I think that's an incomplete summary; a major driver of this is the difference in availability of success (at least according to older generation's standards) between older and younger generations.
I believe they are saying that the American Dream of owning a house and having a good job all one's life is much more difficult now that it used to be.
The opposite is the case. High rent is a localized problem (mostly found in relatively dense cities) and UBI would go a lot farther in a low-cost-of-living area where rents are low as well. So, people who have no use for living in the city (not hyper-productive or anything) would gradually opt to spread out and rents would fall.
High rent is localised? The whole of the UK has high rent AFAICT, our very poor city has high rent.
Rental means paying the costs of property plus paying profit to someone who is already well off enough to front some capital (or at least to get a mortgage) plus paying profits for the bank ... how could renting ever be reasonable priced in a system that requires those without capital to pay those with capital just because those with money already have enough money.
After the price crash in 2008 we lost 40% on our 1 bed flat. Couldn’t afford to sell after a relocation (£60k negative equity after 1 year) so had to rent it out while we rented in a different city.
We just about made a profit on the flat - about £10 a week, but we didn’t have any times of no tenant, or any unexpected major bills.
Eventually price recovered enough that we could afford to sell (below what we paid, even ignoring inflation).
> how could renting ever be reasonable priced in a system that requires those without capital to pay those with capital just because those with money already have enough money.
landlords aren't guaranteed to make money. it's true that monthly rent is almost always higher than the monthly mortgage payment on that property, but the landlord can only profit if, in the long run, the difference between the rent and the mortgage is greater than the overall cost of maintenance and possible devaluation of the property.
personally, I could afford to put a down payment on a mortgage if I really wanted a house where I live, but for now I am happy to pay extra for the ability to relocate at the end of the lease and to avoid the risk of actually owning a house.
Economically, the "cost of property" is a kind of rent (okay, mostly rent - you can subtract the actual cost of physically building the structure. But most of what you're paying is the pure rent of land.) It is this rent that decreases when the demand for being in a particular place falls.
Unsustainable sprawl is a side-effect of high rents. When rent is low, people tend to cluster naturally in order to minimize their costs (and hence, the burden they exert on the surrounding environment) because they can afford to - you see this happening even (perhaps especially) in tiny rural villages and towns, not just in the wealthiest cities.
Why not? Then the wealth can be distributed to everyone fairly. Having this safety net available for everyone and not just the rich would reduce the need for wealth hoarding in the first place. Your ideology has no justification besides your own particular interest in the class position of your offspring.
That's a truly horrendous position you've taken. You're arguing that it is somehow rational to not want a child to benefit from his or her caretakers. The only logical conclusion from this is why stop at death? Why don't we make it so it's illegal for a parent to take any action that provides any sort of benefit for their children, and all children are dependent upon the state from birth, with all adults paying a mandatory 'childcare' tax. This way all children can start out life on 100% equal footing, and also without any opportunity to experience what a parent's love and sacrifice really is. What a dystopian future you desire.
Actually, we live in quite a dystopian reality. Your only argument is a slippery slope fallacy. I never said that a child should not benefit from their caretakers. Only that they should not inherit economic wealth which they did not produce.
So explain what's the tangible difference between receiving benefits while the parent is alive and after they're dead? Either way the child is inheriting economic wealth they didn't produce, which shines a light on the horrendousness of your argument.
Instead of calling my argument horrendous with no justification, maybe you could try engaging with it. I, too, would like to just call you a right-wing libertarian nutjob or something like that and move on with life, but hopefully something better can happen. :)
> Either way the child is inheriting economic wealth they didn't produce
There isn't a whole lot. But you're missing the point of parenting. Hint: it's not financial support. You can't write a baby a check for $1M, plop it down in an empty house and expect it to live a good life. After you die you're not doing any of the stuff that actually makes having a parent valuable to a child relative to receiving the necessary financial support (which will not even be available to working class children under your proposed system).
Maybe if you were confident your children would be adequately taken care of if you died, you wouldn't have to work so hard saving up a nest egg and would actually have more time to be a parent.
How so? You leave, they stop paying you. Any funds for retirement is your account. You leave the country and renounce citizenship, you no longer get the benefits of citizenship which includes social security. That seems pretty fair.
And yes a company doing that is a completely different situation. Like it or not we pay into a pool that if you are a citizen you will receive benefits. You also pay into an account for your 401k that you own. Renouncing citizenship, you walked away from the former account.
> They offer a certain quality of life many desire.
But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society.
It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.
Pray tell, where do you expect all those agricultural products, lumber, livestock, and so forth that we all depend on to come from without small towns and rural communities? They have to grow somewhere after all.
> Pray tell, where do you expect all those agricultural products, lumber, livestock, and so forth that we all depend on to come from without small towns and rural communities? They have to grow somewhere after all.
The article provides several examples showing that those industries continue to operate in small towns, but that they require very little labor anymore, due to mechanization and automation.
The majority of the financial gains for these industries go to the capital owners (including all of us who can afford to save for retirement), not to the local labor pool. The labor pool doesn't have leverage to change that, because they often have few other options for work in their area.
The remote workers transplanted from cities aren't going to meaningfully increase employment in the old sectors. They will just enjoy the cheap housing and lower cost for low-skilled services.
Local low-skilled labor won't be able to suddenly shift to high-skilled remote IT work, and the sectors are too different to have an effect on the others' labor rates.
At best, the remote IT workers' discretionary local spending might prop up a few small service businesses, like restaurants, but the remote workers are likely to keep most of their capital in the same non-local financial instruments that their equivalents in cities do. And who could blame them for doing so?
You're completely correct. We depend utterly on a lot of basic products of small towns and rural communities.
That said, just because food and lumber has to be grown somewhere doesn't mean it has to be grown in American small towns and rural communities. My wheat and rice can come from Mexico and Thailand and my beef from Argentina.
Trans-oceanic shipping and trains are surprisingly low-impact per unit of food. When you add in the environmental impact of things like growing rice in Texas deserts and almonds in California, the results can easily come out in favor of trade.
There are other considerations, too. Favoring local products is a good way to keep poor food-exporting countries poor. I don't want that, though I understand some people have different priorities from me.
This is great until a major conflict happens between the US and the country responsible for a major food staple, and domestic production is decimated by imports, and there’s a food shortage.
I live in the kind of rural place you're talking about. Rural town of 2500, majority farmland/undeveloped, historically impoverished part of the country.
Many people in my town are exactly what you'd expect. But a good fraction of them are millionaires with huge McMansions and lakeside property. The cars that go down my road are a mix of beat up pick up trucks and Cadillacs.
I guarantee you, no outside entity subsidizes us. Not with those kind of property taxes coming in. And I guarantee you, my town is not unique in this regard.
I think these enormous tracts of suburban and rural land that were populated with government subsidies and no real economic reason to exist should be slowly and gracefully depopulated, with people settling denser areas (which we have a scarcity of, due to racially motivated zoning laws and other policies). We also need to do a better job of limiting sprawl so that people living in cities are closer to nature and don't have to travel through hundreds of miles of suburbs to "escape".
People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.).
The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America.
Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.
How is it science? We literally have direct empirical evidence that suggests the contrary, but physicists do complicated mental gymnastics to come up with other explanations that fit their preconceived notions better.
It turns out if you make unjustified assumptions (information can't travel faster than light) you can make unjustified conclusions (no hidden variables).
On an aggregate scale it doesn't make sense to talk about a system based on "saving". You can't eat money in retirement.
So retirees are always extracting some fraction of the productive output of current labor. This fraction can go up or down depending on the economic growth rate and expectation of standard of living of retirees.
The only solution is for nation states to invest pension funds in technology and innovation so that you're not on the hook for fiat decades in the future to support the elderly.
Social Security in the US has lent ~$2.6-2.9 trillion from its trust fund to the US government; imagine if that had been spent on driving down the cost of caring for the elderly instead of frivolous wars and tax cuts. You can't save up for the future to pay for expenses you can't predict; you have to invest today's dollars in getting ahead of the curve, to drastically drive down the cost of future predicted services you'll need to provide.
TL;DR Invest resources today to ensure a steep cost decline curve for existing in the future.
You're projecting our experience of time onto what is a timeless mathematical essence. The idea that OP is referring to is that the universe "exists" simply because it is internally consistent.
