pktechgirlbackup: (pktechgirl)
My municipality has public (government funded) assistance programs to help people make the balloon payment required to rent an apartment (security deposit/first + last month's rent, etc). As assistance programs go, I'm pretty okay with this one: it's a one time investment that helps people get into long term better, more stable, cheaper living arrangements. It increases mobility and threat of exist from bad situations. I like all those things.

But why is it necessary? At least part of the reason is the insane tenants' rights laws. If it takes three months from missed payment to eviction, landlords will demand three months rent up front. A friend of my is being evicted because he missed a payment. The landlord isn't out any money yet because my friend paid last month's rent when he moved in, but he doesn't want to risk a repeat next month. If they could evict on two day's notice, the economically optimal thing would be to take a more wait and see attitude.

Except those rules didn't come about for no reason. I couldn't move on two days notice, and allowing my landlord to force me to do so would give him an extraordinary amount of power. It becomes trivial to extort people, and it's most effective against the most vulnerable, which is the opposite of how I like my extortion to go.

Full disclosure: I already dislike laws that give tenants substantial lead time before eviction, because 1. they're unfair and 2. they push us towards more professional landlords and fewer individuals renting out spaces, and thus hurt both small time capitalists and renters, to the benefit of large capitalists.

This is a thing I've been thinking about a lot since I read Debt. It makes the point that medieval European peasants tended to be heavily involved on both sides of the free market. A household was extended credit by the miller, but they were themselves extending credit to the cobbler. It kept the system from spiralling into wage slavery* or debt peonage, while still giving useful signals about what things were and weren't wanted. It bears a striking resemblance to the ghetto economics described by Sudhir Venkatesh in Off the Books. I'm hoping that things like lyft and airbnb will move more of us back to that, but as they grow they're running into tax and regulatory obstacles.

And we have those regulations on hotels, and taxis, and restaurants for reasons too. Food poisoning, bed bugs, and kidnappings are real things that I think the government should work against. Regulatory capture makes it worse, but that's a distraction from the fact that every safety regulation disproportionately discourages new and small entrepreneurs.

Third, initially unrelated thing: I've been thinking a lot about parenting lately, and how we tend to emphasize protecting children from dangerous things, or teaching them to protect themselves. Avoiding dangerous situations costs them a lot, both in good things they miss out on, and bad things they would have learned from. If I have kids**, I want to emphasize resilience and recovery from trauma, not avoidance out of fear.

This is relevant because the government's current tact is a lot more like wrapping your kid in bubble wrap, and a lot less like teaching them to stand up and brush themselves off. Speculatively, what if we lessened food safety restrictions but provided free treatment for food poisoning? What if anyone could run a cab but everyone had a panic button that could summon the police immediately? I already think the government should spend infinite money in the War on Bed Bugs because fuck bed bugs it's a public safety issue. New reputation mechanisms are arising that could substitute for the closeness of a medieval village.

Once again I have no closing paragraph, just a bunch of thoughts.


*A phrase I still find ludicrous and diminishing to the horror of genuine slavery, but am now beginning to see what it's getting at.

**A thing I have been feeling more positive about since the hypochlorhydria was treated.
pktechgirlbackup: (pktechgirl)
I'm reading Debt: The First 5000 Years, and it has me seriously rethinking my thoughts on economics and even libertarianism. It's an extremely dense book, so I have a lot of thoughts, and I need to read more on them before I commit to any them, but here are things I am thinking right now:

  • I've treated the economics of capitalism/the market as physical laws, as inescapable as gravity. And they pretty much are, in this society, at this time. There are other societies where they are not, where humans orient themselves towards something else, and it's worth examining the costs and benefits of each.
  • Capitalism is based on an assumption of constant growth that can be very destructive. The author is an anthropologist, and I've never heard an economist say it, so I want to read more, but it feels true. This is tied in with Protestantism somehow but I don't know how.
  • Societies where more than a trivial percentage of the population can't support themselves collapse. This is true even though "support themselves in the manner to which they which to become accustomed" is a moving target. Today's peasants may live materially better than anyone on the planet 100 years ago, but they're scoring against something else.
  • A credit-based market among neighbors, where everyone is using credit from and extending it to everyone else (=medieval markets), is very different from a system where everyone goes to a few central organizations, otherwise removed from them, and gets money to use somewhere else (=modern banking).
  • Most of the things I like about capitalism are actually things I like about free markets, and maybe I can get the latter without the former.


Let's talk about the constant growth thing. I was recently faced with a series of decisions at work in which I chose the path with the higher required effort, higher growth potential over the easier ones. I did this in part because I'd had jobs where I coasted, and I found them unfulfilling and was unhappy. This decision path has worked out Poorly. It's cost me a lot, and I haven't accomplished anything I set out to. I am probably going to end up jumping to the safer path I was offered initially, which would seem to make the months of distress completely wasted, and thus the choice wrong. And yet, I don't feel it was. I am proud of myself for trying, and I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd taken the safe path.

Why not?

Some of it, which I figured out right this second, is that I would have been doing it out of fear, and facing down fears is a huge good. So good for me on that. But another driving factor was the belief that I need to grow, and I think that's tied in to capitalist/protestant notions of need to grow. I don't *need* more money. There are more toys to buy, but the additional happiness purchased would be low to non-existent. There are doctors appointments and personal trainers and specialty prepared foods to buy for my health, and those are expensive, but there's no point incurring the health costs of a more stressful job in order to pay for them. There's security, and knowing how long I could last without a job, but again there's no point being miserable now to buy myself out of misery later. So really what we're seeing is my inability to accept not being the best, or at least doing my best, at everything, ever. That's an exhausting way to live

Profile

pktechgirlbackup: (Default)
pktechgirlbackup

May 2014

S M T W T F S
    123
45 678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 04:42 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios