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I think our disagreement here is pretty narrow, about how covert the coverup really is. But when you say you "have a pretty good picture of how it works," I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthy's sexual entertainment. If you don't know, if it's not generally known, then I think that means there is a covert network that does its best to stay hidden.
If you think that's somehow no longer happening any more, then I think you really don't understand how the world works. People like that do not give up their indulgences easily.
You may simply think I'm ascribing more planning and coordination than I really am, and that would just be a miscommunication. However, I do think there are definitely some small number of people who put a lot of thought into how to get away with this, and they've largely succeeded for decades.
A journalist could get to the bottom of the coltan mining trade and expose one chain there, but how do you think they'd fare exposing the latest Epstein-style network? Do you think they'd live through it?
Yeah, that's true, but my point was even in the worst-case scenario that consequences really did happen to someone, it would be a middleman, and that's by design. Epstein was no different in that respect.
There was a guy on some news network around 2020 when people were panicking about Bernie Sanders and his nefarious communist plot to destroy America, and one guy was talking about how there was a time when he was really scared the communists would come in and kill all the rich people and he might've been one of those people strung up in Times Square. He certainly sounded terrified to me. Like I'm sure it was partly crocodile tears, but also you don't pull that story from nowhere. That's obviously something he thinks about.
I mean, I wouldn't say I'm always actively terrified of being hit by a train, but I take steps to avoid it. That's what I mean - they know it's a threat.
This is tangential, but it's my biggest issue with what you've said. Poor countries all over the globe are made and kept poor by colonialism which rolled into modern capitalist imperialism. Africa in particular has been particularly brutally invaded, pillaged and oppressed for centuries. The most recent mechanisms by which this is done have been the World Bank and the IMF sucking them into predatory loans with structural adjustment policies that are calculated to keep them poor and strip them of vital infrastructure.
The cheap labour isn't some natural transitional state between "undeveloped" and "developed". It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries "develop" and improve their station is when the working class organises and forces change to happen. It is never handed down from above or a natural outworking of wealth flowing in from the market. The market is structured to ensure that any wealth that flows in from the exploitation of cheap labour is kept in the hands of a few and siphoned back out as quickly as possible.
This is very similar to the way that the working class is kept in a state of poverty by capitalists within their own countries, and oppressed by the state and the legal system. This is the situation that allows wealthy people to prey upon the children of poorer people with relative immunity. The girls are often plied with money, and if they do go to the police, what do they say? "Trump raped me on Epstein's private jet?" The cops won't touch that, and the wealthy know they won't touch it. We know it because that testimony exists and it hasn't gone anywhere. Even if a detective took the case, he'd wind up at the bottom of a river before too long.
I'm not saying this is a "conspiracy" in the sense that this entire situation is engineered just to get young girls, it's evolved over centuries to maintain power, and the powerful will take advantage of it every way they can.
I don't expect there is such an open practice, to be clear. I don't really buy the pizzagate stuff.
It's not impossible there was a third coconspirator that got away. It's possible Epstein had competition, too, and of course it's possible someone has taken his place. I don't know which drug dealers billionares use, either, although I'm pretty sure they don't sit around discussing how to hide their collective drug use.
I basically just disagree. The conventional economic interpretation makes plenty of sense, matches the figures and my anecdotal experiences, and places like South Korea have made this exact trip already.
There's neoimperialism too, but the difference it makes from our end amounts to pennies. If we can crush the corruption Africa will develop a bit faster, not overnight. When someone over there wants a computer, they go to the West to buy it, not because they're forced to but because they don't have the infrastructure and institutional experience to build such a thing themselves.
It's fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. That's literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.
You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? That's going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. That's not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.
And every single worker's benefit we enjoy today was a function of labour activism. 8 hour days, the weekend, child labour laws, OSHA, I could go on. And all of those benefits are actively fought against by the ruling class because they erode their power over us and raise our wages.
Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. It's not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.
Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent goes into this in some detail, about the forces that act to ensure that the dominant media narrative caters to the ruling class on all levels, and he has talked extensively on how this process works in academia as well. I forget if the academic discussion is a large part of the documentary, but it's well worth watching anyway. It's free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60
Also... if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three people... I mean wow. You know authorities seized a bunch of blackmail from his island, video of rich people with kids, and it has never surfaced since? Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because they're doing their best, honest, but they just can't seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious. Was that the one guy arranging that too?
I'm not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, that's what I've literally been saying they don't do. The difference is if they got caught actually doing the deed, if would be a very different matter, because you physically cannot do that via proxy. That's how the blackmail can exist, and why it was covered up.
Oh and to answer your question about who their drug dealers are, they have middlemen for that as well. Personal assistants who are on call for anything the client needs, who will readily break the law rather than disappoint a client, and whose instructions are generally vague enough that any legal risk falls on the assistant. Again: diffusion of responsibllity.
Don't kid yourself, the society of the wealthy and powerful is rotten to the core, just as it was in the days of monarchy. They just have better cover for it nowadays. It's no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.
It was a right-wing dictatorship up until that date, with the main union loyal to them. There was a reason so many sided with the North. Struggle against it later on took that shape of labour activism, which is interesting and new to me, but to say that industrialisation, which happened starting in the 60s, is due to labour organisation can't be and isn't correct. South Korean work hours are still famously insanely long, too.
As someone who actually understands a good chunk of it, no. It's a strong theory with strong predictions. Maybe you should try it before you knock it. That magazine is just magazine, not a journal or anything related to the field.
I'm not familiar with the law of the area, but don't they have to be able to prove it in order to rule it a homicide? I don't believe in conspiracy theories in general, and doubt I'll believe the one you're proposing in specific until that changes.
Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.
Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.
And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they weren't just yellow unions approved by the dictator?
Even then I don't know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didn't say what that point is.
And I don't know why you think I'm talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what I'm talking about. And industrialisation isn't a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We don't have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.
That's another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.
And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? I've looked for this information and had people try to show me, but they've never actually shown it. It's a fundamental part of economics so I'm told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.
And finally, you don't think there's any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet it's easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.
My SK history is fuzzy, I'll admit. I knew it was authoritarian up until recently (which is why the North had support), and started developing earlier. I searched the rest. If I misunderstood the exact dates my apologies.
Yup, no argument. I'm still team eat the rich.
I'm sure that's exactly what they were. No argument.
The point I was defending there is just that tiger economies work based on trade. The early USSR achieved the same thing by importing a bunch of ready-made US factories, and working from there. The West obviously did it very slowly and painfully over a couple centuries, with no outside competition. Japan sounds like it might have been a mix of the former three. That covers every successful example of development I know of.
I have trouble imagining a pre-industrial society that would beat the one we have for standard of living, so I think it's pretty synonymous with development, which is what this tangent was about.
You're right, there's no alternative Earth to test. I suspect markets, "capitalist" or not, are the only practical way to do it, but that's just my guess.
Yeah, it's not supposed to be real, it's the simplified "no friction in a vacuum" case. The theory still roughly works (and seems to hold empirically) as long as the system is convex. If it's not, funny, bad things happen and you get Google, and market failure which roughly corresponds to enshittification. We had a whole historical period about breaking up monopolies, but unfortunately we've backtracked, especially when computers are involved. Politicians are mostly old and afraid of computers.
Have I linked the yardsale model yet? Hmm, yes, but not to you. Behold, the economics reason for mass inequality. To go back to my recurring theme, it's dumb. The rich would much rather be called evil geniuses - a lot of them think of themselves that way - but they're not even.
Okay, so I think we're largely in agreement except for a little misunderstanding. I'm glad because that means you might be a little more receptive to some of the stuff I might share. I have more links but I'm writing this novella on my phone if you can believe it. I'll share them later.
My criticism about the professional class being paid by the owning class to justify their wealth was specifically about orthodox economics, like the Chicago School who would literally construct studies to justify whatever you wanted if you paid for it. The yardsale model - that's a great link by the way, the graph that emerges perfectly mirrors our actual economy - is an example of heterodox economics, which largely stands in opposition to orthodox economics. The opener to that page is very well written. It'll do a better job than me.
Now, for an example of how completely divorced from reality orthodox economics is, the market convexity concept is perfect. The exceptions you mentioned about veblen and giffen goods aren't the main problem with convexity. The simple problem of inelastic demand is a much bigger problem. This is all couched in extremely obfuscating language, those articles are impenetrable to anyone who isn't steeped in economics language.
I assume you know what inelasticity is, it's something for which demand doesn't change with price, for instance things like shelter or food. So, to demystify the language, another term for "inelastic demand" is "need". Basically, if you read between the lines even slightly, the founding, econ 101, highschool level principle of orthodox economics has been forced to admit that it doesn't work for anything anybody actually needs. And then they go on insisting that this principle should govern our entire society. Got to keep that yardsale going.
Market convexity is an amalgamation of post-hoc justifications for why supply & demand is so hard to find in the real world. When I mentioned the perfectly straight, bisecting, perpendicular lines graph, you admitted that was just an illustration, and I agree, it is a doodle. I know it's now in vogue to use slightly curved lines, but that's just because economists are aware of how ridiculous the first illustration was and they put in just the slightest amount of extra effort to hide it.
When I'm asking for the science, let me ask you this: what data constructs the graph? Where did it originate? This is the question I've never had answered. Just literally the graph appearing in real world data, just one time.
See, when actual sciences want to "illustrate" a concept, sometimes they idealise, but they almost always have real data and real graphs to show. Their idealised lines pass through data points with error bars. Scientists work hard for their data, and they always, always show it off. Stress-strain curves, electron microscope images, star life-cycle data, red-shifting, animal population surveys, and on and on. Real data is complex and interesting and beautiful and scientists will show you their cool slide and say "you can see such-and-such feature here and this indicates...", it's great.
I have looked for the supply & demand version of this and can find nothing but hand-waving excuses.
Also, the convexity article talks about the Nobel Prize in Economics, which is wrongly named. It is the Nobel Memorial Prize. It was named after Nobel, because it's not a Nobel prize, because the Nobel prize committee rejected the economics category because it isn't a real science. Some Swiss bank then financed the wish.com version Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
I suspect this isn't so hard for you to accept since you've already come so far in your understanding of heterodox economics. You still seem to have some respect for the orthodox schools, which is strange when you understand so much of where they have led us.
As for the Epstein thing, I don't have any reason to believe that anything has changed. We know Epstein was part of the trafficking of minors, and absent any evidence about the state of that practice, the idea that removing two people from the network actually fundamentally altered anything seems hopelessly naive. I think the burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to claim the practice has been abolished.
Heterodox economics includes crazy stuff like the modern Austrian school, too, so it's not like it's one thing. I believe and hope the mainstream will come around to the yardsale model eventually.
Yes, this is a great explainer. I've linked it far more than anything else on any subject. People need to know.
There's degrees of need, though. You need food, but, like, prison rations are technically medically sufficient, and people often waste food when they aren't worried about starving. Most things that are bought and sold in the West are definitively beyond the bare minimum for survival. The only thing I can think of that actually has a measured price elasticity of zero is higher education.
However, because we have massive inequality, effective demand doesn't reflect actual demand very well. That's the source of evil here if you ask me.
What do you mean by that, exactly? I've seen supply and demand play out plenty just in my personal life. Houses are in massive shortage here, and as a result they're getting really expensive. On the other hand, it's cheap to get scrap metal, despite there having been times when a big chunk of steel costed more than a house. When a crop fails it gets expensive and I buy less tomatoes or whatever. Conversely, I visit the clearance section all the time and buy stuff nobody wanted for cheap.
Relatedly, part of why I buy orthodox economics is that every time I have to budget out a project or fundraiser or something, I pretty much see it in action. There's no free lunch; if there's a productive human activity of some kind in demand, somebody else is doing it full time for a pretty normal salary. Already, in the current economic framework.
Econometrics, it's called econometrics.
You're not going to get quite the quality of data that you can with a cylinder of C-103 in a press, because humans are complicated, but what I've seen looks clearer than what you'd get in, say, medicine.
Well, it's cost acceptable per unit on one axis (for each party), and the total units on the market on the other. It's hard to collect data far away from the middle because in practice, because in practice amount of goods on the market doesn't stray too far from equilibrium in the first place. If you just want the measured slopes at the middle, here you go, you can go to the citations for support.
Okay, thank you for the information about econometrics, but the economics that goes from data to model tends to be heterodox, not orthodox. Occasionally orthodox economists will accidentally do real science and they usually don't like what they see.
My question was about why you don't see the data being presented when being taught about supply and demand, and you basically answered it by saying that the data isn't there. Now, I see your point that the prices tend to be relatively stable and so the data doesn't extend beyond these short line slopes, but then why are we told that supply & demand "sets prices" when there is no evidence of, for instance, a shock to the system upsetting prices which then follow a standard supply & demand curve to restabilise?
Well, because such a situation would not be "convex", so economics has written an escape clause for this phenomenon whereby it can avoid ever making any real predictions about what the market will do in a situation that isn't already "stabilised".
And also, if it's just short line segments, why is it fashionable to use a curve that implies more data than exists? Again, I would say that it is to ape the aesthetics of science without actually doing it.
And it's very strange that you turn to your personal anecdotal experience to say that you've "seen supply & demand play out". If that were true, then you should be able to gather the data and present it. The fact that data doesn't exist should tell you that you are probably using confirmation bias to evaluate your personal experiences.
For instance, the housing market is something where ideally there would be very inflexible demand, because people don't need more than one bed, typically. The reason the demand is flexible is because there are in reality two markets in the same space. The first market is the people who want housing to actually live in, and the second are landlords that hoard housing, speculate and leverage assets against loans and so on. The landlord market is responsible for both the short housing supply and high price, because they would often rather keep housing scarce and drive up rents, and speculate against one another than put their property back out on the market to go to a competitor. Selling a property you can't rent out is a pretty bad financial decision, you're better off waiting until the housing market flips and it becomes a seller's market again. If a financialised housing market didn't exist, housing would be much cheaper and homelessness would be much, much less.
The reality of all markets is that they are subject to boom & bust cycles which supply & demand cannot account for. Housing in particular is notorious for huge bubbles that burst spectacularly.
Here's an example from a government consumer watchdog in Australia: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/petrol-and-fuel/petrol-price-cycles-in-major-cities
Here's the really damning sentence:
They straight up say that it is not about supply & demand.
Here's the heterodox explanation of this phenomenon: the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation
EDIT: Actually this is a separate phenomenon, but it does emphasise how prices are set by sellers, and not by supply and demand. Wherever a seller can get away with changing their prices, like for instance in petrol sales, they will, but then it follows boom-bust, not supply-demand.
And this is where the authors of that article talk about how orthodox economics institutions will launder heterodox theories. The point of doing this would be to maintain their prestigious position as the arbiter of all economics knowledge, as a result of which any damage such information might do to existing insitutions can be dampened by orthodox economists putting their own spin on the information. If they never acknowledge where the theory comes from, they get to rewrite it however they want. That's distinctly unscientific.
I feel like I've seen that in person. When the pandemic hit here, petrol prices hit the floor, like less than half of what they usually are. After a while they went back up as the production end was slowed down to match. So there's evidence, albeit not evidence you can really fit a whole curve to.
It could be convex. That's not even an economics term, it's math. In terms of gradient decent - like a market adjusting - it just means that the curves are "round" as opposed to having weird little pockets that it can get stuck in. A counterexample would be something where decreasing the price actually decreases sales, with Veblen goods being an obvious example - nobody would buy Gucci if it was just slightly more expensive than a normal bag. Graphed out, that looks like a hump in a curve (supplier profit, I think), until Gucci bags come out the other side where they're cheap enough to compete as normal bags, as opposed to status items.
It creates a "local minimum" where the market can stabilise (it usually is -ise in British spelling) in a way that's counterproductive. You can talk about it in terms of second derivatives, too, but unless you're actually crunching numbers the marginal change of marginal price is unintuitive and unhelpful.
As you add more dimensions things get more complicated. Giffen goods happen when each good individually follows convex logic, but not when you rotate the resulting (hyper-)surfaces into a coordinate basis where cross elasticities become important. The math stays the same, though.
I mean, nobody's ever observed a part of the Sombrero potential other than the very bottom, but Higgs theory doesn't make sense without the rest. That on it's own isn't a point against economics, or QFT. In fact, the physics example is arguably more of a stretch, because it's supposed to be precise, as opposed to just a model.
You could critcise economics for only offering models, but that's all of social sciences, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
I expect someone has been recording it, actually. I suppose I'll actually go looking out of respect for you.
I know many people with a guest bedroom.
Hah, no. Nearly as often the market will keep going the way you don't want, and the whole time you're not earning on your principle. Eventually, it has always gone up again, but there's no time limit on that - look at Detroit - and if the population stops growing in your country real estate becomes deflationary for good. Meanwhile, if you had just put it in an index fund you're going to earn 10% interest per year, on average. If you go bonds it might only be 4%, but it's almost guaranteed.
If you have literally any money saved, "don't try to time the market" is the first thing that every advisor will tell you. It's a dirty open secret that the big investors on wallstreet don't actually beat the market, either.
At the small scale, yes. The economy is noisy. There are also cases where it does bad stuff at the big scale, but they tend to correspond to nonconvexities.
I'll look into Australia when I have the time. I have to go pretty quick, though.
That sounds right.
Cynical and unfair? Definitely. Unscientific? No, academics is pretty much always like that; hard sciences too. You think you get tenure just by being the most honest?
Science itself is fine if worthy ideas make it to the top. Making the process fair is still a pipe dream. Gregori Perelman straight up refused the Abel Medal over this kind of shit.
My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, it's to point out that it's tautological. It's basically saying, "Prices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law." So it's not a law then, is it? It's an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: "our law says the market will be stable," when we see the absolute opposite in many places.
And if you feel like you've seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again I'd say if you're saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then you're admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.
I'm not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. That's literally what the concept entails. It's analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.
As for the "don't try to time the market" advice, if you're right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they can't rent it out and don't want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they don't exist, or your story about that isn't complete.
I don't need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because I'm familiar with it.
And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However I've never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an "orthodox" school, except in economics. It's the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.
You can see the model do that, but not the actual quantum fields. The transition is supposed to have happened irreversibly once in the instants following the big bang.
It was never taught where I went, but that could be. High school teachers should knock it off, if so. It seems to work exactly as theorised in most sectors, bulk commodities being a common example, but there's definitely other sectors that are broken, some of which I mentioned.
I'm a fan of regulation to address that. So are both orthodox and most heterodox schools, to various degrees.
I'm sure someone is dumb enough to try it, but I'm actually not convinced it's widespread. In Canada, we literally just don't have enough houses for a first-world nation of our population - which has been measured - and all of our tradespeople are swamped. (Sorry if I brought that up already, this has been a long-running thread)
Hmm, now that is a good point. There's various small offshoots of anthropology and psychology, some of which are questionable (there's people that still use Freud), but nobody really divides it up like that. Alright, you've sold me on economics probably having especially bad lab politics.
Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it's just unconfirmed speculation. It's a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It's discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn't make the problem substantively the same.
And do you really think supply & demand isn't taught as a law? We hear the phrase "the law of supply & demand" bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?
And you actually think housing speculation doesn't happen on a wide scale? Like... what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you're denying that housing speculation is real?
https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf
The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don't understand where you get off saying speculation isn't a thing.
Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.
Here's a quote that confirms what I just told you:
Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it's a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don't.
And as for the "lab politics" of economics, I'm glad you've been able to see that issue, and I think that's a good term for it. The lab politics doesn't come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.
Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.
For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don't like.
Richard Wolff talks about this:
https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work
Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That's why they don't do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can't work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.
Speculation happens, sure. I don't buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.
I also hear about "Murphy's law", which is self-evidently not (literally) true in all cases. If you're teaching an actual Econ 101-type course and you don't mention market failure, you're teaching it badly.
Not exactly. A drop in housing prices triggered it IIRC, but the actual chain of dominoes played out on paper in financial instruments.
In an ideal market the big banks would have just been replaced with new ones who take less risks of that sort, but they were too big to fail. That's definitely a problem, but I don't really know enough to comment on what the fix should be intelligently; banking economics is on a whole other level.
The total shortfall is in the neighborhood of 3.5 million units.
There's always some, just because people move unpredictably - a "frictional" amount. I'm sure someone somewhere is sitting on an empty house for no good reason, but they're losing money, so I doubt it's a lot by comparison to the frictional amount.
Homeless people aren't let in for a really sad reason that has nothing to do with necessity: few voters care and nonprofits can't raise enough money - or alternately donated space - without government help. A lot of those people have "high needs", and are at risk of causing damage or just leaving a mess, so it's not like it's free to let them stay in a building until the next tenant shows up.
Capitalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for politics. Look at the USSR and all the various times they flip-flopped on whatever issue or person. Or Republican Spain and it's many warring factions, if that's more your idea of non-capitalism.
It's true that some scientists are on the hook to say things convenient for a sponsor. The nice thing is that a valid observation will stand the test of time regardless of who makes it. Marx made a huge impact on social sciences, and you don't have to agree with him on any particular thing (left or right wing - he was still a Victorian white man) to appreciate economics as a driver of history. The same goes for marginalism and friends.
Your link isn't talking about actual housing supply, it is talking about affordability. If you think that addresses my point, you don't understand what I'm saying. Like on a fundamental level, you don't get it.
And you keep throwing up vague, unsourced opinions like:
Like, okay? You don't buy it, but you're not going to bother much more with it, you're not going to make an argument, it's your opinion so you can just handwave anything I say away. If you're not convinced, fine, don't be, but there's literally nothing for me to respond to here.
This is incredibly frustrating. I don't even know what your point is anymore, you seem to just be knee-jerk arguing with every point no matter how weak or irrelevant your response is, and you seem content to throw up smokescreens of details rather than actually engage with anything in a substantive manner.
You seemed responsive for most of this, so I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but this is going in circles and you're not actually taking on board anything I'm saying. Just focus for a second, deal with the speculation thing. Make a point. If you can't do that, I'm not going to keep giving you the benefit of the doubt.
That probably means we've reached the end of the useful period of conversation. It happens, human working memory is small and language is slow, relative to the complexities of the things we're talking about. I feel like it's been pretty successful anyway; my mind has been changed about a few things, you seemed to like the yardsale model.
If we were to keep going, we'd need to rely heavily on data. Yeah, speculation resulting in "few" empty houses is my stance. Your stance is the opposite. It's empirical, and no amount of abstract arguing can answer it. Ditto for supply and demand in general - you know the abstract arguments about entrepreneurs not leaving money on the table already, and you're not convinced. The trick, of course, is that this isn't an economics journal, and we're not full time economists (hetero or orthodox). That limits how much data we can use to not enough.
I thought markets were garbage once too, and the thing that convinced me, besides the alternate explanation for billionaires I shared, was just having to budget out things myself. Everything runs at cost plus investor dividends, and every investment gives about the same return per principle, assuming similar risk profiles. That's a life experience I can't share, though.
Just in the name of explaining myself: I didn't actually check the methodology again. What I've seen in the past is an actual measure of the physical housing stock, and then a comparison of it per capita to other developed countries. It's smaller.
"We" haven't "reached the end of the useful period of conversation", you have reached the end of your capacity or willingness to engage with what I'm saying, and I've laid out very clearly how you're displaying that, and instead of engaging with the points, you fell back into passive-voiced vague notions about human working memory and the speed of language, drawing on sciency language to lend credibility to some absurd notion that nobody could possibly be expected have this conversation, but you just made that up.
We're not at the limits of human mental capacity, you're doing specific things that I've pointed out, with details, and instead of engaging with what I said in any specific way you've done more vague waffle that says nothing.
And if you didn't even check what you were sending me, why are you so confident about everything you're saying?
My sources gave very specific numbers -which I directly highlighted with quotes - about the state of the housing supply compared to the unhoused population that you completely ignored in favour of economic rationalism.
This is precisely the kind of thing orthodox economists do, and this is how economics students are taught to think. It's a real shame, it looks like your critical thinking skills have been pretty badly sabotaged by miseducation. I'm sure you're intelligent in many ways, but intelligence is domain specific, and if you don't learn the kind of rigour it takes to think critically, then you won't be able to.
This is not my first internet argument, by far. It's not even my first that's run this long. This always happens. Maybe I'm just dumb, or domain-specific dumb, but the fact is that political debate never works, with me involved or not. The first thing they tell you if you're door knocking for a candidate is not to bother with debates, and you bet the politicians themselves don't try and convert each other. Honestly, the progress we have made is pretty extraordinary.
You might be annoyed I'm not engaging with your original point, but be assured it's deliberate. (And done without any ill-will towards you)
The thing about mental capacity is my own personal explanation for how that works, despite the fact I don't think either of us is incapable of or unwilling to understand the truth, whatever it may be, and any logical process should have a deterministic outcome.
If you're frustrated, sorry. I'm not worth it though. Per earlier stages of conversation, I might know people with wealth and/or power, but none of them respect my opinion.
I did engage it. The gap appears to be bigger than that (I know, you don't believe my source), and I went into more detail about why unhoused people aren't housed despite it being materially very easy to manage.
I didn't read the entire paper again, because there's only so many hours in the day. Same reason I'm not going to go looking for what I was actually thinking of now. Sorry, it's not personal.
For what it's worth, my college education was in pure math.
That's literally not what I said, I said something direct and specific, something you can read in the first paragraph of that source. I believed what they were saying and I repeated it to you. I read your source back to you and you misunderstood.
This is the problem - you clearly aren't engaging in what's being said. If you did so directly and specifically, then maybe you could get farther, but you dissolve things into nonspecific drivel, to the point it's just either wrong or meaningless.
It's like if I asked you, "What's 2+2?" and you replied, "The nature of addition is involved in the very definition of numbers, which comes from set theory. Entire books have been written on this subject before we can even define the number 2 and I couldn't possibly cover it all, it's just so complicated."
Like sure, maybe that's all true, but motherfucker, what is 2+2? You go broad and vague and mysterious with things that sometimes have simple answers.
Maybe that's why you feel it's pointless having conversations online. I certainly don't find that, but I try to stay focused on the points and deal with things directly, and when someone is wasting my time I tell them so and I disengage.
Again, you seemed responsive to what I was saying at first, but when you're talking about the limits of the "speed of language" in response to a request for details, you are clearly looking for an out. I wouldn't spend this much time talking about this with someone if I thought it was a waste of time. I'm making the effort to give you this feedback because you've shown the ability to be responsive and I don't sense any ill-will. But if you find that "this always happens", then maybe you need to take a good look at why, and what it is that you're doing that might cause that.