You’re right, I was taking the section saying “In this new system, the only incentive to do more and go further is to transcend the status quo in some way, and earn recognition for a unique contribution.” too seriously. On a second re-read, it seems like your proposal is actually just to print money to give people food stamps and housing vouchers. I think the answer to why we don’t do that is that we do that.
Food is essentially a solved problem in the United States, and the biggest problem with housing vouchers is that there physically isn’t enough housing in some areas. Printing more money doesn’t cause more housing to exist (it could change incentives, but incentives don’t matter much when building housing for poor people is largely illegal).
You’re still not reading the post closely enough. This isn’t just food stamps and housing vouchers, it’s real dollars created for purpose, with matching subsidies on the supply side. That means if there’s 4T new dollars of housing spending, the system allocates 4T new dollars of housing subsidies to build new homes. There’s two nuances that your gloss misses, first, producers aren’t just compelled to honor welfare tokens. Second, the dollars are created, not gathered through taxes. Both points make the system more palatable to entrenched interests and ordinary people.
The problem is that lack of money isn’t the reason there’s not enough housing in places that people want to live. Zoning laws intentionally exclude poor people because rich people don’t want to live near them. Allocating more money to the problem doesn’t really help (see: the ridiculous amount of money California spends on affordable housing), and if you fixed the part where it’s illegal, the government spending isn’t necessary because real estate developers would build apartments without subsidies if they were allowed to.
Also, the most recent election shows that ordinary people really, really don’t like inflation, so I don’t think printing trillions of dollars for this purpose is actually more palatable.
The idea is to balance spending with subsidies, to prevent inflation. In this new system, there’s nothing preventing people from migrating from antagonistic municipalities to places where subsidies are approved because of good planning and political climate.
You’re right, I was taking the section saying “In this new system, the only incentive to do more and go further is to transcend the status quo in some way, and earn recognition for a unique contribution.” too seriously. On a second re-read, it seems like your proposal is actually just to print money to give people food stamps and housing vouchers. I think the answer to why we don’t do that is that we do that.
Food is essentially a solved problem in the United States, and the biggest problem with housing vouchers is that there physically isn’t enough housing in some areas. Printing more money doesn’t cause more housing to exist (it could change incentives, but incentives don’t matter much when building housing for poor people is largely illegal).
You’re still not reading the post closely enough. This isn’t just food stamps and housing vouchers, it’s real dollars created for purpose, with matching subsidies on the supply side. That means if there’s 4T new dollars of housing spending, the system allocates 4T new dollars of housing subsidies to build new homes. There’s two nuances that your gloss misses, first, producers aren’t just compelled to honor welfare tokens. Second, the dollars are created, not gathered through taxes. Both points make the system more palatable to entrenched interests and ordinary people.
The problem is that lack of money isn’t the reason there’s not enough housing in places that people want to live. Zoning laws intentionally exclude poor people because rich people don’t want to live near them. Allocating more money to the problem doesn’t really help (see: the ridiculous amount of money California spends on affordable housing), and if you fixed the part where it’s illegal, the government spending isn’t necessary because real estate developers would build apartments without subsidies if they were allowed to.
Also, the most recent election shows that ordinary people really, really don’t like inflation, so I don’t think printing trillions of dollars for this purpose is actually more palatable.
The idea is to balance spending with subsidies, to prevent inflation. In this new system, there’s nothing preventing people from migrating from antagonistic municipalities to places where subsidies are approved because of good planning and political climate.