(I don’t mean that government spending should have an immediate positive return, I mean that things are fundamentally broken in a way money can’t fix but our solution is to spend more money)
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Public goods often have negative unit economics (at least in the short/medium term). If they had positive unit economics, the private sector would’ve provided it already.
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I meant it as an analogy, not literally. It feels like things are fundamentally broken organizationally and we try to solve with money.
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Well, I dunno, when your whole country effectively uses homeownership as a social safety net in lieu of actually having a social safety net and therefore real estate is protected and enhanced as an asset class at literally every level of government and generally appreciates at
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5-7%/yr while wages have generally remained flat since the 1970s, you will just have a larger and larger share of people left out of this system over time and then you’ll also have to spend more money to re-house them via increasingly expensive rental subsidies, land acquisitions
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...that’s exactly what I’m talking about?
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Sounds like a problem much larger than San Francisco
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California and SF exacerbate it with housing policy among other things
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It’s a bigger problem than SF. Also we have a real estate developer (who actually does not have a great track record in business) running the country and so I don’t think the federal stuff is going to get solved soon.
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That's effectively what govt is, but this is the purpose of govt. We don't expect a financial return. But as you point out, we should expect the money to be spent in a way that resolves problems.
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Right, my point is that spending money isn’t working because things are fundamentally broken, but we’re trying to solve the problem by spending even more
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Yeah definitely, is fine for metric of success to be entirely non-financial, but the principal of throwing good money after bad holds.
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I feel like most governments are this way. Seems like the incentive for people in charge doesn't match the "success" criteria.
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Not true - you can make it up in volume!
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biggest difference is that the endgame can't just be that San Francisco goes bankrupt and disappears, because cities don't do that
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Yes, it comes with this thing called Equal Protection.
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So meta and funny. Good joke on a sad topic, sir.
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