It's a little disappointing they don't address the idea of peer competition.
We live in a time of insane material wealth, so we create artificial scarcities of necessities to ensure peers compete with each other.
The article does mention the substantial rises in productivity we've had, but this: "There’s something missing: the question of whether the American system, by its nature, resists the possibility of too much leisure, even if that’s what people actually want" merited far more exploration.
There's a horrible positive feedback loop going on.
Say 10 people want a home in an area that has, oh, 8 homes.
If somebody chooses to work long hours, read emails on weekends, etc. they have a better shot at getting promotions and being able to outbid their peers for those homes. If someone doesn't do this, they have a better chance at falling in to the 2 people who can't afford a home.
So the workaholics work and work and work, get the raise, and buy a home with a big mortgage attached. Maybe a $1.5 million dump in San Jose. Now they're a highly-leveraged housing speculator who desperately can't afford for house prices go down. And the leverage they used to buy the house is secured with the threat of homelessness and personal ruin.
So they oppose any and all new building ferociously and cruelly. Scarcity is the only reason their house even has value!
Similarly, _they_ had to work nights and weekends, so why shouldn't other people? As they rise up the ladder this is what they select for.
So we have house prices ratcheting upwards, people working themselves to the bone to get in to the club of "homeowners" (a dubious word when you owe 90% of the home's value to the bank), and a strong incentive to make sure it keeps going that way.
It's true that presenteeism and wasted time at work are an issue, but ultimately there is a point where more time working means producing more (say 20 hours vs 10), and in a sector where results are hard to quantify people go for the easy thing to measure - hours where you butt was in the seat.
I mean, houses are pretty cheap to build. Habitat for Humanity does it for $50k. Imagine if you could work part time and build your own home? It would threaten people whose power comes from housing scarcity! Why, what if it turns out there's no inherent reason their house should cost 25 times the median income? Can't be having that! Better make it illegal to build homes (or demolish existing low-density ones) anywhere near a job.
The only homes that get built near high paying jobs now are over the wailing shrieks of existing rent-seekers (aka homeowners). The person who owns a home in Berkeley can vote, because they live in the area, but the person who would _like_ to live in Berkeley but commutes from Stockton has no voice. I'm hopeful that remote work will finally destroy their power, though with a decrease in tech incomes as well.
This line of thinking can all be traced back down to American exceptionalism. We're raised to depend only on ourselves. We friendly to our neighbors, at least the ones we can see from the edge of our property line. But everyone else? Fuck 'em. This failure in community building is prevalent throughout American society, and we now have our current hyper-plutocracy as a result.
It's how the country was built. You went off with your wife and 2 kids in a wagon to go claim a piece of land the federal government gave you. It was massive, and there might not always be neighbors (or even a community) to help you out. The entities that grew and acquired power weren't the weak state governments, but nascent corporations. Not saying it's good or bad, it's just how America was.
Eh, I think it has a lot to do with how people discover a cartel can be a pretty handy thing. NIMBYism is all over the place; Ireland has terrible sprawl and ridicuously strict rules about maximum building height even in the absolute middle of the capital, which has no tall buildings and also an utterly unremarkable skyline.
Housing scarcity is more about the cost of the land than the house itself. You're right that that a house can be built for $50k (not by most modern standards, but it can be done). But if you wanted that $50k house in SF bay area, suddenly it's on a piece of land worth $2 million.
Yeah, but these days you can build cheap, decent quality apartment buildings with 10-12-20 floors. Suddenly that piece of land can afford much higher population density.
We live in a time of insane material wealth, so we create artificial scarcities of necessities to ensure peers compete with each other.
The article does mention the substantial rises in productivity we've had, but this: "There’s something missing: the question of whether the American system, by its nature, resists the possibility of too much leisure, even if that’s what people actually want" merited far more exploration.
There's a horrible positive feedback loop going on.
Say 10 people want a home in an area that has, oh, 8 homes.
If somebody chooses to work long hours, read emails on weekends, etc. they have a better shot at getting promotions and being able to outbid their peers for those homes. If someone doesn't do this, they have a better chance at falling in to the 2 people who can't afford a home.
So the workaholics work and work and work, get the raise, and buy a home with a big mortgage attached. Maybe a $1.5 million dump in San Jose. Now they're a highly-leveraged housing speculator who desperately can't afford for house prices go down. And the leverage they used to buy the house is secured with the threat of homelessness and personal ruin.
So they oppose any and all new building ferociously and cruelly. Scarcity is the only reason their house even has value!
Similarly, _they_ had to work nights and weekends, so why shouldn't other people? As they rise up the ladder this is what they select for.
So we have house prices ratcheting upwards, people working themselves to the bone to get in to the club of "homeowners" (a dubious word when you owe 90% of the home's value to the bank), and a strong incentive to make sure it keeps going that way.
It's true that presenteeism and wasted time at work are an issue, but ultimately there is a point where more time working means producing more (say 20 hours vs 10), and in a sector where results are hard to quantify people go for the easy thing to measure - hours where you butt was in the seat.
I mean, houses are pretty cheap to build. Habitat for Humanity does it for $50k. Imagine if you could work part time and build your own home? It would threaten people whose power comes from housing scarcity! Why, what if it turns out there's no inherent reason their house should cost 25 times the median income? Can't be having that! Better make it illegal to build homes (or demolish existing low-density ones) anywhere near a job.
The only homes that get built near high paying jobs now are over the wailing shrieks of existing rent-seekers (aka homeowners). The person who owns a home in Berkeley can vote, because they live in the area, but the person who would _like_ to live in Berkeley but commutes from Stockton has no voice. I'm hopeful that remote work will finally destroy their power, though with a decrease in tech incomes as well.