Even for the first person described in the story, her search for a doctor is not primarily described a search for medical care, but a search for someone who can create a paper trail to ensure her child's eligibility for benefits.
It’s more about keeping minerals on the field. A big one is reducing erosion, which practices like no-till and cover cropping help. Tons of soil being washed away is a lot of nutrients being lost.
If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available.
Most agricultural land is not double-cropped, in the US less than 3% of farmland was double-cropped in 2015 [1]. You actually have it backwards: when possible, cover crops or double cash crops are a key regenerative practice because they prevent erosion and keep living roots in the ground which can enhance soil health in other ways [2].
This is a tempting story to believe, but the actual trend is that global agricultural land use is almost flat over the past 30 years and land under cultivation per capita is decreasing almost everywhere due to improved yields [1].
That's actually incredible - and it has just barely grown since the 60s, when we had just 3 billion people. That means we can now feed nearly 3x the humans on virtually the same amount of land. That's fantastic, I had no idea the efficiencies had been that significant.
Back in the 1800’s people linearly extrapolated farmland usage, and concluded we’d run out in the early 1900’s.
It was about as ridiculous as the degrowth movement is today. Improving efficiency and decreasing environmental impact is almost always a better bet than embracing artificial scarcity.
Improving efficiency sometimes comes with other externalities. See, for instance, massive CAFOs where cows basically live on mountains of their own shit. Or gestation crates, where pigs cannot even turn around.
These things are more efficient, but many people consider them inhumane.
Efficiency is always a tradeoff, it's not always better. It needs to be considered, and done with intention, not with mindless drive towards efficiency for efficiency's sake.
I like to remind people that the Lord of the Rings is about a villain named Sauron, who was a wizard/angel/god whose domain was crafting. He was originally a beautiful person, who just wanted to build more and more. But he wasn't satisfied with the efficiency of the humans, elves, and dwarves. Convincing them was much slower than just telling them to do what he wanted. So he made some rings to control them. And he started breeding orcs who would do what he wanted without question.
Sauron became highly efficient, but he lost his beauty. I'm not anti-efficiency, but I am "think about the tradeoff you are making first. Understand what you are giving up."
Good luck with trying to persuade farmers to apply that additive.
Unkess there’s something in it for them that they can’t get by just claiming they’re applying the additive, farmers won’t do it.
There is no industry in the world more allergic to regulation than farming, despite the fact that most of themp farmers in the developed world (and much of the developing world) are heavily subsidised by the city dwellers they complain about.
If the additive actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and there is a working emissions trading system anywhere in the world, and the additive costs less to use than the reduction times the current carbon price, they could get paid for applying the additive.
Next step, make it legally required to apply the additive. Like filters in chimneys, catalytic converters in cars, etc. and have fines attached to not using it.
If that doesn’t work, increase fines and/or add criminal charges and prison.
A big thing that he didn't mention: Income-based repayment programs (particularly the new SAVE plan) and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), while certainly well-intended, make the cost of college essentially irrelevant for people who can reasonably expect to benefit from those programs. And so the colleges up the bill. His 3 proposed solutions don't really deal with this. Obviously people on IDR or PSLF don't need to declare bankruptcy just because of the loans. And if the colleges had to carry the risk, the risk would be far less than imagined if these programs still exist in the same way as today: the federal government guarantees it will write off the loan of anyone who works in non-profits (which are about 10% of all jobs) for 10 years, or anyone who makes a small minimum payment for 20-25 years with SAVE.
The SAVE income-driven repayment plan is a big deal that will make the cost of college far worse. What you have to pay is 5% of income above 225% of the poverty line. A family of 3 making $80k pays $104 a month - it doesn't matter if they had $10,000, $100,000 or $1,000,000 in loans. If you are not planning to be in a very high-earning field, why wouldn't you borrow the maximum? Why wouldn't the colleges charge the maximum? This amounts to a giant subsidy.
During this same time period I had a project at a part-time gig which involved updating document templates and adding a few fields here and there for a legal application. The application was used by a law firm which specialized in mortgages. So I saw the details of various documents one is served in these situations: notice of default, acceleration notices, notice to vacate, and ultimately evictions and foreclosure auctions. And of course you could see thousands of these documents being generated and mailed out. For a guy like the one in the post to show up, you probably would have had to completely ignore probably a dozen of these documents for at least 6 months, not paying your mortgage all along.
Sometimes I feel like this experience, especially the idea that the entire principal balance can be accelerated if you don't make your payments regardless of the value of the house, left a bit of a scar on me that caused me to miss out on the ZIRP real estate boom II. But I am still happy with the way things are turning out overall.
There was a Planet Money story about Zombie Mortgages. Home owners thought a second mortgage had been annulled, sometimes even being explicitly told that. Years of no statements being sent and suddenly collections was asking for money on what the home owner thought was a done deal. Even the bank was claiming it was some weird fraud attempt. So of course you could feel safe ignoring that paperwork. Until they came and sold her house out from under her.
> For a guy like the one in the post to show up, you probably would have had to completely ignore probably a dozen of these documents for at least 6 months, not paying your mortgage all along.
I find it interesting that in all of these discussions it's treated as known that the person at hand is ignoring the notices and just pretending they aren't in danger of losing their home, just like in issues of evictions for rent, it's treated that for some reason the tenant has decided they don't need to pay. When IMO, in both of these, it's much more reasonable to assume they can't pay.
Maybe it's just a reflexive self-protection thing in people. It's easier to watch/envision a family being forced out of their home via state violence if you assume they were just stupid/inept in some way, that they did something wrong. That the very same thing couldn't happen to you because you would never just not pay your mortgage. And I mean, same. I would never not pay my mortgage. But I can easily conjure all kinds of nightmares that would render me unable to pay my mortgage.
I'm aware that many of these people couldn't pay, mostly for lamentable reasons outside of their control, but pretending nothing is wrong usually doesn't help a bad situation. Ignoring letters from the IRS doesn't make you not owe them taxes. Ignoring letters from your lender or their lawyer doesn't make you owe less money. You still owe the money and it costs you interest and time that you could use to negotiate a settlement or forbearance. Perhaps if you make your situation bad enough, it's easier to file for bankruptcy and start over, but I doubt that people are thinking that far.
In any case, it's a big stretch to call eviction "state violence". When they're even involved, the sheriff is mostly helping to enforce a private contract between the homeowner and their lender. The only conceivable alternative to this situation that still allows lending or private property to exist at all is for the police to not exist and everyone enforces their own contracts with their own violence.
>> In any case, it's a big stretch to call eviction "state violence"
No, it's not, that's exactly what it is. A guy with a gun and a badge coming to your residence to enforce a contract is "state violence".
To me that's a legitimate use of state violence, but let's call it what it is. No, not everyone gets to enforce their contracts with violence, that's called "The state monopoly on violence".
I think it's a bit less dramatic than that really - most people accept that the world we live in has both rights and responsibilities.
One of those responsibilities is that by paying for the loans you take out, in exchange you get to keep the things that you've bought using them, permanently once you've paid it off.
I might, one day, be unable to pay my mortgage. That's a risk I'm taking.
People tend to get super emotional about this stuff but at the end of the day it's just business, you have lived somewhere else and you can live somewhere else again.
This is an incredibly heartless take, and also one not aligned with the nuances lurking beneath the surface of what "most people accept" (banality of evil and all that). The rent you "agreed" to pay may have been set or raised under circumstances ranging from ethically-fraught to soon-to-be-illegal-but-not-yet-litigated. Your income stream, likewise, might have been disrupted by someone else's malfeasance. Neither the law nor landlords care that you fully intend to - in fact, will have the means to, when everything comes out in the wash - live up to your responsibilities. If the eviction proceedings are carried out before the others, you will lose the home you, by all means except a dysfunctional system that has mistimed just order, have the rights to.
Access to a stable domicile is what defines modern civilization. Philosophically, and ironically, that we have a standardized and systematized method for depriving large numbers of our population of that stability suggests a breakdown in civil order. It's reasonable to have an issue with this system without being "super emotional", but let me be clear in stating that it's also a perfectly reasonable subject to be "super emotional" over. Circumstances outside your control depriving you of a home, even temporarily, is not "just business", it's massive disruption families and communities with material ramifications for their well-being, and in a better-organized society would not happen as often as it does here.
Your flippancy also isn't without its own consequences. It turns what could be a problem with a collaborative, mutually-agreeable solution into one where it's accepted that one party is going to get thrown under the bus. The circumstances currently favor landlords. This can be changed. Careful not to let that cannonball hit you.
> Who’s talking about rent here? The article is about mortgages.
I brought up rent. While the long term consequences of paying rent and mortgages are quite different (equity, credit, assets, etc.) ultimately both are equal in that you are exchanging a pre-arranged amount of money on a schedule for a place to live.
Both are also equal in that failure to maintain such a schedule results in houselessness, one notably faster than the other.
> When you buy a house you know what you’re getting into.
A dubious assumption. Tons of people caught up in the 2008 housing crash were sold loans they couldn’t afford by financial professionals who knew damn well they could not afford it. Notably none of those families were made whole, and the banks who facilitated the crash were, because they effectively were wearing economic C4 vests and standing in the center of Wall Street, ready to blow the entire thing to bits.
> Sorry, I don’t subscribe to the pessimistic “landlords bad, capitalism bad” viewpoint of the world, not that this has anything to do with that anyway.
I think you underestimate how painful moving is to some people.
Any house I lived in for more than a year or two I miss. It can be really painful to remember I can’t take my kids to my childhood home because my parents moved. Heck, I occasionally miss living in the first house I bought and I’m just renting that one out.
I don’t disagree that people need to pay their mortgages, but we also should recognize that there are real externalities involved. Thinking you had stability and then losing it hurts. Being forced to relocate hurts. Feeling like you failed your family hurts. Those undergoing that deserve grace, compassion, and understanding. Sometimes they also deserve our charity.
It will still often be necessary for those people to move, but it’s not just a financial transaction for those being forced to leave their home.
Another thing to accept about the world is that "just business" kills millions of people every year, and maybe we should stop accepting it as an excuse.
> you probably would have had to completely ignore probably a dozen of these documents for at least 6 months, not paying your mortgage all along.
Fun-fact: thems the benefits of being a mortgage holder.
If you're a tenant that's renting, you get no such legal protections - let alone discretion from whichever faceless entity actually owns the property: where I am in King County WA, I think, at most you can get 30 days' notice tops (and that's if nonpayment is the only thing they allege; it's trivially straightforward to make it a 3-day nuisance eviction, honestly).
The whole thing doesn't feel right (I don't want to say "class warfare", but I haven't heard a better explanation for this double-standard).
Indeed. When I lived in an apparent, got a very angry knock at the door. Before I even got up, manager already was unlocking the door without asking, with a formal eviction notice in hand.
Every month I faithfully put my rent check in an envelope, deposited the slot at the office.
That month they accidentally threw away the check after opening the envelope.
They really didn’t believe I had paid, despite being a good tenant for years, always on time. Never caused any trouble.
Marched me to the office and they discovered they had photocopied my check but didn’t deposit it (threw it away).
That all happened in one month — no prior notice/warning/call about being late on rent.
I’m still shocked at this treatment many many years later. Can’t even chalk it up to any type of prejudice… just utter stupidity.
Landlords have a financial incentive to dehumanize their tenants. Every repair or improvement they make directly affects their take.
This is probably the #1 reason I haven’t bought a second house or investment property, despite it being the easiest way for me to kickstart some passive income. 20 years of renting has really embedded some class warfare into my psyche.
Logically thinking: if you are a landlord, most of your interactions with tenants aren't with easy tenants who pay on time and don't make unreasonable demands.
A stupid landlord might not realize that easy tenants are worth gathering.
I think this is part of the reason people don't want to live in big city condo buildings with co-ops or communal fees/maintenance. Even if you own your place you don't really own it and these other entity that care nothing about, your bill situation, etc you can impact your housing situation.
If I have a place in the burbs I only have to worry about the soulless local government.
The whole point of a housing co-op is that you do have an ownership stake in what would otherwise be a landlord and/or property manager - meaning that you, and your fellow residents, can compel that other entity to care entirely about your bill situation and so on.
The more common reason people often don't want to live in big city condo buildings is simply because they offer less space than single-family homes. There's a balance to be struck between space, affordability, and proximity to work/amenities, and while everyone prioritizes those three factors differently, a lot of people end up finding that balance to lie in the suburbs.
> If I have a place in the burbs I only have to worry about the soulless local government.
Unless/until there's an HOA, in which case you're in the exact same predicament, at best.
Here in the Netherlands the renters have the right, but mortgage holders do not. I was renting a place the owner had mortgage. For some reason the bank wanted to sale the place but couldn't evict me. Since this was the owners fault the bank's lawyers helped me to get like 6 months of rent back to agree to leave. The bank even offered me to buy the place, which in the hindsight, I should have done.
Long story short, what you guys have in US feels wrong and it's not always like that in the rest of the world.
I don’t think it’s obviously “wrong” that renters don’t automatically get the right to occupy a property indefinitely once they move in, but rather only have that right for an agreed-upon term. Or that the owner has the right to decline to renew a lease after said term with a notice period (well maybe the standard 30 or 60 days notice is a little short…)
The “3-day eviction” is that if you break the law in specific ways, the landlord can immediately terminate the lease and start court proceedings with 3 days notice. It still takes months for the eviction to grind through the courts just like it would in the Netherlands.
It's very local location dependent. You can find lots of horror stories from both the renter and the landlord side. And, in a lot of cases, renters can probably get off with a lot unless the landlord is willing to take extreme illegal measures (which they may).
This is why the "if you have a loan you're just renting from the bank" people aren't right - sure, in a way it's true but there really IS a legal difference, and it DOES come into play when things go south.
Unless they are a trespasser. Generally, you owe no duty of care to trespassers other than to avoid intentionally harming them, unless it’s a kid and you have a pool.
Depends on where you are in the U.S. Some places have extreme renter protections. Tenants can refuse to pay rent for months before you can even start an eviction proceeding. Then it takes months more. E.g. New York. https://www.reddit.com/r/Landlord/comments/15nn6o0/landlordu.... Landlords may forgo six months of back rent just to get the tenant out of the unit.
Meanwhile in Alabama the only recourse you have against a landowner who rents you something not habitable is to move out. American law generally is very bad at compelling a party to uphold a contract.
Real question: Do landlords resort to "hired help" to encourage non-paying tenants to leave more quickly? Two years sounds crazy. Many people who only own a second home for rent might go bankrupt without rent to pay the loan.
In Poland, they sometimes do. For example, they rent the property to another person (they claim that it’s legal), who is a goon. The goon moves in with the original renter, and makes his life hell. Other paths are to disconnect electricity from the property, by cancelling the contract with electric provider. However, some people are ok with living without power, if the apartment is free. Next steps are - disconnecting water and/or heating, although these are less legal than disconnecting power.
There also was a tragic case of an older lady who resisted being evicted from a building in Warsaw bought by a new owner, who in turn kidnapped her, drove to city outskirts and burned her alive to get rid of her.
For a bank, evicting someone from a house is expensive and the departments they have to handle it are very understaffed, their risk is so spread out that not getting 6 months payment is barely a blip. For a landlord, any loss of income for 6 months could be catastrophic, so there is much more urgency behind their action, and many act rashly and without compassion.
While there are certainly asshole landlords, I don't think this situation happened because of a systematic class warfare, it's just landlords tend to be smaller institutions that have a much higher risk profile than banks. Add to that that renters tend to have less political power, and you end up with a situation that greatly prefers mortgage owners.
Depends on where you live in King County and on the property. In Seattle, certain property owners must inform the City 90 days prior to sale (“Intent to Sell” city ordinance).
These laws are hyperlocal and making a sweeping statement about the County, State, or the US will ultimately be providing incorrect information.
The bank will recover the money it lent you at the foreclosure sale; there's only the time-value-of-money element to whether they see it sooner or later.
The landlord will never be reimbursed for the months of rent not paid, and is paying the mortgage out of their own pocket during this time.
TLDR: You pay for the benefits of being a mortgage holder, when you make the down payment.
Think of it from the bank's point of view. A bank can afford to be patient with mortgage holders because there's an underlying asset. There's a $300,000 house and the owner still owes you $150,000. If you repossess right now as opposed to a few months from now, either way you're getting repaid from the value of the asset, minus the cost of dealing with everything.
Whereas when renting, if someone misses rent one month, if you evict them immediately you're out a month's rent. If you wait two more months before evicting, now you're out three months' rent. The longer you delay, the more it costs you.
70% of shelter CPI is calculated by calling random homeowners up and asking them how much they think they could rent out their house for. It was switched to this in the early 80s when the Volcker shock spiked interest rates, housing payments, and CPI. Whatever you want to say about this method’s conceptual validity, it’s clearly a lagging indicator.
>Because homeowners are merely speculating based on Zillow or whatever.
Which seems fine, because most americans own their house and aren't paying market rent. Likewise, a decent portion of americans are on rent control, which means they're not paying market rates either. Using "actual rents" (market rents?) wouldn't represent the actual expenditures for a huge portion of the population.
They do also collect actual rent data, but that is fraught with its own problems. Notably that the large majority don't rent. If you are not collecting opinions from a meaningful segment of the population, you've missed the whole reason for preparing the CPI.
Actual sale data is the best way to find out someone's opinion, but asking them what they would hypothetically pay is nearly as good if sales data is absent. What is most important is to get an opinion from a statistically wide range of people. A billionaire paying $10,000 for a loaf of bread is not indicative. You need an indicator of what most people think.
Wow, that is terrible. It would be trivial to track recently rented homes on Zillow or Redfin and ask the renters to use the figure on the rental contracts from those.
Rents are tracked separately, but weighted less than OER, presumably because most people own their houses. See "Rent of primary residence" and "Owners' equivalent rent of residences" in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm
Doctors don't seem to be driving the majority of the costs. After adjusting for inflation, doctors don't make much more than they did in 1984, yet the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare has almost doubled since then (and the real GDP has also doubled in that time).
For example, see [1] where a general surgeon made an average of $118,689 in 1984 and a family practitioner $84,256. This would be $358k and $254k in 2024 dollars. Today in 2024 they make on average $423k and $272k respectively [2].
Thanks for the datapoint about physician inflation adjusted salaries, but I said ‘hospitals and doctors are driving the majority of the costs’. In 2023, hospitals and physician and clinical services made up just over half of costs:
Nursing care added another 4.3%, and other personal health care expenditures (dental, medical equipment, and other professional services) added another 16.5%, or about 2/3 of total costs when all taken together.
By the way, an average salary of $423K is pretty good, and a six month wait to see a specialist amounts to denial of medical care. Serious reform is needed.
If doctors are not a major part of the cost, then saying "hospitals and doctors are a major part of the problem", while technically true, is disingenuous. It's like saying "Stalin and and his cat killed more than twenty million people" - technically true, but it assigns the cat an unwarranted part in this problem.
Two separate points were made. The first is that the numbers of doctors is limited in order to keep salaries. Which is true. The second is that hospitals and physician/clinical services were the majority of health care costs in the US. Which is also true. See link.
All the rest of the logic you supplied yourself.
Since you seem intent on sticking words in my mouth, I don’t think doctor are necessarily paid too much, and don’t think limiting their salaries will substantially affect health care costs. I do think doctor salaries probably will go down if their ranks weren’t artificially limited, but society would benefit, and doctors might too with a reduced workload. In fact, the overall proportion of medical costs given to physician salaries will likely go up if their ranks weren’t limited, albeit with each individual doctor making less.
