Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...
I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.
This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there is a real want, and where there is a real want, there will be a market (maybe a shadow market). The rich folks will always have a want for "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. And maybe if there was a solution that didn't require arm-wrestling one market vs another, a solution that for example created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.
What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers.
Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as cohesive as the regulatory state.
I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolution, etc.
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it?
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms.
one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why.
It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage.
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved exactly the same.
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
Even the types of games I believe are shifting to less third spaces. Matchmaking is replacing the MMO beginner town where a lot of the socialization happens.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.
Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...
I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.
This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?
Does Sweden have a problem with local land use restrictions? They have done a lot to liberalize their economy over the last few decades
Municipalities have far-reaching power in deciding what gets built where. Getting things built can take quite a long time.
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there is a real want, and where there is a real want, there will be a market (maybe a shadow market). The rich folks will always have a want for "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. And maybe if there was a solution that didn't require arm-wrestling one market vs another, a solution that for example created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.
This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.
They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one:
https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...
Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
you are so wrong. this is not ai.
Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.
> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.
Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.
What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.
>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out
The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.
I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.
The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.
Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.
All of those things you long for have been nuked by the economy too.
Source?
IDK if you're familiar with Church, but that's the most heavily used third space. And we grant it tax exempt status which it abuses to push bad laws.
Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.
I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks.
And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes
It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.
I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.
The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.
Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
Elected local administration is the correct level for deciding policy and allocating funding for such programs. Policy and funding through UBI would be like direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy. The arguments against direct democracy are well known.
> You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.
This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
Volunteering is a great way to see lots of these rooms!
The article spends a good deal of time making the point that these rooms are getting more scarce since people can't afford to volunteer their time.
It is, but that doesn't help that room getting funded.
It is clear that having that room exist is a priority for some people. The market doesn't have a will of its own or compels people to be efficient and produce returns (which, by the way, this room surely produces down the line).
The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.
I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.
It's not the same people. When it comes to land, it's the cumulative wants and needs of regular people being matched against the cumulative offerings of greedy paperclip maximizers.
Yes, it's just the people who's needs are met with it have no means to pay for it themselves. This just won't plug itself with this system of incentives and power.
You are presupposing that an efficient market emerges from a collection of dark patterns, coercion, and exploitative pricing, and turns these low quality inputs into an efficient market that creates overall beneficial results. Cool theory bro.
Markets are only free when both sides of a deal can walk away from that deal. Free marketers go on about state coercion, but their idea of a free market is at least as cohesive as the regulatory state.
I would argue they're even worse. By taking away funding for public institutions, they're removing very important freedoms, like the freedom to live a long and healthy life, to get an education, to have a functional postal service, to know what will become of the climate and to prepare for its evolution, etc.
One fundamental challenge with basic income that gets overlooked is that if you’re a smart person and you’ve built a career where you make a lot of money, you have cash flow issues that prevent you from going to basic income. It’s a huge sacrifice that requires drastic quality of life changes which means the people who will be subsisting on that aren’t the people who have the motivation to set up that room nor are necessarily going to be people you want running it.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets,
Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it?
Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor. There will be a redistribution of stuff, the exact amounts are hard to calculate, but if it doesn't crash the economy, rich people will have less than before and poor people will have more, even if the prices are higher on average because there's more money.
It would, leading to more resources going towards producing those goods. A UBI is price signal indicating the needs no/low income people matter.
Maybe it would be too politically unpopular, lead to too much spending on vices, or some other issue, but inflation shouldn't be a concern unless those particular goods are of a fixed quantity over the long term.
I think as well as UBI we should have universal basic land. Grant everyone the right to a share of an apartment building that doesn't exist yet on a specific plot of land on the city outskirts. Few people will want to actually group together and build apartment buildings on vacant land on the city outskirts, but I would hope that just having the option would bring down the price of land for everyone. Private options would have to actually compete with the basic public option instead of taking advantage of their customers having no alternatives. Same thing that already happened in telecoms.
one of the solutions that they put forward in combination with UBI is LVT. When LVT is implemented, it is likely that those three things will not get more expensive relative to income even with a UBI. Let me know if you want me to explain why.
Proponents of UBI usually also suggest countermeasures to the (real) issues you pointed out.
Things now are completely different than 5 years ago /s
Maybe what can happen is that the people who benefit from it donate back into the organization of this room when they have the means decades later?
It's similar to how the economy benefits from paying workers a decent wage.
Due to many different reasons (including fear of revolutions), western countries decided it was preferable to pay workers a minimum wage. To the elite's surprise, it had an additional benefit to them. It turns out that workers spent the extra money on maybe eating meat once a week or buying an extra pair of pants. Later they even had a name for it: "Disposable income". Yes, the factory owner had to pay more wages, but they also increased the potential customer base.
I think these rooms have a similar benefit to society that is hard to measure directly. There are many stories of "third places" that leads to lower crime levels, lower unemployment etc.
This is the good example of positive externalities => some of the most valuable things in society like the friendships, communities or informal support networks create realbenefits that are important but hard to monetize
It's long but it really expands the point of this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4SmgrAmdUQ
That's the kind of space I've been missing in my youth. I love that Swedish kids have got it available to them.
Many open source efforts seem to belong to this category as well.
Even the title is AI
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets.
The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.
It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.
I'm fully prepared to be downvoted into oblivion and called naive or worse, but in the USA we have non-profit organizations. You might have heard of things like the YMCA, BGCA, etc.
Additionally, most municipalities run community centers and libraries which provide programming. The issue is there is declining interest in participating in these kinds of activities.
It's a societal cultural shift, and those are not things that can be shifted by policy as can be seen with various failed attempts at social engineering in Singapore and China.
Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.
It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.
Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved exactly the same.
How much of this is just due to changing tastes? For example, Minecraft, Roblox, or an Xbox live subscription are the new lobbies for younger generations.
Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.
There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.
Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.
I suspect this is the real key. Reminds me of a lot of other discussions similar to this where it boils soon to folks overweighting their own desires and underweighting the average consumer.
I remember growing up going to my local PC repair shop into their back work area. They smoked, played Ultima Online during the day and had other friends that came and hung out. That is how a bygone era, different but similar to the thought of third spaces.
Yep. It's essentially a form of techie Gen X and Millenial nostalgia, and does come off a boomer-ish, hence why all old people are termed "boomers" now.
HN is rife with it and it shows how out of touch it's becoming demographically.
Even the types of games I believe are shifting to less third spaces. Matchmaking is replacing the MMO beginner town where a lot of the socialization happens.
I'd wager a lot of it is "to protect the kids" (read: remove socialization since platforms don't want to expend the effort to police bsd actors)
This underestimates how friendships are made by younger people even via matchmaking in lobbies depending on the game.
Heck, I have friends who are slightly younger than me who made durable friendships in League via matchmaking.
I think there's no zero friendship making power, but matchmaking is certainly less.
I have online friends from matchmaking, but it's certainly much harder. I'm not underestimating it, but my language might have been too strong.
Consider the average young person's discord group.
Playing Minecraft with friends at a lan party in a social room is better than playing it at home.
It might be to you, but then we wouldn't have seen the shifts away from LAN parties.
The reality is for anyone below 35, their primary touchpoint with their friends is via social media, and they view chatting and playing remotely as a similar experience to a LAN party.