So - what do we do about economic growth?

[Raphael]

Without further comment, here's something Man in Space just posted in the Quote thread:

and businessmen don't go around and sell air. Yet.

Wrong.

[Man in Space]

Honestly, it’s not really as ridiculous a product as it sounds. Yeah it’s flavored, which is kind of ridiculous to me, but bottled oxygen like this does have its use cases. (There is a niche for them with certain athletic purposes [just as some use anaerobic oxygen-reducers, as my sister could tell you], and I could easily see this being stocked at a pool, with fire equipment, or in someone’s medikit.)

[Torco]

The problem with housing in most countries is not one of quantity. Apparently in the US there are more vacant houses than homeless people by a factor of 28. I wouldn't be surprised this was the case elsewhere: according to my local census office, 10% of dwellings are not being lived in here, and apparently the numbers are similar for a bunch of other countries. the private sector building more private houses to be put up for rent will not solve homelessness as long as we have this rule that every house is a merchandise (i.e. property to be bought and sold) and that whoever has enough money gets to buy and rent out however many houses he can. The housing crisis is broader than homelessness, though: it also includes the fact that something like 40% of housed people's income (i.e. the fruits of their labour they get to take home) are paid as tribute to a non-productive class of owners whose sole merit is being rich
or having rich parents. Neither of these things gets solved with building more houses.

The key to your disagreement is that, at first approximation, they're not that far away. Recessions are pretty dreadful, high growth usually helps with unemployment. GDP growth correlates with rising standards of living, and so on.

I mean... yeah, agreed, but as you point out, the correlation *has* been breaking down, and the closer one looks at it the more it breaks down even in history: did enclosure increase the living standards? This is an artifice of the system, though: it's just because private investment relies on profit, and so if the volume of transactions doesn't grow you start getting less and less aggregate investment. so we need growth, I agree, but only because we're playing at this destructive game of capitalism. This could be solved by revolutionary international struggle culminating in global abolition of capitalism, but a more likely solution is going to be de-marketization of certain things (and stopping the marketization of others, such as air). The objection of "rent discourages building new houses" is not false, but there are other ways for things to get done than "only the rich get to do things, and only if they think they'll get richer from doing them". most roads have their rent, or tolls, capped at zero (i.e. it's not allowed for people to charge you for using the sidewalk), after all, and we don't, for the most part, have a problem with paucity of roads.

All over, of course, the problem isn't so much "no housing" as "expensive housing in the places people really want to live." Naturally this is closely tied to transit and good schools-- also things that are locally decided and thus insanely badly distributed here.

Quite so! though I would the concentration of workplaces: I'm sure it's the same in the US but here wherever houses are relatively cheap it's because it's somewhere where you couldn't afford to move unless you're a pensioner or a remote worker. this is in turn tied to big megacorps displacing small businesses, which is in turn tied to deregulation.

[Nortaneous]

Western Europe doesn't produce enough. Neither does the US. If energy is too cheap to meter, you can produce water by desalinization, synthesize carbon-neutral LNG from CO2 in the air, and grow tropical fruits in hydroponic greenhouses as far north as Alaska. It's nice to be able to eat strawberries in winter; it'd be nicer to be able to buy mangosteens, baels, and naranjillas for $3/lb or less at any grocery store anywhere in the world.

Would any of that help with poverty? I doubt it. Would it, in fact, really improve much standards of living? Would people be any happier?
We got enough tasteless hydroponic fruit as it is

Desalinization or synthesizing LNG are besides, inelegant, brute-force solutions to problems that could be fixed by not wasting in the first place.

We're all unimaginably poor compared to our hypothetical descendants in the space of good futures, in the same way that we're unimaginably rich compared to our ancestors. Life is short, it's good not to have to spend it engaged in home production, and in an ideal world even the dishes would wash themselves.

The idea that the availability of goods doesn't really matter is nonsense. There are things that matter outside the economy, and in an age of rapid economic progress those will naturally be the ones that get worse and the ones people focus on - but we could always have the problems we have now and have four months of the year where our food comes from cans.

"Not wasting" is a euphemism for "increasing the price of". If water is cheap, you can use it to grow alfalfa in California; if it's expensive, you can't. If you can't grow alfalfa in California, the price of alfalfa rises, which pushes up the price of meat. Inexpensive meat is a major achievement of our civilization - it took a few thousand years to figure out how to do it, but state agriculturalists are finally healthier than non-state hunter-gatherers along one specific dimension. There are a lot of other dimensions where they aren't, though; more work is necessary. But, unfortunately, there is no alternative to making state agriculturalism viable, because the alternative is losing a war and being enslaved or forced onto land that the system of state-agricultural civilization doesn't want yet.

Ideally, of course, state-agricultural civilization would evolve into fully automated universal landed aristocracy, and everyone would have the option of becoming an eccentric country baron; it's a great failing of the United States that Anglo-Saxon aristocratic eccentricity, the highest calling of our civilization, is largely extinct here despite the fact that becoming a landed aristocrat is a standard part of the American path through life. The incubation of great eccentrics is, of course, the highest calling of any civilization, but it's mostly incompatible with employability.

I'm sure it's the same in the US but here wherever houses are relatively cheap it's because it's somewhere where you couldn't afford to move unless you're a pensioner or a remote worker. this is in turn tied to big megacorps displacing small businesses, which is in turn tied to deregulation.

And network effects. If you're a careermaxxing software engineer, you want to live in the Bay Area, because that's where the most companies, networking opportunities, chances to learn valuable obscurata about the tradecraft and the fashions of your field, etc. are.

[zompist]

The problem with housing in most countries is not one of quantity. Apparently in the US there are more vacant houses than homeless people by a factor of 28.

More or less true, but that's rather misleading, and doesn't show that more housing isn't needed.

Here's a good overview. The most telling bit is the chart of the cities with the most vacancies:

Miami Beach FL, Asheville NC, Detroit MI, Pompano Beach FL, Concord NC, Macon-Bibb GA, Augusta GA, Dayton OH, St Louis MO, Birmingham AL

Not everyone may have an exhaustive knowledge of where the hot US cities are, so here are the top cities by population:

New York NY, Los Angeles CA, Chicago IL, Houston TX, Phoenix AZ, Philadelphia PA, San Antonio TX, San Diego CA, Dallas TX, Austin TX.

Notice the overlap? Zero. The vacant houses are not where people want to live. New York City has a vacancy rate of 3.1%, the lowest of any major city. That's the sort of number where a city should well think about new housing, and not at the tiny trickle level.

If you're a policymaker, you don't want that number to be 0%, because that means that no housing is available. There is always going to be some churn. (Even outside capitalism. The median waiting time for urban apartments in the USSR, in the 80s, was over 3 years.)

The numbers are also complicated by vacation homes, which make up 33% of vacancies. It's 67% in Miami Beach, the top city for vacancies. As a good Marxist, you presumably would say that no one should own two homes. I wouldn't really object, though that means no dacha for you, comrade. But it doesn't have much to do with homelessness.

What do we do about the homeless? Astonishingly, giving them homes works, as has been very successfully tried in that capitalist hellhole, Finland.

All over, of course, the problem isn't so much "no housing" as "expensive housing in the places people really want to live." Naturally this is closely tied to transit and good schools-- also things that are locally decided and thus insanely badly distributed here.

Quite so! though I would the concentration of workplaces: I'm sure it's the same in the US but here wherever houses are relatively cheap it's because it's somewhere where you couldn't afford to move unless you're a pensioner or a remote worker. this is in turn tied to big megacorps displacing small businesses, which is in turn tied to deregulation.

Yes, where the jobs are is still important, though much less so if remote work is allowed.

For the heck of it, I looked at house prices in Detroit. You can get houses for $30,000 or even under $10,000. From the pictures, some look pretty good, comparable to the ones I checked out in the post above.

[Torco]

I don't have problems with people owning two houses, tbh. okay, I do but it's not the number, it's the rent. In principle, because of this regime of places more and less desirable to work in, there's always going to be places where there's houses to spare. and dachas are nice. Myself I'd let that be a matter for local authorities to decide: like no, you don't get to have three country houses in LA, there are homeless people there for god's sake. but detroit? sure, just issue a request to the mayor's office, who are pretty concerned about all those vacant houses. do you promise to keep it in a decent condition? sign here.

What do we do about the homeless? Astonishingly, giving them homes works, as has been very successfully tried in that capitalist hellhole, Finland.

I know, it's crazy! almost as if to each according to their needs was, at least with some goods, a fantastic idea.

[Ares Land]

"Not wasting" is a euphemism for "increasing the price of". If water is cheap, you can use it to grow alfalfa in California; if it's expensive, you can't. If you can't grow alfalfa in California, the price of alfalfa rises, which pushes up the price of meat. Inexpensive meat is a major achievement of our civilization - it took a few thousand years to figure out how to do it, but state agriculturalists are finally healthier than non-state hunter-gatherers along one specific dimension. There are a lot of other dimensions where they aren't, though; more work is necessary. But, unfortunately, there is no alternative to making state agriculturalism viable, because the alternative is losing a war and being enslaved or forced onto land that the system of state-agricultural civilization doesn't want yet.

Here I think trends are moving towards less energy-intensive approaches in terms of food production. Local and/or organic, more small scale farms. I live in the countryside and most of what we eat is locally grown. It's possible more expensive -- though not that much; the profit margins of retail being high, you can save a lot if you're able to cut the middlemen and buy from producers directly.

The numbers are also complicated by vacation homes, which make up 33% of vacancies. It's 67% in Miami Beach, the top city for vacancies. As a good Marxist, you presumably would say that no one should own two homes. I wouldn't really object, though that means no dacha for you, comrade. But it doesn't have much to do with homelessness.

As it happens, that's a huge problem in France. The consequences can be pretty bad; there's a limited housing supply in scenic, touristy area; having buyers from all over France means the locals are out priced in scenic, but low-income areas.

[jcb]

Not everyone may have an exhaustive knowledge of where the hot US cities are, so here are the top cities by population:

Miami Beach FL, Asheville NC, Detroit MI, Pompano Beach FL, Concord NC, Macon-Bibb GA, Augusta GA, Dayton OH, St Louis MO, Birmingham AL

Not everyone may have an exhaustive knowledge of where the hot US cities are, so here are the top cities by population:

New York NY, Los Angeles CA, Chicago IL, Houston TX, Phoenix AZ, Philadelphia PA, San Antonio TX, San Diego CA, Dallas TX, Austin TX.

Notice the overlap? Zero. The vacant houses are not where people want to live. New York City has a vacancy rate of 3.1%, the lowest of any major city. That's the sort of number where a city should well think about new housing, and not at the tiny trickle level.

Furthermore, it matters that the houses are not only in the right city, but in the right neighborhood. Wasn't Chicago recently selling empty lots for 1$ ? But when I look at a map of the lots for sale ( https://chiblockbuilder.com/ ), almost all are in the bad parts of town ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ap.svg.png ) that nobody in their right mind would want to move to. (Sure, if you bought an empty lot, you'd still have to spend money to build a house, but usually the lot itself is a significant (if not the majority) part of the price of buying an already existing house.)

[zompist]

Wasn't Chicago recently selling empty lots for 1$ ? But when I look at a map of the lots for sale ( https://chiblockbuilder.com/ ), almost all are in the bad parts of town ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ap.svg.png ) that nobody in their right mind would want to move to.

Hey, murders in 2023 were down 23% over 2021!

For some reason violent crime has gone way down in NY and LA, but remained high in Chicago.

[alynnidalar]

Relevant personal anecdote on the "are the vacant houses in the same place that homeless people want to live": my uncle was for an extended time homeless in San Diego, California, while owning two (!!) houses in Michigan (about 2000 miles away as the crow flies). Certainly this doesn't apply to every or even most unhoused folks in the US, but I think it's a great example of why housing simply existing somewhere does not solve anything about homelessness. For him, San Diego had great weather, friends, and was where his ex-wife and children lived. Michigan had unpleasant winters, no friends, and meant he wouldn't be able to see his kids on a regular basis (if at all). The mere motivation of having a free roof over his head was not enough to make up for what he perceived as the downsides.

(now, you might say that was a bad decision on his part, but it's the decision he made, as an adult in his right mind with free will, and I'm not sure it'd be a better society if we could send the cops to force him or anybody else to move to Michigan for the sake of defeating the evil specter of "there's empty houses in a dying Rust Belt city")

[Nortaneous]

"Not wasting" is a euphemism for "increasing the price of". If water is cheap, you can use it to grow alfalfa in California; if it's expensive, you can't. If you can't grow alfalfa in California, the price of alfalfa rises, which pushes up the price of meat. Inexpensive meat is a major achievement of our civilization - it took a few thousand years to figure out how to do it, but state agriculturalists are finally healthier than non-state hunter-gatherers along one specific dimension. There are a lot of other dimensions where they aren't, though; more work is necessary. But, unfortunately, there is no alternative to making state agriculturalism viable, because the alternative is losing a war and being enslaved or forced onto land that the system of state-agricultural civilization doesn't want yet.

Here I think trends are moving towards less energy-intensive approaches in terms of food production. Local and/or organic, more small scale farms. I live in the countryside and most of what we eat is locally grown. It's possible more expensive -- though not that much; the profit margins of retail being high, you can save a lot if you're able to cut the middlemen and buy from producers directly.

Are the profit margins of retail high? Grocery stores typically have profit margins around 2%. I don't know what the profit margins of grocery stores and their middlemen are, but with inherently little market differentiation they shouldn't be very high either. Apples are much more expensive from a farmer's market than from the grocery store, but grocery store apples are tasteless, coated in wax, and who knows what else - local/organic/small-scale/etc. IME competes on quality, not on price. It's not paying less for the same thing, but paying more for a noticeably better thing.

I also don't know how organic methods like laser weeding compare in terms of energy use with pesticide application.

[zompist]

Are the profit margins of retail high? Grocery stores typically have profit margins around 2%. I don't know what the profit margins of grocery stores and their middlemen are, but with inherently little market differentiation they shouldn't be very high either.

Grocery stores are famously low on profit margin. That's one reason they emphasize things like deli and bakery goods— they make much more profit on those.

I looked up profit margins for some big retailers:

Best Buy - 2.93%
Barnes and Noble – 3.96%
Macy's - 3.46%
Target - 3.4%
Costco - 2.65%
CVS - 2.47%
Amazon - 3.62%
Lowe's - 8.49%
Home Depot - 10.22%

Lesson: don't sell groceries, or clothes, but consider selling building supplies.

[Ares Land]

Are the profit margins of retail high? Grocery stores typically have profit margins around 2%. I don't know what the profit margins of grocery stores and their middlemen are, but with inherently little market differentiation they shouldn't be very high either. Apples are much more expensive from a farmer's market than from the grocery store, but grocery store apples are tasteless, coated in wax, and who knows what else - local/organic/small-scale/etc. IME competes on quality, not on price. It's not paying less for the same thing, but paying more for a noticeably better thing.

The gross profit margin can be high, and this is what you save on if you can buy from the producers directly (which, of course, isn't always possible) though I agree on your point that local/small-scale competes on quality.

As for laser weeding... I don't think it's used much around here yet.

[rotting bones]

A huge factor behind the lack of affordable housing in America is that home owners want property values to keep rising forever. There have been incidents where home owners come in with guns and threaten policy meetings. In fact, there are concerns that if housing becomes affordable, then the economy might crash. Something similar happened in China. A lot of growth is predicated on speculation about housing prices.

What is the capitalist "solution" to this crisis? One suggestion is to remove government regulations on building trailer homes. Everyone can be housed as long as newcomers celebrate coming into possession of worse quality accomodations.

This is a recurring theme with capitalist solutions in general. You can make money with Bitcoin as long as you're happy putting money into the hands of people who actually own Bitcoins. You'll be working with a billionth of a Bitcoin. Suggest an egalitarian scheme for any problem, and they accuse you of wanting to genocide infinite people.

[jcb]

What is the capitalist "solution" to this crisis? One suggestion is to remove government regulations on building trailer homes. Everyone can be housed as long as newcomers celebrate coming into possession of worse quality accomodations.

Indeed, most American cities have poor zoning laws that prohibit building anything that isn't a "Single-family detached home" in residential areas. And the houses that don't follow the law exist only because they were built before the law and were grandfathered in. Look up "missing middle" on youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... ing+middle ) for 100 different videos on the topic.

[Torco]

the market makes things worse for the vast majority of people for no other reason than it benefits the rich.

I also often get the feeling that real economic development stopped a while back, and that all the growth that's been happening since reaganomics is not an increase in the actual productive capacities of our civilization but on inflation, rentseeking, and new ways to make money change hands. it's all bubbles, but I don't know, that's just vibes tbh. like sure, capitalism "brought people out of poverty" back in the 20th century (povery meaning they didn't make money, of course, it's never measured in actual access to actual goods), but does that keep happening?

[zompist]

I also often get the feeling that real economic development stopped a while back, and that all the growth that's been happening since reaganomics is not an increase in the actual productive capacities of our civilization

Huh? I understand being down on the world, but do you just not notice what's happened since 1990?

1. The computer revolution (computers came earlier, but they transformed education, entertainment, and business)
2. You probably are connected to the world through a device in your pocket
3. Renewable energy became efficient
4. Absolute poverty in the world has been reduced by half
5. Near eradication of many diseases. As just one example, guinea worm infestation went from 3.5 million to 11
6. Ongoing transition to electric cars
7. About 2 billion people gained access to clean water

And that's not even looking at social advances, such as increased rights for women and LBGTQ people.

I'm sure you can find some things that are worse, but seriously, the '80s sucked. Especially for your country, as you may recall.

[Ares Land]

A huge factor behind the lack of affordable housing in America is that home owners want property values to keep rising forever. There have been incidents where home owners come in with guns and threaten policy meetings. In fact, there are concerns that if housing becomes affordable, then the economy might crash. Something similar happened in China. A lot of growth is predicated on speculation about housing prices.

Yeah, same thing here. Except for the guns. I think.
Generally home owners think selling their house at twice the price is a basic human right. The housing market is basically a Ponzi scheme at this point.

Huh? I understand being down on the world, but do you just not notice what's happened since 1990?

1. The computer revolution (computers came earlier, but they transformed education, entertainment, and business)
2. You probably are connected to the world through a device in your pocket
3. Renewable energy became efficient
4. Absolute poverty in the world has been reduced by half
5. Near eradication of many diseases. As just one example, guinea worm infestation went from 3.5 million to 11
6. Ongoing transition to electric cars
7. About 2 billion people gained access to clean water

I should add, though, that a lot of this is happening in spite of capitalism, not thanks to it.
For any item in that list, I could list ways in which capitalism is making things more difficult: computer and cell phones are way less durable than they should, social media have been turned into Nazi enablement machines, the whole enshittification things, plus the damn things are spying on you. Renewable energy is efficient but the discussion is saturated by lobbyists; electric cars are sold at twice (at best) the price people can afford so they're basically status symbols. (And I'm leaving aside the more depressing examples!)

Not that I have a particularly grim worldview (things do improve, in a three-steps forwards, two steps backwards kind of way).

One problem with the pursuit of growth as the chief economic growth is that any attempts at redistribution of any kind is immediately shot down as 'bad for the economy'. Which is one reason I really wish we'd move away from the 'growth at any cost' ideology.

(Now, the measures associated with 'degrowth' -- rehabiliting socialism as a viable alternative; improving our environmental footprint; pursuing alternate lifestyle -- might in fact promote growth in the long run; and in fact we might get more sustainable economic growth by not focussing on economic growth. That's part of the whole socialism/capitalism paradox I keep noticing everywhere. )

[jcb]

For any item in that list, I could list ways in which capitalism is making things more difficult: computer and cell phones are way less durable than they should, social media have been turned into Nazi enablement machines, the whole enshittification things, plus the damn things are spying on you.

Also, your work may require you to carry the damn thing with you all day, every day to be on call to come to work. And because you probably aren't part of a union, there's nothing you can do about this except quit... and get another job that'll probably require you to do the same damn thing. This sucks.

[zompist]

Also, your work may require you to carry the damn thing with you all day, every day to be on call to come to work. And because you probably aren't part of a union, there's nothing you can do about this except quit... and get another job that'll probably require you to do the same damn thing. This sucks.

That reminds me of this passage:

I suppose the telephone is really a useful invention. My own wonder always is, how any human being with the ordinary passions of the race can conduct his business creditably within a hundred yards of the invention. I can imagine Job, or Griselda, or Socrates liking to have a telephone about them as exercise.... Myself, I am, perhaps, too sensitive. I once lived for a month in an office with a telephone, if one could call it life. ...I know friends of mine, men once fearless and high-spirited, who now stand in front of their own telephone for a quarter of an hour at a time, and never so much as answer it back. ...That is what happens: you either break the telephone, or the telephone breaks you."

Written in 1898.