Labor transitions, capital investment, and the societal meaning we all crave

[Pointedstick]

The only practical solution is to have streets too small for cars to comfortably drive, and then people will want to be close to commercial and institutional destinations, and then proximity rather than separation becomes desirable, and then nobody wants either cars or zoning. Houses will shrink, lots will shrink, prices will fall, housing will become affordable again, and people who don't make a lot of money will be able to afford to comfortably live in their modest houses with no cars, and can open up nearby service-based businesses to serve their neighbors whose proximity will will actually be desirable, not problematic.

The rest of the sentence may be true, but you have it backwards on the cost. See NYC, SF, etc.

High prices in NY and SF are again due to the phenomenon of good and bad neighborhoods. There's plenty of affordable housing… in The Bronx and the Tenderloin, but nobody wants to live there because they're hellholes. I have colleagues who live in Tokyo who report that you can get a nice freestanding house in a nice neighborhood there for the equivalent of about $300k. Totally reasonable for a freestanding house in a lovely part of one of the nicest cities on earth. It's because there aren't really any bad neighborhoods, so there's no cost crunch anywhere.

[Libertarian666]

How would you get people to lower their spending en masse? Decrease the costs associated with housing, transportation, health care, education, child care, and food. And so many of these are connected.

The problem is mindset more than money going elsewhere. If the cost of housing, transportation, health care, education, child care, and food dropped, everyone in your class of non-MMM people would just spend the extra cash on a bigger flat-screen TV or a vacation they can't afford. One solution might be to force people to put, say, 20% of their gross income into an account that could only be touched in the event of unemployment or some very limited list of financial hardships. Let's ask Libertarian666 what he thinks about such a plan. 

I have a much simpler plan. Eliminate government and people will figure out very quickly that they need to provide for their own security both physical and financial. Of course this doesn't mean that they can't hire people to do either or both of those, but it is their responsibility in the final analysis.

[Pointedstick]

According to your theory, eliminate cars and the need for them --> housing prices drop. Just not true. As more people cram themselves into a limited land mass, desirable or otherwise, the prices rise. It's all supply and demand. Oh, and stupid BS like rent-control. 

The point I'm trying to make is that when you get rid of cars, the supply of desirable real estate actually rises! You lose the car ghettos, housing density increases, every house is closer to shops and grocery stores, people walk, there are more eyes on the street, crime drops. That can't help but bring up the quality of a lot of areas. More high-quality areas to live in = greater supply = diminished upward price pressure on housing. Of course if more people flock to the city because the whole place is nicer, then that'll be more demand too, which may offset it. But more people living in nicer cities isn't the worst thing in the world, eh?

[MachineGhost]

Nobody helped them, and they didn't have the mindset and culture to do it on their own, so they became economically disadvantaged.

So lots of people had less money, and they became more price-sensitive. Wal-Mart and other similar firms came along and say, "here, have some really cheap stuff that you can now afford despite your very low income!" Of course this stuff is only cheap because it's low quality and made abroad, further depressing domestic manufacturing, putting their employed compatriots in a worse bargaining position against capital, and and plopping the poorest people onto a treadmill of buying crap that breaks and needs to be replaced.

QFT

Frankly, all of thes issues will be going away with autodriving cars you lease instead of own (GM is already acting smart and partnering with Lyft) as well as autofabrication machines aka 4D printers.  Then we'll transition to the post-capitalist economy where the emphasis is on personal happiness instead of economic growth.  Most likely we'll all be fat and obese living our entire lives in imaginative virtual realities, but the point is we'd be happy.

If CA and NY votes to impose a $15 minimum wage this November, I think we'll see a real-time example of how things are going to play out until the post-capitalism phase.  I remain unconvinced by either side's arguments.

[MachineGhost]

The best solution to this problem is to eliminate the phenomenon of "good neighborhoods" that become expensive magnets for families who want their kids to get good educations but can't afford private schooling (i.e. most of them). Make every neighborhood good and then all the schools have enough good students and good teachers that the minority of problem students don't drag it down (this very phenomenon happened to my elementary school when I was a kid and made a big impression on me).

So how do you make every neighborhood a good neighborhood? Well, you make it walkable and affordable, which means small streets, no cars required, small houses, small lots, street-level shops… See how everything's interrelated?

Nice fantasy, but school choice is the more practical solution.  For instance, celebrities can't live in your "good neighborhood", they need secure, gated enclaves and to live apart from the Great Unwashed.

My "good neighborhood" fantasy is an all encompassing high rise where you never need to leave to get anythng you want and you never, ever get exposed to the "outside".  I aim to stay alive long enough to see that futuristic vision made flesh.

[Pointedstick]

According to your theory, eliminate cars and the need for them --> housing prices drop. Just not true. As more people cram themselves into a limited land mass, desirable or otherwise, the prices rise. It's all supply and demand. Oh, and stupid BS like rent-control. 

The point I'm trying to make is that when you get rid of cars, the supply of desirable real estate actually rises! You lose the car ghettos, housing density increases, every house is closer to shops and grocery stores, people walk, there are more eyes on the street, crime drops. That can't help but bring up the quality of a lot of areas. More high-quality areas to live in = greater supply = diminished upward price pressure on housing. Of course if more people flock to the city because the whole place is nicer, then that'll be more demand too, which may offset it. But more people living in nicer cities isn't the worst thing in the world, eh?

Okay, let's try this: Can you provide a real-world example of how increasing the population density brought housing prices down? I'm pretty sure Tokyo doesn't qualify. It may be cheaper than Manhattan, but that doesn't mean it was more expensive when it was less crowded. In any case, how about an example other than Tokyo?

This paper found some:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9081900498

Abstract

Theoretical research has shown that urban housing density, defined as housing services per unit of land, is an increasing function of the price of housing services. However, this concept of density hides as well as provides information because housing services per unit of land equals the product of housing services per dwelling unit and dwelling units per unit of land. This paper proves that housing density, defined as dwelling units per unit of land, can vary either directly or inversely with the price of housing services.

Maybe someone with access can download it and see if the research is any good.

[MachineGhost]

High prices in NY and SF are again due to the phenomenon of good and bad neighborhoods. There's plenty of affordable housing… in The Bronx and the Tenderloin, but nobody wants to live there because they're hellholes. I have colleagues who live in Tokyo who report that you can get a nice freestanding house in a nice neighborhood there for the equivalent of about $300k. Totally reasonable for a freestanding house in a lovely part of one of the nicest cities on earth. It's because there aren't really any bad neighborhoods, so there's no cost crunch anywhere.

Man, you can't bring up another extremely homogenous society like Japan without ignoring all the multitude of social ills they have, not to mention economic.  Yes, maybe if you focus only on personal happiness instead of economic growth you could make a case that Japan and Scandinavia are the pinnacle of what can be accomplished under capitalism as a foreigner, but it's not red roses all over.

[Pointedstick]

Man, you can't bring up another extremely homogenous society like Japan without ignoring all the multitude of social ills they have, not to mention economic.  Yes, maybe if you focus only on personal happiness instead of economic growth you could make a case that Japan and Scandinavia are the pinnacle of what can be accomplished under capitalism as a foreigner, but it's not red roses all over.

Isn't the whole point of economic growth to provide personal happiness? If it's not doing that, what's the benefit?

[MachineGhost]

Isn't the whole point of economic growth to provide personal happiness? If it's not doing that, what's the benefit?

It was never about happiness, just fulfilling mundane biological needs that come built-into the meatbag that we each lease.  We're at that point now in the West where we desparately need to transition as a society to self-actualization and self-transcendence.  This is what I believe post-capitalism will involve.

[Pointedstick]

Isn't the whole point of economic growth to provide personal happiness? If it's not doing that, what's the benefit?

It was never about happiness, just fulfilling mundane biological needs that come built-into the meatbag that we each lease.  We're at that point now in the West where we desparately need to transition as a society to self-actualization and self-transcendence.  This is what I believe post-capitalism will involve.

I uh think you lost me.

[MachineGhost]

Isn't the whole point of economic growth to provide personal happiness? If it's not doing that, what's the benefit?

It was never about happiness, just fulfilling mundane biological needs that come built-into the meatbag that we each lease.  We're at that point now in the West where we desparately need to transition as a society to self-actualization and self-transcendence.  This is what I believe post-capitalism will involve.

I uh think you lost me.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_ ... y_of_needs

[Maddy]

I am skeptical of the "self-actualization" ideal and the claim that we're on the cusp of an age where work will be obsolete and people will be free to pursue loftier pursuits.  In my experience, the vast majority of people need work for their basic sense of orientation and purpose.  The human organism simply isn't built to "self-actualize" in the sense of having an infinite amount of leisure time.

Compared to times past, the twenty-first century has bestowed vast amounts of leisure time upon the majority of people in the developed world.  Yet everywhere you look, people appear downright miserable.  In this country, the mecca of self-actualization, people seem to be struggling mightily to convince themselves that our overcommercialized, oversexed, over-teched, stare-at-a-screen-all-day existence is something to be valued and that the missing meaning in their lives will surely be restored when the next iphone comes out. 

Everywhere you look, people are depressed.  They don't have a reason to get up in the morning.  Life is the same, day after day, regardless of what they do--or don't do.  There's no possibility of failure, and as a consequence, there's no real meaning to success.  It's the quintessential rubber room.  It's a more pernicious, insidious type of detachment than was ever envisoned by Marx when he postulated that with the advent of industrialization people became alienated from the product of their labor.

Ever thought about why people take up hobbies like mountain climbing, back-packing, and sky diving?  Or why people are paying $2,000 a week to live in a bunkhouse and round up cattle?  Or why survival programs such as Outward Bound are often successful in changing the lives of delinquent youth?  People want--and desperately need--to feel real. 

Which is why I dumped a high-flying career in the city to bust my ass from sun-up to sun-down, trying to eke out a survival-type living in the middle of nowhere.  Finally, life makes sense to me.  I KNOW why I get up in the morning.  If I don't light the fire in the wood cookstove, I'm going to freeze my ass off. 

Maybe I'm a total maverick when it comes to my strong luddite orientation, but this is the way I see it.

[jafs]

Wow, that's a lot of different stuff all together there, Maddy.

Maslow's hierarchy makes some sense, in that when your basic needs are met, it frees you for the possibility of focusing on other things.  It's not a guarantee that will happen by any means, more of an understanding that if you're struggling just to get by, it's hard to do more than just focus on that and be stressed about it.

You rightly point out that our culture, despite our wealth and plethora of consumer stuff, isn't producing happy people.  But that's because people get caught up in false ideas, like the idea that having more stuff will make you happier (not true after a certain point), which is because businesses need to keep selling us more stuff if they want to stay in business.  And I think the increasing inequality of wealth and income is a factor as well.

There are plenty of possibilities of failure, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

Your point about city life vs. living in more direct contact with nature is a good one, and echoes my comments to PS that his high-density urban utopia isn't for everyone.  Glad you're happier where you are (although you seem to have gone from one extreme to another  )

[WildAboutHarry]

[quote=Maddy]If I don't light the fire in the wood cookstove, I'm going to freeze my ass off[/quote]

If you are using a cookstove that is hardly Luddite behavior 

And let us not get started about the means to light that product of the industrial revolution!

[Pointedstick]

Now we're getting somewhere significant. Thanks for the opportunity to have this very meaningful conversation, guys!

Maddy, I completely agree with you about the vague undercurrent of hellish wrongness that permeates modern life. We aspire to accumulate more, to constantly expand our leisure time, to reduce the societal shackles we're told society places upon us, but those of us who get closer to achieving these aims seem no happier than anyone else--often less so, in fact.

I think the problem is that "self-actualization" is defined in our culture to be total freedom to express yourself with no barriers or limitation on action; it's a completely liberal, individualistic notion. There's this idea that once people are freed from the bondage of work and social conventions, they'll become artisans, painters, sculptors, musicians, whatever.

The self-actualization concept still works if you acknowledge what true fulfillment looks like to most people, and has looked like since the dawn of human history: it looks like doing useful work that benefits members of your community whom you know and like; it means being a valued element of the social organism you are a member of. This is why men lose meaning in their lives when they can't find a job. It's not really about the money; it's about feeling socially useless. This is common among men, but a similar thing happens to a lot of women after their children leave home. Now what? How can I continue to contribute? Why am I still here? What's the point? There's even a term for it: "empty nest."

Our highly atomized society gives us little doses of that all the time. Many jobs feel either useless or wrong, giving their workers the sense that nothing of value is being created for others, or that the thing being created is a mere facsimile of value, that people are being tricked into consuming what you are producing, that you're making things that are really frivolities or trivialities that will being no lasting value to your community. This is definitely what I feel, and it's probably why I have 9,000 posts on this forum, most of them written during business hours. In my experience, it's not at all an uncommon sentiment in the worlds of tech and non-infrastructural engineering. So much of what we do seems, well, unnecessary. Why bother? Is the new version of the software really any better than the last one? Does anybody really want or need it?

[align=center]* * *[/align]

I think it's tempting, for people who feel this, to want to escape entirely and fabricate a life that demands constant useful work. I wanted to do this myself for several years, and came very chose to purchasing 40 acres of land in rural Nevada with my wife, the goal being to create a little Tatooine-like self-sufficient desert homestead. Constant useful work required, right!? The deal fell through, but the feelings that made it seem desirable never abated. Later on, we moved into an RV briefly, but that wasn't meaningful either because it was a never-ending vehicle maintenance chore which, despite being clearly useful, felt ultimately like a pointless and avoidable treadmill. Most recently, three years ago we moved to suburban New Mexico and bought a modest fixer-upper house on a large plot of land. Never-ending maintenance and repair! I've re-done bathrooms, installed new hardwood flooring and windows, fixed plumbing, done significant electrical work, planted ten trees, you name it. I've plowed through these very physical tasks, and learned an enormous amount of constructions skills, but none of this really brought me more meaning, which was puzzling. I sincerely thought that more directly useful physical work would make me feel energized.

Eventually I realized what probably every four year-old knows: that I feel best when I'm around my family, friends, and neighbors in a social context, and when my work can be seen to directly benefit them and people near to them. The home improvement projects I've felt best about have been the ones that my wife was exited about. The stuff that she didn't care about didn't seem as socially useful, so I didn't end up getting as much out of it, either. The gardening I do with my son ranks very highly, too.

So the key, I think, is to be doing work that seems meaningful to the people you care about--your family, friends, neighbors, and members of your community.

[align=center]* * *[/align]

This is why I think the traditional city model has the potential to be so successful. With no cars needed for day-to-day tasks, people will actual see and interact with their fellow residents on a daily basis. A sense of community will return--something so absent from American cities and suburbs where we all bundle individually into our cars and hurry off to distant destinations, 20 feet apart from other people who we never meet or know. Many people in these new traditional cities will be working in small, street-level shops and firms frequented by pedestrian traffic. You'd be directly selling to members of your own community, and the barriers to entry would be incredibly low because of the low cost of very small commercial real estate and low government regulation and taxation (a man can dream, right? ).

Do you feel un-fulfilled in your big law firm or engineering job? Open up a teeny corner store or something. Easy as pie in that setting. Sell healthy food or something to your neighbors and fellow residents. And with everything having a human scale, there would be an increased desire for beauty and ornamentation in building, decorating, architecture that is so absent today when most places are experienced at a distance, through the window of a car. You could produce artisan furniture or carve stone gargoyles or make public-sized statues or something in your corner shop and people would actually want to buy them! A far cry from the self-actualization model where you make art for your own sake, totally disconnected from anyone else.

[Pointedstick]

I also think, Jafs, that you have a point about our economy being problematic because it relies on continuously selling people things they don't need to avoid unemployment and economic collapse. But there really isn't any reason why this has to be. What an economy produces is driven by what people demand.

When people are crazy and want four mega-screen TVs in their mega-sized houses, then the economy will churn out inexpensive and low-quality TVs and houses, depleting the earth of rare earth metals and other valuable substances, and filling up landfills with the junk. If instead, high quality, aesthetics, and artistic expression were valued, then the economy would shift to producing high quality building materials out of abundant and sustainable materials like sand, stone, iron, and aluminum, high-quality artisanal furniture, building ornamentations, operas, plays, great novels that people actually bought and read, etc. These things are wonderful and there's not really a limit on how well we can decorate our spaces, how durable we can make our buildings, and how much art we can fill our days with. Heck, if people demanded it, the economy could "sustainably" produce mostly theatre productions! Little to none of this stuff would harm the environment to produce, and almost none of it would need to be disposed of.

The key is to figure out what makes people demand big-screen TVs and 2,600 square foot McMansions made out of particleboard instead of stunningly beautiful heirloom furniture, triptychs on the walls of stone public buildings, and artistic cultural expression.

Are Americans uniquely shallow? Is our culture just bad? Are the islamic terrorists right about us? Or is it the structure and organization of our society that promotes the accumulative materialistic cultural rot?

[Greg]

I'm liking where this thread is going.

I very much agree to PS's standpoint, see Fight Club quote below:

"an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."

Or the quote from Walter Slezak in 1957 "Spending money you don't have for things you don't need to impress people you don't like."

Engineering jobs from my standpoint very much can bother me because we produce so many gadgets and such that are not necessarily bad, but are discretionary goods (http://www.businessdictionary.com/defin ... onary.html) that we could easily go without or not needing the "latest" of everything.

[Greg]

Seems relevant (book):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_Fetish

Hamilton proposes that where a society has developed to the point at which the majority of people live reasonably comfortably, the pursuit of growth is pointless and should be curtailed. The surplus wealth could then be diverted into the essential infrastructure and to other nations that have not reached this level of wealth. Hamilton adapted the term Eudemonism to denote a political and economic model that does not depend on ever increasing and ultimately unsustainable levels of growth, but instead (page 212) "promotes the full realisation of human potential through ... proper appreciation of the sources of wellbeing", among which he identifies social relationships, job satisfaction, religious belief for some, and above all a sense of meaning and purpose.

[Mountaineer]

There are many great points in the past several posts.  This is how I've come to my current worldview.  Many years ago I was "trained" in Mazlow's theory with self-actualization at the top of the pyramid.  I bought into it for quite sometime as I suspect many of my generation did.  Then I began to realize I was becoming increasingly curved in on myself to the exclusion of caring about what others thought - especially of me, caring about what others did as long as it did not affect me, and caring about what I could do to help others.  Hello narcisism!  I had become my own god.  I knew (and know) in my core being that is not what I am, not the way humans are intended to be, and definitely is not a recipe for hope.  I think humans are meant to be part of a community and when our individual behaviors are not in concert with that, things go mightly awry - for the individual, for his family, and for those he influences. 

As others have said, when ones work is only for himself and not to a large degree to benefit others, our larger society becomes damaged.  I have seen countless examples of people who only work to get a paycheck and people who somehow do the best job they are capable of doing motivated by seeing some sort of a connection between doing their best and having others do their best for them for the products and services they need - a true win-win.  There is a significant difference in the quality and quantity of ones output depending on which type they are (the paycheck focused person or the do-my-best focused person).  Thankfully, the communities that I'm now a part of (family, friends, and church) tends to have come to the same conclusion that I did about what works best to create an atmosphere of hope - and it is not the pursuit of personal happiness at the expense of others.  Somehow, the communities I am a part of are turned outward to care for others rather than being focused on self most of the time.  I have come to believe that it is that outward focus of caring for and loving others that makes my personal routine daily struggles not quite so important.  It is somewhat paradoxical, but that outward focus has brought me more peace and comfort than all the "rat race" self-actualization pursuits ever did.  The pursuit of happiness is a hollow ideal, the pursuit helping others with their needs brings a happiness that is exponentially more solid.  It is somewhat similar to my experiences in the business world:  organizations with a goal of making money do not make as much as those who focus on making products or delivering services that their customers need. 

... Mountaineer

[Greg]

Some more good quotes from that movie (Fight Club).

http://www.quotesforbros.com/24-fight-c ... gs-images/

[Greg]

I was also thinking about this the other day about the loss of identity.

How many people here drive to work, and you could have a person that worked 15 feet above you on another floor and you have no idea who they are. Or someone who lives 1000 feet from your house and you have no idea who they are.

I think globalization ends up wrecking some of these ties that we can have to our community. Back in the day (which I believe was a Wednesday), when you'd have a wagon, if you broke one of the wheels, you'd go to the local wagon wheel repairer (or something along those lines). Every town may have them, same as a baker, or a blacksmith, a glass blower, etc. We then thought it would be more efficient to just have one place in America that builds these items, so you decouple now knowing the guy that you get wheels from to just saying "it's somewhere in Ohio, some guy makes it and they ship it all over the country". Then it went to where we got these items from other countries so further decoupled from knowing where your product is coming from (and the people that work on it).

I can only imagine how much worse that would be if you said we had interplanetary trading and now you couldn't even say where on a planet that something was made. Just "oh this is a genuine flux capacitor built somewhere on Mars".

[Libertarian666]

I was also thinking about this the other day about the loss of identity.

How many people here drive to work, and you could have a person that worked 15 feet above you on another floor and you have no idea who they are. Or someone who lives 1000 feet from your house and you have no idea who they are.

I think globalization ends up wrecking some of these ties that we can have to our community. Back in the day (which I believe was a Wednesday), when you'd have a wagon, if you broke one of the wheels, you'd go to the local wagon wheel repairer (or something along those lines). Every town may have them, same as a baker, or a blacksmith, a glass blower, etc. We then thought it would be more efficient to just have one place in America that builds these items, so you decouple now knowing the guy that you get wheels from to just saying "it's somewhere in Ohio, some guy makes it and they ship it all over the country". Then it went to where we got these items from other countries so further decoupled from knowing where your product is coming from (and the people that work on it).

I can only imagine how much worse that would be if you said we had interplanetary trading and now you couldn't even say where on a planet that something was made. Just "oh this is a genuine flux capacitor built somewhere on Mars".

It's not just a thought that having one factory makes production more efficient; it is a reality.

Without mass production, most of the objects around us would be unaffordable. Now of course it is possible to say that in that case we shouldn't have them anyway, but I think that will be a very hard sell to the average person who prefers to live in a modern house (of whatever size) rather than a hovel.

Note that I'm not a big fan of consumption for the sake of consumption, but it is still true that mass production makes hitherto unaffordable luxuries available to the average person, which gives us all more choices.

[WildAboutHarry]

[quote=Libertarian666]but it is still true that mass production makes hitherto unaffordable luxuries available to the average person[/quote]

Quite right.

Mass production also gives us time.  What we choose to do with that time is another matter.

Washing machines and other modern "conveniences" were not invented for the wealthy.  The were invented for the average person.

[Pointedstick]

I think we've probably all observed the phenomenon of having more time and using it to either do more unfulfilling work, or fritter it away. In my job, the automation systems (capital investments) I and my colleagues have put in place could easily have allowed us to do the amount of work we did in 2009 in probably one hour a day. Instead, we all continue to work 9 hour days and do about 10 times as much as we did before.

Washing machines are great! But how many of us have used the convenience of washing machines to balloon our wardrobes to ridiculous sizes simply because washing all that stuff isn't really that taxing anymore? How many of us use our dishwashers to accumulate far more cookware and tableware than we actually need?

This is known as the Jevons Paradox: an increase in the efficiency of consumption has a tendency to increase consumption, not savings or leisure time. It's just the way we silly humans seem to be wired.

[WildAboutHarry]

PS - All true, but having more time gives us more choice.  We can certainly make bad choices and waste time, and there are perhaps innate tendencies in humans that lead to sub-optimal behavior.

I think it was Richard Dawkins who said that humans are "wired" to like sugar and sex.  But that Nature did not anticipate saccharine and masturbation.