I'm not a doctor but I can tell you what they will say and save op $200 for a useless visit. Doctor will mention there's no data and does not recommend it.
I don't. I'm saying there's a point at which fandom becomes toxic and, for example, can't tolerate the slightest criticism without downvoting that person into oblivion.
Joining a group that's willing to scream "oppression!" at every convenient target is also living a life of pain. At least if you're sincere, they can only cancel you once.
There's a third option that is neither "publicly align myself with extremists" nor "publicly align myself with the grey area in between", and that is not to participate in the game at all.
Also, I've been on the receiving end of a mob before; "you can only get cancelled once" wasn't exactly true for me. Sure, the public figures who initially called you out will stop eventually -- they know when they've won the battle. But their followers? They're like that annoying kid at school who kept making the same joke long after it was ever considered funny. They'll happily continue harassing you until the end of time (or until you're able to make yourself disappear).
Seriously, the amount of “this” that I see online is 100x what I see in real-life (per interaction). Outrage engagement drives it and if you have found yourself tired of arguing with people you’ve never shared a meal with, just close the tab. Let them be outraged without you.
Have you seen the recent article in the NY Times about labour relations at Smith College, where a black woman who graduated from an elite Connecticut prep school managed to get four local employees fired over allegations of racism and sicced her Twitter army on them? There was an external investigation that found no fault with the fired employees and no systemic racism, yet the solution was to implement sensitivity training for the staff.
Me? I was told by a genderqueer woman at a sister college of Smith during a job interview that she does not get along with older men.
My wife? She is a faculty member at another Amherst area college and was told by a colleague that she is held in high regard because she is BIPOC. That is shit so tasteless that you can't make it up, so it must be true.
The atmosphere at colleges in the Northeast is fucked up beyond description, and playing ostrich is just that, hiding from reality. Unfortunately, reality won't change anytime soon.
Good for you that you can close tabs, unfortunately that article is an account of daily life for many academics and university staff. Read it, you cannot discuss labour relations at colleges in the Northeast (and I guess many Silicon Valley companies) without taking this article into account.
There might be some interesting macro-scale effects if Cancel Culture causes conservative Democrat voters to move to purple counties/states and turns them slightly but consistently blue.
I also would like to hear rsync's answer. But I'll make a guess:
The (world) population is no longer growing (much). But productivity growth hasn't stopped. The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.
Worse, we've gotten to the point where many people have what they need - not necessarily everything they want, but most of what they need. (I'm not going to buy twice as much food if my salary doubles. I'm not going to drive twice as many cars. I'm not going to buy a house that's twice as big. I'd use almost all the money to pay off debt and to invest.) That makes it hard to create inflation in the basic stuff, because you can't make demand exceed supply.
>The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.
It's more about the number of dollars out there. Fractional reserve means that a dollar saved leads to dollars being created. Boomers saving up for retirement meant lots of dollars being created. Boomers withdrawing and buying stuff means lots of dollars will be destroyed. Fewer dollars means dollars become more valuable i.e. deflation.
Because we are. Without taking action to curb it, the US will start to see deflation take hold. This is due to an overall aging demographic who are beginning to leave the workforce, an overall increase in savings/investment across the population, lowered rates of consumption, the younger demographic having less children, higher rates of education and on and on.
This has already begun to in both Germany and Japan. In the former, they've been able to curb things through government intervention. Japan on the other hand has really struggled.
On the contrary the price of up-keeping a household has increased dramatically.
30-40y ago it was not uncommon for a single pension to cover all expenses of:
- food
- car or two
- paying a mortage
- having 4 kids going to school
- other household expenses
- saving up money
/
Currently it is not possible. How in such a case do you still think we live in deflation times?
I would rather say that “some things” became cheaper due to technology advancements, but common things inflated so drastically, its literally impossible for young people to start families with sustainable life.
Low rates and reduction in consumer spending are rather signs of recession not deflation..
From 2008 crisis pretty much every country in the world is printing money like crazy. Its easy to print more digital numbers, its harder to gain actual land to inhabit ppl.
Thats why properties and land gain so much value lately and thats why its the biggest issue of them all - huge inflation in the housing department.
Don’t mean to butt in, but personally, the fact that I’m typing this on a piece of $300 hardware (phone) that would have cost millions in the 80’s, hundreds of thousands in the 90’s, and definitely over a thousand in the 00’s is a good indicator.
Been to the grocery store, ordered takeout or tried to buy a house lately? The prices of electronics (calculators, watches) fell consistently throughout the 70s which was a period of very high inflation. You can't cherry pick one sector.
It is very difficult to get a good number across all sectors. Despite my post, I’m not all that convinced we are in a deflationary period. The bell-weather asset for me would be Gold, and its price since I’ve been alive wouldn’t make me lean towards deflation.
If anything would, I suppose it would be the number of hours worked. That is, how much labor does it take to support a reasonable lifestyle. In my experience — and I’m an old geezer, so take this with a grain of salt — it seems like a lazy bastard can get by in this world a lot easier than 100 years ago. The degree of manual back-breaking labor that went into earning a dollar has decreased significantly. I don’t know how that would get figured in.
Gold prices aren't highly correlated with inflation so that would be a poor indicator. If you look at the actual historical data, gold isn't a very effective inflation hedge.
>> It is very difficult to get a good number across all sectors.
That's what cost of living indexes are for.
>> The bell-weather asset for me would be Gold
You probably mean to say gold futures or gold-based derivatives. There are more people who think they own "gold" than there is physical gold on this planet. Unless you have a bar in your hand, you own a contract tied to the price of gold, ie paper.
And despite the same technological improvements, gasoline is decisively more expensive. Technology is purely deflationary, so the situation with phone cost isn't very telling. What is more impactful is the cost of phone service vs median income across those decades, despite technology's deflationary forces.
Gasoline pump prices are highly impacted by taxes and regulations so those don't tell us much about core inflation or deflation. Look at the spot price of crude oil on international markets. The price today is still well below previous peaks.
I think computer hardware is one of the few things that decreased in price over time. The price of most other good and services has definitely increased since the '80s.
Home prices keep reaching new heights in some areas due to:
1) Migration. Immigration from outside the country, but also internal immigration within the country from less economically vibrant parts to more economically vibrant regions.
2) Falling interest rates keeping the monthly mortgage payment the same or lower despite higher principals
3) Expectations that the price trend for homes will continue to look like the past. This expectation can lead to people buying more housing than they would normally consume.
4) Shrinking household sizes. You have gone from an average household size of 3.33 in the 1960s to an average household size of 2.53 today. That may not seem like much but you would need ~25% more housing today to accommodate the same population.
5) Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.
The above can combine to keep pushing up house prices in some areas (as we see in the US) even as the population growth of a country stagnates.
Most new housing development after the war was gotten by turning farmlands and nature into single family houses. A lot of places have reached the limits of how far one can expand and run into some combination of geographical barriers, legal barriers (e.g. protected park or farmlands), or the barrier posed by time (most people have an upper limit of how long they are willing to commute.)
The next logical step in density, subdivision of existing lots and/or intensifying into homes that accommodate two, three, four families in a place where a single family house stood, is pretty much illegal on most residential parcels in the US. Pre-zoning, neighborhoods were free to densify as they desired, so even in older single family neighborhoods there are sprinklings of slightly more intense development. But in 2021 zoning reform is hotly contested because people feel like they should have control over what their neighbors do with their land, and the overall result is that there isn’t too much developable land left.
Ban building new office space in overcrowded areas. Big corps will be forced to build their offices elsewhere, in remote areas with plenty of land, workers will follow and so do small businesses.
1. Who would pass and enforce such a ban? Local governments are self interested and want more jobs, because it makes politicians look good and jobs require minimal additional services while providing lots of tax money. (See: Bay Area) State has same issues. Feds don't have the rights to do so, and good luck passing that kind of legislation anyways.
2. With the decline of the inner city during the midcentury we already saw what this looked like. It mostly resulted in jobs moving to the suburbs of established big cities, not decentralization of jobs into totally different regions.
What is the definition of overcrowded? Banning office space caps the size of the economy! A very bad result for a nebulous gain. That's like hoping for a recession or praising Gary, Indiana and Youngstown, Ohio for low housing prices.
They choose to set up shop in big cities and in CBDs because there's more opportunity well worth the higher rent. High rent makes buildings more productive because no one is going to waste prime real estate on low productivity or land intensive enterprises.
Some cities are pushing to ease car dependency by mandating businesses support remote working, not further invest in parking, and encourage walking, biking, and mass transit use. Those are ways of improving the land efficiency of businesses.
The gov is able to limit density within the office buildings, so it should be able to limit density within the county limits. I agree, though, that such an initiative would be against the interests of just about everyone, except the future workers who don't exist today and don't have the right to vote.
Considering how many people insist on their neighborhood staying the same, why haven't they thought long and hard about what it means to let more and more corporations settle in their city without building enough housing to match the new jobs?
They don't care. Ideally their community can reap the jobs, retail services, and tax base that businesses represent while pushing off housing demand and public services demand to somewhere else. California has an extreme version of this through Proposition 13 which eliminates increasing property tax revenue base as an incentive to approve housing construction. Thus housing is made a "cost center." The end result is essential workers have to commute an hour or more one way to work in the communities they can't afford to reside in.
> Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.
Maybe it's a California thing, but not so sure about that.
House I grew up in was over 3000sqft and can't think of any friends that had houses smaller than (estimating here) about 2500sqft (in the 70s to 80s). Myself and friends were all lower middle class families. Land and housing was just so cheap then that it was normal.
And yet today, not a single house in this (much more recently built) neighborhood is over 2000sqft. Most of the models are 1300-1500sqft. And of course these houses cost ~40x what my parents paid for the house.
In my opinion the thing that is leading most to inflation in addition to your points above, is that there are way too many land lords anyone who makes a little money goes and buys a house, increasing demand.
You can find cheap housing, the problem is it's all in places where most people don't want to live. For example, Detroit, or any of thousands of small towns all over the US.
Not picking on Detroit, it's just an obvious example of a large city that used to have a much larger population.
There is a lot of cheap housing in places that people are willing to live, but people need a push to change. Allowing work from home, schools, and lockdowns have been helping provide the push. Most cities have reasonable housing prices, it is just distorted by a few areas which have become extremely unaffordable.
Detroit is an interesting example. People did want to live there, but as the jobs declined, so did the city. If jobs can come back, the city can come back.
Ah that reminds me, we should not discount racism as a factor. Many would rather become debt slaves for life or forgo children than live cheaply around black people.
I did live cheaply around black people when I was younger, I lived in a maybe 90% black neighborhood in a literal mansion, for a few hundred a month. It was a dilapidated mansion, and the gunshots from the open air drug market a couple streets over started around 7 most evenings, but it was a mansion and it was cheap. I have fond memories of those times.
It's about a student in Baltimore who failed every class but 3 in his four years of high school, skipped class half the time, and got a 0.13 grade point average.
That put him just short of being in the top half of his class, he was an average student in that school. Can you think of any reasons other than racism that a parent might choose a different neighborhood to live in?
The neighborhood with the mansion has been gentrified for years now, I don't have kids but I still wouldn't seek out a similar neighborhood to what I lived in back then now. My attitudes towards risk and crime are different than they were when I was younger. I guess I am a racist now too?
But yeah, that's certainly one way to save on rent. Worked for me.
Very sad to see this downvoted. I don't know how people can see things like "WTF Happened in 1971?" without realizing the date correlations to the 1968 Fair Housing Act and especially especially to the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act:
That's a sort of two way street though. In areas affordable housing exists, there often aren't many opportunities financially speaking, especially in the labor market.
It's one thing to live in a city, work for awhile to bank up capital, and then move somewhere with a low COL area to live comfortably with some supplemental income from the region with knowledge of that nest egg if investments you currently have.
It's an entirely different story to live in such an and accumulate enough capital to purchase a home. Often, jobs are few and far between that are competitive, even after adjusting for COL. Employers in these areas often have less competition for positions and therefor have more leverage. Acquiring debt in these areas when you start your career could make it difficult to climb out of. Its not true with all positions. A lot of healthcare positions can pay better in these areas due to what are essentially government subsidies through medicare/medicaid. You'll occasionally have some industrial organization doing specialized work people with advanced degrees can prosper in but they need to strategically target these areas.
Or more precisely, once a house attains some value beyond providing a roof over heads, the price of a house is no longer representative of a house, but a government backed asset that can never depreciate lest the pension funds fold.
A single house's price can easily go down. Even an entire city like Detroit MI can devalue. But those mortgage backed securities represent the national average.
With climate change the music may suddenly stop for flood prone areas like Miami once investors stop underwriting 30 year mortgages.
> That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?
Housing prices around me are directly correlated to school quality. The same house near a good school is literally 1.5x-2x the price.
The supply of good public schools is very limited. A good private school is ~20-30k a year. Figure that is worth 300k, not even counting that that over the years tuition prices will go up.
So people pay to live near one of the handful of good schools.
Seattle stopped busing kids awhile back, instead aiming to keep kids at "local" schools (IMHO to save money), so now unlike the opportunity I had as a kid (test well, get into a good school in the "right" part of town) the city is perpetuating generational poverty.
This has the effect of making pockets of the city have well rated and poorly rated schools. Previously schools were kinda mixed in quality, good programs and teachers at many different schools. Sure some had a reputation, but now the ratings are incredibly bi-modal, and housing prices follow that distribution.
Oh also in the last decade, the population has increased by 21 million. The growth rate is slowing, but it isn't zero. The way American cities are managed, it isn't possible to add sufficient housing. E.g. in 2019 around 40k people moved to the Seattle metro. 14k building permits were granted[1].
To put that in perspective, the most construction friendly city in America, Houston, approved 38k permits. (Not sure if these are for housing units, are permits overall inclusive of multi family dwellings).
FWIW Dallas got ~131k new people (US Census Bureau)
No surprise there is a problem. American cities are not capable of building fast enough.
>Housing prices around me are directly correlated to school quality.
Because "school quality" is basically indistinguishable from "socio-economic status". It has little to do with the quality of buildings or teachers or other resources. It's mostly about the ability and willingness of parents to be involved in their kid's life and the standards they hold.
Interest rates is much of it. Just calculate the total payments for a 30y, 100k mortgage in 1980 when the interest rate was 15%. It's 455k in total. The same amount as a 300k mortgage for today's 3% interest for 30 years, also 455k total. In other words, the monthly payments / total payments are the same and thus just as affordable at 3x higher prices, simply because interest rates dropped so much.
Second, there's indications of further concentration. If you have a 10x10 square of land and 100 people, you can each live on one square (spread-out) You can also all live on one square (concentrated). The price levels of the homes in the lived-squares of course grows the more we concentrate, even if total population is constant.
Concentration isn't a straight-line, e.g. NY depopulated in the 80s, but does tend to arc towards further urbanisation, further concentration, further population density. In large part because cities are knowledge/network centres, and our economy is based on knowledge/networks, whereas before our economy was based on e.g. agriculture, which is the opposite of concentrated. I'd be very interested to see if that will ever change due to a working-from-home / remote-work, and even virtual reality to have meaningful social and entertainment experiences remotely. It used to be if you lived in a small town, there'd be few jobs, few bars to meet people, few concerts to go to, no cinema. Many moved to the city despite higher prices, less room, noise and pollution and crime, in search for work and social life. But with remote work and VR, the calculus might change. (not 100%, but many a little bit, enough to bring a little bit of balance to the ever-growing concentration of people in a few big cities).
Because people want to live in the city. I bet you can find really cheap houses in the countryside.
Iirc A couple of days ago there was even a post up on HN that listed places where the government would give you land for free, and I think also some starting capital.
To some extent homes in affluent are expensive because they are expensive. Most rich people don't want to live near poor people and so they'll pay extra for that even if it seems economically irrational.
Rich elites buy-out all properties/flats in cities because its a better overall investment taking to account inflation.
People who slave in that situation consider themselves unhappy and thus consider moving to a houses outside of the city. Due to limited infrastructure outside of the cities -> only a part of outskirts are really habbitable for those families. The demand in this case is higher than supply.
Demand is so low only because city politicians are too inefficient in providing new places with infrastructure.
Population growth ostensibly creates economic growth, which generates tax receipts to pay down public debt. We're about to hit a wave of massive inflation, which rewards asset owners and punishes workers and savers.
Further, I used to think that millennials were poorer than they think they are, but then it clicked they absolutely understand, and that's why they behave exactly like the poor people they subconsciously recognize they in fact are.
If you took the traditional criticisms of how the poor manage their lives you'd get things like, a lack of long term planning, blowing money on gaudy status signalling to attract other poor partners or mates, a temporary and transactional attitude to work, lots of unsecured high interest debt, hyperbolic reactions to perceived slights, superstitious beliefs, extreme promiscuity, isolating and sabotaging people who make their own way as not being authentic, a lot of people would unironically say those are racist and classist stereotypes, without seeing that they accurately describe the lives of ostensibly middle class white millennials.
They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.
"So we drink and dance and screw, because there's nothing else to do..."
>They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.
The entire point is that inflation forces asset owners to do something useful. Inflation is beneficial to those who are dependent on an income.
Actually it's not a myth. Look up bureau of labor statistics. Women clearly make less than men. I feel something must be done to resolve compensation when controlling for skills, experience, etc, gender alone shouldn't result in lower pay.
Again, there is no difference in average hourly rate of wage. Men make more money than women because men (on average) work more hours a week as compared to women. Also men take fewer days off (on average). Thats the reason behind the mythical "wage gap". So, the correct term for it is "earnings gap".
There have been a bunch of studies of this, and the conclusions are pretty consistent: women aren't paid less for doing equal work, they're paid less because they end up doing less or lower-paid work once they have children, because they do a disproportionate share of the childcare.
This should still be fixed, but it means the fix is mostly about what happens at home, not what happens at work, which is much more difficult.
