I'm not quite sure whether progressives are just incapable of understanding unintended consequences, in connection with the inclusionary zoning topic, or whether they just don't care or expect some deus ex machina to intervene and save their dumb strategy. By making housing for ex-convicts a salient political issue, they will make it harder to provide housing for ex-convicts! And harder to provide housing that people can afford in general! It's maddening!
Overly-restrictive zoning, that stops housing supply from increasing, is a product of local govt. It seems to me it'd be better to less/remove that first, before adding additional govt intervention.
I agree that removing overly restrictive zoning is important, but I doubt that it would make housing affordable enough for a large segment of the population.
There are states with far less restrictive zoning than California, yet in every state many people are priced out of housing or housing costs them so much they can't save or invest for their futures.
I think a lot of Dem believes if you set a process, the right result will happen, which is just not based on real world and real people.
I still remember when France announced their 35 hr work week. The ppl in charge thinks that automatically translate to a 12.5% increase in unemployment. Not realize that the one paying for things the business and they will cut down on hiring as a result.
The Gallup poll results on "Republicans' Preferred Rate of Immigration" does not show a change in attitudes. An easier explained is that Republicans are more satisfied with immigration rates now that the Trump administration has changed them to nearly zero.
Mediocre students have always gotten into Harvard, as long as they were white and rich. That was part of the value of a Harvard degree (if not a Harvard education).
Gentlemen's Cs. The Ivies becoming far more meritocratic coincided with affirmative action. You can make the argument you think they should be *more* meritocratic, but it would not be a RETVRN for them, it would be something entirely new...
". . . every new housing development will include poor people. This provides a very strong incentive for rich people to become NIMBYs, blocking development in rich areas in order to keep out poor people". Sad but true. Which Christian values are we supposed to be fighting to preserve against the PC-Muslim axis of woke? Not the ones in the beatitudes, clearly. And I swear if I hear one more conservative loudmouth who has never darkened the door of a church in his life, saying that we need to reclaim our religious heritage, I'll turn the other cheek.
In this society, "poor" = "crime-ridden and dysfunctional." As long as we have policies that encourage and subsidize crime and dysfunction, we have to allow the productive members of society to protect themselves from these people somehow.
True that poor equals crime ridden and dysfunctional. Not because policies encourage that, but because poor people don't have the support they need. Not talking about those low-income housing set-asides though.
Criminals are mainly fatherless boys. Starting with LBJ's "Great Society," we implemented a welfare state that enabled an explosion of fatherlessness. Now we have to allow the productive people to insulate their families from the huge population of dysfunctional, welfare-dependent people that we created.
Most criminal, dysfunctional people are poor but most poor people aren't criminals. The bottom 3-4 income deciles of the US population are poor or low income but if most of them were criminals the US prison population would run into tens of millions rather than about 2 million.
It is only the bottom decile that would qualify for government-mandated "affordable housing." Because of the way markets work, all new housing is affordable housing, so the government should focus on maximizing home building and stop being concerned about whether a given unit is "affordable."
I'm not sure it's quite that simple, but that was a big factor and a big mistake. Totally agree that fatherless children are severely handicapped socially and economically.
From a macro perspective, no one should do what a machine can do, and we should invest in human capital so each person can contribute their highest and best use in the allocation of scarce resources (aka, economics).
We end up paying for unschooled labor one way or another. Either we provide them with jobs that a machine can do and give them the dignity of earning money, or we support them with welfare.
Neither option is good.
What we should do is provide every child with a quality education that prepares them to "play their best game" in the economy. Instead, the US is doing the exact opposite.
Um, sometimes it actually is a lot more efficient to have a person do something than to build a machine to do it for them. Especially if it doesn't have to be done very often. It's a truism among programmers that writing a program to do a one-off task often ends up taking a lot longer than just doing it "the hard way" themselves.
For example, my father the retired college professor used to complain about students spending hours fighting with Microsoft Word (or some similar program) to add a simple diagram to a lab report instead of leaving a blank space and then spending thirty seconds drawing it with a pencil, the way they would have in the 1970s.
good point. one which I often make myself and should have mentioned. especially relevant in today's world where many prefer not to think. but for taking orders at a fast food chain? self-service is cheaper and faster and more accurate--albeit impersonal. my hope is that machines do things that free us up to do higher value add. thx.
That would be worse than setting money on fire. There's no point forcing stupid people through more school. They still won't learn. And even if you had a magical school that could make them, someone still has to clean the toilets. In a hypothetical society where 100% of people are math phds, there will still be the same number of low skilled jobs.
I would want to see this in the context of the unemployment rate for the relevant sector of the workforce. If low-skill workers have plenty of jobs available, then the fact that fast food has become a smaller set of better paying jobs doesn't seem like a problem. But if there's been struggle finding employment, then it's more of an issue.
As a pair of California cheapskates, my wife and I simply avoid fast food outlets, even the healthier ones. Too expensive. It is much more affordable to go to a sit down restaurant or independent taco or sandwich shop.
I would guess the biggest drop is from locations closing; either due to individual low-performing locations or in some cases entire chains shutting down in the state.
LLM are systems that predict most likely response and that prediction is based on training done with public information and opinion making. So the fact that the opinions they tend to express are socially liberal and economically conservative is likely a reflection of the fact that these are the most common views. It's not validation that those views are right because AI isn't really thinking about these things. It's really just answering the question of what is the most likely human answer.
Housing: Noah's comments presume a free market in housing that does not exist in many (most?) communities. Housing has absurdly high transaction fees. Beyond that is the concept of community. Communities can only absorb, at most, 12% influx of new people without losing community (empirical data on this) and generating a move to reject the noobs. Finally, in tourism communities, tourists will always outprice working individuals for a unit of housing. Which is fine, until there are no more teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers or city employees. My beef with our local housing "advocates" (Blaine County Housing Authority) is that they prioritize the lowest-skilled, least value-added jobs for housing on the most expensive real estate and thus squeeze out the middle class, the community needs to function.
“And masked, non-uniformed secret police arbitrarily grabbing law-abiding people off the street and demanding their citizenship papers feels uncomfortably like something an authoritarian ruler would do
“Feels”? It is what authoritarian rulers do. Timid sanewashing does nothing to stop this. Habeus corpus, right to counsel, Miranda rights, Separation of Powers are relics of the past. The Supreme Court doesn’t care. The coin-operated Congress doesn’t care.
"In other words, California is going to pay for housing specifically for ex-prisoners and mental patients. Everyone who has the power to resist that sort of housing in their neighborhood is going to resist it, because people don’t want large numbers of ex-cons and mental patients living in their neighborhoods. The likely result of these grants is that less housing will get built."
Is this money is not being forced on developers. This way of building is not required. If people are going to resist these kinds of developments, builders will just choose to forgo the government subsidies and sell the product people want at the price they would sell at without the subsidy anyway.
That's what I was thinking! In what sense can creating a new subsidy program with silly requirements actually lead to *less* housing? It might make the subsidy program achieve very little, but I don't see how it displaces other housing.
LLMs also tend to converge on left nimbyism, last time I talked to Gemini. They’re very into gentrification and displacement and social housing. As much as I dislike their views on this issue, they seem to be capturing the respectable consensus of classy people who read the NYT.
Quite interesting share on the China-USA comparison and 'Abundance'- grabbing one item from quote here, it seems doubtful to me that it's operationalisable to 'import Chinese' mfg hands-on experience (as like Chinese skilled workers).
However as during the Biden era and the benighted IRA - RenEng deployement, as someone in the RE dev/invest I was constantly saying "for God's sake one needs scale! don't put up damn US walls, labor union req, look at NAFTA and EU + SK/Japan common platforming" The e.g. certain EU likeDanes, the Germans on industrial motors, would love to have scale. Industrial scale is everything for being cost competitive. China is playing US and EU...
(and of course the sheer retarded idiocy of the US only crap for off-shore wind that basically pre-failed off-shore wind for US by avoidable cost-escalation)
not that this will happen in the Orange Erdogan era but some hope future lessons.
Industrial mobility.... this seems exagerated. Unlike IT - hard industrial mfg plants are not fast to grow out of the ground and once one has the assets, one has the interest to sweat them. Of course if national level regs make the variables too expensive (labor, energy costs, primary inputs / intermediary inputs) then one wants to move - but hard assets don't spring out of the ground and if one has the proper flexibility (and variable cost efficiency), a strong interest not to be footloose free.
Energy cost, labor flexibility (Scandinavian model is fine).
"maybe it’s the baseline consensus because it’s basically the best way to govern a country" Leaving aside whether or not it's the best way to govern a country, I think the LLMs converge on this consensus because it is the elite consensus and that is reflected in the published material which was their training data. LLMs basically assemble, summarize, and transmit elite conventional wisdom.
Increasing the birth rate? An abundance economy? Here is yet another Trump, Musk, DOGE-inspired policy running in the opposite direction of Abundance Economy theory:
Two problems that could be solved with one solution: Universal Basic Income. Poorer people could afford to pay higher rents, which would help and encourage developers. And fast food workers could survive on a lower income, so more could be hired. I would love to read a column by you on this topic!
“And the less accurate the inflation numbers get, the more the administration can just claim that the real numbers are much lower.”
Just in time for Trump contemplating firing the Fed Chairman. This is the worst economic policy move Trump could make. And that’s saying something given his performance in the first five months. Somebody who isn’t an incompetent Trump toady should explain what the bond vigilantes would do if he fired the Fed Chairman so he could tell the Fed Chairman what to do in re the overnight lending rate. When all the other rates five-year, 10-year, 30-year would spike higher. Is it time for a recession?
I'm not quite sure whether progressives are just incapable of understanding unintended consequences, in connection with the inclusionary zoning topic, or whether they just don't care or expect some deus ex machina to intervene and save their dumb strategy. By making housing for ex-convicts a salient political issue, they will make it harder to provide housing for ex-convicts! And harder to provide housing that people can afford in general! It's maddening!
How about government subsidized inclusionary zoning ?
It sounds like tying two rocks together and expecting them to float.
how so ?
Overly-restrictive zoning, that stops housing supply from increasing, is a product of local govt. It seems to me it'd be better to less/remove that first, before adding additional govt intervention.
I agree that removing overly restrictive zoning is important, but I doubt that it would make housing affordable enough for a large segment of the population.
There are states with far less restrictive zoning than California, yet in every state many people are priced out of housing or housing costs them so much they can't save or invest for their futures.
Well I'm glad we agree on one thing: that fixing zoning is important!
I think a lot of Dem believes if you set a process, the right result will happen, which is just not based on real world and real people.
I still remember when France announced their 35 hr work week. The ppl in charge thinks that automatically translate to a 12.5% increase in unemployment. Not realize that the one paying for things the business and they will cut down on hiring as a result.
The Gallup poll results on "Republicans' Preferred Rate of Immigration" does not show a change in attitudes. An easier explained is that Republicans are more satisfied with immigration rates now that the Trump administration has changed them to nearly zero.
Mediocre students have always gotten into Harvard, as long as they were white and rich. That was part of the value of a Harvard degree (if not a Harvard education).
Gentlemen's Cs. The Ivies becoming far more meritocratic coincided with affirmative action. You can make the argument you think they should be *more* meritocratic, but it would not be a RETVRN for them, it would be something entirely new...
". . . every new housing development will include poor people. This provides a very strong incentive for rich people to become NIMBYs, blocking development in rich areas in order to keep out poor people". Sad but true. Which Christian values are we supposed to be fighting to preserve against the PC-Muslim axis of woke? Not the ones in the beatitudes, clearly. And I swear if I hear one more conservative loudmouth who has never darkened the door of a church in his life, saying that we need to reclaim our religious heritage, I'll turn the other cheek.
In this society, "poor" = "crime-ridden and dysfunctional." As long as we have policies that encourage and subsidize crime and dysfunction, we have to allow the productive members of society to protect themselves from these people somehow.
True that poor equals crime ridden and dysfunctional. Not because policies encourage that, but because poor people don't have the support they need. Not talking about those low-income housing set-asides though.
Criminals are mainly fatherless boys. Starting with LBJ's "Great Society," we implemented a welfare state that enabled an explosion of fatherlessness. Now we have to allow the productive people to insulate their families from the huge population of dysfunctional, welfare-dependent people that we created.
Most criminal, dysfunctional people are poor but most poor people aren't criminals. The bottom 3-4 income deciles of the US population are poor or low income but if most of them were criminals the US prison population would run into tens of millions rather than about 2 million.
It is only the bottom decile that would qualify for government-mandated "affordable housing." Because of the way markets work, all new housing is affordable housing, so the government should focus on maximizing home building and stop being concerned about whether a given unit is "affordable."
I'm not sure it's quite that simple, but that was a big factor and a big mistake. Totally agree that fatherless children are severely handicapped socially and economically.
Is losing jobs in the fast food industry a bad thing? Did fast food restaurants automate and reduce costs or serve less customers?
It probably is for the person who lost the job. Especially if they originally took it because it was the best option available to them.
True but from a macro perspective I think that result isn’t bad
From a macro perspective, no one should do what a machine can do, and we should invest in human capital so each person can contribute their highest and best use in the allocation of scarce resources (aka, economics).
We end up paying for unschooled labor one way or another. Either we provide them with jobs that a machine can do and give them the dignity of earning money, or we support them with welfare.
Neither option is good.
What we should do is provide every child with a quality education that prepares them to "play their best game" in the economy. Instead, the US is doing the exact opposite.
Time to learn Mandarin.
"No one should do what a machine can do"
Um, sometimes it actually is a lot more efficient to have a person do something than to build a machine to do it for them. Especially if it doesn't have to be done very often. It's a truism among programmers that writing a program to do a one-off task often ends up taking a lot longer than just doing it "the hard way" themselves.
For example, my father the retired college professor used to complain about students spending hours fighting with Microsoft Word (or some similar program) to add a simple diagram to a lab report instead of leaving a blank space and then spending thirty seconds drawing it with a pencil, the way they would have in the 1970s.
good point. one which I often make myself and should have mentioned. especially relevant in today's world where many prefer not to think. but for taking orders at a fast food chain? self-service is cheaper and faster and more accurate--albeit impersonal. my hope is that machines do things that free us up to do higher value add. thx.
That would be worse than setting money on fire. There's no point forcing stupid people through more school. They still won't learn. And even if you had a magical school that could make them, someone still has to clean the toilets. In a hypothetical society where 100% of people are math phds, there will still be the same number of low skilled jobs.
I would want to see this in the context of the unemployment rate for the relevant sector of the workforce. If low-skill workers have plenty of jobs available, then the fact that fast food has become a smaller set of better paying jobs doesn't seem like a problem. But if there's been struggle finding employment, then it's more of an issue.
As a pair of California cheapskates, my wife and I simply avoid fast food outlets, even the healthier ones. Too expensive. It is much more affordable to go to a sit down restaurant or independent taco or sandwich shop.
I would guess the biggest drop is from locations closing; either due to individual low-performing locations or in some cases entire chains shutting down in the state.
LLM are systems that predict most likely response and that prediction is based on training done with public information and opinion making. So the fact that the opinions they tend to express are socially liberal and economically conservative is likely a reflection of the fact that these are the most common views. It's not validation that those views are right because AI isn't really thinking about these things. It's really just answering the question of what is the most likely human answer.
see my comment from a few minutes ago - this is the right answer (modulo folks messing with the System Prompts to strongly bias the output).
Housing: Noah's comments presume a free market in housing that does not exist in many (most?) communities. Housing has absurdly high transaction fees. Beyond that is the concept of community. Communities can only absorb, at most, 12% influx of new people without losing community (empirical data on this) and generating a move to reject the noobs. Finally, in tourism communities, tourists will always outprice working individuals for a unit of housing. Which is fine, until there are no more teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers or city employees. My beef with our local housing "advocates" (Blaine County Housing Authority) is that they prioritize the lowest-skilled, least value-added jobs for housing on the most expensive real estate and thus squeeze out the middle class, the community needs to function.
“And masked, non-uniformed secret police arbitrarily grabbing law-abiding people off the street and demanding their citizenship papers feels uncomfortably like something an authoritarian ruler would do
“Feels”? It is what authoritarian rulers do. Timid sanewashing does nothing to stop this. Habeus corpus, right to counsel, Miranda rights, Separation of Powers are relics of the past. The Supreme Court doesn’t care. The coin-operated Congress doesn’t care.
Noah, you make no sense on this...
"In other words, California is going to pay for housing specifically for ex-prisoners and mental patients. Everyone who has the power to resist that sort of housing in their neighborhood is going to resist it, because people don’t want large numbers of ex-cons and mental patients living in their neighborhoods. The likely result of these grants is that less housing will get built."
Is this money is not being forced on developers. This way of building is not required. If people are going to resist these kinds of developments, builders will just choose to forgo the government subsidies and sell the product people want at the price they would sell at without the subsidy anyway.
That's what I was thinking! In what sense can creating a new subsidy program with silly requirements actually lead to *less* housing? It might make the subsidy program achieve very little, but I don't see how it displaces other housing.
LLMs also tend to converge on left nimbyism, last time I talked to Gemini. They’re very into gentrification and displacement and social housing. As much as I dislike their views on this issue, they seem to be capturing the respectable consensus of classy people who read the NYT.
Quite interesting share on the China-USA comparison and 'Abundance'- grabbing one item from quote here, it seems doubtful to me that it's operationalisable to 'import Chinese' mfg hands-on experience (as like Chinese skilled workers).
However as during the Biden era and the benighted IRA - RenEng deployement, as someone in the RE dev/invest I was constantly saying "for God's sake one needs scale! don't put up damn US walls, labor union req, look at NAFTA and EU + SK/Japan common platforming" The e.g. certain EU likeDanes, the Germans on industrial motors, would love to have scale. Industrial scale is everything for being cost competitive. China is playing US and EU...
(and of course the sheer retarded idiocy of the US only crap for off-shore wind that basically pre-failed off-shore wind for US by avoidable cost-escalation)
not that this will happen in the Orange Erdogan era but some hope future lessons.
Industrial mobility.... this seems exagerated. Unlike IT - hard industrial mfg plants are not fast to grow out of the ground and once one has the assets, one has the interest to sweat them. Of course if national level regs make the variables too expensive (labor, energy costs, primary inputs / intermediary inputs) then one wants to move - but hard assets don't spring out of the ground and if one has the proper flexibility (and variable cost efficiency), a strong interest not to be footloose free.
Energy cost, labor flexibility (Scandinavian model is fine).
"maybe it’s the baseline consensus because it’s basically the best way to govern a country" Leaving aside whether or not it's the best way to govern a country, I think the LLMs converge on this consensus because it is the elite consensus and that is reflected in the published material which was their training data. LLMs basically assemble, summarize, and transmit elite conventional wisdom.
What did I learn today? Personality traits like empathy, curiosity and kindness are mediocre and unmeritorious in the eyes of reactionary elitists.
Increasing the birth rate? An abundance economy? Here is yet another Trump, Musk, DOGE-inspired policy running in the opposite direction of Abundance Economy theory:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2834949
Two problems that could be solved with one solution: Universal Basic Income. Poorer people could afford to pay higher rents, which would help and encourage developers. And fast food workers could survive on a lower income, so more could be hired. I would love to read a column by you on this topic!
“And the less accurate the inflation numbers get, the more the administration can just claim that the real numbers are much lower.”
Just in time for Trump contemplating firing the Fed Chairman. This is the worst economic policy move Trump could make. And that’s saying something given his performance in the first five months. Somebody who isn’t an incompetent Trump toady should explain what the bond vigilantes would do if he fired the Fed Chairman so he could tell the Fed Chairman what to do in re the overnight lending rate. When all the other rates five-year, 10-year, 30-year would spike higher. Is it time for a recession?