NIMBYs in the twenty-first century

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/03/wealth-inequality?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/nimbysinthetwentyfirstcentury

by feelthepain • 11 years ago

49 60 11 years ago

economist.com

hucker2• 11 years ago

Paywalled... Does anyone have a mirror?

edit: They removed it, thanks The Economist!

seany• 11 years ago

https://archive.today/iU9Z3

throwaway_xl5• 11 years ago

Economist lets you read a limited number of articles free of charge each month. The link gave me the full article so perhaps you used up your quota, or their rules are different in your territory?

hucker2• 11 years ago

It says I've used up my number of articles for the month, but I can't remember reading any in a long time, which my browser history confirms. Weird.

rrss1122• 11 years ago

You're right. I hit a paywall at first, but with private browsing got through to the full article, so I guess I used up my quota.

ananyob• 11 years ago

Not paywalled anymore-(Economist journo)

pcarolan2• 11 years ago

Conventional wisdom says that homes are bad investments compared to equities, conventional wisdom looks to be wrong. Maybe loading up your 401k instead of buying a home isn't such a good idea. The right answer is probably to rebalance a bit towards property.

nissimk• 11 years ago

Real estate has two primary advantages over equities:

Large amounts of leverage are both legal and easily acquired for real estate transactions. Most of the remaining tax shelters in the US are related to real estate see "Full time real estate professional," 1031 exchange, etc.

psaintla• 11 years ago

Yes, which is always why I always cringe when I see how many people in their 20s and 30s believe that home ownership is a bad idea. The willingness to rent for life in order to live a high density, urban lifestyle is going to come back to haunt them when they get older. It's good for me as a landlord but I hope people my age start rethinking their position on home ownership.

billmalarky• 11 years ago

Cringe? Really? By living in a high density urban area many people are able to invest more per year than they bring home after taxes living in the midwest.

leviathant• 11 years ago

I was resistant to buying a house here in Pennsylvania, but my wife's from Sydney, Australia, and was gobsmacked by how inexpensive real estate is here. By 26, we had bought a small house in the Philadelphia suburbs about three blocks from a train station and renovated it over the course of a few years. We were able to purchase a larger house in Philadelphia proper, and rented out the house in the suburbs - which covered the price of that house's mortgage and subsidized the newer house's mortgage. Aggressively paying down the first house, it's now paid off, and is just straight income, and we're more than halfway done paying off the mortgage on this house.

This year, we actually dumped our investment account for a sizeable property in an amazing spot (on the waterfront, where the historic district meets the trendy hipster district), with commercial space on the first floor, an apartment on the second floor, and we'll be financing the expansion to a third floor by selling off the other two houses we have.

I'll be living in a new-construction home above a performing arts space that I own outright, paid for by a second floor apartment I'll be renting out, in a high density, urban environment - because my wife and I bought a house when we were 26.

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

I don't rent for the urban lifestyle. I rent because it gives me tremendous flexibility when it comes to where to work. If I bought a house somewhere, I would be stuck in that place for close to ten years. Sure I could do remote work, but that is still not as common-place as regular in-office work, so I would be shooting myself in the foot in terms of job prospects and therefore earning potential.

Home ownership was a no-brainer back when people got a job out of high school or college and worked at that job for decades, got regular raises, then retired with a pension. Nowadays though? Job hopping is the only reliable way of increasing one's income, and "right to work" is very common which means you can lose your job one day just because someone decided they no longer want you.

Not to mention the economic downturns. What did we see during the most recent recession? People lost their jobs first, then they lost their houses because they couldn't pay mortgage anymore. Barely six years have passed and yet people are already losing their minds again about home ownership.

Does home ownership have its advantages? Absolutely. Is it the right choice for everyone? Hell no.

s73v3r• 11 years ago

I can't afford a home in the place I want to live. I'm not going to live somewhere I don't like simply to own a home.

jseliger• 11 years ago

The right answer is probably to rebalance a bit towards property.

I appreciate your use of "a bit" to qualify your statement, but I'll also note that rebalancing towards property in the form of REITs or REIT-like structures makes sense. But on a personal level it may not, since it depends on a) picking the places that'll be important in the future (picking, say, SF or Seattle from 1980 – 2001 was not an obvious bet) and b) depending on a contemporary NIMBY framework to keep more property from being built. Point b is particularly interesting, because Yglesias and others have proposed that height limits, parking minimums, and similar choices should be removed from small governing bodies like cities (where many stakeholders want to limit supply for their own benefit).

Will that happen? From here, the answer looks like "No." But seeing the NIMBY madness and price rises in many coastal cities makes me wonder.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

But seeing the NIMBY madness and price rises in many coastal cities makes me wonder.

Suddenly Lex Lutor's evil plan from Superman : The movie, makes sense.

pcarolan2• 11 years ago

Point taken, but I'd value my (and everyone else's) personal judgment when it comes to property investment higher than investing in a REIT simply because I have more insight into what I'm buying and have the ability to personally improve my asset by taking good care of it, making improvements and getting involved in my community. Owning a home isn't all that different than running a small business in that way.

dangravell• 11 years ago

Whose conventional wisdom says that? In the UK, "convention" says the opposite and is sorely misguided.

In reality they are just different asset classes and should be judged on their merits.

ForHackernews3• 11 years ago

Modern forms of capital, such as software, depreciate faster in value than equipment did in the past: a giant metal press might have a working life of decades while a new piece of database-management software will be obsolete in a few years at most.

Is software even capital? Isn't this part of why we've been arguing against software patents for years now? Obviously software and other forms of intellectual property have value, but to me capital is something used to produce valuable products, not the products themselves. Maybe the firmware for some CNC machine is capital?

Are books capital because you can make movies out of them?

eldavido• 11 years ago

The economist is taking the position of the buyer (not maker) of software -- the prototypical business that buys a CRM tool to manage its customer relationships.

Seen as a good that increases the productive capacity of a company or the economy more generally, it seems software very much is capital.

ForHackernews3• 11 years ago

Do they buy a CRM tool, or do they just license the use of one? My understanding is that it's almost impossible to really "buy" and "own" commercial software, you can only acquire a license to use it.

a_c_s• 11 years ago

Broadly speaking, economics talks about three categories of things: Land (natural resources), Labor & Capital.

Looking at things from this perspective, capital includes everything from carpet, books and desk chairs to massive heavy industry factory machinery.

A source: http://www.henrygeorge.org/def2.htm

task_queue• 11 years ago

In some cases, software allows the rapid accumulation of wealth for owners and that fits the definition of a capital good.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

I don't think the argument about software patents is related to capital.

The argument for patents is that it encourages people to invent things, because they have a guarantee of exclusive use which makes it easier to make money from their invention. It also encourages people to make inventions public instead of keeping things secret and then the knowledge being lost, since that's required as part of obtaining a patent. The US Constitution spells this out explicitly: the purpose of patents and other such things is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts...."

The arguments against software patents are basically that it doesn't have the desired effect. Much of what gets patented gets rediscovered independently, and thus it doesn't seem to actually encourage innovation. Nobody seems to ever go digging through patent archives looking for useful software techniques, so the fact of making patented inventions public also doesn't help.

None of this has much to do with software as capital, which would work much the same with or without software patents.

sun_machine• 11 years ago

I am confused by the way the Economist phrased Mr. Rognlie's argument. The crux of Piketty's argument is that when global returns on wealth (r) is more than global economy growth (g), capital will start snowballing into the hands of the few very quickly.

The mechanism of r getting bigger than g is not an increase in r, but a decrease in g. The increase of the global economy is dominated not by increasing technological efficiency, but by population growth. There is an upper limit of the number of people we can fit on this rock (whether 9 billion or 100 billion, we will hit a limit at some point). Once we bump into that ceiling, growth will slow dramatically, and those who have already managed to create a sizable stash, or who have the talent to regularly beat the market, can accumulate wealth to no end.

In short, as I understood Piketty's book, the fact that r might not increase if we put the right limits on housing development, doesn't change the overall hypothesis made by Piketty.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

Wealth is different than growth.

I think the point is that if you move towards rent-seeking vs. value creation, people with a critical mass just hoover up capital and get richer. Even if the economy contracts, you can still take more chips off the table.

We have historical examples of this as populations start bumping against local ceilings that illustrate that this scenario is very possible. The Roman aristocracy was living it up, while the plebeians in many cases were subsisting on bread and circuses.

tomjen3• 11 years ago

You seem to be under the assumption that the population is going to grow towards infinity. The UN projects that we will stay under 10 billion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...) and even the highest only have us at 16 billion at the end of this century (compare that to the growth in the 20th century).

So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.

onnoonno• 11 years ago

So unless there is a relatively low limit for total humans on this planet, we won't reach it before we become a spacefaring race, at which point the limit will be the carrying capacity of the Universe.

But even in that case, you can only have at most polynomial growth (human habitat spherically expanding with speed of light) instead of an exponential one.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

Modern forms of capital, such as software, depreciate faster in value than equipment did in the past: a giant metal press might have a working life of decades while a new piece of database-management software will be obsolete in a few years at most.

Those rotting bits ... outside of consumer software, the life of software is easily measured in decades.

mikeash2• 11 years ago

I think it's tremendous confusion on their part about what "obsolete" means.

If people upgrade software every few years it's because the new software is much better (or at the very least perceived as such). Even most consumer software keeps on working almost forever (although this is starting to change now that so many things depend on external services).

Imagine if the giant metal press had a new version come out a few years later than was twice as efficient. You could keep operating the old one as long as you wanted, but paying for a new one would be well worth it. The old one is "obsolete." But the value of the old one, in terms of what it does for your business, is unchanged! If you wanted to sell it, the price on the secondary market will take a big hit, but that's less important.

Rather than demonstrating that return from capital is declining, the rapid obsolescence of software demonstrates that return from capital is increasing! If businesses were buying new giant metal presses every few years even though the old ones worked fine, would you say "oh, the return must be decreasing," or would you say, "wow, those new presses must be a huge improvement to be worth such a quick turnaround"?

nwah18• 11 years ago

Housing is a euphemism for land. The value of locations is determined by the quality of the surrounding community and the environment.

This value winds up in land because it is claimed for exclusive use by individuals, enforced by government. Yet, claiming ownership over any part of the surface of this ball of space rock is arbitrary, and no principle of justice can truly legitimize it.

Instead of Piketty's blunt "wealth tax" we should be taxing land value, which as the cited MIT/Brookings report shows, is responsible for nearly all the new growth in inequality.

matwood• 11 years ago

Who isn't paying taxes on their land value? Maybe there are some states that do not, but every year I pay a pretty large tax bill based on the value of my land/house.

ForHackernews3• 11 years ago

Arguably, we should be taxing based on the value of only the land itself, and not considering improvements (buildings, etc.) made to the land, in order to not (mildly) disincentivize making improvements to land one owns.

timclark• 11 years ago

Not every country taxes land in that way. I own no land but pay tax for occupying a property, my landlord pays no tax on this property - he may pay some tax on his rental income and will be taxed if the property is sold.

_delirium2• 11 years ago

One way it happens: In much of the U.S., agricultural land is either exempted, or taxed at a very low rate. The stated rationale (besides openly being an agriculture subsidy) is as a kind of anti-gentrification measure for farmers. Farmers complain that rising land values, due to e.g. expanding cities, would "price them out" if they had to pay taxes on the full (non-agricultural) market value of the land.

In practice it's common for large-scale property investors to use this as a way to accumulate and hold land tax-free or nearly tax-free. At least in Texas almost all large land holdings are held as agricultural land for that reason. Investors keep the land classed "agricultural" until such time as they want to actually develop it. Sometimes this is really agricultural land in addition to being an investment; other times a few gratuitous cows are thrown on some land purely for tax reasons (this is why the city of Houston has a surprising number of tiny cattle ranches within the city limits). The end result either way is that you can accumulate land over long periods of time without paying much in the way of taxes.

khuey• 11 years ago

Anyone who owns property in the State of California, for one. Thanks Prop 13!

mixmastamyk2• 11 years ago

This sounds like Henry George, a guy I never heard about in school, but had some quite interesting ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

... in short capitalism for work, but collective use of land to recognize its unique ability in compounding inequity.

nwah18• 11 years ago

Good spot. One small nitpick.

Georgists would contend that they do not support collectivized land, but rather support "common" rights to land.

http://geolib.com/sullivan.dan/commonrights.html

JoshTriplett2• 11 years ago

Yet, claiming ownership over any part of the surface of this ball of space rock is arbitrary, and no principle of justice can truly legitimize it.

One very easy principle can: the value of land goes down dramatically if you can't kick other people off of it. Exclusive use is critically important. Unless you'd like other people traipsing through your house.

nwah18• 11 years ago

Exclusive use is important, but who gets it is currently arbitrary. To make it non-arbitrary, the titleholder should pay rent for the privilege.

http://libertythinkers.com/education/a-landlord-is-a-governm...

michaelochurch• 11 years ago

The weak point of democracy is the phenomenon of cheap votes. On any high stakes issue, there are still a large number of people who don't give a damn and will sell their vote for $25 if they legally can. This undermines the democratic process, as power accrues to those who bundle cheap votes together and deploy or sell the packages. This leads to a "democracy" (or, in Silicon Valley corporate-speak, a meritocracy) that can readily be used to validate the will of the existing elite, while posing no threat to it or check against its greed.

In elections, we prohibit explicit vote selling. But marketing is also about cheap-vote buying. Pepsi advertises because a large number of people just don't care which cola they get. Wal-Marts destroy small towns, but they're profitable because a large number of people will (with no ill intent, or cognizance of this being what they're doing) "vote" against their own communities to save $25 on Christmas shopping.

In culture, the term for very loud or passionate cheap votes is "useful idiots". Startup cheerleaders and the tech press (regulatory arbitrage! so visionary!) are useful idiots for the venture capitalists. The 22-year-olds who work 12 hours per day because they believe their 0.03% slices are just "teasers" and that they'll be introduced to VCs inside of 6 months are cheap votes.

NIMBY is two problems come together, because it's a cheap-vote dynamic on both sides. Among the renters on the losing side, most people don't get involved in local issues, and not voting is a vote. They're selling their vote for the benefit of not having to put time in, and perhaps because they consider the NIMBY problem helpless. On the other hand, the NIMBYs are also cheap votes. They know what's good for society and the rising generation, yet they push for the opposite because they'd rather jerk up their housing prices and get artificial money they don't need (and can't use unless they sell their houses and move to a cheaper place) than do the right thing. They're easily bought.

The story of the "first world" 21st century, in terms of the breakdown of democracy, capitalism, and meritocracy at the hands of a corporate elite, is the story of cheap vote aggregation. Nowhere is this more evident than in venture capital, where passive capital (cheap votes) from teachers' and firefighters' pension funds from Ohio and Nebraska and Montana is siphoned off to the career benefit of well-connected rich kids in California. The people who should care, don't, because it doesn't affect them enough.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

Why bring new terminology to replace "concentrated benefits and dispersed costs", which is well established?

NIMBYs in the twenty-first century

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