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by seventhtiger 1152 days ago
Land is effectively infinite. But it's a non-fungible ranked good. For something like real estate your entire lifestyle depends on your ranking, including ability to work. It's a community wide constant auction.

It is naturally a race to the bottom. As long as a community is getting wealthier, the competition will be more fierce.

You can develop more land as fast as possible. Unless you're lowering the ranking of the whole area, then again as the community develops competition will become more fierce.

How much does a home cost? $(however much the second buyer can maximally afford) + $1.
2 comments
nine_k 1152 days ago
Land may be "effectively infinite", but desirable land isn't.

Land in the middle of a desert in Arizona may be ridiculously cheap, but few people ever choose to live there (or can actually pull that off). OTOH land on Manhattan, or on the Miami beachfront, is for some reason quite limited.

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justnotworthit 1152 days ago
"desirable" isn't fixed. Once pheonix was "a desert in Arizona". (I'm not arguing that all land is equal).
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formerly_proven 1152 days ago
> How much does a home cost? $(however much the second buyer can maximally afford) + $1.

Which, as a corollary, also means that with double income now being the norm, prices are basically doubled on their own. This also means everyone who doesn't participate in comphet can get fucked.

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seventhtiger 1152 days ago
I've thought about this a lot, and this is happening in real time where I am in Saudi Arabia. The break neck transition from single income households to double income households.

Employment is never a choice. You either can't work, or you must work. Choosing not to work means getting priced out by everyone who does work for all ranked goods.

If you could put a value on a stay-at-home spouse's labor, you can work out whether this was a positive or negative to the family's economy. You see that at the low income end, a double income society forces the family to have a lot less just to compete for rent. Educated professional couples earn more, while outsourcing house labor to the low income families. Capitalists are very happy because they doubled the supply of their labor.

Essentially you see a person go from full time cooking for their family and raising their kids, to working at a fastfood restaurant and babysitting other people's kids for minimum wage, while their own family gets no support.

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