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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33683 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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On The Poverty Equilibrium vs NIBMYism

Big Yud recently posted an interesting thought, The Poverty Equilibrium. The most brutal possible summary is: despite an insane amount of technological progress over the last centuries, some people still toil all day in miserable jobs to provide for some urgent need and it's not clear why this is happening and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.

I have a not quite neat rebuttal. Maybe call it a partial agonist rebuttal: poverty kind of persists because of NIMBYism, but NIMBYism also prevents more poverty.

Lets take my town of Eugene Oregon as an example. Eugene has become a desirable place to live the last 10 years. It has moderate weather, rarely snowing but also rarely hitting the 100s. Is very bike friendly and it exhibits Portlandia levels of absurdity regarding organic and local food and products. You can exercise outdoors all year round, comfortably, and stunning natural beauty is a stones throw away. You're also surrounded by sensual hippies and violent crime is below average for the US, though there is the usual west coast share of scary homelessness and menacing.

Naturally, as a near-coastal elite city, building is heavily restricted and housing inventory is low so prices are high and home ownership is unreachable if you only make minimum wage ($14.70/hour). There are constant calls to build more affordable housing, but instead all that seems to get built are luxury apartments that don't alleviate housing shortages, regularly outraging the /r/Eugene subreddit.

EAs cry incessantly that NIMBYism is to blame for this state of affairs and if we would Just Fucking Build the cost of housing would plummet and gripping poverty would be solved.

One digression. Eugene has, wedged immediately against it, a town called Springfield. The quality of life is nearly identical, you have access to all of the luxuries I said above but maybe add 10 minutes of drive time. It's less bike friendly and the public spaces are a bit less nice. Alternatively, the police do enforce laws harder. Anyway, the cost of this almost-but-not-quite Eugene town is that housing is about 30% cheaper, into the range of comfortable if you make minimum wage. However, nobody wants to live there. Instead people treat living in Eugene like some human right and Springfield Oregon may as well be Springfield Missouri.

But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer. But it can also be argued in hand waving qualitative fashion: the population of the town is about 175,000. If we built 100,000 tiny houses that cost $400/month, the cost of housing would certainly plummet but the quality of life in town would collapse. Traffic, which barely exists here, would become awful, the public spaces would be full of much more homeless menacing, crime and littering would increase and the public services would be stretched thinner.

Aside from tragedy and also usual bad decisions that contribute to poverty (addiction, bad with money), poverty persists because it's actually pretty hard for some people to leave their town if it becomes unaffordable (family obligations, can't find a job in cheaper towns). Similarly, there are not robust ways to accommodate more poor people without making the entire town poorer. I can see how Kowloon Walled City can accommodate high population density but living there seems pretty unappealing compared to quiet quaint little Eugene. Could a 100x increase in utility fix this? Probably! If building was radically cheaper, I could imagine beautiful Sim City style arcologies that have these peaceful pockets of small towns that can support millions of people. But until then, NIMBYism is good actually and prevents poverty from spreading.

If you want Kowloon Walled City in America, on the other hand, what's stopping us? Plenty of room in Nevada. We can build a tech bro metropolis around it. Hell, I'd visit. I'd probably even buy an apartment there that's vacant 50 weeks a year.

I think you're just describing a coordination problem? If Eugene becomes super-YIMBY, it may accumulate poverty from Springfield. But Springfield will lose poverty to Eugene, so Springfield benefits in proportion to however much Eugene suffers. And both cities benefit at least a little from the effects of having enough housing for everyone, wherever they want to have housing.

it's not clear why this is happening

It seems clear to me. We need people to work. Naturally, they don't want to work. We arrange the economy so they are in position where they have to work. This is called economic growth and full employment.

It couched in language of, "pursue full employment", "worker shortage", "keep the median wage down", "increase the labour force".

Big Yud recently posted an interesting thought, The Poverty Equilibrium. The most brutal possible summary is: despite an insane amount of technological progress over the last centuries, some people still toil all day in miserable jobs to provide for some urgent need and it's not clear why this is happening and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.

For those who can afford to retire but choose to work, work is about social class, about control of one's time, about creating boundaries.

As for those who need to work to live, some jobs are impervious to automation or it's cheaper to hire workers than automate such jobs. Or that work provides more choices and higher standard of living than the alternative of post-scarcity subsistence living. Some peopel want nice thing like trucks and homes instead of living in government-subsidized cube farms.

Another part of the answer is status.
While smartphones may be counted as a necessity, you will be perfectly fine getting a $200 Chinese phone, yet iPhones have a huge demand. Same pattern with many, many other goods.

But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.

Municipal budgets don't work like that. The vast majority of cities are funded nearly entirely by property taxes. More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students), which you get into elsewhere in this thread talking about the cost of public school per student.

More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students.

Side note to that point: cities have slowly been figuring out the exact math on that - which is why many new low density suburban developments necessarily come with a HOA, and the cities forces the HOA to take on road maintenance for the new development. Otherwise, fancy suburban neighborhoods can be so low density that they become a net loss for a city once the infrastructure starts to show its age and the city is forced to re-invest in the neighborhood.

I wrote a comment expressing some confusion about what point you're trying to make. Then I deleted it and read Yudkowsky's Tweet and things are much clearer. I only say that to point that your comment is very confusing out of context and I don't think you've done a good job of summarizing his argument.

His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance. He specifically mentions people having to grovel and smile all day at work.

What I think this gets wrong is that people do have the power to avoid those jobs. If you don't like faking a smile at a customer, you can work in a warehouse or on a construction site. If you don't like having a boss, you can freelance in many different fields. You can work as a taxi driver. You can find a nicer boss.

These jobs are also not that different than how people lived in the past. Most people didn't live on their own farms, working for themselves. They usually worked on a farm owned by someone else, or they worked as a servant. Some people even worked in towns and dealt with customers.

So we can observe how people trade off these things and see how much they value them. And it turns out that most people put up with a lot of stuff that seems awful so that they can live in bigger houses and own nicer cars. Not everyone does this. Lots of people value their freedom enough to work low-paying jobs that offer flexibility.

As for your argument that NIMBYism prevents more poverty, I don't agree. When given the choice, people tend to move to really big densely populated cities. They have a choice, so if their quality of life were worse in the city, they wouldn't move there. Yes, some things are worse there. We are not yet so rich that you don't have to make your life worse in some way that poor people in the past didn't have to deal with, but it's still an overall increase in the quality of life, despite the traffic congestion and annoying people.

Consider that you can at any time go join an Amish community and live like you're in the 18th century, but with a few conveniences of the modern world. But almost no one chooses to do this.

you can at any time go join an Amish community

I don't believe that this is in fact true; they don't take converts.

Really? I assumed that they would.

Why? They don't need converts, their communities are growing just fine on their own, incorporating an outsider would be a pain-in-the-ass years-long process with a huge dropout rate, and taking them in would expose them to the possibility of having hostile values smuggled in, either deliberately or subconsciously. Literally, what would be the upside for them?

They have health problems resulting from inbreeding. I don't think they have a problem with hostile values being smuggled in. They practise rumspringa.

It is unusual for a Christian group to not let someone join them, since they usually believe that their way is the only path to salvation.

From what I've seen of the Amish, they could probably use some more people in the community who don't share DNA with them. But that's not realistically something people would think about. I agree with the rest of your points.

The Amish don’t believe that they are the only ones who will be saved, though. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, many of the Amish are very much into genetic testing and diversifying their gene pool. Even though they have historically been careful not to allow marriages between remotely close relatives, enough generations of marrying their fourth and fifth cousins have resulted in a noticeably higher birth defect rate.

IIRC they do, but it's rare and takes a substantial time commitment

Also some communities are substantially more open to it than others. What I'd be curious to know is what marriage prospects look like for converts.

I think that’s a bit obtuse. While you can’t go join the Amish church, you can in fact quite easily band together with likeminded people and build a homestead in some rural area.

To me I think a lot of what’s missing is the community. Being poor in the modern world to me sucks a bit more because you’re an atomized individual with much less support in a world that rubs the lifestyle of your betters in your face through the media.

There are people who’ve joined the Amish, they tend to already be mennonites (and there are Mennonite groups that are easier to join / open to concerts), then they move to Amish country, slowly integrate themselves with the community, and are then part of it within a couple of generations.

It’s not a choice people make from a position of detachment. People are habituated to their societies by adulthood, so that altering their lifestyles by jumping into a different sort of society would constitute a major cost. Everything they had lived for and adapted to up until that point of change would be gone. And it works both ways, the Amish would be apprehensive about forsaking their native societies as well. Crossing the threshold comes with a hefty toll, and so it doesn’t indicate ‘natural’ predilections.

I mean it’s not for everyone because it requires major lifestyle changes. But for the right set of individuals, major lifestyle changes are possible. People do it all the time. Immigrants leave their homes and businesses and families behind and move to places with alien cultures. People join the military which is a huge change from civilian life. Such major changes aren’t for everyone, but even modest changes can be accessible to most people. It’s harder than most people think, but it’s perfectly doable.

I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.

His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance.

Not at all - he points out that in the past it was even worse. But somehow there are still some people in something the ancients would still recognise as a kind of poverty, which is really weird considering how rich we are.

Traffic, which barely exists here, would become awful

I would argue that traffic is more of a function of scale than density. Exurban high density projects don't have traffic near them, while low density megacities such as Denver, Los Angles, Houston, etc. are clogged with traffic.

the public spaces would be full of much more homeless menacing,

Why? Assuming the tiny houses aren't free, any residents still need to be employed. Of course if you made them free by handing them out to bums, certainly this would exacerbate the problem.

crime and littering would increase and the public services would be stretched thinner.

this does seem feasible.

building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically:

...

NIMBYism also prevents more poverty.

Yes, it's true that keeping the poors out keeps the rich gucci community nice. But that doesn't reduce poverty globally, it instead causes a shift. Nimbys aren't wrong in their self interest, but what's why higher level authorities want to bully the nimbys in order to achieve larger scale objectives.

if the goal is to reduce poverty globally, build a Kowloon Walled City metropolis in the Nevada desert and encourage people to move there

if we're confusing "everyone should be able to live in a quaint quiet town" with "reduce poverty globally", my answer is NIMBY

Traffic congestion is caused by a lack of congestion pricing. It's a choice, not a necessary feature of any particular urban layout.

Yudd's essential argument seems to be that if your every need isn't provided, it's possible, and reasonable, to feel poor.

It is a good thing that even utilitarians can recognize that desire is functionally infinite, and thus that infinite amounts of ressources will not satisfy people or eliminate natural inequality.

But at this juncture it seems pertinent to ask what's so bad about "poverty" in the first place? Having to contribute some value to your society to get all of the luxury it affords seems entirely reasonable.

I can't help but think that people would be better off if they had a range of other games to play than "maximize hedonism" (which only some can win at). But that's not compatible with collapsing success to a single quantifiable metric.

The issue with poverty he has is not that one has to work to avoid it but that one has to give up some luxury despite working full time because it isn't available to everyone.

No amount of increase in productivity can eliminate scarcity because:

  • some forms of scarcity aren't material in nature
  • demand is infinite given time
  • supply is finite regardless of the productivity modifier applied to it

I believe that's the point Neil Stephenson successfully makes with The Diamond Age.

It was very silly of Liberalism to promise total equality given those parameters. And at some point it must have seemed really possible that we could make the differences negligible. But it looks like it's not going to ever happen. And I think that's fine.

For completeness he has this quite fantastic followup post where he expounds https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1819867003966148655?t=nxw_B_ejIP_ZsG_GhBVdMw&s=19

I think he's not describing hedonic treadmill stuff. People don't really continue working 60 hour a week jobs alternating between Walmart and driving Uber just because they consider Steam games a burning need.

This relates to how economists measure inflation. As technology advances and as people's consumption habits change, economists need to be able to compare the value of different goods across different baskets of goods. I don't know exactly how they do this, but they do have some ways of dealing with the problem he describes. I'd be interested to know how well they do so.

In theory, if you had the perfect measure of the price level, the fact the government bans apartments under 10,000 square feet and you're forced to buy e-textbooks that have no value other than as a means of acquiring an education, would be accounted for with an appropriate increase in the price level, and real incomes, reflecting that reality, would still be easily comparable to worlds that didn't have these problems. The productivity improvements of that society would only count as productivity improvements if people really were better off despite these limitations.

There are constant calls to build more affordable housing, but instead all that seems to get built are luxury apartments that don't alleviate housing shortages, regularly outraging the /r/Eugene subreddit.

Is this what you believe, or just what the subreddit believes? Because building housing of any kind (including luxury housing) absolutely does mitigate housing shortages and reduce prices.

When cities build luxury housing, the wealthiest people move into those houses, while moving out of their existing, less luxury housing. That housing in turn gets occupied by the next rung on the income ladder, and this continues right now to the bottom. House prices and rents drop for everyone.

"You are only adding larger sized shells to the aquarium. How does this help the medium sized and small sized hermit crabs?"

Seems to be many people's actual thoughts regarding housing.

Survey corroborating this idea

This is true in general though migration can throw a wrench in this logic. If building more housing induces more migration, especially migration of a specific type of person, logically this would counteract any downward pressure on prices.

Yes, but the same thing is true of anything you do to make a city better. It will make people move there and push up rents such that only property owners benefit. The benefit to renters is diffused across the entire country.

I don't really believe your claim from first principles, aside from the fact that building any housing at all moves the needle slightly towards making you a place more aligned with building overall.

I don't have any data to argue against you with though, so take that for what it's worth.

I don't have any data to argue against you with, though

Several studies that argue against your viewpoint are cited in "Folk Economics and the Persistence of Political Opposition to New Housing".

Activists and local officials who oppose new market-rate housing projects in expensive cities often insist that such projects benefit only the rich and “Wall Street”1, notwithstanding compelling empirical evidence that new construction in expensive places opens up housing and dampens prices in more affordable segments of the regional market2,3,4,5,6. The anti-development elites may have chosen their rhetoric to appeal to beliefs that were already widely held. Several previous studies document a tendency toward “folk economic” thinking in the mass public: markets and politics alike are seen as venues in which groups jostle for advantage and try to cheat one another rather than trade or collaborate for mutual advantage7,8,9. It is not yet known whether the mass public actually believes that a substantial increase in housing supply would fail to make housing more affordable. But, if such beliefs were prevalent, they might well undermine support for pro-housing policies.

1Been, Vicki, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan. 2019. “Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability”. Housing Policy Debate 29(1):25–40.

2Rosenthal, Stuart S. 2014. “Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates From a 'Repeat Income' Model”. American Economic Review 104(2):687–706. [paywalled; non-paywalled preliminary version]

3Glaeser, Edward, and Joseph Gyourko. 2018. “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply”. Journal of Economic Perspectives 32(1):3–30.

4Mast, Evan. 2021. “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market”. Journal of Urban Economics p. 103383.

5Bratu, Cristina, Oskari Harjunen, and Tuukka Saarimaa. 2021. “City-Wide Effects of New Housing Supply: Evidence from Moving Chains”. VATT Institute for Economic Research Working Papers.

6Hansena, James, and Alicia Rambaldib. 2022. “How Do Homes Transfer Across the Income Distribution? The Role of Supply Constraints”.

7Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. 1992. “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange”. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 163:163–228.

8Rubin, Paul H. 2003. “Folk Economics”. Southern Economic Journal 70(1):157–171.

9Boyer, Pascal, and Michael Bang Petersen. 2018. “Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.

Which first principles would they be?

Because it seems pretty self-evident that housing is fungible. If I can't live in a grade A apartment because there aren't any available, I'll live in a grade B one rather than sleep on the streets. If grade A apartments become available, I'll leave my grade B one, which will then go on the market. The more apartments that come on the market, the less buyers will need to pay because there will be the same number of buyers chasing more properties, and sellers will be forced to lower their prices.

'Luxury' housing is just the word we use to describe the most expensive houses, it's not a characteristic of the houses that makes them qualitatively different.

The only way for me to believe that building luxury homes doesn't reduce prices would be for me to believe that either:

  1. Increasing supply while keeping demand static doesn't reduce prices
  2. Different types of housing aren't fungible

'Luxury' housing is just the word we use to describe the most expensive houses, it's not a characteristic of the houses that makes them qualitatively different.

It's even worse than that: it's a pretty meaningless marketing adjective that makes you feel better about paying a lot for something. Everyone slaps on the label except those at the cheapest, er "Value!" end of the market looking for price-conscious customers, and the polar opposite of brands that are well-known to the point where using the label is déclassé. And this doesn't just apply to housing.

Agreed. In my city, all housing that's not directly inside a high-crime neighborhood is marketed as “luxury”. I cannot find non-“luxury”-advertised housing, except in high-crime neighborhoods. Preliminary checks on other cities show the same thing.

Ah, the luxury of living in an area with the demographics of several decades ago.

That luxury has been reserved for the rich ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See "When Did Healthy Communities Become Illegal?" by Charles Tuttle.

Except that you have the same issue that makes adding more lanes a bad idea. Which is that people who ordinarily would not be looking to Eugene OR as a potential place to live suddenly do because housing is more available there. If there are 50 apartments and you’re looking between several areas, you might pick Eugene, even if without the extra housing you’d probably say F it and move to some nearby town or suburb or exurb instead.

All this means is the benefit is spread around to other people. The people who move benefit and the property owners benefit.

The steelman for the NIMBY argument is that the demand for dense housing in the US is so high that building more density will always stimulate demand.

By building more big apartment buildings downtown, Eugene will become a more desirable place to live for wealthy people who will move there and drive up prices.

On a national level more housing will lead to lower prices but on a local level it might not.

That just means most of the benefit goes to the local property owners. It's still a net benefit to the community, which could be redistributed if necessary.

Yeah, in aggregate it's a good thing which is why it should be allowed to happen for the most part. But there are losers and the money likely won't be allocated to them in a meaningful way. Kinda like free trade that way.

The overall point stands that building new luxury housing in a community doesn't necessarily reduce the prices for housing in that community.

Moving isn't easy though and it's actually hard for people to figure out that things are better in a different place. Comparisons are hard and people have ties to their current communities. So it probably does help people in that community. It would take a long time for things to reach equilibrium again.

I believe the counter to the steelman is that 'stimulated demand' is just known elsewhere as 'demand,' which is to say the exact thing you'd expect to see from a supply and demand curve interaction when you increase supply.

In a contained system yes, but in this case you're inducing demand from outside the system.

With roughly 100k people, Eugene can't build enough to satisfy all people in the US who want to live in a dense environment. For the same reason, they can't solve their homeless problem by building shelters.

If those people are able to buy houses in Eugene, they are within the system. It's still just demand.

Now, it may be a demand curve that needs to be adjusted by different legislation- such as restricting property purchases by non-residents or some such- but that's different from a claim that the demand is stimulated.

and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.

I'm going to nitpick just the word choice here. Material goods are NOT utility. Utility is actual internal value: happiness/wellbeing/fulfillment/life-satisfaction etc. The endgoal of desirability/morality. By definition, a 100x increase in utility results in a world that is 100x better for everyone. However utility suffers from massive diminishing returns as a function of material goods, as Yudkowsky shows. A 100x increase in material productivity does not result in a 100x increase in utility.

sorry

but! I don't quite understand. what's an example of an increase in material productivity that's not an increase in utility?

They are increasing functions with respect to each other, but the effect is nonlinear. That is, if you make twice as many pizzas, people will generally be more happy, but less than twice as happy. You can only physically eat so much pizza, you only like pizza so much, and there are a bunch of things you care about that aren't food.

So first, let's construct scenarios where material productivity increases but utility decreases utility, starting with unambiguous but somewhat contrived and trivial ways that form a proof by example, and gradually transition into more sophisticated but debatable examples

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to customers, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and shunts them off to a warehouse to rot. (Utility is derived via consumption, not production)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to hungry poor people, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and sends them all to the penthouse suite of a single really fat rich person who eats them all himself. (Utility per pizza is higher the fewer you already have)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 11 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Total output has gone up, but the cost has gone up more, so efficiency is lower)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 80 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours every single day, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Pizza:labor efficiency is equal, but TIME also has nonlinear utility, so the quality of life for the worker has decreased even if he gets paid 8 times as much)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, VS A bakery that produces pizzas with literally no labor or ingredient cost, but the pizzas somehow mess with their consumer's brains such that they to lose the ability to experience happiness ever again. (Obviously the most contrived example, but hopefully clearly pointing out the distinction).

The point being, that although all else being equal, more material production on its own is strictly superior to less material production for the same costs, all else is rarely equal. Therefore, increases in material production should be correlated with but distinct from actual utility. The biggest counterexample is the industrial revolution. Material production has, in reality, increased 100x. The wellbeing and happiness and prosperity of people has not increased 100x. It's gone up, for sure. But some things have gotten worse to compensate, and most things just have improved by less than a factor of 100x. The amount of joy you get from looking at art is less than a hundred times better than it was in the past. The enjoyability of food is less than a hundred times better. The amount of value you get from socialization is less than a hundred times more. Oh sure, you have access to a hundred times as much art, or food, or social connections via the internet, but you can't actually convert that into internal value, utility, at anywhere near perfect efficiency because you have bottlenecks based on time and biology and psychology. This is why Bill Gates isn't running around being thousands of times happier than everyone else: it doesn't work that way.

median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.

I’m not following… absent some additional assumptions (e.g., that the median income in your town is initially >= top 10% income for the US), how does inviting people who make less than the top 10% make your town poorer? The part about the top 10% of taxpayers providing 70% of tax receipts seems irrelevant.

sorry the median income in Eugene is irrelevant to this. I just meant to say everyone who you invite to your town that makes less than $100k consumes more in taxes than they pay

You have to account for all the surplus value they generate that gets captured by their employers, landlords, and uncompetitive or exploitative local industries like food.

I have a hard time appreciating this POV. It sounds pleasant but how is this quantified?

Example: a family of 4 moves to my town, attracted by affordable housing. Dad works full-time delivering pallets of sugar water for $20/hour. Mom picks up DoorDash shifts while kids are at daycare school for some extra bucks. So, lets say their household income is $45,000/year.

Their two kids consume approximately $6000/month in public school funds alone, or $72,000/year. That's just going by their kids in school.

Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school, to say nothing of all of their other socialized costs (roads, police, fire, sanitation, etc)? Am I looking through the wrong lens here? Because I can't see how society is ever ahead in this scenario.

Public schools spend a lot, but it doesn’t cost anywhere near $6000/month. The American average is more like $1000/month.

Now I’m not claiming that lots of lower middle class families are good for the city budget. But public school costs are only about half their family income(Catholic schools could get the job done for a third, if you’re looking for a benchmark of ‘how much of that is just the government spending more money because it can’).

Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical. I don't know if all things equal out in favor of them producing positive value, but I do know that it's tricky calculating such things and that your own calculations have so far neglected crucial points.

Also I don't think your numbers for the cost of schooling are correct. I thought there was an article on the original SSC saying the annual cost per student is 10k or something.

From https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

The average district spends $12,000 per pupil per year on public schools (up to $30,000 in big cities!)

My $3000/month number is is computed it from my local district's 2025 budget statement. We're not even a big city.

Note schools in general bullshit the number into being about half of that by telling you what the program expenses are, but they're not telling you about total costs like grants to build them shiny (or shitty) buildings that are depreciating. You have to dig more to calculate that.

Their kids will only be in school for twelve years, while they'll be working for about four or more decades in all probability, so you need to factor that into your hypothetical.

Do we? OK, the state will spend $360,000 per kid just to put them through school alone (again, not counting CHIP, and other social costs), and one of them will perhaps be employable enough to get their own sugar water delivery job for $40,000/year for 40 years while the other takes half of that time off to look after their future kids who repeat the cycle. Then they start drawing retirement benefits and maybe cost $10k/month in health care for the last 1-10 years of their life.

This isn't a total accounting but I'm not seeing obvious upside here.

Yeah, i suppose if you're living somewhere with high inefficiency and waste the numbers will be extremely negative for all but the upper echelons of society. My model of modern society is that much of its value is produced by machines (capital) which only require skeleton crews of mechanics and engineers to maintain, and that asides from those specialists and the capitalists who own the machines, most other people are superfluous. On the other hand, democracy provides a brutish sort of power to those superfluous people, and thus they are able to extract value beyond what their economic potential would otherwise command. So the attempt to internally partition countries along these class lines could be seen as a class warfare attempt to undermine democracy.

Are we arguing that the value provided by sugar water delivery and DoorDash makes up for the cost of putting their kids in school

Yes. While this may be the price tag, there is no way in hell it takes $6000 per month to teach a single child. For this money you could literally hire a governess for each child (well, +/- the sudden spike in demand for teachers), and operating at scale is supposed to make things cheaper.

It's not reasonable to substitute some idealized, hyper efficient cost for what education actually costs. Could it be cheaper? Obviously. But $6k a month (or whatever) is what it currently actually costs.

As a side note, you are right about "for that much money you could ___", and that's why taxes are collected at gunpoint.

Relax. It's only $3000 month per kid. It's $6000 per month for two kids.

Isn't that still a decent salary for a governess?

Yes, I didn't like public school to begin with but learning how ludicrously expensive it actually is is what radicalized me on homeschooling.

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