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Comment by nerdcity | Hacker News Reader

Most of the stuff we need is more highly regulated than the other stuff...

Especially housing!

Yeah! Who says I can't paint my nursery with lead-based paint!? Who needs electrical grounding!? Circuit breakers? I'm sure it'll be fine.

It's not that part of regulations that are causing housing affordability issues. More zoning regulations that say you have to have x parking spaces with x lot sizes under x height with x impact fees and x long bureaucratic processes.

That is not the problem.

The problem is you can't compete with cash buyers, or people who can qualify to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars when you can't (along with the influx of foreign money from China and South America, and stagnant middle class wages for 40 or so years).

Remove government support for mortgages, remove tax deductions, and put in place higher taxes for non-owner occupied dwellings. This will (mostly) fix the affordable housing issue. Work will still have to be done on pushing wages up.

And cause a massive economic issue for every owner who gets put underwater by the resulting price crash?

Versus continuing to prop the market up artificially? Government does not exist to protect the value of your housing through subsidies.

> [...] and put in place higher taxes for non-owner occupied dwellings.

Why exempt owner occupiers? There are the worst NIMBYs.

(https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/00-04.PDF)

Textbooks are more highly regulated than cell phone service? I doubt it.

As the article tries to point out, the things we need are largely dominated by human costs. TV manufacturing is automated and scaled, but child care is not.

Textbooks are not particularly regulated, but they are an interesting monopoly. You probably don't think of them as a monopoly, but they are. If you just want to learn calculus, any text will do, but if you are taking a college class, you have to have the text the instructor says. You'd better even have the same edition. So the publisher can charge pretty much any price, because you (the buyer) have no choice.

More often than not, you have to have the text the professor (and or department head) had a hand in writing/editing/producing, and therefore gets royalties from. It's corrupt as all hell.

Sounds similar to the monopoly on SIM chips by cell service providers.

We were not always required to have the same (or any) textbook in some of my college classes. Sometimes, multiple alternatives (with brief reviews) were given.

What's the actual punishment in practice, if you just buy a different textbook (or even just a different version)?

They are not gonna ask you 'What's the third letter on the second line of page 317?' are they?

Housing is an exception to this. For housing, the primary barriers to affordability are land being finite and zoning regulations that limit density.

There is a ton of usable land around, and it comes cheap. It just isn't in San Francisco.

Land for housing is only semi-fungible.

Healthcare fits that description, food possibly, housing and education not so much. Have they become more regulated? Are regulations the reason for education prices increase?

Well, yes, but that's also from the expectation of higher standards. Combine that with the sheer mass of consumption for - pick a product, pork - and the costs soon become very high indeed.

Scary thought: very little of our actual total food produced and imported is actually examined. If we insisted on complete examination it would be prohibitively expensive.

Pork is possibly a very poor example, because it has been incredibly cheap, relative to other options in the space, for several years running.

The main reason for the increase in education costs is the availability of student loans.

Lenders will loan huge amounts of money to students, who have often never worked and have no assets, because the loans are almost impossible to discharge or otherwise get out of. In many cases, students qualify to borrow more money than even their parents could.

State governments know that students can get student loans in pretty much all circumstances, and they use that as a justification to cut funding to state colleges -- after all, aid is available for those who need it.

Colleges increase tuition to make up for the shortfall in state funding. They also need to attract students who have the means, via the loans, to attend the school of their choice. So, colleges build amenities, such as luxurious student housing and health clubs, which increase operating costs and necessitate further increases in tuition.

Meanwhile, students are being told by their parents that they will have no problem paying back their loans, but that's not generally true. Their parents went to school before this vicious cycle of loans and funding emerged, and don't fully understand the burden these loans can cause for new grads, especially in non-STEM fields. The students borrow more than they ought to.

This is a parable of unintended consequences.

http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-my...

The most important technology in housing (the elevator) is mostly banned.

For good reason: if you don't take care of the regular maintenance people die. Homeowners are notorious for not doing maintenance until it is too late unless the maintenance is also cosmetic. (fortunately for roof and siding when it looks bad it is bad, and most other parts of a house don't wear out)

The original comment was almost certainly about zoning regulations, not safety regulations. Obviously inspecting elevators so people don't plunge to their deaths is something we know how to do.

Yes, I was a being tongue-in-cheek at the expense of clarity. The elevator, in combination with advances in building materials and engineering, allows for construction of high-rise condominiums. These lower the cost of housing by improving the efficiency of land use. Regulation prevents this technology from being used in many of the areas where it is needed most.

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