Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

Re:Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate not seen sin... by wyager on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:28PM (#37646486)

Every physical good is a financial asset whether you like it or not. Ignoring this reality will not help achieve policy goals.

I agree that you are accurately describing the economically illiterate thought process, just not that it's correct.

Price controls are one of those interesting things where there's a phase transition from near-universal support to near-zero support at a certain knowledge level.

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Re:Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate not seen sin... by klodolph on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @12:13PM (#37661487)

Treating everything as nothing more than a financial asset is way too reductive.

My point here is that housing is not only a financial asset, and should be treated as more than just a financial asset. Or if you want to take an economic approach here, you need to come up with a utility function that more accurately reflects what we care about—we think that two people who have housing is a better situation than one person who has two houses and one person who has none.

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Re:Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate not seen sin... by wyager on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @03:17PM (#37664467)

Thankfully we have a mechanism for working utility-theoretic optimization into economic calculations. The mechanism is called "prices". When you undermine this mechanism, you are not globally utility-maximising.

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