[ixtli]

Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.

[clickety_clack]

An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.

[InsideOutSanta]

This leads to another problem: markets externalize many costs, which is why regulation exists. Sure, you could let "the economy" build as much as it wants without any regulation, but at what cost?

[derektank]

Does Sweden have a problem with local land use restrictions? They have done a lot to liberalize their economy over the last few decades

[occz]

Municipalities have far-reaching power in deciding what gets built where. Getting things built can take quite a long time.

[cousin_it]

Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.

[rjsw]

Pay UBI only at the level needed to live in the place with no jobs and cheap housing.

[bluGill]

> There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.

Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)

[cogman10]

The primary issue is the people that live in "no poors allowed" area can literally push the poors out of a voting area and thus use their "no poors allowed" policies to take over local governments. Which ultimately allows them to expand the "no poors allowed" zones.

Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.

Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.

All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.

Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.

The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.

[AndrewKemendo]

You got the diagnosis right but I’m not convinced voting would change anything - even though it’s definitely true that it could matter, most of the structural issues are upstream of the ballot aka who gets to be on the ballot in the first place is the real problem

“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman

[cousin_it]

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

[inigyou]

Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.

[cogman10]

I disagree.

I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.

It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.

[bluGill]

I do not disagree.

[cousin_it]

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.

Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

[eszed]

> if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air

Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?

[bluGill]

I place strong restrictions on what I allow my governments to control. You get a say in your local government, but that government only has limited things it is allowed to control/do.

[amanaplanacanal]

Allowing local government to restrict what can be built and where has been a double edged sword. Yes it's good that you can't build noisy, smelly, or potentially polluting activities near where people live. But we have gone far beyond that, in ways that harm our communities, require people to own a car to get through daily life, and leave people sleeping in the street.

Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.

[pjc50]

Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.

[kubb]

It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.

I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.

[__MatrixMan__]

The way you say "outcompeted" makes it seem like you're evaluating efficiency in both cases, but isn't direction the more important criteria?

It doesn't really matter if a car without a steering wheel can be faster than one without on account of being lighter. One is going where you want it to, and the other is crashing into things.

The economy, as we're practicing it today, is a car without a steering wheel.

[mym1990]

Somewhat of a weird example…the one without a steering wheel could be autonomous, or the place you want to get to is in a completely straight line from where you start. Also in your example you have both cars without steering wheels.

[mhluongo]

By that logic, from my perspective - your family life, as we're practicing it today, it a car without a steering wheel.

The church down the street from me, that I have nothing to do with, is a car without a steering wheel. My local town, of which I'm only 1 member, is a car without a steering wheel.

Just because you see a system that you don't understand or control doesn't mean it's dangerous. The first instinct shouldn't be to centralize power.

[bluGill]

That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in...

I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Markets create the illusion of choice between monopolies.

I don't like monopolies because they restrict my freedom far more than zoning codes do.

Ultimately markets are not a democratic choice. You can choose a Mac or a PC, or Amazon vs Netflix.

You (often) can't choose to join a union, to get affordable healthcare that won't bankrupt you, or to have a national policy that prioritises the needs of renters over the profits of private equity.

[mym1990]

I feel like in this case, the “Amazon or Netflix” example is particularly bad because I feel like I’m actually drowning in streaming providers.

You will also typically have the option to simply opt out, although this is getting less rare.

I think my point is that there are typically still many options, but the best options are controlled by few players.

[inigyou]

Markets used to be hundreds or thousands of people who were roughly peers and they still work well in that situation. When I go to the riverside market on Saturday to buy fabric for a project, there are 10 different fabric stalls. On this one little river bank alone! Each one of them has a different selection and they all want me to buy their fabric. This is the only thing that people used to think of as a market, and it probably does work well. Since that time, however, the term has been twisted beyond comprehension.

[Rygian]

> I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.

That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.

[inigyou]

Zoning codes have some uses, doesn't mean they're still net positive value. Maybe the current situation is so bad that letting a pig farm or a coal power plant be build right in the middle of a residential neighborhood is actually a better tradeoff than whatever we have now.

In many European places there are only a few zones: farming/industry, mixed commercial/residential, and of course random other stuff like parks. And when you build you can only go a couple stories taller than the average in a certain radius unless you're explicitly approved to build a skyscraper. This height limit is also displayed on the zoning map but I believe it's regularly adjusted.

[kubb]

Depends which objection you mean...

But your choices are more limited than you might think. Ultimately what's available to you is decided by the economic machinery upstream.

[lapcat]

> That objection applies to the other options as well.

True.

> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.

What about when it doesn't? Markets consolidate. They form monopolies and duopolies. The only counterbalance in this situation, the only entities more powerful than massive multinational corporations, are governments and regulators.

I think the problem is the faith that any system will self-regulate, whether the system is economic or political, as if we can just write the founding rules of the system, and then the system will take care of itself and operate to the greatest benefit of the public.

Markets can get captured by wealthy interests. Governments can get captured by wealthy interests. Corruption is perpetual. Those who seek benefit for themselves will interfere in the system, so those who seek to preserve the public benefit must also interfere in the system. Not the invisible hand but eternal vigilance is required. The question is not whether the government will interfere in the markets; the question is who will control that interference, the masses of voters or the much smaller "donor" class.

[bluGill]

Every system can be captured by wealthy interests. Markets are not unique there. Once in a rare while someone not wealthy captures a system - but they inevitably use that capture to become wealthy so it doesn't really matter.

Classical liberalism is the least likely for that to happen to, but it has happened there too over and over in history as well. I still support classical liberalism, which is not the same as supporting the market even though classical liberalism ends up being a market.

[forgetfreeman]

"I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own."

Fair enough but not all option spreads are equal. For example having 35 flavors of snack chips in the grocery store is objectively less valuable than food being broadly affordable, or any of a number of other things that would be directly hostile to shareholder value.

You don't like zoning codes because to date nobody has tried to build a trash incinerator next door to where you live, which ironically is evidence that zoning kinda works.

[bluGill]

Why do I care about a trash incinerator? The truth is I don't.

I care that my air is clean -that includes smell. I care that the trash gets there safely (when on the public roads the drivers need to be safe even when my kids are riding their bikes on the road). There are a few other issues. However the incinerator itself I'm not against.

[eszed]

I agree. To expand your point, that requires upstream regulation of trash incinerators (and road safety, which I'll ignore because developed economies mostly have that at least nominally in place), to make sure it's not a noxious neighbor. Where that doesn't exist, there will be pressure for (blunt force and inefficient) zoning codes to keep the smelly stuff away.

That works for incinerators (which I know - yay technical progress - can be made unnoticeable) but not for things that are irremedially (for now) obnoxious. The answer, I think, is again to put the onus of regulation on the actor by saying: you can't put thing within these sorts of areas unless you achieve these liveability targets; in return, a previously conforming industrial plant, or airport, or whatever, would be protected against being forced out of existence because neighbors encroach and then change the zoning rules. (This actually happens.)

There will be edge cases and problems, of course, but I think they're better problems than current zoning regime. Critically, this encourages continued development of industrial process and practice: build a better incinerator and you can build it in more places.

I believe Japan's zoning system has some of these features.

[dh2022]

I don’t follow. Your first sentence says you do not care about trash incinerators, presumably next to your house. Your second sentence says you care about the smell.

Trash incinerators are very smelly. You are contradicting yourself. I don’t get it.

[inigyou]

But if someone invented a new type that didn't smell, it should be allowed. Regulate consequences, not causes. The power substation down the road is disguised as a brick house, because the rule was ultimately about maintaining the look of the area and not about forbidding power substations.

[ToucanLoucan]

> I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own.

Are you making your own choices?

Do you sincerely believe that when one of the largest pillars of the American economy right now is staffed from top to bottom with PhD holders who use everything they know about psychology to make you think certain ways? To want shit you don't need? To make you play games you don't like? To make you consume art that makes you feel nothing? To make you hate people you don't know? To make you eat food that makes you feel shitty? Do you really make your own choices?

To be clear this is not meant as an attack. I'm just saying there are trillions of dollars on the line in making people, at scale, make choices. Do you really believe you are an island, free from influence? Do you honestly think your wants, needs, desires are not socially informed?

[bluGill]

You say that as if there is any alternative. Every other system as well has people who are good at psychology spreading propaganda.

[ToucanLoucan]

Oh I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just saying if they aren't really your choices, why is making them valuable to you? Sure, you have 30 different choices of peanut butter to pick from, but you always pick the same one, because it's what your mom used when you were a kiddo, or because you don't like the oil separating ones, or because the chunky makes you feel like it's healthy even though it's loaded down with as much sugar as a Coke.

What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?

[bluGill]

I have changed my peanut butter choice - when science started realizing trans fat was a problem I switched before the law changed to reflect science. I have also tried various of the 30 different options in other situations and found the one I personally like best. The value isn't just that I can make a choice, it is also that other people really do make different choices.

You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.

[admjs]

What's an example where central planning outcompetes the market?

[TheOtherHobbes]

Any industry or economic activity where extractive financialisation takes priority over productive economic activity that delivers human value.

Example: the UK's privatisation of water utilities. The UK's water now exist to turn government handouts into dividends while providing as little practical value as possible.

This is not hyperbole. The industry literally dumps shit in the UK's rivers to save operating expenses, and has built zero new reservoirs since privatisation.

[mylifeandtimes]

let's reverse the question. Where are markets expected to be optimal?

> definition of 'perfect competition' perfect competition, in which there are large numbers of identical suppliers and demanders of the same product, buyer and sellers can find one another at no cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market.

And that perfect competition provides the price signals that allow the market to be more competitive.

The less that holds true, the less efficient the market is going to be.

What is the price signal on education?

What is the price signal on public infrastructure?

What is the price signal on rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts?

[dh2022]

City transit-it transports more people than taxis and uber put together. The trade off is public transit is slower (in my case 35 minutes by link-rail vs 15 minutes by car, and probably 20 minutes if I were to take an uber)

[kubb]

Wartime production mobilization, public health (vaccine procurement, disease eradication), natural monopolies like power grids.

Public transport, water and sewage systems, infrastructure like roads and bridges are more of a hybrid model with a strong planning component, and private contractors (who consume a lot of public funds and often misuse them).

[appplication]

These are good examples and it’s even worth noting that the net impact of these can be a huge boost to the market. But it is a local and greedy optimizer. It doesn’t think “would having public transit improve the economy long term” it thinks “could I make enough on fares to justify the investment” (which is almost always no, at least relative to other investments). This is the nature of positive externalities. They are value that the market is unable to weigh in its decision making.

[mylifeandtimes]

Yes, as you say the market is a local (both in space and time) and greedy optimizer.

Long-term payoffs that increase the value of all participants in society, such as education, healthcare, infrastructure (roads including public transportation, water, electricity, ...), are demonstrably better served by government than by business.

[grey-area]

Healthcare.

[Wilsoniumite]

In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.

[alex_suzuki]

This was very well written, thank you. Looking forward to the follow-ups.

[Wilsoniumite]

They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one:

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...

[kupfer]

On your start page, under all posts (which seem to be chronological), it sits below "The room the economy can’t see", so I did not associate it with the follow up.

[alex_suzuki]

Ah, thank you! I kind of assumed it would be coming soon as this post was dated as “today”, and it seemed illogical for the next post to already be out. :)

[svnt]

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

[tejohnso]

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around.

Very strong LLM signal there. I don't mind people using LLM in their writing, but when there are LLMisms like that in the text, it takes away from the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it screams out LLM use and changes the reader's focus from the content to the content creation. Secondly, it's just bad writing that reduces reading enjoyment. I'm looking forward to improvements that eliminate these obvious problems.

How did LLMs end up doing this anyway? I wasn't seeing this kind of thing before LLMs. Was there a large corpus of training material with this kind of thing is common?

[skybrian]

That’s not really an LLMism. It’s a phrase that ordinary writers use and was perfectly fine, but LLMs started overusing it, so now you see it as a “tell.” People who haven’t read enough LLM-generated writing to see the pattern won’t notice anything wrong.

[patcon]

I wonder if you may be seeing ghosts? At least to me, this sounded so clearly like an authentic human voice, at least the parts I've read (haven't finished yet).

This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.

I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?

[duskdozer]

It's possible we're at the point now where it fools me, but I didn't see it that way. I think more evidence against would be the fact that the author discloses genAI usage in another article [0] and provides their own version of the same [1].

[0] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

[throwaway98797]

you are so wrong. this is not ai.

[svnt]

Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.

[forgetfreeman]

Watching trust in online content of any kind disintegrate in realtime due to AI in a forum that on balance breathlessly touts AI is surreal.

[infecto]

Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.

[multjoy]

What people generally want is time, and then if you have time you obviously need to spend it somewhere. If not work or home, then literally a third space.

>t’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out

The point of the article is that the markets are blind to this sort of social good.

[infecto]

I am not convinced any other entity can do “social good” on average better than some form of a market. The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby and not a lot of folks play them to require a third space. And these third spaces generally still exist but they require some organization.

The point of my comment is I don’t agree with the article.

Back to what I said. Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces and is a much more complicated problem.

[eszed]

> Kids don’t even play outside anymore and I don’t think it’s because the market took away third spaces

I agree with this, but I think it reinforces GP's point that what's missing is time: slack in the day. I grew up playing outside with all the neighborhood kids, and the critical enabler was that there were always adults around during the after-school hours. Not actively hanging out with us, or even closely supervising, but around. Some of them (mine, but only for a few years), were stay-at-home mothers, but by no means all. One family had a dad who got home early from work. Another kid we couldn't play at their house certain days, but we could others, because their parents had variable schedules.

There were also more kids around, because families back then had more kids than they do nowadays. I think that's also (not entirely, but to a significant degree) a consequence of adults having less time - across their life-cycles, and in their days - that isn't devoted to work.

No ones' parents did gig-work, or worked two jobs.

Hell, I think the need for third-places (for kids) mentioned in the article is a down-stream effect of the increased time pressures on adults' lives - as is the disappearance of third-places for adults.

[frameset]

> The simpler explanation here is that board games are still a niche hobby

The article says "games", which I took to be more likely to be video games. These are teenagers after all. And if they're safe and goofing around gaming in a youth club, they're less likely to be doing antisocial behaviour on the street.

[tehwebguy]

All of those things you long for have been nuked by the economy too.

[infecto]

Source?

[hiddencost]

IDK if you're familiar with Church, but that's the most heavily used third space. And we grant it tax exempt status which it abuses to push bad laws.

[infecto]

Yes I am well aware of churches and their tax exempt status and generally don’t agree with it. So I will ask what’s your punchline to my opinion? My point is I am not convinced this is a pure market problem so much as the average consumer no longer wants it. There are still plenty of third spaces to organize events like game nights though not dedicated and that includes community centers or other private entity community centers like churches or clubs. I think the problem is less the market stripped away the third space and more that for better or worse the demand does not exist.

[doctorpangloss]

another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.

[jstummbillig]

I mean the market is spending on stuff like this; this is just a form of youth center, no? We pay for those, as we pay for schools or parks.

And it does have positive externalities: Trust, parents, neighbourhood, school outcomes, crime outcomes

It's hot. Maybe I am missing something.