snrplfth

Rants about degeneracy get bigger audiences I guess.

> Land is only valuable due to scarcity. You really can't make more of it even if you dig up parts of another bit of land to dump into a bay (like how they made the airport in Tokyo).

Well, the majority of the land extensions in Tokyo (and elsewhere) have generally been created by using the spoils from tunneling. So in this sense, the total land area has indeed been increased with no reduction in area elsewhere.

Secondly, I would say that land isn't valuable "only due to scarcity". Demand matters too. Lots of land on Earth is not in demand for much of anything, because it's not near anything useful to anybody, or has nothing useful upon it. The overwhelming majority of land value is due to the proximity of economically useful things (the aforementioned buildings and infrastructure and so on.)

The reason to have private property in land is because many things are necessarily tied to specific parcels of land. If you don't have private land ownership, then all land-attached investments are insecure. (UPDATE: That is to say, private land-attached investments are insecure.)

> If you own the land in an area by definition you got a monopoly there.[...cut for length...] But that's a special case and it's one that really suggest you read up on when you have free time.

Firstly, this salty suggestion of yours that I need to "read up on" land economics "when I have free time" is pretty unnecessary. I did my reading, six years of it, in the process of two degrees in urban geography/economics. I have been through literally thousands of pages of reading on this subject. Now, you may disagree with me and that's totally fine! But maybe stash the assumptions about what I have and have not done, alright?

To say that someone has a monopoly on land because they own some small amount is to excessively broaden the meaning of the word. A monopoly doesn't exist in a situation where there is a wide range of substitutable goods available from multiple owners/suppliers. The fact that a good is limited in supply does not make any owner of a small fragment of the total supply a monopolist. And people are mobile - the fact that land is generally immobile doesn't mean that people are unable to exercise choice, since they can do so through movements, even quite small ones.

Centralized land ownership is almost never a case of corporations or private individuals - indeed, it's usually the case that the largest land ownership centralizers are municipalities and other governments. Many of the reasons that slums exist is due not to the private ownership of land, but other factors: rent controls drive down returns from buildings, making upkeep uneconomic, high taxes overconsume the returns in a similar way, insecure property rights lead to underinvestment (this last one is most common in low-income countries.) The private land owners of most cities are usually huge in number - competition does exist, and monopoly, at least due to private owners, typically does not.

I'll further note that while land is, in a sense, limited in supply, the services provided by land are much less so. This is the whole reason behind urban density and building upwards (and down). Land ownership is just a prerequisite to these investments.

> 1. There's no such thing as a "special" law. There's just laws of certain types.

I was referring, apparently too obliquely, to things like patent law, which I agree are different. (Since by copying an idea, one does not seize or destroy the original.)

>2. And of those people, does it seem logical to allow them impede the utilization their capital when they leave it fallow or otherwise try to depress wages while utilizing it as a practice of employment?[...cut for length...] It can be as simple as a cooperative shared among members of the neighborhood or the city.

Firstly, I don't think "leaving fallow" is something easily defined or decided. Of course, the original "fallow" was to let the land rest after a harvest - indeed, it was an investment (foregone consumption in expectation of future returns.) But even land owned "speculatively" and appearing to be fallow may be serving an important purpose. For example, let's say I might be building out a large area one piece at a time. So first, I'll be extending and improving infrastructure. I'd like to get the maximum benefit of that investment, though, so I'll buy up a large amount of land around it ahead of time, even though I'll not be building anything on it for a while. Or, to give another example, let's say I'm an investor hoping that housing demand will cause land in an area to become more valuable. So I'll buy it up and wait, hoping to build on it later - what the sellers get is money now, which is more valuable to them than their expected money later. What I'm doing is taking a risk - it might pan out, it might not - but by selling to me, the previous owners transferred that risk to me in exchange for a known upfront payout. These are perfectly reasonable things to do, even if they look like "land speculation".

And "equal access" is of course not guaranteed by collective ownership. There's nothing about a collective that ensures that its capital will give good returns. And if you've got things on the scale of a neighbourhood or a city, then naturally some neighbourhoods or cities will have much better capital than others. Then all that happens is that some localities are wealthy and some are not - "equality" is only within the cooperative. Yet if cooperatives aren't fixed and mandatory, the failing ones will just evaporate and be bought out. And you're back to inequality.

>Then you should have no issues with paying for a land value tax (which would be lower than a property tax in most cases) for that use.

And I'm not objecting in principle to a land value tax. It's perfectly compatible with private land ownership, although I'm a bit skeptical of it being a particularly effective or progressive tax. But that's neither here nor there.

>What if publicly traded corporations fails, as they will? [...cut for length...] I think you need to study this part of the matter on your own because honestly HN isn't the place to go indepth with alternative incorporation schemes and laws.

I have nothing against cooperatives at all, they're a perfectly reasonable ownership structure, albeit one disadvantaged by a number of tax and liability laws. I have been a member of a number of cooperatives, and have done a reasonable amount of research on them. (Again - your assertion that I "need to study this on my own" is rude and a non-argument.)

What I was referring to was your argument that land and "capital" should all be owned by cooperatives. (Perhaps I should have said "Norea-Armozel-model cooperatives" or something.) What I was arguing is that, if people in these cooperatives are free to leave them, free to start them, free to exclude non-current-members, and free to be in a one-person cooperative, then you're right back at private ownership of land and capital. The only way you can ensure continued collective ownership of capital is by blocking off these avenues of choice.

>No. Just, no. The burger I'll eat today for lunch is no more capital than the notebook I use to write my notes on. Capital are goods which can directly make more goods. Think ore, timber, machines, patents, corporate assets (money, stocks, etc). These are capital. Individual's personal cars, homes, and skills aren't capital by any definition from any school of economics that I'm at least aware of (there might one but I seriously doubt it's considered orthodox).

The capital/consumption distinction is not one inherent to the good itself, though. It's a useful economic concept but is different from the public/private/club/common distinction. What I was saying is that this distinction is not a hard-and-fast one, but more like the distinction between a tropical storm and a hurricane - a line you draw somewhere for the purposes of analysis.

You say, "capital are goods which can directly make more goods". Well, take that private vehicle for example. Now, transportation is needed somehow to get the workers to a factory - it is essential to the production process. So at first the employees drive their own vehicles. Then, let's imagine that the factory owners have the bright idea of starting a company carpool van service, to cut down on parking needed. They buy a bunch of vans and start bringing employees to work in them. The service of transportation is still rendered, but now the vans are "capital goods" because they are used to make the factory's operation possible. It's still a vehicle - did anything change about the good itself? Not really, no.

I mean, are kitchenwares capital goods or not? They certainly directly make more goods - but does that mean that all kitchenwares should be collectively owned? What if somebody starts making and selling food in their own home? A dentist owns many tools which produce a good/service - clean and healthy teeth. They seem to be capital. But many of these same tools, providing quite similar services, in people's homes, are not capital? (As the old question goes, "do I get to own my own toothbrush?") Beds, walls, and bathrooms, when in a hotel, produce a good/service. But those same goods in the home are not capital? (And what about BnBs?) Capital is distinguished from consumption goods just as a helpful measurement category; the goods - and their potential to be owned - do not change.

> If you actually look at paper after paper the core data is horrible or there are simple lapses in judgement about how their research is structured. You sit in graduate class criticizing and laughing at some of this but that's the research that makes the world go round. A lot of our core assumptions are less about data and more about intuitive arguments[....]The real issue is there is nobody but the intellectuals to criticize this bad research...

Which is why, I think, most people outside of the intellectual/journalistic class are just tuning out and losing trust. So much research (especially in this day of internet-powered independent investigators) is so obviously meaningless guff, that people are justifiably apathetic about anything the academic intellectual class thinks.

And they're quite right to do so, in most cases. Not that others necessarily have all the answers, but at least most people don't pretend to the kind of nonsense expertise in evidence at the universities.

Well, I was kind of joking. People who call it "regulatory capture" of course understand the concept. To most people it's counterintuitive and barely grasped.

Yeah, I wish he would just stop calling his blog "the Antiplanner" if he's not going to actually, you know, oppose planning. Ah well.

Or, heck, they don't think about the published excuse at all. That's the real knotty problem - most people don't really have the time or information or inclination to care, so regulatory capture just keeps ratcheting up because each new step "seems reasonable".

If only Randal O'Toole were actually a libertarian. He claims to dislike the government, but he pretty much loves government urban planning. Not sure why he's at Cato. (For more political diversity, I guess?)

Also he calls himself a "pragmatist", not a "true libertarian". Take that as you will.

"Regulatory capture is a common..." True!

"...and well understood phenomenon." Oh, if only it were so.

> The road analogy is specifically dealing with the idea that land itself can be an exclusive good and thus individuals who naturally exclude others (someone's home, factory, farm, etc are the property on the land but not the land itself) should cover for the loss through the exclusion. Allowing people to exclude others but also to extract rents through mere passage or occupancy without actually producing any value (land speculation and slum lords are an example of this).

I don't see why land is special. Sure, it has a few peculiar properties, but it's not that different. Land has value for all sorts of reasons - perhaps it has fertile soil (which must be stewarded), perhaps it has valuable buildings or infrastructures near or on it (which must be built and maintained), perhaps it has certain climactic advantages - but this doesn't mean that anybody who owns some has a "monopoly" on it, any more than the owner of any other thing has a "monopoly" on that particular object. There's a limited number of, say, aluminum atoms on earth, does that mean that anyone who owns some aluminum is a monopolist?

I mean, I can go buy a swathe of desert and put a fence around it, it doesn't mean I've got a monopoly on anything. Land ownership - especially urban land ownership, where most of the value is - is hugely fragmented, there's no monopoly to be found.

I exclude others from my home, and the land it's on. Why should I be able to exclude people from my house legitimately, but not the attached land components?

>If you have a monopoly on the capital goods in question then you are a rentier.

What capital goods do people actually have a monopoly on, though, which has not been granted to them by special law? Any capital good you can think of (outside patent or copyright) can be, and usually is, owned by many people.

> Meaning that one with title can exclude others from its use even if they're not using it or even care to use it ever (again land speculators and patent trolls are a great example of this).

How do you define use, though? (Patent trolls we've covered.) What if I leave land fallow for the pure enjoyment of it, or for natural restoration? What if I use it in a way that others don't like? Who decides? A "land speculator" is investing in the possibility of future returns - what if the "speculator" intends to build houses on a lot, but is still trying to raise money to do so? What's the difference between a land buyer employed by a homebuilder, and a freelance one? Is it only speculation if a profit is returned? (I can speculate on land for years and make no money.) Speculation is nearly impossible to clearly define.

> Cooperatives in themselves are a union among workers thus you can't elevate yourself above fellow workers in the cooperative in terms of economic primacy. All have their say in equal capacity (as in shares != more votes).

Great, what if a cooperative fails, as they will? Those people will have to go find new or other cooperatives to work for. Will all cooperatives be required to take those people in and give them an equal say, even though they've not contributed the same amount of time and may have helped cause a failure? Can you fire people from a cooperative if they're no good? If everyone else in your cooperative besides you leaves, can you still have a single-person cooperative?

> I think the onus is on you to show me how a market needs a capital owner and not the other way around.....You're not a capitalist either just because you decide to use your car to drive Uber fares part time because the act of work itself isn't excluding others from working (i.e. being Uber drivers themselves). A capitalist by definition can and will extract rents from capital and exclude others from its use (be it labor, machines, factories, ideas, or land) via the State or equivalent institutions.

Because all goods are essentially capital - or rather, all capital is essentially just goods. There's no obvious distinction. Let me recast your example: "You're not a capitalist either just because you decide to use your garage workshop to build chairs part time because the act of work isn't excluding others from working (i.e. making chairs themselves.)" And you can expand that - "You're not a capitalist because you decide to use your factory to create steel...."

If you own a car you're excluding others from using that car - but you're not inherently a monopolist rentier, because others can make and own cars. If you own a factory you're excluding others from using that factory - but you're not inherently a monopolist rentier, because others can make and own factories.

Exactly. See also: "trade deficit/surplus" and "value". Economists use all sorts of jargon that really does not convey to the layman what it actually means.

> "the US have grown to a country based on consumption, spending and borrowing, but not on producing anything."

Eh, not really. Services and other tertiary industries are just as much "production" as a factory or a mine is. The US government, and US citizens, are not much more indebted than average. You don't "run out of money" by buying foreign goods.

It's not necessarily always easy or painless. I certainly didn't claim it was. But you can't really grow the economy without introducing labour-saving devices that change the composition of jobs. Economies didn't have 90% of people working on the farm because they preferred it to anything else; it was that way because it had to be - the productivity of labour was so low. Likewise, if we want the economy to continue to grow at reasonable rates, it must be understood that job change is part of that.

> Therefore, I ask why do you feel it's logical to continue down the path of further monopolizations which inevitably harm the economy as a whole and individuals in their pursuit of material betterment?

Why do you assume I'm in favour of a particular form of patent law? (Let alone any patent law?) I'm not (though it's not a super-strongly held prior), and I think that this is perfectly consistent with supporting a very market-based system. I think a no-patents system would probably be more innovative and competitive than what we have now.

>But if you demanded a toll for a stretch of road that happens to be out front of your house that would be capital and it would be rent seeking since the act of ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing your part of the road.

Are you talking about somebody charging a toll on a road they don't own and don't maintain? Because that's not what I'm talking about or proposing.

I mean, who built the road? Someone has to build it and maintain it. It must be refreshed constantly with new investment. It's also not a monopoly on anything - no more than the door in a house is a monopoly on entry into that house. And "ambulation isn't improved by the mere act of crossing a road"? I think roads (and sidewalks, and boardwalks) very much improve ambulation and transportation of all kinds. Building a road and then tolling it is not rentiership in any sense.

Capital is not a fixed pool of items or goods. Owners of capital are not inherently rentiers. They can be, in many cases, but that's not because they own capital.

> It's not gigantism because it's not done at a national level. I support radical localism.

Well, now you're back to, essentially, private property. Some "radically local" entities are going to be more successful than others, and become more prosperous, making membership in them more valuable. They will have to trade between themselves, making prices and property (even if collective) necessary. And unless you're prepared to keep people in their locality permanently, you're going to see localities that change size radically. And if you're going to keep localities of a similar size, who enforces that? And if they do, you're back to gigantism.

But capital is dynamic and ever-changing. Also, a huge amount of it, quite possibly a majority in how you measure it, is in human skills and knowledge.

Capital is not a pool of objects that, once made, forever provide a return. All machines wear out or are obsoleted, buildings require maintenance or become badly located, people change throughout their lives, products and preferences change, making old capital lose value and new capital emerge. Making a "common trust" of capital changes none of this, and it cannot be comprehensibly divided into shares.

And the personal-property/capital distinction is flawed. Is a car personal property? Does it matter if I use it to commute to work, or to deliver pizzas? There's essentially no comprehensible criteria to distinguish personal property from capital property.

And I really don't see how "placing all ownership of capital in a common trust" is not gigantism. It's the most total gigantism, the ultimate monopoly. Whosoever operates that trust really is the king of all.

Generally we don't, and really can't, know ahead of time which new work will be invented and done in the future. That is the point of entrepreneurialism, and of a market more broadly. What I'm pointing out is that it has consistently been the case that people have declared that, because they could not imagine what new kinds of work would exist in the future, that therefore automation would throw people into permanent unemployment. This has consistently been mistaken.

Much work could be automated - but automation is not free. Sure, you can imagine all sorts of work being automated away - but is it worth the cost? In what locations? For what applications? All the time or just some of the time?

The most common way of adjusting to automation is not just to add new value to an old "job title", but to move into new fields entirely. A farmer today has very different responsibilities to a farmer a hundred years ago - but there's also far, far fewer people farming at all. Most people who do things that have been automated will do things that simply weren't done before, or were done very little.

That's been the "theory" for a long time - say, the threshing machine will mean that farmers will be unemployed, the powered sawmill will put all the sawyers out of work, the spreadsheet program will put all the accountants out of work.

The trouble with that theory is that people invent and move into new services and jobs. Sure, the old work was automated, but that just means that people can redeploy their labour into an work that simply wasn't being done before.

Why doesn't this mean that resource-owners will control everything? Because "resources" are transformed by technology in the same way. Things that were previously not thought of as resources, become so. Secondly, one still imagines competition. There is no "he who owns the resources", there's many, and as long as they have to compete for the custom of the other 95% of the economy, they can't control, or coordinate to control, much of anything.

But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more.

When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance.

The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.

Well, I take issue with the "know it when you see it" characteristic of the piece. Eco accuses fascists, rightly I think, of making no clear distinctions, of thinking in impressions. That's why I'm annoyed that he seems to give up on distinctions himself in characterizing fascism.

I find the "social class" analysis just as unsatisfactory. You might usefully characterze these different tendencies by their rhetoric, but if you insist on looking at them as an "actual implementation", I tend to find that they're just the same side of the same coin - a small state political class enormously empowered, and all other "classes" being simply categories measuring the loyalty and proximity to the state class.

I've read it, thanks. I read it a decade ago and a few times since, back when I was in a semiotics degree program and Eco was a prominently featured thinker. I respect him, but I don't really agree with him on this one.

Sure, he's describing major features of the category of political thinking that he calls fascism - but with the purpose of seeing it coming and doing something about it. He says: "Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world." His article is a rubric for identifying its features. Yet to say that fascism may have any of the enumerated features, in almost any combination, with drastically varying applications and manifestations, is to construct a category so broad that it is practically useless. It's a recipe for calling, and perceiving, almost everything as being nascently fascistic. We need to make better distinctions than this, I feel.

“These features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

Umberto Eco is a smart guy but that essay is pretty silly. Fascism: anywhere, everywhere, and you can tell it's coming by any number of contradictory and non-definite phenomena.

It's also why so many CEOs get fired with "golden parachutes" - the value of getting rid of them quickly vastly exceeds the amount of money they get as severance.

What's notable is that Northern European economies have among the freest, most "market capitalist" economies on Earth. There's a substantial amount of tax-and-redistribute to them, but very little in the way of economic planning, or actual-socialist communalism. Mostly it's just a large welfare state.

Essentially zero actual economists assert or believe that actual humans in actual economies are, or behave like, homo economicus. Essentially all are aware that it is a limited model, which attempts to approach certain important features of reality, but cannot always do so due to limits on information, comprehension, and subjective values. Meteorology is still a valid field of science even if its models are limited and incomplete. Likewise with economics.

"Economists think homo economicus is literally true" is a ludicrous strawman.

These examples don't actually disprove anything about microeconomics though.

Your example of the fish markets is just a good example of the fact that people have varying marginal utilities of money. Of course people try to get the highest price they can get - taking into account, of course, the time they'll be receiving the money. Obviously people will see if they can raise the price, but they're still in competition with other sellers; the price cannot be raised indefinitely. And it's not always clear whether other factors have changed - things like fish supply and catching are notoriously dependent on the weather, demand for fish varies seasonally and with changing fashions; it's a perishable good with not-super-fungible markets - maybe the prices know something about fish that you don't.

You give the example of super-high pricing for drugs such as the Daraprim case with Martin Shkreli. Note that this market is overseen and hugely, hugely regulated by the FDA, which imposes very lengthy and costly approval processes on drugs (even different manufacturers of off-patent "generics".) More generally, these drugs are on-patent - both of these situations are a de-facto monopoly that grants exactly the kind of economic rents that microeconomics predicts.

Ecommerce pricing also doesn't disprove anything. You could, for example, explain this by other factors, such as that ecommerce warehouses and logistics chains are capacity-limited, so "surge pricing" would make good sense to smooth demand peaks. But that's besides the point, really, because microeconomics would absolutely predict that if people, on average, have a preference for shopping at a particular time, then a seller may attempt to capture this preference in the price. This isn't done in brick-and-mortar retail, since changing the prices hourly would be a huge hassle. But in ecommerce, it's easy, so prices modulate with demand. And stores have always changed their prices over time, it's just that the internet makes it easy to go for a smaller granularity.

Here's a few examples:

- High implicit labour prices. When you add up all the required costs to hire somebody (minimum wage, healthcare costs, payroll taxes, etc.) it's no surprise that there's going to be some portion of the population which can find no work at that price.

- Unnaturally high costs in the most productive areas. Cities with lots of jobs will naturally have high costs, but a lot of regulations, like zoning law and building codes essentially put a high minimum price on living in particular places. This makes it very hard for people to move to the work.

- Licensing and accreditation. There's tons of jobs (many of them service-sector jobs) that require a license, lots of permits, and often particular kinds of schooling to be able to legally do them.

They've been working on this concept for several years at their Washington state offices. It's just now that we're seeing hard details.

Surge pricing, how does it work.

I think maybe it has to do with what people are asked about, and with the level of uncertainty. Most questions that people would ask of a CS degree holder are probably specific technical ones, with fairly well-defined answers. But with economics, everybody wants answers to the sweeping, big-picture questions that are very hard to answer definitively (people who say, "we just don't know the answer, and here's why" tend not to be terribly popular in the media.) People are also, I feel, not well-informed about the basics of economics, so that they can take a particular jargon-y or specific statement by an economist out of context and totally misinterpret it. (Imagine: "These data are organized in a tree." "Hah, computer scientists think my laptop is powered by tiny forests!" Yet this is what happens when economists talk about "value" or "cost", or things of that nature.)

Of course this phenomenon does happen in other fields too - think of how often there's an article where "science says x!", when in reality it's just one paper with a tentative conclusion. It just seems particularly common for people to misunderstand economics.

The "rational actor" is just a model, only applicable to limited situations, and acknowledged to be so. It's a specifiable model against which to test hypothoses. This rather shopworn critique - "humans aren't like idealized rational actors!" - is based on the implication that classical-type economists think that the model is fully congruent with reality. They don't! And furthermore, they wouldn't agree that "corporations" (hey, why not unincorporated entities too?) can form themselves in this way. They recognize the limitations of information, incomplete knowledge of preferences, and limited foresight and prediction - and these apply no less to groups of people as they do to individuals. If you tried to suggest in a classical-school economics environment that corporations can actually, in real life, form themselves into idealized rational actors, you'd probably give them gut-busting laughing fits.

The disagreement is not whether Laffer curves exist, in a basic sense - nobody disagrees that there is some kind of revenue curve (and it changes over time in response to various factors.) However: the Laffer curve does not necessarily say what the optimal tax rate is, though - just what the revenue maximizing rates are. And these are not the same thing - do not conflate the two! The reason Laffer curves were considered significant was because some economists said that some marginal tax rates were on the right-hand side of the peak - that is, by lowering these high marginal tax rates, the incentive to avoid tax and minimize earnings would be reduced, and therefore the government would collect just as much or slightly more revenue total. What the optimal tax rate is, depends on a lot of other things - like the other economic factors I just mentioned, as well as what outcomes you want to encourage with a particular tax policy. The Laffer curve is just a particular technical description of the situation (and sometimes carelessly associated with Arthur Laffer's personal opinion of where on this curve current policy is located.)

Here's a reasonably representative survey of US economists about the laffer curve: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/laffer-curve

Note what's happening here: most economists either think that a cut in federal income tax rates would lead to higher GDP, or are uncertain/think there's no effect. However, almost all also think that such tax cuts would not increase revenue - so any argument for tax cuts, according to these economists, is not based on the Laffer curve. Indeed, because of where these economists think US income tax rates are on the Laffer curve, they would have to agree, to be consistent, that increasing tax rates would increase revenue, on the margin. Therefore, the "Laffer curve consensus" among US economists is in fact the opposite of what your impression is.

> But the questions aren't going unanswered. Politicians ask and economists do answer questions about tax rates, unemployment rates, interest rates, wage growth... In climatology, at least the basic principles have been tested in laboratories; higher concentration of CO2 in air -> less reflected sunlight -> higher temperature. The Laffer curve theory was never tested in a laboratory, yet it was for decades trotted out as the truth by economists.

Politicians get certain answers to these questions from different economists, but they're definitely live issues in the field itself. Don't confuse the theory that Laffer curves exist - which is not controversial - with the argument that a particular tax regime is on a particular point of the curve - which is more uncertain. Just because you get an answer does not mean the question is definitively concluded.

And you can test the Laffer curve in a lab - but only with small numbers of people in a limited economic context. When you scale it up to a large number of people in a complex economy, the picture is much less clear and more complicated. (Likewise with climatology.) That's why it's hard!

Also, consider the following paper, written around the same time that people first started calling it the Laffer Curve (though the basic idea had been understood well before.): https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/c...

It's by David Henderson for Cato, who's quite in favour of cutting taxes. But rather than jump on the argument as a useful "justification" for doing so, he points out the numerous limitations of the model, and the possibility of unusual Laffer Curve shapes that would mean tax cuts would not "pay for themselves." Again - don't confuse the non-controversiality of the existence of a Laffer curve, with the actual controversy over where, on what kind of a curve shape, current policy is located. (And whether maximizing tax revenue is even the correct policy.)

You're acting as though "economists" are all of a mind on this issue - they aren't. They generally agree on some fundamental analytical tools, but come to a range of answers based on how they use them and what information they have.