A thing I think is underappreciated: prices measure changes which have often already happened in the world. The change in price is not itself usually the event itself. (Speaking of prices for assets here more than for products.)
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Away from housing, one sees this in tech as well. Companies have to “grow into” valuations but the valuations themselves largely structurally lag metrics in the business which suggest that the firm is on a trajectory to possibly plausibly grow into those valuations.
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Pricing attempting to simultaneously predict the future while being set in reference to the past is one of the things which causes so much confusion in the tech industry about it, because many folks’ intuitions about how companies should be valued are informed by regular life.
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Regular life, including many great businesses, doesn’t have virtually any curves which look like 10% month over month growth sustained per year. So people largely are calibrated to assume that they mostly don’t happen. (They do happen.)
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This is one of the reasons venture investors specialize, because the wider markets are like the HN comments inevitably saying “So when is this business going to be profitable?” Venture investors specialize in being indifferent to that contingent on demonstrated growth.
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(I’m being a bit handwavy, because there are stages in VC which happen prior to there being any demonstrable growth, though VC funds seem to be mostly abandoning them to angels/accelerators the last few years.)
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Could you restate that? There are too many negatives for me to make sense of it

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People want to live in places like the SFBA. There are insufficient homes there. Making enough to close gap is illegal. This destroys value (decreases net societal amount of the state of having things people want) but increases prices of homes in places like the SFBA.
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In two consecutive tweets you're arguing that building housing destroys value and not building housing destroys value ?
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Building houses people want creates value; building houses they don’t destroys it. The housing boom was concentrated in areas and at prices where the houses were not appropriate to the needs of the people who’d consider living there.
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Have you written up your thoughts anywhere on how Tokyo builds housing vs dysfunctional western cities?
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