The room the economy can't see

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/the-room-the-economy-cant-see/

by Wilsoniumite • 1 month ago

254 286 1 month ago

wilsoniumite.com

RyanHamilton• 1 month ago

It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ

cobbzilla6• 1 month ago

Volunteering is a great way to see lots of these rooms!

mschuster913• 1 month ago

It is, but that doesn't help that room getting funded.

cobbzilla6• 1 month ago

Volunteers fund lots of stuff! Throw them a buck or two, tell your friends, plenty of great things are community funded! If we can’t get a handout from on high it’s impossible? Have some passion!

(and, realpolitik style, if you get an excited community together with some funds, it’s usually easier to get that handout to top it off!)

_aavaa_• 1 month ago

The article spends a good deal of time making the point that these rooms are getting more scarce since people can't afford to volunteer their time.

cobbzilla6• 1 month ago

People below or near the poverty line can occasionally be found volunteering.

I think it speaks more about what people value, how they value their time. How many people can’t afford an hour a week? An hour a month? There is almost always some unhealthy activity that takes up at least an hour of your time a month, why not substitute?

smallmancontrov• 1 month ago

You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways

The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"

pixl976• 1 month ago

Valuable for Moloch.

PowerElectronix• 1 month ago

It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).

The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.

I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.

RealityVoid• 1 month ago

Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.

Zigurd2• 1 month ago

You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers.

When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.

pixl976• 1 month ago

The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people

Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right?

The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.

nicbou3• 1 month ago

The market doesn't have a will of its own

Of course it does! It is possible to have a system where everyone is unhappy, yet incentivised to keep making things worse.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

or https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...

kubb4• 1 month ago

That's the kind of space I've been missing in my youth. I love that Swedish kids have got it available to them.

mschuster913• 1 month ago

Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.

The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.

It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.

bethekidyouwant3• 1 month ago

Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..

It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.

mschuster913• 1 month ago

Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..

Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.

No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.

Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.

pixl976• 1 month ago

which is the central thesis here

No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a swell idea. The population exploded.

Then you couple this with the technological revolution and the necessity of training huge amounts of the population for specialists jobs if they want to make a living and suddenly a boat load of kids doesn't make any sense at all. And it's getting to the point of the squeeze that having any kids doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

Economic hot take: That scale of saving is impossible. It can't happen. The ends don't meet, the numbers don't match up.

Think about what etiremnent savings means in the real economy. It means I have to store enough food to feed myself for 30 years. It means I have to store enough furniture too. And enough gasoline. And enough of everything else.

This is obviously not possible. So instead I store other things I hope I'll be able to exchange for gasoline and food. But no matter what form it takes, I have to store an absolutely enormous amount of stuff. Whether it's physical goods or abstract financial rights. There is no way for everyone to do this without creating massive economic distortion of some kind. Whatever people store is going to massively increase in value (house deeds! shares!) and crash later when they exchange it for food and gasoline.

But there's a simple alternative, we add a 20% tax and distribute it to people in the form of pensions. This is called a pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Optionally the scheme can keep some kind of weight value for each person based on how much tax they paid or any other metric. Since it doesn't store assets it doesn't distort the economy nearly as much. But, it's vulnerable to a future generation simply cutting it off. When the scheme turns on there's a generation who didn't contribute but still benefit and when the scheme turns off there's a generation who contributed and didn't benefit. This can't happen to people who store real assets because the assets are firmly owned by them, and the society can't easily just decide they aren't.

We can do an intermediate solution if we let people buy a share of future tax income as a financial asset. It doesn't distort the economy too much and your contributions are firmly your property. Treasury bonds are this.

amanaplanacanal5• 1 month ago

Historically, before the twentieth century, the way it was mostly done was by living in extended families, and prehistorically, by living in small tribes. The whole family (grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and their children) worked together to take care of the family (or as I said, the tribe). It was the nuclear family and individualism, driven I'm guessing by economic forces, that destroyed all that.

api• 1 month ago

Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.

It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.

Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.

cousin_it6• 1 month ago

Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.

I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.

pixl976• 1 month ago

Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns).

Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.

ixtli• 1 month ago

Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.

Wilsoniumite2• 1 month ago

In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.

alex_suzuki2• 1 month ago

This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.

kubb4• 1 month ago

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.

I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

bluGill10• 1 month ago

That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...

I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.

admjs• 1 month ago

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

__MatrixMan__2• 1 month ago

The way you say "outcompeted" makes it seem like you're evaluating efficiency in both cases, but isn't direction the more important criteria?

It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things.

The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.

clickety_clack• 1 month ago

An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.

cousin_it6• 1 month ago

Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.

InsideOutSanta• 1 month ago

This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?

derektank3• 1 month ago

Does Sweden have a problem with local land use restrictions? They have done a lot to liberalize their economy over the last few decades

DroneBetter• 1 month ago

also just as importantly (or moreso for cases of individual rooms used for social/hobbyist clubs like this) would be 'empty building taxes' to prevent the eventuality of landlords preferring to rent out fewer properties over reducing the cost of vacant ones because * housing is necessary for survival so people cannot afford to baulk at the prices of artificial scarcity, making the optimal price effectively arbitrarily high without regulation * landlords are generally not infinitesimal entities in a vacuum, and generally stand to lose existing customers who are still on the expensive contracts if they cheapen their unoccupied offerings although such a solution would just move the problem one layer further up (stop building properties to have them be vacant) and the solution is land tax

xg155• 1 month ago

Not an American, so maybe I'm underestimating the insanity of US zoning laws, but I always thought "residental ares" means "no businesses". Admittedly unpleasant if it means there can't be any grocery store or even café reachable by foot, but at least I get the rationale.

But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.

infecto8• 1 month ago

Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.

multjoy2• 1 month ago

What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.

t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out

The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.

tehwebguy• 1 month ago

All of those things you long for have been nuked by the economy too.

hiddencost• 1 month ago

IDK if you're familiar with Church, but that's the most heavily used third space. And we grant it tax exempt status which it abuses to push bad laws.

hakfoo2• 1 month ago

For some of us, we found digital "third spaces". In a way, when we're arguing on HN, or the kids on Discord, are using it largely as a community centre on their screen.

It clearly shouldn't be the only option-- it's not going to service all types of interests and audiences. I attend the meetings of the local numsimatics club-- they get a room in one of the city offices when it's closed for the day, and do presentations and discussions. The demographics are weird, it's like under-15s and over-60s with very little in the middle, and I'm not sure there's the technical capability or the preference to do it over Zoom. (Trying to remember what they did during the pandemic, I think they just closed down for a year or so)

jstummbillig2• 1 month ago

I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks.

And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes

It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.

em-bee14• 1 month ago

the market is not spending that money. the community/goverment is.

svnt5• 1 month ago

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

throwaway987972• 1 month ago

you are so wrong. this is not ai.

patcon• 1 month ago

I wonder if you may be seeing ghosts? At least to me, this sounded so clearly like an authentic human voice, at least the parts I've read (haven't finished yet).

This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.

I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?

tejohnso• 1 month ago

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around.

Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.

How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?

duskdozer2• 1 month ago

It's possible we're at the point now where it fools me, but I didn't see it that way. I think more evidence against would be the fact that the author discloses genAI usage in another article [0] and provides their own version of the same [1].

[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

doctorpangloss• 1 month ago

another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.

em-bee14• 1 month ago

a pure market economy would never allow for the existence of a public park. they are on valuable land, cost a lot of money but don't make any profit at all.

pjc502• 1 month ago

Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.

armchairhacker2• 1 month ago

The market may be performing at a local maximum, if kids without third spaces grow up unproductive.

zeristor• 1 month ago

We had youth clubs where I live when I grew up, but it never crossed my mind to go to them unfortunately I thought they’d be hostile places.

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.

Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.

There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.

Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.

infecto8• 1 month ago

I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer.

I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now.

HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

Playing Minecraft with friends at a lan party in a social room is better than playing it at home.

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties.

The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.

knollimar2• 1 month ago

Even the types of games I believe are shifting to less third spaces. Matchmaking is replacing the MMO beginner town where a lot of the socialization happens.

I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

This underestimates how friendships are made by younger people even via matchmaking in lobbies depending on the game.

Heck, I have friends who are slightly younger than me who made durable friendships in League via matchmaking.

TFYS• 1 month ago

But the preferences might be changing not because people like the new way more, but because the economic system forces people to choose the most efficient way of doing things. Someone who plays games at home can do it cheaper or in less time than someone going to a cafe, and because we are constantly competing against each other in this system, the less efficient choices become unaffordable over time. Efficient people hold most of the economic power and therefore the economy will mostly serve them.

Also people, especially kids, are not always good at understanding the consequences of their choices. The convenience of playing games at home is easy to see, but few kids understand how that choice will affect their social skills over the long term. Allowing individual preferences to dominate society might not give us the best result.

latentframe• 1 month ago

This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize

layer82• 1 month ago

We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.

derektank3• 1 month ago

The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.

layer82• 1 month ago

Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.

atmavatar• 1 month ago

I would expect such a grant to be handled by local/city government, which should have the local knowledge you speak of.

krzat• 1 month ago

Many open source efforts seem to belong to this category as well.

Davidzheng• 1 month ago

Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?

throwaway70345• 1 month ago

It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage.

Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.

I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

But it has to be done by everyone at once. A single factory owner paying a higher wage doesn't see that benefit. It only works if all the factory owners do it.

phkahler2• 1 month ago

> A basic floor of income that everyone gets,

Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.

BobbyJo• 1 month ago

Things now are completely different than 5 years ago /s

thrance3• 1 month ago

Proponents of UBI usually also suggest countermeasures to the (real) issues you pointed out.

AndrewDucker3• 1 month ago

Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.

phkahler2• 1 month ago

I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.

jplusequalt3• 1 month ago

The real issue isn't inflation, it's that UBI is too bloody expensive in practice.

pebbly_bread• 1 month ago

It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter.

Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it?

Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.

derektank3• 1 month ago

Yes, a UBI (really all government spending) re-allocates demand, either directly through taxes and transfer or by decreasing the purchasing power of the currency through inflation. At any point in time, there is more or less a set amount of productive capacity in the economy, and money is what allows it to be allocated.

mr_toad• 1 month ago

You can’t just move assets of that scale around without knock-on effects.

If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.

If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.

idbnstra• 1 month ago

one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why.

occz3• 1 month ago

Radical concept: you could provide UBI in the form of housing, food and transportation

fortzi• 1 month ago

What's happens to the price of construction when the state suddenly commissions millions of homes?

ponector2• 1 month ago

Food and transportation is extremely cheap nowadays. Big bag of rice is couple dollars and a bicycle is a 100$.

Oh, people don't want affordable food but a 20-buck burrito and a 100k truck of ridiculous size?

pixl976• 1 month ago

that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation

Please tell me what's different than what I am seeing right now without UBI?

Zigurd2• 1 month ago

Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.

thrance3• 1 month ago

I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolutions, etc.

ieatcandlewax• 1 month ago

Those aren't freedoms, those are rights. Calling them freedoms is nonsensical

fzeindl• 1 month ago

Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.

But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?

sublinear2• 1 month ago

I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.

alephnerd5• 1 month ago

Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.

It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.

sublinear2• 1 month ago

Yeah the highest participation areas have significant poverty and lean conservative.

My point is that it isn't an unreasonable solution and it achieves everything outlined in the blog. The only catch is that it's incompatible with their politics. :)

dredmorbius3• 1 month ago

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571142>

em-bee14• 1 month ago

they weren't complaining, they were expressing the expectation that their comment would be unpopular and thus downvoted a lot.

cobber2005• 1 month ago

This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

readgrounded• 1 month ago

As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

Do you have a garage? Is it fully occupied by a car?

red-iron-pine6• 1 month ago

they used to create bands in those

armchairhacker2• 1 month ago

It existed in my old town, although I think it got shut down.

If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.

roenxi3• 1 month ago

I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.

The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.

Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.

EliRivers• 1 month ago

"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space"

I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?

pixl976• 1 month ago

Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis.

The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.

andrewflnr3• 1 month ago

Churches are funded by donations, not sales. They're a prime example of what the article is talking about.

roenxi3• 1 month ago

The article is drawing a contrast between the market vs the state funding things. Donations are part of the market from that perspective. They don't stem from the state.

pjc502• 1 month ago

whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community

Something deeply wrong here. Both that this level of antisocial behavior is expected, and that liability would be placed on people who were not meaningfully responsible for it but just happen to have their name on the lease.

regulation

I suspect what people are actually scared of in America is not regulation (from the legislature) but litigation, which is not the same thing even if it can have the same effects.

An example of how to destroy a community through outside litigants pursuing the culture war is what's happened to the Women's Institute, a pretty old organization, in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/14/womens-insti...

This is litigation itself as a form of antisocial behavior.

vlovich1232• 1 month ago

One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.

Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.

It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.

The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

UBI is in addition to whatever you can make from a wage and the B stands for not very high, just barely high enough to live.

vlovich1232• 1 month ago

My point is that it doesn’t solve the room problem outlined in the post - someone who’s just relying on UBI isn’t going to be motivated to create this space because the space will exist regardless, they get UBI either way. That’s why the funding is necessary - it creates a market need through the coercion of pay. UBI will not magically incentivize self organization of social goods, only give marginally more freedom for personal goods.

em-bee14• 1 month ago

since the past few decades china was neither violent nor repressive to the average person living there. it also can't afford to much of that because unhappy people are more likely to revolt. so the goal is to keep people happy. a big factor in the past decades was to enable people to accumulate more wealth. before that it was through controlling information. but as the chinese get a better life, controlling information is less and less necessary since life outside of china is no longer as attractive and thus no longer causes chinese to question their own situation.

you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.

that's a transition problem only for those who are used to make a lot of money. people who grew up subsisting on basic income will not have a problem here. but it seems you misunderstand UBI. because UBI gets paid in addition to the money you earn, not instead of it.

paying everyone the same regardless of their work is not UBI. money earned from work you get to keep on top of UBI. there is no sacrifice to be made, unless you are talking about a situation where people can't find work anymore. but people who can't find work are going to suffer regardless. UBI only helps to soften the blow.

nicbou3• 1 month ago

In my experience, the key element is slack.

For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.

Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.

I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.

Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

michaelleland• 1 month ago

I'm a father of 7 children. I'm the youngest of 5 siblings and my wife is the youngest of 6 siblings. Both of our mothers had college degrees and jobs and chose to stay at home with the children, and neither of our fathers had anything other than middle-class incomes.

My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).

We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.

nicbou3• 1 month ago

This is really cool! I am happy for you and your family. I don't mean to pry, but I'd love more details.

Mezzie2• 1 month ago

I live my life with no slack and no way to get any.

I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.

groan• 1 month ago

This genre of posts should be called “the author has reached adulthood.” Not quite settled in, but no longer a clueless idiot, either.

lukewarm707• 1 month ago

the 'adults' made the mess we are in. and refuse to fix it!

dzink• 1 month ago

Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.

grumpy_coder• 1 month ago

Unfortunately were I live...

The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees. The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week. The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago) Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.

CraigJPerry• 1 month ago

insta-subscribe, very well written.

> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it

I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet.

There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it.

But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble.

Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread.

And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.

goodmythical2• 1 month ago

Most churches I've been to have these?

Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...

jplusequalt3• 1 month ago

You shouldn't need to subscribe to one groups ideas or another to have access to social spaces.

goodmythical2• 1 month ago

Most of the churches I've been to are fairly open about the use of their spaces so long as you're not some sort of obnoxious.

You don't have to BE a luthern to visit a luthern church, and that's true for the kids as well. Same for the Jehovah's, same for multi- and non-denominational churchs.

jplusequalt3• 1 month ago

I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell.

UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale.

There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.

inigyou20• 1 month ago

UBI would overhaul the economy, but it's not like that doesn't happen regularly, just not for the benefit of workers. It's got to be studied before being implemented on a wide scale but there's no reason to assume it's not possible.

Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.

mindslight2• 1 month ago

The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy.

Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.

That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!

Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.

skybrian2• 1 month ago

Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.

mindslight2• 1 month ago

Sure, that is another avenue of economic erosion but I didn't focus on it because the "exempt" dynamic would seem to be the stronger dynamic. But if we actually fixed the flaws I listed, we would likely have to plug that hole of multiple jobs not counting towards the full time limit, especially if full time employment were defined as 15 hours per week (leaving plenty of time to stuff in a second or even third job in place of "visiting grandma")

But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.

nekusar• 1 month ago

Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago.

He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.

This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.

Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.

the_sleaze_4• 1 month ago

This is what religion is for, and what you refer to as THE ECONOMY is simply the hard wired human precondition stand in when you decide there is no God(s).

"The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor!

Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.

hombre_fatal2• 1 month ago

There should be a place for people, especially teens, to gather without a bunch of woo woo baggage. I found church incredibly isolating as a kid because we weren’t there just to be, we were there under this expectation that we were partaking in some superstition.

The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.

the_sleaze_4• 1 month ago

I think you misunderstand, the 3rd space should be at a church. One in my community does this for teens where they just hang out and do homework after school for 2 hours.

Mezzie2• 1 month ago

One aspect of the financialization of everything/the 'economics over all' mindset that I don't see often discussed is that if you for whatever reason can't make the 'sound' financial choice, you just...drown.

The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.

I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.

I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.

So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.

I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.

un-diletante• 1 month ago

Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures.

These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?

And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.

This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.

clapthewind• 1 month ago

In India, by law, companies above a certain size are required to spend 2% of profit on social responsibility activities. So in my city, you see lots of things around adopted or funded by companies.

putzdown• 1 month ago

This is a great article, and I've never seen the problem explained better. The solution doesn't make sense, though, and this is almost but not quite obvious in the article by virtue of how well it has stated the problem. The problem with basic income is that it provides people with cash but does not change the underlying supply-demand system. To get the lokal (the room) to work you needed more than cash: you needed a desire for teens to be happy and engaged, the will to help them get there, a sense of what might help them, leadership to set it up, attract them, and keep it going, and then, yes, money to pay rent. If all you provide is the money, you will get people spending more money on the usual things the economy "sees": phones, video games, amusing t-shirts. What you have around the lokal in the story is actually not merely basic income fed into the existing economy: you actually have a separate economy. The separate economy works differently because it sees differently, it has different demands, different desires. The society as a whole (as embodied here by the government, thankfully—though not all governments are predictably good-willed in this way) wants the teens to thrive, to provide for them, to pay for them, to guide them with modest leadership. Though individuals, and the regular markets, cannot think about the teenagers—they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the time, they have diffusion of responsibility, etc—the society can pool its interests and act upon its collective interest through the market. This may not be the only way to "cut across" the market, to do collectively what no set of individuals will do, but it's one way. So we definitely want to solve the problem: we want to organize, lead, preserve, and fund things that are of collective value but that the market cannot see. Giving individuals a basic income, however, doesn't accomplish that. I wish it did, but it doesn't. It puts the money into the usual demand centers—individuals needing to pay rent and transportation costs and go on dates and so forth—that live within the "blind" economy.

cameldrv• 1 month ago

Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here.

I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.

It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.

red-iron-pine6• 1 month ago

The room the economy can't see

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