> If significant numbers of landlords remove their properties from market, scarcity will drive up rental prices anyway.
unless you're imagining they're destroying the property, you cannot "remove" it from the market (or they decide to leave it vacant deliberately - an illogical a choice as destroying the property).
If they sell to a owner occupier, it removes that buyer's original rental demand, by the same amount as the removal of the rental property from the market.
If they live in it themselves, it's the same (just no money changing hands).
Its not that the house is destroyed, its that they aren't spherical cows that immediately exist on the sale market. Renters cant become owners instantly. Landlords cant sell properties instantly. These things take time. Housing is not a perfectly elastic market.
fixing it implies it is a problem in the first place. It isn't a problem.
There is no right to ownership of a property (despite it being called the american dream). As long as rental vacancy is sufficient to not cause mass homelessness, it isnt a problem. And if does become a problem, the issue becomes one of production of supply and density (related to allowed zoning), and not the price and taxation (of land).
And it is through the fight to afford to buy property that productivity and innovation can be forged.
> fixing it implies it is a problem in the first place. It isn't a problem.
Isn't it?
80% of people own a home, so they vote for policies that increase housing costs. Then 70% of people can afford to own a home, so they vote for policies that increase housing costs.
Eventually only 45% of people can afford a home, so the now-majority of renters vote for different policies. The entire edifice built on ever-increasing home values collapses because policies to support their continued increase are no longer favored by the majority. Without the expectation of continued price increases, speculators divest. There is a massive housing crash and all the people who did own a home end up underwater on their mortgages, but they're no longer in the majority so the now-majority only cheers because housing costs have finally come down and they're no longer paying two thirds of their income in rent. The now-underwater homeowners hand the keys back to the bank, because why pay a $500,000 mortgage when you can now get a house for $250,000?
That's a pending disaster. Maybe we should consider policies that get housing prices down in a controlled way, instead of causing a giant recession?
> There is no right to ownership of a property (despite it being called the american dream). As long as rental vacancy is sufficient to not cause mass homelessness, it isnt a problem.
"As long as there isn't mass homelessness, having landlords milk workers for everything they have is fine"? You get "can't afford medicine" and "can't afford nutritious food" long before you get homelessness. You get "can't afford to start a business" long before even those things. That's bad. That's a problem.
> And if does become a problem, the issue becomes one of production of supply and density (related to allowed zoning), and not the price and taxation (of land).
Those things are related. If taxation is higher then investment in new construction goes down.
Land value tax also does something extra weird. Suppose the annual tax on a plot of land is a million dollars. Meanwhile the amortized construction cost of putting one house on it is $30k annually, a 10 unit complex is $400k and a 25 unit complex is $1.5M annually, because taller buildings cost more per unit. Then the annual cost per unit with the LVT is $1.03M for the house, $140k for the 10 unit complex and $100k for the 25 unit complex. Even though the 25 unit complex costs twice as much per unit than the house to build, and 50% more per unit than the 10 unit complex, and even though the local population density may only require 5 housing units on each plot of land.
So the result is that you get a lot of 25+ unit condos/apartments, and then a lot of abandoned plots with nothing on them at all, because it's not cost effective to build on them unless you're going to build at least 25 units, but it's also not worth the construction cost of 25 units unless rents stay above $100k/year/unit. So you get enough towers to get rents down to the cost of the tower plus the LVT on the land under it and then construction stops because it both costs too much to build more towers (higher construction cost per unit) and costs too much to build smaller structures on the remaining land (LVT kills you with fewer units per plot).
> And it is through the fight to afford to buy property that productivity and innovation can be forged.
High rents cause poverty and crime, not productivity and innovation.
i'm up-chain from who you replied to. Thanks for typing that. You spent a lot more time contemplating this than I did; my comment was off-the-cuff. i find people tend to be blind to certain, "externalities". I am people, too, so sometimes i prod to get discussion going and learn something.
> So when new people move in, there is an increase in demand
but the presumption that there will be a stream of people moving in is false. The people would just not move to a place with high rent (all else being quite equal).
So high rents will lower the incoming demand. Aka, the current rent is almost always the max the market will bear, regardless of people moving in (or out) - so you can assume it's at some sort of equilibrium.
A new tax on the land will cause the owner to obsorb it, and under that equilibrium assumption above, they will not be able to raise the rent to compensate. Unless, the new tax has an equal and opposite tax credit to renters! Who now have more money, and would be able to accept a higher rent as they've become slightly richer.
> but the presumption that there will be a stream of people moving in is false. The people would just not move to a place with high rent (all else being quite equal).
People move into places where there are jobs. All else is not equal, because other places don't have those jobs. Notice that higher rents correlate with population growth. Under your theory, if rents went up, shouldn't the local population decline rather than increase?
Also notice that the overall population increases over time as a result of births and immigration, and that existing structures are occasionally damaged in various ways and have to be renovated or rebuilt. The result is that the steady-state is rents going up unless you have active investment in new housing.
> So high rents will lower the incoming demand. Aka, the current rent is almost always the max the market will bear, regardless of people moving in (or out) - so you can assume it's at some sort of equilibrium.
"What the market will bear" is supply and demand. If you add costs to supplying more housing, supply won't increase until the price matches the new costs. It changes the intersection point with the same demand curve.
> Unless, the new tax has an equal and opposite tax credit to renters! Who now have more money, and would be able to accept a higher rent as they've become slightly richer.
Your assumption is that renters can't pay higher rents. It's that they won't pay higher rents if lower rents are available, which is caused by competition between landlords and increases in supply from new construction. Take that away and people have to outbid each other for the now more constrained number of units, and then people have to pay higher rents and have it come out of their other spending, or take on more debt. Because you pay for housing or you're homeless.
I agree, and the metric for productivity should be clear, and measured, rather than recording and monitoring the process of work. The reason employers want to monitor process is because they cannot find a good metric for productivity, for which they feel cannot be gamed - esp. knowledge workers; you don't measure by lines of code written, bugs fixed or features delivered, as they are all surely game-able.
Not under an LVT. The amount of rent a property does bring is more a property of the buildings and improvements and only minorly of the land.
The amount of rent that it could bring if maximally used is relevant to an LVT, but not what it actually does. (This is the entire point of an LVT vs a property tax.)
Yes, the Fed controls how much money is worth, ie the price level. They 'print' more or less money so that the change in the general price level (aka 'inflation') hits their target.
They are sometimes a bit clumsy, yes. But they manage to get long running inflation to 2%.
(Especially they can always create more inflation by just buying more and more stuff with freshly printed money. If that ever fails, that means they have unlocked an 'infinite wealth' cheat: just keep printing and buying until you own the whole world. Obviously, the dollar would lose value before that, hence proving that they can always create inflation.
Lowering inflation isn't always possible, yes. But it's always possible as long as they have any assets on their balance sheet: incrementally sell those assets and 'bury' the money received in the sale.
As long as the Fed ain't out of assets, they can lower inflation.)
> they can always create more inflation by just buying more and more stuff with freshly printed money.
the GFC would like to chat about that.
The feds cannot nudge more than a tiny bit in either direction. Look how much money was printed during and post GFC, to try make inflation higher, and it never did.
The bank of japan tried the same a decade earlier too, in japan. Inflation never took hold no matter what they tried.
> As long as the Fed ain't out of assets
the Feds can never be out of assets, as they just print more. What they cannot control is the hearts and minds of all economic participants - and that is where the root of inflation (or deflation) comes from.
They didn't take their own advice, that they previously gave to the Japanese central bank in the 1990s. Instead, they started paying interest on excess reserves to neuter their own buying.
> Inflation never took hold no matter what they tried.
They tried approximately nothing. As I said, if you found a way to keep printing money without raising inflation, that's actually an opportunity, not a problem: just keep printing money and gradually buy the rest of the world for a bit of paper and ink. (Well in reality, it's only database entries. Which are even cheaper.)
If they can't create inflation, they should go and take lessons from Argentina, Turkey or Zimbabwe.
> the Feds can never be out of assets, as they just print more.
The Fed prints liabilities, not assets. Domestic money is a liability for the Fed. Assets are the stuff they bought with the money, like eg bonds or gold.
The wind and solar energy would've merely heated up the earth, then get radiated back out. Us capturing some of it, using it, and then re-radiate it back out (at a later date) won't have made any difference.
Unless/until the day we paved the entire earth with solar panels and capture the entire atmosphere of their wind, this will continue to be the case. Hopefully, we reach a dyson swarm before that occurs...
I am old enough to remember when similar statements were made about other - now out of favour - energy production methods. NPPs had a "Once in a thousand years" failure rate. Gas was fossil, sure, but the CO2 would be absorbed into the ecosphere (to make plants grow).
In the end, all energy eventually dissipates again. That does not mean that we do not have immediate or near-immediate phenomena to consider (like: global warming).
Let's take solar ... we now have begun to replace agricultural areas with solar farms. For example: How does this affect biodiversity in that area (the things look not green, but gravel under it)? I'm not even saying it is necessarily a bad thing - just a change.
And we should be careful to change running systems, especially considering the stakes. Instead, what I see is proponents of one tech over the other happily shouting down any attempt at critical consideration.
> They want to turn artists and craftsmen into assembly line supervisors.
the same was uttered by blacksmiths and other craftsman who has been displaced by technology. Yet they are mercilessly crushed.
Your enjoyment of a job is not a consideration to those paying you to do it; and if there's a more efficient way, it will be adopted. The idea that your job is your identity may be at fault here - and when someone's identity is being threatened (as it very much is right now with these new AI tools), they respond very negatively.
> the same was uttered by blacksmiths and other craftsman who has been displaced by technology. Yet they are mercilessly crushed.
This is misleading. The job of blacksmith wasn't automated away. There's just no demand for their services anymore, because we no longer have knights wearing armor, brandishing swords, and riding horses. In contrast, computer software is not disappearing; if anything, it's becoming ubiquitous.
> Your enjoyment of a job is not a consideration to those paying you to do it
But it is a consideration to me in offering my services. And everyone admits that even with LLMs and agents, experienced senior developers are crucial to keep the whole process from falling into utter crap and failure. Claude can't supervise itself.
> The idea that your job is your identity may be at fault here
No, it's just about not wanting to spend a large portion of my waking hours doing something I hate.
> This is misleading. The job of blacksmith wasn't automated away. There's just no demand for their services anymore, because we no longer have knights wearing armor, brandishing swords, and riding horses. In contrast, computer software is not disappearing; if anything, it's becoming ubiquitous.
Why didn't blacksmiths produce rail tracks, if not because they were replaced by more efficient processes? One could say iron and steel became as ubiquitous during the Industrial Revolution as computer software is becoming today...
This is really a silly and pointless discussion, as well as totally irrelevant.
The linked article made very clear that Claude had to be closely, strictly guided and supervised by expert software developers. Claude is not threatening them with extinction.
i actually dont find that outcome odd at all. The high cognative demand comes from the elimination of spurious busy work that would normally come with coding (things like syntax sugars, framework outline, and such). If an AI takes care of all of these things, and lets an author "code" at the speed of thought, you'd be running your engine at maximum.
Not to mention the need to also critically look at the generated code to ensure it's actual correctness (hopefully this can also be helped/offloaded by an ai in the future).
The system is designed to make you think you have a chance.
Ask the 30 people arrested in the UK everyday for their social media posts what they think of this ability to "fight back".
"In a despicable attack on the freedom of speech, a German right-wing journalist has been sentenced to seven months’ probation for mocking left-wing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser."
"The editor-in-chief of the news website Deutschland-Kurier was punished for sharing a satirical meme on his X account. The meme, which was posted by Bendels last February, shows Nancy Faeser holding up a sign, with the words: “I hate freedom of expression.”"
unless you're imagining they're destroying the property, you cannot "remove" it from the market (or they decide to leave it vacant deliberately - an illogical a choice as destroying the property).
If they sell to a owner occupier, it removes that buyer's original rental demand, by the same amount as the removal of the rental property from the market.
If they live in it themselves, it's the same (just no money changing hands).
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