alt Hacker NewsThe room the economy can't see
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In my experience, the key element is slack.
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.
Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
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?"
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.
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.
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
This genre of posts should be called “the author has reached adulthood.” Not quite settled in, but no longer a clueless idiot, either.
Most churches I've been to have these?
Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).
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.
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as coersive as the regulatory state.
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ
Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?
The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy.
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.
That's the kind of space I've been missing in my youth. I love that Swedish kids have got it available to them.
I really liked the article, but the authors suggestion that a universal basic income is real solution is not backed by any evidence as I can tell.
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.
Many open source efforts seem to belong to this category as well.
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets,
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.
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.
Looks like someone else recreated some of the premises that Marx discussed over 150 years ago.
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.
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.
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.
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.
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.
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.
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.
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
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Even the title is AI
Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.