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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • I didn’t mean to imply that denser housing was being built illegally, only that the availability of it is a product of zoning codes forbidding it in most places. I don’t expect dollars per square foot to scale linearly in either case, and in my personal experience, when I ran the numbers about 7 years ago, moving from suburbia to a dense city ended up costing me almost exactly the same, because I no longer need a car here. You think differently about how much space you actually need when your social space is no longer a back yard or a living room and is instead a park or a nearby bar or something.


  • Building like that on those lots is often against zoning code. About 3/4 of all residential lots in the US are zoned for single family homes only, and though this is changing, you’re correct that it’s not fast enough. I’d be happy to get less than what my parents bought, when I’m ready to buy. As empty nesters now, they’ve easily got 4 times as much house as they actually need or use, and my mom in particular refuses to move. Friends of mine bought a place at the market rock bottom back in about 2012, and with no kids themselves, they also have far too much house, but that’s what was available.







  • What you might call a memo, I’d call a poor explanation to confirm your biases. Do some reading on how economists came to their conclusions, and you’ll see why we arrived at an ideal environment of some low inflation. If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires, we’re in an age of unprecedented access to information, and economics is almost entirely math. If someone wanted to be a whistleblower and show the math to back it up, it would have gone viral by now, and that still would have to contradict a working model of reality that makes sense for what we all understand about inflation. There will always be some percentage of people who don’t thrive in whatever our economic conditions are, and that sucks, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to show a system where we can save literally everyone, because as human beings, our flaws tend to get in the way of that. Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.


  • We have history that we can learn from where we’ve had deflation and could observe the effects. The wealthy are the ones not buying products in deflationary environments, or otherwise big ticket purchases for the rest of us. Those big purchases involve a lot of money changing hands, but above and beyond that, there’s also a lack of capital investment, because the investor has no incentive to do anything except to put their money under their mattress, once again not circulating it. If there’s constant low inflation, the investor is guaranteed to lose money keeping it under their mattress but has a good chance at making more money by investing it into companies who use it to hire people and produce things that people want to spend money on.

    Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising? Or do you think there’s a reason there are basically no economists anywhere arguing that deflation is what we should have instead?