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've gone through Think Stats and don't think it's very good. Most of the people that I've seen recommend it either already knew stats and thought it was the sort of book that somebody who wants to learn stats, but was intimidated by stats, would use to learn stats, or was somebody who aspired to learn, saw that it looked friendly, and then decided it was a good book without every really learning stats.
Statistics in Plain English is a much better book for looking statistics. It's very noob friendly and builds a stronger intuition. It's not free, it's not programming, but I've now either taught or mentored a lot of new data analysts/aspiring data scientists in multiple programs and found that it just gets better results.
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?
It seems to me that the same argument applies to places that already have a "property tax". In its simplest implementation, Georgism would simply involve adjustments to the property-tax assessment procedure to more heavily weight land value in relation to the value of structures build upon this land. This is not radical, not difficult to implement, and doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. In places that already have the infrastructure to levy property taxes, it is trivial to, say, make 5% of the assessed value pinned to the LVT assessment. This fraction could increase gradually, 5% per-decade, say. This gives ample time to weigh pros and cons, economically, on short and medium timescales.
You retain exclusive ownership of the land. The difference, however is that the “rent,” which is the benefit you derive solely from occupying land to the exclusion of others, is fully taxed from you and out to the public benefit.
But what I get is if you tax 100% of the generated value, and estimate this estimated value properly, it automatically follow that the price of what is taxed, which in fact represent the accumulated benefits - taxes (with some time preference function), becomes 0 -almost by definition of correctly estimating the LVT and fully taxing it. So full Georgism result in buying land for nothing. Same as a rental change: you do not pay anything to the former renter, nor to the owner.
Or is there something I do not get from Georgism (because this is the main info I extracted from the serie of articles).
What you seem to point to is partial Georgism, where LVT is not the full land rent but a portion of it, meaning the land still have a non zero price and you can (partially) own it and sell it, like anything else. Then I do not have the same objection of course, it all depends on how much the LVT is exactly, compared to current habitation tax. But that is a very different story from what was exposed....
But if you can't afford to pay the tax because you are land rich and cash poor, then you'll be forced off the land. That doesn't seem like ownership to me.
And yes, this is true of current property taxes, and I'm not a big fan of them, either.
You own it. If it non-severable (like planted trees or amended soil) then you should be paid a severance fee, obviously if its a house you can move it, if you want, or sell it to the new owner of that land, in fact many advocate that he would be required to compensate the person who can't sever their improvements from the land.
It would actually be more forgiving than today, in many cases, since houses would be much cheaper and homeowner would be more likely for people, and therefore you don't lose everything in a foreclosure or tax sale.
The state has a moral right to the land to the extent that it acts by the consent of and in the best interests of the people as a whole. That's why Georgism is often connected to a UBI: the idea is that the individual landowners pay the LVT to compensate everyone else for the loss of access to the land, and the state pays that out as the Citizens' Dividend.
This is one thing that I don't get. Why does any state have any more moral right to the land than an individual or smaller group of individuals or another state or all of humanity?
It seems to me that all arguments about the rights to land apply equally to the state. The United States of America also got the existing land through conquest, purchase etc.
It's a little tricky since any plausible configuration can only be an approximation of the ideal. I would say that whatever entity best represents the interests of the largest number of people has the strongest claim. The "rightful owner" is every person who exists, so it's a question of who can most closely approximate acting in their interest.
It is not "Every person owns land", it is "The income stream derived from land arising entirely from the exclusion of other party's rights is injust" - Georgist taxes do not reflect the fact that everybody owns land, that is, but rather the fact that the very concept of ownership of land is the limitation of the rights of others to employ that land to their own purposes.
My next door neighbor is harmed more by my exclusive ownership of land than somebody living in Tokyo; the harm to the person in Tokyo is, basically, negligible.
They don't. No one has any inherent right to a specific location, but I think its pretty clear we all have a right to SOME location.
If that's true we have to figure out how to manage who gets the rights to a given location.
Central governments just happen to the be the major form of government for most of civilization, so that's what we go with. But there are Geo-Anarchists, Geo-Mutualists, Geo-Syndicalists, etc, etc, etc.
If you own a house, why do YOU have a right to it instead of me? Probably because some group a couple hundred years ago were more successful murderers than another group.
When it comes down to it, the only justification for ownership of land is violence or the threat of violence. Every inch of ground on the planet is soaked in blood; that's why fairness is in all our interests.
'cause the only thing that restrains the proles from wheeling out the peoples razor and taking a little off the top is practical considerations.
There is another consideration beyond "how did these specific people come to have ownership" and that's the question of allowing ownership or not. Even if ownership is illegitimate, it may be preferable to a society where ownership is not allowed. The argument for that is long and involved, but I happen to believe that a system where ownership is allowed is better than one where it is not. Given that, the more important question becomes one of how property is handled going forward.
I happen to think that there is actually good bit of land that is held legitimately (though I agree much of it is not). To me, though, that really isn't the important distinction. Given where we are now, taking land away may in fact be worse for society than leaving it in place and nudging the system in better directions for future ownership arrangements.
Georgism is not prescriptive in regards to collection mechanism. There are Geo-Anarchists, Geo-Mutualists, etc, etc.
The important point is that rent is collected and ideally somehow made to equally benefit all members of that community, whether through public investment or handled out via a Citizen's Dividend.
If that happens through community land trusts or mutual societies or whatever other conception you could imagine, that would be okay with us.
I mean, basically any good and thing you own consume or benefit from is excluding everyone else from it. It's hard for me to sign onto that as a basis for ethics.
First, one difference comes from where the value comes from; the value of a carrot does not depend on nobody else having a carrot, after all; otherwise the industrial revolution represented no change to society at all, since the gain in value from having more goods was offset by the goods ceasing to be scarce.
Land shares the quality of having a value arising entirely from the exclusion of other people's rights in common with a few other things, perhaps most contentiously intellectual property.
Land feels more like a thing than intellectual property, perhaps, but what exactly do you own, when you own land? If you were to remove every physical object, every speck of dust, every grain of sand, from the borders of your property - does it cease to be your property? What about air moving through it, or water? What about abstractions, like airwave "space"?
These aren't theoretical problems, we've had to deal with them over time, and repeatedly modified in the process what it means to own land.
What exactly ownership of land is, and where it comes from, are both important questions. If you choose as your default referent a state of nature, it should become apparent that the ownership of land has its roots in violence; it is not a claim of rights to the land, but rather, a refusal of those same rights to anybody else. This becomes quite apparent in the case of owning land with no intent to do anything with it, such as in the case of speculation, which is effectively a form of extortion.
Which isn't to say it isn't important, indeed crucially so. Land ownership is necessary for society to function.
But here's the thing: The ownership of land is not a finite thing. The extent is limited in three dimensions, but not the fourth.
Imagine, for a moment, two societies, which occupy an island each. One island is rich, the other poor. One day, the society on the rich island offer to buy the island from the poor society, for enough money for everybody on the poor island to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. They agree, and sell their island. They never leave; they just sell it, and pay rent. But it's fine, because they have money.
The children's children's children of the poor society later live in even more abject poverty, for in addition to everything else, now they are paying rents to the children's children's children of the rich island. What right did their ancestors have to sell the island? In specific, what right did their ancestors have to sell some portion of their descendant's wages forevermore?
That is land ownership. Georgism is about recognizing that nobody ever had the right to sell that portion of any descendant's wages - that portion that goes towards rent - and the fact that somebody now "owns" that portion of somebody's work into perpetuity, the fact that it has been bought and sold many times, grants no additional validity to the situation.
Some stuff have value mostly indepent from others having access to the fame thing... A carot for example. Some things have more value the more they are used. Stuff showing interaction usually, like an os system or electrical standard. It leads to monopolies and are well suited to state defined standards and strongly capping benefits. That were you get rent abuse imho, and where i would think state intervention is the most welcome. Some things are more valuable if other do not have it. Art pieces. Expertise. Rare sellable talent. It seems georgism try to prevent making land part of the last category by organising artificial scarcity.
Is it a real problem? I don't think so, not at my place and time. Was it a real problem before or at some other place? I guess so, land barrons or companies securing huge amount of previously state owned land (forest often) come to mind. But when the land is really scarce, it will advantage the rich against the first mover, which is nice from some economic point of view but promote insecurity. And when the land is not scarce, it seems to promote exploitation, maybe over exploitation.
But maybe i dont fully get it. In particular i do not understand how you can have a full lvt, which tax lands value at 100%, and the fact that you can own land instead of simply renting it (i.e sale pure land, or (of its too theoretical because no land is left unexploited under georgism)) sell your old home if the lvt has increased enough to be unpayable by people interested in this type of home, knowing the potential new land use will imply destroying it to build something more productive instead, like an hotel or service center...
Lots of land is left unexploited under Georgism. The tax is, basically, on the opportunity cost of the land; the huge tracts of land nobody wants in New Mexico or Arizona or Nevada don't suddenly become more appealing because of a LVT, and the people owning the land, which isn't worth much regardless, aren't suddenly going to decide they don't want to own it because now they're paying $100 in a LVT instead of $100 of a more conventional land tax. (It's not worth much now, and it won't be worth much after a LVT either, so in either cases the taxes are basically negligible).
As for ownership, I think you need to ask yourself what ownership even means, because if the only thing that matters to ownership is revenue streams, then people who live in homes they own must be doing things wrong. The purpose of owning your own home is not to rent it out, it's to live in it, and the ownership grants you rights over your house that are desirable in and of themselves.
The effect of the taxes themselves will largely be negligible in more rural communities, increasing as you move into increasing urban environments; mostly they will fall on commercial developments, and the average homeowner likely will not see much of a personal change in their taxes.
As for destroying homes to put something productive in its place, this already happens, and the kludgy, corrupt, and frequently racist way my own government currently goes about doing this is, if you're familiar with the history of it, kind of horrifying. The Georgist alternative isn't replacing a utopian situation with a dystopian one, it's replacing a dystopian situation with something that is merely good on average, and sometimes individually bad.
I don't get your explanation. Under the current regime, if my place become interesting for some development, i can be forced to sale through expropriation by the state, or indirectly by increase of local prices (good and services, and maybe local taxes although it often goes the other way around) in case of gentrification. In this case, if it goes to the point i am forced to move, it will be with a nice plus value when i sell my home and land (yes, land speculation at work ;-)... Maybe i would choose to leave in that case, even if i could afford higher prices on my gentrified neighborhood. In most case, i must be convinced to sale, which can be done if the price offered makes me better off (buy a better land+home (better for me) somewhere else....
With Georgism, if a new possible valorisation of my land happen (I discover a petrol field in my backyard, or, more likely, city spread, some infrastructure development or some tourism fashion suddenly makes the place more interesting to richer people), my lvt increase and put me in trouble, maybe to the point i have to sell my land (priced 0, that's my understanding of having a 100% lvt on well evaluated land) and my home (at much reduced price compared to what it would have sold before lvt increase (because, as I said before, the kind of house of a guy unable to pay the new lvt is probably of very little interest to people willing to pay this new increased lvt - they have other type of house (or non house infrastructure) in mind).
So Georgism out me similar to the worse kind of expropriation (one that under evaluate the compensation by a lot). And i already dislike expropriation except with super generous compensations. Where is my analysis wrong?
That's an interesting example, because a huge part of agricultural land value in New Mexico is the water rights that may or may not be attached to that land. Water rights are required for using surface water, like rivers, but are also required for pumping gound water.
Water rights have been gained and lost not by labor but through a long and complicated history, that makes sense in about the same way as land ownership itself. Most water use currently is agricultural, which might not be the optimal use. I suppose desert Georgists would advocate a water tax?
One tricky thing about water is that the supply varies from year to year, and can depend on sources in other countries, which must be negotiated for. It's much harder to defend one's water source from downstream than it is to defend a plot of land.
Another tricky thing is that arguments over water use, where it matters, are a good deal more contentious than the pleasant discussions on land use.
Georgism is good because 'deadweight loss' is bad, and this is the way to minimize deadweight loss for taxation.
"Deadweight loss" is what economists call the loss of transactions between people that could have happened, which both of them would have appreciated, which don't happen because of some obstacle that makes it less worthwhile. [For example, travel time is generally a deadweight loss; if people could teleport to restaurants (instead of having to live nearby them), both restaurant owners and restaurant-goers would probably be happier. Similarly, a tax on restaurant meals means that the marginal restaurant meal doesn't happen, and also every meal that does happen is slightly worse for both sides than it could have been.]
>and also every meal that does happen is slightly worse for both sides than it could have been
This last part's not deadweight loss because the government collects the money, right? The DWL is entirely to be found in the meals that don't happen, never in the ones that did.
I think they're talking about meals that did happen, but where the people didn't order dessert, or didn't order drinks, or otherwise left out some feature that would have been a net win-win if it hadn't been taxed, but isn't with the tax, so it doesn't happen at all.
Yeah, agreed that's normally counted as 'tax revenue' instead of deadweight loss; my "also" probably wasn't enough signposting of "and here's a different thing that's bad about taxes."
So is the lack of deadweight loss the only redeeming quality of Georgism? I can accept that as a benefit from an economy sense but I don't think that redeems the inability to privately own land, the inability to use land for purposes that aren't maximally profitable etc.
Seems like a very dreary world to live in if the state owns everything and if you don't put all of your efforts towards generating income you lose your home.
According to a utilitarian capitalist, lack of deadweight loss is the only redeeming quality *any* social organization can have. "Deadweight loss" is any time that two people could both be happier by engaging in some mutually beneficial interaction. When you say "if you don't put all your efforts towards generating income you lose your home", they say "if you don't keep making the world a better place for people, then the scarce resources you have claimed are repurposed by someone who *is* making the world a better place for people".
But it seems like the reason Georgism is achieving this is by forcing everybody to be maximally economically productive, which is obviously a good way to avoid deadweight economic loss but seems awful for utility. A lot of people derive plenty of utils from owning their own home but under LVT they'd have to pay very steep LVT in cash, not utils, and be evicted. Further if it turns out the best way to maximize profit from land is to set up strip malls and plaster them with billboards, and LVT rises to reflect the income the state expects you to generate, doesn't overall utility go down despite revenue to the state going up?
It seems like in the current system people are able to buy land and derive utility however they see fit, even if it doesn't generate income directly, however under Georgism they are forced to do whatever the state thinks can generate the most cash and then uses as a basis for calculating LVT. Am I wrong?
Again I think we've landed in the hypercapitalist dystopia
Well, we would contend that strip malls and billboards are a really bad way to maximize profit if you sufficiently tax the land rent away that lets people get away with such wasteful activities.
It might help to look up Strong Towns' view of things:
I think a lot of people get the view that Georgists want everyone to build Isaac Asimov style "Caves of Steel", covering every inch of the earth with concrete and super skyscrapers to maximize utility uber alles, but really we want to get rid of the wasteful uses of land in the most valuable areas, which we think will lead to the creation of more walkable, dense neighborhoods with nice things like bodegas, rather than sprawling suburbs for miles and miles.
The hyper over densification comes from the "playdough squeezed through the colander" effect and is part of the status quo's malincentives. Because so much land is held out of best use in the city centers, the land that remains in the hands of those that want to put it to use tend to put it to REALLY dense use, and then you get sprawl and sprawl and sprawl out on the edges.
The idea is if you even things out you get more like the "missing middle" of development.
This is the stated Goal of the Georgists who educated me, for the record. We can certainly continue to debate about whether the policies of Georgism will achieve this in practice or not, but it can help to be clear on what the movement's own goals are.
A Skyscraper on every Corner is definitely the impression I got of Georgia's goals, and my expectation of what the Georgist policies would encourage. I am still not sure how you avoid that; any area with a widely attended open natural space could be a widely attended Walmart, don't we have to tax the park owner as if he was Sam Walton to even out the revenue? Or am I missing something
"more walkable, dense neighborhoods with nice things like bodegas"
If I knew what a bodega was, I might want one on the street corner. But for the love of God, this phrase extracted on its own sounds exactly like some 25 year old hipster with no kids or responsibility towards aging parents, who never needs to carry anything heavier than a paper bag full of groceries, and certainly not in the pouring horizontal rain, and earns a living by doing something vaguely in 'design' related work which they can carry out on their laptop in the local artisan coffee shop. They really appreciate the vibrant urban lifestyle where they get to hear the latest indie breakout artist in the brewpub every Saturday night.
Which is lovely for them, but what about the rest of us?
I also really like the NY neighborhood (when it's nice and not crime-ridden). BUT for those romanticizing bodegas and little shops, which I also love in NY, I think there are substantial regulatory structures in place in NYC specifically to prop those up - and the popularity of places like Costco and IKEA in Brooklyn itself attests to the fact that people's preferences, for efficiency at the very least, certainly lay that way.
If something avoids deadweight "economic loss" but is bad for utility, then you haven't properly measured economic loss. Economic loss *should* include all forms of utility.
People don't derive utility from owning their home - they derive actual utility from having a place to stay, and having certainty about the continued ability to stay there enables them to make some risky decisions that on net tend to increase utility in other ways as well.
If the income the state expects the user of a given piece of land to generate is going up, it's only because the users of this land are able to increase the utility for more people by enough to collect payments from those people that allow them to pay the higher income the state expects. If 100 people could live a happy life on this land, but 1 person currently is, and refuses to allow any of these others to partake in such a happy life, then it definitely doesn't increase utility to keep those 99 people homeless in order to avoid evicting that one. (Especially since the extra land rent generated by these people will enable greater "citizens dividend" payments to everyone, including the one who was evicted, who should be able to find an ok place, either as one of the 100 who now occupies the same land, or on some other piece of land that is opening up more spaces for people.)
But yes, Georgism is this weird combination of hypercapitalist and hypercommunist, which can easily go dystopian if you aren't properly measuring everyone's desires in the economic values that are being maximized. But if you are in fact enabling everyone's desires to express themselves in the market, then the dystopian harms you are causing are just a large number of trolley problems where you kill one to save five (or perhaps better, evict one to house five, or stub one toe to prevent five stubbings, or any number of other transactions where most people are being made better off even though some are in fact made worse off).
> But yes, Georgism is this weird combination of hypercapitalist and hypercommunist, which can easily go dystopian if you aren't properly measuring everyone's desires in the economic values that are being maximized.
This strikes me as a pretty fatal flaw, because if we've learned anything from the past century, it's that trying to measure what people value is not at all straightforward, even in economic terms.
"People don't derive utility from owning their home - they derive actual utility from having a place to stay, and having certainty about the continued ability to stay there enables them to make some risky decisions that on net tend to increase utility in other ways as well."
I agree, under perfect economy assumptions. But you should consider owning your home precisely allows to be non-measured, economically speaking. I do a lot of home improvement myself, because I physically and technically can, because I (sometimes, it depend on the actual task) enjoy it, but mostly because it's unofficial work, something that would cost me more that doing it myself. And this even while the hour-price of the guy that would do the work is much less than mine, he can get raw material at a better price than I do and he already have all the tools, that I may need to buy.
But if he work for a company, the company will takes it's (much too large) share, and the state also (and, in my country tax system, it's even worse).
Add to that some interaction effect: when you do the work yourself, you know what you did and learn some new stuff, which will make new works much easier/less costly. Basically, it's a negation of the economic principle of specialisation allowing net wealth creation. This is true, some times, provided there are not too many exchange frictions. But there is frictions. Often too much friction imho. Owning a house and land allows to to escape the all-is-economy game, when it makes sense. Even more if you own a large land and become energetically self-sufficient, more or less. In perfect economy without friction, it should never make sense. In practice, it does, and the more you can't escape the game, the more I feel it will makes sense (playing the economic exchange game is a net loss for the small player), because tuning out is the ultimate thing that keep exchange mutually profitable, in case of inherent power asymmetry (which is never bigger than when one of the 2 players is the state)
And as I said in another thread, the homelessness due to land overuse by a few was maybe a problem in the past, but I really don't think it is now, at least where I live (western europe), and I doubt it is in the US (although there was the subprime stuff and welfare is much lower in the US...so maybe, I am not well placed to know).
But reaching a Demographic plateau and probably down trend, I do not see it becoming more of a problem, if anything, it would become a complete non-issue....
In fact, instead of the homeless having a chance to finally be out of the cold rain, the practical Georgist trolley, as I see it, would more be like eviction a farmer couple and children living their old family farm, to transform the farm into 5 joined habitations (I live in such one, I know it's nice ;-) ) to welcome 5 urban families...Because 2 years of covid lockdowns suddenly makes living in nice vibrant city centers not so fun, even for those who enjoyed it before.
Which can happen today (the couple or their inheritants want to sell this old farm, or are forced to do so because grocery price has inflated due to all those google employees living in the sold and splited farms around). Georgism will be a little like the later, but worser, stronger, faster.
And I am not utilitarian enough to find this a nice outcome (well, to be honest, I am not utilitarian at all ;-p )
"Further if it turns out the best way to maximize profit from land is to set up strip malls and plaster them with billboards, and LVT rises to reflect the income the state expects you to generate, doesn't overall utility go down despite revenue to the state going up?"
To the extent that this is true, we would expect it to be impossible under the current system for anyone to buy land for personal use because they have to compete with companies buying it up to fill with strip malls and billboards. We observe that this has not happened.
To expand on this, given that as you observe people like owning land and using it for the personal purposes, and many of those people have money, it seems likely that these personal purposes will continue to be a very "profitable" use of land under a Georgist system.
By that logic we don't need to worry about efficient land usage at all because if it could be used more efficiently it would already be being done and we can observe this has not happened
>the inability to use land for purposes that aren't maximally profitable
You can, but you must pay for the privilege. How is it different from the status quo, where if you buy valuable land and don’t derive much profit from it, you’re in the red? How is it different from the pressure to have a maximally profitable job if you want to occupy a nice house on nice land?
Now you need to be willing to sell before a richer guy can buy your land. With Georgism, once richer guys, or a guys with better land plans, comes and lvt automatically increase (as it should, if i understand Georgism : the land has indeed become more profitable because it could be rented higher) , your are forced to sell your home (at a likely very low price, because it is certainly not what the richer / better plan guys have in mind for this land parcel - so the home value to potential buyers is low if not zero) because you have been out-lvted. This is in fact very like the current outing of former inhabitants of places that turned touristic. Local services becomes progressively more expensive until it force all locals to move away if their income is not tourism related. This happen all the time, unlike the hypothetical too big for one family land seized to house 10 homeless families.
And, contrary to Georgism, at least the local forced to move by (sort of) gentrification can sell their land with a large plus value (er... Large appreciation? A great deal? Not sure about the English word) to start elsewhere with a nice money pot...
Georgism does remove this feeling of security, but the real question is, is anyone entitled to perpetual ownership of increasingly more valuable land by paying a lump sum once? George claims this is _both_ immoral and detrimental to economy.
I claim it's moral up to a point, and entirely indirect mechanism (priced out by gentrification, death and inheritance taxes) is already more tax enough to stop most of the problematic cases. The immorality is not small or large individual owner, even if multiple properties. It's companies buying square kilometers of forest and making the surrounding villages support the externalities while destroying the country future assets at the same time.
Sometimes, instead of big companies, it's the country own doing. Given that Georgism put land ownership back in countries hand, exclusively, not sure it solve those large scale issues. Georgism seems tailored to address issues when noble families owned large amount of land, while democratic countries were emerging together with industrialisation. And still we use examples of inner cities housing bubbles and countries family homes. I am getting more confused than after i finished part 3 about what exactly georgism will practically change for private home owner? It seems it goes from nothing at all to renting will be the norm, as soon as there is increasing demand at some place...
Upon what does George base his claim of immorality?
"It is possible to own land in perpetuity" has been a pretty consistent thread in most societies for millennia; the fact that it has recently become possible for people other than literal nobility to do so, is normally seen as a moral good.
If anything it seems like Georgism would reverse this trend -- someone who bought a crumbling Victorian in the Mission fifty years ago, then fixed it up and retired would be forced to sell it alright -- but it seems more likely that the buyer would be a rich techbro who can afford the LVT as an altruistic developer of low-cost housing.
This does not seem very moral to me -- hopefully there is more to it than "owning land is immoral because I say so";.
I’m not really sure where you’re getting this idea that the state owns everything in Georgism.
Private landownership is still allowed—encouraged even. However, the benefits of exclusive ownership of the land itself (though not the structures upon it) are taxed away.
This results in higher taxes for those wanting to live in the dense urban core and occupy a significant amount of land, but will make renting an apartment or living in the exurbs much cheaper.
As for whether you lose your home if you do not generate income, how exactly is this different from today? If you fail to pay taxes, whether on your income or your property, your stuff can be taken and sold. Georgism just has a particularly high and focused form property tax (LVT).
How can you own something if you lose all right to the income from it? I don't consider it ownership if by definition all economic value realized must flow through to the state.
Currently our taxes are fairly low across a broad range of activities, a 100% LVT would be very different
There are many things from which you aren’t allowed to derive a profit. For example, certain drugs in certain jurisdictions. Does that mean you somehow no longer own the drugs?
Ownership simply means you decide what happens to your property, who gets to interact with it and who doesn’t, etc.
Well, in my country at least, when you rent a home you partially control what happen in your rented place. You can do whatever you want as long as it does not degrade (more than usual occupation) what you rent, and your owner can not even enter the property except under some very specific circumstances.
but you get evicted of you don't pay the rent and the rent can be increased (with limited rate). Property taxes can be seen indeed as a partial rent from the state, but, as they are much lower than an actual rent, if are much less at risk of being evicted and if you are, home plus land price usually helps a lot restarting elsewhere. If it was not the case, nobody would own any home, it will be rented obviously. Full georgism is not clear in how much it will be different from a full rent, but owning a home on a fully rented land seems especially dangerous and unstable, needing that the land owner can be super trusted because he have power to confisc your accumulated wealth on a whim. In a sense, state already have this power but georgism seems to make that easier instead of harder. Current reluctance of building home in place where land can not be bought (some countries prevent foreigners to buy land, but they can rent it and build... If they dare :-)) makes me believe i am not alone thinking like that...
Speaking for my own situation (not in the US), under the current tax system a whole bunch of things would have to go wrong for my property to be taken and sold off. I have made a lot of sacrifices to place myself in a situation where I'm able to own property and likely be able to pay the (currently negligible) property taxes until I die - even if I lose most of my income. Under Georgism, having the surrounding area developed can push the economic value of the land high enough to force me (and most of my neighbors, most of whom own their properties) out.
Almost everywhere in the USA *already* has LVT- it just has it as a minority portion of the property tax. So, in the US, the exact effect you're worried about can (and does) already occur.
I don't know if this is a motte and bailey thing or what, but it's something like that! Which is it? Is the Georgist LVT going to replace all other taxes and bring us a UBI utopia, or will it look like now except instead of paying $X dollars in property tax you'll pay the same number of dollars in land tax?
The actual numbers themselves matter. To someone who owns property to live on it and not to profit, a $100 property tax turning into $1000 over a number of years is less of a problem than a $10 000 LVT turning into $100 000.
Georgism is often thought of with a private owner, and the state merely taxing the proceeds of the land. But when you get close to 100% taxation of the proceeds, so that the price of the land gets down to zero, it does become very similar to the situation of the state as landowner collecting rents. Methodologically, it's certainly often useful to think of it that way, even if it's also important to distinguish the two situations in some contexts.
I see no fundamental difference between land ownership under Georgism and someone leasing land from the state. If the land value taxes are high enough such that the value of the land is 0, then it doesn't matter whether I own the land, or whether I sell it to someone who leases it to me for the amount of the LVT. If capital gains taxes were raised to 100%, would you really argue with someone who claimed that they couldn't own stock anymore?
> As for whether you lose your home if you do not generate income, how exactly is this different from today?
Because today, the amount of income you need to generate is low relative to your property value - so for people who are buying property within their means, the property taxes are basically never unaffordable - and also more predictable than under Georgism (as the total amount of tax fluctuates less with changes in land value since the taxes are a lower percentage of property value to begin with).
This point was much debated in the comments to Lars' posts about just how to think about and calculate the "value of unimproved land".
It's an argument that follows from a framework where the value of land is just determined by "bare piece of dirt and nearby publicly-funded infrastructure". And the publicly-funded infrastructure piece has room for debate if we apply public choice theory to assess the political reality of whether or not that infrastructure will be built.
The argument against that framework is the observation that the value of land is heavily influenced by positive externalities from nearby private development. For example, land used for housing is worth more if it's convenient to reach workplaces, restaurants, stores, etc. Similarly, land used for workplaces, restaurants, stores. etc. is worth more if it's convenient for customers and employees to get to these businesses.
Based on observed development patterns, these positive externalities are more than hypothetical as incentives to build on land. A developer of a master-planned community or a housing subdivision internalizes some of these positive externalities. Feedback loops as development occurs in an area - even with different owners of individual parcels - also internalize some of these externalities.
So it's not intuitive that really high taxes on a narrow portion of potential tax base (land rents) minimize deadweight loss compared to other possible tax structures.
A better example of dead weight loss would be to use a tax or a price control. One very real one: I would in theory like to hire a nanny for my kids; but I can only afford, say $15/hr. I can pay illegally, thus risking legal penalties, especially if I work for the government (and depriving her of medicare/social security employment "credit") - but she gets $15. Or I can do it legally, but this time for her to get the same $15 I might need to pay $20, to compensate for my and her share of the social security taxes. For those unwilling to go the black market route, less childcare (if any) will be purchased, less hours will be available, for less money effectively, than if that tax were not there.
NOW, I get why the taxes are there, but they do generate this loss of mutually beneficial commercial activity.
I think using physical realities as examples of dead weight loss isn't quite the thing. You can do similar things for "what if people never had to sleep" and "what if stuff could just be teleported to your doorstep and didn't have to travel". I think these innovations would cause so many changes to the economy that - while laws like supply and demand would still apply - the impact to EVERYTHING, including restaurant meals, would be unrecognizable.
Firstly, and I feel like this quote needs to be posted in bold at the top of every georgism article:
"It is not necessary to confiscate land, it is only necessary to confiscate rent."
Private citizens still hold ownership of their land, in that they can exclude its use from others, use it however they like, decide whether or not to keep or sell it, etc. Only the _rents_ of the land are "confiscated" (taxed) by the government. The only piece that georgism adds is that if you want to keep your land you need to pay that tax - but that doesnt mean you don't own it, anymore than you don't currently own your house because you have to pay property tax.
Still! I would personally advocate for a modified Georgism, where LVT was substantially reduced on property that _the owner is actively living on_ and isnt being used for commercial purposes. This throws a bone to everyone who wants to own more easily their family land and doesnt really add much disruption. The problem of land rents really come from commercial land usage. Theres just so much more of it.
As far as the moral stance.... It seems plainly unjust for anyone to be able to own some part of "natures bounty" forever in perpetuity just because. Especially considering that this land was not justly acquired in the first place. I understand theres a bias for anyone who currently owns land, but I find the philosophy that natures bounty is the collective and equal inheritance of all man kind both immediately sensible, fair, beautiful, and its the only land rights philosophy thats at all coherent other than literal might makes right.
Why should you want Georgism?
1. The way things are currently set up, (nearly) all productivity gains from both labor and capital can (and in practice mostly are) eaten up by landlords, without those landlords adding any value anywhere. This is bad for everyone but landlords.
2. Georgism would create a much more efficient economy by both removing a ton of deadweight loss, removing a lot of distortive market effects, and potentially by in part replacing much more distortive taxes with one thats non-distortive
2A. Which would mean cheaper rents, and products, etc.
3. Georgism means that not all land and resource ownership can be swallowed up by a small handful of people and corporations who are then able to lord it over the rest of the human race forever. Whether or not that is ACTUALLY what is happening, your land morality would permit it, which should be a strong signal.
4. You won't meaningfully lose ownership of your land. The title remains yours. You can still do with it as you choose. You just have to pay the tax. Like any other property.
On 2, see Pete's comment on Lars' 3rd post on assessment, or my comment. The additional uncertainty and negative externalities introduced by the LVT is a significant disincentive to invest in improvement of land. And I think it's quite clear that land is inherently close to worthless. So the whole thing kind of falls apart there.
> The additional uncertainty and negative externalities introduced by the LVT is a significant disincentive to invest in improvement of land.
Just checking, is this based on the assumption that assessments to separate improvements from base land are epistemologically (or pragmatically) impossible?
And would you agree or disagree that this assertion could be tested by seeing if increases in LVT with all else held equal, would NOT lead to increased building permits and density, but even decreased building permits and density?
I think I'm being a little more radical. I'm saying that the value of base land is close to zero, especially if you stretch out time horizons a little(decades in some places, centuries in others). And given that we start with very low/zero base value, almost all of the value comes from human activity and improvements, either to the land itself, or via agglomeration effects to the land near it. And that an LVT would lead to significant distortions in the incentives to use land productively.
Let's say you implement an LVT system when the value of base land is close to zero, in an area that may make for a good city if someone were to put in enough money to create enough improvements to induce enough people to move and do things there. I think the LVT would significantly reduce the incentive for large scale investment to take place, because a significant part of the return to the large scale investment happens via capturing the spillovers from agglomeration. An LVT almost by definition makes capturing those spillovers either impossible, or reduces their size. This is a large deadweight loss, and I don't see a significant offsetting positive incentive.
I'll give you an example that I know well. In the early 1990's, Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi, India, basically did not exist. Most of the land prices there were very low. A large real estate developer bought up huge (non-contiguous) parcels of land, invested in putting up office complexes, housing and infrastructure in ~50% of those parcels that by themselves were unlikely to provide attractive risk adjusted returns. But they also had the remaining parcels that appreciated in value when the investment did pay off, allowing further building and significantly greater returns. Today Gurgaon is an enormous generator of economic activity. My understanding is that under an LVT, it would be very unlikely for something like this to happen. And at least from the comments it appears that this is not an uncommon story.
The uncertainty issues are actually even stronger problems I think, even if you and I don't agree on the base value of land being almost zero. Investments are already a risky proposition. Externalities now make them even riskier, and they also flip the direction of the relationship between externalities and risk(or at least introduce a factor with opposite sign). Positive externalities can now increase the riskiness of your investment, because your land's value and hence the tax you have to pay can go up significantly, and negative externalities can decrease them. But of course, positive externalities also have positive effects, and negative externalities negative ones. How would someone planning an investment factor this in?
I can of course be convinced by empirical evidence, but it would likely have to be extensive. It would need to cover long stretches of time, and point to significantly different outcomes. Like how capitalism >> socialism.
But I would definitely shift the confidence in my priors around with weaker evidence.
I have to admit that I'm noticing your assertions are very confusing to me, which is typically a sign that I'm either misapprehending or misunderstanding you, or that we're proceeding from some basic differences in definitions and how we use words, or something like that.
So rather than jumping right into an argument and likely talking straight past you, I'm going to think about this for a while and maybe get back to you later, possibly in a future follow up post or something. That alright?
Sure. It is entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding something about the LVT setup, and using terms in incorrect ways, in which case I would be happy to be corrected and understand things better.
I think what’s missing is this: someone builds a mall, all land in area appreciates slightly, LVT rises for all plots including the one where the mall stands. It would both be fair and incentivize the right things for the extra LVT to go to the owner of the mall that generated it in the first place.
Likewise, if everyone in a neighborhood agrees to improve their own homes in a way that benefits everyone, they’d only get an LVT increase for their trouble. There should be some way of profiting from your improvements that made surrounding land more valuable similarly to the way you can profit from the improvements directly.
Exactly what negative externality? LVT exists to _address_ and externality - that of the unearned increase in land value due to the actions of uninvolved proximal-by-chance agents. The tax allows the local government to capture this externality, which gives them an incentive to create policies that promote land improvement.
The individual maintains whatever incentive is in place to improve land based on the profitability of the improvement alone.
Comments like this one have confused me - I was figuring that "we should only be promoting projects which are on their own profitable" and "if an improvement is a actually a good idea, it will be profitable, and the incentive to create the improvement is to capture that profit, and if you cant profit it by it then theres some other better use for the resources" were in-the-water-supply enough in the commentariat - most tend to agree this reasoning holds for all other sorts of projects and products. Why are land improvements different?
In some ways I'm saying that those externalities which you're calling unearned and believe should be captured by the state are a large and significant part of how and why improvements happen. Capturing (or being able to capture) agglomeration effects makes up a significant part of the incentive structure of land improvement.
Let me see if the following hypothetical will help make this clearer for all of us. We have a bunch of settlers in 17th century England. They are told they have two options to settle in what is now the USA.
One half of the American states, randomly chosen, is Propertyland. In Propertyland, they each get to own land and profit from the improvements they make to their owned land, as well as profit from the improvements other settlers are making to their land.
The other half, also random, is Georgeland. In Georgeland, you will not profit from improvements that the other settlers make, only from those that you make to your own land. Any increases in the value of the base land that comes from agglomeration effects will be taxed away. You will get the returns of this tax as UBI, equally distributed amongst everyone.
Which half do you expect more settlers to settle in (remember settlers/immigrants tend to self-select for risk taking and seeking higher returns)? Which kind of settlers do you think will settle in which half? Which half do you expect to be more prosperous and developed 20 years later? 50? 100?
"Natures Bounty" does not "just happen". Trees, soil, greenfields, farmable area, walkable paths, hell even just clearly marked geolocation data, are *created*. By human effort. The stories about frontier settlers just throwing seeds and eating well are fables and lies.
Those would be improvements, then, and would not be part of the LVT.
The iron vein in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years, the virgin redwood forest, a deep aquifer, despoits of shale natural gas, as far as humans are concerned, absolutely "just happened." Prospectors would get subsidized for _finding_ them, the ones who put the labor in to _extracting_ them get the lions share of the profit, but the resources themselves are only coherently partially owned by all.
They would receive that value by an LVT and a severance tax. Uncomplicated to administer, and a lot of the infrastructure for levying these is already in place.
But if humans had to create it, its an improvement, and not LVT-ed
I believe the value of improvements of this sort are included in estimates of the total value of "unimproved" land on which Georgists base their claims about how much a LVT would raise. If we're not going to be taxing them, the revenue claims have to be scaled down in proportion.
The government used (georgist economist) Vikrey's auction techniques to deal with Spectrum - ie, if you use an auction you can 'separate' the value of the 'nature' part of the product (the innate spectrum) from the labor (the company using the spectrum to build cool stuff).
Using the auction, we have an assessment of the land value at a baseline set by the 'market' of everyone participating. Any auctions above that minimum - the difference between the first and second price, indicate the amount that company believes they can make from their labor and capital compared to their competitors.
LVT aims to achieve this for all such instances, using assessment in place of auctions (though some georgists support self-assessed taxes as outlined by posner and weyl for more forms of economic land).
This is mostly an aside, but spectrum auctions as we know them today are not Vickrey-based. Spectrum auctions as we know them today are simultaneous multi round ascending.
(Design credit was given to Paul Milgrom, Preston McAfee, and several related individuals, though the auction process is not conceptually difficult. Once they found that their auction design was being used in a high-stakes auction, Milgrom and co established a consultancy that advised some of the participants, showed those clients how to break the auction and saving those clients a billion dollars of otherwise taxpayer-destined money.
Suffice to say that this auction mechanism worked out great for Milgrom & company.)
"You won't meaningfully lose ownership of your car. The title remains yours. You can still do with it as you choose. You just have to pay the tax. Like any other property."
"And we just happened to set the tax to what what uber earns per car in their fleet. So, be rich, or give it to an uber driver."
I'd be curious to hear you make the case for a given dollar of tax revenue being collected out of incomes instead of land. Why do you think that's preferable?
Wealth is not zero sum. What we do all day at work *creates* it. Take a second to appreciate that. Customers get things they desire and wouldn't have, if not for your battle against entropy to make them exist. For various reasons this campaign against entropy is more successful in proximity to a lot of other humans. So we have cities. It is good and correct and cause for celebration that urban workers have high incomes. They create the most value.
Land is zero sum. Owning land doesn't bring any more of what people want into the world. It simply puts you in a position to capture it. Like a tax, except you aren't the government and you aren't putting it towards socially beneficial ends. Quite the opposite: landowners, in particular the suburban middle class surrounding productive cities, use their ownership to put the brakes on productive activities as much as possible (NIMBY policies) while at the same time capturing most of the wealth created by labor as rent (for landlords) and home equity (for both landlords and owner-occupiers).
Georgism is good because it puts remuneration back in line with the value one creates. Obviously this is good news for the value creators. Homeowners can also make money by creating value in their own ways, for example subdividing or adding on units to their properties to offer into the housing crises. They just can't build wealth by sitting there on decaying properties while others do useful work down the street.
1. Georgism does not force you to be maximally economically productive. Land value tax (LVT) goes to universal basic income (UBI), so if there are n people, then you get to own 1/n of the land (weighted by value). The UBI exactly pays for the LVT. With that 1/n of the land, you get to do whatever you want, and can be as economically unproductive as you want. If you want to use more land, then you'll pay a bit more for that privilege, and if you don't think you actually need a full 1/n of the land, then you can get a bit of extra money by using less.
2. Georgism is not an all or nothing proposal. It's perfectly possible for some pieces of land to have a 70% LVT, while the rest of the country still continues using the normal system. (And the size of the LVT can vary as well, with 85% generally being the upper end of the scale.) I'd personally be overjoyed to see a 50% LVT tried on a few pieces of land in a single city. (Either land that's already owned by the government, or bought from any existing landowners who are willing to sell for a reasonable price.) A particularly easy policy would be put an LVT on all land that is being sold by the government (crown land sales, etc.). The immediate price fetched would be lower, but the LVT would raise additional funds over time.
3. Why is Georgism good? Two reasons:
a. It discourages speculation, which is harmful. (Because it causes people to buy land and sit on it. So land is going unused that could be used to house people, or used for another productive purpose. Also housing prices randomly spiking all the time isn't great.)
b. Land represents a natural bounty, much like mineral deposits, or the radio spectrum. Given a natural bounty, the best way to divide it up is equally, between all citizens. There's no reason to give any particular person a larger share, because a natural bounty is by definition naturally occurring, and no one did anything to create it in the first place. Mineral deposits are a one-time bounty: Minerals are worth money. Land and the radio spectrum are a recurring bounty: Using a piece of the radio spectrum for a year is worth $X and using it again the next year is worth $X again (plus a bit, because inflation). The same is true of land.
So if land is a natural bounty, how do we divide it equally? Simply dividing up the land equally between everyone, and then letting folks trade between themselves after that point in time has a problem: Most people who will be born in this country aren't born yet, so we don't have a way of giving them their share of the land. Since land is a recurring bounty, that problem has an easy solution: Each year, distribute the bounty of the land for that year equally between all of the citizens who are alive in that year. Do the same the next year and the next. The system that implements this is LVT + UBI.
4. Georgism hurts rural and suburban homeowners less than you think. Land value is highest in the middle of the city. So even though urban dwellers are taking up less land, they are taking up more-valuable land, and would therefore pay proportionally more LVT. Also, see point 2 above about not having a Georgist system everywhere: A lot of the harm in the existing system is from speculation, which isn't as much of a problem in rural and suburban areas. If Georgism is mostly adopted by urban areas, and everywhere else keeps chugging along with the current system, I'd consider that a massive success.
5. This isn't an answer to any of you points, but is something I believe is important to say: It's unfair to suddenly dump a large LVT on existing landowners. There needs to be just compensation for such an action, and I'd only support Georgist proposals that are fair to everyone. There are plenty of improvements to the existing state of things that can be made without screwing people over.
Tacking UBI onto LVT seems like taking two hipster ideas, neither ready for prime time, and just throwing them together because why the hell not, none of this is going to *actually* happen.
I'd prefer an LVT to actually happen, but that would require the current Georgists to undergo some markcomm training.
Georgists were very close to succeeding in many parts of the western world, with several constitutional amendments failing on tight margins, some candidates won and made huge reforms using georgist ideals without achieving the 'endgame', and with some pseudo-implementations emerging ad hoc (like Alaska's dividend system). UBI is not a hipster idea, it's been hanging around for a very long time! IMO it always fails because if it isn't funded by a LVT most of the UBI - at least for renters - will just lead to increased rents.
UBI was linked to LVT by Henry George back in the 19th century (well before UBI was a hipster idea.) It's his answer to the minority of low-earning people who would be significantly injured by implementing Georgism.
Is the UBI really an integral part of Georgism? Lars' first post in the sequence said: "Georgists assert that if we sufficiently tax land in this manner, we'll not only end the housing crisis but also fix a bunch of misaligned incentives that cause poverty to persist alongside economic progress, while raising a bunch of revenue that can lower or even eliminate other less efficient taxes, such as sales and income taxes." Obviously you can't use the proceeds from the LVT to reduce other taxes if you're also paying it out as a UBI.
You don't need to attain "current expenses plus UBI", you need to attain "UBI plus the remaining expenses that it doesn't replace once you account for the way fixing misaligned incentives fix lots of things", which is a significantly different number.
Like, getting rid of payroll taxes, which is a disincentive to hiring people, reduces poverty, which reduces the spending on poverty programs, which reduces the amount of taxes you need to raise in the first place.
You'd have to push Lafferism awfully far in order for the second-order effects of eliminating payroll taxes to amount to more than a fraction of the direct revenue loss. One other tax we'd have to get rid of willy-nilly is existing real-estate taxes: you definitely don't want those piled on top of a LVT.
Yes, the Citizen's Dividend is an integral part of Georgism. George himself believed in more of a limited government, didn't believe that charity was a very useful tool and that the vast majority of people just wanted an opportunity to use their labor productively, and that the CD would pay for the vast majority of "social services" we now pay for with government spending.
But partly the idea relies on a concept known as "ATCOR" or "All Taxes From Out of Rents" (which I think he briefly touches on), but I think he intentionally didn't try to get into it too much because as you can see just the LVT in itself is a step too far.
But, basically the idea is that all "excess" value in the economy flows into land values, so if you reduces taxes in one area, it would result in an increase in land value and therefore revenue from land value tax would increase. Its theoretically true, but there is less empirical evidence to support it, so lars stayed away from it since he's was trying to be evidentiary.
All that being said, the general view of most Georgists is this:
Let's shift taxes off improvements and onto land as much as possible.
Once that's shown to work, then we can gradually increase the LVT up to 100%
As we do that, if we're getting a surplus of revenue, reduce other forms of tax, especially the onerous local taxes, like sales and excise taxes and all that.
As tax base is shown to be stable, we can phase in a CD as we phase out other forms of bureaucratic and wasteful social spending.
If all of that doesn't get us there, then we'll build onto LVT whatever other least bad taxes are necessarily to fund the government, like pigouvian taxes on things like pollution, there are certain qualities of intellectual property that are land-like, and then we haven't really touched on the digital economy and how parts of that are land-like.
And your critiques seem like statements of general discomfort about having your worldview challenged, continually thrown against a mountain of evidence.
Land Value Tax is hundreds of years old. Adam Smith advocated for land value tax over property taxes 250 years ago. Its been past ready for prime time.
The commenter you're replying to says they'd prefer an LVT to happen and you accuse them of being uncomfortable with having their worldview challenged?
To be honest, to me it seems like it's the other way around. Almost without exception (Lars and Andrew are definite exceptions, I'm probably forgetting others), the proponents of Georgism in the comments here act like dangerous fanatics, completely uninterested in examining how their radical proposals can go wrong, unwilling to entertain other value systems and too wrapped up in self-righteousness to even try to be convincing.
Then please, engage with the data and prove us wrong. Our vociferous defense of Georgism does come from a place of passion, but it also comes from well-reasoned and empirically supported studies and data.
No one is born a Georgist in the same way they're born a neoliberal or a capitalist or a socialist or a communist. We all got here from somewhere, which means we've probably spent more time than the average person thinking about political-economic systems.
Sorry if that makes us sound self-righteous. I think the Georgists have done a fairly decent job at acknowledging valid criticisms and addressing them, but a large chunk of the opposition arguments have simply been inconsistent with broadly accepted economic theory or strawmen.
What you're missing is that your preferences and value systems might not align with those of "normies". When someone brings up really bad or disastrous potential consequences of Georgism for an individual and the responses are "that's intended - but just think of all the other people who will benefit"... it isn't helping your cause and, frankly, it makes you sound dangerous. You might be able to convince the tiny group of utilitarians who share your value system (who also discount the ever-present unknown, unintended and unexpected consequences of radical change), but that's it.
I don't think spending more time thinking about political-economic systems necessarily makes you better at making political-economic decisions. If your preferences are abnormal (and I certainly think Georgist preferences are) it just means you'll be able to cause harm more efficiently and ruthlessly.
It takes a lot of gall to show up an established community's comment section and lecture everyone in it like a college professor who already knows all the right answers, but fanatics like these are present in every fringe group.
Mainstream political views have fanatics, too, but they are such a minority they can easily be shoved into a closet by the mainstream thinkers so no one sees them.
Lars is doing yeoman's work to try to persuade people to go to an LVT, but hundreds of hours of his work can be undone in a few seconds by one asshole who won't shut up.
That's really interesting. My experience is the exact opposite. I've previously heard nothing about Georgism, it nearly perfectly fitted my moral intuition and one of the spectacular advantages of Georgism which I immediately noticed is that it's so easy to implement compared to all the other radical economical and political projects.
No need for violent revolution and chopping the heads of kings, no need for immediate radical paradigm shift and imposing new regime simultaniously across all of the world or even a country, no need to wait for a hundred years before we finally arrive to a glorious future. Just one local goverment requires to change tax policy a bit, implementing somewhat 10% lvt instead of other taxes, reducing the deadweight loss and getting noticeable economical benefits soon enough. Then, if it actually works, iterate for highter values of lvt, slowly adding some ubi and just let the market solve it! And if along the way we arrive to some sudden bad consequence when switching from 75% lvt to 85% lvt - than stay at 75%. What can be easier?
As fo moral arguments. Could you elaborate what you find moral about current economical system? I think it will work better if we start from here. You mentioned that 64.8% americans own their houses and therefore value this ability. But what does it actually mean? Is it just because owning land is economically reasonable under current system? Or is it because owning the land allows you to use it the way you want?
We're trying to turn talk into action and get some localities to embrace this, although the areas in Pennsylvania have already shown it can be fairly successful.
I am planning to write a blog post about the normative aspect of Henry George's land tax... I'll post it somewhere when (if?) it's done. People seemed to enjoy my recent book review of Kroptokin's 'The Conquest of Bread' (https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2021-10-30-book-review-conquest-of-bread.html), and I hope to continue entertaining people.
1) I believe this was addressed in the Book Review (part 0). I was certainly mostly convinced by the moral argument, and I think I've seen the cat. (The gist of the argument being that the reason poverty seems not to decrease with progress despite increased production of resources is that rent sucks up everything you gain. George's thief metaphor was particularly striking as a good piece of rhetoric around this.)
2) Under Georgism, people can still own their homes; just (effectively) not the land on which it lies.
3) Georgism obligates nobody to use their land in a maximum-productivity way (anymore than income tax obligates anyone to work maximum-salaries). In fact, Georgists would argue most people would be better off if they did exactly what they're doing with taxes focusing as much as possible on land (thanks to both other taxes being lowerable as a result and on decreased dead weight loss). It does harshly punish real estate speculation, but that doesn't strike me as a bug as much as as an important feature. (Also, I expect it should be easy to do LVT with some special exemption for one plot of residential land where you live, or up to some reasonable value, if it turns out that there would be an unreasonable burden on homeowners otherwise; which doesn't seem like the case to me.)
4) Note also that George's argument is meant to disincentivise slum lords, but not the sorts of landlords actually providing tenants with good value (as buildings and everything of value in them are improvements, not land).
That is almost right except for one key detail: Georgist taxes are based on the maximum productivity of your land *without* improvements. If you try to make any productive use of your land you'll be putting either capital or labour into it; none of which are taxed in a Georgist utopia. If you improve your land even just a bit, you are entitled to all of the profits without any penalty whatsoever.
(I.e., income tax incentivises you to work more productively no matter how much you earn, because it takes a percentage of all you earn. LVT only incentivises you to produce more than what you could make by rent alone. Everything you produce beyond that is all yours.)
The only case in which you have to squeeze everything out of your land is if the only thing you're using it for is collecting rent without having spent a cent maintaining it, improving it, or on anything besides purchasing its raw natural resources. In which case the moral Georgist argument says it's right that you shouldn't be able to do so, as you're just making money off of others' work.
Since the land *does* have improvements on it, how do you determine what it would be hypothetically worth if it didn't? In the rare case where there's a vacant plot down the road that someone e.g. recently purchased to use as grazing land, there's a reasonable benchmark for that. Otherwise, it looks like a huge incentive for corrupt accounting. Who decides which accountants get to set the price?
>Georgist taxes are based on the maximum productivity of your land *without* improvements.
If putting improvements on your land would allow making a profit of $X, people will be willing to pay you $X + base value for the land. The effect of this is that the value of the land includes the value gained from improvements even if you "don't tax improvements".
But no! That's precisely the point! The amount a LVT taxes is the rent you could get for a completely empty plot of land! If you improve your property such that you can make an additional profit of $X, your LVT goes up by exactly $0!
Not true. The price that someone is willing to pay you for an empty plot of land is based on the profit he'd make after he bought it. If you could improve your property and make an additional profit of $X, someone would be willing to buy the empty land for an additional $X so that he could improve it and make the profit himself. This makes the price of the *empty* land go up by $X.
It seems self evident to me that when I rent an apartment, the land value portion of my rent is just wrong. For the house, I'm willing to pay the landlord. Someone had to build the house. For the landscaping, the appliances, for anything the landlord pays for up front or works to upkeep so I don't have to, I'm happy to pay. But it's clear to me that some portion of my rent is only paid to reimburse my landlord for paying the guy who owned the land before him, who paid the guy before him, and so on.
If we could somehow magically live in a world where no one had to pay for the land value when buying property, that would be a better world. This doesn't create perverse incentives, it just reduces the price of things. Communists always talk about "wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to pay for things" and there are a million reasons it wouldn't work which aren't obvious until you learn about economics, but on this one issue, land value, the communists are right and the current system is needlessly cruel.
I'm not convinced land value is in fact a coherent concept. If it is, I'm not convinced LVT would eliminate land value from rent prices. If it would, I'm not sure how we could fairly transition from a world without LVT to a world with LVT. But if George is right, it's clearly a moral imperative to do so.
Compare to communists. If there was a real chance that they were right, that charging people money for their basic needs didn't lead to better outcomes, that privately owned capital added no value to society at all, that every time I buy something my money is being stolen for no good reason, then it would be a moral imperative to investigate further. So I'm not gonna be satisfied until someone explains to me why a just world can't possibly exist in which my landlord doesn't get a pay raise every time a new restaurant opens up downtown.
Taxing land is good because it's supply-inelastic. Taxing anything elastic (like income, or even consumption) reduces the supply, and thus results in deadweight loss.
How do you conceptualize utility gain? I find that I am frequently confused about how to think about problems posed in these terms.
Eg. The writer for "All That Is Solid" recently wrote a hypothetical that says, "one person who you do not know at all will gain 10 utility from [you giving him a prize]; the second person is a close friend, and will only gain 5 utility from the prize. Who do you give the prize to?"
I have only understood "utility" via context of writings like these, so perhaps it is more defined than I realize. At present, I find that I struggle with it in a few ways. For one, I can't intuitively "feel" the weight of the utility that each of these people gain. Is there a good analogy of what each of these feel like, and when you think about them, is it purely in numerical terms or do you convert it to some experiential feeling?
Another problem I have is one of scale: if one person experiences 10 utility, do I understand that to be "positive" like my experience of eating a good breakfast or taking a nap? Or is it more positive; or is it less, and a good nap is actually worth 20 utility? "Double" the utility means different things depending on how "good" a utility of 1 is. Are units of utility defined or commonly agreed upon?
* Also I think I might be conflating utility and happiness / pleasure. Not sure how much they go together or if they are distinct.
"Units" of utility should be understood to be purely relative within a given thought experiment. If someone says, "X gets 20 utility, Y gets 10," all that means is that X gets 2x as much as Y. I don't think anyone realistically tries to define an absolute unit of utility.
"Utility" isn't a specific thing to imagine. It's always whatever the person who gets it wants. But people want different things in different ways. It could be the joy of new love, or the relaxation of a good nap, or the excitement of traveling to a new place, or the satisfaction of finally understanding calculus, or recognizing a Shakespearian reference. I think a lot of these thought experiments that just talk directly about units of utility are often highly misleading, because we really don't *feel* those units of utility when they are put in abstract terms like that.
I have a set of preferences about how the world should be, everything from "I would like to eat cake" to my political opinions. Theoretically I could go through all of my preferences and decide which are more important to me (world peace > cake) and assign values to them. When we talk about "utils" that's an abstraction for fulfilling my preferences a certain amount. So if eating cake is 1 util and getting a new hat is ten times better than that it's 10 utils. So we can talk about it in thought experiments like would I rather have 1 util now (by eg eating cake, but not necessarily, could he anything else of same value) or 10 utils next year (likewise with the hat or thing of similar value).
Here is how utility ratios are mathematically defined.
Suppose for example that a slice of cake is defined to be 1 util. How many utils is a free haircut worth? Well, offer someone a choice: they can either have a slice of cake, or a lottery ticket for a 1-in-10 chance of winning a free haircut. If they choose the haircut, then the haircut is worth at least 10 utils (because the expected value of the lottery ticket is 1/10th the value of a haircut and yet still it exceeds the value of a slice of cake).
In general, you would take any object or experience and offer a choice between a slice of cake or a lottery ticket, and you adjust the odds of the lottery ticket until you find the cutoff point where the person starts choosing the cake. Those odds tell you the number of utils that object or experience is worth.
You have to adjust the setup slightly for objects worth less than 1 util (because probabilities can't be greater than 100%), but the concept is the same. Also I'm not aware of a good way to compare utils across two people, unless you assume that e.g. everyone likes cake the same amount.
Take any object or experience A, and offer someone a choice: you can either have a slice of cake, or you can have a lottery ticket for an X% chance of getting A. If they choose the cake, then A is worth at most
Does the division of interesting in form (i.e. interesting only as a result of the interesting/uninteresting division) vs interesting in content (i.e. interesting for some other reason than the interesting/uninteresting division) resolve the paradox?
All numbers are interesting in form, both by the division into interesting and uninteresting, and by everything that follows from that division, but (perhaps) not all numbers are interesting in content. I.e. Is contemplating form is necessarily interesting while contemplating content potentially uninteresting?
I'm a Christian, and when I met my wife she told me there were no such things as coincidences. I objected, and she argued that if God is guiding anything then he is guiding everything: if we really live in Pacals "best of all possible worlds" (which I believe we do) then it's all one thing, a single tapestry where every thread is purposeful even if we can't see the pattern where we are. I do believe in free will, but if God knows what I will freely choose, and what everyone will freely choose, and if he interferes at all with anything else (which I believe he does) then the argument stands.
I find my life is better when I choose to believe my wife. Today I was late to work, with both kids in the back (headed to daycare) and I was in an enormous hurry. I found myself in a situation on the road I've never been in before: the fast lane was blocked by someone going ten miles under the speed limit, and both of the other lanes had cars essentially matching her speed. I changed lanes several times trying to find a way around, and was thwarted on every occasion. I could have just cursed my luck. But if nothing is a coincidence, then this wasn't either. I reflected on why this might be happening: perhaps if I was allowed to go at high speed I would get into a car accident. With a baby and a toddler in the back, that could be disasterous. I calmed down and accepted that I was going to get to work late and that was okay.
Of course, people do get in car accidents all the time. If there are no coincidences, then those aren't either. But really that's just an extension of the problem of evil general, and I've worked that out to my personal satisfaction already.
All of this to say, I don't know if there are coincidences but I've chosen not to believe in them and that's been great for me personally.
Have you read Voltaire's Candide? It's a fun story - it rejects most gruesomely the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, in favor of the conclusion that we must cultivate our gardens: to attempt to live simply in the world, rather than strive for meaningless titles or lucre. Really it's great just to see Voltaire rip into everyone, and trace some legends and clichés back to a source.
I'm aware of the book, haven't read it. I know it was in great part a rebuttal to Liebniz, but it was mostly an emotional rebuttal of "Look! Look how much the earthquake sucked! Look how bad it was! Do you think we're in the best of all possible worlds now?" Which is a nice rhetorical device, but I already knew the world was terrible before I even heard Leibniz's argument. You are not providing me with new information by going into detail about the terribleness.
Yeah, earthquakes build character. Or something. "Best of all possible worlds" is IMO dubious, but it always included the claim that we needed some measure of tragedy to achieve our full potential, and the claim was made by people who knew full well there was an awful lot of tragedy in the world. So while I don't buy the argument, I think Voltaire's rebuttal is even weaker.
But, "live simply in the world rather than strive for titles or gold", sounds like broadly good advice. So if you can use a massive earthquake to get that message out to a receptive audience, maybe earthquakes *do* build character. Or at least inspire great literature. I'm not even going to try to do the utilitarian math to show that the Lisbon Earthquake was a net good, but there's definitely positive terms in that equation.
To be very precise, Restoration Movement, Christian Church and Churches of Christ. Not to be confused with Church if Christ or Disciples of Christ, of course!
Thanks. I had just read Ross Douthat’s latest book. He became a Catholic as an adult. He’s been going through some serious health challenges and is trying to understand what God has in mind for him.
I was raised Roman Catholic myself and the way it was presented to my credulous 8 year old mind caused a lot of anxiety and confusion. By the time I was 16 I had to give it up.
You know, as I have grown older and read more widely I have become quite attracted to Catholicism. I was raised to believe the Bible and the Bible alone, which is well and good. But it meant a lot of things were not clear. Why is homosexual sex wrong? Because the Bible says so. Why no sex before marriage? Because the Bible says so. Etc., etc. But when I started reading Catholics I found they actually had reasons for everything, explanations that made sense of things that I had always taken on faith. I seriously considered converting.
But on the other hand, it seems that Catholicism is not doing very well. I hear a lot about people like you who were raised Catholic and did not do well. My brother lives in a majority Catholic nation, and he has a great deal of negative things to say. In the end, I decided I should stay where I am and try to serve God with what I have been given. It's an ongoing process. It seems no matter which denomination you look at there is rot somewhere, though not always the same places.
I live my life the same way. Romans 8:28 - "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."
As John Schilling says below, it's often hard to see how "building character" comes out of some really terrible situations, but we happen to know that it often does (always is hard to prove from our limited perspective). WWII was really bad in a lot of ways, but it also fixed the Great Depression, reinstated the will of the people to fight tyranny, led to a great industrialization and productive new world order, a huge improvement in dozens of technological fields, and more. Was it on net good? Who knows, we have no measurement tools capable of trying.
I'm not even that tied to the "builds character" part of it. After all, if a child is murdered in a basement it would be hard to say that it built his character. The fact is the whole problem is too big. I mean, with WWII it's not just about the Great Depression: what happened in WWII (and what happens every single day) will have effects that change things for thousands of years to come. Today's tragedy may result in good we could never have predicted 10,000 years later. It's too big for man's mind to hold at once. We can try to figure out why certain evils are allowed to occur, but we're likely to miss the mark drastically from our limited perspective.
If the world as we know it is a story, it appears to be a tragedy. But we are only in the middle chapters: we don't even know whether we're in chapter 20 or chapter 2, or how many chapters there are to go. But however long it is, Christians believe the story has a happy ending. I really liked Unsong because despite being an atheist Scott got that exactly right. I am confident that someday all the theodicies we come up with now will seem like fretting over lost pennies compared to the good that is ultimately wrought. Just because I believe this is the best of all possible world's doesn't mean that I think it's the best right now: the universe is a tree that is still waiting for the fruit to form, a woman still in the midst of labor, and a piece of clay still not ready for the kiln.
Or at least, that is what I have been taught and what I believe. Theodicies are not really meant to convince outsiders, but to clear an obstacle to those who are otherwise ready to accept Christianity but for the problem of evil. As Lewis put it,
"Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform. At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin."
In the same way, if one is not already at least somewhat willing to accept as true the idea of an all powerful and all good God, then Leibniz's theodicy is foolishness. It wouldn't convince anyone by itself. But it is helpful to those who are already convinced, strengthening our spirit and encouraging us to weather the storms of this world with the hope that our pain has meaning and will be redeemed profitably in the end.
Why is wading out into mildly cool water so unpleasant, but jumping/diving in with your whole body so much better? And also why after 30 something years of experience with this phenomenon do I still always opt to start wading in and resist diving for as long as possible?
I do the same thing. I think if you dive in it is difficult to catch the first breath, and there is always the fear of having a heart attack from the first sudden shock of the cold water. I am 70 years old, and I swim a few times a week, but always wade in.
I swim in the River Thames (a few miles upstream of London) and have taken to diving in from a friend's mooring, so I don't have the option of wading. Lovely!
When you wade out, your mind is continually comparing the ambient air temperature on your skin to the water temperature, and informing you that the water is Very Cold relative to the air, which is true. As you keep your feet in the water, gradually your mind drops this alert, but as you wade further in, the alert is raised for each new body part as it contacts the water. You’re basically subjecting yourself to torture out of fear! However as soon as you jump in, this continual comparison is unnecessary and your mind drops it and adjusts to what normal skin temp in the water is within a moment.
As to why you personally choose to wade in, I’m guessing that you’re letting your fear of the sudden shock master your behavior. I can’t explain that. Everyone I know who has thought this through chooses to jump in, but then I am very familiar and comfortable in the water, and I continually am kind of surprised by the aversion to temporary discomfort across all ranges of sensation, from water to exercise.
Because humans have a gasping shock reaction to sudden immersion in cold water that is very unpleasant to experience, even if short lasting. Similarly, I would choose to take the stars then to rappel down the side of a skyscraper, even if the latter is faster, because humans have a natural fear response to falling.
it's like ripping a band-aid off - both pulling glue from your skin and entering cold water suck, but doing 10x more of it at once doesn't suck 10x more, and shortens the total duration of discomfort required to finish the process.
i.e. I find jumping into cold water is actually much more unpleasant in the instant than wading in, but it lasts a second instead of minutes, and once I'm in the air I no longer have the option to back out.
I think the anticipation is worse than the experience. Diving in to cold water I notice the temperature for a moment. Oh, colder than the air I was just in. But by the time I surface I’m usually comfortable.
Economics is not my strong suit, and maybe I missed it because of all the jargon, but I'm *really* confused about how Georgism protects against people destroying the land / extracting all the value (like, for example, a farmer who spends 20 years doing destructive farming practices) from the land and then not caring that they've destroyed its productivity for the next 200 years. Honestly, the environmentalism angle is as big a concern for me as solving urban landlord problems or government tax revenue, am I missing something?
On a very pure Georgist view, the "land value" is supposed to only be that which is unaffected by what people do with their land. The idea is that all value comes back to sources that can be characterized in three ways. Anything that is perfectly fixed in quantity for all time and can't be increased or decreased in any way is "land". Anything that each person has an equal endowment of, but that can be increased or decreased by creating or destroying people is "labor". Everything else, that is, everything that can be increased or decreased without creating or destroying people, is "capital". Thus, machinery is capital, because it can be created or destroyed without creating or destroying people. But education is also capital, as are social networks. The fertility of the soil is also capital, as are buildings.
If you tax people on the value of the kinds of things that can be created or destroyed, then you discourage people from creating value and encourage them to destroy value. Thus, the Georgist says that you should completely ignore the fertility of the land in levying your land value tax, and only pay attention to the features of the land that the person can't create or destroy - i.e., you should tax people entirely based on the location and immutable features (if any) of the land, but not on the things like fertility that they could work to build up, or drain.
One thing people have sometimes emphasized is that a structure on some land can sometimes have positive value, but sometimes has negative value, if the obvious use of the land would involve removing the structure and building something else. So I would think that at least part of what happens when you nuke some land is that you destroy some existing value, but part of what happens is you also add some negative value.
But this suddenly makes me realize that it's not obvious that there is a clear sense of when the stuff on the land has *zero* value, as opposed to positive or negative. It's seeming a bit more slippery than I had thought...
Land value is affected by what people around that land do with theirs though, isn't it? Hence the talk in these threads about urban land being more valuable than rural, due to opportunities that come from population density(if I'm understanding those comments correctly).
Maybe I should say - the part of the value that is said to belong to the land is the part of the value that the *owner* is in no position to create, but is due to the work of others; the value that the owner creates is said to be "capital".
If you have a small plot of land, then this basically gets things right.
But as others have mentioned in other threads, if you have a large enough plot of land, then you could build a city on one part of it and create lots of value for the other parts of that plot.
Historically, we really don't like it when private entities create cities; it hasn't tended to go well.
So if the problem is that we are disincentivizing this, I'm not sure how many people will take this seriously as a problem.
However, if we want to specifically incentivize this, we can always create some kind of new corporate entity that collects the difference in LVT between its creation and some moving point in the past, so it can collect profit on, say, the last 10 years of investment.
Why 10 years, rather than in perpetuity? The entire extra value of the city land, above its value as farmland, is created by the people who found the city, and people who move there voluntarily.
Moreover, why take this value away from people who have founded cities in the past, or invested in them early? And why will a promise not to confiscate this value in the future be credible if we confiscate it from those who have created it in the past?
Note that these considerations also apply to units smaller than a city (such as a new neighborhood); and they also apply to a new town or neighborhood that is sold off as parcels after it's build, not only if it remains company-owned.
For the same reasons patents don't last forever, and also for the same reasons I can't sell 10% of the work all my descendants produce for perpetuity; they're different reasons, but they both apply.
And the people who founded cities in the past, or invested in them early, are dead; we're not taking anything away from them. And even if they were still alive, the value they created is finite and static, whereas the value stream you are talking about is effectively infinite.
This is the same as a farmer demanding 10% of your wages, forever, because his food enabled you to produce any of them at all. And the blacksmith who made the farmer's tools demanding 10% of his crops, forever. And so on and so forth, until everybody owes everybody else everything they own for things their ancestors did. Except we don't count any of that - instead we count specifically the kind of thing that benefits a class of people who historically had control of the legal institutions which decided which things counted.
No. None of that makes any sense at all once you step back and actually look at it. You build a city? Your payment is what you were paid for building the city, not a portion of that city's productivity forevermore, including the productivity of people who weren't even alive to agree to that deal, now going to people who weren't even alive to create the value we're supposed to be rewarding?
A relevant question is, if land values in a city are higher than in the countryside (or higher in a neighborhood of a city than in other neighborhoods etc.), whether the extra tax should go to a central (state or national) government, or it should remain with the city (or neighborhood etc). If it goes to the central government, this creates a deadweight loss. (Some argue it's probably small, although a developer building a neighborhood and then selling it off in pieces is more realistic than an entire private city.)
However, the value of city land is created by its residents, and they are the ones paying high rent, so, in all fairness, the tax revenue should belong to them. However, this would negate another promise, that landlords couldn't pass on the tax to the tenants. The services the city government can provide from the tax revenue would (further) increase the desirability of the city, which would increase demand, which would increase land values and rent. If the city then reassesses the tax to account for the higher rents, it would create a spiral of higher rent -> higher tax -> more services -> higher rent, each tending to infinity.
The basic idea is that nonrenewable natural resources are economic land, and Georgists support "severance taxes" (a special form of LVT) on the permanent depletion of natural resources. First this discourages doing this willy nilly, and second if someone does go about degrading the earth and extracting the people's resources, society will punitively tax that act, and the value of the extraction itself should go to the people rather than to private enterprises.
Norway operates on this foundation with regards to its oil resources which I can expound on if you like, it's been very successful, especially when you compare it to status quo operations like the UK's squandering of their resources by letting private companies run the whole operation.
If it is a nonrenewable resource, why is it worse for Person A to use the resource now than for Person B to use the resource later? (As opposed to a renewable resource, where I can, e.g., see the argument that Person A shouldn't cut down all the trees without planting new ones for Person B to use down the line)
It's not so much about whether we use the resource now or later so much as who uses it now, and how their incentives to use it play out. Let me explain.
My go to case study is comparing the UK and Norway's approach to their Oil wealth.
I think the UK squandered their supply of oil and handed it out to private foreign businesses, and that furthermore British Petroleum has an absolutely devastating environmental track record, the costs of which are ultimately borne by all of humanity (and nature itself) rather than the actors who caused those problems in the first place, and that's not fair.
Norway on the other hand avoided the malaise of the resource curse with a very clever and arguably Georgist policy regarding their natural resource extraction; It was set up by an Iraqi Immigrant Petroleum engineer by the name of Farouq Al-Kasim who I highly recommend reading about. He set up a policy whereby oil *extraction* is has a massive severance tax, whereas oil *discovery* is heavily subsidized, and its all done under the supervision of an oil regulator set up in a separation-of-powers adversarial relationship with the state oil company.
This encourages a few things:
1) Oil companies can still make money. But they make their money principally by investing in getting better at extracting oil more efficiently *and more safely and with less on-site damage and pollution*, in stark contrast to BP's slapdash cost-cutting methods.
2) Oil companies make very little actual profit on extracting oil itself from Norwegian oil wells, that money mostly goes to the Norwegian people in the form of the sovereign wealth fund, for the benefit of all of society. Nobody made the oil, so by right it doesn't belong to any specific individual. But talented and hardworking and innovative people should be compensated for investing and working to discover it and for making it available -- this is a direct rebuttal to Caplan's "Search-theoretic critique" in practice, and it is a smashing success.
3) By focusing on investment and efficiency, this makes Norwegian oil exploration focus on making the best use of the wells we already have rather than just "skimming off the top" of more and more and more wells. This is the problem with land speculation -- whether it's resources or land in general, if this stuff is too cheap to hold, you get a better return on your investment going out and grabbing more of it, then you get in investing on top of what you have already had. Humans can make more investment and do more work, but we can't make more land/depletable resources, so we want to encourage more investment and less grabbing. This also has the further benefit of less pollution for the same amount of oil extracted.
Now, the big obvious elephant in the room is that this sets up an incentive for Norway to drill oil, and even if we can do that in a super clean way, the stuff is still super bad for the environment once we sell it to people and they burn it up. But if you're going to have an oil industry at all, I think this is the least worst way to do it. Pigouvian taxes on carbon are the next necessary step to price in the further externalities that are being shifted onto all of humanity and nature when Norwegian oil is sold.
So Caplan's basic argument -- which has a point -- is that Georgists are modelling a world in which all the land, and the uses for it, is already discovered. But unless you allow people who hold the land to collect the land rents, you destroy their incentive to 'search' and 'discover,' so you don't actually get land put to its highest and best use by imposing LVT. So to the degree there's stuff left to discover, punishing rent collection punishes people who try to discover.
There's other rebuttals that deal with his analysis regarding conventional land (which I won't get into as I'm not as good at articulating that as others have), and I'll stick to the critique as it goes to depletable natural resources.
Caplan's argument as applied to oil is -- if you apply a heft severance tax to the extraction of oil, why in the world would anybody go out and discover the oil? Well, the man's got a point, you've kind of knocked out the incentive there. On the one hand, this is a good thing if the policy outcome you're looking for is to *actively discourage the depletion of the resource, full stop*.
But if your policy goal is to put it to its best use, and to make sure everyone in society should benefit from the natural resource, then you need to do more than apply a severance tax and subsidize discovery.
I might have given off the impression that "LVT(and its cousins) is all you need" in this series, but what I actually intend to get across is that Georgism is bigger than just LVT, it's at root a philosophy that at its core just asks, "How can we actively reward investment and labor and punish passive extraction of rent income from pre-existing scarce things nobody created and nobody can create, and make sure everyone in society benefits from passive land rents."
So does it work? Norway is an N of one, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's a pretty astounding case study. The Norwegians are considered to be among the savviest, efficient, hi-tech, productive petroleum engineers in the world, they extract the most oil from their wells, with the least pollution and oil spills.
The problems the Norwegians have avoided in this case are the Scylla and Charybdis of the failures of conventional Capitalism and conventional Socialism.
We'll start with socialism in the form of "just nationalize the oil industry." Venezuela is a pretty good example of this -- as exploitative and corrupt and playground-for-foreign industry as you could argue the pre-Chavez oil industry was, stocking PDVSA with political cronies destroyed its industrial competence, much as Mugabe and Mao's "brutally take all the land and give it to people who don't know how to farm" policies failed with conventional land.
The problem with seizure-based socialism is it's obsessed with giving the people's resources to the people, but it doesn't solve the problem of aligning incentives that reward competence and wise stewardship of those resources so they can be productive enough. It doesn't matter if everybody's equal if everybody's also poor.
Likewise the problem with totally privatized capitalism is it hands the people's natural resources to private industries who a) don't share it and b) aren't incentivized to work hard or to invest or innovate as much as they would have to if they couldn't passively just collect the easy oil rents (or whatever the resource is).
Yeah, they could work harder, and they will invest to some degree, but it's always cheaper to go grab another natural resource node and skim the easy stuff off the top, and make someone else pay for the waste, than it is to have a severance tax stick that punishes you for being lazy and wasteful and a discovery subsidy carrot that rewards you for hard work and innovation.
I'm guessing there is a good explanation for it (land use is not even close to my area of expertise, assuming I even have such an area), but it seems like it would be more efficient if you stopped taking one step forward (tax) and then one stop back (subsidize) and then stopped paying bureaucrats to perform that song and dance.
try to look at it from supply and demand. 'demand' for land is actually tied in with transportation innovations/efficiency for a key reason: it comes down to how much people want to use a given piece of land. if you nuke the land, sure, you dodge taxes, but now the land is useless to *you* as well! since land is the base of all wealth, this is a rough way to make a buck.
georgists would argue that long-term environmental consequences are a sort of monopoly privilege. you have the privilege of profiting now at the zero-sum expense of others later on. most would recommend using regulations, carbon taxes, or other schemes to prevent this. Generally i like simple rules that can be consistently applied, so using taxation on pollution is my preferred solution.
there is a lot of good reading on georgist/environmentalist synthesis though - it's generally seen as a preferable system for environmental sustainability than private land ownership. ostrom's work is pretty informative on that- she wasn't a georgist explicitly, but was very interested in 'third ways' beyond states and markets that people solve problems.
I tend to think about examples like exploitive logging practices where the people will be dead by the time the metaphorical bill comes due. But I'll believe that this is solvable with other methods, i.e. regulations and taxation. But "pollution" isn't the only thing in question, because like, there's also just sheer "we could improve this marsh by filling it in with dirt, and make more money on it because then we could rent it" type stuff. Yes we can regulate against that, but also, political will can be bought.
If you think that the marshland is valuable to society as a nature reserve, and yet it is owned by a private entity, society ought to pay them for the value it provides!
Honestly, my personal politics come down pretty much on the "land should be collectively owned by societies with strong cultural mores of conservation and responsible use" side of things, I'm just trying to wrap my head around how the Georgist system is designed.
i'll give you the additional point that, save Disneyworld, it's very rare for 'valuable land' to have development pressure outside of Urban cores under georgism. The only exceptions are areas w/ national resources, and most georgists support pollution/externality taxes or just straight up regulation of energy monopolies who have access to the earth's resources to limit harm.
The other thing that comes through in stiglitz's 'Henry Choice Theorem' is kinda the idea of 'pushing' land values around and up. The land around central park is way way more valuable than the totality *of* central park if we were to develop the green space - when you zoom out the parcels a little more, central park ends up behaving much like a subway station - it increases the overall land value of NYC.
there's an argument or critique made here that this means a LVT only lets the government make big land improvement projects, but IMO this is how it effectively works in practice in every local government I've worked for. the difference is that instead of 'gov builds cool thing, local neighbors profit' it's 'gov builds cool things, all of its voters profit'.
While people are normally risk averse, I think utilitarians should be risk neutral. Being risk averse would result in less than maximizing expected utility. Also, utilitarians should not have time preference over pure utility. So, 10 utility right now is equal to 10 utility in 2022. Are there any arguments against this?
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.
It seemed to be unknown at the time how common long COVID was in vaccinated people.
The only study I'd seen that estimated risk of long COVID was the Israeli study:
"Another study in Israel, of around 1,500 vaccinated health-care workers, found that 7 (19%) of the 39 breakthrough infections produced symptoms that lingered for more than 6 weeks5. However, the numbers of infections studied are too small for firm conclusions to be drawn about the absolute risk." - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
A 19% chance of a viral illness that causes symptoms 6 months later is concerning to me, and makes me careful even if the people around me are unconcerned. But my prior would be that since long COVID is likely related to ICU stays and cellular / organ injury, then vaccines would like reduce it's incidence.
Question Are the belief in having had COVID-19 infection and actually having had the infection as verified by SARS-CoV-2 serology testing associated with persistent physical symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Findings In this cross-sectional analysis of 26 823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with anosmia. Those associations were independent from self-rated health or depressive symptoms.
Meaning Findings suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should not be automatically ascribed to SARS-CoV-2; a complete medical evaluation may be needed to prevent erroneously attributing symptoms to the virus.
Thanks for the reply Eremolalos - this is the article that was mentioned in an open thread in November - Scott said - "Saw it, saw some people I trust say it was bad, still haven't had time to look into it closely. Thanks for bringing it up."
I haven't heard any additional discussion of this paper in the rationalist community, and haven't delved into it myself.
But it seems like a very important question -
If long COVID is not a big deal in the double / triple vaxxed, and assuming paxlovid becomes readily available to me sometime soon, then the combined risk reduction from vaccine + antivirals brings COVID down to a similar risk as the common cold. I'd probably be happy to basically ditch the masks unless I'm planning to be around elderly people and go back to my pre-pandemic habits (except maybe masks on planes or crowded areas - but that was probably always a good idea!)
But if long COVID is common in the vaxxed, then I should be more concerned, because as the Matt Bell article said, there are people who got COVID in March 2020 reporting long-haul symptoms serious enough to impact life almost 2 years later. Because it's a new disease, it could cause ongoing negative effects for years (SARS did), and the rational decision as I see it, may be to continue to make serious efforts to prevent infection until conclusive information is available (ie. social distancing, reducing indoor gatherings, n95s etc.)...
I think that at this point we can be very confident that it is not the case that 10% of people who get a covid infection get something that looks like chronic fatigue syndrome. If we suddenly got several million new CFS cases, we would notice.
I'm not so sure whether we can be that confident that it's not 1% of people who get infected, but this shouldn't be impossible to figure out.
In any case, In the United States we've mostly got our lives back, apart from some rules about masks and vaccines (with the important exception of friends and families of young children - that needs to be worked on).
I disagree. My life feels fundamentally altered because of ongoing COVID restrictions. I just went to a concert last weekend where dancing, or even casual conversation with strangers was impossible because everyone was wearing masks and lightly social distancing (presumably because of omicron risk?). I absolutely do not feel like I have my life back.
Well spotted Prof. Friedman - this was a typo - I mean to write 6 weeks.
But the fact remains - however we define Long COVID, I don't want it. I don't want COVID symptoms for 6 weeks / months / years, and it seems there may be a significant contingent of patients from March 2020 still reporting low energy / brain fog etc. 21 months later. And I believe there are people who had SARS who haven't returned to baseline functioning 18 years later. Even if they represent a small subset of patients, and the median patient might have symptoms for eg. 6-12 weeks - when the symptoms include brain fog / low energy or even just loss of taste that strikes me as significantly bad.
I suspect you also don't want to be all but welded into your home for the rest of your life. But, as trebuchet notes, COVID isn't going away - not completely, not ever. And if you want to absolutely minimize your risk of Long COVID, welding yourself into your home and never coming out is what you're going to have to do.
At some point, you're going to have to say "I don't *want* this, but I'm willing to risk it to get something I do want, or avoid something even worse". You're going to have to choose between risks. If you say that you don't care about the numbers, all you care is that Long COVID exists and it's bad and you don't want it, then you will choose poorly.
If you are into anecdotal evidence, i have more than a dozen friends, colleagues or neighbors (people i do ask face to face, not blog posts i read) who had covid, some asymptomatic, most with mild symptoms (strange flu or cold, often with loss of smell / taste), 3 more severe who had to to to the hospital (no ICU though). None reported long covid issues. In my broader acquaintance circle (friends of friends, people i knew but only still hear about) one 60y of died of it, so covid is not a non issue... But in this circle i also have suicide, paragliding accidental death, car accident death and quite a few lethal cancers, many times for much much younger people, which put covid death into perspective...cancer in particular, now that i think of it it's frightening how many loss of years it caused in my extended circle...
I was afraid of covid when it came out (earlier than most, i read Greg's Cochran blog). I am not anymore, and took the vaccine partly as a very small risk insurance against an already small risk, mostly as a way to avoid part of the annoyance imposed by my gouvernement. I will make sure to remember my anger about those annoyances better than my satisfaction about seeing a vaccine so quickly available...
Thanks for sharing the anecdotal evidence Greg. When you compare the group of COVID consequences to the group of non-COVID seriously negative life events - are the latter all within the past 21 months to make a good control group?
RE: long COVID in my friends and family -
I have 1 (!) known immediate connection with COVID - they had smell and taste issues months later.
I have 4 known friends / family of friends with confirmed COVID and all of them had some long-haul issues (an ICU Dr who was doing 16-hour days of push-bike riding for fun prior, who hasn't gone back to riding at all, a nurse who is now on a desk job 18 months later as part of a 'plan to return to clinical duties', and 2 others who took months to return to work). They all got COVID pre-vaccine, and they all probably had multiple contributing factors to their morbidity.
My sample seems very skewed, but I guess that's why I'm asking the question. I'm also a doctor and have noticed people seem to open up to me about their medical conditions, including stigmatised ones.
If 5/5 1st or 2nd degree connections I know had long-haul symptoms post unvaxxed COVID, it seems that an incidence of around 20% ish is not unreasonable.
But is it the same or even comparable post-Vax?
Even a 5 or 10% risk of anything like that is enough to convince me to wear N95s for a few months until we have more info (which was basically the conclusion of the Matt Bell article from August that Scott linked to in his article) - https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/
For what it's worth, my sample is probably (from what I remember) +- 50% unvaccinated, 50% vaccinated...But even amongst the unvaccinated, most are not from the first wave (Wuhan strain). Only 2 or maybe 3 probably got this one, because it was in April-May 2020...
For the non-covid stuff no, it's not during those last 2 years....although for the cancer things, maybe there was a bad serie invloved but 5 in the last 5y...an 8y and 30y old among them....
Looking at the covid excess death per age and typical cause of death in the 0-60y....it seems my anecdotal impressions are consistent with statistics.
Oh and indeed there can be some skew factor at play, didn't think of it but my friends do not tends to complain much about health issues. And if they do (acquaintances for example), they will likely not choose me as the empathic guy they could get some support from. If I was to hear about some long covid effect from friends, it would be about reduced sport performance, but I did not hear that. We complain mostly about getting older, that's already quite a hit ;-)
From family I got a long (like 1 month) work absence. It was just after vaccine, maybe covid, maybe not. Checks seemed to indicate a covid just at vaccination time, ending in bad reaction....So I can not really say it's long covid per se...
In (21st century) warfare between nation states, is there any kind of moral or practical reason to not target (aka blow up) the other country's civilian leadership? I'm thinking specifically about Iran, one of the top two most likely subjects of a US military attack due to its ongoing nuclear program. I'm not really interested in debating the utility of actually bombing Iran to disrupt its nuclear weapons efforts (probably the least bad option we have on the table now, sadly), but I am interested in discussing- if we do get in a shooting war with them, why not just take out their entire civilian political structure, or military chain of command, with a few cruise missiles? Who would be left to issue orders? Isn't it kind of..... game over for them? It seems like wholesale surrender would have to be next, aside from a few disorganized units here and there.
I do understand that decapitation strikes (there's a fun Wiki page on the topic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_strike) are probably not practical against peer adversaries- we don't target Xi's family in Beijing or Putin in Moscow because we would not like to have Biden or Trump's family targeted here in the US. I don't really understand what the argument is against decapitation strikes with a non-peer adversary like Iran, who can't realistically fire multiple targeted cruise missiles back to the US mainland. The type of SIGINT/data analysis to know where every member of the Iranian parliament or upper military command is at any given time seems like one of the key US technological advantages that we have- we just own that sort of intel.
There must be some kind of ethical/'laws of warfare' type of reason not to, because we did not target the Taliban political structure that way, despite them being fairly out in the open towards the end with press conferences and such. Seems like a drone could have easily targeted them once they moved into Kabul. Is there a reason that we didn't/continue not to just bomb every member of the Taliban leadership whenever we know their location?
My guess is that leaders everywhere are easily convinced that targeting leaders is wrong, because every nation adopting a policy of not targeting leaders is clearly better for leaders than a policy of every nation targeting leaders when that would be helpful for their nation.
Whether there's any better reason for this policy than that, is less clear to me (though it does seem plausible that there would be some range of circumstances under which it might still be right to adopt this policy).
This, and also: in warfare, the practical reasons for not killing civilians are so overwhelming that the moral considerations barely make a dent.
We stopped using chemical weapons, not because it was a bad thing to do, but because it was becoming an ineffectual tactic (you can't occupy or exploit a land that you've salted). We stopped carpet bombing cities for the same reasons.
Specifically about killing the leadership: if you do that without having a ready replacement, you get Iraq, i.e. a 10+ year long civil war (and that would be bad!).
While I broadly agree with your comment: I do think some of the anti-bombing rhetoric is overstated. Having read the literature I'm pretty convinced morale bombing doesn't work. However, bombing production facilities (including those used/run by civilians) seems to have a general degrading effect. The blockade in World War 1 wasn't meant to punish civilians so much as deny the German army's food supplies but it did cause immense civilian suffering. Likewise bombing factories and destroying food stores and all that seems to usefully degrade fighting capability.
So World War 2 style carpet bombing of cities is probably a bad idea even from a purely practical standpoint. However, blockading the enemy, denying them even humanitarian supplies, and bombing key infrastructure (including what people need to survive) is likely to still be a good idea. We've seen less of it, imo, because the US Army expected to occupy that infrastructure quickly. (Correctly, I might add!) If you're going to be occupying a power plant in a week it's easier to capture it than to destroy it. But in an existential war that calculus wouldn't hold.
There's clearly a constituency that's just anti-bombing on principle. And I do get it: bombing creates civilian casualties and horrific humanitarian problems. But that's a question apart from its effectiveness. (The real answer being: war is inhumane and waging a humane war is impossible.)
I agree that in WW2 and other conflicts from decades ago, morale bombing basically didn't work. (Maybe those Germans & Japanese are made of some pretty tough stuff). However, the level of bombing technology & overall aim they had at that time was very primitive, I'm not really clear how accurate they could be. I think more modern systems could do horrific damage to cities, especially if they had munitions specifically designed to target civilians & buildings. Russia and Syria dropped a large number of crude 'barrel bombs' on the Syrian populace, which seemed fairly effective at a low level of technology
Morale bombings historically were anti-effective: an enemy actively trying to kill you makes people dig in and fight back, and eg the Blitz actively increased Londoners' support for the war effort. Blockades that starve a country of civilian luxuries and even necessities like food do erode war support, however.
As for increased tech - the ability to aim better would make targeting of factories much more efficient, but wouldn't represent any particular cost savings on targeting civilian populations, since even primitive tech could usually manage to hit a city even when it really struggled to hit a particular factory within it. Technological improvements have made carpet bombing much less efficient, relatively speaking, than it ever has been.
The Syrian bombings didn't work that well either. The real calculus, like Thor says, is that surrender occurs when the enemy perceives the costs of giving in to be less than the costs of continuing. Indiscriminate bombing lowers the cost of continuing because while surrendering will stop the bombing it won't prevent the bombed infrastructure from being destroyed. The endpoint of this is Afghanistan where Russia basically destroyed the entire country. That meant the Afghans were completely unwilling to surrender because Russia had nothing to offer them.
You want to damage an opponent's ability to fight maximally and everything else minimally so that they both have no capacity to resist and a lot to lose by resisting.
Who said anything about genocidal bombing? I'm talking about taking out power plants, blockading all supplies, etc. There are people who argue that humanitarian aid should still be delivered in wartime but they strike me as shockingly naive. Such supplies will just be sent to the front. Or are you arguing that the British blockade in World War 1 didn't hasten German surrender?
I think many of the post-WW2 blunders of American foreign policy, especially ones in recent memory, were primarily caused by the mistaken assumption that the evil you don't know is better than the evil you do. Someone has to be in charge of the place, and it seems that whatever comes after the adversaries you blow to smithereens is usually worse, not to mention all of the other effects that accompany the blowing to smithereens part.
Precisely this, power vacuums usually get filled by the worst sort of person. The successful nation building examples post WW2 saw America heavily involved in running the country for decades afterwards - and, crucially, intending to stay long-term from the start, rather than spending 2 decades with one foot out the door - and involved the minimum possible disruption to existing functioning governments, unlike the recent ME examples. West Germany had an awful lot of former Nazi politicians and bureaucrats keep their jobs, because those were the people who had experience running the country....
Nobody wants to release the genie from the bottle out of fear that international politics will devolve into "carry out drone assassinations on leaders of enemy states who are politically inconvenient for you".
Practically speaking, with an organization on the scale of a nation state they're going to have a chain of command and succession planning. So there is still someone in charge if you kill the current crop of leaders. (This makes them different from disorganised groups like terrorists or organised crime who don't have clear succession). So any benefit you get is purely temporary. And the cost is that opposition to you is hardened, so it's difficult to obtain your aims long term. Eg you assassinate a president, then the successor from their faction has popular will demanding they take revenge, and it makes it difficult for other factions to propose peace, so the war goes on even longer.
Quite recently USA managed to do this. Ended with ISIS in Middle-East.
And from my understanding Libya is still a mess.
In other words, complete destruction of government results in lack of government what has some downsides.
> There must be some kind of ethical/'laws of warfare' type of reason not to, because we did not target the Taliban political structure that way, despite them being fairly out in the open towards the end with press conferences and such.
Why? There is plenty of other reasons ranging from "cruise missiles are expensive" through "Talibs are no ideal but at least better than ISIS" to "if we attack Talibs they will attack us"
> Is there a reason that we didn't/continue not to just bomb every member of the Taliban leadership whenever we know their location?
Also, it was tried for a long time. How well it went? In the end it was really ineffective at achieving actual goals.
No, there isn't a reason not to try to destroy the other country's civilian leadership. Not if it's a peer conflict. That's why we have many bunkers to hide our civilian leadership in, and I imagine Iran and others have the same.
We haven't done it regularly in recent conflicts because we've wanted something other than the wholesale destruction of the enemy state. Whenever that has been our goal it's something we have tried. When the Iraq war began one of our first actions was trying to drop bombs on Saddam directly.
"When Saddam refused to leave Iraq, U.S. and allied forces launched an attack on the morning of March 20; it began when U.S. aircraft dropped several precision-guided bombs on a bunker complex in which the Iraqi president was believed to be meeting with senior staff. This was followed by a series of air strikes directed against government and military installations,"
The trouble is, in order to take out a leader with a missile you have to know where he is and you have to be able to reach him (we're good at busting bunkers, but not perfect). Think of how long it took to find Osama: any enemy leader worth his salt has more hidey holes than he did.
At a minimum we could remove civilian & military leadership from communicating with the rest of Iran. If they're in active communication, SIGINT can find them- if they really want to hide out, they have to go completely incommunicado. I just feel like the US has a larger technological advantage in terms of offensive cyber actions and tracking people in a more digital world than we did 17+ years ago
I think you are vastly overestimating the capability of SIGINT, especially against the high-level command staff of prepared enemy. Knowing where the radio antenna transmitting El Presidente's orders is, doesn't tell you where El Presidente is. El Presidente can transmit his orders, in real time, through a buried landline to any of a dozen antennas on the far side of the country.
If you get into a shooting war with someone, probably they knew in advance that you were going to do that. FDR didn't know the hour and the day of Pearl Harbor, but he knew approximately the week (and yes, he told all the field commanders). If the Japanese had long-range cruise missiles, do you think there's the slightest chance he would have been in the White House any time that week?
Flip side, the United States tried very hard to kill Saddam Hussein on day one of Operation Desert Storm, and in spite of satellites and air superiority and long-range cruise missiles and yes the SIGINT/data analysis, all we did was blow up some empty buildings and kill some nobodies. And no, the Taliban leaders do not go to bed every night in a building we know about. Before the fall of Kabul, we were lucky if we knew what *province* they were in.
The one thing conspicuously missing from that wikipedia page you cite, are *successful* decapitation strikes, except in the mopping-up phase at the end of the war. They basically don't work. Maybe you can get the actual head of state or head of government, or the chief of staff of the armed forces or whatever. We did get Soleimani. But even that takes a bit of luck, and it's not enough. Kamala Harris can command the US Military as well as Joe Biden can, and the same goes for anyone we might be fighting against.
And no, you don't get a civil war or multiple coups or any such thing, not when there's an external enemy that needs fighting. You basically need to cut all the heads off the hydra at once, everyone with the top-level knowledge and legitimacy to take over, and that's not practical. Not without nuclear missiles, at least, and even then it's chancy.
I kind of agree, even if given my complete lack of any military knowledge it'd only because your arguments looks convincing to a know-nothing... However, i see a logical consequence : if decapitation do not work even in a dictature, the common (i think) view that a dictature is a normal country with a (few) very bad leader and with the right leader you will get a well behaved democracy falls apart. That do not suprise me, it's a native ridiculous belief i think, but it's the official story behind the last irak and afgan wars
Yeah, that's another thing that doesn't work. Turning a "bad" nation into a "good" nation is generally the work of a generation, sometimes two, as you need the new leaders to be people who grew up and were educated under the new regime. The rare exceptions generally involve either nations that weren't all that bad a generation earlier, and/or a very thorough and brutal housecleaning that involves more than just removing a few people at the top.
Note that South Korea was still an impoverished military dictatorship twenty years after the Korean war, and they were on *our* side. The people who genuinely wanted a democracy were still working their way up through the ranks.
Nation-building is a heavy burden, not for the timid or the easily distracted.
Minor correction - South Korea was a military dictatorship, but it was well on its way to not being impoverished 20 years after the korean war. Their economic inflection point came around 1963, and had nothing to do with being or not being, or wanting or not wanting, a democracy.
The inflection point was 1963, but in 1973 the ROK's per capita GDP was still only 60% of the global average, and slightly higher than the East Asian average (itself dominated by pre-Deng China). So, no Africa Poor, but still poor. Not until the mid-1980s did South Korea climb above the world average.
Yes, as I said, well on its way to not being impoverished. From the wiki about Park Chung Hee, the *bad* military dictator -
"According to the Gapminder Foundation, extreme poverty was reduced from 66.9 percent in 1961 to 11.2 percent in 1979, making one of the fastest and largest reductions in poverty in human history. "
Not to mention that the next 10 years were spent under a military dictator too! Most of S. Korea's nation building happened under *bad* military dictators.
Also, I suspect you're thinking of impoverishment in terms of USD. For export oriented countries like Korea that kept their exchange rates artificially low, that would underestimate the actual wealth creation. See for instance page 13 in the following document, - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?oi=10.1.1.462.317&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I think the answer is whatever random ground commander happens to be physically in possession of the missiles/bombs/other assets, and they're a lot more likely to be crazy and angry and do something awful (like unload everything they've got on every civilian center they can find, or just hand everything over to terrorists or be one warlords or w/e) than the central command currently in place.
Leaving central command in place means you're dealing with powerful and generally rich people who have a lot to lose personally, which keeps them in line and let's you apply pressure to keep warfare limited and sane. The less the person actually controlling the weapon has to lose, the uglier things get for everyone involved
It's usually not random. Military forces are big on having clear and robust chains of command for approximately this reason. You may be able to throw the civilian government into dysfunctional chaos, but that just gets you military dictatorship by default, and it was probably the civilian government you were counting on to declare peace.
Does anyone have a plot or a simple model for how omicron cases have been growing in the US over the last few weeks?
BNO news has current cumulative numbers https://newsnodes.com/omicron_tracker but I'd like them split up by day (either day of sample, or day of report)
Hmm, the only thing I see about USA numbers is things like
"If we start with 15 cases on 11/21 (the 15 cases from the Anime Convention on that date that later tested positive), and nothing else, we’d get to 75k cases/day by end of year, so between 10% and 50%. So it seems like 10% by end of year should be a solid favorite at this point, something like 70%, and 50% by then should be very live and be something like 30%. One caveat is that this is detected tested cases rather than cases, and Omicron is milder in practice, so that could reduce the guess by a factor of several times. Given that, the markets don’t seem obviously crazy, but I still would rather buy than sell on all three."
So his model is just "assume the same growth rate as the UK" because there's no good data for the US?
I'm just going to leave this here, but I haven't ever read a convincing reason why being positive for SARS-CoV-2 virus fragments is the same as a "case" of COVID-19. COVID-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. To have a disease, you have to have symptoms. It has always struck me that being SARS-CoV-2-positive is meaningfully different than having a case of COVID-19 in the same way that being HIV-positive is different than having a case of AIDS. Can anyone help me out here?
It is relevant for diseases which have asymptomatic carriers. In the case of COVID, transmission often precedes the development of symptoms by a few days, but last time I checked it was quite rare for people who *never* develop symptoms to infect others. So if we had a magic scanner that could instantly detect every COVID-positive person in a region, we'd care - we'd want to quarantine those people for a few days at least. But if we're looking at last week's statistics, all the "COVID-positive" cases that never developed symptoms are not worth worrying about.
Do you have any source you could share for asymptomatic COVID transmission being very rare? I hadn't had that impression, but I also haven't found new data on it since early in the pandemic, and the data I had then wasn't unambiguous.
https://twitter.com/pavitrarc/status/1470447735585214464 is the kind of thing I was looking for: In Seattle 29/217 positive covid samples are likely omicron on 12/8 with very short doubling time (like 1 day). All based on fairly small amount of data.
I have a serious question that is attached to a rather radical/hyperbolic idea, I'd like to toss both out there.
-- Over and over we have been told that Covid "surges" could overwhelm hospital capacity, with horrible consequences. But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
Q. -- Why are people with COVID symptoms going to hospitals at all? What do they really expect will happen there that will have any effect on their health outcome? They get a cookie and a pat on the head, maybe some cough syrup?
Q2 -- Why are hospitals admitting these patients? Wouldn't the proper public health response be to send them home and arrange for their quarrantine and try to arrange for a nurse or health aide to visit them? (Someday we may have drugs to treat Covid approved by the FDA, which would strengthen the out-patient case.)
Which leads to my rather radical idea: To really stop the pandemic, rather than close everything else in society and the economy, why not CLOSE THE HOSPITALS? Or, at least order them to take no Covid patients. Test every patient at the door and the Covid-positive are denied admission, are treated on an out-patient basis, with strict quarrantine rules while they recover. (As I see it, you will either recover, or die, and the only difference from being in a hospital is tying up emergency resources that could actually help people: trauma victims for example.)
If you think this is monstrous and cold, ask yourself just how different this is from policies aound vaccination.
Vaccination passports etc bar you from entering public venues, and in Austria and Australia, force you into house arrest, just because you MIGHT have a higher risk of possibly catching and spreading Covid. So how is turning away and quarrantining those who are known to be infected (also a much smaller number than the people unvaccinated) not the best strategy?
Given that 99.x% of those who test positive for COVID recover, and are then effectively immune, home-treatment would absolutely free up hospital capacity and allow the rest of society to return to normal.
I will freely admit that my risk calculus is probably different from most people's. Also, I feel in my gut that 99% of anything the govt has or might do to "stop the pandemic" is utterly useless, there is so much randomness in the world that we will arrive at the same medical outcome, whether health officials control society, or people are allowed to choose their own precautions.
We have to stop treating this like the end of the world. It's just a mild respiratory illness for most people.
My understanding is that there are in fact many treatment protocols that are quite effective. Early on in the pandemic they learned that lying people on their front leads to better survival outcomes than lying them on their back. While ventilated patients don't have a great survival rate, I do believe that for patients with severe pneumonia, ventilation does improve survival rates. (That is, when you have this sort of severe pneumonia, I believe that patients without a ventilator nearly always die within a day or two, while patients on a ventilator often survive several weeks and then either die or recover enough to come off the ventilator and eventually end the pneumonia.) And we now know that fluvoxamine, molnupiravir, and especially paxlovid do in fact save a lot of lives.
"Test every patient at the door and the Covid-positive are denied admission, are treated on an out-patient basis, with strict quarrantine rules while they recover."
1) Hospitals do give Covid patients supplemental oxygen (in addition to other interventions), which presumably helps, and while I think self-administering oxygen is a thing people do, I think it requires some help from medical staff to get it right, and hospitals are already set up for that.
2) This assumes that everyone who shows up with Covid is there *because of* their Covid. Is that accurate? How many Covid patients in hospitals are there for other reasons, but also happen to have Covid? My impression is that there's been some controversy about people who die with Covid, because they come in for some other problem, but also happen to have Covid at the time, and are counted in the statistics whether or not the Covid was their main health problem.
3) Similar to point 2. I'm expecting to give birth in about two weeks, and was told to take a Covid test three days before coming in, if I'm not already in labor at that point (c-section is not expected). It's unclear both whether, if I arrive in labor, a Covid test will be part of admission, and what, if anything, will be different if I test positive. But if the problem is using more health resources, I don't think switching to a home birth would be a more efficient use of those resources, since then a couple of nurses would have to load up some equipment, drive out to my house, and stay there for a day or so, and I expect the normal procedures to probably use the nurse's time more efficiently than that. And that's a case where staying at home and having the healthcare provider come to me is probably just fine and I did look into into it. Most acute conditions aren't like that. Are healthcare workers going to be going on house calls because someone was in a car crash while also having Covid? Would that use *less* medical resources than the alternative?
If you test positive the protocols for the nurses and doctors attending on you is very different. For example, everyone will wear an n95 mask while helping you, and you'll likely deliver in a more isolated room (possibly one with negative pressure, to keep the contaminated air in).
> Q. -- Why are people with COVID symptoms going to hospitals at all?
Usually, to be put on a ventilator (or some other artificial respiration machine) so that they have a better chance of survival. Kind of the same reason stabbing victims do, really.
>But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
This part is wrong. There is a lot that hospitals do with severe cases that helps people survive. One of the reasons that the survival rate has gone up over time is that we've learned how to treat the thing. I know (at second hand) a vent survivor. 10/10 that guy dies without the vent. I know a couple of hospital supplemental oxygen survivors. Do they survive without the hospital? Maybe, but maybe not. I don't know. For some people covid is very bad, and those people have a better chance of making it at a hospital. Cut people off from the hospital and you'd see that survival rate drop.
> But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
Others have noted the general treatments (proning, life extension via respirator support while your immune system settles down, etc.) But people also seem to forget that we've had a mainstream therapeutic drug for severe cases since the middle of last year. Dexamethasone has its RECOVERY trial arm stopped for efficacy, and saves the life of approximately 1:6 ventilated COVID patients given it. It's part of the standard of care in the US at this point.
>. But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
This is massively wrong. There's no 'cure,' but like with any serious viral infection, the goal is just to treat symptoms and keep you alive and your organs healthy until your body beats the infection on its own. Hospitalization can massively decrease likelihood of death or permanent damage with all kinds of treatments aimed at this goal.
The comment system in Substack sucks. Once you go to a different page you lose your place. This involves a non trivial effort to reverse. And it can happen both to follow comment threads that are long and interesting AND inadvertently, when you click on someone's name or a post time. Both feel unnecessary and annoying. There also appears to be no way to communicate this to Substack.
Also, why isn't the comment system itself better? There should be a way to find better comments more easily than having to read through all of them. Maybe likes and dislikes aren't great, but surely there could be better systems that we could think of - quadratic voting, reputation systems, any number really
I have always found substacks comments sub-par. No edit button, can't seem to jump to the thing properly and consistently from my email notifications on mobile, order constantly seems to be randomly shifting around. What's taking them so long?
The lack of an edit button is another good one that I forgot about. And the crazy thing is this is a service where at least a significant proportion of comments are likely coming from people who pay.
Also, side note, really appreciate the writing and effort you put into the Georgism posts. Very interesting idea to engage with, and not one that I had come across before. Even if I've come away reasonably convinced that LVT won't be a net positive, I really enjoyed the process. Thank you. (As for the why, Land itself appears to be largely worthless absent improvement, and LVT makes capturing spillover value very hard/impossible, significantly reducing incentives to discover/improve land)
> And the crazy thing is this is a service where at least a significant proportion of comments are likely coming from people who pay.
It is seriously mysterious. It's one of those things where you have to assume it's intentional at some point, or at least intentional to stick it this low down the priority ladder. At the very least, it seems like a sign that substack's founders and employees with decision making power are not themselves commenting on substack posts on a regular basis.
> Also, side note, really appreciate the writing and effort you put into the Georgism posts. Very interesting idea to engage with, and not one that I had come across before.
I really appreciate it! One thing that has been very helpful here is its brought up a bunch of objections I haven't heard before. I think at least *some* of them are based on misapprehensions, which are ultimately the fault of communication errors on my part. It's been super helpful to work that out in practice.
> (As for the why, Land itself appears to be largely worthless absent improvement, and LVT makes capturing spillover value very hard/impossible, significantly reducing incentives to discover/improve land)
Agree to disagree, but thanks for pushing back and engaging nonetheless! Perhaps we'll find a common basis for one of us to convince the other one day, but until then I won't press the point.
>It is seriously mysterious. It's one of those things where you have to assume it's intentional at some point, or at least intentional to stick it this low down the priority ladder. At the very least, it seems like a sign that substack's founders and employees with decision making power are not themselves commenting on substack posts on a regular basis.
I think substack's business model is centered on writers who have audiences that pay to read them, with commenting being a nice-to-have incidental and expected mostly to be glorified "+1"s. Scott's incredible ability to actually build a community that could have interesting discussions even about things he never wrote about, is an outlier.
But I'd be interested to know: how many substacks even have Open Threads?
It's not just about open threads though. A lot of writers that are being paid by their audience would likely want to engage with them. I have seen a reasonable amount of engagement and attempts to build engagement in other Substacks. So comments become a way to build stickiness among paying customers, not just a nice to have incidental.
My cynical theory is that the substack designers envisaged a one-to-many system, with a little bit of commenting that will be mostly ignored by the top level poster.
Less cynically, it's intended to be more like a newspaper, and less like a blog - particularly less like an old style blog, used for interchange between bloggers, on the old livejournal model.
What I've seen on newspaper sites are comments most readers never even see - you have to explicitly request to see them - where I've never personally seen any sign that the author of the article reads or responds to comments.
By that standard, Substack commenting is great.
By any other standard, including that of the software Scott used to use, Substack's comment system looks bad. I usually compare it directly (and unfavorably) to software from the late 20th century, such as livejournal (founded in 1999).
Interesting factoid I stumbled up that you all would probably appreciate. I recently moved to Canada from the US and was wondering why they have bagged milk here. Turns out it's because when they transitioned to the metric system in 70s it was easier to adapt the container sizes. So I guess the only thing that stopped the US from having bagged milk was our stubborn refusal to part with Imperial units. https://www.eater.com/2019/10/21/20919693/milk-carton-bag-pouch-history
I admit the explanation is so cute that it makes me suspicious of its authenticity, so if someone else knows more about it please do share.
I don't see any particular reason why the choice of units would affect the nature of the container.
Also, this is a constant pet peeve of mine: The U.S. does not use Imperial units. The U.S. uses U.S. Customary units, which are pretty much the same as the older English units. The Imperial system, on the other hand, has several units (including the gallon) that are bigger than the U.S. unit with the same name. The Imperial system was adopted by the British Empire many years after U.S. independence.
I have a similar peeve. Retail commerce in the US is already fully metric. Pick up any labelled good in a grocery store, and the weight or volume is clearly printed on it in legally mandated legible text. The text that gives the measurement in US customary units is not legally mandated. The only legal mandate there is that it must not be false.
I can walk into any one of several different ethnic asian markets in the greater Puget Sound area, and pick up a labelled good that is also labelled in metric, is *NOT* labelled in US Customary measures, and *IS* labelled in customary measurements of the culture or society.
I think thats awesome, and any law or regulation that would ban me from buying goods in round numbers of measures from other cultures are bad, and the people who would demand such a thing are overcontrolling tools.
If that was sufficient inducement for bagged milk, it was not sufficient for the entirety of Canada, or other parts of Canada had sufficient countervailing forces. Although not definitive, this tells me that it's not a very powerful explanation.
As a resident of west coast Canada of many years, bagged milk is not a thing here, so I was always perplexed when people associated bagged milk with Canadians. I only understood when I went to study in Ontario for a year.
Indeed. I had to Google some image to realise bagged milk simply means milk in a (plastic) bag. I thought it means something else i didn't get, because after nearly 50y of drinking a lot of milk in Europe, both in my home country and visiting quite a few other ones, i never saw something like that. You learn something everyday :-)
In the movie "Miracle on 34th Street", the antagonist is a corporate psychiatrist. Is that, or has that ever, been a real thing? The only other example of a psychiatrist employed by a corporation, that I've seen, is Dr. Scratchensniff from "Animaniacs".
That seems like a contradiction. A psychiatrist is a licensed practitioner of medicine, and last time I checked, you can't practice medicine on behalf of a corporation.
Ah right, I forgot to check earlier, but the movie is from 1947. Definitely not surprised that companies could make decisions about their employees' health in the past, and I'm sure they'd still do it if it was an option.
I see a plot point in the movie is a psychiatric evaluation, and that still strikes me as strange to be done by a 'company doctor', but it's certainly possible.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the disconnect between people who say things that are symbolically true, and people who (frequently willfully, it feels like) make fun of them because they are not *literally* true. Case in point, there's currently a tweet from a right-wing congresswoman making the rounds on reddit, stating that the only gun policy the US needs was written in 1776, and proceeds to quote the 2nd amendment (which was of course, actually written in 1789.)
People are dunking on this tweet because it's factually incorrect, but they're missing the point--the tweet *feels* true, and it is indeed having the intended impact on the people who understand it. People miss this, either because A. they're part of the ingroup, and so don't recognize the incongruity, B. they're part of the outgroup, and so can't see anything *but* the incongruity, (or possibly, C. they're rationalists, and have consciously trained themselves to think in terms of facts.)
I feel like we missed the point of "truthiness", back when that word was in the zeitgeist. We dismissed it as the folly of evangelicals who still believed in the sky-daddy and wouldn't recognize a real fact if it came up and bit them in the face. But just like how "irrational" people one-box on Newcomb's problem and walk away the big winners, it's the people who know how to speak "truthiness" that end up driving the conversation. It's great to be here and get in-depth, nuanced takes on complicated issues, but if we can't trade the literally true for the symbolically true, I despair of making much of an impact.
People just go for the most obvious weakness when they communicate in bad faith. What you seem to actually care about is for people to communicate in good faith instead, but for that conflict theorists need to be transformed into mistake theorists, and nobody has any idea how to go about it.
Depends on how you define "because". Being factually wrong is not quite a necessary condition, but it's like wearing a Rolex in a bad neighbourhood: it sure increases the odds someone will come after you.
I recall Rep. Ocasio-Cortez getting slammed for saying "I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." and I think the slamming was justified. Yes, we get what the Congressman MEANT with the "gun policy" tweet, since the date isn't crucial to the point, but a politician making an error that could be corrected by a middle-schooler does not bode well for their credibility as a whole. If you really believe your position is correct, you should have the facts to back it up, and the precision and the semantics to explain your position clearly. If your position is based on incorrect facts, or you can't sell it without bungling your own words, it doesn't matter whether you are morally right or not, since you will fail to persuade the people you need to.
I'm typically not an AOC fan, but I think she was actually right about that. (And I assume she was criticizing her own party with that statement...)
>the date isn't crucial to the point
That's the thing though, the date IS crucial to the point. By which I mean, the tweet would have been less impactful if it had been more factual. 1789 doesn't carry the same emotional weight for Americans as 1776. Whether this was a conscious choice or not, she's speaking to her base, soul to soul. Facts kill the romance and get in the way of the actual communication happening.
(And to pre-emptively address the "how can you communicate without facts?" question... no two people in history have ever communicated in pure fact. It's not how our brains are wired, and it's symbols all the way down.)
Here you yourself are admitting that the factual inaccuracy matters - The founders, in 1776, did not nail down gun policy! That the second amendment came around only in 1789 is evidence that to some extent gun ownership rights were a matter of active debate.
(personally, as a non-American, I don't have any particular attachment to gun ownership as a concept, but I do have a strong feeling that respecting a county's constitution is a strong fence on a slippery slope to no rights at all, and it doesn't really matter which clause of the constitution is the first one to get blatantly ignored. )
There's a maxim I've heard in the rationalist community - might have come from Yudkowsky, I'm not sure - which I quite like, and which seems relevant here: anything which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
Very relevant, I think, and i like the sentiment a lot, but I suppose it's another way of asking my original question: is this a thing that can be destroyed by truth? And is factual accuracy a perfect synonym of truth? Or was Keats right all along, with a consequence being that beautiful inaccuracies are truer than ungainly precision? Either way, I appreciate that people are willing to have the conversation.
Well, the whole "truth" part, not everyone cares about that. If Team A produces a tweet, Team B needs to dunk on it, and they will look for something and proceed to do so. And vice versa; whatever Team B produces, Team A will look for flaws in.
I'm not familiar with whatever this tweet was, but it sounds like the writer basically made the signal for Guns! + Revolutionary War! + Constitutional originalist. Truthiness lives in signal-land.
The equation "I understand what you said, therefore I am capable of going to the mindspace that correlates with it, and therefore I agree with it somehow" is the other key. Some folks truly think that understanding, even partial understanding, is tantamount to agreement, or would create enough motive to "go easy" on the other person in some hypothetical fight. In this school of thought, the enemy is either incomprehensible or utterly foolish, because one's own team comprehends everything worth comprehending already. Comprehending anything else would mean agreeing with the enemy, which is a no-no, so they make sure they don't.
Even outside of twitter, the "dunking to evade a serious conversation which might make me seem less pure" thing has been going on for decades. I should go a step further, the dunking helps fence off the boundaries of the safe space. In case a fresh recruit were confused, they could tell by the dunking which ideas were safe and which were unsafe.
People can line up words to indicate concepts in very nonlinear - even inaccurate or untrue - ways and still get a point across to those who are willing to take the ride. That's not what drives the conversation; what drives many of these is the presence of teams. It involves communication, but it's not a conversation, it's a competition.
> Comprehending anything else would mean agreeing with the enemy, which is a no-no, so they make sure they don't.
Thank you. That's exactly what I was trying to get at, and that's a valuable response to me. I remember from "Seven Habits" a warning along the lines of "seeking to understand other people puts you at risk of having your mind changed". (While advocating, of course, to "seek to understand before seeking to be understood")
I feel like that helps me understand the problem, if not bringing me much closer to any solution...
Perhaps looking at an extreme example helps? Brazil president Bolsonaro has said about the side effects of vaccines: “If you turn into a crocodile, it’s your problem”.
His point is that every person has to bear any side effects of vaccinations themselves (as in "being affected", not as in "carry treatment cost"). This is undeniably true, even though the underlying assumption that the side effects are severe, is wrong.
The statement is formulated in such a way that it is *impossible* to interpret it literally. Or so one would think. If you google for "Bolsonaro crocodile", then the first ten headlines are of the form "Bolsonaro: vaccines can turn people into crocodiles".
One point here might be that it's hard to transmit the original meaning in any reformulation. And journalists like to reformulate. In titles, they may have to reformulate. And once a ambiguous version is out, a lot of people (probably including journalists) never learn about the original formulation, and build upon the wrong versions.
On another site a Brazilian said that "it might turn you into a jacare" is a fairly common phrase in Brazil for something that could have unpredictable effects. (Also that it's an alligator, not a crocodile, but for most of us that is a distinction of little obvious consequence...)
The problem with the "you know what I mean" approach is it means that there's no consequence to lying and now way to call them out or challenge it, because they will always retreat to a more defensible position. (Similar to motte and Bailey). So the norm in the past has been to treat politicians like they're being literal, because debate is impossible otherwise
I think political communication has evolved to counteract that sentiment. Debate *IS* impossible right now, precisely because you can't take anything most politicians say literally. Can we alter our communication to have meaningful "symbolic debates"? Do those words even make sense?
Just reminding anyone in the Philadelphia area that the Philly ACX Meetup is hosting a Winter Solstice Celebration on Tuesday, December 21 starting at 6pm. We’re hoping to make it a good time with food and warm drinks, a fire pit, a raffle and maybe a few rounds of “Cards Against Rationality”. Request to join our Google Group for full details:
Enjoyed the guest posts, but it might have been nice to spread them out - it was already a lot of reading and that's before accounting for the thousands of comments.
As several of us have commented in the Georgism threads, it's highly unclear how Georgism would be implemented without disincentivizing large-scale new developments, such as building a new city (assuming that city land wouldn't just be taxed at its farmland value, which would be very low).
So two recent interests of Scott's—model cities and Georgism—may be at odds.
I'm skeptical of the importance of new cities as a route to growth: the case is much stronger for enabling movement to existing cities (see Hseih & Moretti for an example of the literature on this). Georgism helps with that, with the upside of using existing cities more productively.
To the extent that development of new cities would be discouraged for private actors: a) it's exactly offset by an incentive for the state to do so, as they derive the subsequent land tax revenues, and b) you could grant temporary tax relief to new developments, similar to the way that patents currently operate.
I think the Ince give to do large developments like that is decreased, but not to zero. Only the developer cannot capture all of the value of having people come together and starting a community anymore. But they will still be rewarded for their labour + profit involved in the construction of the structures.
Yes, by "disincentivize" I meant reduce the incentive (and thus negating the promise of no deadweight loss), not removing the incentive completely.
This reduce in incentive can prevent a development if some of the structures wouldn't be profitable on their own, but only because they increase the value of nearby homes, which are built and sold by the same developer.
The answer looks fairly simple to me: Compensate people for raising land values. A severance tax is mentioned elsewhere; have integration tax incentives.
How do we determine how much someone has raised other people's land value? This smacks of the socialist calculation problem (even more than assessing land values in the first place: for that, at least we have other similar transactions as a reference).
Hold an All-Pay private auction among everybody who stands to benefit, with a reserve price in which case the builder has no obligation to continue, and there is no obligation for any bidder to pay.
If you don't hit the reserve, and don't build it, nobody valued the improvement.
If you don't hit the reserve, and build it it anyways because you'll still make money, you never needed to incentivize the construction in the first play.
And if you hit the reserve, then the incentives problem is solved.
I feel as though it is worth distinguishing between Radical Georgism and Moderate Georgism. I just made up these terms, so I should explain them.
Radical Georgism:
- We need to redo most of economic theory.
- Land shouldn't really belong to anyone.
- How can we capture all Land Rent?
- Focus on a large (utopian?) scale.
- Closely tied to UBI / Citizens' Dividend.
Moderate Georgism:
- Focus on local issues in your city.
- Replace existing property tax with a land tax or a mix.
- Revenue neutral tax reform, e.g. 2% property tax -> 1% property tax & 5% land tax.
- Focus on reducing vacancies and urban blight.
- Don't talk about big economic questions.
- Support / opposition to UBI is unrelated.
Since Georgism is a fringe belief, it does not have very many weak supporters. [1] There isn't a large population of people who kind of like Georgism but haven't really looked into the worldview in detail. Most of the conservation about Georgism (including here) is about Radical Georgism. I think this is a shame. We should be asking if any moderate forms of Georgist ideas could gain broad support. Perhaps a good analogy is Socialism : Social Democracy :: Radical Georgism : Moderate Georgism.
Moderate Georgism already exists in some cities in Pennsylvania. [2] Last time I checked, Pennsylvania hasn't depended into an abyss of unintended consequences. We know that this can work. The argument can simply be that it is simply better than our current system of property taxes, instead of trying to answer Big Questions about what land ownership means.
While I don't call myself a Georgist (for reasons I explained in the comments to Part 2 of Lars' series), my own policy preferences align very closely with what you describe as "Moderate Georgism."
I would also describe myself as a moderate Georgist although I'm also a landowning financier, so maybe I would be more radical in a different live).
I don't really understand the focus on UBI (other than clarity in the thought experiment); for me, is simply a more efficient way to raise tax revenues while minimising deadweight losses and reducing negative incentives, and I see no reading it couldn't be phased in very gradually, first replacing existing property taxes and then, if that works, replacing elements of income or investment taxes (investment neater from a philosophical perspective but income better in practice as directly recompensing most of those who are paying the LVT)
Yeah, I think that was my main problem with the three-part series on Georgism here, it started off with the "flying cars! Mars colonies! robot servants in every home! 20-hour work week! All this will be how we live in the far-future year of 1980!" kind of estimation, and we all know that 1980 was not, in fact, like that.
"Replacing property taxes and another revenue stream for local government" is a much less interesting and probably much more attainable and workable goal than "land will be worth approximately $0 so since it won't benefit you to sell it, there will be no incentive for speculation, so anyone who does build a block of flats on the site will only charge a peppercorn rent, plus we'll make so much money on a national scale, everyone can have a modest, frugal, but liveable UBI and since every other tax will now be gone, this will mean we all live better" promises.
Where was the suggestion that LVT would lower rents? I guess in the long term it ought to increase housing supply by reducing unused speculation properties, and that could plausibly lower rents (but this would take a while).
I remember the series instead as saying "rents are already as high as the market will bear, so an LVT will not increase rents further". Which seems plausible to me from an EMH standpoint.
"Where was the suggestion that LVT would lower rents?"
(1) Does Georgism work part 1:
"Some people come to Georgism because of their aversion to income and capital taxes, some want to use LVT to fund generous social programs, some are motivated by the beneficial environmental effects, and some just think the Rent is Too Damn High."
Agreed, reading through the three parts plus comments, that does get walked back into "well rents can't be increased/reductions in tax and/or increase in income will reduce impact of rent/more productive use of land means more housing which means no increase in rents for scarcity and lower rents to start off with".
I just wrote up a similar comment on the spectrum of Georgism, only to scroll down and find you had the same sentiments but stated them more clearly!
I think one question I might raise is whether the land value tax is truly necessary. It seems like a government with good central planning and zoning can pretty much approximate what you'd ideally get in a Georgist model.
Or perhaps we can flip this around - maybe Georgism is a way to naturally incentivize the sort of community that would otherwise require good central planning and zoning?
"An analysis of a large insurance-record database of more than seven million Americans has found that Viagra may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia by almost 70 percent."
If true it's a huge effect. The article ended with the usual boilerplate about not advising anyone to actually act on the information, which I expect to be widely ignored. It doesn't say what the average dosage was for the people using viagra; it comes in 25, 50, and 100 mg tablets but I doubt most users take it daily. The average mg/week rate should be deducible from the insurance data the article used and would be useful information.
As per the article: The association between sildenafil use and decreased incidence of AD does not establish causality, which will require a randomized controlled trial.
Most likely it has not causal relationship but rather the people who take sildenafil have better mental (brain) health. We have to remember that sildenafil does not increase libido and doesn't even create erection. It merely makes it possible to have one if your vascular health is a preventing factor.
Maybe it does something to brain vasculature too but it is a long shot.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that people who take Viagra typically have sex partners. I assume the subset of elderly men able to attract sex partners are in general healthier than the set of all elderly men, and that could certainly account for the reduced incidence of Alzheimer's. Also, those sex partners are often spouses, and spouses can cover for their partner's Alzheimer's in the early stages, delaying formal diagnosis and even preventing it entirety if the patient happens to die of something else.
It would be interesting to compare outcomes for older men who take Viagra because they need/want it, those who don't take it because they don't need it (I'm assuming that such exist), and those who don't take it because they're too ill/depressed/poor/partnerless.
The database is seven million, so I doubt they are in a position to do much detailed analysis beyond whatever information the insurance companies already have.
The obvious problem is that it isn't a controlled experiment. The authors tried to reduce that problem in various ways, and they also report some evidence of other sorts.
Sildenafil is also used by women to treat pulmonary hypertension, and they observe a reduction in Alzheimer's for women as well. The error bars are larger, presumably because many fewer women use it, but the pattern is still there.
"after 6 years of follow-up, sildenafil usage was significantly associated with a 69% reduced risk of AD, compared with matched non-sildenafil users" Their explanation of the matching: "Specifically, non-exposures were matched to the exposures (ratio 4:1) by initiation time of sildenafil (Supplementary Fig. 9), enrollment history, sex, HT diagnosis, T2D diagnosis and CAD diagnosis." They are clearly trying to avoid confounders. I don't know enough to judge how well they are doing it.
It's not that I completely disbelieve this. It is definitely something to look into and study more. But I don't hold my hopes high because data provided by insurers tend to be very unreliable. There was that story about car study about car millage which turned out completely false because for unknown reasons the insurers had provided fake data. These companies are not very transparent how they gather their data, and even if they can do it, their corporate and legal departments may put forward all kinds of bullshit reasons why they should give out only "curated" data and may not even allow their representatives to tell about it to researchers.
How confident do you have to be that the result is right to act on it? 60% is a big effect, Alzheimer's is a big negative, and Sildenafil has been used by lots of people for a long time so is unlikely to have serious side effects we don't know about.
What should someone do who (i) sees a scientific consensus on a 'pro-regime' narrative and (ii) believes that there exists significant censorship (direct or indirect, offical or unofficial) of 'anti-regime' ideas?
Let 'p' be a 'pro-regime' proposition. Let 'e' be the proposition that the available academic research concludes (or points to the conclusion that … or whatever phrase you prefer), after apparently rigorous investigation, that p is true. If circumstances (i) and (ii) hold, then as the degree of censorship approaches Soviet levels, it seems as though one should disregard the data completely.
As tyrannical censorship increases, P(e|~p) approaches P(e|p) since the state of the published academic output in such a regime becomes insensitive to the true reality, and, no matter what that reality is, elites will not allow the widespread dissemination of an academic body of research which suggests ~p.
Hence, in a censorious environment, academic consensus provides no evidence for pro-regime propositions.
However, the opposite is the case for anti-regime ideas. Where ‘p’ is now some anti-regime proposition and ‘e’ is as before, in a tyrannical regime, if p is FALSE, then reality and the censorship efforts will almost certainly combine to ensure that an academic consensus in favour of p could never emerge. Thus, as tyrannical censorship increases, P(e|~p) approaches 0. In that case:
So a consensus in favour of an anti-regime proposition entails that said proposition is true.
Of course, we used a lot of approximations and relied a lot on what a certain probability ‘approaches’ as censorship increases, but the general epistemic impacts are the same. As censorship grows, scholarly evidence becomes less relevant when assessing pro-regime propositions. If someone believes that (ii) holds, then one can seemingly disregard any scientific consensus brought to bear on pro-regime propositions.
The more predictable a piece of evidence is the less evidence (smaller update) it provides.
When doing bayes with selection effects, it is often necessary to use more nuanced data. Eg selection effects in what is published makes looking at effect sizes (rather than just effect sign) even more crucial.
On this particular problem the model "censorship level is 9000, the censors prefer hypothesis A, A is true" assigns very low probability to a consensus forming on B, and a very high probability on the consensus being A.
Thus this model doesn't update much on seeing A, as it isn't surprising.
But on seeing B it updates a lot (as it is very surprising).
And it updates away from the above model and towards *all* of the following models:
"censorship level is X<9000, the censors prefer hypothesis A, A is true"
"censorship level is 9000, the censors don't prefer hypothesis A, A is true"
"censorship level is 9000, the censors prefer hypothesis A, A is not true"
"censorship level is X<9000, the censors don't prefer hypothesis A, A is true"
"censorship level is X<9000, he censors prefer hypothesis A, A is not true"
"censorship level is X<9000, he censors don't prefer hypothesis A, A is not true"
So seeing a consensus say B, is strong evidence in favor of all of the following: "there is less censoring going on than i thought", "the censors preferences are different than i though", "B is true"
On a practical level, people feel much more strongly than is warranted that they need to have an opinion on everything. For the ordinary layperson, saying "I don't know" is usually fine, and thus "That doesn't convince me" doesn't need to imply believing the opposite position.
It really depends on what type of coding (web dev, machine learning). For ML, I strongly recommend DataCamp. I've had nothing but great experiences with them and their range of courses has absolutely ballooned in recent years.
Never used it myself (don’t have kids) but I’ve heard great things about MIT’s Scratch! According to Wikipedia it has millions of users around the world and is targeted for ages 8-16.
I did several codecademy courses at 11 or 12ish. I'm not sure how much they've changed in the decade since (they send me all sorts of emails about subscriptions these days), but at the time it was fun and accessible and gave me a good enough foundation in Python to write all of the programs I've needed to write.
I have been telling myself that bitcoin acts like a way of rewarding people for either following basic probabilistic reasoning, having libertarian ideals (or belonging to an epistemic herd that does) and punishing people for not engaging in probabilistic reasoning, valuing libertarianism, or following herds that reject both these ways of thinking.
But this could be entirely self-serving. Please poke holes in the reasoning. A basic argument is sketched out here:
- A: If bitcoin does become the global reserve currency, its value will be substantially higher than at present
- B: if A does happen, anyone who buys in earlier gets rewarded in rough proportion to how early they bought in
- C: we can see the price of bitcoin as being, roughly a market estimate of the likelihood of how likely A is; the price being higher now indicates that the market estimates it is even more likely than prior that bitcoin will be a globally accepted store of value and means of exchange in the future
- D whatever you think the probability of A is right now, it's got to be higher than it was 4 or 8 years ago
- E "You should buy a little bitcoin just in case it blows up" made senes 10 years ago, it makes sense now, but it pushes enough 'tribal buttons' that many intelligent adults reject this argument as absurd
Point A could use some quantifying. The current market capitalization of bitcoin (current market price times the number of bitcoin in existence) is about $900B, which is not enormously less than the amount of US dollars in circulation ($2.2T as of Oct 2021, per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MBCURRCIR ).
You could get a more generous estimation of the upside by using the Total Monetary Base ($6.3T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE ), which also includes money deposited by banks in their Federal Reserve accounts. I suspect the Currency in Circulation metric is the better one to use here, since its history is much smoother (much less noise, and much shallower spikes in 2009 and 2020 when the Fed enormously expanded its balance sheet) and the two numbers were only a few percent apart before bit Bernanke-era changes in fed policy, which leads me to believe CiC represents a decent proxy for US Dollar market cap while the current large gap between CiC and TMB is mostly an artifact of the Fed balance sheet shenanigans.
Either way, this implies the potential upside for Bitcoin completely replacing US dollars is somewhere between 2.4x and 7x. This is a substantial upside, equivalent to 12-25 years worth of average inflation-adjusted US stock market returns, but not a big enough upside to justify buying bitcoin as a long-shot lottery ticket style investment.
Another way of framing the problem, also taking into account opportunity costs, would be to estimate an over/under date for when bitcoin is likely to become the primary global reserve currency. If you think it's ~5 years away, then bitcoin seems a fantastic investment. If you think it's 10-20 years away, then you need to examine relative risks and upsides of stocks vs bitcoin in detail and it probably makes sense to hedge and invest in both to some extent. If you think it's 30+ years away or has a significant chance of never happening, then buy stocks.
On this note, ethereum seems like it might be as good or better a bet than bitcoin. Ethereum's market cap ($455B) is about half that of bitcoin, so there's more potential upside. And, while I haven't been following the technical details closely, I've heard plausible-sounding claims that ethereum scales better in terms of transaction costs and network speeds than bitcoin.
If that trend continues another 4 years, you should expect the price of bitcoin to be $1M. At current price of ~$50k, this says the market estimates less than a 5% chance that bitcoin's trend for the next 4 years will match its previous trend.
As far as claims about ethereum, they simply aren't true. Bitcoin is used as legal tender in el salvador today; the lightning network layer 2 scales to arbitrary transaction throughputs, with effectively zero cost or latency. That said, i expect ethereum to continue its rise vs. the dollar.
No, I think you phrased it appropriately. If there is an endgame for bitcoin other than being a speculative asset bought under the Greater Fool Theory, then it needs to serve a practical purpose that justifies its value. "Global Reserve Currency" is the absolute best case scenario for that practical purpose that I've heard seriously proposed.
And if bitcoin does turn out to be a Greater Fool Theory speculative asset without $1T+ worth of sustainable practical value, then sooner or later it's going to collapse because eventually you run out of greater fools.
> Global Reserve Currency" is the absolute best case scenario for that practical purpose that I've heard seriously proposed.
Can you say more here?
Have you heard about the concept of hyperbitcoinization? I.e. that a single inflation-proof store of value might eventually replace the role that equities + real estate + commodities currently play, as stores of value?
If you take the current geopolitical structure of the world, and assume it stays intact, then yes, i agree that you're right, bitcoin seems pretty silly. But this seems like assuming that the printing press won't fundamentally alter the power of the catholic church in Europe, for example.
No, this is the first I've heard about hyperbitconization. Based on your one-sentence description, it strikes me as horrendously implausible: bitcoin is a direct substitute only for conventional currencies and their associated payment processing systems. It's not a substitute for real assets: you can build a house, farm, store, or factory on land; you can make breakfast out of wheat, pork bellies, and frozen orange juice concentrate; and you can make and sell iPhones and MacBooks with Apple Computer, Inc; but you can't do any of these things with bitcoin except by means of spending it on the use of real assets.
The world in which Bitcoin actually replaces the USD as the global reserve currency is one in which something so big has happened that anything you might plan is pointless anyway.
So if bitcoin does replace USD as the global reserve currency, than someone who intentionally bought a small amount of bitcoin would have gotten lucky, rather than, say, planning for the possibility of this specific outcome?
Great! You're got a small amount of bitcoin, and the US financial system has collapsed, for reasons that I won't guess but they probably have a huge effect on everything else. How are your property values (if relevant), and the stability of your government?
If you've got a _large_ amount of bitcoin, you're doing better in that case, but now you're starting to compromise your situation in the case where the dollar hasn't collapsed, and maybe bitcoin has; remember that you invoked "basic probabilistic reasoning" at the beginning.
"- A: If bitcoin does become the global reserve currency, its value will be substantially higher than at present"
This seems like a Pascal's mugging to me, though I admit you did say to buy a *little* bitcoin.
How much?
I do think bitcoin is an alternative for people who are unhappy with fiat currency. I don't have a feeling for how much of the world economy that's likely to be.
> I do think bitcoin is an alternative for people who are unhappy with fiat currency. I don't have a feeling for how much of the world economy that's likely to be.
Most people put short-term practicality over politics, and continuing to use the money that everyone else is using is practical.
Maybe I don't understand what "global reserve currency" entails, but I think A and B are contradictory goals: It can't become the global reserve currency if everyone who owns it is holding it and waiting for it to go up instead of using it as a medium of exchange.
C: I don't see why this is true? I wouldn't consider the price of gold to be an indicator of the odds we'll return to the gold standard.
E: I would say that by now the early blowup has come and gone, and it's hard to predict if you'll see another. Due to its deflationary nature, "up" is probably the long-term trend (although who knows if it'll be enough to be worth the effort), but it's had wide swings in both directions at this point - if you bought in six months ago you'd be slightly in the negatives right now.
E2: Saying that people are rejecting your arguments because "it pushes tribal buttons" is pure Bulverism.
Maybe i can just rephrase 'A' as "there is some probability that bitcoin continues the growth trend it's been on the last ~10 years".
As for E2: i agree that, in the absence of more evidence, sure, this is bulversim. Here's my reasoning there:
I've been talking with many people, about bitcoin, for 8 years. Whenever there's a price raise in the short term (i..e, a bubble), people are more willing to talk to it - but the arguments themselves seem to remain the same, despite the evidence changing drastically.
If you're dealing with people who are rationally evaluating evidence, they should change their beliefs when they encounter surprising new evidence, right? If I told people in 2016, "look, in 5 years, the price of bitcoin could be 40x what it is right now, if it continues following the trend, so probabilistically it makes senes to buy a small amount", i think most of them would have responded with an assertion that this isn't going to happen, period. They would mention things like 'the transaction rate is slow', 'it's just for speculation', 'sure there was an initial bubble but the time to buy was 4 years ago, not now that it's overpriced at $1k a coin."
So now it's 2021, it's 5 years later, and we have new things like:
- an entire nation using bitcoin as legal tender
- multiple fortune 500 companies investing in bitcoin
And yet plenty of people _still_ reject bitcoin as totally absurd, not gonna last, you'd be crazy to buy even a small amount. Not just random people - leading financiers like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, etc.
It's like the new evidence didn't matter _at all_ to these people. But clearly _some_ people have changed their opinions. I've been having these conversations for 8 years now, and the main predictor i've found, in my personal experience, of oppeness - is willingness to question blue tribe shibboleths.
People who are aggressively woke, who dismiss any complaint against the blue true at all - those people who have, in my experience, tended to remain completely dismissive of all the new evidence int he last few years.
We can project this forward, easily. Check out the price graph of bitcoin over the past 8 years, plotted on a logarithm scale. There's a very obvious trend:
If you project that trends forward another 4 years, you should expect bitcoin to be around $1 M. We could pretend there are only two options there - either a million dollars in four years, or it's worth nothing. The current price is ~50k, which means that the market is pricing a 5% chance of bitcoin continuing the trend it's been on since inception. So, if you think the odds that bitcoin will continue its prior trend are greater than just 5%, it makes some to buy _some_ - even if the only options are "continues the prior trend" or"will crash all the way to zero."
Every year i have these conversations, more and more people have changed their mind. People who held out since 2013 have just started coming around - but it's always been people who were critical of the modern left, anti-woke, etc. This is what's leading me to think that resitance comes mainly from tribal thinking.
In some recent reporting on Omicron and its origin, a hypothesis that it may be related to the clinical trial of Merck's anti-viral pill is mentioned. To quote one paragraph from [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/bbc9eae3-5a49-43e8-8c25-a755008189e0):
"Another theory about how Omicron emerged in southern Africa has been advanced by William Haseltine, a virologist who has speculated that mutations could have been caused by Merck’s Covid-19 antiviral pill. He noted that South Africa was among the locations chosen for clinical trials of the drug molnupiravir, which began in October 2020."
I am not in a position to evaluate the claim. Neither does FT try. I generally welcome a less timid science that is willing to explore more "out there" hypotheses and that doesn't indirectly promote safe conformity in research. So even if we index this particular hypothesis about Molnupiravir at a very low probability, I think it CAN BE fine to let the idea enter the discourse. But I see the potential issues too.
However, what will be the fitness of this meme, prior to any actual data supporting or refuting the hypothesis? In hindsight it is easy to explain and "predict" which meme will find fertile political soil. Before hindsight is available I ask: will regulatory agencies go full precautionary principle on this and the pill receive "the AstraZeneca treatment", will it be pooh-poohed by the Scientists and thus find supporters on the political fringes, or will this meme fizzle out because something else proves more sticky in the crowded December/Holiday meme space? Could we place bets on some meme proliferation prediction market?
As I understand the mode of action, you’re right that the RNA doesn’t mutate entirely at random. So the hypothesis looks testable, so in that sense valid and worth looking into. But the issue is how to weigh the uncertain risks and benefits.
I predict that, regardless of fitness in the broader cultural consciousness, it will be immediately added into the memetic arsenal of COVID denialists to prove that COVID treatments cause disease because COVID doesn't exist.
As a meme in service of that it has potential for sure, since it joins big pharma profits with worsening of a disease. Will it have meaningful health impact, like the scaremongering around AZ did, where many in Europe and Asia elected to delay vaccination in order to get a scarce non-AZ one? The badness can come in different degrees.
I don't think this speculation about the role of molnupiravir is good meme fodder for COVID denialists, because to use it you have to be able to remember the word molnupiravir, and also to grasp at least the general idea of how an antiviral might have led to the Omicron mutation.
Here's some more promising fodder for those folks: I heard that somewhere in the Bible it says that antivirals make your butt fall off cuz covid.
Note that there is little reason to believe the omicron variant actually started in South Africa, rather than a different African country with a less robust testing regime - it was first *Detected* in South Africa because SA has very good healthcare by African standards, but AFAIK the evidence suggests it had been circulating for a couple of months before being picked up.
I had an interesting discussion with my parents, where I played the role of Georgism Advocate, and they played the role of Status Quo Defenders. After some back and forth we realized my hometown is already somewhat Georgist.
Our town has high property taxes (although they are levied based on property value rather than land value). However, if the tax was changed to be based on land value, but with a higher percentage than is currently levied on property value, I think most residents would end up paying about the same amount of tax.
I think the way that this town uses the money they bring in is good. There are plenty of parks and green spaces, the downtown is clean and lively. The school district is well funded and highly rated. There are many old and massive trees throughout the neighborhood, which are costly to maintain but enhance quality of life and land values. Much of this comes down to good planning during the building of the town and good stewardship by its government over the years. However, I suppose much of it is enabled by the property tax.
Anyways, it seems to me that Georgism is more of a spectrum than a binary thing. It would probably behoove proponents of Georgism to sneak their policies in without having to familiarize people with the name of their ideology and all its baggage (which most people will probably suspect is just undercover Marxism). Perhaps you can get most of the way to Georgism with policies that people are already familiar with.
Maybe I'm wrong though and there's a huge gulf between what I've described and true Georgism. If so, it would be enlightening to see how!
Even if currently the property tax is approx. the same as a land value tax would be (that is, land value takes up a similar fraction of the total property value for most properties), the incentives are different: a property tax disincentivizes improvements in a way a LVT wouldn't.
In the comments to one of the Georgism posts, I compared private land rents to consols: bonds with no maturity date that make regular interest payments perpetually (unless and until the issuer repurchases and retires them or defaults on the debt), which were somewhat popular mechanisms for long-term government debt in the 19th century. From a Georgist perspective, the people collectively rightfully own the rental income stream from unimproved land, and the government as instrument of the people's collective action should collect and spend that income stream on the people's behalf.
From this perspective, it seems to me that when the government sells, barters, or assigns the income stream from a particular bit of land, that action is morally and practically similar to issuing a consol: in both cases, the government is granting a vested property right to a future public stream of income into private hands. And for the government to confiscate that income stream without compensation would be improper in most cases, for the same reason it would be improper in most cases for the government to default on a consol or other bond.
I do however see a couple significant differences between consols and a private right to collect rental income, differences which would be of particular concern to Georgists. One is that consols typically pay a fixed interest rate on their original par value: e.g. a $1000 face value consol with a 3% coupon rate would pay $30/year forever. But land's rental value may go up or down a great deal over the decades, and the distributionary effects of unearned appreciation in land value seems to be one of the core concerns that Georgism aims to correct. The other is that a consol only entitles the owner to an income stream, while land ownership bundles the right to collect the rental value of the land, control of the land's usage, and both control and benefit from whatever structures and improvements are on the land.
These differences suggest a possible route to a soft transition to a Georgist regime without defaulting on the "consol" by simply imposing a steep LVT to "reclaim" the rental income stream for the public benefit. My idea is to impose a 85-100% LVT (assuming for the sake of argument that land value can be assessed fairly and accurately enough), but compensate property owners by issuing actual consols to them that would bear a face value equal to the assess value of the land at the effective date of the policy, and would pay an interest rate similar to the capitalization rate used to assess the tax. If unimproved land values increase faster than inflation (as Georgists expect it to), then this will represent a substantial haircut to landlords in the long term, but to a degree more akin to an ordinary tax increase than to wholesale expropriation or a large-scale debt default.
Side note: this is more in the nature of exploring an idea than a policy proposal I'm personally in favor of, as I'm a bleeding-heart libertarian, not a Georgist.
I disagree that it would be improper for a government to default on a consol, any more than it would be improper for France to refuse to honor a bond sold by Germany, which Germany said France would pay out on.
A government, as an entity, does not exist merely in a particular place, but also a particular time. I think it is reasonable to say it has an extent in time, such that I think certain finite-length bonds can be taken as reasonable; I think a thirty year bond, for example, is reasonable. I'm uncertain about a fifty year bond, and I see a hundred year bond as utterly unacceptable.
I talk elsewhere of two islands, the inhabitants of one of which sell their island to the inhabitants of the other so they can live in luxury, while dooming their descendants to pay rent forevermore; a consol, in effect. And I say this transaction is invalid; it is, in the words of a cartoon for adults, just slavery with extra steps.
This isn't just about human lifespans, because I think the same is true of an immortal selling his future self out to enjoy benefits now; I think the temporal distance is sufficient to erase any meaningful notion of consent to this transaction, that the person selling their future, and the future person paying for it, are sufficiently distinct that they should be treated as different entities. On the level of an individual, even a decade might be too long.
On the level of a government, a century certainly is. The entity making the deal, and the entity paying for it, are sufficiently temporarily separated as to represent distinct entities entirely; continuity between one and the other gives an illusion of sameness. And here, human lifespans provide a definite advantage, at least so long as they persist, in arguing against such notions: There can be no transaction where there is no consent, and certainly it is clear that those a century hence cannot consent to a transaction made today.
Does it matter in this analysis if the debt in question is callable? E.g. would you also object to a perpetual interest-only debt (or a negative-amortization debt, for that matter) that allowed the debtor the option of paying off the principal at any time?
It doesn't, no. (This means I have issues with large rolling national debts, as well; taking out a second bond to pay off the first 30 year bond is just taking out a 60 year bond with an extra step. If you didn't expect to be able to pay off the first 30 year bond, you had no right to sign onto it; and if you aren't able to pay it off when it comes due, you should admit that, instead of pushing the problem off onto future generations)
That's more similar to property itself; it's just adding myriad smaller transactions between the past and the present to create an apparent continuity of responsibility.
I'm not sure where to put my high level criticism of Georgism in the topic specific threads, so since it's present here... again... I figured I would drop it here.
At the end of the day there's no debate in here on the topic of whether the state, the public, the people (however you want to refer to it) have a right to to the land and a right therefore to extra the total value out of it.
This all plays out, to me, as a convoluted way to achieve "communism-lite".
From a theoretical view, the whole thing is preposterous once you start talking to me about the "extremely high land value in Manhattan". This is not true. There is extremely high land value for land sitting on top of a gold mine, for instance.
What there is in Manhattan is extremely high societal proximity value. If the government suddenly came in and said ok every landowner in NYC now owes 200x the property taxes, there is a chance that the value of the land in NYC could plummet over an extended period of time.
The value of the land in NYC is the community that surrounds it. Not the land. Taking that value, and distributing it to the "people", is not how you build the next Manhattan or protect your existing Manhattan.
Property is already the most disadvantaged asset class after cash (property tax rates typically are at or under inflation, so I think cash is worse).
We don't have sprawl because we don't tax land enough. That's one of the crazier arguments I heard in these conversations. "If we had LVT people would build up not sprawl". What? If I invest in the infrastructure and the "value of the land" goes up because the "area is now worth more" because of all the up-investing us landowners have been doing, you're just going to tax me more and give it to the "people".
The only good thing about the Georgism conversation is the conversation around incentives and taxes. This is good thinking. The existing tax regime for instance discourages specializations. I am massively incentivized to not hire someone to do work for me. If I hire someone I have to hire them with money I was taxed on (30%+ on the margin depending on your tax bracket) plus I have to pay their payroll and income taxes and depending on the service sales tax. So if the value of the service is $100 of utility my choices are:
1. Invest my free time in it, capture $100 of utility.
2. Hire someone. So for them, $100 * (1.3 marginal income tax) * (1.05 sales tax) * (1.12 payroll taxes) = $152.88. For me to pay $152.88, I had to make $218.40.
So hiring someone to do work for me costs 218% the value of the service being provided thanks to our tax structure. This is why we have unemployed people when almost every American would love for more domestic help.
"At the end of the day there's no debate in here on the topic of whether the state, the public, the people (however you want to refer to it) have a right to to the land and a right therefore to extra the total value out of it. "
I've argued for this position multiple times, against people rejecting this notion. What is absent is argument against this position; you may complain that we take it as a given that the public have a right to the land, but I've actually advanced arguments for exactly that perspective, and what is missing is arguments -against- that position.
That is where the debate is missing, and I'm happy to have them.
I advance the notion that the labor theory of property, which as far as I know is the default libertarian (!) argument for the morality of property, covers only improvements to land, and not the land itself; thus, it is right and proper that the rest of society has a right to that portion of the land which is unconverted, being as how no labor has been mixed with it and thus no moral ownership of it has been established, and that the Georgist tax is right and proper in covering the value streams of the unconverted portions of the land that society as a whole is thus denied. That is, Georgist taxes are taxing the opportunity cost imposed on society as a whole by the particular use a given piece of property has been put to, and is morally justified by the fact that said opportunity cost arises from an ownership without moral basis.
You're welcome to argue against this position, or to argue for another form of property rights, and we can have exactly the debate you say is missing.
As for your arguments about investing in infrastructure, how does that differ from the existing tax scheme, where you're taxed on the investment itself? Speaking as somebody who has gone through multiple properties and had to deal with city governments re-assessing the disasters I purchased so they could tax me higher on the livable houses I turned them into, the idea that investing in property raises taxes is something we already deal with. At least Georgist taxes only tax me on the marginal value overflow the improvements create, rather than the improvements themselves.
In the Pacific Standard cited in the first essay Paul Krugman went on say:
"We're having enough trouble trying to make sure we repeal the Bush tax cuts, and trying to shift to a completely different base of taxation is just not going to be on the table."
How likely is it that any nation will pay its way like this in let’s say, the next century?
Personally my guess is < 1%, basically because in order to get it, we need a large number of people to take it seriously, and in order to get them to take it seriously, they need to think it is likely to happen, which comes back to needing those same people to take it seriously.
Your tax calculation doesn't look right to me. A company normally pays someone's salary with pre-tax revenue of the company. No double-taxing as in your example. If I'm paying someone from my own already-taxed salary then... I'm not sure, but there are thresholds below which I can do that tax-free. Anyway, this question is complicated and probably not a point of disagreement with Georgists, as you say.
As for Georgism, I think you're thinking of it wrong. The value of an empty lot in Manhattan is very high due to the value of the surrounding community, yes, and Georgism ensures that no one hoards that value. That's how it discourages sprawl. The only reason you'd want that lot is if you had something very profitable / socially valuable to do on it.
You can think of it as getting rid of private land ownership -- renting all land (but only the literal land itself) from the government at its fair market value -- but otherwise being maximally laissez faire. I wouldn't call that communism-lite.
It's like how the government auctions off drilling rights or the electromagnetic spectrum. Those things are public goods and should generate revenue that offsets other taxes. Land should be the same. And maybe it's valuable enough to displace all or most other taxes. So arguably/potentially less communism than the status quo.
Posting a question here instead of on the relevant Georgism post because I've only skimmed those posts not read them in full yet --
If you assume that the first LVT experiment would likely be in the form of a $ for $ substitution of LVT for property tax (a fairly modest assumption given that home-owners are a supermajority of voters in most municipalities)*, what's the benefit of a Land Value Tax?
Context: I was very interested in Georgism / LVT a few years ago but as I've learned more about modern zoning codes + the associated submerged thicket of anti-building regulations that exist in most cities where I might want to live, I've cooled on LVT as a solution to the problem of modern cities. LVT wouldn't make it easier to build new buildings, which is the core problem, IMO. Modest pro-building reforms seem to have a clear/larger pay-off for equivalent levels of political activism (e.g. modest steps taken in California to legalize ADUs).
It should disincentivize real estate investment purchases, and (relative to the previous state of affairs) incentive property improvements.
It should also reduce the values of the most valuable real estate, and increase the values of the least valuable real estate (the latter only as long as the LVT doesn't approach 100%); I think it will reduce the incentives for NIMBYism, since changes in land values will be diminished relative to the current tax scheme, but it might also reduce the incentives for certain kinds of YIMBYism, since increases in land value are less of a good deal (but even a 100% LVT still creates YIMBYism for land-value-enhancing projects, since the benefits - those who want the improvement - are more concentrated than the costs - those who don't care about the improvement but have to pay slightly higher taxes as a result).
It would marginally disincentivize investments in empty plots of land. Whether or not it would disincentivize purchases of housing stock for investment purposes depends on the details of implementation of the interaction with the zoning code.
In a city with a very large gap between the cost of constructing a new unit of housing and the cost of a unit of housing, a LVT might DISincentivize property improvements if it defined the "zoning windfall" as a land value increase. (See my other comment for the details on this).
What's wrong with buying real estate for investment?
Even if land value goes up even without improvements, the owner still has every incentive to make improvements that maximize profit, and probably has less sentimental concerns such as the neighborhood aesthetics he's used to than an owner-occupier.
Investment is the wrong word there; speculation is the more appropriate term. I'm fine with real estate investments, if what is happening is development. What I'm not fine with is a situation which incentivizes people to keep properties vacant and unused.
Why would the current system incentivize keeping properties vacant and unused? Even if today it's more feasible to keep land vacant without going bankrupt than under a LVT, if doing so is in fact suboptimal, then landowners can make even more profit by building something on it, even today. Indeed, isn't one of the main selling points of LVT that it wouldn't change incentives at all (except for situations like a developer owning a large track of land it could build an entire neighborhood on, in which case it would reduce the incentive to build)?
The only situation I can think of where a speculator has an incentive to leave land empty is when the landowner expects that a developer will probably buy up the land a few years later to build a skyscraper on it; but there isn't sufficient demand as of yet to build it now, nor sufficient certainty that there will be enough demand later; and it's not economical to build a smaller building now just to tear it down a few years later, nor is it feasible or economical to build the first few floors of a skyscraper now, and build the rest later if there is sufficient demand. But in this case, leaving the land empty for now is indeed the most efficient thing to do.
Removing property tax removes a disincentive to improving the building on your property; now you can add a second story to your house without triggering a tax hike.
If excessive regulation makes new construction impossible that won't result in much change, because the onerous regulation is the bottleneck, but one can at least hope that more pressure on said bottleneck increases the chance of a reform there too...
Also Georgism related, apologies if this was covered in the articles because I've only skimmed them not read them in full --
In a very high cost city where there is a large gap between the value of a new unit of housing and the cost to build a new unit of housing, you get really weird results by trying to calculate the land value.
Stylized example:
In a given city core, a "standard" unit of housing of 1,000 square feet of liveable space sells for $1 million, and a "standard" unit of housing costs $300,000 to construct. There is a $700,000 "zoning windfall" that accrues to the handful of people lucky/connected enough to get permission to build (which rarely happens, which is why these prices are currently at equilibrium).
There are two adjacent Parcels of land of equal size in the city core.
Parcel-One has been zoned for 10 units of housing, and so has 10 units of housing on it, giving it a total price of market price of $10 million.
Parcel-Two has been zoned for 1 unit of housing, and so has 1 unit of housing on it, giving it a total market price of $1.1 million ($1 million for the housing unit, $100,000 for the front/back yard).
If the city transitioned from a Property Tax to a Land Value Tax, then EITHER
(1) both Parcels would be taxed at the same rate since their land quality is identical, spiking the tax rate on Parcel-Two *even though Parcel-Two is improved to the maximum extent allowable under the current law*
(2) the Parcels would be taxed at a rate that takes into account their current zoning, so Parcel-One would pay substantially more LVT than Parcel-Two, making LVT not too different from Property Tax
And scenario (2) gets even weirder, because if you use zoning to account for land value, then either
(2.1) you use zoning-at-time-of-law-passage to account for land value, causing real land values to change relative to taxable land values over time as people get changes made to zoning
or
(2.2) you declare the $700,000 "zoning windfall" of getting permission to build a new unit of housing to be a "land value increase" that is thus taxable. This keeps real land values and taxable land values the same, at a cost of LOWERING development because now the incentive to try to hack your way through the thicket of zoning regulations has been taxed away.
I'm fine with the zoning windfall being taxed away, because I think the current system actually incentivizes having such zoning problems. (The politically well-connected who can hack through the thicket of zoning regulations benefit from those regulations, and will, insofar as they are an economic rational actor, use their political connections to preserve or even expand them.)
Please correct me if I'm not understanding you, but I think you're saying that:
Step 1) Implement a LVT
Step 2) See the rate of housing construction in urban cores drop from "pitiful" to "near zero"
Step 3) ???
Step 4) Housing situation becomes better
The issue with this plan is that the politically well-connected benefit from such zoning problems, but they were not the primary driving force behind zoning problems being created, nor are they the primary force protecting them. The primary constituency for zoning are people who are old enough and rich enough to prefer slower neighbourhood change to extra dollars. Humans have a bias against change and zoning empowers that bias. Without zoning, an individual can monetarily benefit from constructing additional units of housing without having to consult their neighbours who otherwise have to experience the annoyance of construction/change for no direct benefit. Even the new housing itself can be a cost to neighbours, since adding units of housing increases the density of a neighbourhood, people have different preferences for density, and people are often already living at or close to their preferred density.
An LVT will dramatically increase the price the people who are old enough and rich enough to prefer the slower change are paying for that preference.
Also, I think you underestimate in particular the constituency of older wealthier people who don't want new housing undercutting the value of their rental properties.
Let's play through this. You're 65. You've spent the past 35 years toiling away hard for society through your employment. You lived in dense urban environments, often in smaller apartments. You raised your kids for the first 10 years of their lives in a townhouse near the urban center with very little backyard.
You retire and move a bit further out to a nice lot in Arlington VA in 2000. Over the next 10 years demand for property in Arlington VA skyrockets. Yes, you're paying higher property taxes but the rate is not that oppressive. Overall you preserve your little plot of heaven you worked so hard for despite the vast change around you.
Now LVT rolls around and your cost of staying on this "unproductive", to use your language, "dramatically increases". You are forced to move. You can no longer stay near the city you love and instead you need to move deep into the hills of VA or return to the workforce.
I'm not convinced this happens (for what it's worth, I think LVT will demolish cities as it is currently proposed), but you posit it will. This is the ideal outcome you want?
When it comes to economically forcing the relocation of people, I think there is room between Prop 13 and LVT. I love how its now "progressive" to forcefully relocate people, as long as its old rich people :) :)
I am unfamiliar with Arlington, VA, so I can't say. Also, I am not a progressive.
But, supposing the land value in Arlington got high enough - yes.
You focus on the story of one person, and make it salient. However, if that house is bulldozed, and affordable apartments are built in its place, there are dozens of stories that could be told, about how their lives were changed by access to the opportunities that that one person's story began with, access to the ability to toil away for 35 years, to accumulate enough wealth to be able to retire someplace nice.
The retired person is kicked out of their house - but not onto the street, and not empty-handed, and they buy a cheaper place a few more miles away, and enjoys basically the same standard of living as before. However, the next best alternative for the working class families your story doesn't mention aren't nearly as nice; perhaps their commute is a hour longer each way, perhaps they make 25% less wages. The story of your retired person has one blip, in which they enjoy the same standard of living somewhere else. The story of the invisible people, absent the opportunity to live in the most productive places, is considerably darker.
Now, in one case, we have an older wealthier person paying a high LVT to continue living in a place, and in the other, the older person moves out and the higher LVT is divided among a number of working-class people just starting out.
Let's say the older person moves further out, to a cheaper house on less valuable land. Here's the neat thing: The older person is left financially better off in the end of all of this. Because the Citizen's Dividend now comes in, and the older person's own dividend is made higher by that and all the similar transactions taking place, divided out among everybody in the system.
Or you could add a basic protection to the system, such that the LVT of retirees is fixed. If the LVT returns to baseline upon the sale of the house or the death of the owners, you get the same kind of social benefits, albeit at a delay. Personally I think the world where we bite the bullet ends up better, but I can see why somebody would prefer the world with such protections.
LVT will not dramatically change the price that people who are old and rich and prefer slow change pay for that preference if you use model (2) where the land price is dictated by zoning.
Are you claiming that there exists a $-maximizing group that is the dominant group in local politics in zoning-constrained metro areas? This is quite obviously not the case, because there are many many different municipalities in the zoning-constrained metro areas, and any one town/city could unilaterally upzone, generating a truly enormous $ windfall for the property owners in that city relative to the status quo. They don't because voters are a combination of change-averse and economically-misinformed.
It will, because currently, the OnR (old and rich) are, in effect, making money from their preferences; their house values keep going up, because more people want to live there than can live there.
If they start paying for those preferences instead, and don't get to claim that increased value for themselves, yes, that does dramatically change the price; it changes it from making money every year from land value increases due to housing shortages, into losing money every year paying taxes on a constantly-increasing land value.
I've observed the same phenomenon in a number of places; homeowners have a vested financial interest in keeping the housing supply both limited and expensive, and enforce this in a number of ways.
There's a second reason the OnR want housing expensive, in addition to their own financial interests - they don't want to live near poor people. Which ties into a major second way these things are controlled; rental license quotas. You don't want too many renters living around you; lowers property values, which lowers rents, which brings in even poorer renters. But you want some licenses, for the politically well-connected to make some money off the state of affairs.
And yes, any one place could upzone, but that is only of interest to the subset of the OnR who are currently interested in selling their property, which is going to be a minority at any given time, as other OnR people buy in. None of the other voters are interested in that, as it can only harm their financial interests (and also let poor people in).
Here's what I am understanding: Imagine we are post initial implementation of LVT. I am living in residential home. I am just living there - I am not building, rennovating, etc.
As I understand it, if my property value goes from $500,000 to $800,000 I would essentially pay 100% of that change in some form of tax whereas today I would essentially pay 1-2% per year depending on my municipality on that new balance.
The difference is dramatic, and you are essentially forcing people to move. You are infringing on their right to live somewhere.
For what its worth, I feel property taxes in general are terrible. I think that property owners in an area should be forced to pay to maintain roads and municipal services in that area. But that should be it. A budget is set and paid for, other than that, how dare you tell me that if I bought my home, paid off the mortgage, etc, if I can't produce $15,000 a year to pay the town for all kinds of crap that has nothing to do with maintaining the municipality (e.g. schools), you can evict me? I find this outrageous!
The original Georgist were the New World colonizers. They found a bunch of economically under used land and "appropriated" it for more productive use when the natives couldn't pay the proper LVT.
So, I think 2.2 doesn't *remove* the incentive for hacking through the thicket of zoning laws, it *transfers* it. Now instead of an individual developer getting a windfall for getting a single plot of land through the maze, the city gets a humongous windfall for repealing all the red tape in one fell swoop, which IMO is a much better result for the city.
If you have something on the order of a 50% LVT, then *both* the developer *and* the government have incentive to do away with restrictions.
Note that a key assumption here is that the entity in charge of the thicket of regulation is the same as the entity collecting the Land Tax, if fails if the two are at separate levels of governance. (and, unfortunately, the thicket is often spread across multiple levels, though that varies a lot depending on what part of the world you are in)
The thicket is spread across multiple levels of government, but let's zoom in on the local level. Local governments are not tax-maximizing entities*, and even if they were tax-maximizing entities city councillor salaries do not rise when tax collection rises. Transferring the $ incentive for development from a private developer who can capture that incentive to a city council who cannot capture that $ incentive for themselves results in less development.
*They are not tax-minimizing entities either. What a local government is optimizing for varies greatly depending on the local balance of voting blocks, public sector unions, etc.
A related point: since many/most property tax rates are set via the municipality allocating its annual budget proportional to assessed values, under scenario (2) the owners of Parcel-One would have a significant incentive for Parcel-Two to be upzoned, as their *share* of the total land value would go down.
In praise of landlords. First it must suck to be a landlord these days. I was contemplating becoming a landlord before we sold my mom's duplex. I figured it wasn't worth the hassle. Better to sell the house and put the money in the market. Having been on both sides of the renter fence, I only recall good landlords, and mostly good tenants, a few not so good ones. (Almost all my renting experience has been with two family houses.) Landlords have to; pay the mortgage, pay the taxes, pay the insurance, pay for maintenance, deal with tenant complaints, find new tenants... I figure I'm missing something. As we make it harder for landlords, I predict we will drive 'good' people from becoming landlords, and we will be left with the bottom feeders, who can squeeze enough out of an apartment to make it worth it. I think we need to make it easier for landlords, so that more good people will join the ranks. Treat landlords as evil, and you get evil landlords.
There is definitely a phenomenon where returns on land are usually much higher than returns on property, so being a slum-lord is more profitable than trying to rent higher quality accommodation.
As for horror stories of bad landlords, I wonder how many of them stem from terrible property management companies - all the stories I've heard from close friends had them screwed over by the agents and the landlord hadn't ever even heard of the dispute.
I also think the differences between "bad landlords" and "bad tenants" is astronomical.
A "bad landlord" makes you deal with pests yourself and doesn't rush to fix things. Oh my!
A "bad tenant" causes economic devastation by refusing to pay rent on a property that you have to pay for anyway, causes damage that can run up tens of thousands of dollars, and may tie you up in months of litigation.
It's not even comparable.
We love to sympathize with the less well off in this country, and that's admirable. But we need to take off the rose tinted glasses.
No, a "bad landlord" would be someone who illegally evicts you, and you come home to find the locks have been changed without warning and all your stuff has been dumped on the curb to be stolen, causing a comparable amount of loss to someone who's much less able to afford it. At least the landlord has a roof over their head while they try to deal with a nightmare tenant!
For every "landlord who illegally evicts tenants for no reason" how many "tenants who don't pay rent and take year+ to remove" do you think there are? I would estimate the latter outnumber the former by at least 100x, perhaps 1,000x?
If you illegally evict someone you could lose your property, pretty easily.
If you don't pay your rent your landlord will have to spend likely more than you owe them, and take 5-10 years, to get it back. Let alone recover from the trashed apartment.
The law is strongly in the tenants favor in this country, and in some states especially. I really don't think the situation is comparable, but am happy to be educated further if you have statistics that show otherwise.
I've had the nightmare tenants. They're a large part of why I'm not a landlord.
However, I can choose not to be a landlord. That's a choice I get; you self-select to be a landlord, and deal with those kinds of problems, and take those kinds of risks.
The tenants can't choose to just have enough money to not need to rent, and they can't choose to not take those kinds of risks.
You have a serious lack of imagination when it comes to what "bad landlord" can mean. Try this one on for size - I only heard about it due to the BSD connection, I imagine there are plenty more less prominent / actually insane ones out there, where the landlord merely commits a felony, ruins their tenantss lives and gets away with it.
"Prominent FreeBSD developer Kip Macy has been charged with waging a campaign of terror against people renting apartments in a six-unit building he owns. He stands accused of cutting out floor supports to retaliate against a tenant who went to court to keep from being evicted.
According to San Francisco prosecutors, Macy also shut off the tenant's electricity, disconnected his phone and had workers saw a hole in his living room floor. Other tenants claim the programmer-turned-landlord and his wife broke into their apartment and stole $2,000 worth of belongings. The couple was arrested Tuesday and charged with multiple felonies, including burglary, stalking, grand theft and shutting off service."
Again orders of magnitude man. The simple fact is a landlord pulling that shit stands to lose a lot so I need to see some data showing me that this is real life problem. Those are criminal offenses.
Tenants who do the same face very little consequences, these matters are not considered criminal
It's funny that you add "paying the mortgage" and "paying taxes" and "insurance" to the list of things landlords are saddled with as if this pushes "good landlords" away.
1. Mortgage payments go into equity, and this money appreciates as your land does. (minus some loss to the Overlandlord - mortgage lenders. Nearly everyone in the past hundred years managed to come out ahead on this front). This can hardly be considered a cost.
2. Everyone pays taxes, this isn't a problem unique to being a landlord.
3. People insure their assets. If I were renting out my car do you think I would not insure it against damage? You can not pay property insurance, it would just be a Very Bad Idea.
Everything else you mentioned is indeed the job of a landlord, and ostensibly the reason that landlords collect rent. This can be stressful, but is extremely lucrative. Sometimes it's so lucrative that landlords will just hire someone to do "maintenance, deal with tenant complaints, find new tenants" and still make piles of money. Nobody needs to be praised for naturally following incentives into huge piles of cash.
Capital, taxes and insurance are part of the cost of being a landlord. And a big part of the rent covers those costs. I ran the numbers and it was not lucrative for me, so I decided not to be a landlord.
Well yes, exactly. The people who did run the numbers and found it worthwhile ended up being landlords. Your leading sentence was 'in praise of landlords', I mostly took issue with that.
To provide a counterpoint. My wife and I are buying the duplex next door. Monthly rent will just about cover monthly expenses. Fair market rent would be a bit higher and would definitely cover them, but we have a long term renter who's staying and don't want to raise the rent too fast. That said, this will be a small expense, or maybe a small income. Either way it won't be much on our monthly budget.
In the meantime, we build equity, and very likely, the house's value itself goes up. In 10 years, the rents will be higher, but out mortgage won't. In 20 or 30 years it will be worth a good deal and paid off. Our kids will get it either as an asset that by then, with just paying tax and maintenance, should be able to generate real income, or will sell it and collect the cash as inheritance. Either way, it'll build generational wealth.
Now, our downpayment put into the market might do better than the rate at which the house appreciates. But.
1) It also might not.
2) We already have a goodly chunk of my retirement there.
3) I doubt it will appreciate faster than the house plus the portion of the monthly rent which goes to equity. (I admit haven't run the numbers to see just what that looks like.)
This is what my parents did ~60 years ago. Having a good tenant next door is totally worth the few thousand you may lose in rent. (IMHO) Re: 'the numbers' one can't know the future, but I get a certain sense of security from owning property, that I don't get from owning stocks. It's hard to put a number on that.
The idea behind "That said, this will be a small expense, or maybe a small income" is what I was taking umbrage with when I scoffed at the idea that mortgage payments are a true cost. When you pay your mortgage, the only money you 'lose' is interest. Increasing home equity IS income. It's not a positive cash flow (which is what I assume you're talking about) but you can have it as cash whenever you like by selling the underlying asset or taking out a new loan against it.
With regards to point 3, you will also have to consider the extreme leverage you have when you invest in a home.
Let's say you bought a 500 thousand dollar property, and you put down a 100 thousand dollar down payment. You are entitled to 100% of the growth of your asset. So at the start of your mortgage you are getting the capital gains of a 500k house for a mere 100k down. Even if your property appreciates at a very conservative rate of 2% per year, that's 10k in value - which is 10% of your original investment of 100k! The market tends to track home prices pretty strongly, because Land is Important, so you're likely to outperform any safe market investment for a long time.
Politics allowed, just in time. So California is doing tit-for-tat and fighting fire with fire - going after gun rights the same way Texas is going after abortion. What could go wrong? I expect Supreme Court will have to eventually deal with it, and would not be surprised if they do so inconsistently, upholding Texas law and overturning California. If they do decide consistently, I wonder which way they would go.
Anti-gun states have been ignoring Heller through much more direct routes and the Supreme Court has just let them. I still can't buy a gun in NJ. California doing this doesn't change a thing.
The point of the framework of the Texas law is to evade pre-enforcement review, where a law is challenged by a plantiff suing a government actor (usually the state attorney general or the head of the regulatory agency charged with enforcing the law) seeking an injunction preventing them from acting to enforce a law the plantiff argues is unconstitutional.
The Texas law in question seeks to prevent this by putting enforcement in private hands, but even if successful this only defeats pre-enforcement review. The law can still be struck down if someone deliberately violates the law and someone else brings a suit against them: the defence could then raise constitutional objections at trial or appeal, and the court ruling could agree with those objections setting a precedent nullifying the law. The problem is this is a slower and more heavyweight process than pre-enforcement review, and it requires someone to volunteer to go first and risk incurring liability if the courts rule against them.
In this case, Texas abortion providers all seem to have (last I heard) adopted a strategy of complying with the law for now, presumably waiting for the appeals around pre-enforcement challenges to play out, and probably also waiting for SOCTUS to rule on Dobbs as that might substantially revise precedents on which abortion statutes are unconstitutional or not.
Thanks for this clarification. So now my question is - will California gunmakers also, temporarily, follow the law while awaiting appeals to play out? Is there a similar pending SCOTUS ruling on gun control?
Since politics are allowed on this thread, I'm curious what people's predictions are for the 2024 election. Who are the contenders in the primaries? Who wins them? Who will be the new people who didn't run in the last election cycle?
An intelligent friend of mine who shall remain anonymous seems to think Tucker Carlson might run—since he's like an American Zemmour I suppose it's possible.
Trump runs in the Republican primary and most of the contenders stay out of his way. You'll get a couple of old-style contenders but no one who moves the needle. He wins in a walk.
I really don't know who's running on our side. Pete and Kamala, of whom Pete wins, but there's probably someone I'm not thinking of who beats him.
Since this is a political thread, what do people think about the 2024 election? Who will be the candidates and the winner? Give odds. Who will be the new players? Is there a good way to predict who will be new players?
One thing I found lacking from the Georgism discussion: even if it will work in principle to raise taxes, it would cause an absolutely enormous shift in _what_ we tax. Farms in particular will be massively taxed, while a tech company or a venture capitalist will be essentially untaxed (at least if they forego downtown offices).
Is this really a good thing, shifting the tax burden almost completely to activities that are land-intensive? _Why_ would we want this, as opposed to for instance a flat tax on income or a fixed VAT, that affects the economy more evenly?
I feel like some numbers are in order. That all seems backwards, I would think farmers would pay less since farmland is cheap. Also many farmers do not even own their land so nothing would change for them.
And many venture capitalists already rent their offices. So nothing would change for them either.
If farmers would pay *less* than now, who would pay more to compensate? I don't know a lot about farming, but it seems to me that land would be a big deal there...
Not half the cost of farming. Half the cost of the farm property. Farming costs a great deal more in terms of labor and non-land-improvement capital than land and land improvements.
Thanks! So what part of total budget is land rent (real or imputed)?
We can try another angle as well. Taxes are 25% of GDP in the US. If you go full Georgism, this will have to be entirely shifted to LVT. What percentage of land-only value in the U.S. is farmland (including razing) value (or what part of Georgism-imputed land rents and farmalnd land rents - this is by definition the same ratio)? This percentage times the 25% of GDP that are taxes need to be covered by agriculture (which is in itself about 5% of U.S. GDP). So if, for instance, agricultural land value is 20% of all land value (no idea what the actual number is), then agriculture will be taxed at 100%.
Ha, I thought parking was expensive already! Might it get really fucking expensive in a Georgist city? Or I at least it would all need to be in more intensive structures, like parking garages etc...
Hopefully the LVT revenue will contribute to a robust public transit system.
I think the point isn't whether or not farm land would be expensive in LVT. I think the point being made is any industry which is landless would be significantly tax advantaged against any industry that requires land.
For instance, LVT in the age of remote work could be the death knell for office space. If suddenly office space is significantly more expensive, why bother?
If it's not, then great, but you're still taking whole segments of the industrial base that *require* use of land and increasing the tax burden on them vis a vis those that do not. This is a distortion.
Why would an office space get more expensive to rent? Surely an enormous chunk of the value of the property in that case is the office building which is untaxed by LVT?
Farmers on the other hand would probably pay about twice the property tax than they currently do. (Improvements to the land are actually a notable piece of property value for farmers, including irrigation systems, barns, fencing, etc., but they still use a lot of land.) They aren't the biggest losers from LVT, but they certainly would lose (and pass on that additional burden on to food consumers.)
Also worth noting that this likely replaces some other tax burden (perhaps some income tax or equivalent) which makes the actual net impact of an LVT ambiguous on farmers without a lot more detail.
Per the "Part 1" article, specifically 1.1. Most of the value of urban real estate is land, this is specifically presented as the opposite. Most of the value is in the "land" not the office building.
Now, Lars may be incorrect that this is the Georgist position. I wouldn't be in a position to say that so am responding to this specifically.
Now he later argues that Georgists can prove this cost won't get passed on tenants, and apparently the property owners are just going to swallow a absolutely massive cost increase. If that is so, office rents won't go up but.... new offices will certainly appear elsewhere with lower rates and this "massively valuable urban land" will after a few years be not as valuable.
Whether farmland is cheap is irrelevant. The question is, what percentage of property value is land value (and comparing that percentage to the ratio of current property tax rate and hypothetical land tax rate.)
In practice, I think farmland property value average out to about half land value in my area. Irrigation systems and barns are very significant improvement expenses, but they support a lot of acres of land each. Assuming we're going from a property tax of 1% to a land tax of 4%, that's going to about double their property/land-tax-burden.
Per the USDA, total revenue of farmers was 439 billion, and per some internet searches and math, property taxes paid by farmers is currently around 7.5 billion. So currently property taxes represent 1.7% of the revenue stream, which means, basically, that even a negligible Citizen's Dividend more than makes up for the slight increase in food costs.
Eliminating tax decisions wouldn't necessarily lead to socially optimal outcomes being the basis of all/most decisions, just to be clear, unless you're a radical libertarian who thinks that free market outcomes necessarily equals socially optimal outcome (which I don't say pejoratively).
Agreed! Intentional tax influences could make sense (but can suffer from "I know better than the crowd" mistakes).
However, today's tax structure creates a lot of unintentional side effects. There is a massive tax incentive for unpaid labor. I should cook my own meals instead of hiring a chef, or perform my own landscaping instead of hiring a landscaper, is a bad tax incentive. DIY is so large because taxes create a MASSIVE tax disincentive to hiring people to do that work. Massive. And it hurts the working class.
step 1: genetically engineer algae to excrete massive amounts of caprylic acid (8-carbon saturated fat which is just barely liquid at room temperature and bouyant in water)
I find it hard believe this works at scale given that billions of dollars of venture capital already went into algae biofuels with nothing to show for it.
I did not know that, but the linked post was *not* an ACX post mysteriously posted on dynomights blog. Despite that being what was claimed. I hold to my polite request for less of this kind of spam.
Ah, perhaps I am too charitable, but I interpreted the statement as a joke that suggested that the writing of the post was similar to the writing style on ACX/the post would be of interest to readers of this blog. /shrug
Well.. I'm actually being a little more aggressive than the situation warrents. If I was more familiar with dynamax I think I probably wouldn't have been quite as irritated. It really probably was just a joke that landed weird with me.
I wonder if the style of 'many concrete examples of a general trend' will become popular. I tend to enjoy most such posts when I read them, but I could see it become shallow like listicles (perhaps it already is?).
So with the benefits of hindsight this seems like something Scott did write foreshadowing his wedding, right down to the Odysseus reference. Sorry we doubted you Mr or Ms SeishinSennin.
The term "economic collapse" is thrown around freely, but what does it mean? What specific conditions must exist for an economist to be able to say "the economy has collapsed"?
To start out, I'd say one condition is ubiquitous reversion to the barter system in a country that once used currency. I can't think of a situation where that condition would exist, but the economy would still be healthy overall.
I think the barter system is mostly mythical; you don't ever actually have people trading three chickens for a pair of shoes or anything like that as a major economic driver. Economic collapse typically takes the form of hyperinflation but people still trying desperately to get *some* use out of their traditional currency because that's still better than trying to find someone with shoes in the right size who wants chickens, or people using foreign (traditionally GBP or USD) currency rather than their own, or quasi-socialist arrangements where a local strongman grabs all the surplus Stuff and distributes it to his followers while commanding all the labor to ensure more Stuff tomorrow.
Barter can work when two groups reliably have what the other need. I read about a pair of Siberian tribes who herd reindeer and hunt seals, respectively, and trade seal meat for reindeer meat every year. (The herders' diet would be dangerously low in fat without seal, and the seal hunters need the reindeer because it comes in a fur bag, which they rework into clothes.)
That said, if a society is built with the assumption that people use money, it's going to go to shit if money stops working properly.
People would use barter to institutes some sort of pseudo-currency, like cigarettes in prisons etc. Obviously a whole economy couldn't run on cigarettes, but I would assume a market would develop for tradable objects of known value, perhaps in several kinds.
I think police should use bodycams 100% of the time, and have the footage livestreamed to a separate agency which monitors it and publicly posts the footage of any arrest that involves struggle. (exception: delay if necessary to avoid tipping off related suspects that are about to be arrested) This would have some benefits:
1. Give people a feel for the entire distribution of police & criminal activity, instead of only seeing incidents that are ultra-cherrypicked to push a particular emotional narrative. This probably leads to more accurate beliefs and better policy prescriptions.
2. Preempt misinformation that incites riots about falsely alleged police misconduct.
3. Prevent coverups of actual police misconduct.
4. Incentivize police and criminals to be on their best behavior, since unnecessary violence by either party will go to a permanent public video record.
5. Protect police from harm, because it is no longer possible for the criminal to murder the only witness. This changes incentives a lot.
6. Since police become less likely to get shot, they can also be more chill.
A key lesson from WWII is that, in a war of attrition between industrial countries, it is crucial to strike the right balance between the quantity and quality of weapons your side produces. U.S. and Soviet-made weapons (especially tanks) are generally closer to the optimum than German-made weapons, which are considered too expensive and complicated to have been worth it.
What are some specific examples of WWII weapons that, without doubt, represent the following:
1) Too cheap / primitive / simple; country would have been better off changing the design to be more expensive / complex.
2) A perfect balance of cost and complexity.
3) Too expensive / complicated; country would have been better off changing the design to be cheaper / less complex.
My understanding of German weapons in WWII is that they focused on quality because quantity wasn't possible for them. Germany was a smaller country than their enemies, with fewer natural resources. So their optimum balance was different from ours.
Even accepting that viewpoint, I'm not sure the Germans were getting their money's worth. A lot of German tanks were over-engineered and had reliability issues. It doesn't matter how good your tank is if it can't drive to the front lines.
I should probably finish Wages before speculating about this but maybe the timing was also relevant and you can make 10 good tanks faster than 20 mediocre ones.
3. The Japanese super-battleships? Incredibly expensive to build and operate, so rarely-used that Yamato got called a "hotel," and never actually saw the sort of decisive battle they were intended for - Yamato and Musashi were sunk by aircraft and their half-finished sister Shinano was sunk by a submarine.
But the same could be said of Japan's non-super battleships, for the most part. They saw a little bit of action in the Solomons, then died horribly. It turned out not to be a battleship kind of war - but it plausibly could have if Pearl Harbor had turned out differently.
If it had, history might speak more favorably of the super-battleships. Their value proposition was that Japan couldn't beat the United States in quantity, either numbers of ships or tonnage, but might do something with quality - and one possible area for a qualitative advantage was not having to fit its battleships through the Panama Canal.
Against the sort of battleships the United States was producing in 1937 and had in service in 1942, it's plausible that two Yamatos could have stood off outside the effective range of US guns while punching through the armor of US ships, defeating an otherwise-superior force. They would have had a narrow window to do that, because by 1944 superior US metallurgy (thus AP shells) and fire-control radar gave our smaller battleships an absolute edge, but it wasn't an absurd strategy and arguably the best strategy for a Japan that is going to build battleships at all.
#1 is hard to come up with good examples of, probably because it's much easier to squeeze more performance out of a system by adding complexity than the inverse, so such weapons are fairly rapidly succeeded by improved variants.
#2: North American P-51D Mustang. Sacrificed some aerodynamic efficiency relative to, e.g., the P-40 Warhawk in exchange for a *much* simpler wing planform. Simpler construction -> higher production rate -> Allied fighters over Berlin*.
*With the integration of the Merlin engine
#3: Messerschmitt Me 262. Although the postwar era decisively proved out that fighters with turbine engines dominate those with piston engines, it was too finicky and relied on too scarce of materials, diverting production capacity from more proven platforms.
When inflation is calculated, hedonic regression can only account for legible attributes of products. But there is quite a lot of corner-cutting on illegible attributes. You could even say that producers are often incentivized to maximize illegible corner-cutting. So I thought of an alternative to hedonic regression which is directly based on consumer preferences rather than instead of central planners trying to do linear algebra to calculate what the price of something "should" have been. Compare the price of a used P1 with the price of a used P2 at time T3, and adjust for depreciation.
An oft-expressed notion in recent years is "food is the new music". I continue to think this is true, and that it's due to economic change. Music used to be expensive. An album cost you more than a good meal 30 years ago.
Music is now ridiculously cheap, almost free, whereas food still costs something but it's available in many more varieties than it was a few decades ago.
Is this change purely an economic phenomenon---ethnic food has become more available and affordable? Or does the shift from music to food mean something else? Some deeper value change?
I'm not sure how widespread this is, but some quarters are of the opinion that contemporary music is generally bad, both popular and academic. Of course, one can always delve into backlogs, but that's a pretty niche interest.
Why is the resale market for NBA tickets a failure? I'm watching a mediocre team on TV and more than half the good seats are empty. This in a city where ticket scalping is legal.
My guess is the problem is that digital tickets are still a recent advent, one which gives the franchise a monopoly on the resale market. You can't go out and buy a physical ticket outside the arena from a scalper like you could just two years ago.
The franchise "resells" tickets on their home ticket site, but they obviously aren't succeeding at the mission. My guess is that it's not really a market. They won't drop their price in the insolent face of low demand, so the seats go empty.
Swire is a British conglomerate with British roots, but operates on Chinese land, hires Chinese employees, and profits from Chinese customers.
I wrote a reflection from reading Bickers' China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World. It turns out the history of Swire is the history of 1) a firm retelling history of itself 2) indexing Hong Kong's economic growth 3) operating in emerging markets with the backing of hegemonic power.
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!
I've gone through Think Stats and don't think it's very good. Most of the people that I've seen recommend it either already knew stats and thought it was the sort of book that somebody who wants to learn stats, but was intimidated by stats, would use to learn stats, or was somebody who aspired to learn, saw that it looked friendly, and then decided it was a good book without every really learning stats.
Statistics in Plain English is a much better book for looking statistics. It's very noob friendly and builds a stronger intuition. It's not free, it's not programming, but I've now either taught or mentored a lot of new data analysts/aspiring data scientists in multiple programs and found that it just gets better results.
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?
It seems to me that the same argument applies to places that already have a "property tax". In its simplest implementation, Georgism would simply involve adjustments to the property-tax assessment procedure to more heavily weight land value in relation to the value of structures build upon this land. This is not radical, not difficult to implement, and doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. In places that already have the infrastructure to levy property taxes, it is trivial to, say, make 5% of the assessed value pinned to the LVT assessment. This fraction could increase gradually, 5% per-decade, say. This gives ample time to weigh pros and cons, economically, on short and medium timescales.
You’re missing the point of Georgism.
You retain exclusive ownership of the land. The difference, however is that the “rent,” which is the benefit you derive solely from occupying land to the exclusion of others, is fully taxed from you and out to the public benefit.
But what I get is if you tax 100% of the generated value, and estimate this estimated value properly, it automatically follow that the price of what is taxed, which in fact represent the accumulated benefits - taxes (with some time preference function), becomes 0 -almost by definition of correctly estimating the LVT and fully taxing it. So full Georgism result in buying land for nothing. Same as a rental change: you do not pay anything to the former renter, nor to the owner.
Or is there something I do not get from Georgism (because this is the main info I extracted from the serie of articles).
What you seem to point to is partial Georgism, where LVT is not the full land rent but a portion of it, meaning the land still have a non zero price and you can (partially) own it and sell it, like anything else. Then I do not have the same objection of course, it all depends on how much the LVT is exactly, compared to current habitation tax. But that is a very different story from what was exposed....
"You retain exclusive ownership of the land"
But if you can't afford to pay the tax because you are land rich and cash poor, then you'll be forced off the land. That doesn't seem like ownership to me.
And yes, this is true of current property taxes, and I'm not a big fan of them, either.
You own it. If it non-severable (like planted trees or amended soil) then you should be paid a severance fee, obviously if its a house you can move it, if you want, or sell it to the new owner of that land, in fact many advocate that he would be required to compensate the person who can't sever their improvements from the land.
It would actually be more forgiving than today, in many cases, since houses would be much cheaper and homeowner would be more likely for people, and therefore you don't lose everything in a foreclosure or tax sale.
The state has a moral right to the land to the extent that it acts by the consent of and in the best interests of the people as a whole. That's why Georgism is often connected to a UBI: the idea is that the individual landowners pay the LVT to compensate everyone else for the loss of access to the land, and the state pays that out as the Citizens' Dividend.
This is one thing that I don't get. Why does any state have any more moral right to the land than an individual or smaller group of individuals or another state or all of humanity?
It seems to me that all arguments about the rights to land apply equally to the state. The United States of America also got the existing land through conquest, purchase etc.
It's a little tricky since any plausible configuration can only be an approximation of the ideal. I would say that whatever entity best represents the interests of the largest number of people has the strongest claim. The "rightful owner" is every person who exists, so it's a question of who can most closely approximate acting in their interest.
This, and additionally, locality matters.
It is not "Every person owns land", it is "The income stream derived from land arising entirely from the exclusion of other party's rights is injust" - Georgist taxes do not reflect the fact that everybody owns land, that is, but rather the fact that the very concept of ownership of land is the limitation of the rights of others to employ that land to their own purposes.
My next door neighbor is harmed more by my exclusive ownership of land than somebody living in Tokyo; the harm to the person in Tokyo is, basically, negligible.
They don't. No one has any inherent right to a specific location, but I think its pretty clear we all have a right to SOME location.
If that's true we have to figure out how to manage who gets the rights to a given location.
Central governments just happen to the be the major form of government for most of civilization, so that's what we go with. But there are Geo-Anarchists, Geo-Mutualists, Geo-Syndicalists, etc, etc, etc.
If you own a house, why do YOU have a right to it instead of me? Probably because some group a couple hundred years ago were more successful murderers than another group.
When it comes down to it, the only justification for ownership of land is violence or the threat of violence. Every inch of ground on the planet is soaked in blood; that's why fairness is in all our interests.
'cause the only thing that restrains the proles from wheeling out the peoples razor and taking a little off the top is practical considerations.
There is another consideration beyond "how did these specific people come to have ownership" and that's the question of allowing ownership or not. Even if ownership is illegitimate, it may be preferable to a society where ownership is not allowed. The argument for that is long and involved, but I happen to believe that a system where ownership is allowed is better than one where it is not. Given that, the more important question becomes one of how property is handled going forward.
I happen to think that there is actually good bit of land that is held legitimately (though I agree much of it is not). To me, though, that really isn't the important distinction. Given where we are now, taking land away may in fact be worse for society than leaving it in place and nudging the system in better directions for future ownership arrangements.
Georgism is not prescriptive in regards to collection mechanism. There are Geo-Anarchists, Geo-Mutualists, etc, etc.
The important point is that rent is collected and ideally somehow made to equally benefit all members of that community, whether through public investment or handled out via a Citizen's Dividend.
If that happens through community land trusts or mutual societies or whatever other conception you could imagine, that would be okay with us.
I mean, basically any good and thing you own consume or benefit from is excluding everyone else from it. It's hard for me to sign onto that as a basis for ethics.
First, one difference comes from where the value comes from; the value of a carrot does not depend on nobody else having a carrot, after all; otherwise the industrial revolution represented no change to society at all, since the gain in value from having more goods was offset by the goods ceasing to be scarce.
Land shares the quality of having a value arising entirely from the exclusion of other people's rights in common with a few other things, perhaps most contentiously intellectual property.
Land feels more like a thing than intellectual property, perhaps, but what exactly do you own, when you own land? If you were to remove every physical object, every speck of dust, every grain of sand, from the borders of your property - does it cease to be your property? What about air moving through it, or water? What about abstractions, like airwave "space"?
These aren't theoretical problems, we've had to deal with them over time, and repeatedly modified in the process what it means to own land.
What exactly ownership of land is, and where it comes from, are both important questions. If you choose as your default referent a state of nature, it should become apparent that the ownership of land has its roots in violence; it is not a claim of rights to the land, but rather, a refusal of those same rights to anybody else. This becomes quite apparent in the case of owning land with no intent to do anything with it, such as in the case of speculation, which is effectively a form of extortion.
Which isn't to say it isn't important, indeed crucially so. Land ownership is necessary for society to function.
But here's the thing: The ownership of land is not a finite thing. The extent is limited in three dimensions, but not the fourth.
Imagine, for a moment, two societies, which occupy an island each. One island is rich, the other poor. One day, the society on the rich island offer to buy the island from the poor society, for enough money for everybody on the poor island to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. They agree, and sell their island. They never leave; they just sell it, and pay rent. But it's fine, because they have money.
The children's children's children of the poor society later live in even more abject poverty, for in addition to everything else, now they are paying rents to the children's children's children of the rich island. What right did their ancestors have to sell the island? In specific, what right did their ancestors have to sell some portion of their descendant's wages forevermore?
That is land ownership. Georgism is about recognizing that nobody ever had the right to sell that portion of any descendant's wages - that portion that goes towards rent - and the fact that somebody now "owns" that portion of somebody's work into perpetuity, the fact that it has been bought and sold many times, grants no additional validity to the situation.
Some stuff have value mostly indepent from others having access to the fame thing... A carot for example. Some things have more value the more they are used. Stuff showing interaction usually, like an os system or electrical standard. It leads to monopolies and are well suited to state defined standards and strongly capping benefits. That were you get rent abuse imho, and where i would think state intervention is the most welcome. Some things are more valuable if other do not have it. Art pieces. Expertise. Rare sellable talent. It seems georgism try to prevent making land part of the last category by organising artificial scarcity.
Is it a real problem? I don't think so, not at my place and time. Was it a real problem before or at some other place? I guess so, land barrons or companies securing huge amount of previously state owned land (forest often) come to mind. But when the land is really scarce, it will advantage the rich against the first mover, which is nice from some economic point of view but promote insecurity. And when the land is not scarce, it seems to promote exploitation, maybe over exploitation.
But maybe i dont fully get it. In particular i do not understand how you can have a full lvt, which tax lands value at 100%, and the fact that you can own land instead of simply renting it (i.e sale pure land, or (of its too theoretical because no land is left unexploited under georgism)) sell your old home if the lvt has increased enough to be unpayable by people interested in this type of home, knowing the potential new land use will imply destroying it to build something more productive instead, like an hotel or service center...
Lots of land is left unexploited under Georgism. The tax is, basically, on the opportunity cost of the land; the huge tracts of land nobody wants in New Mexico or Arizona or Nevada don't suddenly become more appealing because of a LVT, and the people owning the land, which isn't worth much regardless, aren't suddenly going to decide they don't want to own it because now they're paying $100 in a LVT instead of $100 of a more conventional land tax. (It's not worth much now, and it won't be worth much after a LVT either, so in either cases the taxes are basically negligible).
As for ownership, I think you need to ask yourself what ownership even means, because if the only thing that matters to ownership is revenue streams, then people who live in homes they own must be doing things wrong. The purpose of owning your own home is not to rent it out, it's to live in it, and the ownership grants you rights over your house that are desirable in and of themselves.
The effect of the taxes themselves will largely be negligible in more rural communities, increasing as you move into increasing urban environments; mostly they will fall on commercial developments, and the average homeowner likely will not see much of a personal change in their taxes.
As for destroying homes to put something productive in its place, this already happens, and the kludgy, corrupt, and frequently racist way my own government currently goes about doing this is, if you're familiar with the history of it, kind of horrifying. The Georgist alternative isn't replacing a utopian situation with a dystopian one, it's replacing a dystopian situation with something that is merely good on average, and sometimes individually bad.
I don't get your explanation. Under the current regime, if my place become interesting for some development, i can be forced to sale through expropriation by the state, or indirectly by increase of local prices (good and services, and maybe local taxes although it often goes the other way around) in case of gentrification. In this case, if it goes to the point i am forced to move, it will be with a nice plus value when i sell my home and land (yes, land speculation at work ;-)... Maybe i would choose to leave in that case, even if i could afford higher prices on my gentrified neighborhood. In most case, i must be convinced to sale, which can be done if the price offered makes me better off (buy a better land+home (better for me) somewhere else....
With Georgism, if a new possible valorisation of my land happen (I discover a petrol field in my backyard, or, more likely, city spread, some infrastructure development or some tourism fashion suddenly makes the place more interesting to richer people), my lvt increase and put me in trouble, maybe to the point i have to sell my land (priced 0, that's my understanding of having a 100% lvt on well evaluated land) and my home (at much reduced price compared to what it would have sold before lvt increase (because, as I said before, the kind of house of a guy unable to pay the new lvt is probably of very little interest to people willing to pay this new increased lvt - they have other type of house (or non house infrastructure) in mind).
So Georgism out me similar to the worse kind of expropriation (one that under evaluate the compensation by a lot). And i already dislike expropriation except with super generous compensations. Where is my analysis wrong?
That's an interesting example, because a huge part of agricultural land value in New Mexico is the water rights that may or may not be attached to that land. Water rights are required for using surface water, like rivers, but are also required for pumping gound water.
Water rights have been gained and lost not by labor but through a long and complicated history, that makes sense in about the same way as land ownership itself. Most water use currently is agricultural, which might not be the optimal use. I suppose desert Georgists would advocate a water tax?
One tricky thing about water is that the supply varies from year to year, and can depend on sources in other countries, which must be negotiated for. It's much harder to defend one's water source from downstream than it is to defend a plot of land.
Another tricky thing is that arguments over water use, where it matters, are a good deal more contentious than the pleasant discussions on land use.
Georgism is good because 'deadweight loss' is bad, and this is the way to minimize deadweight loss for taxation.
"Deadweight loss" is what economists call the loss of transactions between people that could have happened, which both of them would have appreciated, which don't happen because of some obstacle that makes it less worthwhile. [For example, travel time is generally a deadweight loss; if people could teleport to restaurants (instead of having to live nearby them), both restaurant owners and restaurant-goers would probably be happier. Similarly, a tax on restaurant meals means that the marginal restaurant meal doesn't happen, and also every meal that does happen is slightly worse for both sides than it could have been.]
>and also every meal that does happen is slightly worse for both sides than it could have been
This last part's not deadweight loss because the government collects the money, right? The DWL is entirely to be found in the meals that don't happen, never in the ones that did.
I think they're talking about meals that did happen, but where the people didn't order dessert, or didn't order drinks, or otherwise left out some feature that would have been a net win-win if it hadn't been taxed, but isn't with the tax, so it doesn't happen at all.
Yeah, agreed that's normally counted as 'tax revenue' instead of deadweight loss; my "also" probably wasn't enough signposting of "and here's a different thing that's bad about taxes."
So is the lack of deadweight loss the only redeeming quality of Georgism? I can accept that as a benefit from an economy sense but I don't think that redeems the inability to privately own land, the inability to use land for purposes that aren't maximally profitable etc.
Seems like a very dreary world to live in if the state owns everything and if you don't put all of your efforts towards generating income you lose your home.
According to a utilitarian capitalist, lack of deadweight loss is the only redeeming quality *any* social organization can have. "Deadweight loss" is any time that two people could both be happier by engaging in some mutually beneficial interaction. When you say "if you don't put all your efforts towards generating income you lose your home", they say "if you don't keep making the world a better place for people, then the scarce resources you have claimed are repurposed by someone who *is* making the world a better place for people".
But it seems like the reason Georgism is achieving this is by forcing everybody to be maximally economically productive, which is obviously a good way to avoid deadweight economic loss but seems awful for utility. A lot of people derive plenty of utils from owning their own home but under LVT they'd have to pay very steep LVT in cash, not utils, and be evicted. Further if it turns out the best way to maximize profit from land is to set up strip malls and plaster them with billboards, and LVT rises to reflect the income the state expects you to generate, doesn't overall utility go down despite revenue to the state going up?
It seems like in the current system people are able to buy land and derive utility however they see fit, even if it doesn't generate income directly, however under Georgism they are forced to do whatever the state thinks can generate the most cash and then uses as a basis for calculating LVT. Am I wrong?
Again I think we've landed in the hypercapitalist dystopia
Well, we would contend that strip malls and billboards are a really bad way to maximize profit if you sufficiently tax the land rent away that lets people get away with such wasteful activities.
It might help to look up Strong Towns' view of things:
https://www.strongtowns.org/landvaluetax
I think a lot of people get the view that Georgists want everyone to build Isaac Asimov style "Caves of Steel", covering every inch of the earth with concrete and super skyscrapers to maximize utility uber alles, but really we want to get rid of the wasteful uses of land in the most valuable areas, which we think will lead to the creation of more walkable, dense neighborhoods with nice things like bodegas, rather than sprawling suburbs for miles and miles.
The hyper over densification comes from the "playdough squeezed through the colander" effect and is part of the status quo's malincentives. Because so much land is held out of best use in the city centers, the land that remains in the hands of those that want to put it to use tend to put it to REALLY dense use, and then you get sprawl and sprawl and sprawl out on the edges.
The idea is if you even things out you get more like the "missing middle" of development.
https://missingmiddlehousing.com
This is the stated Goal of the Georgists who educated me, for the record. We can certainly continue to debate about whether the policies of Georgism will achieve this in practice or not, but it can help to be clear on what the movement's own goals are.
A Skyscraper on every Corner is definitely the impression I got of Georgia's goals, and my expectation of what the Georgist policies would encourage. I am still not sure how you avoid that; any area with a widely attended open natural space could be a widely attended Walmart, don't we have to tax the park owner as if he was Sam Walton to even out the revenue? Or am I missing something
"more walkable, dense neighborhoods with nice things like bodegas"
If I knew what a bodega was, I might want one on the street corner. But for the love of God, this phrase extracted on its own sounds exactly like some 25 year old hipster with no kids or responsibility towards aging parents, who never needs to carry anything heavier than a paper bag full of groceries, and certainly not in the pouring horizontal rain, and earns a living by doing something vaguely in 'design' related work which they can carry out on their laptop in the local artisan coffee shop. They really appreciate the vibrant urban lifestyle where they get to hear the latest indie breakout artist in the brewpub every Saturday night.
Which is lovely for them, but what about the rest of us?
I also really like the NY neighborhood (when it's nice and not crime-ridden). BUT for those romanticizing bodegas and little shops, which I also love in NY, I think there are substantial regulatory structures in place in NYC specifically to prop those up - and the popularity of places like Costco and IKEA in Brooklyn itself attests to the fact that people's preferences, for efficiency at the very least, certainly lay that way.
If something avoids deadweight "economic loss" but is bad for utility, then you haven't properly measured economic loss. Economic loss *should* include all forms of utility.
People don't derive utility from owning their home - they derive actual utility from having a place to stay, and having certainty about the continued ability to stay there enables them to make some risky decisions that on net tend to increase utility in other ways as well.
If the income the state expects the user of a given piece of land to generate is going up, it's only because the users of this land are able to increase the utility for more people by enough to collect payments from those people that allow them to pay the higher income the state expects. If 100 people could live a happy life on this land, but 1 person currently is, and refuses to allow any of these others to partake in such a happy life, then it definitely doesn't increase utility to keep those 99 people homeless in order to avoid evicting that one. (Especially since the extra land rent generated by these people will enable greater "citizens dividend" payments to everyone, including the one who was evicted, who should be able to find an ok place, either as one of the 100 who now occupies the same land, or on some other piece of land that is opening up more spaces for people.)
But yes, Georgism is this weird combination of hypercapitalist and hypercommunist, which can easily go dystopian if you aren't properly measuring everyone's desires in the economic values that are being maximized. But if you are in fact enabling everyone's desires to express themselves in the market, then the dystopian harms you are causing are just a large number of trolley problems where you kill one to save five (or perhaps better, evict one to house five, or stub one toe to prevent five stubbings, or any number of other transactions where most people are being made better off even though some are in fact made worse off).
> But yes, Georgism is this weird combination of hypercapitalist and hypercommunist, which can easily go dystopian if you aren't properly measuring everyone's desires in the economic values that are being maximized.
This strikes me as a pretty fatal flaw, because if we've learned anything from the past century, it's that trying to measure what people value is not at all straightforward, even in economic terms.
"People don't derive utility from owning their home - they derive actual utility from having a place to stay, and having certainty about the continued ability to stay there enables them to make some risky decisions that on net tend to increase utility in other ways as well."
I agree, under perfect economy assumptions. But you should consider owning your home precisely allows to be non-measured, economically speaking. I do a lot of home improvement myself, because I physically and technically can, because I (sometimes, it depend on the actual task) enjoy it, but mostly because it's unofficial work, something that would cost me more that doing it myself. And this even while the hour-price of the guy that would do the work is much less than mine, he can get raw material at a better price than I do and he already have all the tools, that I may need to buy.
But if he work for a company, the company will takes it's (much too large) share, and the state also (and, in my country tax system, it's even worse).
Add to that some interaction effect: when you do the work yourself, you know what you did and learn some new stuff, which will make new works much easier/less costly. Basically, it's a negation of the economic principle of specialisation allowing net wealth creation. This is true, some times, provided there are not too many exchange frictions. But there is frictions. Often too much friction imho. Owning a house and land allows to to escape the all-is-economy game, when it makes sense. Even more if you own a large land and become energetically self-sufficient, more or less. In perfect economy without friction, it should never make sense. In practice, it does, and the more you can't escape the game, the more I feel it will makes sense (playing the economic exchange game is a net loss for the small player), because tuning out is the ultimate thing that keep exchange mutually profitable, in case of inherent power asymmetry (which is never bigger than when one of the 2 players is the state)
And as I said in another thread, the homelessness due to land overuse by a few was maybe a problem in the past, but I really don't think it is now, at least where I live (western europe), and I doubt it is in the US (although there was the subprime stuff and welfare is much lower in the US...so maybe, I am not well placed to know).
But reaching a Demographic plateau and probably down trend, I do not see it becoming more of a problem, if anything, it would become a complete non-issue....
In fact, instead of the homeless having a chance to finally be out of the cold rain, the practical Georgist trolley, as I see it, would more be like eviction a farmer couple and children living their old family farm, to transform the farm into 5 joined habitations (I live in such one, I know it's nice ;-) ) to welcome 5 urban families...Because 2 years of covid lockdowns suddenly makes living in nice vibrant city centers not so fun, even for those who enjoyed it before.
Which can happen today (the couple or their inheritants want to sell this old farm, or are forced to do so because grocery price has inflated due to all those google employees living in the sold and splited farms around). Georgism will be a little like the later, but worser, stronger, faster.
And I am not utilitarian enough to find this a nice outcome (well, to be honest, I am not utilitarian at all ;-p )
"Further if it turns out the best way to maximize profit from land is to set up strip malls and plaster them with billboards, and LVT rises to reflect the income the state expects you to generate, doesn't overall utility go down despite revenue to the state going up?"
To the extent that this is true, we would expect it to be impossible under the current system for anyone to buy land for personal use because they have to compete with companies buying it up to fill with strip malls and billboards. We observe that this has not happened.
To expand on this, given that as you observe people like owning land and using it for the personal purposes, and many of those people have money, it seems likely that these personal purposes will continue to be a very "profitable" use of land under a Georgist system.
By that logic we don't need to worry about efficient land usage at all because if it could be used more efficiently it would already be being done and we can observe this has not happened
>the inability to use land for purposes that aren't maximally profitable
You can, but you must pay for the privilege. How is it different from the status quo, where if you buy valuable land and don’t derive much profit from it, you’re in the red? How is it different from the pressure to have a maximally profitable job if you want to occupy a nice house on nice land?
Now you need to be willing to sell before a richer guy can buy your land. With Georgism, once richer guys, or a guys with better land plans, comes and lvt automatically increase (as it should, if i understand Georgism : the land has indeed become more profitable because it could be rented higher) , your are forced to sell your home (at a likely very low price, because it is certainly not what the richer / better plan guys have in mind for this land parcel - so the home value to potential buyers is low if not zero) because you have been out-lvted. This is in fact very like the current outing of former inhabitants of places that turned touristic. Local services becomes progressively more expensive until it force all locals to move away if their income is not tourism related. This happen all the time, unlike the hypothetical too big for one family land seized to house 10 homeless families.
And, contrary to Georgism, at least the local forced to move by (sort of) gentrification can sell their land with a large plus value (er... Large appreciation? A great deal? Not sure about the English word) to start elsewhere with a nice money pot...
Georgism does remove this feeling of security, but the real question is, is anyone entitled to perpetual ownership of increasingly more valuable land by paying a lump sum once? George claims this is _both_ immoral and detrimental to economy.
I claim it's moral up to a point, and entirely indirect mechanism (priced out by gentrification, death and inheritance taxes) is already more tax enough to stop most of the problematic cases. The immorality is not small or large individual owner, even if multiple properties. It's companies buying square kilometers of forest and making the surrounding villages support the externalities while destroying the country future assets at the same time.
Sometimes, instead of big companies, it's the country own doing. Given that Georgism put land ownership back in countries hand, exclusively, not sure it solve those large scale issues. Georgism seems tailored to address issues when noble families owned large amount of land, while democratic countries were emerging together with industrialisation. And still we use examples of inner cities housing bubbles and countries family homes. I am getting more confused than after i finished part 3 about what exactly georgism will practically change for private home owner? It seems it goes from nothing at all to renting will be the norm, as soon as there is increasing demand at some place...
Upon what does George base his claim of immorality?
"It is possible to own land in perpetuity" has been a pretty consistent thread in most societies for millennia; the fact that it has recently become possible for people other than literal nobility to do so, is normally seen as a moral good.
If anything it seems like Georgism would reverse this trend -- someone who bought a crumbling Victorian in the Mission fifty years ago, then fixed it up and retired would be forced to sell it alright -- but it seems more likely that the buyer would be a rich techbro who can afford the LVT as an altruistic developer of low-cost housing.
This does not seem very moral to me -- hopefully there is more to it than "owning land is immoral because I say so";.
I’m not really sure where you’re getting this idea that the state owns everything in Georgism.
Private landownership is still allowed—encouraged even. However, the benefits of exclusive ownership of the land itself (though not the structures upon it) are taxed away.
This results in higher taxes for those wanting to live in the dense urban core and occupy a significant amount of land, but will make renting an apartment or living in the exurbs much cheaper.
As for whether you lose your home if you do not generate income, how exactly is this different from today? If you fail to pay taxes, whether on your income or your property, your stuff can be taken and sold. Georgism just has a particularly high and focused form property tax (LVT).
How can you own something if you lose all right to the income from it? I don't consider it ownership if by definition all economic value realized must flow through to the state.
Currently our taxes are fairly low across a broad range of activities, a 100% LVT would be very different
There are many things from which you aren’t allowed to derive a profit. For example, certain drugs in certain jurisdictions. Does that mean you somehow no longer own the drugs?
Ownership simply means you decide what happens to your property, who gets to interact with it and who doesn’t, etc.
Well, in my country at least, when you rent a home you partially control what happen in your rented place. You can do whatever you want as long as it does not degrade (more than usual occupation) what you rent, and your owner can not even enter the property except under some very specific circumstances.
but you get evicted of you don't pay the rent and the rent can be increased (with limited rate). Property taxes can be seen indeed as a partial rent from the state, but, as they are much lower than an actual rent, if are much less at risk of being evicted and if you are, home plus land price usually helps a lot restarting elsewhere. If it was not the case, nobody would own any home, it will be rented obviously. Full georgism is not clear in how much it will be different from a full rent, but owning a home on a fully rented land seems especially dangerous and unstable, needing that the land owner can be super trusted because he have power to confisc your accumulated wealth on a whim. In a sense, state already have this power but georgism seems to make that easier instead of harder. Current reluctance of building home in place where land can not be bought (some countries prevent foreigners to buy land, but they can rent it and build... If they dare :-)) makes me believe i am not alone thinking like that...
Speaking for my own situation (not in the US), under the current tax system a whole bunch of things would have to go wrong for my property to be taken and sold off. I have made a lot of sacrifices to place myself in a situation where I'm able to own property and likely be able to pay the (currently negligible) property taxes until I die - even if I lose most of my income. Under Georgism, having the surrounding area developed can push the economic value of the land high enough to force me (and most of my neighbors, most of whom own their properties) out.
To put it politely, that's just not cool.
Almost everywhere in the USA *already* has LVT- it just has it as a minority portion of the property tax. So, in the US, the exact effect you're worried about can (and does) already occur.
I don't know if this is a motte and bailey thing or what, but it's something like that! Which is it? Is the Georgist LVT going to replace all other taxes and bring us a UBI utopia, or will it look like now except instead of paying $X dollars in property tax you'll pay the same number of dollars in land tax?
The actual numbers themselves matter. To someone who owns property to live on it and not to profit, a $100 property tax turning into $1000 over a number of years is less of a problem than a $10 000 LVT turning into $100 000.
Georgism is often thought of with a private owner, and the state merely taxing the proceeds of the land. But when you get close to 100% taxation of the proceeds, so that the price of the land gets down to zero, it does become very similar to the situation of the state as landowner collecting rents. Methodologically, it's certainly often useful to think of it that way, even if it's also important to distinguish the two situations in some contexts.
I see no fundamental difference between land ownership under Georgism and someone leasing land from the state. If the land value taxes are high enough such that the value of the land is 0, then it doesn't matter whether I own the land, or whether I sell it to someone who leases it to me for the amount of the LVT. If capital gains taxes were raised to 100%, would you really argue with someone who claimed that they couldn't own stock anymore?
> As for whether you lose your home if you do not generate income, how exactly is this different from today?
Because today, the amount of income you need to generate is low relative to your property value - so for people who are buying property within their means, the property taxes are basically never unaffordable - and also more predictable than under Georgism (as the total amount of tax fluctuates less with changes in land value since the taxes are a lower percentage of property value to begin with).
This point was much debated in the comments to Lars' posts about just how to think about and calculate the "value of unimproved land".
It's an argument that follows from a framework where the value of land is just determined by "bare piece of dirt and nearby publicly-funded infrastructure". And the publicly-funded infrastructure piece has room for debate if we apply public choice theory to assess the political reality of whether or not that infrastructure will be built.
The argument against that framework is the observation that the value of land is heavily influenced by positive externalities from nearby private development. For example, land used for housing is worth more if it's convenient to reach workplaces, restaurants, stores, etc. Similarly, land used for workplaces, restaurants, stores. etc. is worth more if it's convenient for customers and employees to get to these businesses.
Based on observed development patterns, these positive externalities are more than hypothetical as incentives to build on land. A developer of a master-planned community or a housing subdivision internalizes some of these positive externalities. Feedback loops as development occurs in an area - even with different owners of individual parcels - also internalize some of these externalities.
So it's not intuitive that really high taxes on a narrow portion of potential tax base (land rents) minimize deadweight loss compared to other possible tax structures.
Alex Godofsky makes a very good (and more detailed) argument for this point in the comments at this post - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-landlords .
A better example of dead weight loss would be to use a tax or a price control. One very real one: I would in theory like to hire a nanny for my kids; but I can only afford, say $15/hr. I can pay illegally, thus risking legal penalties, especially if I work for the government (and depriving her of medicare/social security employment "credit") - but she gets $15. Or I can do it legally, but this time for her to get the same $15 I might need to pay $20, to compensate for my and her share of the social security taxes. For those unwilling to go the black market route, less childcare (if any) will be purchased, less hours will be available, for less money effectively, than if that tax were not there.
NOW, I get why the taxes are there, but they do generate this loss of mutually beneficial commercial activity.
I think using physical realities as examples of dead weight loss isn't quite the thing. You can do similar things for "what if people never had to sleep" and "what if stuff could just be teleported to your doorstep and didn't have to travel". I think these innovations would cause so many changes to the economy that - while laws like supply and demand would still apply - the impact to EVERYTHING, including restaurant meals, would be unrecognizable.
To be clear DWL is this:
I want to buy oil at 10 dollars/barrel. You produce oil at 9 dollars a barrel and would be happy to sell my oil at 10 dollars/barrel.
The government taxes oil at 3 dollars per/barrel, so now the cost your oil is 12 dollars per barrel, meaning I don't purchase your oil.
A few points:
Firstly, and I feel like this quote needs to be posted in bold at the top of every georgism article:
"It is not necessary to confiscate land, it is only necessary to confiscate rent."
Private citizens still hold ownership of their land, in that they can exclude its use from others, use it however they like, decide whether or not to keep or sell it, etc. Only the _rents_ of the land are "confiscated" (taxed) by the government. The only piece that georgism adds is that if you want to keep your land you need to pay that tax - but that doesnt mean you don't own it, anymore than you don't currently own your house because you have to pay property tax.
Still! I would personally advocate for a modified Georgism, where LVT was substantially reduced on property that _the owner is actively living on_ and isnt being used for commercial purposes. This throws a bone to everyone who wants to own more easily their family land and doesnt really add much disruption. The problem of land rents really come from commercial land usage. Theres just so much more of it.
As far as the moral stance.... It seems plainly unjust for anyone to be able to own some part of "natures bounty" forever in perpetuity just because. Especially considering that this land was not justly acquired in the first place. I understand theres a bias for anyone who currently owns land, but I find the philosophy that natures bounty is the collective and equal inheritance of all man kind both immediately sensible, fair, beautiful, and its the only land rights philosophy thats at all coherent other than literal might makes right.
Why should you want Georgism?
1. The way things are currently set up, (nearly) all productivity gains from both labor and capital can (and in practice mostly are) eaten up by landlords, without those landlords adding any value anywhere. This is bad for everyone but landlords.
2. Georgism would create a much more efficient economy by both removing a ton of deadweight loss, removing a lot of distortive market effects, and potentially by in part replacing much more distortive taxes with one thats non-distortive
2A. Which would mean cheaper rents, and products, etc.
3. Georgism means that not all land and resource ownership can be swallowed up by a small handful of people and corporations who are then able to lord it over the rest of the human race forever. Whether or not that is ACTUALLY what is happening, your land morality would permit it, which should be a strong signal.
4. You won't meaningfully lose ownership of your land. The title remains yours. You can still do with it as you choose. You just have to pay the tax. Like any other property.
On 2, see Pete's comment on Lars' 3rd post on assessment, or my comment. The additional uncertainty and negative externalities introduced by the LVT is a significant disincentive to invest in improvement of land. And I think it's quite clear that land is inherently close to worthless. So the whole thing kind of falls apart there.
> The additional uncertainty and negative externalities introduced by the LVT is a significant disincentive to invest in improvement of land.
Just checking, is this based on the assumption that assessments to separate improvements from base land are epistemologically (or pragmatically) impossible?
And would you agree or disagree that this assertion could be tested by seeing if increases in LVT with all else held equal, would NOT lead to increased building permits and density, but even decreased building permits and density?
I think I'm being a little more radical. I'm saying that the value of base land is close to zero, especially if you stretch out time horizons a little(decades in some places, centuries in others). And given that we start with very low/zero base value, almost all of the value comes from human activity and improvements, either to the land itself, or via agglomeration effects to the land near it. And that an LVT would lead to significant distortions in the incentives to use land productively.
Let's say you implement an LVT system when the value of base land is close to zero, in an area that may make for a good city if someone were to put in enough money to create enough improvements to induce enough people to move and do things there. I think the LVT would significantly reduce the incentive for large scale investment to take place, because a significant part of the return to the large scale investment happens via capturing the spillovers from agglomeration. An LVT almost by definition makes capturing those spillovers either impossible, or reduces their size. This is a large deadweight loss, and I don't see a significant offsetting positive incentive.
I'll give you an example that I know well. In the early 1990's, Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi, India, basically did not exist. Most of the land prices there were very low. A large real estate developer bought up huge (non-contiguous) parcels of land, invested in putting up office complexes, housing and infrastructure in ~50% of those parcels that by themselves were unlikely to provide attractive risk adjusted returns. But they also had the remaining parcels that appreciated in value when the investment did pay off, allowing further building and significantly greater returns. Today Gurgaon is an enormous generator of economic activity. My understanding is that under an LVT, it would be very unlikely for something like this to happen. And at least from the comments it appears that this is not an uncommon story.
The uncertainty issues are actually even stronger problems I think, even if you and I don't agree on the base value of land being almost zero. Investments are already a risky proposition. Externalities now make them even riskier, and they also flip the direction of the relationship between externalities and risk(or at least introduce a factor with opposite sign). Positive externalities can now increase the riskiness of your investment, because your land's value and hence the tax you have to pay can go up significantly, and negative externalities can decrease them. But of course, positive externalities also have positive effects, and negative externalities negative ones. How would someone planning an investment factor this in?
I can of course be convinced by empirical evidence, but it would likely have to be extensive. It would need to cover long stretches of time, and point to significantly different outcomes. Like how capitalism >> socialism.
But I would definitely shift the confidence in my priors around with weaker evidence.
I have to admit that I'm noticing your assertions are very confusing to me, which is typically a sign that I'm either misapprehending or misunderstanding you, or that we're proceeding from some basic differences in definitions and how we use words, or something like that.
So rather than jumping right into an argument and likely talking straight past you, I'm going to think about this for a while and maybe get back to you later, possibly in a future follow up post or something. That alright?
Sure. It is entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding something about the LVT setup, and using terms in incorrect ways, in which case I would be happy to be corrected and understand things better.
Also, if you would point out which assertion is confusing, I would be happy to clarify (in some time, busy days at work)
I think what’s missing is this: someone builds a mall, all land in area appreciates slightly, LVT rises for all plots including the one where the mall stands. It would both be fair and incentivize the right things for the extra LVT to go to the owner of the mall that generated it in the first place.
Likewise, if everyone in a neighborhood agrees to improve their own homes in a way that benefits everyone, they’d only get an LVT increase for their trouble. There should be some way of profiting from your improvements that made surrounding land more valuable similarly to the way you can profit from the improvements directly.
Exactly what negative externality? LVT exists to _address_ and externality - that of the unearned increase in land value due to the actions of uninvolved proximal-by-chance agents. The tax allows the local government to capture this externality, which gives them an incentive to create policies that promote land improvement.
The individual maintains whatever incentive is in place to improve land based on the profitability of the improvement alone.
Comments like this one have confused me - I was figuring that "we should only be promoting projects which are on their own profitable" and "if an improvement is a actually a good idea, it will be profitable, and the incentive to create the improvement is to capture that profit, and if you cant profit it by it then theres some other better use for the resources" were in-the-water-supply enough in the commentariat - most tend to agree this reasoning holds for all other sorts of projects and products. Why are land improvements different?
In some ways I'm saying that those externalities which you're calling unearned and believe should be captured by the state are a large and significant part of how and why improvements happen. Capturing (or being able to capture) agglomeration effects makes up a significant part of the incentive structure of land improvement.
Let me see if the following hypothetical will help make this clearer for all of us. We have a bunch of settlers in 17th century England. They are told they have two options to settle in what is now the USA.
One half of the American states, randomly chosen, is Propertyland. In Propertyland, they each get to own land and profit from the improvements they make to their owned land, as well as profit from the improvements other settlers are making to their land.
The other half, also random, is Georgeland. In Georgeland, you will not profit from improvements that the other settlers make, only from those that you make to your own land. Any increases in the value of the base land that comes from agglomeration effects will be taxed away. You will get the returns of this tax as UBI, equally distributed amongst everyone.
Which half do you expect more settlers to settle in (remember settlers/immigrants tend to self-select for risk taking and seeking higher returns)? Which kind of settlers do you think will settle in which half? Which half do you expect to be more prosperous and developed 20 years later? 50? 100?
"Natures Bounty" does not "just happen". Trees, soil, greenfields, farmable area, walkable paths, hell even just clearly marked geolocation data, are *created*. By human effort. The stories about frontier settlers just throwing seeds and eating well are fables and lies.
Those would be improvements, then, and would not be part of the LVT.
The iron vein in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years, the virgin redwood forest, a deep aquifer, despoits of shale natural gas, as far as humans are concerned, absolutely "just happened." Prospectors would get subsidized for _finding_ them, the ones who put the labor in to _extracting_ them get the lions share of the profit, but the resources themselves are only coherently partially owned by all.
They would receive that value by an LVT and a severance tax. Uncomplicated to administer, and a lot of the infrastructure for levying these is already in place.
But if humans had to create it, its an improvement, and not LVT-ed
I believe the value of improvements of this sort are included in estimates of the total value of "unimproved" land on which Georgists base their claims about how much a LVT would raise. If we're not going to be taxing them, the revenue claims have to be scaled down in proportion.
The government used (georgist economist) Vikrey's auction techniques to deal with Spectrum - ie, if you use an auction you can 'separate' the value of the 'nature' part of the product (the innate spectrum) from the labor (the company using the spectrum to build cool stuff).
Using the auction, we have an assessment of the land value at a baseline set by the 'market' of everyone participating. Any auctions above that minimum - the difference between the first and second price, indicate the amount that company believes they can make from their labor and capital compared to their competitors.
LVT aims to achieve this for all such instances, using assessment in place of auctions (though some georgists support self-assessed taxes as outlined by posner and weyl for more forms of economic land).
This is mostly an aside, but spectrum auctions as we know them today are not Vickrey-based. Spectrum auctions as we know them today are simultaneous multi round ascending.
(Design credit was given to Paul Milgrom, Preston McAfee, and several related individuals, though the auction process is not conceptually difficult. Once they found that their auction design was being used in a high-stakes auction, Milgrom and co established a consultancy that advised some of the participants, showed those clients how to break the auction and saving those clients a billion dollars of otherwise taxpayer-destined money.
Suffice to say that this auction mechanism worked out great for Milgrom & company.)
"You won't meaningfully lose ownership of your car. The title remains yours. You can still do with it as you choose. You just have to pay the tax. Like any other property."
"And we just happened to set the tax to what what uber earns per car in their fleet. So, be rich, or give it to an uber driver."
If you're upset about taxes which strip people of their rightful property, you must be absolutely outraged by income tax.
Yeah, not a huge fan. Founded on a lie and a deception.
But at least its not 100% of the value earned. Unlike what the Georgists want.
I'd be curious to hear you make the case for a given dollar of tax revenue being collected out of incomes instead of land. Why do you think that's preferable?
Wealth is not zero sum. What we do all day at work *creates* it. Take a second to appreciate that. Customers get things they desire and wouldn't have, if not for your battle against entropy to make them exist. For various reasons this campaign against entropy is more successful in proximity to a lot of other humans. So we have cities. It is good and correct and cause for celebration that urban workers have high incomes. They create the most value.
Land is zero sum. Owning land doesn't bring any more of what people want into the world. It simply puts you in a position to capture it. Like a tax, except you aren't the government and you aren't putting it towards socially beneficial ends. Quite the opposite: landowners, in particular the suburban middle class surrounding productive cities, use their ownership to put the brakes on productive activities as much as possible (NIMBY policies) while at the same time capturing most of the wealth created by labor as rent (for landlords) and home equity (for both landlords and owner-occupiers).
Georgism is good because it puts remuneration back in line with the value one creates. Obviously this is good news for the value creators. Homeowners can also make money by creating value in their own ways, for example subdividing or adding on units to their properties to offer into the housing crises. They just can't build wealth by sitting there on decaying properties while others do useful work down the street.
Some wealth is zero sum - that's the only wealth worth taxing
1. Georgism does not force you to be maximally economically productive. Land value tax (LVT) goes to universal basic income (UBI), so if there are n people, then you get to own 1/n of the land (weighted by value). The UBI exactly pays for the LVT. With that 1/n of the land, you get to do whatever you want, and can be as economically unproductive as you want. If you want to use more land, then you'll pay a bit more for that privilege, and if you don't think you actually need a full 1/n of the land, then you can get a bit of extra money by using less.
2. Georgism is not an all or nothing proposal. It's perfectly possible for some pieces of land to have a 70% LVT, while the rest of the country still continues using the normal system. (And the size of the LVT can vary as well, with 85% generally being the upper end of the scale.) I'd personally be overjoyed to see a 50% LVT tried on a few pieces of land in a single city. (Either land that's already owned by the government, or bought from any existing landowners who are willing to sell for a reasonable price.) A particularly easy policy would be put an LVT on all land that is being sold by the government (crown land sales, etc.). The immediate price fetched would be lower, but the LVT would raise additional funds over time.
3. Why is Georgism good? Two reasons:
a. It discourages speculation, which is harmful. (Because it causes people to buy land and sit on it. So land is going unused that could be used to house people, or used for another productive purpose. Also housing prices randomly spiking all the time isn't great.)
b. Land represents a natural bounty, much like mineral deposits, or the radio spectrum. Given a natural bounty, the best way to divide it up is equally, between all citizens. There's no reason to give any particular person a larger share, because a natural bounty is by definition naturally occurring, and no one did anything to create it in the first place. Mineral deposits are a one-time bounty: Minerals are worth money. Land and the radio spectrum are a recurring bounty: Using a piece of the radio spectrum for a year is worth $X and using it again the next year is worth $X again (plus a bit, because inflation). The same is true of land.
So if land is a natural bounty, how do we divide it equally? Simply dividing up the land equally between everyone, and then letting folks trade between themselves after that point in time has a problem: Most people who will be born in this country aren't born yet, so we don't have a way of giving them their share of the land. Since land is a recurring bounty, that problem has an easy solution: Each year, distribute the bounty of the land for that year equally between all of the citizens who are alive in that year. Do the same the next year and the next. The system that implements this is LVT + UBI.
4. Georgism hurts rural and suburban homeowners less than you think. Land value is highest in the middle of the city. So even though urban dwellers are taking up less land, they are taking up more-valuable land, and would therefore pay proportionally more LVT. Also, see point 2 above about not having a Georgist system everywhere: A lot of the harm in the existing system is from speculation, which isn't as much of a problem in rural and suburban areas. If Georgism is mostly adopted by urban areas, and everywhere else keeps chugging along with the current system, I'd consider that a massive success.
5. This isn't an answer to any of you points, but is something I believe is important to say: It's unfair to suddenly dump a large LVT on existing landowners. There needs to be just compensation for such an action, and I'd only support Georgist proposals that are fair to everyone. There are plenty of improvements to the existing state of things that can be made without screwing people over.
Tacking UBI onto LVT seems like taking two hipster ideas, neither ready for prime time, and just throwing them together because why the hell not, none of this is going to *actually* happen.
I'd prefer an LVT to actually happen, but that would require the current Georgists to undergo some markcomm training.
Georgists were very close to succeeding in many parts of the western world, with several constitutional amendments failing on tight margins, some candidates won and made huge reforms using georgist ideals without achieving the 'endgame', and with some pseudo-implementations emerging ad hoc (like Alaska's dividend system). UBI is not a hipster idea, it's been hanging around for a very long time! IMO it always fails because if it isn't funded by a LVT most of the UBI - at least for renters - will just lead to increased rents.
UBI was linked to LVT by Henry George back in the 19th century (well before UBI was a hipster idea.) It's his answer to the minority of low-earning people who would be significantly injured by implementing Georgism.
Is the UBI really an integral part of Georgism? Lars' first post in the sequence said: "Georgists assert that if we sufficiently tax land in this manner, we'll not only end the housing crisis but also fix a bunch of misaligned incentives that cause poverty to persist alongside economic progress, while raising a bunch of revenue that can lower or even eliminate other less efficient taxes, such as sales and income taxes." Obviously you can't use the proceeds from the LVT to reduce other taxes if you're also paying it out as a UBI.
You don't need to attain "current expenses plus UBI", you need to attain "UBI plus the remaining expenses that it doesn't replace once you account for the way fixing misaligned incentives fix lots of things", which is a significantly different number.
Like, getting rid of payroll taxes, which is a disincentive to hiring people, reduces poverty, which reduces the spending on poverty programs, which reduces the amount of taxes you need to raise in the first place.
You'd have to push Lafferism awfully far in order for the second-order effects of eliminating payroll taxes to amount to more than a fraction of the direct revenue loss. One other tax we'd have to get rid of willy-nilly is existing real-estate taxes: you definitely don't want those piled on top of a LVT.
Yes, the Citizen's Dividend is an integral part of Georgism. George himself believed in more of a limited government, didn't believe that charity was a very useful tool and that the vast majority of people just wanted an opportunity to use their labor productively, and that the CD would pay for the vast majority of "social services" we now pay for with government spending.
But partly the idea relies on a concept known as "ATCOR" or "All Taxes From Out of Rents" (which I think he briefly touches on), but I think he intentionally didn't try to get into it too much because as you can see just the LVT in itself is a step too far.
But, basically the idea is that all "excess" value in the economy flows into land values, so if you reduces taxes in one area, it would result in an increase in land value and therefore revenue from land value tax would increase. Its theoretically true, but there is less empirical evidence to support it, so lars stayed away from it since he's was trying to be evidentiary.
All that being said, the general view of most Georgists is this:
Let's shift taxes off improvements and onto land as much as possible.
Once that's shown to work, then we can gradually increase the LVT up to 100%
As we do that, if we're getting a surplus of revenue, reduce other forms of tax, especially the onerous local taxes, like sales and excise taxes and all that.
As tax base is shown to be stable, we can phase in a CD as we phase out other forms of bureaucratic and wasteful social spending.
If all of that doesn't get us there, then we'll build onto LVT whatever other least bad taxes are necessarily to fund the government, like pigouvian taxes on things like pollution, there are certain qualities of intellectual property that are land-like, and then we haven't really touched on the digital economy and how parts of that are land-like.
And your critiques seem like statements of general discomfort about having your worldview challenged, continually thrown against a mountain of evidence.
Land Value Tax is hundreds of years old. Adam Smith advocated for land value tax over property taxes 250 years ago. Its been past ready for prime time.
The commenter you're replying to says they'd prefer an LVT to happen and you accuse them of being uncomfortable with having their worldview challenged?
To be honest, to me it seems like it's the other way around. Almost without exception (Lars and Andrew are definite exceptions, I'm probably forgetting others), the proponents of Georgism in the comments here act like dangerous fanatics, completely uninterested in examining how their radical proposals can go wrong, unwilling to entertain other value systems and too wrapped up in self-righteousness to even try to be convincing.
Then please, engage with the data and prove us wrong. Our vociferous defense of Georgism does come from a place of passion, but it also comes from well-reasoned and empirically supported studies and data.
No one is born a Georgist in the same way they're born a neoliberal or a capitalist or a socialist or a communist. We all got here from somewhere, which means we've probably spent more time than the average person thinking about political-economic systems.
Sorry if that makes us sound self-righteous. I think the Georgists have done a fairly decent job at acknowledging valid criticisms and addressing them, but a large chunk of the opposition arguments have simply been inconsistent with broadly accepted economic theory or strawmen.
What you're missing is that your preferences and value systems might not align with those of "normies". When someone brings up really bad or disastrous potential consequences of Georgism for an individual and the responses are "that's intended - but just think of all the other people who will benefit"... it isn't helping your cause and, frankly, it makes you sound dangerous. You might be able to convince the tiny group of utilitarians who share your value system (who also discount the ever-present unknown, unintended and unexpected consequences of radical change), but that's it.
I don't think spending more time thinking about political-economic systems necessarily makes you better at making political-economic decisions. If your preferences are abnormal (and I certainly think Georgist preferences are) it just means you'll be able to cause harm more efficiently and ruthlessly.
It takes a lot of gall to show up an established community's comment section and lecture everyone in it like a college professor who already knows all the right answers, but fanatics like these are present in every fringe group.
Mainstream political views have fanatics, too, but they are such a minority they can easily be shoved into a closet by the mainstream thinkers so no one sees them.
Lars is doing yeoman's work to try to persuade people to go to an LVT, but hundreds of hours of his work can be undone in a few seconds by one asshole who won't shut up.
That's really interesting. My experience is the exact opposite. I've previously heard nothing about Georgism, it nearly perfectly fitted my moral intuition and one of the spectacular advantages of Georgism which I immediately noticed is that it's so easy to implement compared to all the other radical economical and political projects.
No need for violent revolution and chopping the heads of kings, no need for immediate radical paradigm shift and imposing new regime simultaniously across all of the world or even a country, no need to wait for a hundred years before we finally arrive to a glorious future. Just one local goverment requires to change tax policy a bit, implementing somewhat 10% lvt instead of other taxes, reducing the deadweight loss and getting noticeable economical benefits soon enough. Then, if it actually works, iterate for highter values of lvt, slowly adding some ubi and just let the market solve it! And if along the way we arrive to some sudden bad consequence when switching from 75% lvt to 85% lvt - than stay at 75%. What can be easier?
As fo moral arguments. Could you elaborate what you find moral about current economical system? I think it will work better if we start from here. You mentioned that 64.8% americans own their houses and therefore value this ability. But what does it actually mean? Is it just because owning land is economically reasonable under current system? Or is it because owning the land allows you to use it the way you want?
You should join us over the in Discord! https://discord.gg/twmk8wCx
We're trying to turn talk into action and get some localities to embrace this, although the areas in Pennsylvania have already shown it can be fairly successful.
I am planning to write a blog post about the normative aspect of Henry George's land tax... I'll post it somewhere when (if?) it's done. People seemed to enjoy my recent book review of Kroptokin's 'The Conquest of Bread' (https://www.awanderingmind.blog/posts/2021-10-30-book-review-conquest-of-bread.html), and I hope to continue entertaining people.
1) I believe this was addressed in the Book Review (part 0). I was certainly mostly convinced by the moral argument, and I think I've seen the cat. (The gist of the argument being that the reason poverty seems not to decrease with progress despite increased production of resources is that rent sucks up everything you gain. George's thief metaphor was particularly striking as a good piece of rhetoric around this.)
2) Under Georgism, people can still own their homes; just (effectively) not the land on which it lies.
3) Georgism obligates nobody to use their land in a maximum-productivity way (anymore than income tax obligates anyone to work maximum-salaries). In fact, Georgists would argue most people would be better off if they did exactly what they're doing with taxes focusing as much as possible on land (thanks to both other taxes being lowerable as a result and on decreased dead weight loss). It does harshly punish real estate speculation, but that doesn't strike me as a bug as much as as an important feature. (Also, I expect it should be easy to do LVT with some special exemption for one plot of residential land where you live, or up to some reasonable value, if it turns out that there would be an unreasonable burden on homeowners otherwise; which doesn't seem like the case to me.)
4) Note also that George's argument is meant to disincentivise slum lords, but not the sorts of landlords actually providing tenants with good value (as buildings and everything of value in them are improvements, not land).
>Georgism obligates nobody to use their land in a maximum-productivity way (anymore than income tax obligates anyone to work maximum-salaries).
Income tax is based on your current salary, not on your maximum possible salary. Georgist taxes are based on the maximum productivity of your land.
That is almost right except for one key detail: Georgist taxes are based on the maximum productivity of your land *without* improvements. If you try to make any productive use of your land you'll be putting either capital or labour into it; none of which are taxed in a Georgist utopia. If you improve your land even just a bit, you are entitled to all of the profits without any penalty whatsoever.
(I.e., income tax incentivises you to work more productively no matter how much you earn, because it takes a percentage of all you earn. LVT only incentivises you to produce more than what you could make by rent alone. Everything you produce beyond that is all yours.)
The only case in which you have to squeeze everything out of your land is if the only thing you're using it for is collecting rent without having spent a cent maintaining it, improving it, or on anything besides purchasing its raw natural resources. In which case the moral Georgist argument says it's right that you shouldn't be able to do so, as you're just making money off of others' work.
Since the land *does* have improvements on it, how do you determine what it would be hypothetically worth if it didn't? In the rare case where there's a vacant plot down the road that someone e.g. recently purchased to use as grazing land, there's a reasonable benchmark for that. Otherwise, it looks like a huge incentive for corrupt accounting. Who decides which accountants get to set the price?
That's literally the whole point of part 3 in the series...
>Georgist taxes are based on the maximum productivity of your land *without* improvements.
If putting improvements on your land would allow making a profit of $X, people will be willing to pay you $X + base value for the land. The effect of this is that the value of the land includes the value gained from improvements even if you "don't tax improvements".
But no! That's precisely the point! The amount a LVT taxes is the rent you could get for a completely empty plot of land! If you improve your property such that you can make an additional profit of $X, your LVT goes up by exactly $0!
But improving the land does lead to an increase the value of the land, and the land around it.
An empty acre in Manhattan is worth more than an empty acre in the plains, because people have built up value there.
*Most* of the value of improving land by building on it goes into the building, but some *does* go into the land.
Not true. The price that someone is willing to pay you for an empty plot of land is based on the profit he'd make after he bought it. If you could improve your property and make an additional profit of $X, someone would be willing to buy the empty land for an additional $X so that he could improve it and make the profit himself. This makes the price of the *empty* land go up by $X.
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It seems self evident to me that when I rent an apartment, the land value portion of my rent is just wrong. For the house, I'm willing to pay the landlord. Someone had to build the house. For the landscaping, the appliances, for anything the landlord pays for up front or works to upkeep so I don't have to, I'm happy to pay. But it's clear to me that some portion of my rent is only paid to reimburse my landlord for paying the guy who owned the land before him, who paid the guy before him, and so on.
If we could somehow magically live in a world where no one had to pay for the land value when buying property, that would be a better world. This doesn't create perverse incentives, it just reduces the price of things. Communists always talk about "wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to pay for things" and there are a million reasons it wouldn't work which aren't obvious until you learn about economics, but on this one issue, land value, the communists are right and the current system is needlessly cruel.
I'm not convinced land value is in fact a coherent concept. If it is, I'm not convinced LVT would eliminate land value from rent prices. If it would, I'm not sure how we could fairly transition from a world without LVT to a world with LVT. But if George is right, it's clearly a moral imperative to do so.
Compare to communists. If there was a real chance that they were right, that charging people money for their basic needs didn't lead to better outcomes, that privately owned capital added no value to society at all, that every time I buy something my money is being stolen for no good reason, then it would be a moral imperative to investigate further. So I'm not gonna be satisfied until someone explains to me why a just world can't possibly exist in which my landlord doesn't get a pay raise every time a new restaurant opens up downtown.
Taxing land is good because it's supply-inelastic. Taxing anything elastic (like income, or even consumption) reduces the supply, and thus results in deadweight loss.
How do you conceptualize utility gain? I find that I am frequently confused about how to think about problems posed in these terms.
Eg. The writer for "All That Is Solid" recently wrote a hypothetical that says, "one person who you do not know at all will gain 10 utility from [you giving him a prize]; the second person is a close friend, and will only gain 5 utility from the prize. Who do you give the prize to?"
I have only understood "utility" via context of writings like these, so perhaps it is more defined than I realize. At present, I find that I struggle with it in a few ways. For one, I can't intuitively "feel" the weight of the utility that each of these people gain. Is there a good analogy of what each of these feel like, and when you think about them, is it purely in numerical terms or do you convert it to some experiential feeling?
Another problem I have is one of scale: if one person experiences 10 utility, do I understand that to be "positive" like my experience of eating a good breakfast or taking a nap? Or is it more positive; or is it less, and a good nap is actually worth 20 utility? "Double" the utility means different things depending on how "good" a utility of 1 is. Are units of utility defined or commonly agreed upon?
* Also I think I might be conflating utility and happiness / pleasure. Not sure how much they go together or if they are distinct.
"Units" of utility should be understood to be purely relative within a given thought experiment. If someone says, "X gets 20 utility, Y gets 10," all that means is that X gets 2x as much as Y. I don't think anyone realistically tries to define an absolute unit of utility.
"Utility" isn't a specific thing to imagine. It's always whatever the person who gets it wants. But people want different things in different ways. It could be the joy of new love, or the relaxation of a good nap, or the excitement of traveling to a new place, or the satisfaction of finally understanding calculus, or recognizing a Shakespearian reference. I think a lot of these thought experiments that just talk directly about units of utility are often highly misleading, because we really don't *feel* those units of utility when they are put in abstract terms like that.
I have a set of preferences about how the world should be, everything from "I would like to eat cake" to my political opinions. Theoretically I could go through all of my preferences and decide which are more important to me (world peace > cake) and assign values to them. When we talk about "utils" that's an abstraction for fulfilling my preferences a certain amount. So if eating cake is 1 util and getting a new hat is ten times better than that it's 10 utils. So we can talk about it in thought experiments like would I rather have 1 util now (by eg eating cake, but not necessarily, could he anything else of same value) or 10 utils next year (likewise with the hat or thing of similar value).
https://utility-function-extractor.quantifieduncertainty.org/ might be of interest.
Here is how utility ratios are mathematically defined.
Suppose for example that a slice of cake is defined to be 1 util. How many utils is a free haircut worth? Well, offer someone a choice: they can either have a slice of cake, or a lottery ticket for a 1-in-10 chance of winning a free haircut. If they choose the haircut, then the haircut is worth at least 10 utils (because the expected value of the lottery ticket is 1/10th the value of a haircut and yet still it exceeds the value of a slice of cake).
In general, you would take any object or experience and offer a choice between a slice of cake or a lottery ticket, and you adjust the odds of the lottery ticket until you find the cutoff point where the person starts choosing the cake. Those odds tell you the number of utils that object or experience is worth.
You have to adjust the setup slightly for objects worth less than 1 util (because probabilities can't be greater than 100%), but the concept is the same. Also I'm not aware of a good way to compare utils across two people, unless you assume that e.g. everyone likes cake the same amount.
Take any object or experience A, and offer someone a choice: you can either have a slice of cake, or you can have a lottery ticket for an X% chance of getting A. If they choose the cake, then A is worth at most
Are there any pure coincidences? Are there any totally meaningless happenings?https://allsouls.substack.com/p/are-there-any-pure-coincidences-are
Would love feedback :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
Does the division of interesting in form (i.e. interesting only as a result of the interesting/uninteresting division) vs interesting in content (i.e. interesting for some other reason than the interesting/uninteresting division) resolve the paradox?
All numbers are interesting in form, both by the division into interesting and uninteresting, and by everything that follows from that division, but (perhaps) not all numbers are interesting in content. I.e. Is contemplating form is necessarily interesting while contemplating content potentially uninteresting?
Yes.
I'm a Christian, and when I met my wife she told me there were no such things as coincidences. I objected, and she argued that if God is guiding anything then he is guiding everything: if we really live in Pacals "best of all possible worlds" (which I believe we do) then it's all one thing, a single tapestry where every thread is purposeful even if we can't see the pattern where we are. I do believe in free will, but if God knows what I will freely choose, and what everyone will freely choose, and if he interferes at all with anything else (which I believe he does) then the argument stands.
I find my life is better when I choose to believe my wife. Today I was late to work, with both kids in the back (headed to daycare) and I was in an enormous hurry. I found myself in a situation on the road I've never been in before: the fast lane was blocked by someone going ten miles under the speed limit, and both of the other lanes had cars essentially matching her speed. I changed lanes several times trying to find a way around, and was thwarted on every occasion. I could have just cursed my luck. But if nothing is a coincidence, then this wasn't either. I reflected on why this might be happening: perhaps if I was allowed to go at high speed I would get into a car accident. With a baby and a toddler in the back, that could be disasterous. I calmed down and accepted that I was going to get to work late and that was okay.
Of course, people do get in car accidents all the time. If there are no coincidences, then those aren't either. But really that's just an extension of the problem of evil general, and I've worked that out to my personal satisfaction already.
All of this to say, I don't know if there are coincidences but I've chosen not to believe in them and that's been great for me personally.
Pardon, that should have be Leibniz's "Best of all Possible Worlds."
Have you read Voltaire's Candide? It's a fun story - it rejects most gruesomely the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, in favor of the conclusion that we must cultivate our gardens: to attempt to live simply in the world, rather than strive for meaningless titles or lucre. Really it's great just to see Voltaire rip into everyone, and trace some legends and clichés back to a source.
I'm aware of the book, haven't read it. I know it was in great part a rebuttal to Liebniz, but it was mostly an emotional rebuttal of "Look! Look how much the earthquake sucked! Look how bad it was! Do you think we're in the best of all possible worlds now?" Which is a nice rhetorical device, but I already knew the world was terrible before I even heard Leibniz's argument. You are not providing me with new information by going into detail about the terribleness.
I'm sure it's a good book.
Yeah, earthquakes build character. Or something. "Best of all possible worlds" is IMO dubious, but it always included the claim that we needed some measure of tragedy to achieve our full potential, and the claim was made by people who knew full well there was an awful lot of tragedy in the world. So while I don't buy the argument, I think Voltaire's rebuttal is even weaker.
But, "live simply in the world rather than strive for titles or gold", sounds like broadly good advice. So if you can use a massive earthquake to get that message out to a receptive audience, maybe earthquakes *do* build character. Or at least inspire great literature. I'm not even going to try to do the utilitarian math to show that the Lisbon Earthquake was a net good, but there's definitely positive terms in that equation.
Do you mind if I ask which branch of Christianity you identify with?
To be very precise, Restoration Movement, Christian Church and Churches of Christ. Not to be confused with Church if Christ or Disciples of Christ, of course!
More usefully, Evangelical.
Thanks. I had just read Ross Douthat’s latest book. He became a Catholic as an adult. He’s been going through some serious health challenges and is trying to understand what God has in mind for him.
I was raised Roman Catholic myself and the way it was presented to my credulous 8 year old mind caused a lot of anxiety and confusion. By the time I was 16 I had to give it up.
You know, as I have grown older and read more widely I have become quite attracted to Catholicism. I was raised to believe the Bible and the Bible alone, which is well and good. But it meant a lot of things were not clear. Why is homosexual sex wrong? Because the Bible says so. Why no sex before marriage? Because the Bible says so. Etc., etc. But when I started reading Catholics I found they actually had reasons for everything, explanations that made sense of things that I had always taken on faith. I seriously considered converting.
But on the other hand, it seems that Catholicism is not doing very well. I hear a lot about people like you who were raised Catholic and did not do well. My brother lives in a majority Catholic nation, and he has a great deal of negative things to say. In the end, I decided I should stay where I am and try to serve God with what I have been given. It's an ongoing process. It seems no matter which denomination you look at there is rot somewhere, though not always the same places.
I live my life the same way. Romans 8:28 - "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."
As John Schilling says below, it's often hard to see how "building character" comes out of some really terrible situations, but we happen to know that it often does (always is hard to prove from our limited perspective). WWII was really bad in a lot of ways, but it also fixed the Great Depression, reinstated the will of the people to fight tyranny, led to a great industrialization and productive new world order, a huge improvement in dozens of technological fields, and more. Was it on net good? Who knows, we have no measurement tools capable of trying.
I'm not even that tied to the "builds character" part of it. After all, if a child is murdered in a basement it would be hard to say that it built his character. The fact is the whole problem is too big. I mean, with WWII it's not just about the Great Depression: what happened in WWII (and what happens every single day) will have effects that change things for thousands of years to come. Today's tragedy may result in good we could never have predicted 10,000 years later. It's too big for man's mind to hold at once. We can try to figure out why certain evils are allowed to occur, but we're likely to miss the mark drastically from our limited perspective.
If the world as we know it is a story, it appears to be a tragedy. But we are only in the middle chapters: we don't even know whether we're in chapter 20 or chapter 2, or how many chapters there are to go. But however long it is, Christians believe the story has a happy ending. I really liked Unsong because despite being an atheist Scott got that exactly right. I am confident that someday all the theodicies we come up with now will seem like fretting over lost pennies compared to the good that is ultimately wrought. Just because I believe this is the best of all possible world's doesn't mean that I think it's the best right now: the universe is a tree that is still waiting for the fruit to form, a woman still in the midst of labor, and a piece of clay still not ready for the kiln.
Or at least, that is what I have been taught and what I believe. Theodicies are not really meant to convince outsiders, but to clear an obstacle to those who are otherwise ready to accept Christianity but for the problem of evil. As Lewis put it,
"Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform. At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin."
In the same way, if one is not already at least somewhat willing to accept as true the idea of an all powerful and all good God, then Leibniz's theodicy is foolishness. It wouldn't convince anyone by itself. But it is helpful to those who are already convinced, strengthening our spirit and encouraging us to weather the storms of this world with the hope that our pain has meaning and will be redeemed profitably in the end.
Why is wading out into mildly cool water so unpleasant, but jumping/diving in with your whole body so much better? And also why after 30 something years of experience with this phenomenon do I still always opt to start wading in and resist diving for as long as possible?
I do the same thing. I think if you dive in it is difficult to catch the first breath, and there is always the fear of having a heart attack from the first sudden shock of the cold water. I am 70 years old, and I swim a few times a week, but always wade in.
I swim in the River Thames (a few miles upstream of London) and have taken to diving in from a friend's mooring, so I don't have the option of wading. Lovely!
When you wade out, your mind is continually comparing the ambient air temperature on your skin to the water temperature, and informing you that the water is Very Cold relative to the air, which is true. As you keep your feet in the water, gradually your mind drops this alert, but as you wade further in, the alert is raised for each new body part as it contacts the water. You’re basically subjecting yourself to torture out of fear! However as soon as you jump in, this continual comparison is unnecessary and your mind drops it and adjusts to what normal skin temp in the water is within a moment.
As to why you personally choose to wade in, I’m guessing that you’re letting your fear of the sudden shock master your behavior. I can’t explain that. Everyone I know who has thought this through chooses to jump in, but then I am very familiar and comfortable in the water, and I continually am kind of surprised by the aversion to temporary discomfort across all ranges of sensation, from water to exercise.
Because humans have a gasping shock reaction to sudden immersion in cold water that is very unpleasant to experience, even if short lasting. Similarly, I would choose to take the stars then to rappel down the side of a skyscraper, even if the latter is faster, because humans have a natural fear response to falling.
it's like ripping a band-aid off - both pulling glue from your skin and entering cold water suck, but doing 10x more of it at once doesn't suck 10x more, and shortens the total duration of discomfort required to finish the process.
i.e. I find jumping into cold water is actually much more unpleasant in the instant than wading in, but it lasts a second instead of minutes, and once I'm in the air I no longer have the option to back out.
I think the anticipation is worse than the experience. Diving in to cold water I notice the temperature for a moment. Oh, colder than the air I was just in. But by the time I surface I’m usually comfortable.
Economics is not my strong suit, and maybe I missed it because of all the jargon, but I'm *really* confused about how Georgism protects against people destroying the land / extracting all the value (like, for example, a farmer who spends 20 years doing destructive farming practices) from the land and then not caring that they've destroyed its productivity for the next 200 years. Honestly, the environmentalism angle is as big a concern for me as solving urban landlord problems or government tax revenue, am I missing something?
On a very pure Georgist view, the "land value" is supposed to only be that which is unaffected by what people do with their land. The idea is that all value comes back to sources that can be characterized in three ways. Anything that is perfectly fixed in quantity for all time and can't be increased or decreased in any way is "land". Anything that each person has an equal endowment of, but that can be increased or decreased by creating or destroying people is "labor". Everything else, that is, everything that can be increased or decreased without creating or destroying people, is "capital". Thus, machinery is capital, because it can be created or destroyed without creating or destroying people. But education is also capital, as are social networks. The fertility of the soil is also capital, as are buildings.
If you tax people on the value of the kinds of things that can be created or destroyed, then you discourage people from creating value and encourage them to destroy value. Thus, the Georgist says that you should completely ignore the fertility of the land in levying your land value tax, and only pay attention to the features of the land that the person can't create or destroy - i.e., you should tax people entirely based on the location and immutable features (if any) of the land, but not on the things like fertility that they could work to build up, or drain.
So if some part of the value of land is destroyed by nuking it, that portion is capital and doesn't count into LVT?
One thing people have sometimes emphasized is that a structure on some land can sometimes have positive value, but sometimes has negative value, if the obvious use of the land would involve removing the structure and building something else. So I would think that at least part of what happens when you nuke some land is that you destroy some existing value, but part of what happens is you also add some negative value.
But this suddenly makes me realize that it's not obvious that there is a clear sense of when the stuff on the land has *zero* value, as opposed to positive or negative. It's seeming a bit more slippery than I had thought...
Land value is affected by what people around that land do with theirs though, isn't it? Hence the talk in these threads about urban land being more valuable than rural, due to opportunities that come from population density(if I'm understanding those comments correctly).
The problem is that they then want to tax city land at a higher rate than farmland, even though cities can be created.
Or at least some Georgists want to, and if we don't, the whole potential tax revenue is too small to be worth the bother.
Maybe I should say - the part of the value that is said to belong to the land is the part of the value that the *owner* is in no position to create, but is due to the work of others; the value that the owner creates is said to be "capital".
If you have a small plot of land, then this basically gets things right.
But as others have mentioned in other threads, if you have a large enough plot of land, then you could build a city on one part of it and create lots of value for the other parts of that plot.
Historically, we really don't like it when private entities create cities; it hasn't tended to go well.
So if the problem is that we are disincentivizing this, I'm not sure how many people will take this seriously as a problem.
However, if we want to specifically incentivize this, we can always create some kind of new corporate entity that collects the difference in LVT between its creation and some moving point in the past, so it can collect profit on, say, the last 10 years of investment.
Why 10 years, rather than in perpetuity? The entire extra value of the city land, above its value as farmland, is created by the people who found the city, and people who move there voluntarily.
Moreover, why take this value away from people who have founded cities in the past, or invested in them early? And why will a promise not to confiscate this value in the future be credible if we confiscate it from those who have created it in the past?
Note that these considerations also apply to units smaller than a city (such as a new neighborhood); and they also apply to a new town or neighborhood that is sold off as parcels after it's build, not only if it remains company-owned.
For the same reasons patents don't last forever, and also for the same reasons I can't sell 10% of the work all my descendants produce for perpetuity; they're different reasons, but they both apply.
And the people who founded cities in the past, or invested in them early, are dead; we're not taking anything away from them. And even if they were still alive, the value they created is finite and static, whereas the value stream you are talking about is effectively infinite.
This is the same as a farmer demanding 10% of your wages, forever, because his food enabled you to produce any of them at all. And the blacksmith who made the farmer's tools demanding 10% of his crops, forever. And so on and so forth, until everybody owes everybody else everything they own for things their ancestors did. Except we don't count any of that - instead we count specifically the kind of thing that benefits a class of people who historically had control of the legal institutions which decided which things counted.
No. None of that makes any sense at all once you step back and actually look at it. You build a city? Your payment is what you were paid for building the city, not a portion of that city's productivity forevermore, including the productivity of people who weren't even alive to agree to that deal, now going to people who weren't even alive to create the value we're supposed to be rewarding?
A relevant question is, if land values in a city are higher than in the countryside (or higher in a neighborhood of a city than in other neighborhoods etc.), whether the extra tax should go to a central (state or national) government, or it should remain with the city (or neighborhood etc). If it goes to the central government, this creates a deadweight loss. (Some argue it's probably small, although a developer building a neighborhood and then selling it off in pieces is more realistic than an entire private city.)
However, the value of city land is created by its residents, and they are the ones paying high rent, so, in all fairness, the tax revenue should belong to them. However, this would negate another promise, that landlords couldn't pass on the tax to the tenants. The services the city government can provide from the tax revenue would (further) increase the desirability of the city, which would increase demand, which would increase land values and rent. If the city then reassesses the tax to account for the higher rents, it would create a spiral of higher rent -> higher tax -> more services -> higher rent, each tending to infinity.
Here's one paper:
https://www.progress.org/articles/climate-change-from-a-georgist-perspective
The basic idea is that nonrenewable natural resources are economic land, and Georgists support "severance taxes" (a special form of LVT) on the permanent depletion of natural resources. First this discourages doing this willy nilly, and second if someone does go about degrading the earth and extracting the people's resources, society will punitively tax that act, and the value of the extraction itself should go to the people rather than to private enterprises.
Norway operates on this foundation with regards to its oil resources which I can expound on if you like, it's been very successful, especially when you compare it to status quo operations like the UK's squandering of their resources by letting private companies run the whole operation.
The "this gets handled by punitive taxes" thing makes sense, thanks!
If it is a nonrenewable resource, why is it worse for Person A to use the resource now than for Person B to use the resource later? (As opposed to a renewable resource, where I can, e.g., see the argument that Person A shouldn't cut down all the trees without planting new ones for Person B to use down the line)
It's not so much about whether we use the resource now or later so much as who uses it now, and how their incentives to use it play out. Let me explain.
My go to case study is comparing the UK and Norway's approach to their Oil wealth.
I think the UK squandered their supply of oil and handed it out to private foreign businesses, and that furthermore British Petroleum has an absolutely devastating environmental track record, the costs of which are ultimately borne by all of humanity (and nature itself) rather than the actors who caused those problems in the first place, and that's not fair.
Norway on the other hand avoided the malaise of the resource curse with a very clever and arguably Georgist policy regarding their natural resource extraction; It was set up by an Iraqi Immigrant Petroleum engineer by the name of Farouq Al-Kasim who I highly recommend reading about. He set up a policy whereby oil *extraction* is has a massive severance tax, whereas oil *discovery* is heavily subsidized, and its all done under the supervision of an oil regulator set up in a separation-of-powers adversarial relationship with the state oil company.
This encourages a few things:
1) Oil companies can still make money. But they make their money principally by investing in getting better at extracting oil more efficiently *and more safely and with less on-site damage and pollution*, in stark contrast to BP's slapdash cost-cutting methods.
2) Oil companies make very little actual profit on extracting oil itself from Norwegian oil wells, that money mostly goes to the Norwegian people in the form of the sovereign wealth fund, for the benefit of all of society. Nobody made the oil, so by right it doesn't belong to any specific individual. But talented and hardworking and innovative people should be compensated for investing and working to discover it and for making it available -- this is a direct rebuttal to Caplan's "Search-theoretic critique" in practice, and it is a smashing success.
3) By focusing on investment and efficiency, this makes Norwegian oil exploration focus on making the best use of the wells we already have rather than just "skimming off the top" of more and more and more wells. This is the problem with land speculation -- whether it's resources or land in general, if this stuff is too cheap to hold, you get a better return on your investment going out and grabbing more of it, then you get in investing on top of what you have already had. Humans can make more investment and do more work, but we can't make more land/depletable resources, so we want to encourage more investment and less grabbing. This also has the further benefit of less pollution for the same amount of oil extracted.
Now, the big obvious elephant in the room is that this sets up an incentive for Norway to drill oil, and even if we can do that in a super clean way, the stuff is still super bad for the environment once we sell it to people and they burn it up. But if you're going to have an oil industry at all, I think this is the least worst way to do it. Pigouvian taxes on carbon are the next necessary step to price in the further externalities that are being shifted onto all of humanity and nature when Norwegian oil is sold.
"this is a direct rebuttal to Caplan's "Search-theoretic critique" in practice, and it is a smashing success." Can you explain this further? Thanks.
Glad to!
So Caplan's basic argument -- which has a point -- is that Georgists are modelling a world in which all the land, and the uses for it, is already discovered. But unless you allow people who hold the land to collect the land rents, you destroy their incentive to 'search' and 'discover,' so you don't actually get land put to its highest and best use by imposing LVT. So to the degree there's stuff left to discover, punishing rent collection punishes people who try to discover.
There's other rebuttals that deal with his analysis regarding conventional land (which I won't get into as I'm not as good at articulating that as others have), and I'll stick to the critique as it goes to depletable natural resources.
Caplan's argument as applied to oil is -- if you apply a heft severance tax to the extraction of oil, why in the world would anybody go out and discover the oil? Well, the man's got a point, you've kind of knocked out the incentive there. On the one hand, this is a good thing if the policy outcome you're looking for is to *actively discourage the depletion of the resource, full stop*.
But if your policy goal is to put it to its best use, and to make sure everyone in society should benefit from the natural resource, then you need to do more than apply a severance tax and subsidize discovery.
I might have given off the impression that "LVT(and its cousins) is all you need" in this series, but what I actually intend to get across is that Georgism is bigger than just LVT, it's at root a philosophy that at its core just asks, "How can we actively reward investment and labor and punish passive extraction of rent income from pre-existing scarce things nobody created and nobody can create, and make sure everyone in society benefits from passive land rents."
So does it work? Norway is an N of one, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's a pretty astounding case study. The Norwegians are considered to be among the savviest, efficient, hi-tech, productive petroleum engineers in the world, they extract the most oil from their wells, with the least pollution and oil spills.
The problems the Norwegians have avoided in this case are the Scylla and Charybdis of the failures of conventional Capitalism and conventional Socialism.
We'll start with socialism in the form of "just nationalize the oil industry." Venezuela is a pretty good example of this -- as exploitative and corrupt and playground-for-foreign industry as you could argue the pre-Chavez oil industry was, stocking PDVSA with political cronies destroyed its industrial competence, much as Mugabe and Mao's "brutally take all the land and give it to people who don't know how to farm" policies failed with conventional land.
The problem with seizure-based socialism is it's obsessed with giving the people's resources to the people, but it doesn't solve the problem of aligning incentives that reward competence and wise stewardship of those resources so they can be productive enough. It doesn't matter if everybody's equal if everybody's also poor.
Likewise the problem with totally privatized capitalism is it hands the people's natural resources to private industries who a) don't share it and b) aren't incentivized to work hard or to invest or innovate as much as they would have to if they couldn't passively just collect the easy oil rents (or whatever the resource is).
Yeah, they could work harder, and they will invest to some degree, but it's always cheaper to go grab another natural resource node and skim the easy stuff off the top, and make someone else pay for the waste, than it is to have a severance tax stick that punishes you for being lazy and wasteful and a discovery subsidy carrot that rewards you for hard work and innovation.
ARG my kingdom for an edit button, this should read;
"then you need to do more than apply a severance tax, you also need to subsidize discovery."
I'm guessing there is a good explanation for it (land use is not even close to my area of expertise, assuming I even have such an area), but it seems like it would be more efficient if you stopped taking one step forward (tax) and then one stop back (subsidize) and then stopped paying bureaucrats to perform that song and dance.
try to look at it from supply and demand. 'demand' for land is actually tied in with transportation innovations/efficiency for a key reason: it comes down to how much people want to use a given piece of land. if you nuke the land, sure, you dodge taxes, but now the land is useless to *you* as well! since land is the base of all wealth, this is a rough way to make a buck.
georgists would argue that long-term environmental consequences are a sort of monopoly privilege. you have the privilege of profiting now at the zero-sum expense of others later on. most would recommend using regulations, carbon taxes, or other schemes to prevent this. Generally i like simple rules that can be consistently applied, so using taxation on pollution is my preferred solution.
there is a lot of good reading on georgist/environmentalist synthesis though - it's generally seen as a preferable system for environmental sustainability than private land ownership. ostrom's work is pretty informative on that- she wasn't a georgist explicitly, but was very interested in 'third ways' beyond states and markets that people solve problems.
I tend to think about examples like exploitive logging practices where the people will be dead by the time the metaphorical bill comes due. But I'll believe that this is solvable with other methods, i.e. regulations and taxation. But "pollution" isn't the only thing in question, because like, there's also just sheer "we could improve this marsh by filling it in with dirt, and make more money on it because then we could rent it" type stuff. Yes we can regulate against that, but also, political will can be bought.
If you think that the marshland is valuable to society as a nature reserve, and yet it is owned by a private entity, society ought to pay them for the value it provides!
Honestly, my personal politics come down pretty much on the "land should be collectively owned by societies with strong cultural mores of conservation and responsible use" side of things, I'm just trying to wrap my head around how the Georgist system is designed.
i'll give you the additional point that, save Disneyworld, it's very rare for 'valuable land' to have development pressure outside of Urban cores under georgism. The only exceptions are areas w/ national resources, and most georgists support pollution/externality taxes or just straight up regulation of energy monopolies who have access to the earth's resources to limit harm.
The other thing that comes through in stiglitz's 'Henry Choice Theorem' is kinda the idea of 'pushing' land values around and up. The land around central park is way way more valuable than the totality *of* central park if we were to develop the green space - when you zoom out the parcels a little more, central park ends up behaving much like a subway station - it increases the overall land value of NYC.
there's an argument or critique made here that this means a LVT only lets the government make big land improvement projects, but IMO this is how it effectively works in practice in every local government I've worked for. the difference is that instead of 'gov builds cool thing, local neighbors profit' it's 'gov builds cool things, all of its voters profit'.
I guess the honest answer is you'd need separate laws to prevent damage to "commons". I see no reason why you couldn't or shouldn't have both!
While people are normally risk averse, I think utilitarians should be risk neutral. Being risk averse would result in less than maximizing expected utility. Also, utilitarians should not have time preference over pure utility. So, 10 utility right now is equal to 10 utility in 2022. Are there any arguments against this?
I think the concept of time value of money and discounting would apply here
Not money but utility.
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.
Thanks for the great comment!
What criteria would she use to evaluate whether one risk-weighing method was better than another?
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.
What's the latest evidence on risk of long COVID in vaccinated people?
It's been 3 months since Scott posted - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted
And 4 months since Matt Bell's article https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/
It seemed to be unknown at the time how common long COVID was in vaccinated people.
The only study I'd seen that estimated risk of long COVID was the Israeli study:
"Another study in Israel, of around 1,500 vaccinated health-care workers, found that 7 (19%) of the 39 breakthrough infections produced symptoms that lingered for more than 6 weeks5. However, the numbers of infections studied are too small for firm conclusions to be drawn about the absolute risk." - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
A 19% chance of a viral illness that causes symptoms 6 months later is concerning to me, and makes me careful even if the people around me are unconcerned. But my prior would be that since long COVID is likely related to ICU stays and cellular / organ injury, then vaccines would like reduce it's incidence.
Is there any new evidence?
Well, there's this study, from about a month ago, whose findings support skepticism about rampant long covid:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832
From the abstract:
Question Are the belief in having had COVID-19 infection and actually having had the infection as verified by SARS-CoV-2 serology testing associated with persistent physical symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Findings In this cross-sectional analysis of 26 823 adults from the population-based French CONSTANCES cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with anosmia. Those associations were independent from self-rated health or depressive symptoms.
Meaning Findings suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should not be automatically ascribed to SARS-CoV-2; a complete medical evaluation may be needed to prevent erroneously attributing symptoms to the virus.
Thanks for the reply Eremolalos - this is the article that was mentioned in an open thread in November - Scott said - "Saw it, saw some people I trust say it was bad, still haven't had time to look into it closely. Thanks for bringing it up."
I haven't heard any additional discussion of this paper in the rationalist community, and haven't delved into it myself.
But it seems like a very important question -
If long COVID is not a big deal in the double / triple vaxxed, and assuming paxlovid becomes readily available to me sometime soon, then the combined risk reduction from vaccine + antivirals brings COVID down to a similar risk as the common cold. I'd probably be happy to basically ditch the masks unless I'm planning to be around elderly people and go back to my pre-pandemic habits (except maybe masks on planes or crowded areas - but that was probably always a good idea!)
But if long COVID is common in the vaxxed, then I should be more concerned, because as the Matt Bell article said, there are people who got COVID in March 2020 reporting long-haul symptoms serious enough to impact life almost 2 years later. Because it's a new disease, it could cause ongoing negative effects for years (SARS did), and the rational decision as I see it, may be to continue to make serious efforts to prevent infection until conclusive information is available (ie. social distancing, reducing indoor gatherings, n95s etc.)...
I think that at this point we can be very confident that it is not the case that 10% of people who get a covid infection get something that looks like chronic fatigue syndrome. If we suddenly got several million new CFS cases, we would notice.
I'm not so sure whether we can be that confident that it's not 1% of people who get infected, but this shouldn't be impossible to figure out.
In any case, In the United States we've mostly got our lives back, apart from some rules about masks and vaccines (with the important exception of friends and families of young children - that needs to be worked on).
I disagree. My life feels fundamentally altered because of ongoing COVID restrictions. I just went to a concert last weekend where dancing, or even casual conversation with strangers was impossible because everyone was wearing masks and lightly social distancing (presumably because of omicron risk?). I absolutely do not feel like I have my life back.
I'm not sure if you misread the quote. It was six weeks, not six months.
Well spotted Prof. Friedman - this was a typo - I mean to write 6 weeks.
But the fact remains - however we define Long COVID, I don't want it. I don't want COVID symptoms for 6 weeks / months / years, and it seems there may be a significant contingent of patients from March 2020 still reporting low energy / brain fog etc. 21 months later. And I believe there are people who had SARS who haven't returned to baseline functioning 18 years later. Even if they represent a small subset of patients, and the median patient might have symptoms for eg. 6-12 weeks - when the symptoms include brain fog / low energy or even just loss of taste that strikes me as significantly bad.
I suspect you also don't want to be all but welded into your home for the rest of your life. But, as trebuchet notes, COVID isn't going away - not completely, not ever. And if you want to absolutely minimize your risk of Long COVID, welding yourself into your home and never coming out is what you're going to have to do.
At some point, you're going to have to say "I don't *want* this, but I'm willing to risk it to get something I do want, or avoid something even worse". You're going to have to choose between risks. If you say that you don't care about the numbers, all you care is that Long COVID exists and it's bad and you don't want it, then you will choose poorly.
If you are into anecdotal evidence, i have more than a dozen friends, colleagues or neighbors (people i do ask face to face, not blog posts i read) who had covid, some asymptomatic, most with mild symptoms (strange flu or cold, often with loss of smell / taste), 3 more severe who had to to to the hospital (no ICU though). None reported long covid issues. In my broader acquaintance circle (friends of friends, people i knew but only still hear about) one 60y of died of it, so covid is not a non issue... But in this circle i also have suicide, paragliding accidental death, car accident death and quite a few lethal cancers, many times for much much younger people, which put covid death into perspective...cancer in particular, now that i think of it it's frightening how many loss of years it caused in my extended circle...
I was afraid of covid when it came out (earlier than most, i read Greg's Cochran blog). I am not anymore, and took the vaccine partly as a very small risk insurance against an already small risk, mostly as a way to avoid part of the annoyance imposed by my gouvernement. I will make sure to remember my anger about those annoyances better than my satisfaction about seeing a vaccine so quickly available...
Thanks for sharing the anecdotal evidence Greg. When you compare the group of COVID consequences to the group of non-COVID seriously negative life events - are the latter all within the past 21 months to make a good control group?
RE: long COVID in my friends and family -
I have 1 (!) known immediate connection with COVID - they had smell and taste issues months later.
I have 4 known friends / family of friends with confirmed COVID and all of them had some long-haul issues (an ICU Dr who was doing 16-hour days of push-bike riding for fun prior, who hasn't gone back to riding at all, a nurse who is now on a desk job 18 months later as part of a 'plan to return to clinical duties', and 2 others who took months to return to work). They all got COVID pre-vaccine, and they all probably had multiple contributing factors to their morbidity.
My sample seems very skewed, but I guess that's why I'm asking the question. I'm also a doctor and have noticed people seem to open up to me about their medical conditions, including stigmatised ones.
If 5/5 1st or 2nd degree connections I know had long-haul symptoms post unvaxxed COVID, it seems that an incidence of around 20% ish is not unreasonable.
But is it the same or even comparable post-Vax?
Even a 5 or 10% risk of anything like that is enough to convince me to wear N95s for a few months until we have more info (which was basically the conclusion of the Matt Bell article from August that Scott linked to in his article) - https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/
For what it's worth, my sample is probably (from what I remember) +- 50% unvaccinated, 50% vaccinated...But even amongst the unvaccinated, most are not from the first wave (Wuhan strain). Only 2 or maybe 3 probably got this one, because it was in April-May 2020...
For the non-covid stuff no, it's not during those last 2 years....although for the cancer things, maybe there was a bad serie invloved but 5 in the last 5y...an 8y and 30y old among them....
Looking at the covid excess death per age and typical cause of death in the 0-60y....it seems my anecdotal impressions are consistent with statistics.
Oh and indeed there can be some skew factor at play, didn't think of it but my friends do not tends to complain much about health issues. And if they do (acquaintances for example), they will likely not choose me as the empathic guy they could get some support from. If I was to hear about some long covid effect from friends, it would be about reduced sport performance, but I did not hear that. We complain mostly about getting older, that's already quite a hit ;-)
From family I got a long (like 1 month) work absence. It was just after vaccine, maybe covid, maybe not. Checks seemed to indicate a covid just at vaccination time, ending in bad reaction....So I can not really say it's long covid per se...
In (21st century) warfare between nation states, is there any kind of moral or practical reason to not target (aka blow up) the other country's civilian leadership? I'm thinking specifically about Iran, one of the top two most likely subjects of a US military attack due to its ongoing nuclear program. I'm not really interested in debating the utility of actually bombing Iran to disrupt its nuclear weapons efforts (probably the least bad option we have on the table now, sadly), but I am interested in discussing- if we do get in a shooting war with them, why not just take out their entire civilian political structure, or military chain of command, with a few cruise missiles? Who would be left to issue orders? Isn't it kind of..... game over for them? It seems like wholesale surrender would have to be next, aside from a few disorganized units here and there.
I do understand that decapitation strikes (there's a fun Wiki page on the topic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_strike) are probably not practical against peer adversaries- we don't target Xi's family in Beijing or Putin in Moscow because we would not like to have Biden or Trump's family targeted here in the US. I don't really understand what the argument is against decapitation strikes with a non-peer adversary like Iran, who can't realistically fire multiple targeted cruise missiles back to the US mainland. The type of SIGINT/data analysis to know where every member of the Iranian parliament or upper military command is at any given time seems like one of the key US technological advantages that we have- we just own that sort of intel.
There must be some kind of ethical/'laws of warfare' type of reason not to, because we did not target the Taliban political structure that way, despite them being fairly out in the open towards the end with press conferences and such. Seems like a drone could have easily targeted them once they moved into Kabul. Is there a reason that we didn't/continue not to just bomb every member of the Taliban leadership whenever we know their location?
My guess is that leaders everywhere are easily convinced that targeting leaders is wrong, because every nation adopting a policy of not targeting leaders is clearly better for leaders than a policy of every nation targeting leaders when that would be helpful for their nation.
Whether there's any better reason for this policy than that, is less clear to me (though it does seem plausible that there would be some range of circumstances under which it might still be right to adopt this policy).
The reason not to destroy the national leadership is that they're the ones who can surrender.
This, and also: in warfare, the practical reasons for not killing civilians are so overwhelming that the moral considerations barely make a dent.
We stopped using chemical weapons, not because it was a bad thing to do, but because it was becoming an ineffectual tactic (you can't occupy or exploit a land that you've salted). We stopped carpet bombing cities for the same reasons.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
Specifically about killing the leadership: if you do that without having a ready replacement, you get Iraq, i.e. a 10+ year long civil war (and that would be bad!).
While I broadly agree with your comment: I do think some of the anti-bombing rhetoric is overstated. Having read the literature I'm pretty convinced morale bombing doesn't work. However, bombing production facilities (including those used/run by civilians) seems to have a general degrading effect. The blockade in World War 1 wasn't meant to punish civilians so much as deny the German army's food supplies but it did cause immense civilian suffering. Likewise bombing factories and destroying food stores and all that seems to usefully degrade fighting capability.
So World War 2 style carpet bombing of cities is probably a bad idea even from a purely practical standpoint. However, blockading the enemy, denying them even humanitarian supplies, and bombing key infrastructure (including what people need to survive) is likely to still be a good idea. We've seen less of it, imo, because the US Army expected to occupy that infrastructure quickly. (Correctly, I might add!) If you're going to be occupying a power plant in a week it's easier to capture it than to destroy it. But in an existential war that calculus wouldn't hold.
There's clearly a constituency that's just anti-bombing on principle. And I do get it: bombing creates civilian casualties and horrific humanitarian problems. But that's a question apart from its effectiveness. (The real answer being: war is inhumane and waging a humane war is impossible.)
I agree that in WW2 and other conflicts from decades ago, morale bombing basically didn't work. (Maybe those Germans & Japanese are made of some pretty tough stuff). However, the level of bombing technology & overall aim they had at that time was very primitive, I'm not really clear how accurate they could be. I think more modern systems could do horrific damage to cities, especially if they had munitions specifically designed to target civilians & buildings. Russia and Syria dropped a large number of crude 'barrel bombs' on the Syrian populace, which seemed fairly effective at a low level of technology
Morale bombings historically were anti-effective: an enemy actively trying to kill you makes people dig in and fight back, and eg the Blitz actively increased Londoners' support for the war effort. Blockades that starve a country of civilian luxuries and even necessities like food do erode war support, however.
As for increased tech - the ability to aim better would make targeting of factories much more efficient, but wouldn't represent any particular cost savings on targeting civilian populations, since even primitive tech could usually manage to hit a city even when it really struggled to hit a particular factory within it. Technological improvements have made carpet bombing much less efficient, relatively speaking, than it ever has been.
The Syrian bombings didn't work that well either. The real calculus, like Thor says, is that surrender occurs when the enemy perceives the costs of giving in to be less than the costs of continuing. Indiscriminate bombing lowers the cost of continuing because while surrendering will stop the bombing it won't prevent the bombed infrastructure from being destroyed. The endpoint of this is Afghanistan where Russia basically destroyed the entire country. That meant the Afghans were completely unwilling to surrender because Russia had nothing to offer them.
You want to damage an opponent's ability to fight maximally and everything else minimally so that they both have no capacity to resist and a lot to lose by resisting.
While genocidal bombing will work sooner or later there are both more effective, more ethical and less expensive methods of warfare.
Who said anything about genocidal bombing? I'm talking about taking out power plants, blockading all supplies, etc. There are people who argue that humanitarian aid should still be delivered in wartime but they strike me as shockingly naive. Such supplies will just be sent to the front. Or are you arguing that the British blockade in World War 1 didn't hasten German surrender?
I think many of the post-WW2 blunders of American foreign policy, especially ones in recent memory, were primarily caused by the mistaken assumption that the evil you don't know is better than the evil you do. Someone has to be in charge of the place, and it seems that whatever comes after the adversaries you blow to smithereens is usually worse, not to mention all of the other effects that accompany the blowing to smithereens part.
Precisely this, power vacuums usually get filled by the worst sort of person. The successful nation building examples post WW2 saw America heavily involved in running the country for decades afterwards - and, crucially, intending to stay long-term from the start, rather than spending 2 decades with one foot out the door - and involved the minimum possible disruption to existing functioning governments, unlike the recent ME examples. West Germany had an awful lot of former Nazi politicians and bureaucrats keep their jobs, because those were the people who had experience running the country....
Iran can't hit Biden with cruise missiles, but they might manage the same effect with older technology.
Nobody wants to release the genie from the bottle out of fear that international politics will devolve into "carry out drone assassinations on leaders of enemy states who are politically inconvenient for you".
The leadership would hole up in bunkers and keep information about their whereabouts a secret.
Practically speaking, with an organization on the scale of a nation state they're going to have a chain of command and succession planning. So there is still someone in charge if you kill the current crop of leaders. (This makes them different from disorganised groups like terrorists or organised crime who don't have clear succession). So any benefit you get is purely temporary. And the cost is that opposition to you is hardened, so it's difficult to obtain your aims long term. Eg you assassinate a president, then the successor from their faction has popular will demanding they take revenge, and it makes it difficult for other factions to propose peace, so the war goes on even longer.
Quite recently USA managed to do this. Ended with ISIS in Middle-East.
And from my understanding Libya is still a mess.
In other words, complete destruction of government results in lack of government what has some downsides.
> There must be some kind of ethical/'laws of warfare' type of reason not to, because we did not target the Taliban political structure that way, despite them being fairly out in the open towards the end with press conferences and such.
Why? There is plenty of other reasons ranging from "cruise missiles are expensive" through "Talibs are no ideal but at least better than ISIS" to "if we attack Talibs they will attack us"
> Is there a reason that we didn't/continue not to just bomb every member of the Taliban leadership whenever we know their location?
Also, it was tried for a long time. How well it went? In the end it was really ineffective at achieving actual goals.
No, there isn't a reason not to try to destroy the other country's civilian leadership. Not if it's a peer conflict. That's why we have many bunkers to hide our civilian leadership in, and I imagine Iran and others have the same.
We haven't done it regularly in recent conflicts because we've wanted something other than the wholesale destruction of the enemy state. Whenever that has been our goal it's something we have tried. When the Iraq war began one of our first actions was trying to drop bombs on Saddam directly.
"When Saddam refused to leave Iraq, U.S. and allied forces launched an attack on the morning of March 20; it began when U.S. aircraft dropped several precision-guided bombs on a bunker complex in which the Iraqi president was believed to be meeting with senior staff. This was followed by a series of air strikes directed against government and military installations,"
https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War
The trouble is, in order to take out a leader with a missile you have to know where he is and you have to be able to reach him (we're good at busting bunkers, but not perfect). Think of how long it took to find Osama: any enemy leader worth his salt has more hidey holes than he did.
At a minimum we could remove civilian & military leadership from communicating with the rest of Iran. If they're in active communication, SIGINT can find them- if they really want to hide out, they have to go completely incommunicado. I just feel like the US has a larger technological advantage in terms of offensive cyber actions and tracking people in a more digital world than we did 17+ years ago
I think you are vastly overestimating the capability of SIGINT, especially against the high-level command staff of prepared enemy. Knowing where the radio antenna transmitting El Presidente's orders is, doesn't tell you where El Presidente is. El Presidente can transmit his orders, in real time, through a buried landline to any of a dozen antennas on the far side of the country.
> If they're in active communication, SIGINT can find them- if they really want to hide out, they have to go completely incommunicado.
Even assuming utter control over all electronics including - you can communicate via couriers.
And isolated dumb phone line is safe anyway.
And in practice SIGINT is not all-knowing anyway.
If you get into a shooting war with someone, probably they knew in advance that you were going to do that. FDR didn't know the hour and the day of Pearl Harbor, but he knew approximately the week (and yes, he told all the field commanders). If the Japanese had long-range cruise missiles, do you think there's the slightest chance he would have been in the White House any time that week?
Flip side, the United States tried very hard to kill Saddam Hussein on day one of Operation Desert Storm, and in spite of satellites and air superiority and long-range cruise missiles and yes the SIGINT/data analysis, all we did was blow up some empty buildings and kill some nobodies. And no, the Taliban leaders do not go to bed every night in a building we know about. Before the fall of Kabul, we were lucky if we knew what *province* they were in.
The one thing conspicuously missing from that wikipedia page you cite, are *successful* decapitation strikes, except in the mopping-up phase at the end of the war. They basically don't work. Maybe you can get the actual head of state or head of government, or the chief of staff of the armed forces or whatever. We did get Soleimani. But even that takes a bit of luck, and it's not enough. Kamala Harris can command the US Military as well as Joe Biden can, and the same goes for anyone we might be fighting against.
And no, you don't get a civil war or multiple coups or any such thing, not when there's an external enemy that needs fighting. You basically need to cut all the heads off the hydra at once, everyone with the top-level knowledge and legitimacy to take over, and that's not practical. Not without nuclear missiles, at least, and even then it's chancy.
I kind of agree, even if given my complete lack of any military knowledge it'd only because your arguments looks convincing to a know-nothing... However, i see a logical consequence : if decapitation do not work even in a dictature, the common (i think) view that a dictature is a normal country with a (few) very bad leader and with the right leader you will get a well behaved democracy falls apart. That do not suprise me, it's a native ridiculous belief i think, but it's the official story behind the last irak and afgan wars
Yeah, that's another thing that doesn't work. Turning a "bad" nation into a "good" nation is generally the work of a generation, sometimes two, as you need the new leaders to be people who grew up and were educated under the new regime. The rare exceptions generally involve either nations that weren't all that bad a generation earlier, and/or a very thorough and brutal housecleaning that involves more than just removing a few people at the top.
Note that South Korea was still an impoverished military dictatorship twenty years after the Korean war, and they were on *our* side. The people who genuinely wanted a democracy were still working their way up through the ranks.
Nation-building is a heavy burden, not for the timid or the easily distracted.
Minor correction - South Korea was a military dictatorship, but it was well on its way to not being impoverished 20 years after the korean war. Their economic inflection point came around 1963, and had nothing to do with being or not being, or wanting or not wanting, a democracy.
The inflection point was 1963, but in 1973 the ROK's per capita GDP was still only 60% of the global average, and slightly higher than the East Asian average (itself dominated by pre-Deng China). So, no Africa Poor, but still poor. Not until the mid-1980s did South Korea climb above the world average.
Yes, as I said, well on its way to not being impoverished. From the wiki about Park Chung Hee, the *bad* military dictator -
"According to the Gapminder Foundation, extreme poverty was reduced from 66.9 percent in 1961 to 11.2 percent in 1979, making one of the fastest and largest reductions in poverty in human history. "
Not to mention that the next 10 years were spent under a military dictator too! Most of S. Korea's nation building happened under *bad* military dictators.
Also, I suspect you're thinking of impoverishment in terms of USD. For export oriented countries like Korea that kept their exchange rates artificially low, that would underestimate the actual wealth creation. See for instance page 13 in the following document, - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?oi=10.1.1.462.317&rep=rep1&type=pdf
which indicates that
>Who would be left to issue orders?
I think the answer is whatever random ground commander happens to be physically in possession of the missiles/bombs/other assets, and they're a lot more likely to be crazy and angry and do something awful (like unload everything they've got on every civilian center they can find, or just hand everything over to terrorists or be one warlords or w/e) than the central command currently in place.
Leaving central command in place means you're dealing with powerful and generally rich people who have a lot to lose personally, which keeps them in line and let's you apply pressure to keep warfare limited and sane. The less the person actually controlling the weapon has to lose, the uglier things get for everyone involved
It's usually not random. Military forces are big on having clear and robust chains of command for approximately this reason. You may be able to throw the civilian government into dysfunctional chaos, but that just gets you military dictatorship by default, and it was probably the civilian government you were counting on to declare peace.
Does anyone have a plot or a simple model for how omicron cases have been growing in the US over the last few weeks?
BNO news has current cumulative numbers https://newsnodes.com/omicron_tracker but I'd like them split up by day (either day of sample, or day of report)
https://twitter.com/NathanGrubaugh/status/1469721839027081219 shows data but as the tweet points out presumably there's a ~10 day lag in reporting (because the peak is about that long ago)
Trevor Bedford https://twitter.com/trvrb and Marlin Figgins have a model https://github.com/blab/rt-from-frequency-dynamics/tree/master/results/omicron-countries but the numbers seem very high (~1000 cases on ~Dec 1) and I don't understand how they came up with them.
This is in contrast with the UK where there are graphs like https://twitter.com/AlastairGrant4/status/1469451643167121416 that seem to tell a useful story on more up to date days.
Zvi's blog contains an extensive treatment of this question in his Omicron post #5, which came out yesterday or today:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/omicron-post-5
It actually came out Thursday.
Hmm, the only thing I see about USA numbers is things like
"If we start with 15 cases on 11/21 (the 15 cases from the Anime Convention on that date that later tested positive), and nothing else, we’d get to 75k cases/day by end of year, so between 10% and 50%. So it seems like 10% by end of year should be a solid favorite at this point, something like 70%, and 50% by then should be very live and be something like 30%. One caveat is that this is detected tested cases rather than cases, and Omicron is milder in practice, so that could reduce the guess by a factor of several times. Given that, the markets don’t seem obviously crazy, but I still would rather buy than sell on all three."
So his model is just "assume the same growth rate as the UK" because there's no good data for the US?
Yes -- well, UK + Denmark. Gotta work with what you got.
And #6 today https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/13/omicron-post-6/
I'm just going to leave this here, but I haven't ever read a convincing reason why being positive for SARS-CoV-2 virus fragments is the same as a "case" of COVID-19. COVID-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. To have a disease, you have to have symptoms. It has always struck me that being SARS-CoV-2-positive is meaningfully different than having a case of COVID-19 in the same way that being HIV-positive is different than having a case of AIDS. Can anyone help me out here?
It is relevant for diseases which have asymptomatic carriers. In the case of COVID, transmission often precedes the development of symptoms by a few days, but last time I checked it was quite rare for people who *never* develop symptoms to infect others. So if we had a magic scanner that could instantly detect every COVID-positive person in a region, we'd care - we'd want to quarantine those people for a few days at least. But if we're looking at last week's statistics, all the "COVID-positive" cases that never developed symptoms are not worth worrying about.
Do you have any source you could share for asymptomatic COVID transmission being very rare? I hadn't had that impression, but I also haven't found new data on it since early in the pandemic, and the data I had then wasn't unambiguous.
https://twitter.com/pavitrarc/status/1470447735585214464 is the kind of thing I was looking for: In Seattle 29/217 positive covid samples are likely omicron on 12/8 with very short doubling time (like 1 day). All based on fairly small amount of data.
I have a serious question that is attached to a rather radical/hyperbolic idea, I'd like to toss both out there.
-- Over and over we have been told that Covid "surges" could overwhelm hospital capacity, with horrible consequences. But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
Q. -- Why are people with COVID symptoms going to hospitals at all? What do they really expect will happen there that will have any effect on their health outcome? They get a cookie and a pat on the head, maybe some cough syrup?
Q2 -- Why are hospitals admitting these patients? Wouldn't the proper public health response be to send them home and arrange for their quarrantine and try to arrange for a nurse or health aide to visit them? (Someday we may have drugs to treat Covid approved by the FDA, which would strengthen the out-patient case.)
Which leads to my rather radical idea: To really stop the pandemic, rather than close everything else in society and the economy, why not CLOSE THE HOSPITALS? Or, at least order them to take no Covid patients. Test every patient at the door and the Covid-positive are denied admission, are treated on an out-patient basis, with strict quarrantine rules while they recover. (As I see it, you will either recover, or die, and the only difference from being in a hospital is tying up emergency resources that could actually help people: trauma victims for example.)
If you think this is monstrous and cold, ask yourself just how different this is from policies aound vaccination.
Vaccination passports etc bar you from entering public venues, and in Austria and Australia, force you into house arrest, just because you MIGHT have a higher risk of possibly catching and spreading Covid. So how is turning away and quarrantining those who are known to be infected (also a much smaller number than the people unvaccinated) not the best strategy?
Given that 99.x% of those who test positive for COVID recover, and are then effectively immune, home-treatment would absolutely free up hospital capacity and allow the rest of society to return to normal.
I will freely admit that my risk calculus is probably different from most people's. Also, I feel in my gut that 99% of anything the govt has or might do to "stop the pandemic" is utterly useless, there is so much randomness in the world that we will arrive at the same medical outcome, whether health officials control society, or people are allowed to choose their own precautions.
We have to stop treating this like the end of the world. It's just a mild respiratory illness for most people.
My understanding is that there are in fact many treatment protocols that are quite effective. Early on in the pandemic they learned that lying people on their front leads to better survival outcomes than lying them on their back. While ventilated patients don't have a great survival rate, I do believe that for patients with severe pneumonia, ventilation does improve survival rates. (That is, when you have this sort of severe pneumonia, I believe that patients without a ventilator nearly always die within a day or two, while patients on a ventilator often survive several weeks and then either die or recover enough to come off the ventilator and eventually end the pneumonia.) And we now know that fluvoxamine, molnupiravir, and especially paxlovid do in fact save a lot of lives.
Fair points, but this part doesn't seem right:
"And we now know that fluvoxamine, molnupiravir, and especially paxlovid do in fact save a lot of lives."
AFAIK molnupiravir and paxlovid save few if any lives today since they aren't approved and scaled (at least in the US). Is fluvoxamine widely used?
True, those aren't very relevant yet.
"Test every patient at the door and the Covid-positive are denied admission, are treated on an out-patient basis, with strict quarrantine rules while they recover."
1) Hospitals do give Covid patients supplemental oxygen (in addition to other interventions), which presumably helps, and while I think self-administering oxygen is a thing people do, I think it requires some help from medical staff to get it right, and hospitals are already set up for that.
2) This assumes that everyone who shows up with Covid is there *because of* their Covid. Is that accurate? How many Covid patients in hospitals are there for other reasons, but also happen to have Covid? My impression is that there's been some controversy about people who die with Covid, because they come in for some other problem, but also happen to have Covid at the time, and are counted in the statistics whether or not the Covid was their main health problem.
3) Similar to point 2. I'm expecting to give birth in about two weeks, and was told to take a Covid test three days before coming in, if I'm not already in labor at that point (c-section is not expected). It's unclear both whether, if I arrive in labor, a Covid test will be part of admission, and what, if anything, will be different if I test positive. But if the problem is using more health resources, I don't think switching to a home birth would be a more efficient use of those resources, since then a couple of nurses would have to load up some equipment, drive out to my house, and stay there for a day or so, and I expect the normal procedures to probably use the nurse's time more efficiently than that. And that's a case where staying at home and having the healthcare provider come to me is probably just fine and I did look into into it. Most acute conditions aren't like that. Are healthcare workers going to be going on house calls because someone was in a car crash while also having Covid? Would that use *less* medical resources than the alternative?
If you test positive the protocols for the nurses and doctors attending on you is very different. For example, everyone will wear an n95 mask while helping you, and you'll likely deliver in a more isolated room (possibly one with negative pressure, to keep the contaminated air in).
> Q. -- Why are people with COVID symptoms going to hospitals at all?
Usually, to be put on a ventilator (or some other artificial respiration machine) so that they have a better chance of survival. Kind of the same reason stabbing victims do, really.
>But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
This part is wrong. There is a lot that hospitals do with severe cases that helps people survive. One of the reasons that the survival rate has gone up over time is that we've learned how to treat the thing. I know (at second hand) a vent survivor. 10/10 that guy dies without the vent. I know a couple of hospital supplemental oxygen survivors. Do they survive without the hospital? Maybe, but maybe not. I don't know. For some people covid is very bad, and those people have a better chance of making it at a hospital. Cut people off from the hospital and you'd see that survival rate drop.
> But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
Others have noted the general treatments (proning, life extension via respirator support while your immune system settles down, etc.) But people also seem to forget that we've had a mainstream therapeutic drug for severe cases since the middle of last year. Dexamethasone has its RECOVERY trial arm stopped for efficacy, and saves the life of approximately 1:6 ventilated COVID patients given it. It's part of the standard of care in the US at this point.
>. But given that there is actually no treatment, no clinical protocol that we know to be effective,
This is massively wrong. There's no 'cure,' but like with any serious viral infection, the goal is just to treat symptoms and keep you alive and your organs healthy until your body beats the infection on its own. Hospitalization can massively decrease likelihood of death or permanent damage with all kinds of treatments aimed at this goal.
The comment system in Substack sucks. Once you go to a different page you lose your place. This involves a non trivial effort to reverse. And it can happen both to follow comment threads that are long and interesting AND inadvertently, when you click on someone's name or a post time. Both feel unnecessary and annoying. There also appears to be no way to communicate this to Substack.
Also, why isn't the comment system itself better? There should be a way to find better comments more easily than having to read through all of them. Maybe likes and dislikes aren't great, but surely there could be better systems that we could think of - quadratic voting, reputation systems, any number really
I have always found substacks comments sub-par. No edit button, can't seem to jump to the thing properly and consistently from my email notifications on mobile, order constantly seems to be randomly shifting around. What's taking them so long?
The lack of an edit button is another good one that I forgot about. And the crazy thing is this is a service where at least a significant proportion of comments are likely coming from people who pay.
Also, side note, really appreciate the writing and effort you put into the Georgism posts. Very interesting idea to engage with, and not one that I had come across before. Even if I've come away reasonably convinced that LVT won't be a net positive, I really enjoyed the process. Thank you. (As for the why, Land itself appears to be largely worthless absent improvement, and LVT makes capturing spillover value very hard/impossible, significantly reducing incentives to discover/improve land)
> And the crazy thing is this is a service where at least a significant proportion of comments are likely coming from people who pay.
It is seriously mysterious. It's one of those things where you have to assume it's intentional at some point, or at least intentional to stick it this low down the priority ladder. At the very least, it seems like a sign that substack's founders and employees with decision making power are not themselves commenting on substack posts on a regular basis.
> Also, side note, really appreciate the writing and effort you put into the Georgism posts. Very interesting idea to engage with, and not one that I had come across before.
I really appreciate it! One thing that has been very helpful here is its brought up a bunch of objections I haven't heard before. I think at least *some* of them are based on misapprehensions, which are ultimately the fault of communication errors on my part. It's been super helpful to work that out in practice.
> (As for the why, Land itself appears to be largely worthless absent improvement, and LVT makes capturing spillover value very hard/impossible, significantly reducing incentives to discover/improve land)
Agree to disagree, but thanks for pushing back and engaging nonetheless! Perhaps we'll find a common basis for one of us to convince the other one day, but until then I won't press the point.
>It is seriously mysterious. It's one of those things where you have to assume it's intentional at some point, or at least intentional to stick it this low down the priority ladder. At the very least, it seems like a sign that substack's founders and employees with decision making power are not themselves commenting on substack posts on a regular basis.
I think substack's business model is centered on writers who have audiences that pay to read them, with commenting being a nice-to-have incidental and expected mostly to be glorified "+1"s. Scott's incredible ability to actually build a community that could have interesting discussions even about things he never wrote about, is an outlier.
But I'd be interested to know: how many substacks even have Open Threads?
Yeah that may be. I guess it's a symptom of how email-first they are.
It's not just about open threads though. A lot of writers that are being paid by their audience would likely want to engage with them. I have seen a reasonable amount of engagement and attempts to build engagement in other Substacks. So comments become a way to build stickiness among paying customers, not just a nice to have incidental.
It also seems to lag on mobile when there's a lot of comments on the page. Which is bizarre with modern web design.
The mobile interface is particularly horrible.
My cynical theory is that the substack designers envisaged a one-to-many system, with a little bit of commenting that will be mostly ignored by the top level poster.
Less cynically, it's intended to be more like a newspaper, and less like a blog - particularly less like an old style blog, used for interchange between bloggers, on the old livejournal model.
What I've seen on newspaper sites are comments most readers never even see - you have to explicitly request to see them - where I've never personally seen any sign that the author of the article reads or responds to comments.
By that standard, Substack commenting is great.
By any other standard, including that of the software Scott used to use, Substack's comment system looks bad. I usually compare it directly (and unfavorably) to software from the late 20th century, such as livejournal (founded in 1999).
Interesting factoid I stumbled up that you all would probably appreciate. I recently moved to Canada from the US and was wondering why they have bagged milk here. Turns out it's because when they transitioned to the metric system in 70s it was easier to adapt the container sizes. So I guess the only thing that stopped the US from having bagged milk was our stubborn refusal to part with Imperial units. https://www.eater.com/2019/10/21/20919693/milk-carton-bag-pouch-history
I admit the explanation is so cute that it makes me suspicious of its authenticity, so if someone else knows more about it please do share.
I don't see any particular reason why the choice of units would affect the nature of the container.
Also, this is a constant pet peeve of mine: The U.S. does not use Imperial units. The U.S. uses U.S. Customary units, which are pretty much the same as the older English units. The Imperial system, on the other hand, has several units (including the gallon) that are bigger than the U.S. unit with the same name. The Imperial system was adopted by the British Empire many years after U.S. independence.
I have a similar peeve. Retail commerce in the US is already fully metric. Pick up any labelled good in a grocery store, and the weight or volume is clearly printed on it in legally mandated legible text. The text that gives the measurement in US customary units is not legally mandated. The only legal mandate there is that it must not be false.
I can walk into any one of several different ethnic asian markets in the greater Puget Sound area, and pick up a labelled good that is also labelled in metric, is *NOT* labelled in US Customary measures, and *IS* labelled in customary measurements of the culture or society.
I think thats awesome, and any law or regulation that would ban me from buying goods in round numbers of measures from other cultures are bad, and the people who would demand such a thing are overcontrolling tools.
"... the weight or volume IN METRIC UNITS is clearly printed ..."
If that was sufficient inducement for bagged milk, it was not sufficient for the entirety of Canada, or other parts of Canada had sufficient countervailing forces. Although not definitive, this tells me that it's not a very powerful explanation.
As a resident of west coast Canada of many years, bagged milk is not a thing here, so I was always perplexed when people associated bagged milk with Canadians. I only understood when I went to study in Ontario for a year.
They tried this in Ireland but it never caught on. Cardboard and plastic litre cartons of milk replaced the glass bottles in common use.
Other countries (most of Europe) transitioned to metric and don't have bagged milk afaik
Indeed. I had to Google some image to realise bagged milk simply means milk in a (plastic) bag. I thought it means something else i didn't get, because after nearly 50y of drinking a lot of milk in Europe, both in my home country and visiting quite a few other ones, i never saw something like that. You learn something everyday :-)
In the movie "Miracle on 34th Street", the antagonist is a corporate psychiatrist. Is that, or has that ever, been a real thing? The only other example of a psychiatrist employed by a corporation, that I've seen, is Dr. Scratchensniff from "Animaniacs".
That seems like a contradiction. A psychiatrist is a licensed practitioner of medicine, and last time I checked, you can't practice medicine on behalf of a corporation.
Historically this was more common. E.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2684872/
Ah right, I forgot to check earlier, but the movie is from 1947. Definitely not surprised that companies could make decisions about their employees' health in the past, and I'm sure they'd still do it if it was an option.
I see a plot point in the movie is a psychiatric evaluation, and that still strikes me as strange to be done by a 'company doctor', but it's certainly possible.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the disconnect between people who say things that are symbolically true, and people who (frequently willfully, it feels like) make fun of them because they are not *literally* true. Case in point, there's currently a tweet from a right-wing congresswoman making the rounds on reddit, stating that the only gun policy the US needs was written in 1776, and proceeds to quote the 2nd amendment (which was of course, actually written in 1789.)
People are dunking on this tweet because it's factually incorrect, but they're missing the point--the tweet *feels* true, and it is indeed having the intended impact on the people who understand it. People miss this, either because A. they're part of the ingroup, and so don't recognize the incongruity, B. they're part of the outgroup, and so can't see anything *but* the incongruity, (or possibly, C. they're rationalists, and have consciously trained themselves to think in terms of facts.)
I feel like we missed the point of "truthiness", back when that word was in the zeitgeist. We dismissed it as the folly of evangelicals who still believed in the sky-daddy and wouldn't recognize a real fact if it came up and bit them in the face. But just like how "irrational" people one-box on Newcomb's problem and walk away the big winners, it's the people who know how to speak "truthiness" that end up driving the conversation. It's great to be here and get in-depth, nuanced takes on complicated issues, but if we can't trade the literally true for the symbolically true, I despair of making much of an impact.
> People are dunking on this tweet because it's factually incorrect
That's not why people dunk on things.
Fair, and perhaps I've hoisted myself by my own petard with that comment. :-) But that's definitely a common initial vector of attack.
People just go for the most obvious weakness when they communicate in bad faith. What you seem to actually care about is for people to communicate in good faith instead, but for that conflict theorists need to be transformed into mistake theorists, and nobody has any idea how to go about it.
Depends on how you define "because". Being factually wrong is not quite a necessary condition, but it's like wearing a Rolex in a bad neighbourhood: it sure increases the odds someone will come after you.
"the tweet *feels* true, and it is indeed having the intended impact on the people who understand it."
The dunking also feels true and has the intended impact on the people who understand it.
I recall Rep. Ocasio-Cortez getting slammed for saying "I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." and I think the slamming was justified. Yes, we get what the Congressman MEANT with the "gun policy" tweet, since the date isn't crucial to the point, but a politician making an error that could be corrected by a middle-schooler does not bode well for their credibility as a whole. If you really believe your position is correct, you should have the facts to back it up, and the precision and the semantics to explain your position clearly. If your position is based on incorrect facts, or you can't sell it without bungling your own words, it doesn't matter whether you are morally right or not, since you will fail to persuade the people you need to.
I'm typically not an AOC fan, but I think she was actually right about that. (And I assume she was criticizing her own party with that statement...)
>the date isn't crucial to the point
That's the thing though, the date IS crucial to the point. By which I mean, the tweet would have been less impactful if it had been more factual. 1789 doesn't carry the same emotional weight for Americans as 1776. Whether this was a conscious choice or not, she's speaking to her base, soul to soul. Facts kill the romance and get in the way of the actual communication happening.
(And to pre-emptively address the "how can you communicate without facts?" question... no two people in history have ever communicated in pure fact. It's not how our brains are wired, and it's symbols all the way down.)
Here you yourself are admitting that the factual inaccuracy matters - The founders, in 1776, did not nail down gun policy! That the second amendment came around only in 1789 is evidence that to some extent gun ownership rights were a matter of active debate.
(personally, as a non-American, I don't have any particular attachment to gun ownership as a concept, but I do have a strong feeling that respecting a county's constitution is a strong fence on a slippery slope to no rights at all, and it doesn't really matter which clause of the constitution is the first one to get blatantly ignored. )
> That the second amendment came around only in 1789 is evidence that to some extent gun ownership rights were a matter of active debate.
Not in a nontrivial sense. It only came about in 1789 because the entire Constitution came about in 1789.
There's a maxim I've heard in the rationalist community - might have come from Yudkowsky, I'm not sure - which I quite like, and which seems relevant here: anything which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
Very relevant, I think, and i like the sentiment a lot, but I suppose it's another way of asking my original question: is this a thing that can be destroyed by truth? And is factual accuracy a perfect synonym of truth? Or was Keats right all along, with a consequence being that beautiful inaccuracies are truer than ungainly precision? Either way, I appreciate that people are willing to have the conversation.
Well, the whole "truth" part, not everyone cares about that. If Team A produces a tweet, Team B needs to dunk on it, and they will look for something and proceed to do so. And vice versa; whatever Team B produces, Team A will look for flaws in.
I'm not familiar with whatever this tweet was, but it sounds like the writer basically made the signal for Guns! + Revolutionary War! + Constitutional originalist. Truthiness lives in signal-land.
The equation "I understand what you said, therefore I am capable of going to the mindspace that correlates with it, and therefore I agree with it somehow" is the other key. Some folks truly think that understanding, even partial understanding, is tantamount to agreement, or would create enough motive to "go easy" on the other person in some hypothetical fight. In this school of thought, the enemy is either incomprehensible or utterly foolish, because one's own team comprehends everything worth comprehending already. Comprehending anything else would mean agreeing with the enemy, which is a no-no, so they make sure they don't.
Even outside of twitter, the "dunking to evade a serious conversation which might make me seem less pure" thing has been going on for decades. I should go a step further, the dunking helps fence off the boundaries of the safe space. In case a fresh recruit were confused, they could tell by the dunking which ideas were safe and which were unsafe.
People can line up words to indicate concepts in very nonlinear - even inaccurate or untrue - ways and still get a point across to those who are willing to take the ride. That's not what drives the conversation; what drives many of these is the presence of teams. It involves communication, but it's not a conversation, it's a competition.
> Comprehending anything else would mean agreeing with the enemy, which is a no-no, so they make sure they don't.
Thank you. That's exactly what I was trying to get at, and that's a valuable response to me. I remember from "Seven Habits" a warning along the lines of "seeking to understand other people puts you at risk of having your mind changed". (While advocating, of course, to "seek to understand before seeking to be understood")
I feel like that helps me understand the problem, if not bringing me much closer to any solution...
Perhaps looking at an extreme example helps? Brazil president Bolsonaro has said about the side effects of vaccines: “If you turn into a crocodile, it’s your problem”.
His point is that every person has to bear any side effects of vaccinations themselves (as in "being affected", not as in "carry treatment cost"). This is undeniably true, even though the underlying assumption that the side effects are severe, is wrong.
The statement is formulated in such a way that it is *impossible* to interpret it literally. Or so one would think. If you google for "Bolsonaro crocodile", then the first ten headlines are of the form "Bolsonaro: vaccines can turn people into crocodiles".
One point here might be that it's hard to transmit the original meaning in any reformulation. And journalists like to reformulate. In titles, they may have to reformulate. And once a ambiguous version is out, a lot of people (probably including journalists) never learn about the original formulation, and build upon the wrong versions.
On another site a Brazilian said that "it might turn you into a jacare" is a fairly common phrase in Brazil for something that could have unpredictable effects. (Also that it's an alligator, not a crocodile, but for most of us that is a distinction of little obvious consequence...)
The problem with the "you know what I mean" approach is it means that there's no consequence to lying and now way to call them out or challenge it, because they will always retreat to a more defensible position. (Similar to motte and Bailey). So the norm in the past has been to treat politicians like they're being literal, because debate is impossible otherwise
I think political communication has evolved to counteract that sentiment. Debate *IS* impossible right now, precisely because you can't take anything most politicians say literally. Can we alter our communication to have meaningful "symbolic debates"? Do those words even make sense?
Just reminding anyone in the Philadelphia area that the Philly ACX Meetup is hosting a Winter Solstice Celebration on Tuesday, December 21 starting at 6pm. We’re hoping to make it a good time with food and warm drinks, a fire pit, a raffle and maybe a few rounds of “Cards Against Rationality”. Request to join our Google Group for full details:
https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/ACXPhiladelphia
Enjoyed the guest posts, but it might have been nice to spread them out - it was already a lot of reading and that's before accounting for the thousands of comments.
Agree. I think one a week would have been preferable.
But also agree that they were enjoyable (and well written.. and very much worth their guest slots on ACX)
As several of us have commented in the Georgism threads, it's highly unclear how Georgism would be implemented without disincentivizing large-scale new developments, such as building a new city (assuming that city land wouldn't just be taxed at its farmland value, which would be very low).
So two recent interests of Scott's—model cities and Georgism—may be at odds.
I'm skeptical of the importance of new cities as a route to growth: the case is much stronger for enabling movement to existing cities (see Hseih & Moretti for an example of the literature on this). Georgism helps with that, with the upside of using existing cities more productively.
To the extent that development of new cities would be discouraged for private actors: a) it's exactly offset by an incentive for the state to do so, as they derive the subsequent land tax revenues, and b) you could grant temporary tax relief to new developments, similar to the way that patents currently operate.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that states react to such incentives as strongly as private actors do.
I think a nice first prototype of Georgism could be a private city that charges land-value rents for all its land.
I don't think lost productivity from the issue you're concerned about is sufficient to outweigh the productivity gains from switching to LVT.
We have Singapore already.
I think the Ince give to do large developments like that is decreased, but not to zero. Only the developer cannot capture all of the value of having people come together and starting a community anymore. But they will still be rewarded for their labour + profit involved in the construction of the structures.
Yes, by "disincentivize" I meant reduce the incentive (and thus negating the promise of no deadweight loss), not removing the incentive completely.
This reduce in incentive can prevent a development if some of the structures wouldn't be profitable on their own, but only because they increase the value of nearby homes, which are built and sold by the same developer.
The answer looks fairly simple to me: Compensate people for raising land values. A severance tax is mentioned elsewhere; have integration tax incentives.
How do we determine how much someone has raised other people's land value? This smacks of the socialist calculation problem (even more than assessing land values in the first place: for that, at least we have other similar transactions as a reference).
Hold an All-Pay private auction among everybody who stands to benefit, with a reserve price in which case the builder has no obligation to continue, and there is no obligation for any bidder to pay.
If you don't hit the reserve, and don't build it, nobody valued the improvement.
If you don't hit the reserve, and build it it anyways because you'll still make money, you never needed to incentivize the construction in the first play.
And if you hit the reserve, then the incentives problem is solved.
(So, basically, a KickStarter campaign, in case that wasn't clear.)
I feel as though it is worth distinguishing between Radical Georgism and Moderate Georgism. I just made up these terms, so I should explain them.
Radical Georgism:
- We need to redo most of economic theory.
- Land shouldn't really belong to anyone.
- How can we capture all Land Rent?
- Focus on a large (utopian?) scale.
- Closely tied to UBI / Citizens' Dividend.
Moderate Georgism:
- Focus on local issues in your city.
- Replace existing property tax with a land tax or a mix.
- Revenue neutral tax reform, e.g. 2% property tax -> 1% property tax & 5% land tax.
- Focus on reducing vacancies and urban blight.
- Don't talk about big economic questions.
- Support / opposition to UBI is unrelated.
Since Georgism is a fringe belief, it does not have very many weak supporters. [1] There isn't a large population of people who kind of like Georgism but haven't really looked into the worldview in detail. Most of the conservation about Georgism (including here) is about Radical Georgism. I think this is a shame. We should be asking if any moderate forms of Georgist ideas could gain broad support. Perhaps a good analogy is Socialism : Social Democracy :: Radical Georgism : Moderate Georgism.
Moderate Georgism already exists in some cities in Pennsylvania. [2] Last time I checked, Pennsylvania hasn't depended into an abyss of unintended consequences. We know that this can work. The argument can simply be that it is simply better than our current system of property taxes, instead of trying to answer Big Questions about what land ownership means.
[1] Scott's "Popular & Silenced" post is kind of relevant, although Georgism is more unknown than taboo. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
[2] This is also where I got the example tax rates above. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-gains-the-pennsylvania-land-tax-experiment
While I don't call myself a Georgist (for reasons I explained in the comments to Part 2 of Lars' series), my own policy preferences align very closely with what you describe as "Moderate Georgism."
I would also describe myself as a moderate Georgist although I'm also a landowning financier, so maybe I would be more radical in a different live).
I don't really understand the focus on UBI (other than clarity in the thought experiment); for me, is simply a more efficient way to raise tax revenues while minimising deadweight losses and reducing negative incentives, and I see no reading it couldn't be phased in very gradually, first replacing existing property taxes and then, if that works, replacing elements of income or investment taxes (investment neater from a philosophical perspective but income better in practice as directly recompensing most of those who are paying the LVT)
Substack desperately needs an edit button, just pretend that was proofread.
*(, *life, *no reason
Yeah, I think that was my main problem with the three-part series on Georgism here, it started off with the "flying cars! Mars colonies! robot servants in every home! 20-hour work week! All this will be how we live in the far-future year of 1980!" kind of estimation, and we all know that 1980 was not, in fact, like that.
"Replacing property taxes and another revenue stream for local government" is a much less interesting and probably much more attainable and workable goal than "land will be worth approximately $0 so since it won't benefit you to sell it, there will be no incentive for speculation, so anyone who does build a block of flats on the site will only charge a peppercorn rent, plus we'll make so much money on a national scale, everyone can have a modest, frugal, but liveable UBI and since every other tax will now be gone, this will mean we all live better" promises.
Where was the suggestion that LVT would lower rents? I guess in the long term it ought to increase housing supply by reducing unused speculation properties, and that could plausibly lower rents (but this would take a while).
I remember the series instead as saying "rents are already as high as the market will bear, so an LVT will not increase rents further". Which seems plausible to me from an EMH standpoint.
"Where was the suggestion that LVT would lower rents?"
(1) Does Georgism work part 1:
"Some people come to Georgism because of their aversion to income and capital taxes, some want to use LVT to fund generous social programs, some are motivated by the beneficial environmental effects, and some just think the Rent is Too Damn High."
Agreed, reading through the three parts plus comments, that does get walked back into "well rents can't be increased/reductions in tax and/or increase in income will reduce impact of rent/more productive use of land means more housing which means no increase in rents for scarcity and lower rents to start off with".
I just wrote up a similar comment on the spectrum of Georgism, only to scroll down and find you had the same sentiments but stated them more clearly!
I think one question I might raise is whether the land value tax is truly necessary. It seems like a government with good central planning and zoning can pretty much approximate what you'd ideally get in a Georgist model.
Or perhaps we can flip this around - maybe Georgism is a way to naturally incentivize the sort of community that would otherwise require good central planning and zoning?
"An analysis of a large insurance-record database of more than seven million Americans has found that Viagra may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia by almost 70 percent."
[https://www.everydayhealth.com/alzheimers-disease/viagra-may-significantly-cut-alzheimers-risk-study-finds/]
The article is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00138-z, and mostly deals with the approach to analyzing existing drugs to figure out which might be effective against Alzheimer's.
If true it's a huge effect. The article ended with the usual boilerplate about not advising anyone to actually act on the information, which I expect to be widely ignored. It doesn't say what the average dosage was for the people using viagra; it comes in 25, 50, and 100 mg tablets but I doubt most users take it daily. The average mg/week rate should be deducible from the insurance data the article used and would be useful information.
As per the article: The association between sildenafil use and decreased incidence of AD does not establish causality, which will require a randomized controlled trial.
Most likely it has not causal relationship but rather the people who take sildenafil have better mental (brain) health. We have to remember that sildenafil does not increase libido and doesn't even create erection. It merely makes it possible to have one if your vascular health is a preventing factor.
Maybe it does something to brain vasculature too but it is a long shot.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that people who take Viagra typically have sex partners. I assume the subset of elderly men able to attract sex partners are in general healthier than the set of all elderly men, and that could certainly account for the reduced incidence of Alzheimer's. Also, those sex partners are often spouses, and spouses can cover for their partner's Alzheimer's in the early stages, delaying formal diagnosis and even preventing it entirety if the patient happens to die of something else.
It would be interesting to compare outcomes for older men who take Viagra because they need/want it, those who don't take it because they don't need it (I'm assuming that such exist), and those who don't take it because they're too ill/depressed/poor/partnerless.
The database is seven million, so I doubt they are in a position to do much detailed analysis beyond whatever information the insurance companies already have.
Again, consider that the effect seems to also exist for women who take sildenafil for pulmonary hypertension.
The obvious problem is that it isn't a controlled experiment. The authors tried to reduce that problem in various ways, and they also report some evidence of other sorts.
Sildenafil is also used by women to treat pulmonary hypertension, and they observe a reduction in Alzheimer's for women as well. The error bars are larger, presumably because many fewer women use it, but the pattern is still there.
"after 6 years of follow-up, sildenafil usage was significantly associated with a 69% reduced risk of AD, compared with matched non-sildenafil users" Their explanation of the matching: "Specifically, non-exposures were matched to the exposures (ratio 4:1) by initiation time of sildenafil (Supplementary Fig. 9), enrollment history, sex, HT diagnosis, T2D diagnosis and CAD diagnosis." They are clearly trying to avoid confounders. I don't know enough to judge how well they are doing it.
It's not that I completely disbelieve this. It is definitely something to look into and study more. But I don't hold my hopes high because data provided by insurers tend to be very unreliable. There was that story about car study about car millage which turned out completely false because for unknown reasons the insurers had provided fake data. These companies are not very transparent how they gather their data, and even if they can do it, their corporate and legal departments may put forward all kinds of bullshit reasons why they should give out only "curated" data and may not even allow their representatives to tell about it to researchers.
How confident do you have to be that the result is right to act on it? 60% is a big effect, Alzheimer's is a big negative, and Sildenafil has been used by lots of people for a long time so is unlikely to have serious side effects we don't know about.
I am not confident at all. Currently it is at the level of ivermectin against covid.
Interesting. It would be a big effect even if only 10% of that would be causal.
What should someone do who (i) sees a scientific consensus on a 'pro-regime' narrative and (ii) believes that there exists significant censorship (direct or indirect, offical or unofficial) of 'anti-regime' ideas?
Let 'p' be a 'pro-regime' proposition. Let 'e' be the proposition that the available academic research concludes (or points to the conclusion that … or whatever phrase you prefer), after apparently rigorous investigation, that p is true. If circumstances (i) and (ii) hold, then as the degree of censorship approaches Soviet levels, it seems as though one should disregard the data completely.
P(p|e) = P(e|p)*P(p) / [P(e|p)*P(p) + P(e|~p)*P(~p)]
As tyrannical censorship increases, P(e|~p) approaches P(e|p) since the state of the published academic output in such a regime becomes insensitive to the true reality, and, no matter what that reality is, elites will not allow the widespread dissemination of an academic body of research which suggests ~p.
Thus, P(p|e) approaches P(e|p)*P(p) / [P(e|p)*P(p) + P(e|p)*P(~p)]
= P(e|p)*P(p) / [P(e|p)*(P(p) + P(~p))] = P(e|p)*P(p) / [P(e|p)*(1)] = P(p).
Hence, in a censorious environment, academic consensus provides no evidence for pro-regime propositions.
However, the opposite is the case for anti-regime ideas. Where ‘p’ is now some anti-regime proposition and ‘e’ is as before, in a tyrannical regime, if p is FALSE, then reality and the censorship efforts will almost certainly combine to ensure that an academic consensus in favour of p could never emerge. Thus, as tyrannical censorship increases, P(e|~p) approaches 0. In that case:
P(p|e) approaches P(e|p)*P(p) / [P(e|p)*P(p) + 0*P(~p)]
= P(e|p)*P(p) / [P(e|p)*P(p)] = 1
So a consensus in favour of an anti-regime proposition entails that said proposition is true.
Of course, we used a lot of approximations and relied a lot on what a certain probability ‘approaches’ as censorship increases, but the general epistemic impacts are the same. As censorship grows, scholarly evidence becomes less relevant when assessing pro-regime propositions. If someone believes that (ii) holds, then one can seemingly disregard any scientific consensus brought to bear on pro-regime propositions.
The more predictable a piece of evidence is the less evidence (smaller update) it provides.
When doing bayes with selection effects, it is often necessary to use more nuanced data. Eg selection effects in what is published makes looking at effect sizes (rather than just effect sign) even more crucial.
On this particular problem the model "censorship level is 9000, the censors prefer hypothesis A, A is true" assigns very low probability to a consensus forming on B, and a very high probability on the consensus being A.
Thus this model doesn't update much on seeing A, as it isn't surprising.
But on seeing B it updates a lot (as it is very surprising).
And it updates away from the above model and towards *all* of the following models:
"censorship level is X<9000, the censors prefer hypothesis A, A is true"
"censorship level is 9000, the censors don't prefer hypothesis A, A is true"
"censorship level is 9000, the censors prefer hypothesis A, A is not true"
"censorship level is X<9000, the censors don't prefer hypothesis A, A is true"
"censorship level is X<9000, he censors prefer hypothesis A, A is not true"
"censorship level is X<9000, he censors don't prefer hypothesis A, A is not true"
So seeing a consensus say B, is strong evidence in favor of all of the following: "there is less censoring going on than i thought", "the censors preferences are different than i though", "B is true"
On a practical level, people feel much more strongly than is warranted that they need to have an opinion on everything. For the ordinary layperson, saying "I don't know" is usually fine, and thus "That doesn't convince me" doesn't need to imply believing the opposite position.
Do any of you have recommendations for online courses for kids getting into coding?
It really depends on what type of coding (web dev, machine learning). For ML, I strongly recommend DataCamp. I've had nothing but great experiences with them and their range of courses has absolutely ballooned in recent years.
The game Cargo-Bot.
Never used it myself (don’t have kids) but I’ve heard great things about MIT’s Scratch! According to Wikipedia it has millions of users around the world and is targeted for ages 8-16.
I did several codecademy courses at 11 or 12ish. I'm not sure how much they've changed in the decade since (they send me all sorts of emails about subscriptions these days), but at the time it was fun and accessible and gave me a good enough foundation in Python to write all of the programs I've needed to write.
I've been adding some predictions from this blog into: https://www.foretold.io/c/6eebf79b-4b6f-487b-a6a5-748d82524637
I have been telling myself that bitcoin acts like a way of rewarding people for either following basic probabilistic reasoning, having libertarian ideals (or belonging to an epistemic herd that does) and punishing people for not engaging in probabilistic reasoning, valuing libertarianism, or following herds that reject both these ways of thinking.
But this could be entirely self-serving. Please poke holes in the reasoning. A basic argument is sketched out here:
- A: If bitcoin does become the global reserve currency, its value will be substantially higher than at present
- B: if A does happen, anyone who buys in earlier gets rewarded in rough proportion to how early they bought in
- C: we can see the price of bitcoin as being, roughly a market estimate of the likelihood of how likely A is; the price being higher now indicates that the market estimates it is even more likely than prior that bitcoin will be a globally accepted store of value and means of exchange in the future
- D whatever you think the probability of A is right now, it's got to be higher than it was 4 or 8 years ago
- E "You should buy a little bitcoin just in case it blows up" made senes 10 years ago, it makes sense now, but it pushes enough 'tribal buttons' that many intelligent adults reject this argument as absurd
> If bitcoin does become the global reserve currency
That is not going to happen.
> we can see the price of bitcoin as being, roughly a market estimate of the likelihood of how likely A
No, it is mostly measure of inflation and FOMO.
Point A could use some quantifying. The current market capitalization of bitcoin (current market price times the number of bitcoin in existence) is about $900B, which is not enormously less than the amount of US dollars in circulation ($2.2T as of Oct 2021, per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MBCURRCIR ).
You could get a more generous estimation of the upside by using the Total Monetary Base ($6.3T: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE ), which also includes money deposited by banks in their Federal Reserve accounts. I suspect the Currency in Circulation metric is the better one to use here, since its history is much smoother (much less noise, and much shallower spikes in 2009 and 2020 when the Fed enormously expanded its balance sheet) and the two numbers were only a few percent apart before bit Bernanke-era changes in fed policy, which leads me to believe CiC represents a decent proxy for US Dollar market cap while the current large gap between CiC and TMB is mostly an artifact of the Fed balance sheet shenanigans.
Either way, this implies the potential upside for Bitcoin completely replacing US dollars is somewhere between 2.4x and 7x. This is a substantial upside, equivalent to 12-25 years worth of average inflation-adjusted US stock market returns, but not a big enough upside to justify buying bitcoin as a long-shot lottery ticket style investment.
Another way of framing the problem, also taking into account opportunity costs, would be to estimate an over/under date for when bitcoin is likely to become the primary global reserve currency. If you think it's ~5 years away, then bitcoin seems a fantastic investment. If you think it's 10-20 years away, then you need to examine relative risks and upsides of stocks vs bitcoin in detail and it probably makes sense to hedge and invest in both to some extent. If you think it's 30+ years away or has a significant chance of never happening, then buy stocks.
On this note, ethereum seems like it might be as good or better a bet than bitcoin. Ethereum's market cap ($455B) is about half that of bitcoin, so there's more potential upside. And, while I haven't been following the technical details closely, I've heard plausible-sounding claims that ethereum scales better in terms of transaction costs and network speeds than bitcoin.
Thank you for your response here - I think point A is poorly phrased.
Maybe a better phrasing is "the price trend of the last 10 years will continue another 4":
View this graph logarithmically. There's a pretty clear trend, with some noise of course:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
If that trend continues another 4 years, you should expect the price of bitcoin to be $1M. At current price of ~$50k, this says the market estimates less than a 5% chance that bitcoin's trend for the next 4 years will match its previous trend.
As far as claims about ethereum, they simply aren't true. Bitcoin is used as legal tender in el salvador today; the lightning network layer 2 scales to arbitrary transaction throughputs, with effectively zero cost or latency. That said, i expect ethereum to continue its rise vs. the dollar.
No, I think you phrased it appropriately. If there is an endgame for bitcoin other than being a speculative asset bought under the Greater Fool Theory, then it needs to serve a practical purpose that justifies its value. "Global Reserve Currency" is the absolute best case scenario for that practical purpose that I've heard seriously proposed.
And if bitcoin does turn out to be a Greater Fool Theory speculative asset without $1T+ worth of sustainable practical value, then sooner or later it's going to collapse because eventually you run out of greater fools.
> Global Reserve Currency" is the absolute best case scenario for that practical purpose that I've heard seriously proposed.
Can you say more here?
Have you heard about the concept of hyperbitcoinization? I.e. that a single inflation-proof store of value might eventually replace the role that equities + real estate + commodities currently play, as stores of value?
If you take the current geopolitical structure of the world, and assume it stays intact, then yes, i agree that you're right, bitcoin seems pretty silly. But this seems like assuming that the printing press won't fundamentally alter the power of the catholic church in Europe, for example.
No, this is the first I've heard about hyperbitconization. Based on your one-sentence description, it strikes me as horrendously implausible: bitcoin is a direct substitute only for conventional currencies and their associated payment processing systems. It's not a substitute for real assets: you can build a house, farm, store, or factory on land; you can make breakfast out of wheat, pork bellies, and frozen orange juice concentrate; and you can make and sell iPhones and MacBooks with Apple Computer, Inc; but you can't do any of these things with bitcoin except by means of spending it on the use of real assets.
We tried hypertulipization, and it didn't go so great.
The world in which Bitcoin actually replaces the USD as the global reserve currency is one in which something so big has happened that anything you might plan is pointless anyway.
Literally _anything_ ?
"Anything" pertaining to your financial future, yes, your current plans are probably obsolete, and if they're not, it's more by luck than by design.
So if bitcoin does replace USD as the global reserve currency, than someone who intentionally bought a small amount of bitcoin would have gotten lucky, rather than, say, planning for the possibility of this specific outcome?
Great! You're got a small amount of bitcoin, and the US financial system has collapsed, for reasons that I won't guess but they probably have a huge effect on everything else. How are your property values (if relevant), and the stability of your government?
If you've got a _large_ amount of bitcoin, you're doing better in that case, but now you're starting to compromise your situation in the case where the dollar hasn't collapsed, and maybe bitcoin has; remember that you invoked "basic probabilistic reasoning" at the beginning.
Is your belief that any situation where bitcoin replaces the dollar as federal reserve currency inherently means _no_ functional us governance?
What probability would you assign to a case like "the dollar undergoes > 10%, but < 20% inflation, for 10 years?"
"- A: If bitcoin does become the global reserve currency, its value will be substantially higher than at present"
This seems like a Pascal's mugging to me, though I admit you did say to buy a *little* bitcoin.
How much?
I do think bitcoin is an alternative for people who are unhappy with fiat currency. I don't have a feeling for how much of the world economy that's likely to be.
> I do think bitcoin is an alternative for people who are unhappy with fiat currency. I don't have a feeling for how much of the world economy that's likely to be.
Most people put short-term practicality over politics, and continuing to use the money that everyone else is using is practical.
Do you think inflation changes this?
Maybe I don't understand what "global reserve currency" entails, but I think A and B are contradictory goals: It can't become the global reserve currency if everyone who owns it is holding it and waiting for it to go up instead of using it as a medium of exchange.
C: I don't see why this is true? I wouldn't consider the price of gold to be an indicator of the odds we'll return to the gold standard.
E: I would say that by now the early blowup has come and gone, and it's hard to predict if you'll see another. Due to its deflationary nature, "up" is probably the long-term trend (although who knows if it'll be enough to be worth the effort), but it's had wide swings in both directions at this point - if you bought in six months ago you'd be slightly in the negatives right now.
E2: Saying that people are rejecting your arguments because "it pushes tribal buttons" is pure Bulverism.
Maybe i can just rephrase 'A' as "there is some probability that bitcoin continues the growth trend it's been on the last ~10 years".
As for E2: i agree that, in the absence of more evidence, sure, this is bulversim. Here's my reasoning there:
I've been talking with many people, about bitcoin, for 8 years. Whenever there's a price raise in the short term (i..e, a bubble), people are more willing to talk to it - but the arguments themselves seem to remain the same, despite the evidence changing drastically.
If you're dealing with people who are rationally evaluating evidence, they should change their beliefs when they encounter surprising new evidence, right? If I told people in 2016, "look, in 5 years, the price of bitcoin could be 40x what it is right now, if it continues following the trend, so probabilistically it makes senes to buy a small amount", i think most of them would have responded with an assertion that this isn't going to happen, period. They would mention things like 'the transaction rate is slow', 'it's just for speculation', 'sure there was an initial bubble but the time to buy was 4 years ago, not now that it's overpriced at $1k a coin."
So now it's 2021, it's 5 years later, and we have new things like:
- an entire nation using bitcoin as legal tender
- multiple fortune 500 companies investing in bitcoin
- lightning network enabling effectively free, instant transactions at arbitrary scales
And yet plenty of people _still_ reject bitcoin as totally absurd, not gonna last, you'd be crazy to buy even a small amount. Not just random people - leading financiers like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet, etc.
It's like the new evidence didn't matter _at all_ to these people. But clearly _some_ people have changed their opinions. I've been having these conversations for 8 years now, and the main predictor i've found, in my personal experience, of oppeness - is willingness to question blue tribe shibboleths.
People who are aggressively woke, who dismiss any complaint against the blue true at all - those people who have, in my experience, tended to remain completely dismissive of all the new evidence int he last few years.
We can project this forward, easily. Check out the price graph of bitcoin over the past 8 years, plotted on a logarithm scale. There's a very obvious trend:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
If you project that trends forward another 4 years, you should expect bitcoin to be around $1 M. We could pretend there are only two options there - either a million dollars in four years, or it's worth nothing. The current price is ~50k, which means that the market is pricing a 5% chance of bitcoin continuing the trend it's been on since inception. So, if you think the odds that bitcoin will continue its prior trend are greater than just 5%, it makes some to buy _some_ - even if the only options are "continues the prior trend" or"will crash all the way to zero."
Every year i have these conversations, more and more people have changed their mind. People who held out since 2013 have just started coming around - but it's always been people who were critical of the modern left, anti-woke, etc. This is what's leading me to think that resitance comes mainly from tribal thinking.
1) There are many worrying parts, especially Tether is build on pile of blatant lies
2) Note that your description of situation would apply to many bubbles. See Enron or tulip bulbs.
> lightning network enabling effectively free, instant transactions at arbitrary scales
What is the actual price and settlement time? I heard Bitcoin also described this way when it had fees over 5$ and about one hour settlement time.
> If you project that trends forward another 4 years, you should expect bitcoin to be around $1 M.
If making such assumptions would work in general then profiting on speculation would be much easier.
> If making such assumptions would work in general then profiting on speculation would be much easier
Sure, this is why you reason in terms of probabilities and bets.
What probability would you put on that outcome? The current market price says it's much much less than 5%.
Test your meme theory on this.
In some recent reporting on Omicron and its origin, a hypothesis that it may be related to the clinical trial of Merck's anti-viral pill is mentioned. To quote one paragraph from [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/bbc9eae3-5a49-43e8-8c25-a755008189e0):
"Another theory about how Omicron emerged in southern Africa has been advanced by William Haseltine, a virologist who has speculated that mutations could have been caused by Merck’s Covid-19 antiviral pill. He noted that South Africa was among the locations chosen for clinical trials of the drug molnupiravir, which began in October 2020."
I am not in a position to evaluate the claim. Neither does FT try. I generally welcome a less timid science that is willing to explore more "out there" hypotheses and that doesn't indirectly promote safe conformity in research. So even if we index this particular hypothesis about Molnupiravir at a very low probability, I think it CAN BE fine to let the idea enter the discourse. But I see the potential issues too.
However, what will be the fitness of this meme, prior to any actual data supporting or refuting the hypothesis? In hindsight it is easy to explain and "predict" which meme will find fertile political soil. Before hindsight is available I ask: will regulatory agencies go full precautionary principle on this and the pill receive "the AstraZeneca treatment", will it be pooh-poohed by the Scientists and thus find supporters on the political fringes, or will this meme fizzle out because something else proves more sticky in the crowded December/Holiday meme space? Could we place bets on some meme proliferation prediction market?
If that were the case we'd expect the majority of mutations to be from C to U, would we not?
As I understand the mode of action, you’re right that the RNA doesn’t mutate entirely at random. So the hypothesis looks testable, so in that sense valid and worth looking into. But the issue is how to weigh the uncertain risks and benefits.
I predict that, regardless of fitness in the broader cultural consciousness, it will be immediately added into the memetic arsenal of COVID denialists to prove that COVID treatments cause disease because COVID doesn't exist.
As a meme in service of that it has potential for sure, since it joins big pharma profits with worsening of a disease. Will it have meaningful health impact, like the scaremongering around AZ did, where many in Europe and Asia elected to delay vaccination in order to get a scarce non-AZ one? The badness can come in different degrees.
I don't think this speculation about the role of molnupiravir is good meme fodder for COVID denialists, because to use it you have to be able to remember the word molnupiravir, and also to grasp at least the general idea of how an antiviral might have led to the Omicron mutation.
Here's some more promising fodder for those folks: I heard that somewhere in the Bible it says that antivirals make your butt fall off cuz covid.
Note that there is little reason to believe the omicron variant actually started in South Africa, rather than a different African country with a less robust testing regime - it was first *Detected* in South Africa because SA has very good healthcare by African standards, but AFAIK the evidence suggests it had been circulating for a couple of months before being picked up.
I had an interesting discussion with my parents, where I played the role of Georgism Advocate, and they played the role of Status Quo Defenders. After some back and forth we realized my hometown is already somewhat Georgist.
Our town has high property taxes (although they are levied based on property value rather than land value). However, if the tax was changed to be based on land value, but with a higher percentage than is currently levied on property value, I think most residents would end up paying about the same amount of tax.
I think the way that this town uses the money they bring in is good. There are plenty of parks and green spaces, the downtown is clean and lively. The school district is well funded and highly rated. There are many old and massive trees throughout the neighborhood, which are costly to maintain but enhance quality of life and land values. Much of this comes down to good planning during the building of the town and good stewardship by its government over the years. However, I suppose much of it is enabled by the property tax.
Anyways, it seems to me that Georgism is more of a spectrum than a binary thing. It would probably behoove proponents of Georgism to sneak their policies in without having to familiarize people with the name of their ideology and all its baggage (which most people will probably suspect is just undercover Marxism). Perhaps you can get most of the way to Georgism with policies that people are already familiar with.
Maybe I'm wrong though and there's a huge gulf between what I've described and true Georgism. If so, it would be enlightening to see how!
Even if currently the property tax is approx. the same as a land value tax would be (that is, land value takes up a similar fraction of the total property value for most properties), the incentives are different: a property tax disincentivizes improvements in a way a LVT wouldn't.
In the comments to one of the Georgism posts, I compared private land rents to consols: bonds with no maturity date that make regular interest payments perpetually (unless and until the issuer repurchases and retires them or defaults on the debt), which were somewhat popular mechanisms for long-term government debt in the 19th century. From a Georgist perspective, the people collectively rightfully own the rental income stream from unimproved land, and the government as instrument of the people's collective action should collect and spend that income stream on the people's behalf.
From this perspective, it seems to me that when the government sells, barters, or assigns the income stream from a particular bit of land, that action is morally and practically similar to issuing a consol: in both cases, the government is granting a vested property right to a future public stream of income into private hands. And for the government to confiscate that income stream without compensation would be improper in most cases, for the same reason it would be improper in most cases for the government to default on a consol or other bond.
I do however see a couple significant differences between consols and a private right to collect rental income, differences which would be of particular concern to Georgists. One is that consols typically pay a fixed interest rate on their original par value: e.g. a $1000 face value consol with a 3% coupon rate would pay $30/year forever. But land's rental value may go up or down a great deal over the decades, and the distributionary effects of unearned appreciation in land value seems to be one of the core concerns that Georgism aims to correct. The other is that a consol only entitles the owner to an income stream, while land ownership bundles the right to collect the rental value of the land, control of the land's usage, and both control and benefit from whatever structures and improvements are on the land.
These differences suggest a possible route to a soft transition to a Georgist regime without defaulting on the "consol" by simply imposing a steep LVT to "reclaim" the rental income stream for the public benefit. My idea is to impose a 85-100% LVT (assuming for the sake of argument that land value can be assessed fairly and accurately enough), but compensate property owners by issuing actual consols to them that would bear a face value equal to the assess value of the land at the effective date of the policy, and would pay an interest rate similar to the capitalization rate used to assess the tax. If unimproved land values increase faster than inflation (as Georgists expect it to), then this will represent a substantial haircut to landlords in the long term, but to a degree more akin to an ordinary tax increase than to wholesale expropriation or a large-scale debt default.
Side note: this is more in the nature of exploring an idea than a policy proposal I'm personally in favor of, as I'm a bleeding-heart libertarian, not a Georgist.
I disagree that it would be improper for a government to default on a consol, any more than it would be improper for France to refuse to honor a bond sold by Germany, which Germany said France would pay out on.
A government, as an entity, does not exist merely in a particular place, but also a particular time. I think it is reasonable to say it has an extent in time, such that I think certain finite-length bonds can be taken as reasonable; I think a thirty year bond, for example, is reasonable. I'm uncertain about a fifty year bond, and I see a hundred year bond as utterly unacceptable.
I talk elsewhere of two islands, the inhabitants of one of which sell their island to the inhabitants of the other so they can live in luxury, while dooming their descendants to pay rent forevermore; a consol, in effect. And I say this transaction is invalid; it is, in the words of a cartoon for adults, just slavery with extra steps.
This isn't just about human lifespans, because I think the same is true of an immortal selling his future self out to enjoy benefits now; I think the temporal distance is sufficient to erase any meaningful notion of consent to this transaction, that the person selling their future, and the future person paying for it, are sufficiently distinct that they should be treated as different entities. On the level of an individual, even a decade might be too long.
On the level of a government, a century certainly is. The entity making the deal, and the entity paying for it, are sufficiently temporarily separated as to represent distinct entities entirely; continuity between one and the other gives an illusion of sameness. And here, human lifespans provide a definite advantage, at least so long as they persist, in arguing against such notions: There can be no transaction where there is no consent, and certainly it is clear that those a century hence cannot consent to a transaction made today.
Does it matter in this analysis if the debt in question is callable? E.g. would you also object to a perpetual interest-only debt (or a negative-amortization debt, for that matter) that allowed the debtor the option of paying off the principal at any time?
It doesn't, no. (This means I have issues with large rolling national debts, as well; taking out a second bond to pay off the first 30 year bond is just taking out a 60 year bond with an extra step. If you didn't expect to be able to pay off the first 30 year bond, you had no right to sign onto it; and if you aren't able to pay it off when it comes due, you should admit that, instead of pushing the problem off onto future generations)
That's more similar to property itself; it's just adding myriad smaller transactions between the past and the present to create an apparent continuity of responsibility.
I'm not sure where to put my high level criticism of Georgism in the topic specific threads, so since it's present here... again... I figured I would drop it here.
At the end of the day there's no debate in here on the topic of whether the state, the public, the people (however you want to refer to it) have a right to to the land and a right therefore to extra the total value out of it.
This all plays out, to me, as a convoluted way to achieve "communism-lite".
From a theoretical view, the whole thing is preposterous once you start talking to me about the "extremely high land value in Manhattan". This is not true. There is extremely high land value for land sitting on top of a gold mine, for instance.
What there is in Manhattan is extremely high societal proximity value. If the government suddenly came in and said ok every landowner in NYC now owes 200x the property taxes, there is a chance that the value of the land in NYC could plummet over an extended period of time.
The value of the land in NYC is the community that surrounds it. Not the land. Taking that value, and distributing it to the "people", is not how you build the next Manhattan or protect your existing Manhattan.
Property is already the most disadvantaged asset class after cash (property tax rates typically are at or under inflation, so I think cash is worse).
We don't have sprawl because we don't tax land enough. That's one of the crazier arguments I heard in these conversations. "If we had LVT people would build up not sprawl". What? If I invest in the infrastructure and the "value of the land" goes up because the "area is now worth more" because of all the up-investing us landowners have been doing, you're just going to tax me more and give it to the "people".
The only good thing about the Georgism conversation is the conversation around incentives and taxes. This is good thinking. The existing tax regime for instance discourages specializations. I am massively incentivized to not hire someone to do work for me. If I hire someone I have to hire them with money I was taxed on (30%+ on the margin depending on your tax bracket) plus I have to pay their payroll and income taxes and depending on the service sales tax. So if the value of the service is $100 of utility my choices are:
1. Invest my free time in it, capture $100 of utility.
2. Hire someone. So for them, $100 * (1.3 marginal income tax) * (1.05 sales tax) * (1.12 payroll taxes) = $152.88. For me to pay $152.88, I had to make $218.40.
So hiring someone to do work for me costs 218% the value of the service being provided thanks to our tax structure. This is why we have unemployed people when almost every American would love for more domestic help.
"At the end of the day there's no debate in here on the topic of whether the state, the public, the people (however you want to refer to it) have a right to to the land and a right therefore to extra the total value out of it. "
I've argued for this position multiple times, against people rejecting this notion. What is absent is argument against this position; you may complain that we take it as a given that the public have a right to the land, but I've actually advanced arguments for exactly that perspective, and what is missing is arguments -against- that position.
That is where the debate is missing, and I'm happy to have them.
I advance the notion that the labor theory of property, which as far as I know is the default libertarian (!) argument for the morality of property, covers only improvements to land, and not the land itself; thus, it is right and proper that the rest of society has a right to that portion of the land which is unconverted, being as how no labor has been mixed with it and thus no moral ownership of it has been established, and that the Georgist tax is right and proper in covering the value streams of the unconverted portions of the land that society as a whole is thus denied. That is, Georgist taxes are taxing the opportunity cost imposed on society as a whole by the particular use a given piece of property has been put to, and is morally justified by the fact that said opportunity cost arises from an ownership without moral basis.
You're welcome to argue against this position, or to argue for another form of property rights, and we can have exactly the debate you say is missing.
As for your arguments about investing in infrastructure, how does that differ from the existing tax scheme, where you're taxed on the investment itself? Speaking as somebody who has gone through multiple properties and had to deal with city governments re-assessing the disasters I purchased so they could tax me higher on the livable houses I turned them into, the idea that investing in property raises taxes is something we already deal with. At least Georgist taxes only tax me on the marginal value overflow the improvements create, rather than the improvements themselves.
I’m not sure how seriously to take this argument.
In the Pacific Standard cited in the first essay Paul Krugman went on say:
"We're having enough trouble trying to make sure we repeal the Bush tax cuts, and trying to shift to a completely different base of taxation is just not going to be on the table."
How likely is it that any nation will pay its way like this in let’s say, the next century?
Personally my guess is < 1%, basically because in order to get it, we need a large number of people to take it seriously, and in order to get them to take it seriously, they need to think it is likely to happen, which comes back to needing those same people to take it seriously.
Your tax calculation doesn't look right to me. A company normally pays someone's salary with pre-tax revenue of the company. No double-taxing as in your example. If I'm paying someone from my own already-taxed salary then... I'm not sure, but there are thresholds below which I can do that tax-free. Anyway, this question is complicated and probably not a point of disagreement with Georgists, as you say.
As for Georgism, I think you're thinking of it wrong. The value of an empty lot in Manhattan is very high due to the value of the surrounding community, yes, and Georgism ensures that no one hoards that value. That's how it discourages sprawl. The only reason you'd want that lot is if you had something very profitable / socially valuable to do on it.
You can think of it as getting rid of private land ownership -- renting all land (but only the literal land itself) from the government at its fair market value -- but otherwise being maximally laissez faire. I wouldn't call that communism-lite.
It's like how the government auctions off drilling rights or the electromagnetic spectrum. Those things are public goods and should generate revenue that offsets other taxes. Land should be the same. And maybe it's valuable enough to displace all or most other taxes. So arguably/potentially less communism than the status quo.
Posting a question here instead of on the relevant Georgism post because I've only skimmed those posts not read them in full yet --
If you assume that the first LVT experiment would likely be in the form of a $ for $ substitution of LVT for property tax (a fairly modest assumption given that home-owners are a supermajority of voters in most municipalities)*, what's the benefit of a Land Value Tax?
Context: I was very interested in Georgism / LVT a few years ago but as I've learned more about modern zoning codes + the associated submerged thicket of anti-building regulations that exist in most cities where I might want to live, I've cooled on LVT as a solution to the problem of modern cities. LVT wouldn't make it easier to build new buildings, which is the core problem, IMO. Modest pro-building reforms seem to have a clear/larger pay-off for equivalent levels of political activism (e.g. modest steps taken in California to legalize ADUs).
It should disincentivize real estate investment purchases, and (relative to the previous state of affairs) incentive property improvements.
It should also reduce the values of the most valuable real estate, and increase the values of the least valuable real estate (the latter only as long as the LVT doesn't approach 100%); I think it will reduce the incentives for NIMBYism, since changes in land values will be diminished relative to the current tax scheme, but it might also reduce the incentives for certain kinds of YIMBYism, since increases in land value are less of a good deal (but even a 100% LVT still creates YIMBYism for land-value-enhancing projects, since the benefits - those who want the improvement - are more concentrated than the costs - those who don't care about the improvement but have to pay slightly higher taxes as a result).
It would marginally disincentivize investments in empty plots of land. Whether or not it would disincentivize purchases of housing stock for investment purposes depends on the details of implementation of the interaction with the zoning code.
In a city with a very large gap between the cost of constructing a new unit of housing and the cost of a unit of housing, a LVT might DISincentivize property improvements if it defined the "zoning windfall" as a land value increase. (See my other comment for the details on this).
What's wrong with buying real estate for investment?
Even if land value goes up even without improvements, the owner still has every incentive to make improvements that maximize profit, and probably has less sentimental concerns such as the neighborhood aesthetics he's used to than an owner-occupier.
Investment is the wrong word there; speculation is the more appropriate term. I'm fine with real estate investments, if what is happening is development. What I'm not fine with is a situation which incentivizes people to keep properties vacant and unused.
Why would the current system incentivize keeping properties vacant and unused? Even if today it's more feasible to keep land vacant without going bankrupt than under a LVT, if doing so is in fact suboptimal, then landowners can make even more profit by building something on it, even today. Indeed, isn't one of the main selling points of LVT that it wouldn't change incentives at all (except for situations like a developer owning a large track of land it could build an entire neighborhood on, in which case it would reduce the incentive to build)?
The only situation I can think of where a speculator has an incentive to leave land empty is when the landowner expects that a developer will probably buy up the land a few years later to build a skyscraper on it; but there isn't sufficient demand as of yet to build it now, nor sufficient certainty that there will be enough demand later; and it's not economical to build a smaller building now just to tear it down a few years later, nor is it feasible or economical to build the first few floors of a skyscraper now, and build the rest later if there is sufficient demand. But in this case, leaving the land empty for now is indeed the most efficient thing to do.
Removing property tax removes a disincentive to improving the building on your property; now you can add a second story to your house without triggering a tax hike.
If excessive regulation makes new construction impossible that won't result in much change, because the onerous regulation is the bottleneck, but one can at least hope that more pressure on said bottleneck increases the chance of a reform there too...
Also Georgism related, apologies if this was covered in the articles because I've only skimmed them not read them in full --
In a very high cost city where there is a large gap between the value of a new unit of housing and the cost to build a new unit of housing, you get really weird results by trying to calculate the land value.
Stylized example:
In a given city core, a "standard" unit of housing of 1,000 square feet of liveable space sells for $1 million, and a "standard" unit of housing costs $300,000 to construct. There is a $700,000 "zoning windfall" that accrues to the handful of people lucky/connected enough to get permission to build (which rarely happens, which is why these prices are currently at equilibrium).
There are two adjacent Parcels of land of equal size in the city core.
Parcel-One has been zoned for 10 units of housing, and so has 10 units of housing on it, giving it a total price of market price of $10 million.
Parcel-Two has been zoned for 1 unit of housing, and so has 1 unit of housing on it, giving it a total market price of $1.1 million ($1 million for the housing unit, $100,000 for the front/back yard).
If the city transitioned from a Property Tax to a Land Value Tax, then EITHER
(1) both Parcels would be taxed at the same rate since their land quality is identical, spiking the tax rate on Parcel-Two *even though Parcel-Two is improved to the maximum extent allowable under the current law*
(2) the Parcels would be taxed at a rate that takes into account their current zoning, so Parcel-One would pay substantially more LVT than Parcel-Two, making LVT not too different from Property Tax
And scenario (2) gets even weirder, because if you use zoning to account for land value, then either
(2.1) you use zoning-at-time-of-law-passage to account for land value, causing real land values to change relative to taxable land values over time as people get changes made to zoning
or
(2.2) you declare the $700,000 "zoning windfall" of getting permission to build a new unit of housing to be a "land value increase" that is thus taxable. This keeps real land values and taxable land values the same, at a cost of LOWERING development because now the incentive to try to hack your way through the thicket of zoning regulations has been taxed away.
I'm fine with the zoning windfall being taxed away, because I think the current system actually incentivizes having such zoning problems. (The politically well-connected who can hack through the thicket of zoning regulations benefit from those regulations, and will, insofar as they are an economic rational actor, use their political connections to preserve or even expand them.)
Please correct me if I'm not understanding you, but I think you're saying that:
Step 1) Implement a LVT
Step 2) See the rate of housing construction in urban cores drop from "pitiful" to "near zero"
Step 3) ???
Step 4) Housing situation becomes better
The issue with this plan is that the politically well-connected benefit from such zoning problems, but they were not the primary driving force behind zoning problems being created, nor are they the primary force protecting them. The primary constituency for zoning are people who are old enough and rich enough to prefer slower neighbourhood change to extra dollars. Humans have a bias against change and zoning empowers that bias. Without zoning, an individual can monetarily benefit from constructing additional units of housing without having to consult their neighbours who otherwise have to experience the annoyance of construction/change for no direct benefit. Even the new housing itself can be a cost to neighbours, since adding units of housing increases the density of a neighbourhood, people have different preferences for density, and people are often already living at or close to their preferred density.
An LVT will dramatically increase the price the people who are old enough and rich enough to prefer the slower change are paying for that preference.
Also, I think you underestimate in particular the constituency of older wealthier people who don't want new housing undercutting the value of their rental properties.
And this is a good thing?
Let's play through this. You're 65. You've spent the past 35 years toiling away hard for society through your employment. You lived in dense urban environments, often in smaller apartments. You raised your kids for the first 10 years of their lives in a townhouse near the urban center with very little backyard.
You retire and move a bit further out to a nice lot in Arlington VA in 2000. Over the next 10 years demand for property in Arlington VA skyrockets. Yes, you're paying higher property taxes but the rate is not that oppressive. Overall you preserve your little plot of heaven you worked so hard for despite the vast change around you.
Now LVT rolls around and your cost of staying on this "unproductive", to use your language, "dramatically increases". You are forced to move. You can no longer stay near the city you love and instead you need to move deep into the hills of VA or return to the workforce.
I'm not convinced this happens (for what it's worth, I think LVT will demolish cities as it is currently proposed), but you posit it will. This is the ideal outcome you want?
When it comes to economically forcing the relocation of people, I think there is room between Prop 13 and LVT. I love how its now "progressive" to forcefully relocate people, as long as its old rich people :) :)
I am unfamiliar with Arlington, VA, so I can't say. Also, I am not a progressive.
But, supposing the land value in Arlington got high enough - yes.
You focus on the story of one person, and make it salient. However, if that house is bulldozed, and affordable apartments are built in its place, there are dozens of stories that could be told, about how their lives were changed by access to the opportunities that that one person's story began with, access to the ability to toil away for 35 years, to accumulate enough wealth to be able to retire someplace nice.
The retired person is kicked out of their house - but not onto the street, and not empty-handed, and they buy a cheaper place a few more miles away, and enjoys basically the same standard of living as before. However, the next best alternative for the working class families your story doesn't mention aren't nearly as nice; perhaps their commute is a hour longer each way, perhaps they make 25% less wages. The story of your retired person has one blip, in which they enjoy the same standard of living somewhere else. The story of the invisible people, absent the opportunity to live in the most productive places, is considerably darker.
Now, in one case, we have an older wealthier person paying a high LVT to continue living in a place, and in the other, the older person moves out and the higher LVT is divided among a number of working-class people just starting out.
Let's say the older person moves further out, to a cheaper house on less valuable land. Here's the neat thing: The older person is left financially better off in the end of all of this. Because the Citizen's Dividend now comes in, and the older person's own dividend is made higher by that and all the similar transactions taking place, divided out among everybody in the system.
Or you could add a basic protection to the system, such that the LVT of retirees is fixed. If the LVT returns to baseline upon the sale of the house or the death of the owners, you get the same kind of social benefits, albeit at a delay. Personally I think the world where we bite the bullet ends up better, but I can see why somebody would prefer the world with such protections.
LVT will not dramatically change the price that people who are old and rich and prefer slow change pay for that preference if you use model (2) where the land price is dictated by zoning.
Are you claiming that there exists a $-maximizing group that is the dominant group in local politics in zoning-constrained metro areas? This is quite obviously not the case, because there are many many different municipalities in the zoning-constrained metro areas, and any one town/city could unilaterally upzone, generating a truly enormous $ windfall for the property owners in that city relative to the status quo. They don't because voters are a combination of change-averse and economically-misinformed.
It will, because currently, the OnR (old and rich) are, in effect, making money from their preferences; their house values keep going up, because more people want to live there than can live there.
If they start paying for those preferences instead, and don't get to claim that increased value for themselves, yes, that does dramatically change the price; it changes it from making money every year from land value increases due to housing shortages, into losing money every year paying taxes on a constantly-increasing land value.
I've observed the same phenomenon in a number of places; homeowners have a vested financial interest in keeping the housing supply both limited and expensive, and enforce this in a number of ways.
There's a second reason the OnR want housing expensive, in addition to their own financial interests - they don't want to live near poor people. Which ties into a major second way these things are controlled; rental license quotas. You don't want too many renters living around you; lowers property values, which lowers rents, which brings in even poorer renters. But you want some licenses, for the politically well-connected to make some money off the state of affairs.
And yes, any one place could upzone, but that is only of interest to the subset of the OnR who are currently interested in selling their property, which is going to be a minority at any given time, as other OnR people buy in. None of the other voters are interested in that, as it can only harm their financial interests (and also let poor people in).
Here's what I am understanding: Imagine we are post initial implementation of LVT. I am living in residential home. I am just living there - I am not building, rennovating, etc.
As I understand it, if my property value goes from $500,000 to $800,000 I would essentially pay 100% of that change in some form of tax whereas today I would essentially pay 1-2% per year depending on my municipality on that new balance.
The difference is dramatic, and you are essentially forcing people to move. You are infringing on their right to live somewhere.
For what its worth, I feel property taxes in general are terrible. I think that property owners in an area should be forced to pay to maintain roads and municipal services in that area. But that should be it. A budget is set and paid for, other than that, how dare you tell me that if I bought my home, paid off the mortgage, etc, if I can't produce $15,000 a year to pay the town for all kinds of crap that has nothing to do with maintaining the municipality (e.g. schools), you can evict me? I find this outrageous!
The original Georgist were the New World colonizers. They found a bunch of economically under used land and "appropriated" it for more productive use when the natives couldn't pay the proper LVT.
So, I think 2.2 doesn't *remove* the incentive for hacking through the thicket of zoning laws, it *transfers* it. Now instead of an individual developer getting a windfall for getting a single plot of land through the maze, the city gets a humongous windfall for repealing all the red tape in one fell swoop, which IMO is a much better result for the city.
If you have something on the order of a 50% LVT, then *both* the developer *and* the government have incentive to do away with restrictions.
Note that a key assumption here is that the entity in charge of the thicket of regulation is the same as the entity collecting the Land Tax, if fails if the two are at separate levels of governance. (and, unfortunately, the thicket is often spread across multiple levels, though that varies a lot depending on what part of the world you are in)
The thicket is spread across multiple levels of government, but let's zoom in on the local level. Local governments are not tax-maximizing entities*, and even if they were tax-maximizing entities city councillor salaries do not rise when tax collection rises. Transferring the $ incentive for development from a private developer who can capture that incentive to a city council who cannot capture that $ incentive for themselves results in less development.
*They are not tax-minimizing entities either. What a local government is optimizing for varies greatly depending on the local balance of voting blocks, public sector unions, etc.
A related point: since many/most property tax rates are set via the municipality allocating its annual budget proportional to assessed values, under scenario (2) the owners of Parcel-One would have a significant incentive for Parcel-Two to be upzoned, as their *share* of the total land value would go down.
In praise of landlords. First it must suck to be a landlord these days. I was contemplating becoming a landlord before we sold my mom's duplex. I figured it wasn't worth the hassle. Better to sell the house and put the money in the market. Having been on both sides of the renter fence, I only recall good landlords, and mostly good tenants, a few not so good ones. (Almost all my renting experience has been with two family houses.) Landlords have to; pay the mortgage, pay the taxes, pay the insurance, pay for maintenance, deal with tenant complaints, find new tenants... I figure I'm missing something. As we make it harder for landlords, I predict we will drive 'good' people from becoming landlords, and we will be left with the bottom feeders, who can squeeze enough out of an apartment to make it worth it. I think we need to make it easier for landlords, so that more good people will join the ranks. Treat landlords as evil, and you get evil landlords.
There is definitely a phenomenon where returns on land are usually much higher than returns on property, so being a slum-lord is more profitable than trying to rent higher quality accommodation.
As for horror stories of bad landlords, I wonder how many of them stem from terrible property management companies - all the stories I've heard from close friends had them screwed over by the agents and the landlord hadn't ever even heard of the dispute.
I also think the differences between "bad landlords" and "bad tenants" is astronomical.
A "bad landlord" makes you deal with pests yourself and doesn't rush to fix things. Oh my!
A "bad tenant" causes economic devastation by refusing to pay rent on a property that you have to pay for anyway, causes damage that can run up tens of thousands of dollars, and may tie you up in months of litigation.
It's not even comparable.
We love to sympathize with the less well off in this country, and that's admirable. But we need to take off the rose tinted glasses.
No, a "bad landlord" would be someone who illegally evicts you, and you come home to find the locks have been changed without warning and all your stuff has been dumped on the curb to be stolen, causing a comparable amount of loss to someone who's much less able to afford it. At least the landlord has a roof over their head while they try to deal with a nightmare tenant!
And at least you have been caused loss by someone with a fixed address and sufficient income to recover damages from.
The nightmare tenant situation is still far worse.
For every "landlord who illegally evicts tenants for no reason" how many "tenants who don't pay rent and take year+ to remove" do you think there are? I would estimate the latter outnumber the former by at least 100x, perhaps 1,000x?
If you illegally evict someone you could lose your property, pretty easily.
If you don't pay your rent your landlord will have to spend likely more than you owe them, and take 5-10 years, to get it back. Let alone recover from the trashed apartment.
The law is strongly in the tenants favor in this country, and in some states especially. I really don't think the situation is comparable, but am happy to be educated further if you have statistics that show otherwise.
If you can afford a lawyer.
I've had the nightmare tenants. They're a large part of why I'm not a landlord.
However, I can choose not to be a landlord. That's a choice I get; you self-select to be a landlord, and deal with those kinds of problems, and take those kinds of risks.
The tenants can't choose to just have enough money to not need to rent, and they can't choose to not take those kinds of risks.
The situation isn't symmetrical.
Hmm I think tenants have choices. For a while in my youth I looked into buying a trailer home. Not as nice as living in most apartments, but cheaper.
You have a serious lack of imagination when it comes to what "bad landlord" can mean. Try this one on for size - I only heard about it due to the BSD connection, I imagine there are plenty more less prominent / actually insane ones out there, where the landlord merely commits a felony, ruins their tenantss lives and gets away with it.
"Prominent FreeBSD developer Kip Macy has been charged with waging a campaign of terror against people renting apartments in a six-unit building he owns. He stands accused of cutting out floor supports to retaliate against a tenant who went to court to keep from being evicted.
According to San Francisco prosecutors, Macy also shut off the tenant's electricity, disconnected his phone and had workers saw a hole in his living room floor. Other tenants claim the programmer-turned-landlord and his wife broke into their apartment and stole $2,000 worth of belongings. The couple was arrested Tuesday and charged with multiple felonies, including burglary, stalking, grand theft and shutting off service."
Again orders of magnitude man. The simple fact is a landlord pulling that shit stands to lose a lot so I need to see some data showing me that this is real life problem. Those are criminal offenses.
Tenants who do the same face very little consequences, these matters are not considered criminal
Distinguish 'landlord' from property manager.'
It's funny that you add "paying the mortgage" and "paying taxes" and "insurance" to the list of things landlords are saddled with as if this pushes "good landlords" away.
1. Mortgage payments go into equity, and this money appreciates as your land does. (minus some loss to the Overlandlord - mortgage lenders. Nearly everyone in the past hundred years managed to come out ahead on this front). This can hardly be considered a cost.
2. Everyone pays taxes, this isn't a problem unique to being a landlord.
3. People insure their assets. If I were renting out my car do you think I would not insure it against damage? You can not pay property insurance, it would just be a Very Bad Idea.
Everything else you mentioned is indeed the job of a landlord, and ostensibly the reason that landlords collect rent. This can be stressful, but is extremely lucrative. Sometimes it's so lucrative that landlords will just hire someone to do "maintenance, deal with tenant complaints, find new tenants" and still make piles of money. Nobody needs to be praised for naturally following incentives into huge piles of cash.
Capital, taxes and insurance are part of the cost of being a landlord. And a big part of the rent covers those costs. I ran the numbers and it was not lucrative for me, so I decided not to be a landlord.
Well yes, exactly. The people who did run the numbers and found it worthwhile ended up being landlords. Your leading sentence was 'in praise of landlords', I mostly took issue with that.
Yeah sorry, the first line was meant to 'tweak' you. But I do feel landlords perform a needed service and that they get dog-piled on as evil.
To provide a counterpoint. My wife and I are buying the duplex next door. Monthly rent will just about cover monthly expenses. Fair market rent would be a bit higher and would definitely cover them, but we have a long term renter who's staying and don't want to raise the rent too fast. That said, this will be a small expense, or maybe a small income. Either way it won't be much on our monthly budget.
In the meantime, we build equity, and very likely, the house's value itself goes up. In 10 years, the rents will be higher, but out mortgage won't. In 20 or 30 years it will be worth a good deal and paid off. Our kids will get it either as an asset that by then, with just paying tax and maintenance, should be able to generate real income, or will sell it and collect the cash as inheritance. Either way, it'll build generational wealth.
Now, our downpayment put into the market might do better than the rate at which the house appreciates. But.
1) It also might not.
2) We already have a goodly chunk of my retirement there.
3) I doubt it will appreciate faster than the house plus the portion of the monthly rent which goes to equity. (I admit haven't run the numbers to see just what that looks like.)
This is what my parents did ~60 years ago. Having a good tenant next door is totally worth the few thousand you may lose in rent. (IMHO) Re: 'the numbers' one can't know the future, but I get a certain sense of security from owning property, that I don't get from owning stocks. It's hard to put a number on that.
So this post is in praise of you, well done. :^)
Well, then, let the record reflect. In praise of my wife - she talked me into it. :)
The idea behind "That said, this will be a small expense, or maybe a small income" is what I was taking umbrage with when I scoffed at the idea that mortgage payments are a true cost. When you pay your mortgage, the only money you 'lose' is interest. Increasing home equity IS income. It's not a positive cash flow (which is what I assume you're talking about) but you can have it as cash whenever you like by selling the underlying asset or taking out a new loan against it.
With regards to point 3, you will also have to consider the extreme leverage you have when you invest in a home.
Let's say you bought a 500 thousand dollar property, and you put down a 100 thousand dollar down payment. You are entitled to 100% of the growth of your asset. So at the start of your mortgage you are getting the capital gains of a 500k house for a mere 100k down. Even if your property appreciates at a very conservative rate of 2% per year, that's 10k in value - which is 10% of your original investment of 100k! The market tends to track home prices pretty strongly, because Land is Important, so you're likely to outperform any safe market investment for a long time.
Best of luck with your investment, btw.
Politics allowed, just in time. So California is doing tit-for-tat and fighting fire with fire - going after gun rights the same way Texas is going after abortion. What could go wrong? I expect Supreme Court will have to eventually deal with it, and would not be surprised if they do so inconsistently, upholding Texas law and overturning California. If they do decide consistently, I wonder which way they would go.
Anti-gun states have been ignoring Heller through much more direct routes and the Supreme Court has just let them. I still can't buy a gun in NJ. California doing this doesn't change a thing.
The point of the framework of the Texas law is to evade pre-enforcement review, where a law is challenged by a plantiff suing a government actor (usually the state attorney general or the head of the regulatory agency charged with enforcing the law) seeking an injunction preventing them from acting to enforce a law the plantiff argues is unconstitutional.
The Texas law in question seeks to prevent this by putting enforcement in private hands, but even if successful this only defeats pre-enforcement review. The law can still be struck down if someone deliberately violates the law and someone else brings a suit against them: the defence could then raise constitutional objections at trial or appeal, and the court ruling could agree with those objections setting a precedent nullifying the law. The problem is this is a slower and more heavyweight process than pre-enforcement review, and it requires someone to volunteer to go first and risk incurring liability if the courts rule against them.
In this case, Texas abortion providers all seem to have (last I heard) adopted a strategy of complying with the law for now, presumably waiting for the appeals around pre-enforcement challenges to play out, and probably also waiting for SOCTUS to rule on Dobbs as that might substantially revise precedents on which abortion statutes are unconstitutional or not.
Thanks for this clarification. So now my question is - will California gunmakers also, temporarily, follow the law while awaiting appeals to play out? Is there a similar pending SCOTUS ruling on gun control?
Will they have to? Isn't it always their perogative whether to hear a case or not?
Since politics are allowed on this thread, I'm curious what people's predictions are for the 2024 election. Who are the contenders in the primaries? Who wins them? Who will be the new people who didn't run in the last election cycle?
An intelligent friend of mine who shall remain anonymous seems to think Tucker Carlson might run—since he's like an American Zemmour I suppose it's possible.
Trump runs in the Republican primary and most of the contenders stay out of his way. You'll get a couple of old-style contenders but no one who moves the needle. He wins in a walk.
I really don't know who's running on our side. Pete and Kamala, of whom Pete wins, but there's probably someone I'm not thinking of who beats him.
Trump wins the general.
I wouldn't be so certain about Trump winning the general
Since this is a political thread, what do people think about the 2024 election? Who will be the candidates and the winner? Give odds. Who will be the new players? Is there a good way to predict who will be new players?
My answers are the same as Predictit.
Democratic Primary:
60% Biden wins without serious opposition.
30% Biden doesn't run, and Harris wins.
Republican Primary:
50% Trump doesn't run, but the leading candidates are forced to say whether they like him. Someone who says "yes" wins.
30% Trump himself wins.
General Election:
60% Democrat wins.
40% Republican wins.
All of these numbers are based on vague feelings, which is why the last two add up to 100% even though theoretically something else could happen.
I think Tucker Carlson has a >1% of running and winning the primary
If Trump gets the nomination, I think there's very little chance he will win the general
The trouble is, Trump, Biden....they're all so old! And they're getting older!
One thing I found lacking from the Georgism discussion: even if it will work in principle to raise taxes, it would cause an absolutely enormous shift in _what_ we tax. Farms in particular will be massively taxed, while a tech company or a venture capitalist will be essentially untaxed (at least if they forego downtown offices).
Is this really a good thing, shifting the tax burden almost completely to activities that are land-intensive? _Why_ would we want this, as opposed to for instance a flat tax on income or a fixed VAT, that affects the economy more evenly?
I feel like some numbers are in order. That all seems backwards, I would think farmers would pay less since farmland is cheap. Also many farmers do not even own their land so nothing would change for them.
And many venture capitalists already rent their offices. So nothing would change for them either.
If farmers would pay *less* than now, who would pay more to compensate? I don't know a lot about farming, but it seems to me that land would be a big deal there...
People holding real-estate in high value areas as an investment.
Parking lot owners in cities, commercial real-estate landlords, sports stadiums, low density homes on valuable land, etc.
They won't pay taxes as they will have already been wiped out and there's no money to be made.
Other people have said that mere land cost is half of the cost of farming - very few other activities can match this.
Did you read part 1? Land as a portion of cost rises the more urban you get.
Not half the cost of farming. Half the cost of the farm property. Farming costs a great deal more in terms of labor and non-land-improvement capital than land and land improvements.
Thanks! So what part of total budget is land rent (real or imputed)?
We can try another angle as well. Taxes are 25% of GDP in the US. If you go full Georgism, this will have to be entirely shifted to LVT. What percentage of land-only value in the U.S. is farmland (including razing) value (or what part of Georgism-imputed land rents and farmalnd land rents - this is by definition the same ratio)? This percentage times the 25% of GDP that are taxes need to be covered by agriculture (which is in itself about 5% of U.S. GDP). So if, for instance, agricultural land value is 20% of all land value (no idea what the actual number is), then agriculture will be taxed at 100%.
Ha, I thought parking was expensive already! Might it get really fucking expensive in a Georgist city? Or I at least it would all need to be in more intensive structures, like parking garages etc...
Hopefully the LVT revenue will contribute to a robust public transit system.
I think the point isn't whether or not farm land would be expensive in LVT. I think the point being made is any industry which is landless would be significantly tax advantaged against any industry that requires land.
For instance, LVT in the age of remote work could be the death knell for office space. If suddenly office space is significantly more expensive, why bother?
If it's not, then great, but you're still taking whole segments of the industrial base that *require* use of land and increasing the tax burden on them vis a vis those that do not. This is a distortion.
Why would an office space get more expensive to rent? Surely an enormous chunk of the value of the property in that case is the office building which is untaxed by LVT?
Farmers on the other hand would probably pay about twice the property tax than they currently do. (Improvements to the land are actually a notable piece of property value for farmers, including irrigation systems, barns, fencing, etc., but they still use a lot of land.) They aren't the biggest losers from LVT, but they certainly would lose (and pass on that additional burden on to food consumers.)
Also worth noting that this likely replaces some other tax burden (perhaps some income tax or equivalent) which makes the actual net impact of an LVT ambiguous on farmers without a lot more detail.
Per the "Part 1" article, specifically 1.1. Most of the value of urban real estate is land, this is specifically presented as the opposite. Most of the value is in the "land" not the office building.
Now, Lars may be incorrect that this is the Georgist position. I wouldn't be in a position to say that so am responding to this specifically.
Now he later argues that Georgists can prove this cost won't get passed on tenants, and apparently the property owners are just going to swallow a absolutely massive cost increase. If that is so, office rents won't go up but.... new offices will certainly appear elsewhere with lower rates and this "massively valuable urban land" will after a few years be not as valuable.
Whether farmland is cheap is irrelevant. The question is, what percentage of property value is land value (and comparing that percentage to the ratio of current property tax rate and hypothetical land tax rate.)
In practice, I think farmland property value average out to about half land value in my area. Irrigation systems and barns are very significant improvement expenses, but they support a lot of acres of land each. Assuming we're going from a property tax of 1% to a land tax of 4%, that's going to about double their property/land-tax-burden.
Errr, I think farmland land value averages out to about half of the farmland property value in my area.
Per the USDA, total revenue of farmers was 439 billion, and per some internet searches and math, property taxes paid by farmers is currently around 7.5 billion. So currently property taxes represent 1.7% of the revenue stream, which means, basically, that even a negligible Citizen's Dividend more than makes up for the slight increase in food costs.
How does this compare to the size of agricultural subsidies? (at least it's not the EU's Single Payment which, AFAICT, is a negative LVT)
Under Georgism, LVT is supposed to replace all taxes, not just property taxes.
Yes!
Taxes are ENORMOUS causes of inefficiency in the world. Tax efficiency is 90% of what matters.
So many decisions in America are made based on optimal tax outcome, not optimal societal outcome. Taxes ideally should not influence decisions.
Eliminating tax decisions wouldn't necessarily lead to socially optimal outcomes being the basis of all/most decisions, just to be clear, unless you're a radical libertarian who thinks that free market outcomes necessarily equals socially optimal outcome (which I don't say pejoratively).
Agreed! Intentional tax influences could make sense (but can suffer from "I know better than the crowd" mistakes).
However, today's tax structure creates a lot of unintentional side effects. There is a massive tax incentive for unpaid labor. I should cook my own meals instead of hiring a chef, or perform my own landscaping instead of hiring a landscaper, is a bad tax incentive. DIY is so large because taxes create a MASSIVE tax disincentive to hiring people to do that work. Massive. And it hurts the working class.
Well, that's if you really make it one tax. Most likely if it was attempted it would be yet another tax on top of all the ones we already have.
step 1: genetically engineer algae to excrete massive amounts of caprylic acid (8-carbon saturated fat which is just barely liquid at room temperature and bouyant in water)
step 2: skim it off the surface of the lake
step 3: convert it to octane with a catalyst https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.8b00562
step 4: ???
Step 5: sell equivalent fuel to gas stations for cheaper than fossil oil companies can
Step 6: sell carbon offsets for about the same price as fuel, by pumping biofuel back into depleted oil wells.
Step 7: profit! Also avoiding GW.
Not so far-fetched, since some biofuels are already <2x more expensive than gasoline. Genetic modification has boosted crop yields by >2x before.
Use chip fat for diesel vehicles too and you can have a road network that smells like deep-fried goat.
your algae will be outcompeted by wild-type algae unless you completely isolate the lake
Also there are higher-value products to produce than fuel.
I find it hard believe this works at scale given that billions of dollars of venture capital already went into algae biofuels with nothing to show for it.
I ran a search for those companies and it looks like many of them pivoted into making higher-value products from algae instead of fuel:
https://www.algenol.com/
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/aurora-biofuels
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/culture-fuels
But it's still carbon capture, right?
Plans You’re Not Supposed to Talk About is an ACX post mysteriously written on another blog: https://dynomight.net/plans/
No it isn't. Its just an average blog someone is shilling.
Less of this please
I wasn’t sure at first but after a bit more scrutiny I would agree.
I would say it's slightly above average and just about ACX-ish. But no more than that.
You realize that Scott has dynomight in the blogroll, right?
I did not know that, but the linked post was *not* an ACX post mysteriously posted on dynomights blog. Despite that being what was claimed. I hold to my polite request for less of this kind of spam.
Ah, perhaps I am too charitable, but I interpreted the statement as a joke that suggested that the writing of the post was similar to the writing style on ACX/the post would be of interest to readers of this blog. /shrug
Well.. I'm actually being a little more aggressive than the situation warrents. If I was more familiar with dynamax I think I probably wouldn't have been quite as irritated. It really probably was just a joke that landed weird with me.
Saw this on HN, big fan! The style was very reminiscent of 'Slightly Skew Systems of Government'.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/
I wonder if the style of 'many concrete examples of a general trend' will become popular. I tend to enjoy most such posts when I read them, but I could see it become shallow like listicles (perhaps it already is?).
So with the benefits of hindsight this seems like something Scott did write foreshadowing his wedding, right down to the Odysseus reference. Sorry we doubted you Mr or Ms SeishinSennin.
The term "economic collapse" is thrown around freely, but what does it mean? What specific conditions must exist for an economist to be able to say "the economy has collapsed"?
To start out, I'd say one condition is ubiquitous reversion to the barter system in a country that once used currency. I can't think of a situation where that condition would exist, but the economy would still be healthy overall.
I think the barter system is mostly mythical; you don't ever actually have people trading three chickens for a pair of shoes or anything like that as a major economic driver. Economic collapse typically takes the form of hyperinflation but people still trying desperately to get *some* use out of their traditional currency because that's still better than trying to find someone with shoes in the right size who wants chickens, or people using foreign (traditionally GBP or USD) currency rather than their own, or quasi-socialist arrangements where a local strongman grabs all the surplus Stuff and distributes it to his followers while commanding all the labor to ensure more Stuff tomorrow.
Barter can work when two groups reliably have what the other need. I read about a pair of Siberian tribes who herd reindeer and hunt seals, respectively, and trade seal meat for reindeer meat every year. (The herders' diet would be dangerously low in fat without seal, and the seal hunters need the reindeer because it comes in a fur bag, which they rework into clothes.)
That said, if a society is built with the assumption that people use money, it's going to go to shit if money stops working properly.
People would use barter to institutes some sort of pseudo-currency, like cigarettes in prisons etc. Obviously a whole economy couldn't run on cigarettes, but I would assume a market would develop for tradable objects of known value, perhaps in several kinds.
I think police should use bodycams 100% of the time, and have the footage livestreamed to a separate agency which monitors it and publicly posts the footage of any arrest that involves struggle. (exception: delay if necessary to avoid tipping off related suspects that are about to be arrested) This would have some benefits:
1. Give people a feel for the entire distribution of police & criminal activity, instead of only seeing incidents that are ultra-cherrypicked to push a particular emotional narrative. This probably leads to more accurate beliefs and better policy prescriptions.
2. Preempt misinformation that incites riots about falsely alleged police misconduct.
3. Prevent coverups of actual police misconduct.
4. Incentivize police and criminals to be on their best behavior, since unnecessary violence by either party will go to a permanent public video record.
5. Protect police from harm, because it is no longer possible for the criminal to murder the only witness. This changes incentives a lot.
6. Since police become less likely to get shot, they can also be more chill.
A key lesson from WWII is that, in a war of attrition between industrial countries, it is crucial to strike the right balance between the quantity and quality of weapons your side produces. U.S. and Soviet-made weapons (especially tanks) are generally closer to the optimum than German-made weapons, which are considered too expensive and complicated to have been worth it.
What are some specific examples of WWII weapons that, without doubt, represent the following:
1) Too cheap / primitive / simple; country would have been better off changing the design to be more expensive / complex.
2) A perfect balance of cost and complexity.
3) Too expensive / complicated; country would have been better off changing the design to be cheaper / less complex.
?
My understanding of German weapons in WWII is that they focused on quality because quantity wasn't possible for them. Germany was a smaller country than their enemies, with fewer natural resources. So their optimum balance was different from ours.
Even accepting that viewpoint, I'm not sure the Germans were getting their money's worth. A lot of German tanks were over-engineered and had reliability issues. It doesn't matter how good your tank is if it can't drive to the front lines.
I should probably finish Wages before speculating about this but maybe the timing was also relevant and you can make 10 good tanks faster than 20 mediocre ones.
3. The Japanese super-battleships? Incredibly expensive to build and operate, so rarely-used that Yamato got called a "hotel," and never actually saw the sort of decisive battle they were intended for - Yamato and Musashi were sunk by aircraft and their half-finished sister Shinano was sunk by a submarine.
But the same could be said of Japan's non-super battleships, for the most part. They saw a little bit of action in the Solomons, then died horribly. It turned out not to be a battleship kind of war - but it plausibly could have if Pearl Harbor had turned out differently.
If it had, history might speak more favorably of the super-battleships. Their value proposition was that Japan couldn't beat the United States in quantity, either numbers of ships or tonnage, but might do something with quality - and one possible area for a qualitative advantage was not having to fit its battleships through the Panama Canal.
Against the sort of battleships the United States was producing in 1937 and had in service in 1942, it's plausible that two Yamatos could have stood off outside the effective range of US guns while punching through the armor of US ships, defeating an otherwise-superior force. They would have had a narrow window to do that, because by 1944 superior US metallurgy (thus AP shells) and fire-control radar gave our smaller battleships an absolute edge, but it wasn't an absurd strategy and arguably the best strategy for a Japan that is going to build battleships at all.
And no, it wasn't an absurd strategy to build battleships in the late 1930s or even 1940s, https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Battleship-and-the-Carrier
#1 is hard to come up with good examples of, probably because it's much easier to squeeze more performance out of a system by adding complexity than the inverse, so such weapons are fairly rapidly succeeded by improved variants.
#2: North American P-51D Mustang. Sacrificed some aerodynamic efficiency relative to, e.g., the P-40 Warhawk in exchange for a *much* simpler wing planform. Simpler construction -> higher production rate -> Allied fighters over Berlin*.
*With the integration of the Merlin engine
#3: Messerschmitt Me 262. Although the postwar era decisively proved out that fighters with turbine engines dominate those with piston engines, it was too finicky and relied on too scarce of materials, diverting production capacity from more proven platforms.
When inflation is calculated, hedonic regression can only account for legible attributes of products. But there is quite a lot of corner-cutting on illegible attributes. You could even say that producers are often incentivized to maximize illegible corner-cutting. So I thought of an alternative to hedonic regression which is directly based on consumer preferences rather than instead of central planners trying to do linear algebra to calculate what the price of something "should" have been. Compare the price of a used P1 with the price of a used P2 at time T3, and adjust for depreciation.
An oft-expressed notion in recent years is "food is the new music". I continue to think this is true, and that it's due to economic change. Music used to be expensive. An album cost you more than a good meal 30 years ago.
Music is now ridiculously cheap, almost free, whereas food still costs something but it's available in many more varieties than it was a few decades ago.
Is this change purely an economic phenomenon---ethnic food has become more available and affordable? Or does the shift from music to food mean something else? Some deeper value change?
I'm not sure how widespread this is, but some quarters are of the opinion that contemporary music is generally bad, both popular and academic. Of course, one can always delve into backlogs, but that's a pretty niche interest.
Why is the resale market for NBA tickets a failure? I'm watching a mediocre team on TV and more than half the good seats are empty. This in a city where ticket scalping is legal.
My guess is the problem is that digital tickets are still a recent advent, one which gives the franchise a monopoly on the resale market. You can't go out and buy a physical ticket outside the arena from a scalper like you could just two years ago.
The franchise "resells" tickets on their home ticket site, but they obviously aren't succeeding at the mission. My guess is that it's not really a market. They won't drop their price in the insolent face of low demand, so the seats go empty.
I guess the economic concept is "sticky prices". No?
Does anyone have a working link for the discord server? The one in the sidebar doesn't seem to work for me.
I'm leaning towards effective altruism, I give more than 10% of my income to EA-related organizations.
But I also buy stuff from Amazon, which told workers to work through the tornado, and people have died due to Amazon's company policies.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/multiple-deaths-confirmed-after-tornado-hits-amazon-warehouse/ar-AARIyVf
If I think of my impact on the world, how much me buying stuff from Amazon reduces my positive impact?
Swire is a British conglomerate with British roots, but operates on Chinese land, hires Chinese employees, and profits from Chinese customers.
I wrote a reflection from reading Bickers' China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World. It turns out the history of Swire is the history of 1) a firm retelling history of itself 2) indexing Hong Kong's economic growth 3) operating in emerging markets with the backing of hegemonic power.
https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/adventurers-imperialism-hongkong/