Re:YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
by mindslight on Thursday May 23, 2019 @04:25PM
(#19995549)
> aren't things like education and affordable housing also problems that governments have been tackling for decades without much progress and even often making things worse
Not exactly. Government has been throwing band aids at the symptoms, while continuing full steam ahead with the underlying policy - an inflationary treadmill that keeps pushing "full employment" at a time when human labor is rapidly less required.
Housing is not affordable not because it has become expensive to build, but because it has been effectively financialized into a rent extraction scheme. And changing those fundamentals would disrupt the exit plans of everyone that has bought into the bubble.
I'm not excited about private industry approaches - they can succeed in isolation but they can't change the game. Even if innovation does say, bring down the cost of housing. The explicit government policy is to then raise prices across the board to make sure that average costs still keep going up. Essentially, economic progress itself has been turned into a zero sum affair for everyone but the upper class.
This feedback is exactly what happened after free trade and big box stores brought the benefits of cheaper goods and economies of scale, but also hollowed out our local economies. Rather than everybody ending up with more buying power that compensated for the local lost income, prices were raised to erode those gains. So we were left with lower quality goods for the same price, and displaced workers unable to take over a share of the still-needed work, as the still-employed had to keep working "full time" to keep the same buying power.
Not exactly. Government has been throwing band aids at the symptoms, while continuing full steam ahead with the underlying policy - an inflationary treadmill that keeps pushing "full employment" at a time when human labor is rapidly less required.
Housing is not affordable not because it has become expensive to build, but because it has been effectively financialized into a rent extraction scheme. And changing those fundamentals would disrupt the exit plans of everyone that has bought into the bubble.
I'm not excited about private industry approaches - they can succeed in isolation but they can't change the game. Even if innovation does say, bring down the cost of housing. The explicit government policy is to then raise prices across the board to make sure that average costs still keep going up. Essentially, economic progress itself has been turned into a zero sum affair for everyone but the upper class.
This feedback is exactly what happened after free trade and big box stores brought the benefits of cheaper goods and economies of scale, but also hollowed out our local economies. Rather than everybody ending up with more buying power that compensated for the local lost income, prices were raised to erode those gains. So we were left with lower quality goods for the same price, and displaced workers unable to take over a share of the still-needed work, as the still-employed had to keep working "full time" to keep the same buying power.