[benreesman]

I’m not sure what the theme of your contention is: it sounds like you’re basically saying everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish.

But that tired toy example from game theory shows that everyone loses if both grass the other up. Countless studies of both human beings and computer programs in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma show that the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value.

This smash and grab, “how much can you carry” mafia capitalism has been tried before and the result was a guillotine.

[JumpCrisscross]

> everyone will fight as hard as possible with whatever means at their disposal to be maximally selfish

No, I'm saying loss aversion is often misunderstood [1]. Both in its existence and strength. And the fact that it operates in relative terms, i.e. someone who is materially better off than they were 10 years ago may still throw their toys out of the pram if their neighbor is much better.

> the wining strategy is not in fact to drive housing prices so high that the homeless problem eventually wrecks your property value

Sure. The point is you also can't drive home prices down, because that hurts homeowners and activates them as a political bloc. (The solution is real home price growth as close to zero as possible amidst rising real incomes.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

[benreesman]

I’m aware of the concept of loss aversion, but I think it as an explanatory factor for macro economics is a red herring: one of a long list of diversions in the grand company of all trickle-down economics.

People say that the without arbitrary incentives for arbitrary wealth that hard work and innovation won’t happen. Demonstrably false! The Internet that the current cartel is looting was a public private partnership! The best software these days is done substantially by passionate hobbyists!

People point to Silicon Valley and say “this wouldn’t be possible in Europe”. Then they point to the market capitalizations of the vampire megacorps that the world would be far better without as the success story.

People make other arguments slightly craftier: punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter. True, but that’s not the point of a punitive wealth tax: the point of a punitive billionaire tax is to deprive billionaires of godlike power to restructure society in their own interest.

Anyone outside a few narrow bubbles can see that this is going very badly.

I’ll agree with you this far: it’s going to be a tall hill to climb to get people with homes worth 20 times what they paid and 401ks to vote for a sane future. But this is a comparatively recent phenomenon: older people used to be obsessively concerned with the prospects of younger people for trivial biological reasons.

These days? That “blood boy” transfusion thing Thiel is always on about? It’s a terrifying metaphor for the bigger picture. The procedure was pioneered so a father could keep his daughter alive at great risk to himself.

For some reason we now tolerate if not celebrate the vampire ideal of running that backwards.

[JumpCrisscross]

> These days? That “blood boy” transfusion thing Thiel is always on about?

This complaint is old as civilisation. Cato complained about the price of pickled fish exceeding that of ploughmen, and that was hundreds of years before even the Republic peaked.

> punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter

Who said this?

I’m a fan of higher (not necessarily punitive) taxes on billionaires. But you can’t trade that for middle-class income taxes 1:1; the former is far more volatile.

[benreesman]

I’ve read Cato as well as undergraduate behavioral economics.

No tax on the wealthy is worth its weight in paper unless it breaks the back of fluid fungibility of money into policy. We have any number of ways to raise revenue, most of which would be trivial if Bezos cast one ballot like anyone else.

Directly or indirectly bribing legislators or regulators should be a capital offense.

[JumpCrisscross]

> No tax on the wealthy is worth its weight in paper unless it breaks the back of fluid fungibility of money into policy

These are separate policy fronts. You've got a water leak in your engine and are trying to solve it by banning rain.

> Directly or indirectly bribing legislators or regulators should be a capital offense

Define this as loosely as Redditors consider lobbying and you essentially shut down democractic involvement to all but those who can afford the trip to D.C. to advocate in person. Or, to Cato, the Tribal Assembly. Bet you'd get a lot of rich people on board with that rule!

[benreesman]

We’ve all been having some version of this conversation for decades: any time someone proposes limiting campaign finance or any other mechanism by which wealth becomes law some unfounded assertion gets made about how it will have unintended consequences that actually favor the people with the money.

“Trust me, I’ll get you over the barrel even more easily if you try to stop me. Shhh, just let it happen.”

I think it’s a bluff.