All work for me. I’ve had psychedelics a few times.
Also, while watching out for the snow (very prominent once you know what you’re looking for, kinda like tinnitus), I noticed how (if you keep your vision still) everything constantly glides/shifts/jerks around a little bit, like when you’re really drunk.
I mean something like: in the equilibrium, all consumer surplus is extracted by rents.
I’m saying “on aggregate”, because it might often not be the case in individual cases; landlords are not capable of doing perfect price discrimination on individual basis, only at the level of something like neighborhoods, roughly speaking (people sort themselves into neighborhoods by income, so the landlords can price-discriminate based on “how affluent a neighborhood you wanna live in”; people also want as short commutes as possible, so you can price-discriminate based on the distance to the nearest megalopolis).
This is made very complicated by the distinction between land and land improvements, i.e. the bare plot of land itself, on one hand, and the infrastructure and buldings built on top of it, on the other. When I talk about lands and rents, I talk about the former. The supply of land improvements is somewhat elastic (you can build more floors); the supply of land itself is absolutely inelastic.
I unfortunately don’t wanna go into the mechanism by which consumer surplus is actually extracted by rents, because I already spent some time thinking and writing this comment and I originally wanted to do something else with my Saturday.
Viliam hinted at the mechanism: land is a positional good, so, to quote him, “as long as the life at some place is better than at other places, people will keep moving there.”
Compare with other positional goods: e.g. all sports clubs’ profits will eventually be extracted by players and their agents, unless a league instantiates a wage cap, precisely because players are a positional good: you don’t care how good your players are, you only care how good they are in comparison to other teams’ players.
In the same vein, you don’t care where you live, you care how far you are from the center of gravity of where other people live (roughly speaking).