[roenxi]

Most of those things are being caused by political will.

Healthcare is paralysed by over-regulation. There are lots of easy ways to bring down costs in healthcare that the average entreprenure would love to fix. They don't fix the problems because most of those ways have been made illegal because regulators who adopt a do-no-harm approach that ironically causes more harm than good. In every country I can read the laws of, a doctor and a patient trying to make decisions about healthcare are going to discover that the regulator is in the room 2nd guessing them.

Housing and education, assuming we are talking the US, have been flooded with credit by the government. That happens to be why costs are so high. There is no way the levels of money there are the market-optimal amounts. Every so often the housing market tries to shed debt and force people to buy the things they enjoy and the regulators step in with money printing. I'm pretty sure the US even has such a thing as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage which is insane. I see figures as high as trillions [0] in the things.

Big tech the reason we need privacy is because sooner or later there will be authoritarians in charge with a lot of political will, using that data. There is a conversation to be had there; the Europeans have crippled their tech sector and privacy legislation was a part of that. Maybe the upside is worth the costs.

Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.

[0] https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-statistics/

[pfdietz]

The biggest problem with healthcare is that doctors are sued if they don't provide state of the art care. So there's an incentive to produce more and more expensive drugs and technologies, and no (or at least insufficient) ability to trade off cost vs. effectiveness.

[Panzer04]

Flooding the housing market with credit is only an issue because there isn't enough housing so prices are demand driven rather than supply driven.

[anovikov]

But that is caused by nothing but zoning! That's the only reason. Sure, in a token few places like NYC, probably prices would be sky high even without the zoning, but in the absolute majority of places, not at all. Zoning is a politically pushed limitation of construction for the benefit of incumbents - local property owners who want their housing values to go sky high, and they achieve it. It's example of conseqences of government action.

[mrguyorama]

Permissive zoning doesn't make cheap/affordable housing more profitable than mcmansions.

It's easier and more profitable for a developer to work with a single rich individual to sell them a big overpriced house instead of working hard to make a lot of housing with a small margin (because the purchasers CANNOT AFFORD a high margin).

You know what finally got builders to put up new, affordable housing in my area? Rent control (well, "stabilization"). It means they can only "capture" the cash looking for property in the area by building new property, because otherwise they are limited in the price they can charge. It has caused many area landlords to start huge housing projects because the alternative is a 5% max increase in rent income every year.

[Panzer04]

I would have imagined an apartment block would be by far the most valuable thing a developer could put on a property if permitted and in the right area.

At worst, usually you'll do better with 4-6 units on a single block than a single high-value dwelling. People value having anywhere at all to live quite highly, and further amenties than that significantly less (ie. a 4bd house with 2x the space is not worth 2x a single house with half the space)

[mrguyorama]

I'm not talking total income, I'm talking profit per effort. Does a developer really want to take the big risk of hoping they can find a property management client to take the large apartment building off their hands for a probably minimal profit since they are also a business with strong connections looking to earn maximum profit off minimum work?

It's so much easier for the average development group or individual to just build a single mcmansion, where the profit margin can be easily raised with stupid water fixtures or other pointless things, and with clients that are not at all price sensitive. A single moderately expensive mcmansion is probably also easier to get financing for than a competitively priced apartment building where you basically have to hope you keep a good market position for 15 years to start actually making money.

[anovikov]

Absolutely so. Zoning rules prohibit construction of more units per plot exactly because this is what customers want to buy and developers want to build and what makes the most money to everyone - everyone except the incumbents who own other places because that would increase housing supply in their area and lower valuations of their existing properties. If developers wanted to build a smaller number of bigger houses and customers wanted to buy those, zoning rules won't exist, they won't be necessary.

[roenxi]

I did consider that a little after posting - my conclusion was that people who don't have access to credit will be pushed out of the market and forced to rent.

[briandear]

> Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.

Some of us feel that you can literally wipe the US off the map and it wouldn’t make a single degree’s worth of difference to climate. Some of us also feel that the climate movement is not about climate but about resource redistribution and thus suspect in its real intent.