- cross-posted to:
- degrowth@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- degrowth@slrpnk.net
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We operate under the depression-era assumption that per-capita GDP is some kinda gold-standard metric for evaluating how well a country is doing economically. In reality per-capita GDP is just tracking the trash changing hands. We also overemphasize transactionality because of this. It’s somehow much better from an “economic perspective” to have everyone buying new shirts every week even if it’s the same people buying and then tossing the same fast fashion junk in the trash.
When you consider other metrics we could be judged by such as the OP is kinda pointing at here, our country looks way fucking worse on the leaderboard.
We ought to use the measures of the material conditions of our population to drive policy rather than how much currency has changed hands and how many worthless transactions have occurred.
I keep wondering if we have reached or are on the cusp of a post-scarcity society.
It is true that there will never be enough to satisfy the greediest among us. Unless there’s some kind of global revolution this will continue until the end
This concept has a name. Artificial Scarcity.
Related: the idea that everyone needs to work all the time isn’t really true anymore. If we were in like 3000 bce in a small farming village outside Ur, yeah, people gotta pitch in so we don’t get eaten by wildlife, the neighboring tribe, or whatever.
But in 2025ce, where so many jobs have so much filler nonsense? And when the rich can just live on investment income? No, the whole “work or starve” thing isn’t needed anymore.
We should have basic income for all and public housing. Let people pursue what they want. Maybe it’s art. Maybe they just want to take care of the local library. Maybe they just want to be a local barfly that keeps the tavern interesting. Who knows? But wage slavery needs to go.
when the rich can just live on investment income
How do you think they make that money? Primarily off of consumerism. If we all collectively decided to share what we have and stop buying what we don’t need, there could be no passive income, not at the scale it exists today, anyways.
We also need to outlaw landlords. Owning land is not a job and it’s certainly not a business.
I think landlords make a lot of sense for commercially-zoned property, and for residentially there needs to be some way to live somewhere even if you can’t afford the mortgage deposit. So there’s nuance here that needs addressing IMO.
Only raccoons could be owners of land :D
Hard Agree.
Consumerism is used for wealth redistribution.
Real wealth production occurs when machines create work, saving time. Work = money.
I guess? With enough money you can just buy bonds, which sort of depend on consumerism but indirectly. Some municipal bonds return like 5%. 5% of a shit load of money is enough to live on.
Recommendation: the book Bullshit Jobs
Also Graeber’s Debt.
So many of Graeber’s ideas are right on the dot. Those two books helped me understand economics better than fucking Milton Friedman ever could.
I’ve heard of this one. Maybe I’ll check it out.
The downside of reading a lot of depressing non fiction is I increasingly feel like I’m living in a cuckoo clock, and get frustrated with how everyone else seems oblivious and uncaring.
If you want an understanding of the cuckoo clock and how it came to be, I highly recommend you watch the BBC documentary HyperNormalisation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
I want the inside of my house to look like the outside of an insane asylum
We haven’t needed to work since the early 1900s. The labor movement was all about getting people to work less and ensuring everyone is taken care of. Consumerism was invented to fight back and has been winning ever since. People are animals and animals can be manipulated.
First, I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are some devilish details.
Take a look at some pictures of Gary, Indiana. It’s an entire city that’s been mostly abandoned since the collapse of the industry that built it. There are entire boarded up neighborhoods, and some quite fine large, brick houses where wealthy people used to live. It’s all just sitting there. I’m sure that Gary would love to have people start moving back in, and revive the city.
So, say Gary just eminent-domained all those properties, and said to America: you want a house? All you have to do is come, pick one, and move in. You live in it for 5 years, it’s your’s.
The problem is that it costs money to keep up a home. Home maintenance is stupid expensive, and most of these abandoned homes need repairs: new windows, new roofs, new water heaters, plumbing repairs, electrical repairs. Do you have any idea what a new window costs? And even if it’s sweat equity, and you’re able to repair a roof yourself, you still need materials. Where does this money come from?
Are the homeless in California going to move to Gary, IN? Are the homeless in Alabama? There are homeless employed folks, but they’re tied to their locations by their jobs. They’re not moving to Gary.
Finally, it’s a truism that it’s often less expensive to tear down a house in poor condition and build a new one than it is to renovate. If these people don’t have the money to build a new house, how are they going to afford to renovate a vacant one.
The problem is that people need jobs to live in a house (unless someone else is paying for taxes, insurance, and maintenance). And the places with jobs aren’t the places like Gary, that have a abundance of empty homes. All of those empty homes are in inconvenient places, where the industry and jobs they created dried up.
It may be that a well-funded organization could artificially construct a self-sustaining community built on the bones of a dead one. But I think it’s oversimplifying to suggest that you can just take an empty home away from the owner (let’s assume you can) and just stick homeless people in it and assume it’ll work - that, even given a house, they’ll be able to afford to keep it heated, maintained, powered, insured. Shit, even if you given them a complete tax exemption, just keeping a house is expensive.
I’m sure there are some minority of homeless for whom giving an abandoned home in the area they live would solve their problems. And I’m sure that, for a while at least, having a bigger box to live in would be an improvement for many, even if the box is slowly falling apart around them. But I think it’s naive to be angry about the number of empty homes, and that homelessness could be solved by relocating the homeless to where these places are and assigning them a house - whatever state it’s in.
The problem is that people need jobs to live
QFT
Don’t get me started on that one.
We don’t need to move them, there are vacant homes everywhere. Even in San francisco the residential vacancy rate is 6%. The unhoused in San francisco make up about 1% of the population, so assuming the unhoused population takes up the same amount of housing per person as the housed population, we could house every unhoused person here and still have 5% left over.
That’s the worst case too, the rest of the country has a higher vacancy rate and a proportionally lower unhoused population.
so, the biggest reasons why the california unhoused population is so big are because social workers from the rest of the country send their high needs people our way. it’s called ‘greyhound therapy’-california is warm enough you won’t freeze in winter, nobody thinks about heat stroke, and a bus ticket is better than a month of shelter beds. we also get all the children they throw away for being queer, at least the ones who don’t just join the military, which isn’t going to be a thing anymore, for pretty similar reasons.
so the opposite of that actually happens. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to go home.
except… even in los angeles, there are so many empty units. I don’t just mean for turnover-the half dozen or so big landlording companies make more money keeping a unit empty and recursively leveraging it like tesla stock than renting it out to a tenant with good income and dubious credit. so we are being stared at by a thousand blind windows at all times. many of them in large buildings that are partially occupied, and even the single family residences are well maintained, because they exist as financial instruments. I doubt it’s enough, but not everybody actually wants to live in los angeles-the food is great, the culture is good, I adore the mild winters, and so much else, but the hills, the traffic, the ground constantly shaking, the noise, the fact one of our seasons is just ‘fire’ and the smoke sometimes drops the temperature by a degree or two so it’s not even a net negative every time, the amount of funding we give to the gangs, and the fact it’s just so fucking big and so fucking city just isn’t for everyone. I’m sure there are people who miss snow.
the concept is more sound than you would think, and it’s not like there’s any down side.
called ‘greyhound therapy’-california is warm enough you won’t freeze in winter,
I live in Minneapolis, where we regularly have winter days that reach -30°F. Not frequently that bad, but rarely a winter without one of those, and in the past 7 years I’ve lived here, we’ve had a couple of days where it’s hit -50°. You don’t survive that very long, even with a lot of good clothes; any exposed skin gets frostbite within minutes. It’s not been as bad the past couple of years, what with global warming, but the winters here can well be described as “brutal.” I can’t imagine being homeless here, and if I was, and someone offered me a free trip to California, I’d take it. I grew up in Santa Cruz, and while LA is rather hotter than I prefer, I’d still rather face that than a Minnesota winter.
We have family in Dana Point. Everything around there is stupid expensive. I don’t know about LA housing prices, but I haven’t heard it’s cheap. And you still have to maintain, if you own, especially in apartments, where your problems can trivially become your neighbors’, too.
To compound matters, the US is currently moving all the new manufacturing jobs into southern red states, which will be interesting. Red staters are pissed because they are experiencing major cost of living adjustments, particularly in housing prices. Which is partly why they voted maga.
We don’t have a resource problem, we have a distribution problem.
Resources are constantly being wasted to accelerate the wealth transfer up the chain.
The first thing you say is absolutely correct but I have no idea what you mean by the second
Food being wasted instead of given out. Clothing slashed and tossed away. Housing boarded up and left vacant in the name of investing.
All in the name of maximizing sales and profit. Resources hoarded and wasted.
30% of the worlds resources would be sufficient to meet everyone’s needs if properly distributed.
But it’s not because corporations see a homeless man taking a sandwich out of the trash as a lost sale.
The problem is even if you do give away excess food, next growing cycle, you’ll still adjust to grow less. And there won’t be excess. So donating food is good, but it’s not a long term solution to the distribution problem. Same with houses and clothes and whatnot
Or in a resource based economy, production would be decided by the needs of the community at various scales and not driven by sales or profits.
I think the ideal is a system that provides UBI, Nutritious food distribution, needs based housing, universal healthcare, and job services that provide aptitude testing, training and placement.
If 30% can meet our needs, the other 70% should be sufficient to provide the system and framework and enough left over for consumption, luxury and still have room for meritocracy advancement.
What’s the current wealth distribution? 10% holding 85% leaving the rest of us 15% only half of the 30 we need.
Shout-out to too good to go - an app that aims to minimize food waste by letting restaurants and grocery stores sell “surprise bags” of food at 1/3 to 1/2 off!
Good mythical morning has a few episodes featuring these!
My colleague brought us doughnuts from here today. She got them last night but they were still plenty fresh.
this
that
away
empty
people
clothing
That’s a good typographic river. Nice find!
Ahhhh I couldn’t remember the term, thank you!
this…Blows
D33P
That’s capitalism baybe. The expectation of infinite growth in a finite system based around the infinite sales of infinite products that have a price because they say they are finite.
That’s why people want to go to mars btw. Some people are economists/adventurers and can’t stand still. Doing business on Earth however starts to be more and more damaging as we’re exhausting the possibilities of healthy growth. That’s why it’s better to cease economic growth on earth and instead focus the “line must go up (at any cost)” people on Mars. Just my two cents from the ecological perspective.
except making mars even somewhat habitable is a centuries long undertaking, decades after decades of cost without even a glimmer returns on the horizon. The Line Go Up folks only talk about it because they’re delusional, not because it actually gives them what they want.
Here in the Netherlands, the government agency for housing has the figures on how many second homes people own, but refuses to publish it.
Journalists have estimated that the number is about equal to the number of people looking for a house. About 400K on a population of 18M.
The scarcity is artificial.
There’s also so much bureaucratic pushback to building new houses for all sorts of bullshit reasons. The scarcity is indeed artificial and this is the kind of corruption that we accuse 3d world countries of. Except here it’s called “lobbying”.
I don’t think owning a second home per se is wrong or evil. Many people can’t afford buying a house due to the upfront costs. But owning a second home and leaving it empty for years? Owning multiple homes to use as Airbnbs in residential areas? I really wish this was regulated. But it will never be because there’s big bucks being made there.
I’m even ok with them owning a second house - but I think simple, easily understood answers are what’s called for in this day and age (nuance is so easily corrupted) so here’s my pitch
You have a second house? If it’s empty for 6 months, your taxes start going up. By a year it should be more then the house value rises, and it should just keep going up
Same with apartments and any property opening companies. Honestly, I’d be fine saying it all starts when your household owns at least three homes
You can surrender the house to the government to be rented at cost, maybe for a tax write-off for the first 10 years or something, otherwise it should just keep rising to insane levels.
I want people begging for renters. Developers should slash their prices to move units quickly - it’ll incentivize more affordable housing. Hell, I want landlords so desperate they pay people to inhabit them for a fixed time period.
And that’s why I like 3 - you had to move and your house isn’t selling? I don’t want to screw over individuals, there’s easier people to. You have a vacation house? Fine, but if you move you better get your empty house sold.
It’ll cause all kinds of problems, but we have empty homes and homeless people - that’s just uncivilized
Unfortunately this won’t solve the housing problem. It’ll just cause the demolition of perfectly fine houses to avoid increasing costs and new homes would only be built if there are people that signed a tenancy agreement beforehand.
The market would shift from readily available but empty homes to yet to build homes.
Why would they demolish houses rather than selling them? Makes no economic sense.
Who would buy a house that would only cost you?
The homeless wouldn’t magically have money for rent. So the homes stay empty. Nobody would buy them either because then they’ll have to burden the ever increasing costs.
A nominal fee from a heavily discounted sale is still more than spending money on a demolition.
Why would they demolish homes? They’d have ways to make some money off them vs none - either they sell at a loss, take a tax write-off to surrender it, or they spend a significant fraction of the construction cost to tear it down to resell the land
It would definitely flip the current real estate development industry upside down, but I don’t see that as a big negative - being a landlord is still very profitable, so investors will still want to do it. But you can’t let units go empty, so they’ll be going for affordable or in demand housing rather than highest profit margin (aka McMansions)
Plus, it’s estimated that up to 1/3 of housing in the US is empty - the homes exist, they’re just sitting empty. I’m not sure if that counts stuff like air BNB or not either.
Eventually, these buildings are going to age out and need to be replaced, which my plan would throw some hiccups into - but that gives us time to fix things without forcing people to die on the streets
Many second house owners use their second home as a pied-à-terre, a house they use to sleep in when they work in the city or a place to fuck their mistress when the wife sits at home in their mansion in the burbs/country side. So it rarely sits empty.
That’s why I’d prefer starting at 3 - you can count as occupying 2 homes. Vacation house, house you’re trying to sell, condo for work - whatever. You get the one, past that I think you should have to figure something out
This is somewhat tangential, but what are your thoughts on Georgism – a land value tax?
I like it in theory, but I have a couple issuesn.
I feel like it’s too complicated to make average people understand how it works, the idea is simple on the surface, but I think you’d have an endless parade of people asking “so if I have resources on my land, then what happens exactly?”
And in practice I feel like it would be a difficult transition from where we are. There’s a lot of opportunity to sabotage it if they can muddy the waters, and I feel like lobbyists would end up carving it up in a way that puts corporate profits first… It depends on assessing value of many things, and if you compromise that portion of the process it all falls apart. They might even sneak in easier eminent domain or something
Systems like this can’t be put in place through compromise, they have to be pure or it all falls apart. Maybe someday, I just don’t know how to get from here to there without a lot of middle stages
Those are good points. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I like your thinking. Personally, I prefer easier schemes that are difficult to avoid.
Schemes like yours, while good on paper, are often circumvented through shell companies and foreign residency.
I prefer a scheme where we just tax all real estate at a quite high rate, somewhere in the 1-5% range. Let’s say that a simple apartment would then result in €5K tax. A family home €10K.
Every citizen gets to subtract up to €5K of property tax from their income tax. So a family might pay €20K income tax, but can subtract €10K.
End result is a progressive property tax, which actually decreases tax on normal people.
People with expensive homes, foreign owners of homes and people who own multiple homes would be paying significantly more tax without the possibility to subtract it
I have two problems with that - first, it doesn’t directly address empty homes. Housing could still be commoditized, they just pay a larger tax - if they can make property prices go up even faster it would eat the difference
Second, messaging - people will hear that and ask “what does that mean for my property tax?” endlessly. It doesn’t matter even if every individual would pay less, it’s too mathematical and people won’t do the math - they’ll listen to their favorite voices tell them what it means
The nice thing about my idea is that it would crash the housing market, but it would do it by playing on a sense of justice. How is someone going to stand up and say “why can’t I have a bunch of empty houses while we have homeless camps?”. Many people would resist, but they have to do it while sounding like entitled assholes
Also, I think it would work for foreign investors and shell companies perfectly - see, it doesn’t matter who owns the home, it matters who claims to live in it
A company doesn’t live in a house. A foreigner can’t say they’re living their 6 months of the year when they’re not in the country that long. A resident can claim a house and a secondary home (however that works out), but companies can’t claim any - they need actual people to live in the home or it’s vacant.
You put the fact the house is occupied first, then figure out who to tax and how much after - it doesn’t matter what shell games you play, the only way around that is straight up fraud
Yes, people are sadly dumb and fall for bad messaging. I recognize that as a weakness.
The messaging should therefore be: lower property taxes for normal people by making it progressive and combating tax evasion by foreign investors.
My scheme significantly empowers normal people vs. speculators/investors. Speculators need a positive return to justify their investment.
Therefore, it will basically put a moat around the housing market that greatly benefits owner-occupiers.
I do. There’s a full blown climate crisis. How much of an extra footprint is a second home? How much wilderness is destroyed by peoples desire to have a nice view while they sip their coffee? We all need to look inward and ask what we’re actually entitled to.
Al Gore said it best; it’s an inconvenient truth.
Counterpoint, I don’t mind people owning a second home on the basis of climate change. There are so many other bigger fish to fry in that realm rather than wasting resources limiting a small group of people with the means of affording a second home. I would much rather people with the means of owning a second home having to pledge to improve the carbon footprint of the second home through things like adding solar panels, smart landscaping, etc. That way when the house is eventually let go its more sustainable and environmentally friendly then when it started.
Poverty almost certainly costs more than all this ecologically, socially, and financially. The suffering and stress of the unhoused spills over into the lives of others who interact with or observe them, increasing our collective societal stress levels, increasing hospital visits, pushing people to earlier deaths (especially, of course, among the ultra-poor), and leading to expenses involving their unplanned funerals and messier aftermaths as opposed to cleanly laid-out wills, lost/absent documentation, etc.
Poverty drives people to violence and crime when they feel unheard and ignored. What if that house could help people find some peace in their lives? Instead maybe they become the very ones who rob and wreck it out of desperation. Societies need to help all people to keep the peace.
A lot of these issues can be or begin to be solved by giving them small apartments like in Finland. Homelessness ultimately costs society more than the actual cost to home them, ironically. We’ll see, I suppose: https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2025-03-19/housing-experts-worry-about-federal-plans-to-cut-homelessness-programs
All those things cost carbon. All those vacation homes require a huge amount of infrastructure. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Notice how the first R is reduce? “Luxury” condos in urban areas now houses locals.
And as for the endless stretches of “cabins” that are just suburbs by a different name? Strip out the hazardous waste, strip anything easily reusable and let it return to nature. Re-foresting happens very quickly. Perhaps encourage some native, climate appropriate plants.
It’s inconvenient AF. But it’s where we’re at.
That is the bummer, it’s all going to cost carbon and it’s all going to happen regardless if we ban people owning a second house. As long as the population keeps increasing, the demand for more new houses will naturally increase regardless of what we do to curb demand for second houses.
So I see it as a necessary evil. One in which I am of the opinion that that if we are going to screw with the environment and increase our footprint on nature then lets make it worth it.
For example, lets demolish more woodland but instead of single family housing, lets build a 30 story condominium with the first 2 levels being a shopping center, the next 3 being rentable office space, 20 levels for condominiums, and the last 5 being for entertainment, restaurants, and leisure. Hell create sub basement levels for parking. Is the construction bigger than building a house in the woods? sure. But in the long run by building vertically the overall footprint is much less than building a sub division, strip mall, individual restaurants, and a business zone.
I would much rather devote efforts into making that a reality than policing people from getting a second house. Hell, really try to market it to that demographic just so that we can combat the NIMBY attitude people have to vertical urban development and we will probably have more net good to the climate compared to anything else we do in urban development.
Yes! I get on Google maps and look at Hong Kong sometimes. Bit of an extreme example but it doesn’t seem terrible. Tall buildings interspersed with nature. You get the best of both worlds. I could live like that. I’m not gonna say single family should be outright banned, but this endless suburbia we’ve got going on is terrible for everyone, the environment especially.
Seriously get on Google Earth and go for a walk about Hong Kong. They don’t do everything perfectly, but it is impressive. We could be living so much better.
Hm, when I say owning a second home I don’t mean building a second home. I strictly mean owning a second estate. I don’t see how buying an existing estate to rent it out has anything to do with climate. It’s just an investment to buy it and rent it out, even without planning on it increasing in value.
Don’t farm people. It’s a home not a financial instrument. If you want riches produce something of value. In that scenario you’re just jamming yourself between someone and their basic need for shelter with your hand out. A different problem than climate change to be sure, but problematic all the same.
Hm I don’t know man. I’m not a landlord, I don’t even own a home. But I see renting as a useful service. Do landlords and estate companies abuse people? Absolutely. But I don’t see renting as evil per se. Buying a house/flat is a huge personal investment and risk, and I’m happy to rent for the time being until I’m ready to buy.
We could have co-op’s, instead we have profits. I wish you all the luck in buying your own home. But for me, where I’m at, I will forever pay rent to never own anything. Forever a second class citizen. All these apartments I’ve lived in with rents calculated not by necessity, but by what the market will bear. I’m pissed, and I think you should be too.
Your problem is with capitalism, not landlords.
Yup, it’s pretty disgusting when rents are allowed to increase by inflation (or more) instead of the average salaries.
Co-ops do exist, but they are so rare. I wonder how hard it is to start my. Own co-op?
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Those second homes by the beach usually aren’t where the unhoused need them, and they probably couldn’t afford them anyway
Most of them, along with most houses in general, are in cities where the unhoused do need them.
And people think it’s the fault of the poor that they don’t have enough :)
It doesn’t blow my mind, it infuriates me
Brings to mind the barbecue speech
How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you’ll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain’t got no business with.
man this man that. If I lived in the time people were all referred to as men I would probably go crazy and blow up the world.
american rhetoric: okay, imagine you have 10 steaks right?
I can’t believe this is my first time reading this. Thanks for sharing
I agree.
Economic growth on Earth is coming to an end, and it’s important to recognize it and deal with it properly. It doesn’t make sense to scare people into work by telling them “otherwise we don’t produce enough”. We do. Whether people work 60 hours a week or 20 hours. We should just recognize what we really need. Which is the right to self-determination.
