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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4460 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How much of a pay decrement would you take if —

  • you never have to worry about school quality, healthcare, crime, or drug abuse among your children

  • the area where you work is beautiful and stress-reducing

  • you can walk a pleasant street to obtain the necessities of life

  • the people who you meet daily are kind and have good etiquette

This is pretty much my life already tbh. Our district is literally called "university district" and the demographics are exactly what you would expect, we have a giant park in front of us that is overall very clean and has multiple nice playgrounds, my "commute" is <10 mins (by bike) to my daughter's daycare and <5 mins (by foot) to my work. We live in an historic city with a beautiful old town center that we can visit in less than 30 mins (by bike, again).

The pay admittedly isn't great for our level of education but still far above average and easily enough to get by with a family. There is a minor crime issue, mostly stealing bikes.

Who here doesn't have this?

This sounds like regular middle class things.

Walking a pleasant street to necessities is not easy to achieve in suburbia.

My current lifestyle to money ratio is fine (could use a bit more money), but I suppose if I moved somewhere else to have a lifestyle more like that, I would see what the local monetary expectations were, and adjust accordingly. Like, if I didn't need a car there, I would need the car payment or insurance, so it would be fine to decrease pay by that much, minus whatever I would then spend on public transport. There clearly isn't any abstract answer, because most income is used to buy those things anyway.

None, as I have that in Poland or I can skip that (stress-reducing work is not needed, without not necessary stress is good enough).

(OK, first not fully - but it would require magic to have that and I prefer to avoid running untested magic on my children)

  • the area where you work is beautiful and stress-reducing
  • you can walk a pleasant street to obtain the necessities of life
  • the people who you meet daily are kind and have good etiquette

These three I have already got covered. I can get a $400k mortgage with $2k payments to move to a gated community with private amenities to solve #1, which is about what I am willing to pay. Maaybe $2.5k to cover healthcare forever.

????? Where???

Russia, obviously.

What is the alternative we are comparing this to? I already have most of these things, so not much. Less than 10%.

(pulling numbers roughly out my ass here) Private gated apartment rent: 48k Private school for 2 kids: 32k Private insurance: 12k (double the 6k average to get Premium) Pleasant social and work environments: basically just remove hazard pay incentives. Call that a 18k hardship bonus that is off the table. Private security: most of the need is obviated if the above are all satisfied, but call it a 6k annual fee split across however large your little community is.

Just on the face of it thats 120k worth of 'good stuff' you're paying to have if you don't have it already, and thats the minimum state you are envisioning here. We can postulate that the average positive externality per household in a functioning society might be worth this much and could theoretically be achieved with greater economies of scale, but lets table that thought experiment for another time.

The end state is the 'what is your job on the commune' ideal made manifest. Most disgruntled cynics, sorry realists, here look askance at this utopia because of accurate concerns regarding the likelihood of such a utopia being targeted for 'diversification' by larger powers that be. The reality though is that the disgruntlement and skepticism is an outgrowth of current degrading circumstances rather than hostility to this nice idea to begin with.

We all want our bag of escape money so that we can hide in Belize or Vermont when things hit the fan, and are just coasting through the enshittification of our local environs, getting as much out of it as we can while eyeing the escape hatch. It is a very cynical approach, and it saddens me that civic engagement is such a thankless exercise.

Unfortunately, in equity-focused societies oversensitive to disparate impact, I do not see any recourse. The only real solution is to hide ones utopia lest a horde of foreign and domestic migrants descend to enshittify it thoroughly. Best to be like a mumbai mansion: filthy on the outside but paradise within.

Around two-thirds to three-quarters, because, along the lines of what other commenters are saying, that's what I'm paying now vs the counterfactual where I live in a low cost-of-living locale.

Interestingly, this describes the situation in Taiwan nearly perfectly except that the buildings are kinda ugly.

Pay seems to be about 50-75% less than U.S. norms, partially compensated by much lower prices on nearly everything.

describes the situation in Taiwan nearly perfectly

Don't forget the looming threat of a Chinese military invasion, or, as the kids are calling it now, a "special military operation."

I wouldn't, because realistically the deal would (Lando mutter) keep getting worse all the time.
Wil Stancil clones would come along to slap down favelas in your village as revenge against class enemies for living comfortably, as we've seen him announce as his actual goal.
A huge brokerage account backed by political power is the only thing that can't be taken away, and that means I don't get to take it easy if i want my grandchildren set up in an enclave free of murder and dysfunction.

I think it depends on how much of a support network exists in the community. If I take a job that doesn't give me enough money to afford basic necessities, will there be a food pantry, farmer's market, cooperative drug store, etc. available?

The great social division is economic. So no, if course not. "People can be poor somewhere else." is the near universal revealed preference.

Of course, but with the housing market being what it is, being able to afford living somewhere where I get all this is what I need more money for.

Yeah, the actual figure is pretty easy to measure by comparing peoples' actual takehome pay after mortgage and property tax.

For sure in the US. But the thought experiment is also interesting from the standpoint of measuring intranational quality of life and proposing higher taxation. If, at the greatest extreme, a person would sacrifice two thirds of his extraneous income (after housing/food) in order to live in this utopian social environment, then we really ought to be comparing social environments instead of economies when considering quality of life between nations and states. And this probably has some moral application to taxing the wealthy more.

I would take a significant pay cut if I could be assured of having this, maybe half. The hobbies I have that make me truly happy are pretty cheap. But I'd need guarantees that my children and their descendants would have the same deal. Because it's important to note that with less money for myself, there would also be a lot less for me to leave to my children, which means that if that community collapses or regresses, they won't necessarily have the egg nest to make a pleasant life for themselves elsewhere.

BUT I don't think it's a realistic prospect, short of fully automated luxury gay space communism (post-scarcity society). I think this is the deal of capitalism, you can't really modulate it to specific levels. We might get the impression it isn't so because this can take a couple of generations for the problems of "social democracy" to be obvious. Life is pleasant and orderly because other people work to make it so for others in society. They work because they are rewarded. If you reduce the reward, they won't strive as hard, making quality of life drop. And with the workforce mobility we currently have, the highly motivated, quality individuals will easily be convinced to move to a pleasant gated community where they will be surrounded by other highly motivated individual AND also get more money, and your community is going to be slowly only populated by the least ambitious and driven individuals, which will erode the very qualities that you thought you were compromising for.

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