in the bush. There is no way to guarantee that you'll get 10 utility in 2022, so you would probably want at least a 90% chance at 11 utility in order to balance out 10 utility now.
And boom, there you have interest rates i.e. time preference.
On risk aversion, you might look at Lara Buchak's book "Risk and Rationality" (https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672165.001.0001/acprof-9780199672165). Fundamentally, we care about *actual* utility, and she argues that maximizing *expected* utility is just one way of working to maximize actual utility. But maximizing any of the quantities she calls "risk-weighted expected utility", using a different risk-weighting function than the neutral one, is another way of working to maximize actual utility. If we knew in advance what act would maximize actual utility, then every risk-weighted expected utility would coincide, but as long as there is uncertainty, they can differ.
Risk-neutrality is the only risk-weighting that always treats a second choice of bets that are probabilistically independent from and identically distributed to a prior choice of bets in exactly the same way as it treats the first choice. Risk-neutrality is also the only risk-weighting that makes a choice at a time the same way that it makes the choice about which decision to pre-commit to at an earlier time. But she argues that neither of these concepts is essential to doing what we can to make the actual outcome better. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but her concept of risk-weighting is more plausible to me than any other I've encountered.
I haven't thought as much about time preference, but I think there's lots of formal reasons to treat ourselves at different times the same we we treat other people at the same time, and treat ourself in the future at a non-actual but possible outcome the same way we treat another person at the same time in the actual outcome. Whether we treat different people identically, or treat them incomparably, or treat each person more or less significantly to the same degree depending on how badly or well off they are, is not necessarily set by that. But time preference, risk aversion, and inequality aversion, seem to me like they should stand or fall together.
I don't know if she says a lot about how to compare risk-weighting methods. I think she treats them the same way many Bayesians treat priors, but I don't know if she's committed to either an objective or subjective source for them. I believe Simon Blessenohl has an interesting recent paper on the question of how to aggregate utility between people with different risk weighting functions.
This argument holds for pure utility, but not for most things that can actually be measured. Increasing amounts of money gives diminishing returns in utility for most people. This makes it so someone who is risk neutral with utility will be risk averse for money.
Is there evidence that people are risk averse with utility, and not something like money?
There's a 100 ticket lottery. You can choose between getting either (A) a big prize (say, $5 million) on tickets 1-9, or (B) a smaller prize (say, $1 million) on tickets 1-10. Most people pick (A) over (B). You can choose between getting either (C) the big prize on tickets 1-9, nothing on ticket 10, and the small prize on tickets 11-100 or (D) the small prize regardless of what ticket comes up. Most people pick (D) over (C).
If we take the probabilities as granted, and use classical expected value, there is no way of assigning utilities to the big prize, small prize, and nothing that rationalizes *both* choosing A over B and D over C. However, various theories of risk aversion (where outcomes are weighted not directly proportionally to their probability, but where the values of the worst outcomes are weighted more and the best outcomes less) can rationalize these preferences. These theories are structurally identical to social choice theories that are inequality averse, where (for example) the *n*th best off person has their utility multiplied by *n* when summing to get the total social utility.
This would be a way to explain away the risk aversion by saying it's not risk aversion at all, and instead just mis-described probabilities. John Quiggin has a 1982 paper where he gives a formal system that is formally identical to Lara Buchak's later risk averse system, except he interprets it as people being "pessimistic", so that they think of the worse outcomes as being more subjectively probable than they objectively are, while she interprets it as true risk aversion, with people putting more weight on worse outcomes than their subjective probability. It's very hard to separate these two phenomena, either empirically or even theoretically.
So I definitely interpret utility as encoding the risk aversion and then utilitarianism being risk neutral with respect to utility.
To expand that thought - I get less utility from a 50:50 shot at $100k than I do a 100% chance at $50k because my utility gain from $100k is less than twice my utility gain from $50k. This is because I'd spend the first $50k on higher priority items than the subsequent $50k so risking the first $50k to gain the second $50k isn't worth it, and therefore I'm risk averse.
If we assume that my utility from $33k is equivalent to a 50% chance of $100k then I should be risk neutral between those two options (because the utility is the same) but the way my utility is calculated means I'm risk adverse in terms of dollars.
The exception I've seen to this argument is when it comes to altruism. If you assign value to other people's welfare then it's not obvious that you should be risk adverse in any metric - a 10% chance of saving 10 lives really is as good as a 100% chance of saving 1 life and therefore a 50% chance of donating $100k to charity really is as good as donating $50k to charity, assuming the charity's funding needs are linear over that amount of money.
This is standardly what economists say, but as the economist Maurice Allais pointed out, there are some decisions people make that seem to come out of genuine risk aversion, but that can't be accounted for by diminishing marginal utility. (I mentioned the case in the reply to Brian, above.)
Diminishing marginal utility can *look* like risk aversion when you're just comparing two-outcome gambles. But the two can be distinguished with particular gambles.
So that's a really interesting point and it definitely makes me wonder if there's any argument for anyone being "risk averse" in the way described in your example. Because yeah, I'd agree that utilitarians shouldn't do that, but should anyone? I'm admittedly less familiar with deontological ethics or virtue ethics so maybe utilitarians really are being unusually hypocritical in being risk averse in the way you described!
My thought on this is that there's not a strong argument *for* being risk averse, but I think there's also not an especially strong argument *against* being risk averse in this way either. (The same points apply to attitudes that are risk "seeking" rather than averse.)
People sometimes use the word "utilitarian" to refer to any sort of consequentialist who thinks that what makes policies right or wrong is the aggregate of their effects on all the people. But they also sometimes use "utilitarian" more specifically for the view that each person is treated equally, and contrast it with "prioritarians" or "egalitarians" who think that the interests of those less well off should be counted more. (I always forget which is which, but one says that interests matter more depending on objectively low quality of life, while the other says that interests matter more depending on relatively low quality of life. But both can be phrased carefully in ways that avoid any blatant leveling-down objections and the like.)
I think there are some formal reasons why prioritarian or egalitarian aggregation might go naturally with a risk-averse approach to uncertainty, while utilitarian aggregation goes naturally with a risk-neutral approach to uncertainty.
One other formal fact is that on Buchak's theory of risk sensitivity, it turns out that someone who currently holds a portfolio of risky gambles, and is deciding whether or not to accept an additional gamble whose risk is uncorrelated with the ones they hold, will end up deciding almost identically regardless of whether they are risk neutral or risk sensitive. Since I think her account is the best account of risk sensitivity, this might end up largely neutralizing concerns about it, but not fully.
I think that people’s preferences tend to discount into the future, so any sort of preference utilitarianism would immediately get future discounting built in
John Quiggin just presented an interesting paper at a conference last week where he pointed out that although individuals discount their own future preferences, the future people won't discount their preferences, and thus if we take all people (past, present, and future) equally into account, then we should discount much less than current people are inclined to (and perhaps not at all, if we think that each moment of time contains approximately the same distribution of discounted end-of-life stages and non-discounted early-life stages).
And regarding your second comment, I have a recent paper where I argue that we can get around some of those problems with infinity even without discounting. (https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article-abstract/121/3/299/6367834?redirectedFrom=fulltext) Although there is no such thing as the sum of utilities with an infinite population, we can still say that one overall situation is better than another if everyone is better off in the one than the other; we can still say that certain trade-offs either among sets of individuals or among worlds of equal probability should be treated as invariances; and the result we get is a consistent partial ordering of options that yields plausible results in many cases (though it does say that at least some options are neither better nor worse nor equal to certain others).
One argument against (I actually think there are several), but sticking to one:
Interpersonal comparisons of utility are, to say the least, madly controversial. There's no widely accepted way to compare what 10 utils "for you" means against 10 utils to me. (And, yes, this can be seen as a problem for utilarianism). We are on much firmer ground trying to set a meaningful utility scale for a single cohesive rational agent.
The relevance to your question is: the me in 2022 is someone different from the me here now. Utils may not be directly comparable (there's no theory as to what each "10" means here any more as there is to comparing my utility vs yours). And even if we could just pretend that this problem was solved, the truth is that I just don't care about the so-called me in 2022 quite as much as the real "now" me. If it had to be you or I with the 10 utils, I'd prefer me, and comparing me or this future person with the same name is an attenuated version of that comparison.
Hence (well one reason for) discounting and time preference.
> So, 10 utility right now is equal to 10 utility in 2022. Are there any arguments against this?
Not at all. First of all I may die before 2022.
My values may change, actual utility may change, whoever was backing it may withdraw or bankrupt. There is also chance that it may result in utility increase, but overall certain 10 utility now seems clearly preferable over delayed 10 utility.
Also, 10 utility now in many cases will allow me to produce more utility or better judge further utility or benefit in other way increasing total utility over my lifetime.
So you're correct, but, implementing this in practice often looks like being risk averse and having time preferences.
Because, for instance, it's usually worse in terms of utility to lose $1000 than to gain $1000 (marginal utility of money decreases with quantity, etc) and its usually better for a good thing to happen now than later (you will change over time and might enjoy the same thing less in the future, you will have longer to enjoy the memory and less time to suffer from desire for it, you may be able to leverage it into other good things, etc.)
A lot of the studies that initially found things like risk aversion and time discounting used what I think to be pretty naive definitions of utility (like, $1=1 util, period), and I think people are a lot more rational than those studies suggest if you think about utility functions in more depth. Yes, rationalists should not be biased in terms of risk aversion and time discounting, however, they will still rationally show the preferences those naive studies found, maybe to a lesser degree than others.or maybe not.
Not sure if promotion is allowed here but super interested what people think of this article: https://atis.substack.com/p/on-income-and-happiness, think it’s in the style of an SSC post, would love some feedback.
Nice, succint, survey and analysis of the issue! I'd love to have an entire book's worth of these for commonly cited things I think I know because I heard them on the internet once
There should be more than one study of such an important subject.
I also wonder about the effects of relative income. The classic "we didn't know we were poor" vs. "when you make your first million, you find out how many people have two million".
The top graph is great, took me a bit to figure out the two x axes. Don't want to discourage you, but I dont feel like your commentary added much, idle statistical whinging is lazy even when scott does it. Id be much more interested in personal experience, trying to tie in a related concept, or diving into one of those interesting looking thresholds (positive affect? Stress reaches a mininum at 80k?!)
Some good points, but you didn't recognize the biggest flaw in the Kahnemann paper. There's a ceiling effect in their well-being measure, so the function HAS to level off. But of course their need not be a ceiling on well-being, e.g. I have never known the happiness that apparently comes from having a car whose doors go "like this" (sorry).
Jebb, Tay, Diener, & Oishi (2018) suffers from the same problem, but still good to know.
Killingsworth 2021 addresses the ceiling effect problem and finds no levelling of on the log scale. I can send you my seminar slides that discuss this and the logging question and the causality question with respect to the question of the anticipated happiness effects of redistribution. I'll message you on Twitter.
Sorry, no, and some of them are in German.. There is a nice treatment in a footnote of the first chapter in Harden's book The Genetic Lottery, but of course happiness economics is no small literature. And I can recommend reading the Killingsworth paper. Regrettably, neither cites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oV4IVy8tvE
Thank you, I will check the Killingsworth paper. I've read quite a few studies using happiness measures, but I hadn't realized this ceiling problem at all, which seems obvious in retrospect...- and the clip is wonderful indeed!
I don't know where I read this, but it has sort of stuck with me that happiness/life-satisfaction goes up until a net worth of $4 million. If your net worth is above $4 million, it goes down, presumably because you spend a lot of time worrying about protecting your money, what to do with it, how to pass it on after you die, and so on. Of course, this figure should be adjusted for inflation.
I'm starting the "bye-George society" for people who were initially enamored with Georgism but have grown disillusioned, the "bi-George society" for greater representation of sexual minorities in debates about land taxes, and the "buy-George society" for strawman libertarians who take the idea of freedom of contract way too far.
The cat link is confusing. Is the old-timey image on that page supposed to be the landscape painting in question? If so, I have to confess that I can't see the cat either. If not, maybe they should fix that, it's horribly misleading if not.
Ah. I had Noscript on, of course, not that it would've occurred to me to hover over the top third of the image in the first place... (I thought the deformed little critters on the ground were the cats. They look more like cats than many cats I've seen in, say, medieval artwork.)
They really do! I initially thought they were the cats too. I could probably have stared at the painting forever without seeing the cat, but I see it clearly after having seen it highlighted, which is of course what they were going for (even if it may not be the original painting). I wonder if I will see Georgism like that after I have finally read up on it. It's hard to imagine, but who knows?
I'm interested in building a list of learning resources, ideally free, for something like a "learn by doing" approach to math and statistics. (I have in mind primarily programming as "doing" but also opened to eg. games, spreadsheets, etc).
For example these are great and fit what I have in mind:
...Green Tea Press in particular has the philosophy of "if you can program you can learn the discrete version of many concepts, then the continuous version", which is most in line with what I have in mind.
I have this idea that very practical math and stats thinking can be taught to a very wide range of on people if we used discretization to teach the basics first, then followed it with analytics optionally.
I'd love to find more resources like these, if you know of any, please share!
I'm a traditional horary astrologer and I'd like to practice my art: I invite anyone who would care to have a query answered through the toolkit of astrological divination to drop me a line at FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. (The email address is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, of course materialists and even--dare I dream?--atheists are quite welcome.) I look forward to hearing from you!
If this is for serious, I'll bet you $50 that you can't guess my birthdate through astrological methods after asking me twenty questions. (If astrology makes predictions about the future, you could make the predictions, wait for the answers, and then extract the birth date which would make those predictions true.)
I see that Horary astrology (https://wikiless.org/wiki/Horary_astrology?lang=en) is different, but one should still be able to devise a method to falsify it, e.g., by going toe to toe with Metaculus questions.
I am certainly willing to wager money on event-based challenges, though, as I wrote above, it might take a few tries to land on a situation where you predict X with high confidence and horary predicts Y with high confidence.
I mean, if you try long enough, discarding any potential misses, eventually you're bound to land a hit just by chance.
I'll offer the $50 bet, but only if you commit to a prediction ahead of time. For example, you could predict what I will have for lunch on Friday, then encrypt the prediction and send it to me. On Friday, I have lunch, then you send me the decryption key. If had a Denver omelette, and the prediction says "Denver omelette", then you win. If the prediction says "anything but ostrich eggs", then you still don't win, because predictions have to be specific and non-obvious.
Let's say you interview for a job and assign 75% confidence you'll get an offer; if the astrology says yes, you'll get the offer, that would be a prediction we'd need to discard in this hypothetical proving attempt. By "try a few times", I mean myself and whoever else would need to keep going until we hit on a circumstance where our respective high-confidence predictions disagree with each other.
As regards lunch, I'm afraid your entrée choice is too obscure for even astrology to ascertain. Do keep in mind we're working with seven planets, twelve signs, and five aspects; while the art contains a great deal of subtlety, astrology is not mechanistic to the extent that we can pull the level and get a result. Some of the biggest limitations in horary are situations involving things we don't care about or in which we have no personal stake (same thing as in re: your dice example).
Fair enough, but as I said in my other comment, vague predictions without actionable results or specific timeframes are not terribly interesting -- anyone can make them, you don't need astrology for that. So, what can horary astrology do that I, as a layman, cannot ?
You've actually hit pretty close to a method from natal astrology called "rectification", where true birth time is ascertained by examining life events from a number of progressed charts; to put it mildly, this is a lot of work. A better use of horary would be if you have high confidence about some upcoming event(s), I'd be willing to delineate charts for such questions as a test (though this might take a few tries if e.g. the horary agrees with your assessment).
I am a gamer, so I have a lot of dice in my house. If I rolled 10 differently-colored dice, could you predict which color die would show which number ?
Surely you must have realized that even with just binary-valued answers, 20 questions is enough to identify an object in a search space of 2^20 possibilities, which covers over 2 millennia of dates. Are you imposing other stipulations, such as none of the questions being allowed to be directly about your birthdate?
I'm guessing questions like "were you born in the first six months of the year" don't count as guessing a birthdate through astrological methods, so that would not technically win the bet.
With the caveat that world events are beyond my capacity at the moment (that would be mundane astrology, which takes pride of place above elections, horary, and natal as the most difficult and complex form of astrology), I'm perfectly willing to use horary out in public. Most people don't ask questions they'd be comfortable sharing over the open internet, of course, which is why astrologer-client privilege is a thing.
Most horaries I have seen are aimed at events ("will this thing happen in the next three months?"), timing ("when will the package arrive?"), choice ("should I take this offer or stay at my current job?"), or analysis ("how does this person view our partnership?"). Any binary question is generally better suited to outright true/false judgment (wrt astrology itself) than others.
If anyone is reading this, I decided this was closer to divination/magic than I was comfortable being directly involved in, but I hope someone else tries it out.
I'm not trying to be cagey, but I'm not sure I should say? Definitely get in touch with him -- I think my issues with this are probably not going to be anyone else's issues.
An excellent point. It's a recurring fantasy of mine to one day meet and impress a real market devotee; he'd ask for a divination out of amused curiosity at first, but after a number of accurate and insightful prognostications, we'd begin working on market prediction via financial astrology. A guy can dream...
It's a long-term goal. Trouble is I am entirely ignorant re: the market, and figure it would take some time before I know enough not to make novice-level errors. It is like if you have a magic amulet that gives you +2% chance of winning at cards, you want to make sure you know when to hit on 17 outside of just showing up and expecting get rich.
I am not sure I understand how your astrological method works (I'm only familiar with the more conventional astrology). Are you saying that it's only about 2% more accurate than guessing ? Or is it the case that you cannot answer straightforward questions such as "what will be the price of BTC at noon tomorrow" ? But if so, what *can* you answer ?
I am not a gambler, but it's my understanding that in some games, the house wins based on very narrow probabilities, such that those who can count cards or otherwise favorably shift the winning percentages a mere degree or two can reliably profit over time. In much the same way, financial astrology isn't looking for a single massive completely-certain lottery win, into which you dump your life savings (and I trust everyone here would recognize such rank charlatanry for what it is). Rather, it's meant to be an additional source of information ignored by nearly everyone else; I'm sure you can see the value in having a more complete picture of reality than your competitors (even if the competition is vague "market forces").
Re: BTC price, that's heading in the right direction. Without going into too much detail publicly, and keeping in mind the limitations of horary with respect to personal interest, you'd want to ask whether you, personally, would profit from doing such-and-such with your investment.
Considering the rug-sweeping that occurs in modern biographies of Kepler, Brahe, Cardano, Jean-Baptiste Morin, Jung (et very much cetera), I can't really blame Munroe for missing this one...
It's easy to find which companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars on GPS technology. Like, Qualcomm manufactures the GPS chip used in the iPhone, and they're gigantic. Lift the rug for me; what huge companies are using Gann's astrological techniques as part of their business? It's not as easy to find on Google as GPS was.
C'mon, if you had a reliable method for divining price fluctuations and deceiving your competition, would you publicize it? And not to abstract from fictional examples, but the movie Pi is enough to scare anyone off being indiscreet in such cases.
I remember some sci-fi story where someone gets super-powers and one of the first things they do is claim the Randi Foundation's prize for proving the supernatural.
I'm curious about this project, but took awhile to come up with a good question. Would this work? I play in a band whose gigs have been decimated by the pandemic. Can you predict when we will get to play out again?
Glad I came up with something workable, and that we can run this experiment. Reply here, when the predicted moment arrives (and if this site still is going) we can check in and see if it's accurate. Could you specify your answer publicly here? or do I have to remain "double-blind" so I can't influence the outcome?
OK, now we're on. For those of you keeping score at home, the short answer is 27 time units. Doc Abramelin thinks the time units are more likely months than weeks, but I find both plausible, and would call it a hit if it's 27 weeks. So we'll check back at the end of June 2022, and/or end of March 2024.
1. I thought the Georgism articles were very well written and informative, especially the first one.
2. Going into them I was vaguely familar with the concept, having seen it in some econ undergrad classes briefly and having read the book review. Afterwards, I'm firmly anti-Georgist.
Firstly, as far as I can tell by reading the articles, discussing them in the comments, and being responded to by the author in the comments, it doesn't seem like there's really any answer available for how it could be implemented. At best I got some waffly 'maybe if we phase it in slowly over a century' responses which were unencouraging, but at least the author just left implementing the whole theory as an exercise to the reader. I would be interested in a follow-up to address this, if there is interest.
Secondly, while the author did a reasonable job of arguing his theses, that Land Matters, Land Value Tax can be Effective, and Assessment of Unimproved Land can Work, I never picked up on any moral or ethical argument for why Georgism is good.
I like the ability of people to own their own land, and the American public as a whole seems to agree with me, at least the 64.8% owning their own homes. The Georgist worldview that was laid out appeared to me to be so profit focused and hypercapitalistic, with everybody forced to use their land in a maximally profit-efficient way just to not be evicted, was so disturbing that it made me assess my own opinions and realize I wasn't as much of a capitalist as I thought I was, and certainly not enough to be a Georgist. Implementation, as I mentioned above, also appears more or less impossible or at least incredibly inequitable to current landholders.
As a whole, I am still not convinced that Georgism is a good thing. I can see why it would have made sense a century ago with robber barons, high poverty, and high inequality. At present, though, I still don't see any point to it aside from in theory being a revenue-neutral alternative to income tax which punishes rural and suburban homeowners and rewards urban renters with higher incomes.
Can somebody, in plain English, justify why Georgism is a good thing and something I should want?
The right to own land is not the right to own land; absent the existence of ownership of land, you can do anything you could do once the concept of ownership of land is added. What is changed by the ownership of land is that the ability of anyone except the owner to do those things.
That is, the "right" of land ownership is purely one of exclusion of other people's rights to do things.
Georgism's ethical grounding therefore comes from the idea that this exclusive right, being an infringement on the freedoms of everybody except the owner, is not a valid wellspring of wealth; Georgism grants you the value that you deserve, being the value you create, in the land. It subtracts out the value that you do not deserve, that value which is created entirely by the destruction of the rights of all others; it subtracts out the value of the exclusive right to the land, that exclusivity itself is not profitable, but instead is treated properly as an unfortunate necessity.
And if you think the agreements of ancestors about how land should be allocated somehow justify the current state of affairs, ask what right any generation has ever had any real right to sell, trade, or vote the rights of their children away? If it seems injust to take some aspect of property away from those who now own it, why is it just that every child born has had these right stripped from them already?
Thus, the citizen's dividend, because land ownership is in fact important, and powerful, and useful. And Georgist taxes, because the exclusive right to land is, in addition to all of those things, fundamentally unjust.
In that case I just have fundamental differences with Mr. George. I don't think exclusive ownership of land is unjust. I think that the exclusive right to use land comes from (in America) the State seizing the lands through treaty, purchase or conquest and selling it to its citizens, who sell it between themselves. As for prior generations, their actions in every way directly lead to every aspect of our current society, economy, and wealth distribution, and I don't see why land is anything more than just another asset.
The citizens dividend, or UBI, is an entirely separate policy from LVT and I don't see what it has to do with the rest of Georgism (which seems to really be the primary focus of Georgism) outside of being a general suggestion for how to spend tax revenue to fight inequality. Given that we could just implement UBI under any tax regime, including the current one, I don't think that the merits of UBI as a spending strategy in any way support or relate to LVT as a revenue strategy. I'm fine with revising to say that I disagree with just the land part of Georgism, though that does seem to be much of the point of it.
What is your ethical theory of property? Is it the labor theory of property? If so, why does one's exclusive rights extend to property with which one has mixed no labor?
And if the exclusive right to land comes ultimately from the state, then Georgism needs no moral justification - it cannot be just or unjust, it can only be part of the state schema or not. That is, in the sense in which ownership of property is just historical-political fact rather than moral fact, a vote to enact Georgism is equally just historical-political action, and has no bearing on morality at all.
So if ownership of property in this sense isn't unjust, applying Georgism is equally not-unjust; it's just another treaty/purchase/conquest/sale. Remember that "The population of the world less one" didn't agree to the sale of their rights, nor did any of their descendants.
The government is not an entity separate from the people. If the people reject a particular mode of taxes, for instance an LVT, then regardless of whether they consider it unjust or not, it doesn't get implemented. I think we all agree that Georgism is not generally popular now. In order for it to gain popularity, I think you will need a better slogan than "Georgism - It's equally not-unjust!" A positive ethical argument would be a big step that way, but you will run right into the ~65% of Americans who own their home. Disrupting 65% of a population just doesn't seem very useful or practical in any system. Georgists seem entirely fixated on the people who live in growing urban areas, who far more often rent, at the expense of a large majority of other people.
Currently, if you have a $300,000 house built on land worth $100,000, this is taxed the same as a $100,000 house built on land worth $300,000. Relative to Georgist taxes, the current property tax scheme in fact rewards people who live in growing urban areas, and penalizes rural and suburban lots.
The current tax scheme is the disruptive one, it's just we don't connect intrusive and right-violating permitting processes intended to let a city know when to raise assessed values of individual properties, and punish those who try to avoid such assessments, to extract additional property taxes to the property tax scheme we live under.
Like, when a home owner is forced to destroy unpermitted work (and pay for the demolition, in addition to their own costs in doing the work in the first place), is that really about safety, or punishing a tax-avoidance strategy?
Georgism won't destroy home ownership. Judging by the trends I've personally observed, it's possibly the only way to save it.
I have no issue switching property taxes from taxing the buildings to taxing the land, while keeping revenues the same. I think that's a fine change. Please don't pretend that is the end of Georgism. Without significantly higher tax *rates* an LVT achieves none of the envisioned systematic goals of Georgism. I'm fine with that, but I feel like your response is a rhetorical sleight of hand trying to imply otherwise.
Most of the things I own are things with which I've mixed no labor; I own them because I've paid for them. I think the problem most of us have with Georgism, on a moral level, is its insistence on treating something *we've paid for* as if it were some sort of windfall.
The labor theory of property covers things you've purchased. Somebody else mixed labor with them, you traded your own labor, or things you mixed with your labor, for them; it's not -your- labor, but you exchanged something like an equivalent amount of labor (adjusting for the value of said labor) for them.
An increase in land value isn't something you paid for. You buy a piece of property in 1967; you paid for the property as it existed in 1967. Somebody builds a factory down the road, and your property triples in value, as suddenly everybody wants to live there; you didn't pay for that.
That's a basic kind of argument, but it doesn't quite get into it.
Elsewhere, I use the example of a pair of islands. You live on Rich Island, and your ancestors bought Poor Island; the ownership is now held by a corporation which you own shares in. Let's even suppose you bought those shares.
On Poor Island, everybody has to pay rent, because their ancestors sold the island; everybody there is very poor, and barely makes enough to get by, and certainly not enough, after they pay rent, to improve things.
Now, you can say you're entitled to your portion of the rent, because you bought those shares in the corporation that collectively owns Poor Island. However, the inhabitants of Poor Island didn't sell you anything, and yet they're the ones whose livelihoods you own.
Okay, their ancestors sold it - but did they have any right to sell their descendants' livelihood in this fashion?
I'm analogizing to slavery here, in case that isn't clear, and to be clear, the fact that a slave owner has paid for a slave does not, in fact, represent a moral claim.
The mere act of paying for something is not, in and of itself, sufficient justification for ownership; it must be something that can be morally owned. There is good moral theory for why you can own a car, why you can own a computer, why you can own your house.
The land that your house sits on doesn't have good moral theory for ownership, and as I hope the island example might demonstrate, there are actually some pretty good reasons to be suspicious of the moral validity of the ownership of land; in our modern society, we have a chain of transactions obscuring the origins of that ownership, but it ultimately comes down to "Somebody else said that other people can't use this land anymore", without any compensation or consent from the people thus deprived, including in particular those in the future.
But the thing is, ownership of land is, in fact, pretty damned important. Without it, society doesn't function.
Georgism is an attempt to square the moral issues of land ownership with the practical necessity of the same; there still isn't consent, but it does its best to at least compensate those thus deprived.
You're clearly alert to the danger of the Georgist critique devolving into a fully general argument against property-- but I don't think you've succeeded so far in averting it. The example of Poor Island doesn't satisfy, because it's not clear why they should be poor simply because they've traded one thing of value for another. (There are plenty of businesses making good profits while operating out of leased quarters.) I suppose if they spent the proceeds of the land sale on a big party-- but they didn't have to do that. How does this differ from the case where they sell their steel mill instead of their land, and then blow all the money?
To the extent that the increase in the value of my land since I bought it was foreseeable, I certainly did pay for it; it's not the sort of thing a seller would throw in as a freebie. A surprise increase would be a stroke of luck, though no different in principle from, say, buying Pfizer stock just before they discover Viagra. I can see where a general claim of justice could lie against someone who first appropriates a piece of land from nature, but that's almost never going to be the present owner.
If the people of Rich Island are really savvy, they'll sell Poor Island back to the inhabitants along with their own island-- and then impose a LVT on them.
I think Thegnskald made an exceptionally clear case but let me add a couple of things and respond to your specific questions.
> The Georgist worldview that was laid out appeared to me to be so profit focused and hypercapitalistic, with everybody forced to use their land in a maximally profit-efficient way just to not be evicted
This is literally what being part of the renting class is like except with your entire life. If you don't produce enough value from your labor you are kicked out of the house you rent and onto the street. If it sounds horrible to wealthy capitalists who inherited a lot of property-- they can take solace in that it's the faintest shadow of a fraction of what their tenants have to deal with.
Let me try to give you another "moral picture" of where Georgism comes from. One of the principle questions of Georgism is, "Who deserves to benefit from improving society?"
If you rent a loft and convert it to an art gallery in my spare time and fill it with beautiful things, here is what happens. You've improved the neighborhood, but the (vast?) majority of the value I've created is collected by the land-owners. They will raise the rent on the art gallery until you can no longer afford to do it. You are literally being punished for creating value.
This isn't some trivial hypothetical. If you're a certain age, you have lived through the mass erosion of public spaces.
There are a lot of moral values- I'd say the strongest one for Georgism is "fairness". It seems "unfair" that someone who wants to become a professional should have the vast majority of their earnings taken from them in the form of rent, healthcare, taxes, and education.
A lot of this is going to come down to whether you see the individual or society first, how much you value the present versus the past, how much you care about efficiency, just a lot of stuff. I can see someone who is more religious being furious with Georgism's ultra-presentism. Religious institutions are thousands of years old. Haven't they earned a *little* goodwill in that time?
Some day I'd like to own my own property. I'm well on track to doing so and don't want land ownership to be abolished just because I don't currently participate in it.
I've had good experiences with my landlords and know that if I run on hard times I have tenant protections and can always downgrade if need be. I absolutely do not trust the government to do a better job at landlording than private industry.
Further you seem focused with owning the rich capitalists, but the truly rich own stocks and other securities in addition to land, while the majority of American households own their own home and it's often a significant portion of net worth.
That's all fine. I'm not (and Georgism certainly isn't) concerned with "owning rich capitalists." It has to do with fairness and incentives.
I didn't focus on this because Thegnskald's comment already covered it. It has to do with how people obtain their wealth. If you invent something, build something, or whatever, Georgism wants you to get the proceeds for that innovation. And generally that kind of work *enriches the world*.
If you obtained your wealth from basically *stopping everyone else from obtaining opportunity*, then Georgism wants that money back.
Georgism is not about abolishing land ownership. It is, in fact, a major advancement in ownership rights over the existing property tax schema.
If you own land in the current schema, you are taxed on the value. If you improve the land - say, by planting trees, or building a house, or building a shopping mall, or building a skyscraper - you are then taxed on the value of the improvements.
So, insofar as Georgism taxing you for the land says "You don't own this", the current tax scheme is saying, about every improvement to the property, "You don't own this either." So insofar as you think taxing the land is saying you don't own it, Georgism is actually granting you ownership over at least the improvements to the land, which is more than you currently own, under this perspective.
Also, as a homeowner, I'd love it if housing prices collapse. That would mean I could sell my current home (at a loss), and buy a nicer home (much cheaper), and end up better off than I am right now.
The idea that perpetually increasing housing prices is good is, frankly, insane, and born of the idea of housing as investment, as opposed to housing as a place to live; it's antithetical to home ownership, and turns us into a nation of renters.
The current tax scheme has fairly low rates, I don't think all taxes mean 'you don't own this', but an 100% tax rate does.
I don't see why perpetually increasing housing prices are bad. Further, as I've said repeatedly, we are not in fact a nation of renters and the majority of households do not rent. Under Georgism, however, it seems like the goal is for all of us to have to rent our land from the state at market rates (which current property taxes don't come close to).
That's an excellent point, because improving your tented home is not something renters do, except trivially. Because if they get evicted, they will lose their improvements, an investment in term of time and money... At least those they can not move.
Sale reason building on rented land is so uncommon. It also happen, but comes with securities (like 99y rents) or often ends badly.
so if you accept Georgism means renting land from the government (which i did, thanks to the great articles), why would you build on this land? Private builder should be a minority under Georgism, while mobile home, renting state homes and maybe big Corp homes (big corps will have a bargaining power with gouvernement that no individual will have. So they may trust the rent being stable and factor everything into a business plan)... Plus they will control multiple adjacent pacels so also control cross effects that change the lvt...
My impression is that Georgism was a socialist reaction to land Barrons, probably justified at some time and places... But in places without land barrons, it become a push to a rent only future that is ongoing on multiple fronts. Private property being something for states and big corps, not people. I oppose this on moral principle, as anti natural, so I oppose Georgism now that the articles (and discussion) helped me to understand what it means. Certainly if applied on small parcels for individual home. BTW, owning land seems moral to me, like all private property. It's basic security against confiscation, and the only way i see apart children to prepare the future (aka invest). I feel opposition to land being privately owned would be natural in two cases: a general opposition to private property (communism) or being a nomad.
BTW, property taxes, especially those on your own house, always made me angry, even before i bought my home. They break the feeling you own the place you live in, part of the drive toward having your home instead of renting it. It's mostly an illusion, but I feel it's a powerful natural feeling. Maybe also why many people are into self home improvements, if they have the capacity for it.
you will see on the comment many critics of Georgism are "traditional" home owners
>That's an excellent point, because improving your tented home is not something renters do, except trivially. Because if they get evicted, they will lose their improvements, an investment in term of time and money... At least those they can not move.
>Sale reason building on rented land is so uncommon. It also happen, but comes with securities (like 99y rents) or often ends badly.
>so if you accept Georgism means renting land from the government (which i did, thanks to the great articles), why would you build on this land?
The difference between a renter in a privately-owned building and an owner-occupier under LVT is that the renter can't sell the improvement; it only profits the landlord (including via the landlord potentially raising the renter's own rent!). Under LVT improvements are *not* taxed, which means the sale value of real estate with improvements on it does not collapse to 0 but merely to the value of the improvements in a vacuum. This means that, assuming your improvements add more value to the property than it cost you to build them, you can profit by improving a property and selling it, or by improving a property and then renting it out for more money as landlords currently do.
>Plus they will control multiple adjacent pacels so also control cross effects that change the lvt...
This can't disincentivise land development below the incentive individual owner-occupiers would have (unless LVT exceeds 100%). It removes the extra incentive for a capitalist of speculating on land and then developing other nearby land, but that's all.
Week in theory yes, and that's also the case in current regime where you build your home on rented land. In principle you can sell it, and often indeed can, but still peuple are reluctant to do it... Because the value of the home itself will tremendously depend on the rent the land it's built on. A d when building your home, you don't control the rent. This situation require a huge trust in the landlord not to abuse his position for you too stay building, something that happen but is extremely uncommon. Is my local governement trustful enough to build on a land i rent from it? In my case, no. And i live in western Europe...
Yes improvements do wind up raising the tax, because the value of the land is not just "how much is this dirt worth," it's also "what is the value of being in this particular location, where this dirt is." The more nice things around the dirt, the more valuable having that particular patch of dirt, as opposed to some other dirt somewhere else, is. Also, if the improvement is major (i.e., finding a way to put 2n lovely apartments on the plot instead of n crappy apartments), suddenly everyone else around the plot has a new "highest and best use" which they must immediately conform to or else get taxed out the wazoo.
That sounds like an argument against land ownership in general, but Georgism (by my limited understanding) seem to advocate for the centralization of land ownership into the hands of one (or a few) organizations.
I don't think ownership of land or other natural resources in their unaltered state is legitimate, but if it's to exist, I would much rather have it distributed among may different owners than to have it centralized to a single owner (e.g. a state) that can charge everyone rent. I don't see why a state would have any more moral right to own land.
To me, a better solution would be to only recognize ownership in that which is the product of somebody's labor. That would naturally mean that if you put a house on a piece of land, a satellite in an orbital position, or generate radio waves at a particular wavelength, you are depriving others of simultaneously doing the same and thereby of the use of something that you don't own and that they could have used if it was not for your activities, but the same is true if you e.g. stand in particular place. I think that's just a fact of nature and doesn't require a centrally planned and imposed solution, which is how I (again, in my limited understanding) view Georgism.
You refer to the labor theory of property; Georgism also is based on the labor theory of property, but where the theory generally concerns itself with the portion of the land with which labor was mixed, Georgism asks after all the rest of the land. This is why it is critical to Georgism that it is -land- that is taxed, and not improvements.
Compare the existing land tax schemes, in which a skyscraper is taxed for the value of the skyscraper and the land, versus Georgism, where the value of the skyscraper is not taxed, but the land underneath it is, and ask which is more just; is it more just to tax people based on what the create and produce, or is it more just to tax for the opportunity costs thus imposed on everybody else?
The Citizen's Dividend exists because the state does -not- own the land, and is acting only as an imperfect proxy for society as a whole, who are compensated, not as owners of the land, but for the loss of their natural rights to do something with the land other than what is being done with it.
This has seduced me before I read the comments and thought more. But the big question Georgidt have to answer : if you do not own the land itself (and i realized that is really what Georgism means with the LVT), how can you own non - movable things you build on this land. My current opinion is that you can't. Very few people currently build on rented land (rented to private owner or the state), so apparently i am not alone in thinking that...
If there is one addition old like to see to the great serie of articles it's this: how can you own your home if you don't own the land it's built on, and can not move it? Owning the home meaning it's value is not subject to the whim of the land owner?
I think the concept of time value of money and discounting would apply here
If I’m being honest, I don’t really understand the difference.
It's the uncertainty of the bird in the bush. There is no way to guarantee that you'll get 10 utility in 2022, so you would probably want at least a 90% chance at 11 utility in order to balance out 10 utility now.
And boom, there you have interest rates i.e. time preference.
If I'm risk averse, that means a loss has a greater affect on my total utility than a gain would.
On risk aversion, you might look at Lara Buchak's book "Risk and Rationality" (https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672165.001.0001/acprof-9780199672165). Fundamentally, we care about *actual* utility, and she argues that maximizing *expected* utility is just one way of working to maximize actual utility. But maximizing any of the quantities she calls "risk-weighted expected utility", using a different risk-weighting function than the neutral one, is another way of working to maximize actual utility. If we knew in advance what act would maximize actual utility, then every risk-weighted expected utility would coincide, but as long as there is uncertainty, they can differ.
Risk-neutrality is the only risk-weighting that always treats a second choice of bets that are probabilistically independent from and identically distributed to a prior choice of bets in exactly the same way as it treats the first choice. Risk-neutrality is also the only risk-weighting that makes a choice at a time the same way that it makes the choice about which decision to pre-commit to at an earlier time. But she argues that neither of these concepts is essential to doing what we can to make the actual outcome better. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but her concept of risk-weighting is more plausible to me than any other I've encountered.
I haven't thought as much about time preference, but I think there's lots of formal reasons to treat ourselves at different times the same we we treat other people at the same time, and treat ourself in the future at a non-actual but possible outcome the same way we treat another person at the same time in the actual outcome. Whether we treat different people identically, or treat them incomparably, or treat each person more or less significantly to the same degree depending on how badly or well off they are, is not necessarily set by that. But time preference, risk aversion, and inequality aversion, seem to me like they should stand or fall together.
I don't know if she says a lot about how to compare risk-weighting methods. I think she treats them the same way many Bayesians treat priors, but I don't know if she's committed to either an objective or subjective source for them. I believe Simon Blessenohl has an interesting recent paper on the question of how to aggregate utility between people with different risk weighting functions.
This argument holds for pure utility, but not for most things that can actually be measured. Increasing amounts of money gives diminishing returns in utility for most people. This makes it so someone who is risk neutral with utility will be risk averse for money.
Is there evidence that people are risk averse with utility, and not something like money?
The Allais paradox is a classic example.
There's a 100 ticket lottery. You can choose between getting either (A) a big prize (say, $5 million) on tickets 1-9, or (B) a smaller prize (say, $1 million) on tickets 1-10. Most people pick (A) over (B). You can choose between getting either (C) the big prize on tickets 1-9, nothing on ticket 10, and the small prize on tickets 11-100 or (D) the small prize regardless of what ticket comes up. Most people pick (D) over (C).
If we take the probabilities as granted, and use classical expected value, there is no way of assigning utilities to the big prize, small prize, and nothing that rationalizes *both* choosing A over B and D over C. However, various theories of risk aversion (where outcomes are weighted not directly proportionally to their probability, but where the values of the worst outcomes are weighted more and the best outcomes less) can rationalize these preferences. These theories are structurally identical to social choice theories that are inequality averse, where (for example) the *n*th best off person has their utility multiplied by *n* when summing to get the total social utility.
> Most people pick (D) over (C).
I would select D over C even if expected value would be the same - as this way cheating is harder.
With (D) not getting prize means that I was lied to. With (C) it either means that I honestly lost or that I was lied to.
This is very useful.
> classical expected value
It ignores that in actual world filtering out cheaters and liars is important and exact expected value is not known.
This would be a way to explain away the risk aversion by saying it's not risk aversion at all, and instead just mis-described probabilities. John Quiggin has a 1982 paper where he gives a formal system that is formally identical to Lara Buchak's later risk averse system, except he interprets it as people being "pessimistic", so that they think of the worse outcomes as being more subjectively probable than they objectively are, while she interprets it as true risk aversion, with people putting more weight on worse outcomes than their subjective probability. It's very hard to separate these two phenomena, either empirically or even theoretically.
So I definitely interpret utility as encoding the risk aversion and then utilitarianism being risk neutral with respect to utility.
To expand that thought - I get less utility from a 50:50 shot at $100k than I do a 100% chance at $50k because my utility gain from $100k is less than twice my utility gain from $50k. This is because I'd spend the first $50k on higher priority items than the subsequent $50k so risking the first $50k to gain the second $50k isn't worth it, and therefore I'm risk averse.
If we assume that my utility from $33k is equivalent to a 50% chance of $100k then I should be risk neutral between those two options (because the utility is the same) but the way my utility is calculated means I'm risk adverse in terms of dollars.
The exception I've seen to this argument is when it comes to altruism. If you assign value to other people's welfare then it's not obvious that you should be risk adverse in any metric - a 10% chance of saving 10 lives really is as good as a 100% chance of saving 1 life and therefore a 50% chance of donating $100k to charity really is as good as donating $50k to charity, assuming the charity's funding needs are linear over that amount of money.
This is standardly what economists say, but as the economist Maurice Allais pointed out, there are some decisions people make that seem to come out of genuine risk aversion, but that can't be accounted for by diminishing marginal utility. (I mentioned the case in the reply to Brian, above.)
Diminishing marginal utility can *look* like risk aversion when you're just comparing two-outcome gambles. But the two can be distinguished with particular gambles.
So that's a really interesting point and it definitely makes me wonder if there's any argument for anyone being "risk averse" in the way described in your example. Because yeah, I'd agree that utilitarians shouldn't do that, but should anyone? I'm admittedly less familiar with deontological ethics or virtue ethics so maybe utilitarians really are being unusually hypocritical in being risk averse in the way you described!
My thought on this is that there's not a strong argument *for* being risk averse, but I think there's also not an especially strong argument *against* being risk averse in this way either. (The same points apply to attitudes that are risk "seeking" rather than averse.)
People sometimes use the word "utilitarian" to refer to any sort of consequentialist who thinks that what makes policies right or wrong is the aggregate of their effects on all the people. But they also sometimes use "utilitarian" more specifically for the view that each person is treated equally, and contrast it with "prioritarians" or "egalitarians" who think that the interests of those less well off should be counted more. (I always forget which is which, but one says that interests matter more depending on objectively low quality of life, while the other says that interests matter more depending on relatively low quality of life. But both can be phrased carefully in ways that avoid any blatant leveling-down objections and the like.)
I think there are some formal reasons why prioritarian or egalitarian aggregation might go naturally with a risk-averse approach to uncertainty, while utilitarian aggregation goes naturally with a risk-neutral approach to uncertainty.
One other formal fact is that on Buchak's theory of risk sensitivity, it turns out that someone who currently holds a portfolio of risky gambles, and is deciding whether or not to accept an additional gamble whose risk is uncorrelated with the ones they hold, will end up deciding almost identically regardless of whether they are risk neutral or risk sensitive. Since I think her account is the best account of risk sensitivity, this might end up largely neutralizing concerns about it, but not fully.
I think that people’s preferences tend to discount into the future, so any sort of preference utilitarianism would immediately get future discounting built in
I also think that without some sort of convergent series acting as your discount you risk running into problems with math and infinity
John Quiggin just presented an interesting paper at a conference last week where he pointed out that although individuals discount their own future preferences, the future people won't discount their preferences, and thus if we take all people (past, present, and future) equally into account, then we should discount much less than current people are inclined to (and perhaps not at all, if we think that each moment of time contains approximately the same distribution of discounted end-of-life stages and non-discounted early-life stages).
And regarding your second comment, I have a recent paper where I argue that we can get around some of those problems with infinity even without discounting. (https://academic.oup.com/aristotelian/article-abstract/121/3/299/6367834?redirectedFrom=fulltext) Although there is no such thing as the sum of utilities with an infinite population, we can still say that one overall situation is better than another if everyone is better off in the one than the other; we can still say that certain trade-offs either among sets of individuals or among worlds of equal probability should be treated as invariances; and the result we get is a consistent partial ordering of options that yields plausible results in many cases (though it does say that at least some options are neither better nor worse nor equal to certain others).
One argument against (I actually think there are several), but sticking to one:
Interpersonal comparisons of utility are, to say the least, madly controversial. There's no widely accepted way to compare what 10 utils "for you" means against 10 utils to me. (And, yes, this can be seen as a problem for utilarianism). We are on much firmer ground trying to set a meaningful utility scale for a single cohesive rational agent.
The relevance to your question is: the me in 2022 is someone different from the me here now. Utils may not be directly comparable (there's no theory as to what each "10" means here any more as there is to comparing my utility vs yours). And even if we could just pretend that this problem was solved, the truth is that I just don't care about the so-called me in 2022 quite as much as the real "now" me. If it had to be you or I with the 10 utils, I'd prefer me, and comparing me or this future person with the same name is an attenuated version of that comparison.
Hence (well one reason for) discounting and time preference.
> So, 10 utility right now is equal to 10 utility in 2022. Are there any arguments against this?
Not at all. First of all I may die before 2022.
My values may change, actual utility may change, whoever was backing it may withdraw or bankrupt. There is also chance that it may result in utility increase, but overall certain 10 utility now seems clearly preferable over delayed 10 utility.
Also, 10 utility now in many cases will allow me to produce more utility or better judge further utility or benefit in other way increasing total utility over my lifetime.
So you're correct, but, implementing this in practice often looks like being risk averse and having time preferences.
Because, for instance, it's usually worse in terms of utility to lose $1000 than to gain $1000 (marginal utility of money decreases with quantity, etc) and its usually better for a good thing to happen now than later (you will change over time and might enjoy the same thing less in the future, you will have longer to enjoy the memory and less time to suffer from desire for it, you may be able to leverage it into other good things, etc.)
A lot of the studies that initially found things like risk aversion and time discounting used what I think to be pretty naive definitions of utility (like, $1=1 util, period), and I think people are a lot more rational than those studies suggest if you think about utility functions in more depth. Yes, rationalists should not be biased in terms of risk aversion and time discounting, however, they will still rationally show the preferences those naive studies found, maybe to a lesser degree than others.or maybe not.
Not sure if promotion is allowed here but super interested what people think of this article: https://atis.substack.com/p/on-income-and-happiness, think it’s in the style of an SSC post, would love some feedback.
Nice, succint, survey and analysis of the issue! I'd love to have an entire book's worth of these for commonly cited things I think I know because I heard them on the internet once
Thanks!
I found it very interesting, a good clarification on a messy subject!
Very good essay.
There should be more than one study of such an important subject.
I also wonder about the effects of relative income. The classic "we didn't know we were poor" vs. "when you make your first million, you find out how many people have two million".
The top graph is great, took me a bit to figure out the two x axes. Don't want to discourage you, but I dont feel like your commentary added much, idle statistical whinging is lazy even when scott does it. Id be much more interested in personal experience, trying to tie in a related concept, or diving into one of those interesting looking thresholds (positive affect? Stress reaches a mininum at 80k?!)
Some good points, but you didn't recognize the biggest flaw in the Kahnemann paper. There's a ceiling effect in their well-being measure, so the function HAS to level off. But of course their need not be a ceiling on well-being, e.g. I have never known the happiness that apparently comes from having a car whose doors go "like this" (sorry).
Jebb, Tay, Diener, & Oishi (2018) suffers from the same problem, but still good to know.
Killingsworth 2021 addresses the ceiling effect problem and finds no levelling of on the log scale. I can send you my seminar slides that discuss this and the logging question and the causality question with respect to the question of the anticipated happiness effects of redistribution. I'll message you on Twitter.
Are your slides available somewhere? I would love to see them.
Sorry, no, and some of them are in German.. There is a nice treatment in a footnote of the first chapter in Harden's book The Genetic Lottery, but of course happiness economics is no small literature. And I can recommend reading the Killingsworth paper. Regrettably, neither cites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oV4IVy8tvE
Thank you, I will check the Killingsworth paper. I've read quite a few studies using happiness measures, but I hadn't realized this ceiling problem at all, which seems obvious in retrospect...- and the clip is wonderful indeed!
I don't know where I read this, but it has sort of stuck with me that happiness/life-satisfaction goes up until a net worth of $4 million. If your net worth is above $4 million, it goes down, presumably because you spend a lot of time worrying about protecting your money, what to do with it, how to pass it on after you die, and so on. Of course, this figure should be adjusted for inflation.
I dub this the "Scrooge McDuck" effect
I'm starting the "by-George Society" for those who wish Georgism were true. "We're not with George, but we're by him."
NICE
The first members of the by-George Society were Anna George de Mille and Henry George Jr.
I'm starting the "bye-George society" for people who were initially enamored with Georgism but have grown disillusioned, the "bi-George society" for greater representation of sexual minorities in debates about land taxes, and the "buy-George society" for strawman libertarians who take the idea of freedom of contract way too far.
Can I join all three societies?
That would be the tri-George bundle.
To sign up for it, you have to go to their secret headquarters by the three-Georges dam.
Damming Gorge I and Gorge II made some sense, but Gorge III was just crazy.
The strawman libertarians have all gone off to colonize other planets, buy Jove.
If they are by Jove, then they would be moons, right?
The cat link is confusing. Is the old-timey image on that page supposed to be the landscape painting in question? If so, I have to confess that I can't see the cat either. If not, maybe they should fix that, it's horribly misleading if not.
The can is highlighted in yellow when you hover your cursor over it on the landscape painting.
Ah. I had Noscript on, of course, not that it would've occurred to me to hover over the top third of the image in the first place... (I thought the deformed little critters on the ground were the cats. They look more like cats than many cats I've seen in, say, medieval artwork.)
They really do! I initially thought they were the cats too. I could probably have stared at the painting forever without seeing the cat, but I see it clearly after having seen it highlighted, which is of course what they were going for (even if it may not be the original painting). I wonder if I will see Georgism like that after I have finally read up on it. It's hard to imagine, but who knows?
I definitely thought that was a bear.
You know, we have the same problem with the logo for the Minnesota NHL team, The Wild. What is that critter:
http://www.stickpng.com/img/sports/ice-hockey/national-hockey-league/minnesota-wild-official-logo
The cat is there, but it's not the case that "the picture is all cat", as advertised. So I'm guessing it's not the same landscape painting.
Yeah I think the original picture from the story has been lost. Fun fact I had no clue what this phrase meant until like a month ago
What happened to the shill threads? There haven't been ones since October, or have they been paying-subscribers only?
Send me $10 and I'll tell you.....
LOL
We're about due another one, there hasn't been one that's subscriber-only.
Well, there was, but it was an accident.
I'm interested in building a list of learning resources, ideally free, for something like a "learn by doing" approach to math and statistics. (I have in mind primarily programming as "doing" but also opened to eg. games, spreadsheets, etc).
For example these are great and fit what I have in mind:
- [Think Stats](http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats2/index.html)
- [Think Bayes](http://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/)
- [Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View](http://stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/ADAfaEPoV/)
- [Computer Age Statistical Inference](https://hastie.su.domains/CASI/)
...Green Tea Press in particular has the philosophy of "if you can program you can learn the discrete version of many concepts, then the continuous version", which is most in line with what I have in mind.
I have this idea that very practical math and stats thinking can be taught to a very wide range of on people if we used discretization to teach the basics first, then followed it with analytics optionally.
I'd love to find more resources like these, if you know of any, please share!
Yeah maybe I'm reflecting my warm feeling from "think bayes" back onto "think stats," will go back and reconsider it with that in mind.
Thanks for the "Stats in Plain English" recommendation!
I'm a traditional horary astrologer and I'd like to practice my art: I invite anyone who would care to have a query answered through the toolkit of astrological divination to drop me a line at FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. (The email address is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, of course materialists and even--dare I dream?--atheists are quite welcome.) I look forward to hearing from you!
If this is for serious, I'll bet you $50 that you can't guess my birthdate through astrological methods after asking me twenty questions. (If astrology makes predictions about the future, you could make the predictions, wait for the answers, and then extract the birth date which would make those predictions true.)
I see that Horary astrology (https://wikiless.org/wiki/Horary_astrology?lang=en) is different, but one should still be able to devise a method to falsify it, e.g., by going toe to toe with Metaculus questions.
I also will offer that bet.
I am certainly willing to wager money on event-based challenges, though, as I wrote above, it might take a few tries to land on a situation where you predict X with high confidence and horary predicts Y with high confidence.
I mean, if you try long enough, discarding any potential misses, eventually you're bound to land a hit just by chance.
I'll offer the $50 bet, but only if you commit to a prediction ahead of time. For example, you could predict what I will have for lunch on Friday, then encrypt the prediction and send it to me. On Friday, I have lunch, then you send me the decryption key. If had a Denver omelette, and the prediction says "Denver omelette", then you win. If the prediction says "anything but ostrich eggs", then you still don't win, because predictions have to be specific and non-obvious.
Let's say you interview for a job and assign 75% confidence you'll get an offer; if the astrology says yes, you'll get the offer, that would be a prediction we'd need to discard in this hypothetical proving attempt. By "try a few times", I mean myself and whoever else would need to keep going until we hit on a circumstance where our respective high-confidence predictions disagree with each other.
As regards lunch, I'm afraid your entrée choice is too obscure for even astrology to ascertain. Do keep in mind we're working with seven planets, twelve signs, and five aspects; while the art contains a great deal of subtlety, astrology is not mechanistic to the extent that we can pull the level and get a result. Some of the biggest limitations in horary are situations involving things we don't care about or in which we have no personal stake (same thing as in re: your dice example).
Fair enough, but as I said in my other comment, vague predictions without actionable results or specific timeframes are not terribly interesting -- anyone can make them, you don't need astrology for that. So, what can horary astrology do that I, as a layman, cannot ?
You've actually hit pretty close to a method from natal astrology called "rectification", where true birth time is ascertained by examining life events from a number of progressed charts; to put it mildly, this is a lot of work. A better use of horary would be if you have high confidence about some upcoming event(s), I'd be willing to delineate charts for such questions as a test (though this might take a few tries if e.g. the horary agrees with your assessment).
I am a gamer, so I have a lot of dice in my house. If I rolled 10 differently-colored dice, could you predict which color die would show which number ?
Surely you must have realized that even with just binary-valued answers, 20 questions is enough to identify an object in a search space of 2^20 possibilities, which covers over 2 millennia of dates. Are you imposing other stipulations, such as none of the questions being allowed to be directly about your birthdate?
I'm guessing questions like "were you born in the first six months of the year" don't count as guessing a birthdate through astrological methods, so that would not technically win the bet.
If one is allowed to do a simple bisection search on the calendar, your birthdate can be found in less than 9 yes/no questions, since log_2(365) ~ 8.5
This seems fun. But it should be public, right? Like, let's test this?
With the caveat that world events are beyond my capacity at the moment (that would be mundane astrology, which takes pride of place above elections, horary, and natal as the most difficult and complex form of astrology), I'm perfectly willing to use horary out in public. Most people don't ask questions they'd be comfortable sharing over the open internet, of course, which is why astrologer-client privilege is a thing.
Can you help us out with some possible examples?
Most horaries I have seen are aimed at events ("will this thing happen in the next three months?"), timing ("when will the package arrive?"), choice ("should I take this offer or stay at my current job?"), or analysis ("how does this person view our partnership?"). Any binary question is generally better suited to outright true/false judgment (wrt astrology itself) than others.
OK. What about if/when someone will get COVID? I'd be happy to be predicted on that. If you predict a date I can commit to getting tested then.
Sure. I'd ask for an email just so we don't clutter the thread working out the specific query and my delineation, but plague is a classic topic.
If anyone is reading this, I decided this was closer to divination/magic than I was comfortable being directly involved in, but I hope someone else tries it out.
How is it like magic? I might be willing to pick up the torch of
"When will souleater get covid"
I'm not trying to be cagey, but I'm not sure I should say? Definitely get in touch with him -- I think my issues with this are probably not going to be anyone else's issues.
Ditto on the COVID prediction
I suggest that you avoid anything that might be deemed to be investment advice.
An excellent point. It's a recurring fantasy of mine to one day meet and impress a real market devotee; he'd ask for a divination out of amused curiosity at first, but after a number of accurate and insightful prognostications, we'd begin working on market prediction via financial astrology. A guy can dream...
Why don't you just get rich yourself? A very small amount can grow very quickly if you have a way of accurately predicting future events.
It's a long-term goal. Trouble is I am entirely ignorant re: the market, and figure it would take some time before I know enough not to make novice-level errors. It is like if you have a magic amulet that gives you +2% chance of winning at cards, you want to make sure you know when to hit on 17 outside of just showing up and expecting get rich.
I am not sure I understand how your astrological method works (I'm only familiar with the more conventional astrology). Are you saying that it's only about 2% more accurate than guessing ? Or is it the case that you cannot answer straightforward questions such as "what will be the price of BTC at noon tomorrow" ? But if so, what *can* you answer ?
I am not a gambler, but it's my understanding that in some games, the house wins based on very narrow probabilities, such that those who can count cards or otherwise favorably shift the winning percentages a mere degree or two can reliably profit over time. In much the same way, financial astrology isn't looking for a single massive completely-certain lottery win, into which you dump your life savings (and I trust everyone here would recognize such rank charlatanry for what it is). Rather, it's meant to be an additional source of information ignored by nearly everyone else; I'm sure you can see the value in having a more complete picture of reality than your competitors (even if the competition is vague "market forces").
Re: BTC price, that's heading in the right direction. Without going into too much detail publicly, and keeping in mind the limitations of horary with respect to personal interest, you'd want to ask whether you, personally, would profit from doing such-and-such with your investment.
Came here to link this:
https://xkcd.com/808/
and comment that wouldn't it be fun if this is the thread that ends up putting one more checkmark in that right-most column?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Delbert_Gann
Considering the rug-sweeping that occurs in modern biographies of Kepler, Brahe, Cardano, Jean-Baptiste Morin, Jung (et very much cetera), I can't really blame Munroe for missing this one...
It's easy to find which companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars on GPS technology. Like, Qualcomm manufactures the GPS chip used in the iPhone, and they're gigantic. Lift the rug for me; what huge companies are using Gann's astrological techniques as part of their business? It's not as easy to find on Google as GPS was.
C'mon, if you had a reliable method for divining price fluctuations and deceiving your competition, would you publicize it? And not to abstract from fictional examples, but the movie Pi is enough to scare anyone off being indiscreet in such cases.
I remember some sci-fi story where someone gets super-powers and one of the first things they do is claim the Randi Foundation's prize for proving the supernatural.
There is a decent market for homeopathic products in many countries.
You can also go to prison for doing so in many countries; in the US, it's often called "practicing medicine without a license".
I'm curious about this project, but took awhile to come up with a good question. Would this work? I play in a band whose gigs have been decimated by the pandemic. Can you predict when we will get to play out again?
Sure. Would you like the reply here (in which case I'll have to pastebin it) or via email?
Glad I came up with something workable, and that we can run this experiment. Reply here, when the predicted moment arrives (and if this site still is going) we can check in and see if it's accurate. Could you specify your answer publicly here? or do I have to remain "double-blind" so I can't influence the outcome?
https://pastebin.com/raw/PXp5DpSy
I hope this helps.
OK, now we're on. For those of you keeping score at home, the short answer is 27 time units. Doc Abramelin thinks the time units are more likely months than weeks, but I find both plausible, and would call it a hit if it's 27 weeks. So we'll check back at the end of June 2022, and/or end of March 2024.
1. I thought the Georgism articles were very well written and informative, especially the first one.
2. Going into them I was vaguely familar with the concept, having seen it in some econ undergrad classes briefly and having read the book review. Afterwards, I'm firmly anti-Georgist.
Firstly, as far as I can tell by reading the articles, discussing them in the comments, and being responded to by the author in the comments, it doesn't seem like there's really any answer available for how it could be implemented. At best I got some waffly 'maybe if we phase it in slowly over a century' responses which were unencouraging, but at least the author just left implementing the whole theory as an exercise to the reader. I would be interested in a follow-up to address this, if there is interest.
Secondly, while the author did a reasonable job of arguing his theses, that Land Matters, Land Value Tax can be Effective, and Assessment of Unimproved Land can Work, I never picked up on any moral or ethical argument for why Georgism is good.
I like the ability of people to own their own land, and the American public as a whole seems to agree with me, at least the 64.8% owning their own homes. The Georgist worldview that was laid out appeared to me to be so profit focused and hypercapitalistic, with everybody forced to use their land in a maximally profit-efficient way just to not be evicted, was so disturbing that it made me assess my own opinions and realize I wasn't as much of a capitalist as I thought I was, and certainly not enough to be a Georgist. Implementation, as I mentioned above, also appears more or less impossible or at least incredibly inequitable to current landholders.
As a whole, I am still not convinced that Georgism is a good thing. I can see why it would have made sense a century ago with robber barons, high poverty, and high inequality. At present, though, I still don't see any point to it aside from in theory being a revenue-neutral alternative to income tax which punishes rural and suburban homeowners and rewards urban renters with higher incomes.
Can somebody, in plain English, justify why Georgism is a good thing and something I should want?
The right to own land is not the right to own land; absent the existence of ownership of land, you can do anything you could do once the concept of ownership of land is added. What is changed by the ownership of land is that the ability of anyone except the owner to do those things.
That is, the "right" of land ownership is purely one of exclusion of other people's rights to do things.
Georgism's ethical grounding therefore comes from the idea that this exclusive right, being an infringement on the freedoms of everybody except the owner, is not a valid wellspring of wealth; Georgism grants you the value that you deserve, being the value you create, in the land. It subtracts out the value that you do not deserve, that value which is created entirely by the destruction of the rights of all others; it subtracts out the value of the exclusive right to the land, that exclusivity itself is not profitable, but instead is treated properly as an unfortunate necessity.
And if you think the agreements of ancestors about how land should be allocated somehow justify the current state of affairs, ask what right any generation has ever had any real right to sell, trade, or vote the rights of their children away? If it seems injust to take some aspect of property away from those who now own it, why is it just that every child born has had these right stripped from them already?
Thus, the citizen's dividend, because land ownership is in fact important, and powerful, and useful. And Georgist taxes, because the exclusive right to land is, in addition to all of those things, fundamentally unjust.
In that case I just have fundamental differences with Mr. George. I don't think exclusive ownership of land is unjust. I think that the exclusive right to use land comes from (in America) the State seizing the lands through treaty, purchase or conquest and selling it to its citizens, who sell it between themselves. As for prior generations, their actions in every way directly lead to every aspect of our current society, economy, and wealth distribution, and I don't see why land is anything more than just another asset.
The citizens dividend, or UBI, is an entirely separate policy from LVT and I don't see what it has to do with the rest of Georgism (which seems to really be the primary focus of Georgism) outside of being a general suggestion for how to spend tax revenue to fight inequality. Given that we could just implement UBI under any tax regime, including the current one, I don't think that the merits of UBI as a spending strategy in any way support or relate to LVT as a revenue strategy. I'm fine with revising to say that I disagree with just the land part of Georgism, though that does seem to be much of the point of it.
What is your ethical theory of property? Is it the labor theory of property? If so, why does one's exclusive rights extend to property with which one has mixed no labor?
And if the exclusive right to land comes ultimately from the state, then Georgism needs no moral justification - it cannot be just or unjust, it can only be part of the state schema or not. That is, in the sense in which ownership of property is just historical-political fact rather than moral fact, a vote to enact Georgism is equally just historical-political action, and has no bearing on morality at all.
So if ownership of property in this sense isn't unjust, applying Georgism is equally not-unjust; it's just another treaty/purchase/conquest/sale. Remember that "The population of the world less one" didn't agree to the sale of their rights, nor did any of their descendants.
The government is not an entity separate from the people. If the people reject a particular mode of taxes, for instance an LVT, then regardless of whether they consider it unjust or not, it doesn't get implemented. I think we all agree that Georgism is not generally popular now. In order for it to gain popularity, I think you will need a better slogan than "Georgism - It's equally not-unjust!" A positive ethical argument would be a big step that way, but you will run right into the ~65% of Americans who own their home. Disrupting 65% of a population just doesn't seem very useful or practical in any system. Georgists seem entirely fixated on the people who live in growing urban areas, who far more often rent, at the expense of a large majority of other people.
Currently, if you have a $300,000 house built on land worth $100,000, this is taxed the same as a $100,000 house built on land worth $300,000. Relative to Georgist taxes, the current property tax scheme in fact rewards people who live in growing urban areas, and penalizes rural and suburban lots.
The current tax scheme is the disruptive one, it's just we don't connect intrusive and right-violating permitting processes intended to let a city know when to raise assessed values of individual properties, and punish those who try to avoid such assessments, to extract additional property taxes to the property tax scheme we live under.
Like, when a home owner is forced to destroy unpermitted work (and pay for the demolition, in addition to their own costs in doing the work in the first place), is that really about safety, or punishing a tax-avoidance strategy?
Georgism won't destroy home ownership. Judging by the trends I've personally observed, it's possibly the only way to save it.
I have no issue switching property taxes from taxing the buildings to taxing the land, while keeping revenues the same. I think that's a fine change. Please don't pretend that is the end of Georgism. Without significantly higher tax *rates* an LVT achieves none of the envisioned systematic goals of Georgism. I'm fine with that, but I feel like your response is a rhetorical sleight of hand trying to imply otherwise.
Most of the things I own are things with which I've mixed no labor; I own them because I've paid for them. I think the problem most of us have with Georgism, on a moral level, is its insistence on treating something *we've paid for* as if it were some sort of windfall.
The labor theory of property covers things you've purchased. Somebody else mixed labor with them, you traded your own labor, or things you mixed with your labor, for them; it's not -your- labor, but you exchanged something like an equivalent amount of labor (adjusting for the value of said labor) for them.
An increase in land value isn't something you paid for. You buy a piece of property in 1967; you paid for the property as it existed in 1967. Somebody builds a factory down the road, and your property triples in value, as suddenly everybody wants to live there; you didn't pay for that.
That's a basic kind of argument, but it doesn't quite get into it.
Elsewhere, I use the example of a pair of islands. You live on Rich Island, and your ancestors bought Poor Island; the ownership is now held by a corporation which you own shares in. Let's even suppose you bought those shares.
On Poor Island, everybody has to pay rent, because their ancestors sold the island; everybody there is very poor, and barely makes enough to get by, and certainly not enough, after they pay rent, to improve things.
Now, you can say you're entitled to your portion of the rent, because you bought those shares in the corporation that collectively owns Poor Island. However, the inhabitants of Poor Island didn't sell you anything, and yet they're the ones whose livelihoods you own.
Okay, their ancestors sold it - but did they have any right to sell their descendants' livelihood in this fashion?
I'm analogizing to slavery here, in case that isn't clear, and to be clear, the fact that a slave owner has paid for a slave does not, in fact, represent a moral claim.
The mere act of paying for something is not, in and of itself, sufficient justification for ownership; it must be something that can be morally owned. There is good moral theory for why you can own a car, why you can own a computer, why you can own your house.
The land that your house sits on doesn't have good moral theory for ownership, and as I hope the island example might demonstrate, there are actually some pretty good reasons to be suspicious of the moral validity of the ownership of land; in our modern society, we have a chain of transactions obscuring the origins of that ownership, but it ultimately comes down to "Somebody else said that other people can't use this land anymore", without any compensation or consent from the people thus deprived, including in particular those in the future.
But the thing is, ownership of land is, in fact, pretty damned important. Without it, society doesn't function.
Georgism is an attempt to square the moral issues of land ownership with the practical necessity of the same; there still isn't consent, but it does its best to at least compensate those thus deprived.
You're clearly alert to the danger of the Georgist critique devolving into a fully general argument against property-- but I don't think you've succeeded so far in averting it. The example of Poor Island doesn't satisfy, because it's not clear why they should be poor simply because they've traded one thing of value for another. (There are plenty of businesses making good profits while operating out of leased quarters.) I suppose if they spent the proceeds of the land sale on a big party-- but they didn't have to do that. How does this differ from the case where they sell their steel mill instead of their land, and then blow all the money?
To the extent that the increase in the value of my land since I bought it was foreseeable, I certainly did pay for it; it's not the sort of thing a seller would throw in as a freebie. A surprise increase would be a stroke of luck, though no different in principle from, say, buying Pfizer stock just before they discover Viagra. I can see where a general claim of justice could lie against someone who first appropriates a piece of land from nature, but that's almost never going to be the present owner.
If the people of Rich Island are really savvy, they'll sell Poor Island back to the inhabitants along with their own island-- and then impose a LVT on them.
I think Thegnskald made an exceptionally clear case but let me add a couple of things and respond to your specific questions.
> The Georgist worldview that was laid out appeared to me to be so profit focused and hypercapitalistic, with everybody forced to use their land in a maximally profit-efficient way just to not be evicted
This is literally what being part of the renting class is like except with your entire life. If you don't produce enough value from your labor you are kicked out of the house you rent and onto the street. If it sounds horrible to wealthy capitalists who inherited a lot of property-- they can take solace in that it's the faintest shadow of a fraction of what their tenants have to deal with.
Let me try to give you another "moral picture" of where Georgism comes from. One of the principle questions of Georgism is, "Who deserves to benefit from improving society?"
If you rent a loft and convert it to an art gallery in my spare time and fill it with beautiful things, here is what happens. You've improved the neighborhood, but the (vast?) majority of the value I've created is collected by the land-owners. They will raise the rent on the art gallery until you can no longer afford to do it. You are literally being punished for creating value.
This isn't some trivial hypothetical. If you're a certain age, you have lived through the mass erosion of public spaces.
There are a lot of moral values- I'd say the strongest one for Georgism is "fairness". It seems "unfair" that someone who wants to become a professional should have the vast majority of their earnings taken from them in the form of rent, healthcare, taxes, and education.
A lot of this is going to come down to whether you see the individual or society first, how much you value the present versus the past, how much you care about efficiency, just a lot of stuff. I can see someone who is more religious being furious with Georgism's ultra-presentism. Religious institutions are thousands of years old. Haven't they earned a *little* goodwill in that time?
I'm a renter and am not religious.
Some day I'd like to own my own property. I'm well on track to doing so and don't want land ownership to be abolished just because I don't currently participate in it.
I've had good experiences with my landlords and know that if I run on hard times I have tenant protections and can always downgrade if need be. I absolutely do not trust the government to do a better job at landlording than private industry.
Further you seem focused with owning the rich capitalists, but the truly rich own stocks and other securities in addition to land, while the majority of American households own their own home and it's often a significant portion of net worth.
That's all fine. I'm not (and Georgism certainly isn't) concerned with "owning rich capitalists." It has to do with fairness and incentives.
I didn't focus on this because Thegnskald's comment already covered it. It has to do with how people obtain their wealth. If you invent something, build something, or whatever, Georgism wants you to get the proceeds for that innovation. And generally that kind of work *enriches the world*.
If you obtained your wealth from basically *stopping everyone else from obtaining opportunity*, then Georgism wants that money back.
Georgism is not about abolishing land ownership. It is, in fact, a major advancement in ownership rights over the existing property tax schema.
If you own land in the current schema, you are taxed on the value. If you improve the land - say, by planting trees, or building a house, or building a shopping mall, or building a skyscraper - you are then taxed on the value of the improvements.
So, insofar as Georgism taxing you for the land says "You don't own this", the current tax scheme is saying, about every improvement to the property, "You don't own this either." So insofar as you think taxing the land is saying you don't own it, Georgism is actually granting you ownership over at least the improvements to the land, which is more than you currently own, under this perspective.
Also, as a homeowner, I'd love it if housing prices collapse. That would mean I could sell my current home (at a loss), and buy a nicer home (much cheaper), and end up better off than I am right now.
The idea that perpetually increasing housing prices is good is, frankly, insane, and born of the idea of housing as investment, as opposed to housing as a place to live; it's antithetical to home ownership, and turns us into a nation of renters.
The current tax scheme has fairly low rates, I don't think all taxes mean 'you don't own this', but an 100% tax rate does.
I don't see why perpetually increasing housing prices are bad. Further, as I've said repeatedly, we are not in fact a nation of renters and the majority of households do not rent. Under Georgism, however, it seems like the goal is for all of us to have to rent our land from the state at market rates (which current property taxes don't come close to).
That's an excellent point, because improving your tented home is not something renters do, except trivially. Because if they get evicted, they will lose their improvements, an investment in term of time and money... At least those they can not move.
Sale reason building on rented land is so uncommon. It also happen, but comes with securities (like 99y rents) or often ends badly.
so if you accept Georgism means renting land from the government (which i did, thanks to the great articles), why would you build on this land? Private builder should be a minority under Georgism, while mobile home, renting state homes and maybe big Corp homes (big corps will have a bargaining power with gouvernement that no individual will have. So they may trust the rent being stable and factor everything into a business plan)... Plus they will control multiple adjacent pacels so also control cross effects that change the lvt...
My impression is that Georgism was a socialist reaction to land Barrons, probably justified at some time and places... But in places without land barrons, it become a push to a rent only future that is ongoing on multiple fronts. Private property being something for states and big corps, not people. I oppose this on moral principle, as anti natural, so I oppose Georgism now that the articles (and discussion) helped me to understand what it means. Certainly if applied on small parcels for individual home. BTW, owning land seems moral to me, like all private property. It's basic security against confiscation, and the only way i see apart children to prepare the future (aka invest). I feel opposition to land being privately owned would be natural in two cases: a general opposition to private property (communism) or being a nomad.
BTW, property taxes, especially those on your own house, always made me angry, even before i bought my home. They break the feeling you own the place you live in, part of the drive toward having your home instead of renting it. It's mostly an illusion, but I feel it's a powerful natural feeling. Maybe also why many people are into self home improvements, if they have the capacity for it.
you will see on the comment many critics of Georgism are "traditional" home owners
>That's an excellent point, because improving your tented home is not something renters do, except trivially. Because if they get evicted, they will lose their improvements, an investment in term of time and money... At least those they can not move.
>Sale reason building on rented land is so uncommon. It also happen, but comes with securities (like 99y rents) or often ends badly.
>so if you accept Georgism means renting land from the government (which i did, thanks to the great articles), why would you build on this land?
The difference between a renter in a privately-owned building and an owner-occupier under LVT is that the renter can't sell the improvement; it only profits the landlord (including via the landlord potentially raising the renter's own rent!). Under LVT improvements are *not* taxed, which means the sale value of real estate with improvements on it does not collapse to 0 but merely to the value of the improvements in a vacuum. This means that, assuming your improvements add more value to the property than it cost you to build them, you can profit by improving a property and selling it, or by improving a property and then renting it out for more money as landlords currently do.
>Plus they will control multiple adjacent pacels so also control cross effects that change the lvt...
This can't disincentivise land development below the incentive individual owner-occupiers would have (unless LVT exceeds 100%). It removes the extra incentive for a capitalist of speculating on land and then developing other nearby land, but that's all.
Week in theory yes, and that's also the case in current regime where you build your home on rented land. In principle you can sell it, and often indeed can, but still peuple are reluctant to do it... Because the value of the home itself will tremendously depend on the rent the land it's built on. A d when building your home, you don't control the rent. This situation require a huge trust in the landlord not to abuse his position for you too stay building, something that happen but is extremely uncommon. Is my local governement trustful enough to build on a land i rent from it? In my case, no. And i live in western Europe...
Yes improvements do wind up raising the tax, because the value of the land is not just "how much is this dirt worth," it's also "what is the value of being in this particular location, where this dirt is." The more nice things around the dirt, the more valuable having that particular patch of dirt, as opposed to some other dirt somewhere else, is. Also, if the improvement is major (i.e., finding a way to put 2n lovely apartments on the plot instead of n crappy apartments), suddenly everyone else around the plot has a new "highest and best use" which they must immediately conform to or else get taxed out the wazoo.
That sounds like an argument against land ownership in general, but Georgism (by my limited understanding) seem to advocate for the centralization of land ownership into the hands of one (or a few) organizations.
I don't think ownership of land or other natural resources in their unaltered state is legitimate, but if it's to exist, I would much rather have it distributed among may different owners than to have it centralized to a single owner (e.g. a state) that can charge everyone rent. I don't see why a state would have any more moral right to own land.
To me, a better solution would be to only recognize ownership in that which is the product of somebody's labor. That would naturally mean that if you put a house on a piece of land, a satellite in an orbital position, or generate radio waves at a particular wavelength, you are depriving others of simultaneously doing the same and thereby of the use of something that you don't own and that they could have used if it was not for your activities, but the same is true if you e.g. stand in particular place. I think that's just a fact of nature and doesn't require a centrally planned and imposed solution, which is how I (again, in my limited understanding) view Georgism.
You refer to the labor theory of property; Georgism also is based on the labor theory of property, but where the theory generally concerns itself with the portion of the land with which labor was mixed, Georgism asks after all the rest of the land. This is why it is critical to Georgism that it is -land- that is taxed, and not improvements.
Compare the existing land tax schemes, in which a skyscraper is taxed for the value of the skyscraper and the land, versus Georgism, where the value of the skyscraper is not taxed, but the land underneath it is, and ask which is more just; is it more just to tax people based on what the create and produce, or is it more just to tax for the opportunity costs thus imposed on everybody else?
The Citizen's Dividend exists because the state does -not- own the land, and is acting only as an imperfect proxy for society as a whole, who are compensated, not as owners of the land, but for the loss of their natural rights to do something with the land other than what is being done with it.
This has seduced me before I read the comments and thought more. But the big question Georgidt have to answer : if you do not own the land itself (and i realized that is really what Georgism means with the LVT), how can you own non - movable things you build on this land. My current opinion is that you can't. Very few people currently build on rented land (rented to private owner or the state), so apparently i am not alone in thinking that...
If there is one addition old like to see to the great serie of articles it's this: how can you own your home if you don't own the land it's built on, and can not move it? Owning the home meaning it's value is not subject to the whim of the land owner?