Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...
I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
Markets create the illusion of choice between monopolies.
I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.
Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.
You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.
> That objection applies to the other options as well.
True.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.
I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.
Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.
Every system can be captured by wealthy interests. Markets are not unique there. Once in a rare while someone not wealthy captures a system - but they inevitably use that capture to become wealthy so it doesn't really matter.
Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.
"I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own."
Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.
You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.
Why do I care about a trash incinerator? The truth is I don't.
I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
Are you making your own choices?
Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?
To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?
Any industry or economic activity where extractive financialisation takes priority over productive economic activity that delivers human value.
Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.
This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.
Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids.
Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).
An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.
This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones.
Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.
Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.
All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.
Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.
The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.
Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.
You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.
In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.
What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
I wonder if you may be seeing ghosts? At least to me, this sounded so clearly like an authentic human voice, at least the parts I've read (haven't finished yet).
This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.
I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?
Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space"
I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers.
Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
It's more than when minimum wage goes up (which has a similar effect on people at the lowest end of the wage earners - their income goes up by X) the effect is not that food/housing immediately captures all of that X, it captures about 20% of X.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms.
It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it?
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
You can’t just move assets of that scale around without knock-on effects.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
Yes, a UBI (really all government spending) re-allocates demand, either directly through taxes and transfer or by decreasing the purchasing power of the currency through inflation. At any point in time, there is more or less a set amount of productive capacity in the economy, and money is what allows it to be allocated.
one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why.
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.
I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolutions, etc.
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage.
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
> Where are you meant to save retirement money if not the market? Not sure the European model of kicking the can down the road is better..
Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.
No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.
Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
Even the types of games I believe are shifting to less third spaces. Matchmaking is replacing the MMO beginner town where a lot of the socialization happens.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.
Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.
You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.
But your choices are more limited than you might think. Ultimately what's available to you is decided by the economic machinery upstream.
That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.
True.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.
I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.
Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.
Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.
Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.
You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.
I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.
Are you making your own choices?
Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?
To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?
Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.
This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.
Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.
Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.
All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.
Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.
The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.
I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes
It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.
No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.
Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
Heck, I have friends who are slightly younger than me who made durable friendships in League via matchmaking.
I have online friends from matchmaking, but it's certainly much harder. I'm not underestimating it, but my language might have been too strong.
Consider the average young person's discord group.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.