millimeterman

A negative income tax is equivalent to UBI combined with increased taxes on mid to top bracket earners. There are some practical concerns such as potential administrative waste from having to distribute and then immediately tax away UBI money or ensuring that NIT is set up to not strain the already extremely tight liquidity/cashflow of low income households (also a problem with the EITC).

> There is of course some concern about how you'd implement a negative income tax

The machinery for this already exists due to the EITC. Expanding it to people without employment is a valid concern, but tax rebates based on income are not a totally foreign idea.

> I'm not against Daft Punk. But, I can't stand to listen to very much rap after M.F. DOOM because it has all been infected by T-Pain.

Why is overt use of autotune a less valid artistic choice when T-Pain uses it than when Daft Punk uses it?

> Thriller sold 70 million copies, Bat out of Hell (somehow) sold 43 million copies. That's on a different order of magnitude than what seems possible today.

This is mostly due to the monumental changes in the sales model for music since those days. Sales suffered massively at the hands of iTunes and Spotify - there's little correlation with trends in the actual music.

> I think part of what makes music interesting to listen to is the subtle imperfections and nonidealities. I think MIDI and the click track are part of the same problem as autotune... "Snap to grid" and a lot of what makes music interesting is just gone.

There's nothing wrong with feeling that way, but I would be cautious of projecting your preferences onto the rest of the world. I think it's clear that many, many people enjoy music produced in this style.

After all, someone living a century before us could make the exact same arguments decrying recorded music in favor of live performances. Who wants to listen to the same thing over and over again? The subtle variations and imperfections between live performances are what gives music color - do away with them and all we have is a cold, mechanical, unfeeling facsimile of proper music.

While I agree that increasing productivity is the prime directive when it comes to improving standards of living, dismissing the benefits of wealth transfer is naive.

Direct wealth transfer is a useful tool for mitigating market failures like labor market monopsony and the various negative externalities of excessive inequality. When used correctly, it does in fact improve economic efficiency and societal well-being.

> you’re going to end up with an outgoing cash flow towards some welfate policy or humanitarian cause that funds people’s basic needs and healthcare, which won’t count as “growth” in the capitalist sense

Properly executed redistributive policy absolutely increases growth in the "capitalist sense", whatever that means. That's kind of the whole point.

Do you think humans have run out of things to invent and improve? Are standards of living good enough that we can be content to stop here? Why exactly should we expect (let alone hope) that growth will stop?

Because there are major societal losses incurred by preventing development. I see no reason why governments should enable locals to enjoy the benefits of high property values and low density while externalizing the costs of that behavior onto others.

There are already some companies that let you calibrate your TV's colors with your phone camera. Apple TVs do it and adjust the output signal while some new Samsung TVs can do it and actually apply hardware calibration. Adjusting for unevenness in the same way seems potentially harder but doable.

> What I am calling "slavery" for lack of a better word

I would object to calling a mutually beneficial arrangement "slavery", but whatever.

> I'm just saying that no one really wants something made 100% in the USA because very few people could afford it

While this is true, it invites reasonable-sounding criticism to the effect of "well if you can't make your cheap toys without exploiting people then maybe you shouldn't have it at all" and so misses the most crucial point. Forcing something to be made 100% in the USA is bad for _everyone_. It doesn't empower workers at the cost of the rich or empower Indians at the cost of Americans. It simply satisfies some misguided and/or nationalistic sentiment while leaving everyone worse off for it.

> I would say that low wages alone are no longer the primary benefit of having something made in China. It's much more the scale and loose environmental regulations that are valuable now.

While yes, a huge component is the vast amount of manufacturing expertise and capital that has been built up in China. It may have started as a country from which you bought cheap junk manufactured for low wages, sure. But after decades of that unsavory and seemingly exploitative relationship, China is now home to lots of advanced, high quality manufacturing with skilled and productive workers that can demand better pay than ever before.

In a funny sense, it reminds me of that quote about how "the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them". At no point did any of the foreign industries investing in China have any intention more noble than "exploiting" cheap, undifferentiated labor from a developing country. Yet that very behavior has apparently driven wages so high that companies are willing to spend billions to start the process all over again in another country.

It's not like Apple can compel anyone to work for them - they must offer competitive pay to attract workers. By definition, the people in India taking jobs at Apple are doing so because it's the best option available to them. The reality is that foreign industry factory jobs are generally considered quite desirable and high-paying in these countries. This "slave labor" is, in fact, one of the primary mechanisms by which living standards in developing countries are elevated over time.

You may (understandably) feel bad about enjoying a product made by someone getting nominally paid orders of magnitude less than you. But naively arguing that Apple should be mandated to pay more (or even be forced to produce in the US) does the opposite of help the people you claim to be worried about.

> you could still have the situation where everyone refuses to sell to developers

There's nothing wrong with this - no one is obligated to sell their land to developers. But considering that NIMBYs have to fight hard and continuously to block new development that would have otherwise proceeded, clearly that's not the case.

Why should development be a matter of formal voting and government mandates? Why should it be any more complex than private entities buying land and then constructing what they want on that land? (Within reason - zoning is still important to keep housing away from industrial waste or garbage dumps. But the externalities of disallowing dense and mixed-use development are profoundly negative.)

There are cities that are pro-growth in the sense of not having NIMBY zoning but that have awful urban planning from a transportation perspective. Houston and Atlanta come to mind. Pro-growth perhaps, but certainly not pro-density. I don't know of any city that has both pro-growth housing policy and decent investment in public transportation.

> Most people who live (and vote) in Santa Cruz prefer to be in a low density area. While I understand that some people actually like to live in denser cities, the majority prefer some space and privacy.

Sure, there's nothing wrong with that. What _is_ unreasonable is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone without a sufficiently large bag of money from moving to Santa Cruz to try and preserve that low density.

> Places like Santa Cruz have never had any real intentional urban planning, so building a lot of additional housing is going to overload the infrastructure. They would need to upgrade all the utilities, build more schools, and completely revamp the transportation system.

I don't see how this is a valid argument against densification. It's not as if the current infrastructure in Santa Cruz was just lying around when people got there. Every growing population center has had to deal with expanding infrastructure to match. This isn't some novel, unsolvable problem.

> Good luck convincing any long-term Santa Cruz residents that they should sacrifice their quality of life and live in the middle of a construction zone for years for the sake of reducing someone else's rent.

Why should they get to decide? Why are their preferences so much more important than those of poorer or newer residents?

While some comments have pointed out that the population has increased, that doesn't actually matter. Because what's being discussed here is an increase in demand for housing in a specific city.

Even if the country's population stayed the same, an increase of people wanting to move to Santa Cruz will drive up demand for housing in Santa Cruz. When you have sustained increases in demand over multiple decades but local governments that block any and all attempts at constructing housing supply to match, you get the ballooning prices you see now. That there is plenty of housing supply in Nowheresville, Nebraska is of little use to the people who can't afford to live in Santa Cruz.

You are effectively just proposing an enormous tax (read: price increase) on renters, which seems like the exact opposite of what needs to be achieved. I would support completely repealing prop 13 though.

Demonizing landlords, developers, and property investment firms at best does nothing and at worst actively makes the housing situation worse by further restricting supply. No amount of disincentives to property ownership will solve the core, fundamental problem that _there is not enough housing_. Any solution that doesn't increase supply is no solution at all.

> The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is

There's no good reason that Santa Cruz should specifically stay the way it was 50 years ago or whatever. Personally, I would have liked for Santa Cruz to remain the way it was before people came and tore up all the nature to build a bunch of suburbs, but I can't get what I want either. Culture is inherently ever-changing; Santa Cruz may be _different_ in 50 years if densification and growth was allowed but I don't see how it would be somehow not be Santa Cruz.

There are real, severe economic effects from trying to freeze a city in an arbitrary point in time. At some point the well-being of real actual people needs to be prioritized over the aesthetic preferences and property values of a few NIMBYs. Especially when those aesthetic preferences essentially boil down to hating multi-story apartments and public transit.

I think humans have demonstrated time and time again that densely constructed cities are a desirable place to live. Are there some people that would leave if these cities started loosening zoning and allowing dense construction? Sure - not everyone wants to live in a big city. But I would argue that the net change in population would still be massively positive.

Besides, why should existing homeowners get a monopoly on deciding what kind of city Santa Cruz should be? If there is a desire for dense housing, then dense housing will get filled. If you're right that people moving to these cities want suburbia then one would expect new multi-story apartments to go empty. But that's clearly not what happens.

I'm not disagreeing that land can be a good investment for that reason (though psychically knowing which bits of land will increase in desirability in the future is not trivial).

I _am_ disagreeing with your assertion that "there is a certain amount of delusion in expecting any static resource to meet monotonically increasing amounts of demand". Increasing the efficiency with which you use a resource is, in fact, an excellent way to make a static resource meet an increasing amount of demand.

> instead of building an arbitrarily tall building, you band together with the other land owners and implement something called zoning that restricts how high buildings can be

AFAIK this isn't the actual origin of restrictive American zoning policy, but yes I see your point. However, effective NIMBYism requires that small groups of zealous locals be able to control construction in the first place. If zoning policy was restructured to be controlled primarily by the federal or state government, it would be impossible for local councils to zone away dense construction the way they do now. Japan is a practical example of a country that does zoning in exactly this way.

> When does growth stop ? What’s the end-game ?

Why should the growth stop? People are clearly demonstrating a desire to move to these cities. I see no reason why NIMBYs should be allowed to artificially decide that newcomers are not allowed. Growth will simply continue as long as people keep moving in.

Ever since humanity started being able to build upward, I'm not sure this is so relevant. There's more than enough developed land to comfortably house the human race. We're just using it comically inefficiently.

> voters feel it's in their interest to not change things

I mean, in a sense it is. NIMBY-dominated suburbia might be a disaster for the environment, economic growth, and the well-being of newer and poorer residents, but it does an excellent job of keeping homeowners' property values sky-high.

> Santa Cruz since the 70's has been a very environmentally conscious no-growth city

Dense construction with high-quality public transport is a significantly more environmentally-friendly city design than a sea of single-family homes with mandatory car ownership. The latter may be more superficially "natural" - green swaths of suburbia vs. concrete jungles - but it really is only superficial.

> San Jose style growth

San Jose, like the entire Bay Area, is crippled by the exact same rampant NIMBYism and suburban sprawl as Santa Cruz. Not only would a densely constructed San Jose be more environmentally friendly, its economic growth would be _significantly_ higher.

Underneath all the posturing about the environment and "the feel of the community", the only thing NIMBYism protects is high property values and rents.

EDIT:

> natives who resent 5 story huge San Jose style apartment blocks going up in their beautiful city

I'm sorry, _what_? In what universe is a 5 story apartment building huge or unreasonable in one of the most desirable areas to live in the country?

There's nothing inherently impossible about building a dense, thriving city on "a tiny dot of land". I fail to see how the issue is overpopulation and not an abject failure to construct housing in line with the number of people who want to live there.

The regressiveness of sales taxes is fairly irrelevant since the government can simply perform direct redistribution to achieve any desired level of progressivity.

On HN, VCs are either ruthless short-term profit extracting machines or overly optimistic clowns investing in hopelessly unprofitable companies on the promise of future growth, depending entirely on the point currently being made.

The EPI's numbers are wrong/misleading for a few reasons.

- The productivity and compensation graphs are often inflation-adjusted using incomparable deflators. Productivity is measured using a GDP inflator (which includes investments) whereas compensation is measured using a CPI deflator (which only includes consumer products). CPI is historically higher[1] which means compensation is artificially being deflated more than productivity.

- The most well-known graph from the EPI[2] shows productivity for all workers but shows compensation for only 80% of workers, with the provided reason being to exclude high earners like management and executives. Which, sure I guess, but surely the two metrics should be kept consistent.

If you correct for these errors you end up finding a productivity/compensation gap that is much smaller than the EPI claims, though notably not zero. The EPI themselves have a figure that includes all workers and uses matching deflators ([3], figure C, "Real producer average hourly consumption") so perhaps some of the blame here is on readers.

I think this BLS paper on the subject[4] is well worth a read. An interesting result they found is that the industry with the greatest productivity/compensation gap is...computing. Probably not the jobs people usually imagine when they think of stagnating pay.

1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/comparing-the-cpi-...

2. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

3. https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...

4. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...

Real compensation has tracked with productivity gains quite nicely, though a growing gap did start to emerge in 2008. https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...

Two things that _are_ real issues are

- Compensation includes benefits, and much of the increase in compensation has been eaten up by healthcare costs. This means wages haven't increased nearly as much.

- There is a growing gap in productivity inequality within labor which has led to growing income inequality. Those productivity and income increases have disproportionately gone to the upper percentiles of workers.

> It's parroted because it's make sense. Every 'imperfection' of an economists idea has led to further concentration of capital in the hands of incumbents.

Has it? Are you talking about actual economics research or conservative politics wrapping itself in free market fundamentalism disguised as economics? It's understandable but endlessly frustrating how politics has convinced the public that economics is a bunch of libertarian nonsense.

In reality, economists actually skew significantly left of center (by US standards): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2007...

> Any economic thought a bit further left than left-of-center gets quickly deemed "not economics."

I would encourage you to listen to actual economics experts and academics, not right-wing hacks dressed in economic cosplay. Despite their posturing, libertarians and free-market fundamentalists are just as divorced from economic reality as anyone else.

Economists in the US actually skew significantly Democrat[1] and surveys of economists on various topics generally show left-of-center leanings[2]. It's worth noting though that the political leaning of an economist need not indicate the quality of their research and plenty of good results have come from economists with atypical views.

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2007...

2. https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/

> Economics is the lies told by some middle class assholes with a degree and/or credential that get paid just enough by upper class assholes to trick low class rubes.

Why does nonsense like this get parroted so much? Economics is as much a science as any other social science. Which is to say that it's certainly imperfect and is subject to social problems surrounding science (e.g. the replication crisis), but it's still very much a science. Obviously it's an evolving field with many areas of disagreement among experts, but what science isn't? Plenty of economic principles/models have strong predictive power and broad consensus from economists.

As for your (apparent) critique, economics currently isn't very good at long-term (especially macroeconomic) forecasting. But then science isn't great at predicting weather or earthquakes long term, yet we don't dismiss those fields as lies propagated by the elite. This isn't a defense of Moody's or anything - they may well have ignored the risks of mortgage-backed securities for financial gain, and I can't speak to the accuracy of their podcast.

But your argument seems no different than claims that because pharmaceutical companies have lied and caused harm in the name of profits, the entire field of medicine is nothing but lies and propaganda and we should throw it out and switch to curing cancer with juice cleanses.