2. This turns out to be interesting I think. I do think almost everything in the city is obviously overpriced, but it becomes devilishly hard to identify it as overpriced because it has incorporated its high prices into its defining functionality.
Luxury clothes stores say “it’s a good thing that we charge six or seven times the cost of production because it makes us a positional good”, cafes say “It’s a good thing we charge so much because it keeps people from loitering”, nightclubs say “it keeps out the riff-raff”.
There’s a sense in which, the thing that they are is “supposed to be that way”, they truly couldn’t be better priced and so it’s hard to call them overpriced. We end up with services like that because that’s all that survives.
A solution here wouldn’t look like cheaper versions of these things, because those things wouldn’t work if they were cheaper. A really livable megacity would mostly have different things instead of them, things that only start to become economical at the lower price ranges. Instead of assorting by class, social clubs would select on more targeted personal characteristics. Instead of luxury there would be genuine finery included under the craft designation, to an extent that couldn’t have been funded before. Instead of cafes there would be mostly unstaffed bookable spaces where you could meet people, that are quiet enough to have conversations in, because lingering is the point of them. They all earn little money but increase the total value of the city far beyond their opportunity cost.
Related observation: Nothing can be said to be overpriced if you submit deeply to the necessity of the overhead. Gold-plated audio cables can’t be called overpriced if you believe that you need them to be gold-plated. They’re only overpriced if you can accept the possibility of having audio cables that don’t need to be gold-plated. So, a lot of people will say things like, “bitcoin’s proof of work mechanisms aren’t wasteful because they’re necessary to making bitcoin work”, whether you accept that depends on whether you think there’s an alternative to proof of work (many projects do). And some people who weren’t in the mood to entertain the possibility of an alternative to rent would say this about rent, that it’s not overhead because it’s an irreplaceable part of the mechanism.
2. This turns out to be interesting I think. I do think almost everything in the city is obviously overpriced, but it becomes devilishly hard to identify it as overpriced because it has incorporated its high prices into its defining functionality.
Luxury clothes stores say “it’s a good thing that we charge six or seven times the cost of production because it makes us a positional good”, cafes say “It’s a good thing we charge so much because it keeps people from loitering”, nightclubs say “it keeps out the riff-raff”.
There’s a sense in which, the thing that they are is “supposed to be that way”, they truly couldn’t be better priced and so it’s hard to call them overpriced. We end up with services like that because that’s all that survives.
A solution here wouldn’t look like cheaper versions of these things, because those things wouldn’t work if they were cheaper. A really livable megacity would mostly have different things instead of them, things that only start to become economical at the lower price ranges. Instead of assorting by class, social clubs would select on more targeted personal characteristics. Instead of luxury there would be genuine finery included under the craft designation, to an extent that couldn’t have been funded before. Instead of cafes there would be mostly unstaffed bookable spaces where you could meet people, that are quiet enough to have conversations in, because lingering is the point of them. They all earn little money but increase the total value of the city far beyond their opportunity cost.
Related observation: Nothing can be said to be overpriced if you submit deeply to the necessity of the overhead. Gold-plated audio cables can’t be called overpriced if you believe that you need them to be gold-plated. They’re only overpriced if you can accept the possibility of having audio cables that don’t need to be gold-plated. So, a lot of people will say things like, “bitcoin’s proof of work mechanisms aren’t wasteful because they’re necessary to making bitcoin work”, whether you accept that depends on whether you think there’s an alternative to proof of work (many projects do).
And some people who weren’t in the mood to entertain the possibility of an alternative to rent would say this about rent, that it’s not overhead because it’s an irreplaceable part of the mechanism.