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Notes -
I also believe that allowing people to 'hoard' capital and property individually (i.e. decentralization) is important for ensuring systems are robust and to some extent antifragile.
This is also my argument against strict HOAs and zoning laws. Enforcing high levels of uniformity is good in some ways (making sure homes in a hurricane-prone area are built to a particular standard!), but really bad in others.
I prefer to live in an environment with novel and 'unique' aesthetics, even if this creates a hodgepodge of styles without any uniting theme, because the alternative seems to be everything is designed around the same blueprint and is painted the same shade of beige. But a lot of people seem to be fine with living in the uniform beige suburbs.
For me, the tradeoff of a gym membership in exchange for having more space in my living area is generally worth it, and the gym will have a wider variety of equipment that I wouldn't want to store long-term (let alone move) anyway.
Would it be so bad if you have a 'community' gym that was <5 minutes walking distance from your house and had all the equipment you needed, readily available in most cases (i.e. NOT constantly occupied by other users)?
Because there is certainly an efficiency tradeoff. If every household had their own exercise equipment, even assuming they use it several times a week, it is still sitting idle most of the time. Whereas a communal gym area will minimize the overall cost of setting up (because you're paying for less equipment overall) and ensure that the available equipment is in regular use so you're getting more value for the equipment you do have.
I'm seeing how the 'slack vs. efficiency' argument seems to be moving in favor of efficiency these days.
And fertile! The existence of the dilletante is important in terms of creativity over time. Many great innovations have come from people having the freedom to fuck around.
I live in a place where space is more or less a non-issue for me. This allows me to keep this stuff around.
This was basically the situation in law school, and in law school I did have a gym membership at the school. The cool feature there that I've never seen replicated at a commercial gym: you could "rent" gym clothes (think a gym uniform from the 80s: tube socks, mesh gym shorts, cotton t shirt) which made it extra convenient because I didn't need to pack clothing when I went to class in the morning.
But, just in my short lifetime, I've seen the equipment in gyms shift radically from machine focused, to free weight focused. When I was a teenager I never would have found a kettlebell in a commercial gym! And even today, unless I join a KB focused gym I'm not going to find one with a 97#er like Erica.
Ultimately I will probably dispose of some things. I don't really boulder outside anymore, I'm probably going to sell my crashpad for a loss. But that means some kid at my old climbing gym is going to get a great deal on a crash pad, and maybe that will help him become a great boulderer. Slack in the system!
Much like how the thrift store has historically been a prime driver of fashion innovation. Kids with more taste and time than money shop at thrift stores, pick up great vintage items cheap, and find ways to remix them to create something new. Slack in the system which wouldn't exist if everyone rented clothing.
Throw in all the stuff about power that everyone else talks about, but this is one reason.
P.S.
A big part of what makes for boring houses is that people don't really "own" it, the bank does, and they have no intention of ever paying off the mortgage and really owning the house, they just intend to sell it on to someone else at some point. As such, they don't decorate their house for their taste, they decorate for their idea of someone else's taste, for resale value. The same thing has made the watch market so recursive: everyone is obsessed with resale value, and as such they must stick to what "everyone" wants. The same thing has made cars more and more silver and less and less interesting, it used to be much more common to drive a car all the way from dealership to junkyard, now people don't want to get a car in a color that will make it harder to sell.
It's the same dynamic. When you're optimizing for general rather than a specific taste, you produce things that no one likes quite as much.
So I'm trying to distill the argument this supports down to a few sentences.
"Slack in the system" and "freedom to be expressive/innovative" is the basic idea, but what is the actual reason why systems without individual ownership wouldn't permit such innovation and would remove slack, which could be catastrophic?
Is it just a centralization vs. decentralization argument, or is there something a tad more nuanced here, where people who aren't able to own things will never act as if they own things, stifling their own creativity and preferences in the process?
This is probably the philosophical quandary I'm facing.
Probably if I had to summarize it in a sentence it would be this: Creativity comes from Freedom, and Freedom is the freedom to be stupid. Arguing merely that a rental economy is optimal in each individual case is not enough, because on a meta level we need variety, which can only be created by making sub-optimal decisions.
RE: HOAs and architectural standards for example. I would not want to live in most developments or towns with strict architectural uniformity, but I often enjoy visiting towns in New England that do have those kinds of standards. So I don't just want all freedom or all uniformity, I want varieties of different ways of running a town.
I also think there's a bit of quandry from the 'search problem' wherein it can be impossible to know if you've actually found the best accessible maxima when optimizing for [whatever you value] or if you're only on a local maxima but a couple miles over is a much better one, if only you could find it.
For instance, if you only ever see big grey suburbs, it might feel like the ideal living arrangement, until you randomly come across a neighborhood built on different architectural principles and displaying different aesthetics, and you find it MUCH more appealing!
But if most neighborhoods are 'forced' to have the same or similar standards, obviously you're much less likely to encounter the variants you might prefer.
So a level of freedom to 'explore' design-space, or whatever other space, even if most paths are dead ends, is kind of critical, and allowing individual ownership (and the attendant creative expression that we argue comes with it) you enable a much wider search for the best maxima, and one hopes this improves everyone's wellbeing.
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