[mindslight]

Have you discovered a proof of P == NP, or are you just choosing to assert it to go on a message board commenting spree completely disconnected from the real world?

If markets worked the way you are implying, then the problem would already be solved. In reality, the inefficiencies matter a lot.

[haroldp]

> In reality, the inefficiencies matter a lot.

Which is how big stores attract customers with lower prices, provided they already have cars to get to them.

[mindslight]

I was talking about inefficiencies due to "free market" optimization being a mere heuristic that finds local optima rather than global ones. So it can be completely rational for individual customers to be basing their purchasing around such a dynamic, to the point where even adding some energy (eg investment capital) can't get the optimization unstuck, while still having longstanding structural inefficiencies when looking at the larger scale.

[haroldp]

I think that is also what I am talking about.

A big central store is more economically efficient, and as a result the consumer preference, in an economic landscape where Men With Guns have removed every option except diffuse suburban housing, where they already need to have cars to get along.

Some suggest as a fix, getting the gunmen back out to force a more expensive, less efficient system for distributing food. I'm saying, can we strike at the root instead of forever hacking at the branches? Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.

[mindslight]

Except your original volley of comments was channeling the efficient market fallacy, whereby anything that's suboptimal must imply an opportunity for profit. And this comment is still focusing on economic inefficiency coming from external non-economic factors, when my point is that the market itself will sustain such inefficiencies on its own.

> Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.

Keep following this thought experiment. There is plenty of vacant unincorporated land that a group of people could get together and build whatever city they might want. That scale of investment could even get some legal leeway from state government. The type of blank-slate freedom that you're idyllically invoking ("build the cities they actually want") actually exists right now.

The intrinsic problem is still that of social scaling. Cities need people, and those people will inevitably have conflicts (and these conflicts become more intense with residents' capital buy in - cf a building full of owned condominiums versus rented apartments). Cue you've just reinvented laws but are perhaps calling them by another name (eg "policies" "user agreement" etc).

And so sorry, there is no blanket "striking the root" answer here, just a lot of messy tradeoffs. If you think eliminating some type of regulation (eg minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, etc) might change consumer preferences to make neighborhood grocery stores viable again, you can argue for that! But recognize that you're arguing tradeoffs (eg denser buildings now mean more traffic, taller buildings mean the fire department needs higher ladders, existing properties lose access to sunlight, etc) rather than some imaginary null hypothesis of a blank slate where everything will be correct by construction.

[haroldp]

> There is plenty of vacant unincorporated land that a group of people could get together and build whatever city they might want.

This is just a big network affect failure. A bunch of zealots starting a cult in the desert isn't a city, and fails quickly every time.

> there is no blanket "striking the root" answer here

I didn't invent this. This is how the whole world worked, in general, 100 years ago. Japan already went back to this 30 years ago, and it absolutely worked.

> denser buildings now mean more traffic

But less need for cars when you can walk to where you are going. Also, public transit becomes a viable option at higher densities.

> existing properties lose access to sunlight

Exactly the NIMBY attitude that supposes you get to say what other people do with their property. This is what makes homes unaffordable, neighborhoods unwalkable, our working days full of commute time, the atmosphere full of CO2 and soot, and consolidates all sorts of commerce from the small and local into the national and international mega-corps. Great tradeoff!

[mindslight]

> This is just a big network affect failure.

What do you mean "just" ? The whole point is that the difficulty of social scaling is the network effects.

> I didn't invent this. This is how the whole world worked, in general, 100 years ago.

Sorry, you cannot reverse the arrow of time. From the little I understand the Japanese model is close to what I proposed about buying up land and creating a new urban area from scratch. So as I said, that is actually legally still on the table in the US. The problem is it seems to be off the table culturally (development companies in the US are building suburban tract houses instead of train stations and sky scrapers).

> But less need for cars when you can walk to where you are going

Yes, as I said, it's a tradeoff. I didn't explore all the facets. You're free to make these arguments. In fact, I encourage you to in general! I'm in a more ruralish area now and at this point in my life probably won't ever move back, but I used to live in a good sized walkable/bikeable city and I really enjoyed it (but for the economic treadmill).

> Exactly the NIMBY attitude that supposes you get to say what other people do with their property

Here we've gotten to the heart of the matter where so called right-libertarianism falls apart [0]. We're not talking about property (the buildings), but rather real estate (a land area relative to other people's real estate). That distinction exists for an important reason - because physical proximity means that your actions on your real estate does affect your neighbors, regardless of how much you want to ignore it. The retort of living next to a chemical plant is cliche, but for a good reason.

The null hypothesis base case is to move somewhere less dense so you don't affect your neighbors as much (which is precisely why the American conception of freedom encourages the sprawl it has!), not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations. Scaling population density inherently requires social technology, not merely the rejection of social technology. If you're concerned about freedom in the urban context, you should be looking for freedom-preserving social technologies.

[0] just for context here I am libertarian, but have come to see right libertarianism as pathologically specious.