But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.
This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.
Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.
>> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it
I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet.
There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it.
But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble.
Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread.
And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...
Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.
That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!
Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.
UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale.
There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
When it's furniture I have the option to make my own furniture, that's my BATNA if IKEA tries to screw me, and so IKEA has to be better than that if it wants to make any money. I don't have that option with land because it cannot be created or destroyed.
Ah, what about the market for human suffering? I mean, there are people that want other people to suffer, and I'm sure there are people that want to suffer, so this market should exist right?
The thing is the market exists between the laws and regulations we have, and regulations that prevent a public harm can sometimes disincentivize a public good. You sound like of libertarian so you'd just say "get rid of the regulations" which is all fine and good until YOU get ate by the bear.
Something deeply wrong here. Both that this level of antisocial behavior is expected, and that liability would be placed on people who were not meaningfully responsible for it but just happen to have their name on the lease.
> regulation
I suspect what people are actually scared of in America is not regulation (from the legislature) but litigation, which is not the same thing even if it can have the same effects.
An example of how to destroy a community through outside litigants pursuing the culture war is what's happened to the Women's Institute, a pretty old organization, in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/14/womens-insti...
This is litigation itself as a form of antisocial behavior.
I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
Obviously if you give $1000 to each person, taxes have to be raised by an average $1000 per person, which sounds really bad as a soundbite. An implementation using negative tax brackets doesn't have this soundbite.
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
"The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor!
Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes
It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.
One thing I notice is that very busy people, are often busy by choice. Yes they have work, but they're not slaves to working those extra hours... they choose to pick up that laptop at home because it is there.
Folks after school, their kids are busy, because they signed the kid up for a dozen things.
Not to say some people aren't super stuck in a cycle, the working poor with multiple jobs, I used to do that and it was exhausting. That's still a problem.
But even people with choices seem to choose to be busy.
These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?
And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.
This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.
The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.
I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.
I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.
So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.
I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.
These positive externalities are supposed to be paid from the owners of capital, primarily via tax. This is how it very successfully worked for quite some time. However, most western societies have decided in the last few decades to believe two things -
1) The government and elected representatives (and thus, voters) cannot be trusted with the allocation of capital spent on social welfare
and contradictorily,
2) The government and elected representatives can be trusted with the allocation of capital when it comes to the market and the owners of capital
Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.
This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.
I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?
[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...
[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...
Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.
How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?
The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.
Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.
Think about what etiremnent savings means in the real economy. It means I have to store enough food to feed myself for 30 years. It means I have to store enough furniture too. And enough gasoline. And enough of everything else.
This is obviously not possible. So instead I store other things I hope I'll be able to exchange for gasoline and food. But no matter what form it takes, I have to store an absolutely enormous amount of stuff. Whether it's physical goods or abstract financial rights. There is no way for everyone to do this without creating massive economic distortion of some kind. Whatever people store is going to massively increase in value (house deeds! shares!) and crash later when they exchange it for food and gasoline.
But there's a simple alternative, we add a 20% tax and distribute it to people in the form of pensions. This is called a pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Optionally the scheme can keep some kind of weight value for each person based on how much tax they paid or any other metric. Since it doesn't store assets it doesn't distort the economy nearly as much. But, it's vulnerable to a future generation simply cutting it off. When the scheme turns on there's a generation who didn't contribute but still benefit and when the scheme turns off there's a generation who contributed and didn't benefit. This can't happen to people who store real assets because the assets are firmly owned by them, and the society can't easily just decide they aren't.
We can do an intermediate solution if we let people buy a share of future tax income as a financial asset. It doesn't distort the economy too much and your contributions are firmly your property. Treasury bonds are this.
No, not exactly. We're dealing with a historical confluence of long term changes in humanity. Before 1900 or so and some people had a lot of kids survive and others had a lot of kids die. The population rate increased very slowly, and not from a lack of trying. Then around the time I stated people figured out germs were real, chlorine in water was good, and washing ones hands was a swell idea. The population exploded.
Then you couple this with the technological revolution and the necessity of training huge amounts of the population for specialists jobs if they want to make a living and suddenly a boat load of kids doesn't make any sense at all. And it's getting to the point of the squeeze that having any kids doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of people.
Either a stock based system (US) or a rollover based system (RoW) has the problem someone needs to work in the future to provide for the pensioners. Stocks are just as much IOUs as straight cash, gold or "pension points" - you have to hope someone will be there in 30, 40, 50 or more years to take your token and exchange it for money that you can exchange for housing, food or other expenses.
No matter what, it is always kicking the can down the road.
Even the "oldest" way of just buying real estate and hoping to rent it out or sell it depends on there being someone in a few decades who wants to buy or rent it. Or the even older way of farms, it depends on you having kids and those kids surviving and for at least one of those kids willing to take over the farm. Many rural people got screwed over hard by rural flight.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
If it was just cash - then payments of that scale would definitely be inflationary. People with debts would gain, lenders would lose, you’d create a bunch of instability in the money markets, and I don’t like to predict the long term effects. In real terms you’re probably going to hurt more people than you’d help.
If you’re imagining a scenario where that level of largess is backed up by huge gains in the real economy, then yes the people receiving it would be better off. But where would that productivity come from? In this scenario the people who sell stuff that the UBI recipients would be buying would be far more wealthy. You wouldn’t close the wealth gap, you’d cleave it apart like the sky and the land.
It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things.
The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).
We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.
It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.
The article already points out a room that the kids were enjoying without religious crap imposed on them. We need solutions beyond bolting on these things to institutions that come with ulterior motives rather than “come here and just be”.
The rest of the article can basically be summed up with "work takes too much time and pays too little", which is absolutely true.
I am not sure what the jab at stay at home moms or grandparents who help with childcare is supposed to be. Probably some other communist drivel. Grandma absolutely did not do unpaid childcare, she was insistent she had to teach us right and also got tons of labour and money from my parents. If the exchanges of money and labour between parents and grandparents in the context of childcare were measured, it would probably double the nation's GDP.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
If you want UBI without massive inflation then you have to suck back in most of the money you've produced.
Of course, you can then do that pretty sensibly so that you don't have cliff edges like we do at the moment.
Of course it does! It is possible to have a system where everyone is unhappy, yet incentivised to keep making things worse.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
or https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...
Also people, especially kids, are not always good at understanding the consequences of their choices. The convenience of playing games at home is easy to see, but few kids understand how that choice will affect their social skills over the long term. Allowing individual preferences to dominate society might not give us the best result.
The church down the street from me, that I have nothing to do with, is a car without a steering wheel. My local town, of which I'm only 1 member, is a car without a steering wheel.
Just because you see a system that you don't understand or control doesn't mean it's dangerous. The first instinct shouldn't be to centralize power.
Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.
This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.
> definition of 'perfect competition' perfect competition, in which there are large numbers of identical suppliers and demanders of the same product, buyer and sellers can find one another at no cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market.
And that perfect competition provides the price signals that allow the market to be more competitive.
The less that holds true, the less efficient the market is going to be.
What is the price signal on education?
What is the price signal on public infrastructure?
What is the price signal on rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts?
[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).
I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.
Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.
You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.
Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.
You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.
True.
> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.
What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.
I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.
Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.
https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
(this is part of a series of posts, the link to the next one is at the bottom of the page)
There is a room in Stockholm where a bunch of kids I know hang out. It is a Sverok lokal, which is to say a little clubhouse for a gaming association, and it is exactly the unglamorous kind of good you would hope it is. Kids who do not have anywhere else to be go there. They play games, they argue about games, they sit around being teenagers together in a warm room that is not their bedroom and is not a shop that expects them to keep buying things. Some of them would be pretty lonely without it. It is, by any reasonable measure, a small and real social good.
I want to start with the fact that it works, because the rest of this post is about a problem, and I do not want you to come away thinking the situation is hopeless. It is not. We know how to make rooms like this. We have made one. The kids are ok, at least those that find this kind of resource.
Why does it exist?
It exists because it gets a grant. Public money for associations, what in Sweden we call föreningsbidrag, in this case handed out by MUCF, the agency for youth and civil-society affairs, through a system that was set up to fund youth organisations. Someone, at some point, decided that gaming clubs count, so a trickle of money flows to a federation, and some of that becomes rent on a room. That is the whole reason. Take the grant away and, almost certainly, no room.
And here is the bit that bugs me. The market was never going to build that room. Not because the market is evil, but because there is genuinely no money in it. You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways, onto the kids and their parents and the neighbourhood, and nobody can put it on an invoice. Economists call this a positive externality, which is a fancy way of saying a good thing that happens as a side effect, that the person doing it cannot charge anyone for. The dumb version is: the room makes the world a little better and makes precisely zero kronor, so left to its own devices, the economy does not build it.
So the room only exists because someone reached in by hand and paid for it directly. Can we teach the economy to see the value there naturally, without needing a planning committee? Hold that thought. I think it is most of the answer, but I want to show you the size of the problem first.
That Sverok lokal is an increasingly rare kind of thing. The general version has a name, the third place1, the spot that is neither home (the first place) nor work (the second place). The café, the pub, the library, the club, the church hall, the union that was also just somewhere to be. We have fewer of them than we used to2, and the ones that are left either don’t have many visitors or want you spending money the entire time you are in them.
But it is not only rooms. Look around and you notice a whole category of things quietly going missing, and they have a suspicious amount in common.
Nobody visits grandma. Partly because grandma is three hundred kilometres away, since everyone moved for work, or partly because grandma herself maybe is still working. Kids end up in front of a screen in the afternoon, because both parents have to be at a job and a tablet is a cheap stand-in for a present adult. The neighbour you used to know. The club someone used to run. The friend you used to see every week. People report fewer close friends than they used to, to the point that actual public health officials now say “loneliness epidemic” with a straight face3.
Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
What I will say is narrower, and I think it holds up: these all rhyme. And the thing they rhyme on is that they are all unpaid. Visiting grandma, raising your own kid, running the club, being a decent neighbour, keeping a friendship alive. None of it pays. All of it takes time. And I think one of the reasons we have less of it is the same boring reason I keep banging on about on this blog, which is labor pressure.
For almost all of us, a wage is the only way we get a claim on the things the world produces. That is what a salary really is. Not a reward for effort, but the one socially accepted ticket to food and shelter. Economists call this the distribution function of the wage. I just think of it as the only pipe through which stuff reaches you. And because it is the only pipe, you have to feed it. You sell your hours to a job, because the job pays, even in the cases where the genuinely better use of your time is something that does not pay. The afternoon with your kid. The Tuesday running the club. The trip to see grandma.
So you take the shift. And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it. Except you did not really choose it. You chose between the shift and not making rent. The room full of kids, the present parent, the visited grandparent, all of it lost a contest it was never actually allowed to enter.
The economy never sits up and goes “hang on, who is going to run the room?” It has no way to say that. It just quietly fails to fund the room, fills your afternoon with a job of marginal value, and moves on. If it could talk, the most it would ever manage, years later when maybe you’ve gotten away from a subsistence wage, is a sheepish “oh, yeah, that probably was not worth it.” And by then the afternoon is gone. You do not get the afternoon back.
This is the same idea as what I have called make-work, just pointed at your living room instead of at the office. It is the economy spending a genuinely scarce thing, human time, on output worth less than the time, and not even noticing, because all the price signals look fine.
I need to put a fence here, because “people have less time for family and community” is a sentence that some people love to finish in an ugly way.
This is not me saying the past was lovely and we should go back. It is not a call for mum to quit her job, or for grandma to be conscripted into unpaid childcare, or for any particular person to go back to any particular kitchen. That is the opposite of the point. The point is that people have quietly been stripped of the option to do the unpaid thing, because the unpaid thing does not pay rent and rent is not optional. The problem is not that someone is shirking their duty. The problem is that we built an economy where the loving, useful, unpaid choice is a luxury most people simply cannot afford.
So the fix is not to push anyone anywhere. The fix is to make the unpaid choice affordable, for whoever wants it, whoever they happen to be. Give people enough room to choose grandma, or the club, or the kid, without the alternative being “or starve.”
So how do you actually get rooms full of kids? There are basically three settings.
One: leave it to the market. As established, you get no room. The market cannot see things it cannot sell, and a room full of happy teenagers is invisible to it. This is the default, and the default is bad.
Two: pay for it by hand. This is what Sweden does, and it is genuinely much better than nothing. The state notices a gap and plugs it directly with a grant. It is the improvised second pipe, the patchwork of grants and transfers we have bolted on, one programme at a time, to do the distributing that wages no longer manage on their own. It works. Our lokal is proof it works. But it is a patch. Someone on a committee has to keep choosing to fund it, every single year. And it only ever reaches the goods that somebody specifically thought to pay for. Nobody ever wrote a grant for “being a good neighbour,” so that one just stays broken.
Three: teach the economy to do it on its own. This is the one I actually want. Instead of the state hand-picking which good rooms deserve a cheque, you change the rule underneath, so that the people who would run the rooms can simply afford to. You do that by fixing the pipe. A basic floor of income that everyone gets, funded in a careful way I am not going to relitigate here (see the next post in this series for that), means the person who wants to spend their Tuesdays running the club is not forced to spend them on a marginal shift instead. The whole point is to stop the price system being blind to value that does not happen to arrive in the shape of a wage.
I am not going to pretend a basic income magically conjures gaming clubs out of thin air. It does not. Somebody still has to start the club, find the room, do all the boring organising. A floor does not do any of that for you. Targeting and universality each do something the other cannot. A grant can deliberately build one specific thing. A floor can quietly make a thousand unspecified things possible, without anyone having to choose them in advance.
So I am not even saying we should scrap the grants. The floor goes on top of what we already have (again, it is not difficult to fund, you just have to do it carefully! Check out the next post). Keep föreningsbidrag. Keep funding the lokal. All I am saying is that right now, a room full of kids gets to exist only because a committee remembered to fund it (sounds like a planned economy eh?), and that is a silly and fragile way to run a civilisation. We managed to build one room almost by accident. The goal is an economy where rooms like it are the normal outcome.
We have a room in Stockholm because, more or less by happenstance, someone funded a social good almost directly. That is genuinely wonderful, and it is not enough.
We need to teach the economy how to do that on purpose.
The next part of this series looks at Sub-subsistence work as well, and introduces the solution. The post is here.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.
Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.
All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.
Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.
The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.
You will also typically have the option to simply opt out, although this is getting less rare.
I think my point is that there are typically still many options, but the best options are controlled by few players.
In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.
I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.
Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.
The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.
Are you making your own choices?
Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?
To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?
It clearly shouldn't be the only option-- it's not going to service all types of interests and audiences. I attend the meetings of the local numsimatics club-- they get a room in one of the city offices when it's closed for the day, and do presentations and discussions. The demographics are weird, it's like under-15s and over-60s with very little in the middle, and I'm not sure there's the technical capability or the preference to do it over Zoom. (Trying to remember what they did during the pandemic, I think they just closed down for a year or so)
(and, realpolitik style, if you get an excited community together with some funds, it’s usually easier to get that handout to top it off!)
The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees. The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week. The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago) Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.
If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.
You don't have to BE a luthern to visit a luthern church, and that's true for the kids as well. Same for the Jehovah's, same for multi- and non-denominational churchs.
But in general here we're talking about the common case. There's no real way to stop an entrepreneur from dumping 80 hours per week into their own profitable business. The important part is that such things not be common, to prevent the result of many things just being bid up in price and making that amount of time spent de facto mandatory.
I'm way older than 50, and don't miss having kids at all.
The trouble is, the people who are most vocal about "no poors allowed" emphatically do not subscribe to it, and the people who are most likely to have power over these things do not subscribe to it (there is some, but not perfect, overlap between these groups).
And it's kinda tricky to go over their heads and get rules put in place at the next level above them (ie, the level that sets the rules they have to follow) that can effectively prevent this sort of thing.
what freedom, or choice, does that translate to?
e.g. I either go without power or food, or I don't get a brutally painful tooth pulled
in germany this is handled by supporting youth organizations. sport, scouts and other activities. most of these groups get free access to government owned buildings. they get financial support for their equipment, etc, under the condition that any youth can join with only a nominal membership fee.
in a pure market economy none of these organizations or spaces would survive. they depend on government support.
Looking at their website it's hard to tell. Their calendar doesn't show any activities like that, but maybe you have to be plugged into the congregation to know. They appear to be a very left-leaning Evangelical organization now. I didn't even know there was such a thing.
But there was always this underlying, uncomfortable "threat" that an adult would approach you to talk about your relationship with god or whatever since that's the whole motive of the place existing.
If you're not into that, then you feel out of place. Like being a straight guy at a gay bar who's only there for the happy hour. Or hanging out at a cafe without wanting to buy anything.
We need to come up with something without any motive other than "here's a place to just be".
Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?
Long-term payoffs that increase the value of all participants in society, such as education, healthcare, infrastructure (roads including public transportation, water, electricity, ...), are demonstrably better served by government than by business.
That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)
There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.
I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.
But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.
I think it speaks more about what people value, how they value their time. How many people can’t afford an hour a week? An hour a month? There is almost always some unhealthy activity that takes up at least an hour of your time a month, why not substitute?
How silly, even autonomous vehicles have steering. They may be built without the wheel, but they have some kind of steering mechanism
> or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start
I hope your wheels never lose alignment and that you're pointed exactly where you want to go at the start.
It's not a weird example at all if you don't come up with crazy unrealistic situations that don't match actual cars or the metaphor.
I agree with this, but I think it reinforces GP's point that what's missing is time: slack in the day. I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood kids, and the critical enabler was that there were always adults around during the after-school hours. Not actively hanging out with us, or even closely supervising, but around. Some of them (mine, but only for a few years), were stay-at-home mothers, but by no means all. One family had a dad who got home early from work. Another kid we couldn't play at their house certain days, but we could others, because their parents had variable schedules.
There were also more kids around, because families back then had more kids than they do nowadays. I think that's also (not entirely, but to a significant degree) a consequence of adults having less time - across their life-cycles, and in their days - that isn't devoted to work.
No ones' parents did gig-work, or worked two jobs. Most parents were 9-5, or maybe 8-4 (or I don't know: I was a kid, and not paying attention to things like that), but no one went to "after school care", because there were always adults around after school got out.
Hell, I think the need for third-places (for kids) mentioned in the article is a down-stream effect of the increased time pressures on adults' lives - as is the disappearance of third-places for adults.
The very need for psychiatrists is, in a sense, an example for that. This is a case of companies trying to do their best to convince you to engage with them, because, otherwise, you likely wouldn't. Also, you never get stuff you don't "need". Games you don't want to play? Never happens, even in addictive games. Consume art that makes you feel nothing? Feel nothing how? Worst case scenario, you thought it would make you feel something, but it didn't. In all of these cases, the worst that happened is that you were made to wrongly belive that they would sate you, but your prediction was wrong, so you improve it for next time. Remember, even hypnosis can't overrule individual will, only brainwashing (which isn't a thing yet).
Take the opposite approach, central planning. In central planning, you are given little to no choices. You will be assigned the resources and roles you need according to the central planner. Even if the planner is democratic, your influence is reduced to a single vote, which is guaranteed to be erased by the law of large numbers. And that's ignoring external factor to you that are in control of the central planner: the psychlogists you mentioned still exist, but now they work for the planner instead.
We can argue that people are currently led into making poor choices in the market, but to conclude that this means no choice is being made is wrong. In a market, we can improve people's choices. In centralized systems, "people's choices" aren't a thing.
Meaning, I think that ticket sales can a good job of capturing the costs and benefits of transportation - the benefits to the consumer and the costs to the producer. It’s worked well in other areas of transportation, like passenger boats and planes, and the market mostly works well in those areas.
So I’d have guessed that issue with subways, different from planes and ships, is that you have to buy the rights to large portions of underground land in order to build your lines in contiguous fashion. It’s hard for private developers to get the rights to these lands, if one landowner refuses to sell, it can block the construction of an entire line. This is why rail, dam, and highway projects tend to be coordinated by the state. They all suffer this problem, which doesn’t apply to transport by air or sea, as air and sea lack similar private property issues to trip over.
That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.
> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?
I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.
It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.
“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman
It's a fake choice, because they carry mutually exclusive catalogs, and entertainment choice is not particularly substitutable (e.g. if I want to watch "Star Wars" and it's not available on services I'm subscribed to, I'm not going to be satisfied with all the rich selection of things they carry that is still not "Star Wars").
Lots of that in the economy, that's where the most money seems to be made. Smartphones are my go-to example: plenty of nearly identical options to choose from, choice entirely set up by vendors, with little to no way of users to voice their feedback. A supply-driven market. You get to choose from what's made available, not what is possible.
What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?
i can't think of any volunteering opportunity that only takes an hour unless it is something you can do at home or nearby. otherwise you also have to consider travel times, getting ready, etc. any activity no matter how short usually cost me a full afternoon or evening.
You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.
I dont get the rationale with those two. What it is, to make living less comforta ble for residents? Doesnt everybody wants a grocery store and cafe nearby?
personally i believe for every story in that article where the government failed or did worse than private owners we can find just as many stories where private owners failed to act in the public interest and only government was there to support the public. this is not a question of the system, but of the motivation of the people involved. even some examples in the article only work because government set the rules that empowered the people to act against bad actors in the first place.
the article claims that government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits and i would counter that that is broadly not true in many places because people do expect the government to act in their interest and not doing so can and will backfire. even in a country like china where the government is more top down. but i digress.
so yeah, i agree that government and people are market participants. but i just had this argument in another thread where someone insists that i am a non-interested party in commercial property dealings if i am not a tenant or owner, while i kept arguing that as a person living in the city my interests are affected too if a property stays empty and therefore it's only right that the government gets involved.
Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.
Saying entertainment is not substitutable is kind of crazy. It is very rare that I will only ever want to watch one specific thing, and if that happens, I have the choice to rent it, or buy it or pay for one month of a service. To me as a consumer...that great.
The market for smartphones is mostly driven by lack of options in OS, not hardware. Each of the big players offer plenty of hardware choices at different price points. But if you don't like the OS, harder to get away from that. Competing on OS is very difficult though.
how could there be an alternative? surely without god or a king everything would fall apart!
I'm not going to lie, I'm not deluded enough to think voting will (often) bring change quickly. I don't even have a lot of hope in the likelihood of it working. However, it's not nothing and it's something everyone can and should do.
Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
a noble sentiment but most often these cannot be separated.
At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement."
There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time.
If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)
I think that's a huge mistake: there are child-development studies that suggest that it's important for kids to engage in (moderately) risk-taking play in order to develop accurate assessments of their own skills and calibrate their own internal risk models; other studies suggest that it's helpful for children's social development to spend time playing independently (of adults) in age-diverse groups of other kids. My opinion is that the parents who (e.g.) follow their kids around the playground, making sure they don't fall down and settling every squabble, are not being helpful - though not doing that sure got me dirty looks from other parents!
So, that's where at least some of the "kids aren't exploring outside" effect comes from. My own (GenX / "latchkey" / elder-millennial) cohort was arguably under-patented; now we ourselves have over-corrected with our kids. Maaaybe the idea that at-home entertainment is today more compelling or convenient has something to do with it, but I don't know: my generation was plenty compelled by TV and 8-bit Nintendo. I think we'd have spent just as much time on those as kids today spend on whatever they do on their devices now.
However, I think the primary drivers are:
1.) Fewer kids around, both per-capita and (related, but separable) per geographical area: you can't have a spontaneous neighborhood "gang" when other kids don't live nearby. Declining birth rates and increased sprawl force parents to be more involved in their kids' social lives, as transportation to / organizers of scheduled activities and formalized "play-dates". (Of course, this only increases the time-pressure on parents, and makes it even more difficult to imagine having more kids. It's a vicious cycle.)
2.) As you say, experience-maxxing. Some of this is great: parents in general seem to be way more (emotionally healthily!) involved in their kids lives than my parents' generation ever were.
(But one example: I think my parents might have attended one or two of my Little League or high school baseball games, ever. It didn't hurt my feelings at all: parents mostly didn't, and we kids mostly thought the families who came every time were kinda weird, and were a bit embarrassed for the teammates whose parents showed up. Today, I love how much support my kid and his peers receive at their games. It's fantastic. [Coming to watch practice though? Nah. That's a little too helicoptery. Parents, don't do that, unless you're volunteering to help coach the team.])
On the other hand, I think a lot of the other efforts parents make - structuring every afternoon and family weekend around doing something kid-friendly - isn't such a good thing: kids need a little boredom and a bit of independence to spark their creativity. But... For time-pressed parents, who genuinely and rightly crave interaction with their kids, those hours are precious: that's all the time you get, so the temptation to over-schedule is strong.
I think both of those factors reduce down (in large part) to time pressure. Having to work or train longer, and on top of that having to have more than one income, to be financially stable increases the (fractional) time investment, and then all of it compounds.
It's not a simple answer, but I think higher wages, better social and societal support for families, and denser built environments would all help to pull societies away from the current equilibrium. Developed countries are all well below replacement birth rates, while at the same time surveys indicate that most women have fewer children than they'd "ideally" want. There's something off kilter in the way we're living our lives, and I think it's downstream of the economic system we've collectively built.
(Sorry to hit you with these walls of text. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this since becoming a parent.)
The divine right of kings touched on a lot of things, like governance, ownership, origin of law, etc. Decentralization/centralization focuses on ownership before anything else.
Independence here isn't about whether your mind exists in a parallel world - devoid of external inputs - it's whether your input is required for an action to happen or not. They didn't simply comply with a choice from above, they experimented and came with an option that works for them. It doesn't matter whether that's a common choice or not, but who held the final authority in it.
In centralized systems, your input is, in theory, basically irrelevant/in practice, completely irrelevant unless you happen to the central authority.
That’s not even remotely true political parties determine privately who they will fund to put on the ballot underneath their particular party
The public is not invited to vote in those outside of certain primaries and even then the people who are proposed for the primaries are chosen from the party members
Ballot access for third-party or non-affiliated typically require a petition to apply and that threshold is again set by party members in office
>Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
Voting is the lowest possible bar or participation for political engagement
Organizing and agitating are the day to day efforts people should be doing but aren’t because they prefer to have money
With section 8 (fed housing welfare) rules, any multifamily structure has a better than not chance of becoming slum housing in a time frame less than the average span of homeownership.
Which is both about property values and not wanting to live in/near section 8 residents.
"Planning" and zoning aren't the problem, they're the enforcement mechanism. (Since police and other public enforcement of quality of life issues has been all but neutered in the name of equity/civil-rights/whatever.)
Same reason for the seemingly inexplicable popularity of HOAs that everyone seems to hate.
High prices are one of many resultant 'enforcement' prongs.
I promise you you will have zero success getting Claudia De-La Cruz (who I voted for and was on the ballot in VA) put on the DNC or RNC ballot.
So no, you can’t just get on a ballot as a candidate by showing up. You need to be a party loyalist and there are no independent parties that voters show up for.
Hell even “down ballot” have to stick to the party line.