Treating housing as an investment instead of a commodity.
This provides an incentive to discourage the construction of new housing.
Cause and effect reversed. Housing (i.e., land near booming metropolises) is a viable investment because the supply can be effectively cartelized under our systems of governance.
Imagine if every existing bank got to vote on whether each new bank would get chartered, or a nationwide doctors' guild got to decide how many residency slots we should have in the country, or if all the major oil exporting countries got together to control the global supply of oil. Similarly, every homeowner who already lives in San Francisco, plus renters who already can make rent in San Francisco, get to vote on whether we can expand the housing supply in San Francisco. The population of San Francisco has stayed roughly around 800k since the 1970s downzoning.
As long as we have local governments planning housing, we can cartelize housing. Analogously, as long as we centrally plan migration, American labor can cartelize as a whole; indeed, this is half of why we centrally plan migration.
I think all these problems are downstream of challenges in democracy design + trade offs based on the revealed preferences of the electorate.
By example, we have an innate conflict between social security solvency, the age of retirement, fertility rates, and migration to expand the labor force. The electorate does not want to raise the retirement age nor does it want to (nor do we know how to; the main challenge is increasing family formation in the 20s) raise TFR to above replacement. So we've accepted migration & made peace with some level of social security insolvency.
But due to the fragmented nature of democracy, few of us have to explicitly accept the trade off we've made. Instead we treat each of our wants as an absolute and get lost in a cycle of mood swings.
This is also just downstream of national identity. If you're part of an imagined community of American workers or Palo Alto residents, you will protect their interests as a form of collective insurance. In practice, this means that some of your fellow American workers or Palo Alto homeowners- the least sympathetic ones- will be protected by the national or local cartel at the expense of those that would contribute more in their place. This form of insurance, like any other, suffers from adverse selection & costs expected value. Unfortunately people find such insurance essential.
Every country does this somewhere. All civilizations today actively handicap their own progress due to dysfunctional decision making. Every single one in history has done this too. It's inherent to group decision making: whenever there's a mismatch between decision makers and those impacted by the decision, overrepresented decision makers will tend to extract value from the impactees underrepresented or not represented in the process. By way of example, consider what happened to schoolchildren during the global pandemic and how their interests were weighed against the adults who got to make decisions.
America just stayed ahead of the pack for a long time by doing it a little less than the rest. We'll see this century whether that will hold.
My final 2c: political involvement is rarely the best use of your time. The idiocy of your fellow man requires more effort to confront & has a lower chance of being triumphed against than nearly any other barrier in your life. If you think politics costs you money, spend that same time and energy raising your income. If you think politics costs you health, work on your health with the same time politics would take of you. If you think politics risks your safety, spend the same time and money politics would demand of you insulating yourself (maybe just move).
This is all a trap.
Edited 2/6/2025 03:46:11
