Steve Randy Waldman

Steve Waldman has a great blog post on this topic that goes beyond big city rents (though I agree that's a huge issue): https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7263.html

https://www.interfluidity.com/, on economics and economic philosophy

> It is the interaction of productivity and inequality that makes societies vulnerable to idle unemployment. The poor in technologically primitive societies hustle to live. In relatively equal, technologically advanced societies, people create plenty of demand for one another’s services. But when productivity and inequality are combined, we get a highly productive elite that cannot provide adequate employment, and a mass of people who preserve more value by remaining idle and cutting consumption than by attempting low-productivity work. Steve Randy Waldman wrote a post about "Tradeoffs between inequality and employment", https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html - recommended.

The best suggestion I've seen is 1¢ for the 141st character, 2¢ for the 142nd, 4¢ for the 143rd, etc. Going slightly over 140 costs a trivial amount, but it would be stupidly expensive to tweet anything really long. EDIT: I found where I stole this idea from: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6207.html

“The issue with Greece is that they were given money and they did not change anything, they just kept spending.” I don't understand why this is repeated again and again. The reality has nothing to do with that. Greece has implemented austerity policies that no other country in Europe has implemented. Compared to the American big depression, they have lived for a longer period of time with worse economic conditions. The recipes coming from the Troika has been implemented and the result is that they are in a deeper hole. So they say “now what?” and the answer is “keep digging”. I am amazed how brainwashed is the public opinion. And about where the money is going, I recommend reading this: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6013.html

Interfulidity is one of the best economics blogs out there. Last year he did a five-part series on welfare economics[0] that, while quite lengthy, was very well-done. Anybody that's interested in political economy, but has a more traditional Econ 101 background, it's a good place to start. [0]: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5149.html

The risk of riots is a reason for not using the machinery of a non-representative democracy as a velvet glove for enforcing the will of a privileged elite. There's a more detailed explanation of this viewpoint here: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5911.html You should look at this from the same perspective as irrational rage, or nuclear war. The risk of a destructive conflagration even when it is also harmful to the people who start the destruction is an impetus to solve disputes peacefully and fairly, and to not push structural power imbalances too far to gain an advantage.

I support alternatives to Uber, not because they're bad or anything, but because I don't want to see a monopoly develop. Competition is the best way to ensure that we don't wind up with the next Comcast. I found this analysis to be the most compelling thing supporting alternatives to Uber that I've ever read: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5822.html

Steven Randy Waldman of the blog Interfluidity has a great post which makes the case that "Wealth is about insurance much more than it is about consumption." http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html It's a great insight, and the thought experiment to "[c]onsider a libertarian Titanic" is illustrative. (Though, it's a unfair slur to label the scenario 'libertarian', as that word does not mean 'everything is reduced to dollar purchases' except in a caricature promoted by critics. Just calling the scenario a 'pay-to-play Titanic' would be descriptive without extra partisanship.)

More transparency would definitely help, but I am not sure how solvable the problem is at a fundamental level. As Steve Waldman points out (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/716.html), there is a large confidence interval around any measure of asset worth, and hence of capital levels. I am not sure what the solution is, but increased transparency, simpler measures such as the leverage ratio, and potentially the separation of complex securities businesses from simpler deposit-and-loan businesses all come to mind.

You raise some extremely good points here, and you're right, the trade offs are massive, partially due to how early the project is. My view is that maturity of the project will bring some of the answers everyone is looking for. As an anecdote, the first name auctions are actually ending in the next 48h. Mean bids for early names (a few hundred) from the last time I looked in a cli were under 10 HNS, so under 5 USD at current prices. .coin for low thousands of USD. .11 for low hundreds of USD. So that may give you a bit of an early view of what the prices are looking like. All subject to change of course because the auctions are not done yet. For what it's worth, as someone enthusiastic about Handshake, crypto, and decentralized systems in general...I can totally empathize with the irritation you've expressed here. There's so much noise out there and 2017-2018 blockchain projects are notorious for over-promising on vague and impossible things, and then fading to nothing when the impossible things turn out to actually be impossible. One thing I'd like to emphasize: Handshake's community may be what ends up being the differentiator against ICANN, less so anything financial or crypto related. I think that is what Rasengan is trying to accomplish here: build a true grassroots effort to work together to make Handshake a real contender. Because many of the readers here already have a piece of the network (majority of the coin supply being given not to investors, but Foss…

Yes this article makes some good points but the rhetoric is all wrong. Here, this guy says it much better than I can: >Home is where the cartel is. I use the word “home” not “housing” advisedly. Homeowners understand their actions not as monopolizing the housing market but as protecting their homes and neighborhoods from the market. The libertarian “deregulatory” rhetoric by which market urbanists sometimes make their case is counterproductive. Telling people to think of their homes as a commodity upon which market forces should be brought to bear in order to ensure production of housing services at competitive prices is obtuse. People purchase property, rather than renting, largely to gain security and control, to escape the vicissitudes of the market. The worst place to emphasize “deregulation” is in dense urban environments, where almost every sort of action has spillovers. Policies like up/rezoning which decrease current home prices in order to lower rents are directly redistributionary and I think you have to make your case in those terms and I just don't find redistribution on the basis of age that convincing. http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html

>I'm having a hard time with the statement as a super-majority of economists agree that liberal trade is a net boon Not the OP but familiar with some of these arguments. Free trade is held to be pareto optimal outcome - you and I get cheaper tshirts, people in bangladesh get higher incomes because of tshirt manufacturing, everyone is better off because of comparative advantage, etc. However, if we distinguish between development or industrialization, then free trade provides strong disincentives wrt investing in capital intensive industries where one does not have a comparative advantage. If I have capital to invest in Bangladesh, it does not make sense for me to try to create a high-end equipment factory; German manufacturers are way more efficient and effective, so it will be very hard for me to compete. The competitive advantage of my region is cheap-labour, so all investment will be biased towards that. Unfortunately, this means that it's very hard to create high-value-added industries that can substantially raise average incomes. If we look into the historical record, we find that the industrial revolution was a period of high tariffs and protectionism; the British empire had a great advantage in acquiring raw materials but IIRC, the French textile industry was more efficient at the time. As a result, they were incentivized to export raw resources and import high value added materials. This is a loser's game. Instead, with the application of high tariffs British…

Yeah this is all pretty wrong. >> upset that Greece might actually be forced to pay its bills and what that means for the welfare state model the EU has built itself on. 1) Those aren't just Greece's bills. Steve Waldman put it best: "The European financial system was architected to make lending to Greece — and Spain and Portugal and Italy — a money machine for bankers with little career risk over a medium term. Sketchy credits tend to punch above their weight in terms of volume of issuance, so there was a lot of nice paper to buy. The bankers who lent to these states understood perfectly well that there was in fact a long-term risk, an uncertainty, a constructive ambiguity. They lent anyway, and took home very nice salaries and bonuses for doing so." (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html) 2) This has nothing to do with implicating the welfare-state model; as you note, there are a ton of Euro welfare states with extremely robust economies. Some Euro welfare states have been chronically mismanaged (Greece, Italy, probably Spain) and now they're in trouble, in part for reasons not of their making. >> Only the most wealthy, least corrupt, and productive EU states can have a proper welfare state Oh, so in other words, if you take out Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Finland, Belgium and Switzerland, the European welfare state is a total disaster, huh? >> and even some of them have problems with youth unemployment, job growth, low military…

Mencius Moldbug describes it best: "Money is the bubble that doesn’t need to pop. As long as there is demand for indirect exchange, at least one asset will be stockpiled by hoarders, hence experience demand that is not a consequence of any direct utility, hence be overvalued. As long as the storage cost for this asset is zero and the supply in existence is fixed, you have a perfect Nash equilibrium - using any other asset as a medium of indirect exchange provides no advantage, and runs the risk of buying into a bubble which will subsequently pop as punters revert back to the stable standard." (source: http://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1233118501.shtml) The story of the past ten years is that people started trading dollars for substitute stores of value ( houses, stocks, oil futures, etc). But those substitutes were not stable Nash equilibriums. In the long run, supply of housing is elastic and bubble prices cannot be sustained. Prices crashed, and people rushed back to using dollars as a store of value. When demand for dollars increases, it becomes harder to trade goods and labor for dollars, so the price of goods and labor in dollars decreases ( deflation). However, employment contracts and debts are denominated assuming a higher price level. Thus businesses are unable to meet payroll and pay creditors. Businesses fire workers or go out of business. That's the stage we are at now. The solution is to simply renominate the currency by mailing everyone checks, in…

You might check out what Steve Randy Waldman is doing with his "drafts" blog. He has found it freeing: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html

salaries rarely and hardly ever go down. however inflation does exactly that in real terms. This is an interesting article about it: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9566.html

> Does anyone think these psychological games end up helping the economy long term? Color me undecided, but I thought this argument was interesting. It's not directly related to the Fed, but it is about using mind games to benefit the economy. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2669.html

Dead Voles - https://deadvoles.wordpress.com/ Interfluidity - https://www.interfluidity.com/ The Debate Link - http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/ Econbrowser - http://econbrowser.com/ Empassive - https://mandelcabrera.com/ Dead Voles and Econbrowser may have more than one contributor, but its not part of some institute or organization or anything like that.

Fair enough. Steve Waldman described about this mentality pretty well here: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale provisioning these amenities to many people. That is exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need not be. Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have little to do with what you like about your community; there are plenty of places in Central California with detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.

Decentralization is good when there is no need for coordination. We sometimes like to collaborate - but we don't like the constant requirement of mandatory coordination. Unfortunately technology connects us more and more and that means that coordination and un-coordination brings more and more externalities (positive and negative respectively). Decentralization works in cases that are like we were back to the near empty savannah and where everybody could just go in his own direction. The Internet was once like that - but it is not any more, it is rather the reverse. By the way, just a few hours ago I submitted to HN this article: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html - it is about these tensions between our freedom to do whatever we like and the need for coordination in a more and more connected world.

Interfluidity, for instance this https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html

The person willing to pay the most may not be the person who most desires it, considering the differing marginal utility of money across the vast spectrum of income/wealth inequality. Trump can buy on a lark what I would only shell out for as a matter of deepest, life-or-death desire. (See also: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/10/do-economists-actually-know-wha… http://www.demos.org/blog/12/23/14/when-inequality-ruins-analysis, http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5822.html, and http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5117.html for more on this same point)

neither am i comparing them. you're observing that the NYT comment section is free of trolls/spam but is otherwise a liberal echo chamber. that's another way of saying that it's lacking a counter-balance of intelligent conservative comments. i'm accepting that critique for the purpose of argumentation, and replying by asking you to look around and find anywhere on the web that has a majority critical mass of intelligent conservative commentary. once you realize that it pretty much doesn't exist, maybe that will lead to a different conclusion... anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for example: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html

Yes. Because it is effectively a cartel. "Home is where the Cartel is" http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html

> Are we just going to centralize ourselves in entrepreneurial Athenian city-states, while the rest of America groans under job loss and decay? This would work better if your cities hadn't stopped moving in the 70s. (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html)

We will retire and the Fed will end up bailing out the IOUs on the SS trust fund. This is not a problem so long as it's done once. All SS money ends up strengthening the metric formerly known as M3, so it'll work out just fine. The problem is the closely-held belief that There Must Be Suffering or we're not being responsible adults. The economy has been liquidity constrained ( outside of bubbles ) since 1980, with the odd 24 or 12 month period off. http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html

>It's all a consensual hallucination which works only as long as everyone still has confidence in the system. Yes, but delusion is not as irrational as it sounds. http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2669.html

> And their recovery was underway This considered bullshit by at least Hans-Werner-Sinn and Flassbeck - 2 economists that usually don't share a lot of opinions. Also austeritiy didn't work and made things worse: http://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2015/07/Greekovery.png The new government wanted to change that.

Remember Germany's history of debt forgiveness and non-forgiveness. Don't know about it? Look at the treaty of Versailles, and John Maynard Keynes's polemic against it. Also look at the Marshall plan, and the debt forgiveness of 1953. And then consider how you want Greece to be treated. And consider how Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany should be treated when they run to big a deficit. Also read this post (unless you are extremely annoyed by vulgar language): http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html