snrplfth

Economics is a science the same way climatology is a science, or ecology is a science. While you can fairly accurately determine what will happen on very small scales on short time spans (microeconomics, in short), questions about what will happen on larger scales over longer time spans get exponentially more difficult as you scale up, since the system is so complex and so difficult to measure. It doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, it just means that there needs to be some epistemological humility there.

And contrary to popular belief, economists would generally agree that certain facts have established themselves and been agreed upon. For example, subjective value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

This is an essential insight of economics, and one that was not really systematically grasped until recently (and still not grasped by the majority of the public.) It is as close to true as a sociological/ecological thesis can be, and is almost universally accepted. But because it is so accepted, you don't hear much about it.

What you're referring to is the Laffer curve - based on the observation that, at both 0% and 100% marginal tax rates, no tax revenue will be collected (none at 0% because no tax, essentially none at 100% because of disincentive.) That means that, in between those two end-points, there has to be a curve of some shape showing the total revenue collected, with a peak (or peaks) somewhere on it where revenue is maximized. The discussion is about where this peak is, and how the curve is shaped. To say "does lowering income taxes increase revenue" is an incomplete question: lower from what rate? Under what macroeconomic conditions? At what overall national wealth level? Interacting with what other taxes? Considering what conditions in capital markets? Etc, etc. Teasing out these huge numbers of other factors is the challenge of economic study, and why so many seemingly "simple questions" are unanswered: because they're not actually simple.

Exactly. It's like how I keep seeing people accusing "economists" (usually as an undefined group) with being concerned with "justifying the status quo". This, despite most economists having frequent, major disagreements with common current policies in many areas. What it tells me is that they're probably not really looking at the field as a whole.

It's the trouble with people making equivalences between "a particular person calling themselves an economist" and "economics". There are hundreds of thousands of people with economics degrees, it is trivially easy to find one who says what you want to hear. But then, that economist's words are often taken to reflective of economics as an entire field of study - regardless of the reasoning behind it, or how many other economists actually agree. So most economists may have totally sensible reasons for supporting Policy A, but when one dissenting economist supports Policy Not-A, the "consensus view" gets ignored. I don't know why this is. Maybe because people feel competent to judge economic reasoning in a way that they don't with other fields (and which might lead them to seek more opinions.)

The trouble is that economists, of whatever theoretical school (well, except Marxians who are rather different) usually are asked to weigh in on the issues that are not well-investigated and where considerable disagreement exists. Basic concepts like supply and demand, and subjective value, are taken for granted by economists, even though they're the things that the average layperson does not understand and really should. The genuinely important insights of economics are too rarely discussed, while the controversies get all the airtime - so of course what we hear is the non-reproducible, opinion-driven stuff.

I'm not saying "all parking has the same externalities" - obviously, the first parking spot at a house has different impacts than the tenth. And of course people can do creative things with parking lots. I never said that they couldn't. What I am saying is that mandated parking, above what property owners want to provide, is a deadweight loss and can't be ignored. And, as is common in many suburbs, when parking and roads is frequently one-quarter of total land use, we have to consider that this could have a significant impact.

If what you desire is a walkable or Main-Street-y type urban form, you have to tackle parking minimums. Likewise if you want compact row housing and multi-storey apartments. If you don't want those things, that's fine, no problem. But if you do, you should consider that the dense urban form of older downtowns and main streets is basically impossible to build with current parking regulations.

Well, a lot of it originated around street parking. When cars were becoming very popular and common, they would generally be parked on the street. Of course, since most street parking spaces were not metered (that is, free parking) this meant that parking was constantly scarce. Huge parking congestion, conflict over spaces, etcetera. Even where the parking was metered, the price was usually set too low (since it was owned by municipalities, with no incentive to maximize revenue). So street parking was still congested everywhere, but the straightforward solution of just raising the price of street parking was too unpopular for most cities.

This led, mostly post-1940s, to urban planners requiring homes, businesses and offices to have a minimum amount of parking. However, the way they usually determined the "appropriate minimum" was to estimate the maximum probable use: measuring the busiest day of the year at a shopping mall, or requiring one parking space per bedroom in a house, etcetera. This basically ensured that, no matter where you go, there's almost always parking available. However, this also means that most parking is never used. The secondary effect of this means that everything becomes surrounded by large amounts of parking, causing everything to be further apart, making driving much more appealing. Also, people become very accustomed to free parking, so anywhere that there is a parking shortage, they demand not better pricing, but more mandatory supply. In the US at least, you will typically only pay for parking in areas built before 1940.

But it's not necessarily US-centric. While the US tends to have the most extreme parking minimums, they're common all over the world, from England to Malaysia.

Most of the problems of resident-permit systems come from the fact that they are inconstantly enforced, or that no spots are reserved, so that people arrive in an area where they have permits but cannot find a spot. This is a problem in the design of the particular resident-permit system - it does not mean that all such systems will fail. And, to me, resident-permits is indeed second-best to a system where the prices for parking are allowed to float, to balance demand with supply (and residents can be reimbursed by some share in the parking revenues.)

The only real problem with zero parking minimums is the possibility that people will park in places that other people were hoping to use (for parking, driving, biking, etc.) But all that means is that either rights have been unclearly assigned (as in street parking that doesn't officially belong to anybody), or a scarce good has been underpriced (as in 'free street parking' that's always full.) So, just assign clear rights, or adjust the price until there's free spots.

To me, it seems totally fair that the people who use parking should own it or pay for it (which are really the same thing). Why mandatorily bundle parking with other things if people don't want it?

Well, there's a number of solutions. You can tie the properties to particular street locations, like immediately in front of their house. You can give parking permits to local residents, and disallow visitor parking in some or all areas. You can turn it into metered parking, for which local residents are reimbursed some or all of their costs (or from which they receive a share of the local parking fees.) You could even turn it into neighbourhood-owned "parking co-ops" where neighbours in an area determine the price and can trade shares in the co-op.

I mean, there's a large, obvious middle ground of solutions in between "nobody can park on the street ever" and "anybody can park on the street for free at any time". There are many options; you can ration it by price, by local ownership, or some other mechanism, quite easily. Indeed, almost everywhere in the city I live in where people rely on street parking, there's a resident-permit system. So, in effect, when people buy houses on that street, they're paying to buy a "share" of its parking too.

I live in a metro area of 6.5 million people. The level of condo/apartment tower construction is huge, and is the majority of housing growth in the region. Developers demonstrably do construct parking - even expensive-to-build underground parking - but generally they do not demand to build more than they need. Recently a tower was finished, directly above a subway station, without any dedicated parking for 400+ units. All the units sold, no problem, because those buyers don't have or want cars. Other towers are built with parking, but frequently the minimum required. Indicating that it's not in high demand for that tower.

The cost of building a parking space doesn't evaporate just because it's required by the government. And builders will include parking if it's in sufficient demand, just as they include any other amenity in their buildings.

That's how these kinds of regulations frequently get ratcheted up.

A: "It's nice to have lots of parking available everywhere! Let's make it mandatory."

B:"But now everything is far apart, and I need a car to do anything."

A:"Hm, good point. Well, then we will make sure there's even more parking than anybody ever needs, so it doesn't cost you anything to park anywhere."

B:"What about letting the market decide?"

A:"The market? Why do you hate the poor?!"

Hugely. It's possible to build extremely tall buildings in certain specific areas of Manhattan (and New York in general, like in Downtown Brooklyn), but most of the city is "maxed out" to its zoning - that is, the tallest building that can be legally built is already there. Indeed, in many places, the existing buildings are taller than the zoning code allows - so if you demolished an old building, you'd have to build a shorter one in its place!

If it's structured parking on a difficult grade, that's actually a totally plausible price, no cozy cost-inflating required. Recall that you're not just building the area of each parking space, but all the aisles and space leading up to them, and that it has to be built out of reinforced materials to carry the weight. Standard aboveground parking garage spaces frequently run into $60k+ apiece.

I think sfall means "cost to the public purse". It's like any minimum requirement that the government sets - it imposes costs, but doesn't require the raising of taxes, so it's easier to do politically.

It's not hard to enforce the rule "don't park on places marked as not-for-parking". In fact it's quite easy. The problem is mainly that nobody tries actually enforcing them with sufficient strength, because they get pushback. In my city, they were having huge problems with parking on the sidewalk, in bike lanes, during no-street-parking times, etcetera. How'd they solve it? First they started giving out $120 tickets. Then they started doing immediate towings on the arterial streets. Amazingly, people suddenly learned not to park on the street when and where they weren't supposed to.

>Sooooooooo private security firms for law enforcement? Pretty sure we saw how that worked out in Iraq with Blackwater. No thank you.

A firm hired by the government, using taxpayer dollars, to carry out government orders, is not a good example of anything an anarchocapitalist is proposing.

> So you only use 2.5 miles of a highway to get to and back from work - right? Should you pay for the entire highway or just the parts you use?

It would be bundled together the same way other goods are, determined by the balance between ease of charging and the scale of the good. Maybe a road company would charge a flat fee, or maybe a per-mile fee, or maybe a fee varying by congestion. All these things can be and are done now with toll roads. Road companies would have to determine the optimal scale, just like any other company.

Because if your building catches on fire, the people inside could die and it could spread to other buildings. Classic externality problem. Nobody is going to die because the owners of buildings get to choose how much parking their building needs, any more than they will if they get to decide how many bathrooms their house has.

Then just enforce the existing rules against parking on the street! This is not difficult. Indeed, it's easier than trying to centrally plan out exactly how much parking each house and business needs.

The problem is that the requirements are so high, and demand the creation of so much parking (indeed, parking lots for commercial uses are generally required to be larger than the buildings they serve) that the price for parking is driven down to $0. Most parking lots in the suburban US fill up either never, or on a single day per year.

The point is that forcing businesses to have excess parking imposes a real cost on them that they make up with prices increased over what they otherwise would have been.

All of those things are substantial factors. Building codes are another big one - most of them have little to do with safety or health, but rather "buildings must be of such-and-such minimum niceness, and if you can't afford that, too bad, go somewhere else." And everybody standardizes on the same building codes, and pretty soon there is no "somewhere else" to go to.

But it's a large deadweight on the economy. It requires the production of considerable amounts of parking that is never, or almost never, used or needed by anybody. It makes parking easier only by hiding the cost of parking in everything else, in a wholly regressive way. And it's not a "commons problem" like air pollution - it's just the government deciding that a particular private good is nice, and everybody should be forced to provide it. It's silly.

Maybe, maybe not. But isn't that for the businesses to decide, depending on their needs? As it stands, large numbers of businesses (and residences, etc.) are required to have more parking than they ever need at any point. How does that make sense? Why can't the owners of a property determine how much it's worth to them?

But you said it yourself - the way to solve the externality is to forbid them from parking on the street. How is that so difficult? Rather than the government trying to plan the optimal amount of parking for every possible time and use and density, they can just say, "don't park on the street. Figure out your own parking requirements."

Sure, if you want to sell. But if only some of the people want to sell, then the problem of non-compensated externalities arises again. It's a classic collective action problem arising mostly from the fact that things like air rights, street space, and so on, are barely tradable.

Yes, Japan got it much righter than most.

Which is one reason why condo ownership is so ubiquitous there.

Yeah, it's hard to get this across to people who live in a city where it feels like supply is increasing fast (because it's in huge, highly visible towers), but as a percentage of the total stock, is growing quite slowly.

I lived in Vancouver for a while, and though people were totally on board with the idea that increases in demand for housing would push up prices, they were highly skeptical of the idea that increased supply could decrease prices.

I understand the response, certainly. But I don't think it's going to make housing (rental or ownership) substantially more available or cheaper in Vancouver - it'll just shuffle a few people around. And rich people don't just evaporate because you limit housing supply; they can arbitrage their way around most of these limits pretty easily.

The problem is that there's no effective way with (currently constituted) zoning law to 'trade' the externalities of density. You can't compensate your neighbours for shadows or traffic or other impacts in exchange for being able to build larger. So the choice faced by most residents is:

1) Acquiesce to high-density development, and receive zero compensation, or

2) Fight high-density development, and probably get zoning laws imposed at minimal personal cost.

You can see why this setup incentivizes people to push hard for "static neighbourhood" zoning law.

The logic is that zoning makes for a housing shortage, which means it's profitable simply to hold on to properties without renting them, because the rent would be such a small portion of the investment gains. If supply increased, and moderated the price increases, then people would rent out more because they wouldn't be seeing huge year-on-year home value increases.

Vancouverism-as-high-density only applies to the small downtown area, and tiny slices of land near transit stations. Nearly all the city's area is single-family homes on tenth-acre lots.

Vancouver voters simultaneously want: a) a low-rise, spaced-out city, b) rising property values for people who already own, and c) low home prices for people getting into the market.

If you point out that you can only have two of these three things, you will not have any electoral success there.