A great essay, worthy of detailed reading as it contains so many interesting connections and associations from the past to explain the present and maybe forecast the future.
Just one example among the many:
> Making family-sized dwellings abundant and thus affordable for most people would be the single most effective step toward restoring faith in progress.
We are drowning in stochastic parrots and cryptographically minted "wealth" while very fundamental aspects of wellbeing are delegated to the dysfunctional, stagnating "technologies" of yesteryear.
My only criticism would be the subtitle: no, the future when it arrived did not feel ordinary. It felt disconnected from the human predicament and ominous about our prospects.
The affordability crisis is entirely a function of over regulation and NIMBYism. Supply and demand are economic laws and it turns out when you restrict supply and demand is held constant or increases, prices skyrocket.
Taxing property on land, as well as the land, creates perverse incentives & disincentives.
If we only taxed land, renormalizing for the same total taxes:
1. It would be much more expensive to hold (absolutely or relatively) undeveloped land as an investment that parasitically increased in value due to surrounding investment.
Land is the exclusionary resource, so fully taxing it makes sense.
Renormalization would tax unused land hard, reducing its passive return, and the supply & availability of less used land will increase, and prices decrease.
2. It would be far more attractive to further develop land for economically rewarding use, since adding living spaces and other increased use would not directly raise annual taxes. Which today are essentially a heavy disincentive to development.
Ironically, property (excluding land) taxes, are a recurrent never ending wealth tax, inhibiting both the wealthy and non-wealthy from increasing their properties utility value.
We are so used to it we don’t really consider how much it warps our choices that putting in capital or labor into home improvements or increased multi-housing actually raises our taxes.
If they didn’t, improvements would be far more attractive for both utility and property value appreciation.
Oooh, that's interesting to me, as someone who sees a common pattern in the way ills that tend to vex black Americans in one generation come back to haunt the rest of the country a few down the road (and often, silently, visited Native Americans first)[1]. There's been a decent amount of scholarship on the gulf between white and black Americans on their experience of the moon landing (shining beacon of progress versus a waste of taxpayer money while food and housing was insecure). Now, everyone's feeling the, "Can you please fund basic things that actually matter," blues. (For the NA analogue, perhaps the way the "progress" of industrialization made their subjugation and denial of land all the easier.)
[1]E.g., the crack epidemic, the opioid epidemic, and alcoholism on reservations, respectively.
Just one example among the many:
> Making family-sized dwellings abundant and thus affordable for most people would be the single most effective step toward restoring faith in progress.
We are drowning in stochastic parrots and cryptographically minted "wealth" while very fundamental aspects of wellbeing are delegated to the dysfunctional, stagnating "technologies" of yesteryear.
My only criticism would be the subtitle: no, the future when it arrived did not feel ordinary. It felt disconnected from the human predicament and ominous about our prospects.