[bgun]

The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, setting up their family with generational wealth, is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful.

This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.

Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.

[wcfrobert]

Land is not scarce in the US. My road trip through Nevada to Salt Lake City convinced me of that much. What is scarce is land people actually want to live in - with safe neighborhoods, good schools, restaurants, shops, etc. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism is definitely making this worse.

I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore.

Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

[skybrian]

In much of the American West, water is the limiting factor. To build another Las Vegas, the water rights would need to be bought somehow.

Cities can outbid agriculture, but the water rights market is complicated.

A better example might be the California Forever project which seemingly had this figured out, but was blocked because they couldn't get permission.

[downrightmike]

Agriculture, the Saudis get five harvests of alfalfa a year by leasing unlimited water rights in Arizona for practically nothing. The Az Governor could call the leases and stop that, but they haven't for some reason. Most water in AZ is for Manufacturing and Farming, very little is used for people.

[fireflash38]

There's tons of land on the east coast too, just far away from people and amenities. See: rural WV, PA, VA, etc.

[skybrian]

Yes, and rust belt cities have lots of infrastructure that could be reused. Jobs are probably a limiting factor. Less so with working remotely.

[robotnikman]

This is one of the reasons I wish companies embraced remote work more, and which I wish the government encouraged more. Plenty of locations could be rebuilt and revitalized simply by moving working families there, and plenty of people would be happy to buy up the cheaper housing and contribute to the local economy if their places of work allowed for such flexibility.

Its a real shame that both state and federal governments do not see the advantages of this...

[kjkjadksj]

Most of that rust belt infrastructure from mid century population highs is actually at end of life. Some cities are having a crisis with things like their sewer systems right now. Its underreported because no one cares about the intricacies of stormwater and sewage movements, much less in a smaller midwestern city.

[telotortium]

They are currently attempting to essentially be annexed by the small community of Suisun City in exchange for being allowed to develop the land according to their vision.

[pfannkuchen]

Doesn’t BLM control chunks of land that are desirable but not allowed for settlement?

[scoofy]

The point is San Francisco has tons of land (with houses already built on it) that is desirable but not allow for redevelopment.

[Analemma_]

Not really, no. The land the BLM owns is mostly scrubland suitable for cattle grazing and basically nothing else. I suspect whoever told you that has an ideological bone to pick with the BLM and is bullshitting you to try and make you equally mad at them.

[pfannkuchen]

By the way, this is such a textbook example of how planted counter narratives brainwash people into deflecting actual criticism on a topic.

People interpret the speaker as if he is “one of those people”, who believes the counter narrative the listener has heard about.

Rarely does the listener move past this point, and check in on whether the speaker is actually one of those people, or if he is someone who has never heard of those people, or if he has ignored those people because he thinks their views are just as stupid as you think they are, and he is actually independently criticizing the topic.

[pfannkuchen]

No one told me that I’ve just seen a map and it looks quite extensive in a lot of the western US.

[sc68cal]

> the pioneer days when land was plentiful.

I think you mean to say "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"

[araes]

We can still steal land from people who were originally on that land, happens all the time in America.

- Land Appropriation for "Public Need" with Direct Transfer to Wealthy: https://fastercapital.com/content/Land-appropriation--The-In...

- Heirs property, property tax sales, and Torrens Acts (article focuses on black people, yet works equally well on all skin colors): https://inequality.org/article/black-land-theft-racial-wealt...

- Wealth City / Suburb secession to leave poor areas to pay bills, and then buy them in destitution: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-11/atlanta-s...

- Rezone areas to make new cities, take all the businesses and good land, and leave the remaining "city" with the bills (another Atlanta idea): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Union+City,+GA/@33.6158433...

- Sell vacant land out from under land owners with false listings: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newark/news/fra...

- Purposely Induced Foreclosure, Bankruptcy or surprise tax assessments to cause a forced sale: https://www.businessethicsnetwork.org/forced-sale-implicatio...

[giantg2]

Define "orginally". You might be interested to research how the Native Americans interacted, especially the Lakota. Rights by conquest was not a new idea.

[andrepd]

Well the obvious response is then "can I conquer your land by force too?". No. Because there is a construction of "lawful property rights" that starts with the appropriation of land by force but protects the new owner from the same.

[pcthrowaway]

Well technically the land can still be appropriated by force, only you have to apply it against the entire system which enforces "lawful property rights"

[whamlastxmas]

The most human thing ASI could do would be to have its own Manifest Destiny

[flutas]

or just use the system which enforces "lawful property rights"

see: Adverse Possession

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I mean murder's not a new idea either but it's broadly condemned in most moral vibes

"Right by conquest" is sort of a cope, like "You might have a green light and the right of way, but Isaac Newton always favors the semi truck"

[lurk2]

If the land had been the basis of North American prosperity there would have been civilizations there capable of resisting European colonialism.

[James_K]

The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them.

[andrepd]

Also no sheep, no dogs, no cows, no chicken.

[lurk2]

Native Americans did have dogs. They didn't have sheep, but the Incans did have access to wool-bearing animals in the form of the alpaca (though the Incan Empire was geographically isolated so these animals never reached North America). Guinea pigs were also domesticated in this region. There were neither cows nor chickens, but there were other forms of poultry such as turkeys and ducks.

[fuzzfactor]

There sure was buffalo though.

[dgfitz]

Others disagree.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-s...

[James_K]

> Spanish settlers likely first brought horses back to the Americas in 1519

No they don't.

[andrepd]

Yes they did, even if they were present in the continent before humans, they died out at least 10ky ago.

[dgfitz]

I uh, source?

[stanleykm]

what

[asdf6969]

There were a few hundred thousand of them across the entire continent. In the best case scenario, most of them still would have died to disease. Unless you believe a few hundred thousand people own should own an entire continent as their blood and soil birthright the land was always going to end up like this

There’s still a lot of land out there. The only problem today is nobody wants to start over with no plumbing, electricity, or other modern conveniences.

[codingdave]

The numbers you mention don't match what I see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...

[asdf6969]

You’re right, I mistook the Canadian numbers for all of North America. I know south and Central America had a much higher population but that’s not what this thread is about. It looks like a more accurate number is in the low millions so my point still stands.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I'm gonna go conquer Georgia, then. Genocide some country folks, burn every Confederate flag I see, end some bloodlines forever. There's not many people living there, right by conquest, etc., plus Reconstruction wasn't finished properly anyway.

[asdf6969]

Hell yea brother. Blood and soil. Georgia is for the Georgians and nobody else should be allowed to settle there

[casey2]

The truth has always been and will always be that the people who are most technologically advanced will end up with the land, weather by force or purchase.

Simply due to the fact that it's more valuable in their hands. Driving out some campers to build a town is the rule, not an exception.

[pfannkuchen]

More valuable? More valuable… to whom?

In human affairs there is no such thing as absolute value.

The reason is simply that it is inevitable as much as gravity is inevitable.

Making a moral law against gravity isn’t going to get you very far.

[echelon]

> "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"

That's every single society ever. This has been the civilizational algorithm. It predates our species.

That same tactic is alive and well today.

[milicat]

A gross oversimplification of anthropology.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

> It predates our species

People will really say this and then still be mad when I want to marry just a couple of my cousins

[yulker]

European colonization of the world is a unique enough phenomenon to not hand wave it away as business as usual. Further, the industrial intensification and financialization of this colonization through the 18th-20th centuries alone is singular on its impact on human civilization with no precedent.

[James_K]

I don't think so. How many genocides can you think of on the scale of the Native American genocide? Such events seem rare to me.

[WorkerBee28474]

Rare in absolute numbers, but not rare on a percentage basis.

That was, what, a 95% extermination? Native Americans probably committed 100% exterminations e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture

[echelon]

Apart from the Sentinelese, I can't think of one civilization that hasn't warred and taken over land and resources from others. And we really don't have proof the Sentinelese didn't do this at some point themselves.

History was full of violence.

[James_K]

You can think of many examples of war and conquest, but what happened in America is more than just war. Genocide is more than just war. Framing the atrocities upon which the US was founded as merely "historically normal" is a deeply revisionist view of history. Technological development at that time allowed for many great evils which were simply not possible before.

[ConspiracyFact]

How do you know that what happened to the natives was so much worse than the hundreds if not thousands of similar fates that must have befallen other cultures over the last several tens of thousands of years?

[michaelcampbell]

That's what YOU mean to say.

[dpc050505]

Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.

[James_K]

Even if the land was "shared", settlers still stole it for themselves.

[dgfitz]

Isn’t this the definition of a settler?

[giantg2]

Source?

Some of the nations were large, such as the Aztec. And at least a few of them understood right by conquest. They also had extensive trade routes across the continent, seeming to disprove the lack of ownership.

[int_19h]

You seem to be confusing the concept of "ownership" with that of "private property" (on immovables, especially). The "Marxist notion" of personal property still requires the concept of ownership.

[FireBeyond]

And if there happened to be people on the land they “wanted” well then there’s guns and smallpox blankets to take care of those pesky details.

“The people there didn’t have the concept of ownership” but some pioneers sure as hell made sure to enlighten them by laying claim to that same land and then threatening anyone for encroaching on it.

[watwut]

Except it was not shared, it was almost a genocide.

[stanleykm]

Nothing almost about it. This and the smallpox thing the sibling brought up are what we tell ourselves to feel better about what the truth is.

[scarby2]

genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population.

After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.

[ConspiracyFact]

If the settlers had done what the first thousand or so invading cultures did and just exterminated the natives, they would have been able to cast them in whatever light they chose. Instead they gave them rather a lot of autonomous territory relative to their population, along with legal monopolies designed to prevent them from being forced into wage slavery.

Oops!

[fc417fc802]

> at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population

Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.

[IncreasePosts]

Sure, some tried, but smallpox and other diseases were doing a great job on their own. It didn't need a few blankets to make it a real pandemic.

[Aloisius]

The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.

[watwut]

It was an intentional act. They wrote about it being an intentional act. The violence was not an accidental nor rare event either, it was an intentional act too.

The east expansion took a lot of time, involved quite a few massacres and invonluntary relocations.

[jfengel]

And yet we took 100% of it, and forcibly relocated the survivors.

[IncreasePosts]

If you steal something from someone who stole something, I'm not going to cry for the original thief.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Most of us were born into land that was colonized in written memory.

I would definitely cry for the death of the innocent grandchildren of thieves.

[Aurornis]

A big part of the problem is that too many people want and/or have to live in very tiny portions of the country: major cities.

There is a lot of cheap land and even a lot of cheap houses for those willing to live in a different place. Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically. This has opened the door to many of them moving even farther away, unlocking an entire new world of affordability.

There was a brief moment where all of this looked like it was a very real possibility for many of us, but the rubber band is snapping back with remote work and now many are being required to move back to those few cities again to find the best jobs.

> but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing.

I don't think most people believe that you can just work hard and then have generational wealth for your heirs. That feels like a strawman argument. Generational wealth has always been a difficult feat for the few, not something we promised everyone could achieve.

However, people also underestimate the power of compounding for retirement savings. Obviously not helpful to someone working at McDonalds and trying to pay rent in a big city, but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. Not "generational wealth" or "setting up your heirs", but enough to make big contributions to education, helping kids with emergencies, possibly leaving some non-trivial inheritance. This happens all the time and continues to happen with millenials, as it will happen with Gen Z. Again, not literally everyone but to suggest that it's out of reach is really out of alignment with the reality of what we see people earning and saving.

[koolba]

> but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years.

You’re off by at least a factor of ten.

40 years of $100/month savings at a generous 5% compounding is $148,242. And that’s in future dollars. Drop it to 4% and you’re down $116,606.

The real formula to consider is what percentage of your monthly spending you are savings. If it’s 100%, then every month worked is one month of retirement. If it’s 50% then two months of working is one month of retirement. If you live frugally and save 400% of your spend, each month counts as four retired months.

It’s a simple fraction with the numerator as your net savings and the denominator your total spending. And lowering the denominator scales things much faster.

[WorkerBee28474]

5% is not generous. 5% is conservative. 10% is historical for the S&P 500. 12% is generous.

[scoofy]

7% is historical for S&P500, but that's with 3% average inflation. His point is that 5% real returns are, in fact, generous.

[NoLinkToMe]

No he said 5% 'is in future dollars', i.e. not inflation adjusted to a present value... When in reality the nominal S&P500 returns are 10% leading to the same 'future dollars'. That is conservative.

Plus if 7% real returns (after a 3% inflation) is the historical average, how is 5% real returns generous? That's still conservative even if he meant to claim a 5% real return.

[whamlastxmas]

Especially generous if you account for official inflation numbers doing a terrible job at representing income to cost of living ratio

[whateveracct]

> Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically.

And there are plenty of nice places to live in that radius! I'm in Tacoma which I really like. And Seattle is plenty accessible for shows, events, a night out.

I did what your friends did. After 6y of paying off student loans and saving cash (not even being frugal - enjoying Seattle for sure), we looked at Tacoma and realized "oh we have our pick of wonderful homes here."

[lurk2]

America isn't overpopulated. The pyramid scheme you're describing is not a Malthusian constraint but the product of bad monetary policy privileging non-productive investments in real estate. There's still no better place on earth for normal people to build wealth, unless you're playing the digital nomad game.

[yulker]

America has enough room to build many new cities in useful locations, yet it doesn't. Why is that?

[lurk2]

I would contest the idea that this construction isn't happening - it's largely just resulting in sprawl at the periphery of existing cities. America has a lot of space available and a lot of space actively being developed.

As to why new cities aren't being built in completely empty areas, I would have to know where you're talking about to make a guess as to why they aren't being developed. Off the top of my head:

1) Environmental concerns 2) Expropriation concerns making projects politically untenable 3) The concerns of aboriginals 4) Cost of infrastructure development 5) Lack of market demand

To elaborate on the fifth point, I would posit that people don't tend to populate such greenfield cities unless there is a compelling reason to do so; either by being pulled (e.g. by resource extraction opportunities, a growing economy, educational opportunities, etc.) or by being pushed (e.g. fleeing a war, the effects of climate change, or political persecution). China is the example to look at here. They spent most of the 2010s buying up an enormous amount of resources to build cities that ended up just sitting empty before eventually being demolished. A lot of this was just fraud (the buildings weren't constructed to be habitable to begin with), but at least some proportion of it had to do with the factors I mentioned above. The cost of physically moving to a new city, as well as the loss of social capital resulting from such a move make relocating to a new city both undesirable and prohibitively expensive for most people.

Do you have another theory?

[alephnerd]

> Do you have another theory

I do (becuase I've heard it from a buddy of mine who's an MD at a Bulge Bank) - there is no capital to invest in consumer real estate anymore.

Large portions of that industry died out in 2008-12, and capital for large real estate projects like a housing community tend to be allocated 2-3 years before ground breaking, and then an additional 1-2 years to build.

So to build a brand new community by 2020, you should have done all the leg work in 2014-16. And to build a new one today, it should have been done in 2019-20.

Any pipeline that even existed is now dead, because manufacturing construction was the asset class of choice in the 2022-24 period along with high interest rates (making projects much more expensive) and tariffs on Canadian lumber, so the housing shortage is about to get even worse.

[thelamest]

It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.

[lurk2]

It was never implied that this mechanism was magical.

If you reread the original post, the claim being made is:

> The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, [...] was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing.

This is manifestly not the case. My response was that, insofar as a pyramid scheme exists, it has nothing to do with some fundamental Malthusian limit on how many people can fit in a given space; this limit exists, but is not the reason that the rich are getting richer, which instead has to do with monetary policy.

You make cheap money available to those with good credit. These people take out loans and use the money to buy real property with the expectation that they will be able to rent it out for more than the carrying cost of the loan. This causes the price of real estate to rise artificially beyond what it would if the cheap credit had not been made available. The key issue here is that this credit isn't being made available to everyone at once - you have to qualify for the loan first.

[fc417fc802]

> bad monetary policy

Bad zoning policy, more like.

[TZubiri]

" This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas."

And why you guys are looking at Mars now.

Here in latam we haven't filled the land at all, you guys have been hard working and filled with riches. But our laziness might give us more longevity, we are playing the long game with the amazon

[hnthrow90348765]

LATAM will get a lot of remote work if the wages stay lower than the US since they're in better-for-US-company-timezones than India or others overseas. That's what my company is outsourcing to.

[dumbledoren]

Doubtful. Digital nomads, short-term rental tourism, real estate investors (prompted by the former two) are increasing housing costs and CoL in all the popular destinations. Costs in some regions like Barcelona almost got equalized with costs in major US tech hubs. The same is happening in places like Buenos Aires. So its unlikely that the trend in LATAM will continue as it is.

Also, this is very bad for not only the locals as they get gentrified from living in their own city/urban centers (and in some cases even rural zones), but also the local companies: The US and other rich Western companies dump their healthcare and housing costs onto the locals through arbitration while making it harder for local companies to keep up with the CoL increase through wages, therefore increasing their expenses and reducing their competitiveness. And the reduced taxes that the nomads etc pay doesn't help it. (that is, the ones who actually pay).

[lurk2]

> The US and other rich Western companies dump their healthcare and housing costs onto the locals [...] And the reduced taxes that the nomads etc pay doesn't help it. (that is, the ones who actually pay).

Most nomads are going to be getting private health insurance. It's true that a lot of them are not paying their taxes, but if you're talking about Latin America that's true for a large portion of the domestic population as well. I looked into relocating to a country in South America a few years ago and had a lawyer tell me to not even worry about filling out the relevant visas because he had clients from China who had been living there for decades with no papers (I opted not to retain his services). The key here is that even if they aren't paying taxes, they are bringing money into the economy and are generally not competing with local laborers. This attitude has started to shift in places like Mexico City because a lot of the expats are not digital nomads but instead run-of-the-mill immigrants competing with the working population for jobs.

[dumbledoren]

> Most nomads are going to be getting private health insurance

Those private health insurances are subsidized by the public healthcare because they piggyback off of the public healthcare system. That's why they are affordable, unlike the US. And as a result, those nomads end up congestion the public healthcare system because the private health insurers also send their own patients to public hospitals for anything serious. Im telling this from a place that is experiencing precisely this.

> It's true that a lot of them are not paying their taxes, but if you're talking about Latin America that's true for a large portion of the domestic population as well

The amount of taxes avoided by the poor majority in such countries don't compare to the taxes avoided by the rich white collars. Nomads earn 2 to 5 times more than the local white collars as well. Even in some European countries.

> The key here is that even if they aren't paying taxes, they are bringing money into the economy

They don't. People think that but neither tourists nor nomads nor short term-renters (whatever the kind) bring money into the economy:

The nomad doesn't buy 10 shoes every month, 2 cars every year, eat out 20 times every day or buy 50 loaves of bread every day. He consumes just like any other human being (obviously), and his consumption does not move the needle of the local economy much.

What nomad's consumption boosts is a few local/luxury shops that cater to the rich or nomads, and maybe one or two local shops or services that they also use. Those few businesses make bank even as other businesses in the same neighborhood rot. And those few businesses that benefit don't buy dozens of employees to make up for the added workload - they hire one or two and everyone works harder and that's it. So what nomads end up doing is enriching a few local, already-well-to-do shop and business owners. On the other side, they cause a 20 to 30% increase in rents (even in Europe), housing prices and significant increases in CoL.

> This attitude has started to shift in places like Mexico City because a lot of the expats are not digital nomads but instead run-of-the-mill immigrants competing with the working population for jobs.

It started changing in Europe too. In places like Barcelona, Madrid, Southern Spain, Portugal, some central European 'bohemian' destinations etc. Mostly because of the sharp gentrification the nomads are causing even for the white collars. But especially the English-speaking foreigner population concentration in some places became way too visible and they started outnumbering the locals. In Barcelona there seems to be a lot of cafes in the city center where the waiters don't know Spanish or Catalan, people having difficulty hearing either language being spoken in the city center etc.

In any case a strong reaction came to being against nomadism and its not looking good.

[lurk2]

> Those private health insurances are subsidized by the public healthcare because they piggyback off of the public healthcare system.

Most nomads I know have insurance that is either global or based in their home country. If I had been injured in my host country I would have been required to pay full price for my medical services, which is why I bought insurance in my own country. If you're at the point that you've purchased insurance in the place you are living, are you really a nomad anymore?

> The amount of taxes avoided by the poor majority in such countries don't compare to the taxes avoided by the rich white collars.

Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just speculating? I've read about this with regards to South America and what I took away from it was that the informal economy is largely made up of low wage laborers, not white collar professionals. In either case, this is kind of irrelevant to the discussion because any taxes the nomads pay represent revenues that the host would not otherwise have had. As a nomad you aren't going to be consuming more in services than you're spending unless you're camping in a tent and end up breaking a leg.

> They don't. People think that but neither tourists nor nomads nor short term-renters (whatever the kind) bring money into the economy:

I spent more on rent in 3 months in my host country than most people spend in a year. I ate out at restaurants almost every night I was there, and took taxis every day. These aren't normal consumption patterns where I was living. Your point might hold if you're talking about Europe; but if we accept that it does, we would then have to ask how it's possible for nomads to be driving rents up.

> Those few businesses make bank even as other businesses in the same neighborhood rot.

Does the economy improve or does it not?

> And those few businesses that benefit don't buy dozens of employees to make up for the added workload - they hire one or two and everyone works harder and that's it.

This is pure speculation on your part and there's no compelling reason to think that it occurs.

[umanwizard]

Rent in Barcelona is still way cheaper than NYC.

[dumbledoren]

Not in the city center. And of course, not compared to Manhattan etc.

[umanwizard]

Can you post some listings from both to show what you mean? If you’re comparing the city center of Barcelona to some distant suburban neighborhood that looks like Long Island but is technically part of Queens maybe it’s true, but if you’re comparing like to like I’m pretty confident NYC is still way more expensive.

[TZubiri]

Yeah, looks like the go to strategy, but I may have to pass on the gold mine and go for the higher payoff of a decent living but a more spiritually fulfilling trade diplomacy

In international trade there's complementary/productive trade, you have gold, we have silver, let's trade. And you also have redundant/substitutive trade, you have soy, we have cheaper soy, buy our soy.

I don't believe from the bottom of my heart in substitutive trade for similar reasons I don't believe in (most) inmigration. We've conquered the americas, now we have to populate it, god won't reward desertors who revert their ancestor's decision by running back to the old continent, and the excuse of "I was born in the wrong hemisphere" is also quite petty, we rolled the dice and this is what we got.

Substitutive trade isn't far from immigration, the poor want to go to the rich countries, and the rich buy the cheap labour. Where is the pride in that? In both sides. Leave your country for another with a different religion, leave your mother your brethren, and serve. Leave a war instead of fighting? Take a 1 hour bus to a fancy neighbourhood to serve coffee and wash dishes. Conversely, you can wash your own dishes, you can use a bottle of water and fill that up before you leave, we don't need a migrant washing our dishes, and we don't need to migrate to wash dishes.

So I'm trying to focus on trade that is not replaceable with local labour, hopefully countries start nailing down remote work and we start locking those behind visas.

And unfortunately india and philipinnes get that productive trade, they can cover night shifts.

We'll find stuff to export. There's not much, as Trump said "they need us more than we need them".

Local entertainment, sports and games will always be there, it's like cybertourism.

there might be an argument for redundant trade as a counterweight to an unbalanced productive export. But I don't think that works long term.

There's also localization services, in language and legal, but those are just costs of exporting really.

Lithium is probably the lesser evil, super extractive, but we gotta pay somehow.

Sorry about the super rant. Lately I've been more using forums as a way to write things that I already had drafted in my mind.

[nullc]

In the US you can buy land at quantity for, say, ~$1k/acre in places where there aren't people/infrastructure/etc...

There is no shortage of land in the US. There is a shortage of land in a few high density areas. But increasing their density makes them more attractive.

I don't think it's reasonable to make the pioneer comparison-- if you want to do what pioneers did and build something from almost nothing in the middle of nowhere with great effort then there is still an analogous route open to you.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

There is a lot of land for $100/acre. The main problem with that land is there is no water.

[nullc]

Indeed, though at $1000/ you can be proximal to subsurface water at least... Perhaps not enough for intensive agriculture, but absolutely enough to live.

[6stringmerc]

The Puritans became settlers in the New World because they were hated and thrown out of Europe / England so they set up shop and managed to derange society to this day in the US.

[giantg2]

"is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful."

Land is still generally plentiful. The need to all live in one spot is more social/artificial and really accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to rapid urbanization.

[adverbly]

Land value tax would solve this.

[foolfoolz]

land is still plentiful in the u. s. just maybe not where you want to be, similar to what a pioneer town might look like

[ndsipa_pomu]

It always strikes me as bizarre that people can "own" land. It existed before you and will exist after you, so how can a short-lived being really "own" it?

It would make so much more sense if land "ownership" was related to whether you live on or work that particular piece of land rather than relying on arbitrary pieces of paper that were mainly decided before any of us were even born.

[newsclues]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_(property)

It’s paying tax for owning something that is weird to me.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Isn't the tax paying towards a society that will respect your "ownership" so that you can have access to legal redress if someone prevents you using it?

[nitwit005]

The homestead act only ended in the 1970s. We were happily handing out land for free if people were willing to live there and work it quite recently.

If there had still been a big demand for it, the program would probably still be running. They granted an extension to Alaska for that reason.

[Gothmog69]

I wonder about the economics of places with declining population like Japan and South Korea. I always read that declining population is bad for the economy but feels like those countries will have more opportunities for the young in the future.

[andrepd]

Look at Georgism, and LVT. A 100% "tax" on the value of unimproved land would ensure the forces of market itself would push away from the situation you describe.

[wwarner]

I want to agree with you but I don't see the difference between land and any other kind of asset ownership.

[yapyap]

of course this was never going to last forever, we have more than 8 billion people in the world, if even 0.00001% of people wanted to do what you proposed, eventually own a part of a nation’s land, thats 80 thousand people.

that’s just not happening

[rsynnott]

This is a fairly simplistic/wrong view. If this were the case, say, you’d expect housing costs to be fairly reliably lower in low density European countries than high density ones. Spoiler: nope.

In practice housing costs are driven by shortages of _housing_, not land. And these are quite different.

[methou]

It does not have to be the "pioneer days", just saying this from Japan...