[Avicebron]

Can he provide evidence of one that has?

[cm2012]

Look around you and see we are not living in mud and huts anymore

[inigyou]

Actually I'd rather start from a mud hut and then upgrade it myself than live in the current rental system, but I don't have that option because landlords own most of the land.

[crawfordcomeaux]

It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.

Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123

[AndrewKemendo]

Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable

[crawfordcomeaux]

And saying so will get you downvoted on here most times. To anyone downvoting, show us the depth of your reasoning for it?

[cm2012]

The fact that while racism exists, Western society is certainly not at the forefront of it? If anything the collective "West" is the most sensitive about race and racial issues.

[crawfordcomeaux]

It's performative because resolving it would require the end of the governments within the "West" and replacing with reindigenizing governance. Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play. The racism is systemic and cultural. Sensitivity isn't sufficient; there needs to be actual systemic shifts that help drive cultural shifts and vice-versa. Not simply language changes, either. Rooting out binary thinking is key to it all. Nondual animist views are more aligned with how things work in the cosmos than dualism/nonanimism.

[saghm]

Housing prices certainly can get high, but they aren't anywhere close to a billion dollars, which is the actual number under discussion

[margalabargala]

The thing being discussed is that wealth can be created, not merely stolen.

The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.

[hnav]

But it's extractive, i.e. the housing costs what you can pay if you sacrifice. Those who got housing first need to get paid by latecomers. If the cost of building magically went to 0, the soft costs would inflate.

[margalabargala]

Sure. The extractiveness of housing costs can exist alongside the fact that constructing a building on land creates value.

[oh_my_goodness]

Always the same straw man argument. Nobody here is arguing that wealth can't be created.

[margalabargala]

Did you not read the comment chain above? That's precisely the point that was being discussed, then misunderstood.

[oh_my_goodness]

I read the comment chain above. I just went back and read it again. I question whether you've done the same.

[BurningFrog]

Also note that we're 8 billion people living on a much higher average material living standard than when we were 2 billion 100 years ago.

[atwrk]

No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.