I look around and see work that needs doing all the time. Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.
What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs... it's a world where work is not focused on satisfying our needs but rather focused on maximizing profit. As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs, we'll never have enough jobs to get the work done.
Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagement by the government. Trillions in debt, for what?
Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's better to vote for people who vibe with you, than people who can provide essential services.
You are assuming that the obsession with maximizing profit is limited to private industry, where the post you are replying to makes no such assumption.
I agree that the government ought to work for the public good, and not doing so is mismanagement and corruption. But following the logic of the parent poster, the postulate would be that the mismatch between what the government ought to do and what it does is an outgrowth of a society that values maximizing profit over satisfying needs. Which I find hard to deny if we are a bit flexible with the question "whose profit is maximized". This is just a different way to arrive at the word corruption, but it provides a frame for possible societal causes for that widespread corruption
The way greed applies to the public purse is mediated by zero cost accounting wherein a government agency is compelled to spend all of their year's allocation without completing their work so that they can justify getting more in the next budget cycle.
In the US, the Republican party for the last 40 years has had a policy of starve the beast. They actively choose policies that provide worse services/break the governments ability to provide services/pile on unsustainable debt so that they can make the very same argument you are. Government is broken (yes, because Republicans have chosen to intentionally break it for 40 years. It is hard for a country to function when half of politics is intent on making the country worse in order to reach their political agenda).
The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services.
Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time):
1) Cut taxes
2) Point out the resulting deficit, say we're spending
too much, and cut services
3) Repeat
Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporations pay no tax. The US has cut IRS enforcement even though it pays for itself many, many times over. The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary), and because their taxes are cut over and over and they have endless loopholes - e.g., trust funds!
> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)...
A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want.
Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. Compare that to spending wealth on luxuries, a money sink that also creates a job market and grows the economy (people have to make the luxuries). The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.
I vaguely remember Adam Smith talking about directing the vanity of the rich towards spending great amounts of money on proper objects in exchange for recognition. 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M
> Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market.
You forgot the most important part. Let me add it for you: "Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment..., while creating a job market, [and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole]."
> The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.
These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits. You cannot eat a stock certificate, nor can you use it to heal an infection, nor can you ask it to repair your refrigerator. To receive a tangible benefit such as these, you must consume a good or service. And what is the economy but a machine that produces the goods and services that the people within it consume? Therefore, it is the mix of goods and services consumed (which equals that produced) that determines how society benefits. And, as you've already admitted, a low capital gains tax incentivizes the wealthy to buy paper assets instead of luxuries for themselves. But luxuries are real goods and services, aren't they? In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
>[and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole].
I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel this out, muddying the connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. For example, we needed cap-and-trade to internalize the costs of acid rain back onto power plants.
>These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits.
I think my rhetorical bait worked: you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)? Adam Smith argues to take that vanity and drive it towards public recognition. For example, many universities put the names of rich donors on the opulent buildings they donate to build. That's good! (My college's music building was amazing!)
>In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game? Money supply is a zero-sum game (I think), and I want money sinks to spread the money. We want them to spend their stored money to generate more tangible wealth for all. Luxury goods often push the limits to what can be done, advancing technology and generating wealth while also depleting their money stores. But while investments and venture capital might also advance technology and generate wealth, they continue to concentrate the money supply to the rich. Not good!
> I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel [general societal benefits] out.
While I agree that the factors you cited are drags on the economy, I think historical evidence suggests strongly that they do not cancel out net benefit to society in general. The fact that poor people today benefit from refrigeration, air conditioning, electronic computers, vaccinations, safe anesthesia, cancer drugs, dialysis, HDTVs, cell phones, and a host of other things that the wealthiest people of yesteryear could not have purchased with all their wealth, suggests that the net trend of the economy has been to produce benefits for all of society, including regular people.
> you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)?
No, that is the opposite of my original claim. My claim, put simply, is that a low capital gains tax shifts the economy's output away from luxuries and toward meeting the needs of regular people.
> I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game?
But resource allocation is a zero-sum game. In any given year, there are only so many productively employable atoms and human hours. If less of those resources are being used to produce luxuries for wealthy people, they can be employed to produce goods and services for regular people.
Very interesting perspective. Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy (I would need to prove this, and in recent years the distribution of wealth has increased towards the wealthy), then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
This might not result in problems, as historically the increases in resource production have increased regular people's resource allocation in absolute terms, but I see no necessity in this trend. I might argue that the poor can lose resource allocation in the zero-sum game, but I'd need to prove that (something like, inflation hurts poor people more than the rich? incomplete thoughts). I could also argue that currents trends place financial assets (intangible) above production assets (tangible), slowing the benefit to regular people.
I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.
First, thanks for continuing this interesting conversation!
> Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
Actually, this line of reasoning is tangential to the thrust of my argument. Let’s get to it now:
> If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, …
Okay, here’s what I think you’re missing. Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does! Only by spending money do you get to consume goods and services. Therefore, by getting wealthy people not to spend but to invest almost all of their wealth, we get them to give up their claim on where today’s resources are allocated. They control wealth but not resource allocations.
> … and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy, …
I believe that this claim is more or less true.
> … then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
But this claim does not follow. Wealthy people gain a greater share of the wealth allocation next year, but they do not spend that wealth, nor the new wealth they gain each year. They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest. Thus, most of this “extra” wealth that wealthy people gain is invested, with resource allocations from that wealth to be determined by spending across the population in general, not by the wealthy who invested it.
> I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.
Let’s say that the wealthiest 1% of people control half of all wealth. If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people. For a very long time, the remaining 99% of people, especially the lower 80%, would find it very hard to purchase goods and services, for their spending would be dwarfed. Resource production would increase, but I doubt it would be “just fine.” Factories producing mega-yachts, doctors providing exotic cosmetic surgeries, and master chefs preparing one-of-a-kind meals with luxury ingredients such as hand-massaged beef fed grasses from the richest soils on Earth… These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.
By getting those wealthy people to invest their wealth instead, we get them to give up their ability to dictate where today’s resources go. In exchange, they (as a group) get the promise of earning more wealth tomorrow from their investments.
I agree, however, that concentration of wealth is a problem for society. When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good. But a low tax rate on capital gains is only one contributing factor to the concentration-of-wealth problem.
>thanks for continuing this interesting conversation!
Cheers!
>Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does!
Very good point. Investors have some say as to where the money goes, but you're right. Often said that the economy runs on debt.
>They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest.
Well said. I suppose their wealth only represents a potential for resource allocation.
>If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people.
Under most theories of value, this extreme demand and labor would cause the price of such luxury goods and services to skyrocket! The money would quickly distribute to the hands of those who provided such goods. Then the masses can spend the money.
I now see our discussion as a classic debate of supply-side vs demand-side economics. I'll steal "the unity of means and ends" from the anarchists for this: I fully believe that the masses must have the resource allocation potential in order to achieve greater wealth for all. That exists in a positive feedback loop with businesses, increasing technology and production, and increasing the general standard of living. But, investing gives the resource allocation power to the businesses. With enough wealth and power, large businesses can keep the investment cycle flowing between businesses and owners, underpaying the workers and buying out competitors. At the most extreme result, a vertically closed system where the workers must meet the needs of the business (company towns).
>These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.
So many goods start out as expensive luxury goods. Refrigeration, commercial airlines, air conditioning, computers, HDTVs, cell phones...
>When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good.
Then they morph government policy towards further enriching themselves, hurting the masses in the process. Very bad!
Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
> Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
I wouldn't advocate for any particular tax rate for capital gains without it being part of comprehensive fiscal and government reform. The point I was trying to get across in my original comment was that, when people talk about raising the capital gains tax because they think it's an obvious way to tax the rich without affecting working people and that the only reason we're not already doing it is because the rich have rigged the system, the reality is way more complicated. There are no easy fixes. Changing the capital gains tax substantially (outside of more widespread reforms) is likely to have unwanted consequences. And even with widespread reforms, we're likely to suffer unwanted consequences.
I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy.
(I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.)
I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false.
Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
> Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
> Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments..., then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
That if is doing a lot of lifting. What percentage of investments do you believe satisfy that if condition? If that percentage is p, then do you agree that it's generally beneficial for society, for approximately 100% − p percent of the time, when wealthy people decide to invest in the economy instead of spend on themselves?
(Further, even when companies downsize, don't they release their resources, such as people and equipment, back to the market? And doesn't the evidence of economic history suggest that, on the whole, the market tends to take up resources, including those released from downsizing companies, and use them produce goods and services that benefit both the owning class and the working class? For example, for most of history, even the wealthiest of the owning class lacked electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, radio, television, electronic computers, the internet, cell phones, HDTVs, antibiotics, vaccines, generic drugs, medical imaging, DNA testing, video conferences with health care professionals, and so on. Today, don't even working people benefit from these things? So, even when your if condition holds, the claimed consequence, that such investments "either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class" seems hard to believe.)
More than two third of all public investments are on the secondary market, and this do not benefit investments or the 'real' economy. It's this beneficial to society at best 33% of the time (I'm counting MIC in 'benefic for society' only for the sake of the argument to be clear).
While a worker is beneficial to society 100% of the time.
If that's what you think is happening – tests and grades – when people come to a site whose purpose is to foster thoughtful and substantive discussions, and then on that site they share ideas and invite criticism of them, you might consider whether you're missing something.
I'm curious. What specifically about my comment made you believe it was a test and that I would be assigning grades to responses, as opposed to an idea for which I invited criticism?
Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines.
I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.
Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low.
BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple.
Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs.
With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses.
And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data.
> With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency.
But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes.
On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.
"On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste."
Nope, I didn't express a conviction that this is a linear function from 0 to 100. My statement should rather read as "If, at current, the American public sector is unable to provide good roads and sidewalks while redistributing 40 per cent of the domestic GDP, I find it hard to believe that the situation would improve much if it redistributed 45 per cent instead."
Good roads and sidewalks aren't that expensive. The Romans and the Incas could maintain them with a more primitive economy, and a well-run modern city should have no old potholes anywhere.
How many of those unemployed people want to get a job filling potholes, or mowing the lawn at the park? How many are qualified to do anything about pollution in whatever specific sense you mean? What job does your average unemployed person get to "fight housing shortages" or whatever you're trying to say?
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
Any system that isn't designed from the outside? Any system that's goal is not simply maximizing employment? Surely you can imagine a scenario with two civilizations, one has 99% employment, one has 80% employment, but the people in the 99% employed society are, on average, worse off?
> As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs
Most people would not say the number of potholes they encounter or the level of park maintenance is so poor that their needs aren't being met.
I haven't done the math, but my guess is that a pothole might do hundreds of dollars worth of damage over its lifetime, maybe thousands. If society was willing to pay 1/10th of that sum per pothole to anyone willing to fill it, there'd be a lot more applicants. (Though it might lead to people making potholes on purpose, so the payment needs to depend on road health over time, not number of potholes filled.)
Well your last sentence shows exactly why it wouldn't work and so you're not really talking about "1/10th of that sum per pothole" you're talking about, I don't even know - paying random people random sums of money at arbitrary times based on overall road health?
A map, posted on the municipal or county website. You, a private citizen, bid to fill a hole. The city accepts. You upload a geostamped 'Before' picture. You are given a time window to fill the hole (often at night). You fill the hole. Upload 'After' pictures. Get paid in the next cycle.
You take a sledge hammer to the street a block over. Repeat. Profit.
You do a bad job filling the hole. Some hits it and their car breaks. They sue you and the city. The city attorneys successfully push the blame onto you since you're a contractor. You have no liability insurance because you're not a professional because that's the whole point of this thing, right? You're on the hook for the car, a few grand for a medical check-up, and a spurious mental anguish claim. You declare bankruptcy and on the way back from your last visit with your attorney, you hit another pothole and your car breaks. Full circle.
Yeah, you will fill the potholes to the limit of your abilities and the society provides for your needs. This had been tried many times and does not work because the balance of abilities and needs comes out unbounded: even if your abilities to fill potholes were greater than your needs initially, having all needs satisfied generates more needs and diminishes the ability to work. Even sending someone to poke you with a bayonet in order to have more abilities won't work because, again, the dude with the bayonet is the subject to the same abilities/needs disbalance. So it ends up with very little needs satisfied, a lot of bayonet poking and tons of waste since the ability/need balance is calculated by vibes instead of market.
I wonder how much of roads today being worse are because we have added a large amount of buried services under roadways? There are streets in my town that are a patched up messed. Thinking about it, all of those streets/the worst streets in town are ones without overhead lines.
What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
a system that doesn't provide enough education for its citizens. this is why education needs to be made available to everyone, and not just those who can afford it. especially, if you get education for free you also won't need to get a high paying job to pay off your debts.
Because governments and councils waste money on paying private contractors do do stupid bullshit like installing statues or gardens or other vanity crap meanwhile grass areas are overgrown and the roads are filled with potholes.
The general populace aka the voters are too apathetic and absorbed in their little consumer lives and tribally motivated political quibbles to know or care that so much tax money is wasted.
Man, we make enough food for everyone, but throw away tons because poor people can’t pay for it. Our economy is based on scarcity. It seems to create scarcity even when there is none.
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
A system where citizens complain about potholes but don't want to chip in to pay people to fix them - that is, they won't pay the taxes necessary. I've seen some very clean, well-financed, high-tax places in the world.
That's just one part of this issue but it's a necesssary one. And before you say, 'government just wastes money', I say, 'that's just an meaningless talking point against chipping in.' First, everyone and every organization wastes money; larger organizations have both much more power to do things but more inefficiencies, unavoidably - that applies to large software companies too. Government inefficiency can be dealt with if we want to do it; if you don't pay attention and don't vote, others will be very happy to do without you.
> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.
Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.
This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.
This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.
And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?
I have stopped. I get chastised constantly for it. Leftist candidates are rare, most mainline dems are center right. I catch so much flak from vote blue no matter who types (who then go out and don't vote for Mamdani).
If candidates want my vote, they can offer literally anything as a concession. I'm not holding some purity standard.
> You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.
You doing think there are other needs people have? Social needs, where years of customer service experience would be desirable? Or financial advice? Potholes are a stand in. Think bigger.
It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
> It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
If only there were a system to align incentives toward a common good under the assumption that everyone is corrupt and will therefore seek to maximize their own interests....
What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy? No one's making any money from that. But it causes damages to everyone.
You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
> What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy?
Well, in a purely capitalist economy, the answer would be property rights, competition, and liability. For example, a road would be owned by someone, and you could sue that someone for damages if the road damaged your car. A road owner could discharge liability risk by purchacing insurance, and insurance underwriters could require some minimum standard of maintenance from owners in exchange.
> You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
The whole point of the article that spawned these discussions is that society has already delegated the responsibility for fixing potholes to the government, and the government is doing a crappy enough job of fixing potholes that "art activists" need to make potholes into public art projects to get the government to actually do its job.
Some libertarians moved in the small town of Grafton, NH [0], with the explicit goal of turning it into a "Free Town".
> This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and the Grafton Police Department being reduced to one officer (the police chief), who said he was unable to answer calls for service as the town had no money to repair the one police vehicle left. Other issues were inconsistent basic public services, such as trash collection.
Most roads are unprofitable individually, but still beneficial to the greater economy. It's very unrealistic to expect private individuals to build and maintain them. And the logistics of paying for every street one drives one, and the profiteering this enables sounds hellish.
There was a time when the government was able to build and fix stuff. We should probably get to fixing that, by kicking out the parasitic contracters, actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages, taxing the ever-increasing wealth of the top 1%, etc. Not by privatizing roads, which is a nonsensical idea that failed miserably anytime it was tried.
The golden age of America (and the West) happened when redistributive taxation was maximal and the government had the means and the will to improve citizens life. We've been privatizing stuff ever since the 1980s with arguably disastrous results. It's time we came back to first base.
You can be a libertarian without being a capitalist, and you can be a capitalist without being a libertarian, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with a [completely accurate] libertarian dig when the original point was that if the system was more capitalist, it would get fixed faster and better.
> actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages
I think most people would be open to increasing cash government salaries if the rest of the job also matched the broader economy - at-will employment, no public sector unions, etc. You trade some of your cash compensation in the government for the cushy benefits, sub-40 hour work week and lots of time off, and the near impossibility of being fired especially once you've been there for a few decades.
The golden age of the West happened due to a war-time manufacturing boom that would put the industrial revolution to shame. If you're making a ton of money and your marginal tax rate is 90%, what incentive do you have to work another ten hours a week or open another factor or release a new product if you're only keeping 10% of what you earn?
Or we’ve invested far too much money in building a road network and the economic value from it either isn’t captured to sustain it OR it’s insufficient to cover costs and it’s being subsidized. Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine. Pretending like capitalism is the thing that creates economic tradeoffs is incorrect and it’s just scapegoating capitalism - of course every economic system will have problems, but potholes are not uniquely a capitalism problem but more a problem of maintenance after huge capital investments for building infrastructure - maintenance is always harder and a debt that previous generations saddled us by building said infrastructure and that’s true whatever economic model you follow. China will have a similar problem in ~100-200 years as the cost to maintain all the roads, power plants, and buildings start to become a reality.
It's funny how the "hard choices" fingerwagging never comes out to scold the parts of the economy where rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, and it's such a dogmatic article of faith that the gross excess over there couldn't possibly have anything to do with the deprivation over here.
Yep. Move all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and whoops! The well ran dry! Better cut social programs, nothing else to be done, no sir!
Last I knew China's new train system wasn't generating the income needed to pay down the construction debt. It's going to be interesting to watch how things play out long term.
I mean, I don't disagree with you. But potholes are a stand in for infrastructure repair. I bike everywhere, my bike lanes and paths have holes. Water systems still dump lead, electricity and broadband networks aren't resilient. Potholes are just visible failures we can just to analogize.
Profit isn't exactly the problem here. We could pay people to fix various kinds of infrastructure, they could make big profits, that would be great - if only they existed and had figured out their business plans.
If they have profit, we should be splitting that money towards addressing other needs. Maybe some profit is fine for ensuring sustainability or whatever, but like, potholes aren't the only need.
If money was duct tape, that would follow. I think of it as like gratitude (when paid) and influence (when gained). So we'd be grateful to the road-menders, or broadband-stabilizers, and they could accrue a big pile of influence. What will they do with it? Perhaps they want something stupid and pointless, like building a pyramid.
If we're not going to allow that, there's no need for money at all. We'd vote on what needs doing, and it would always be something like mending roads, and we'd all have to knuckle down and do it, through a conscription-like system, on pain of pain. It would never be fixing the broadband, though, because broadband is a crazy imaginative project, like building a pyramid, so there wouldn't be any.
> Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine.
Have you ever driven on a cobblestone street? There are a few in the city where I grew up and it's pretty obvious why we don't build that way anymore. It's like driving on an uneven dirt road, you're lucky to get above 25MPH consistently lest you want to risk damaging your car.
My point is that classifying it as a “need” is strange because it’s in no way the same as eating or drinking or love. It’s useful for modern society but “need” feels wrong.
Commerce drives the economy, and commerce needs roads. Even ancient Rome understood this. Once Rome could no longer protect the roads and travel ranges became shorter the economy declined much more quickly.
If society can't afford roads and therefor can no longer afford to conduct commerce, society can't afford to exist.
My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day.
Spraypainting the pothole distorts the triage process and makes a pothole jump the queue, putting it ahead of more severe or older issues than it otherwise would have been.
It might not be zero sum, if it causes the agency to act with more haste to avoid embarrassment, but it seems like it could be close? Plus it probably takes more resources to clean up the spraypaint afterwards.
Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around with abundant materials and machinery neglecting their duties, so I guess I just have some questions about what the real cost of this tactic is. What's giving.
If we're making stuff up with no basis, I'll go with it distorts the process by bringing attention to and prioritising the potholes that bother people enough to make the effort of painting them. But really I think most municipalities are not as good at planning as you give them credit for.
Although if a big pothole remains for several years amid many complaints, it's reasonable to think there's no such list. Or there is a list, but it's so long that it might as well not exist.
> Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around
Assuming that's true, the most likely explanation is that they are working on Big Projects. Pothole maintenance is (probably) behind these projects, even though it can be done without affecting their timeline.
"Projects" (whatever that means to your municipality) are almost always contracted out. The maintenance crews maintain. Sometimes they do a little pre/post work for the big projects but mostly they maintain stuff. It's not like they're being pulled off a bridge replacement to fill a pothole.
> My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day.
I'm sure it depends on the city. I reported several large potholes in my city via an online form, and was disappointed to see them unrepaired for several months. Then one day I came and found that they'd repaved the whole street for 50m.
Yep, this kind of stuff can be extremely complicated because there are a lot of layers.
Potholes have different causes. For example if there is a slow water leak that's compromised the road sub base that needs to get fixed first or you're just throwing money in a hole.
I agree about the distortion, and it omits what is typically the greatest distortion: Wealth and power. I've been on bumpy, deteriorating roads in poor neighborhoods that suddenly turned into smooth, paved roads in wealthy neighborhoods.
Also, the person of a certain class, ethnicity and age who spraypaints is called an 'artivist'. For someone else it would be called graffiti and they might be arrested for vandalism.
Citizens should have a say in how municipalities order work. If they're not given that say through less-disruptive means, then they can choose to harmlessly tag places where maintenance is failing.
Why are we excusing civic inaction because it might cause an unexpected schedule change for road crews? Why am I supposed to be so full of concern for the ease of their schedule that I'm ok with broken streets?
This is just a dressed up way of saying "I don't care how the road crews work or who else they might be helping, I want them working on the problem I care about". You don't know if the crews are working on bigger problems (or bigger potholes), or they're working in a neighborhood you don't drive through and thus don't care about...if they aren't patching up your annoyance right now, then screw 'em, they suck at their job.
I've gone to our municipal planning meetings for these types of things, and there is always at least one person there with this sense of entitlement. They want to talk about "excusing civic inaction" or similar just like you, but when shown "this is what the crews are working on", the retort is "yeah, but that's not the pothole on my street" (with the usually unsaid "...so why should I give a phuk about those people").
These people usually show up at other meetings to complain about having to pay taxes to pay for those repairs. But that's another little joy of local politics...
Just so we’re clear, “screw them” in this case means spray painting holes in the road. Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here.
I find it very hard to fault that person coming to the meeting wanting their street fixed early. What real sin are they committing except noticing that there’s a piece of infrastructure that they depend on that’s messed up? The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.
If I believed that the city schedule was optimal in every way, I could be convinced that nothing should change as a result of that person‘s complaints, but I don’t believe that. And even if I did, that person is providing a valuable service in the case that the city made a mistake somewhere. They do not know that the schedule is optimal (if it even is). They know their street is messed up.
Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here.
I never said a single word about painting the pothole; I think it's a clever hack. I should have tried that when we were negotiating with the city about scheduling our much needed street repaving. But since you clearly assume whatever your opinion is is sacrosanct, I suppose it's not surprising you would assume I agree you are unquestioningly correct.
The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.
Yes, it does, particularly if it is. At least for the adults in the room. Resources are finite. They have to be allocated. They have to be paid for. No, that's never "optimal" for everyone, especially for people for whom 'optimal == 'what I want, done immediately, even at the expense of other citizens'.
I think the idea that the city is already allocating resources optimally is pretty historically contingent, to put things mildly. Even in cases where it is, it's making *choices* about what to allocate and where and citizens are allowed to think those choices are wrong. In fact, well functioning cities use that information to better understand where those choices are wrong.
If you want to be mad at someone who is annoying at city meetings because they can't see your picture that's fine, but don't conflate that with adulthood. It's certainly not the only bigger picture to have.
After the second time someone obviously doesn't even think about what I wrote and continues to blather on with the same irrelvancy they're committed to hammering on, there's not much point to continue. Have fun with your FYIGM world view, you're clearly committed.
I appreciate the pushback, but I wasn't actually saying people shouldn't do this. If a neighbourhood is being neglected because of some incentive structure they're powerless to affect, then yeah, take some action.
I'm just compulsive in pointing out trade-offs, and this blog post (understandably) doesn't have an interview with the civil servant on the other side presenting their perspective, so I wanted to raise the question here in case someone knew how it worked.
Alright, it's worth a try. I'll do it at night in a balaclava though, because I live in the USA and no matter whether it's local, state, or federal government they'd rather spend $100k prosecuting this than $1k fixing the hole.
Ah, we did it in plan sight, but I guess in the US is different. I head about people arrested while truing to fix the pothole themselves, but not for painting it, yet.
Thankfully the case was taken to the Hamilton County Municipal Court, which I imagine was a much fairer trail than he would've received at Lockland's Mayor Court. He was cleared of all charges[0].
Sadly, @scrumper is 100% correct! In many, many areas and gov-levels of the U.S., the incentives have become so perverse that a municipality will spend 10x or 100x to prosecute people instead of spending 1x to fix things in the first place.
Some areas are even worse, because they'll use the event (e.g. "we have rampant crime now that criminals are spray-painting and ruining our potholes!")...as an excuse to then drastically increase funding for law enforcement agencies! Its bonkers and sad all around!
I don't know if it will help fixing it, but it might help drivers avoid them more easily if they're painted in bright colors, which still sounds like a plus. Nobody wants to drive into a massive pothole at full speed unaware or try to dangerously dodge at the last moment.
In 1961, Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, read a newspaper story about two Portuguese students who went to jail for making a toast to freedom. He wrote letters to the Portuguese government and got others to do so as well, and it got media attention, and they were freed.
That was the start of Amnesty International, which to this day, simply asks people to write a letter when they see an injustice. The spray painting potholes story has the same theme: "Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."
I still want an iPhone app that uses the accelerometers to "geotag" bumps in the road.
You'd think a low-pass filter of a collective database of this data would quickly draw attention to the legit "bumps in the road"…
And you would think a city municipality could use this data (within a geofence, sorted by "popularity"
and Newtons) to determine which potholes to tackle.
That's a good idea. Seriously. I think with a decent LLM tool you could get a POC going pretty quickly, and Code for America [0] is a pretty good resource for interfacing with governments on projects like that.
I could knock it out—it's adoption that is the issue. It's only useful at scale.
As someone else pointed out, Waymo (or Waze, or Google Maps, or Apple Maps) ought to adopt this as an opt-in feature. You would get rich pot-hole data fast.
> A pothole on a road is a pothole on a road. But a pothole sprayed bright, photographed, shared, and laughed at, is something else. It is a small proof that the citizen and the system are not as far apart as we like to think.
Next to where I live there is a sign to caution drivers because of kids playing. The sign was very worn to the point that it’s just white from the distance of a driver. So I repainted it with an ink pen, making the kid’s head into a balloon. It draws a lot of attention now. I think the speed bumps in the road probably do more for the safety, but the sign does more for laughs.
> A few neighbours who told us “nothing will change” went quiet. A few said “OK, but this was a fluke.”
Are they wrong? This is the equivalent of getting customer support from an otherwise unreachable tech company because your story went viral. It's the exception that proves the rule, not the status quo.
Undeniably it's a good reminder of the power of publicity for accountability, but at some point the news media won't be interested in airing another "neighbors taking action" human interest story.
It's interesting to see lack of tolerance towards potholes - the government has a lot of other issues to work on (healthcare, education, pollution) yet potholes, being a problem we are affected by daily seem more important to people than the "remote" problems caused by underfunding in other areas.
Even if this trick works, would it be ethical, knowing it draws money away from other areas? What would be the road SLO we would agree be acceptable?
Motorcyclists in Romania had a campaign a few years ago. They spray-painted a body outline near potholes, as if they were crime scenes / fatal accident sites.
Here in Zurich there's a city office where you can report graffiti that's on city property and they eventually will fix it but they have a big backlog. I learned though that if it's obscene graffiti they move it to the top of the list - there was a typical FCZ (football club Zurich) on a wall near where I live for months then one night someone spray-painted a big penis over it and the graffiti was fixed in just a couple of days later...
This is what the Deutsche Bahn does on their train platforms as well. I thought it was one cohort that marks the damage and then comes another and fixes them. But true to Deutsche Bahn they just leave it as that. Now I understand that this can be considered fixing it.
I find that potholes in my area generally get fixed, but it may take a while for them to get around to it. Furthermore, if it's a major divot on an interstate, you have to do more than just pothole repair: you have to scrape it down and completely re-pave the entire area.
One thing I've noticed in my travels is that it's rather difficult to have a pothole on a train track.
I look around and see work that needs doing all the time. Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.
What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs... it's a world where work is not focused on satisfying our needs but rather focused on maximizing profit. As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs, we'll never have enough jobs to get the work done.
Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
> Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's more efficient to prioritize capital than care.
How though. Roads are a public good and fixing them should come from the governments pocket. How can you say the problem is private industry, when the government is doing such a good job collecting our tax money. You should be asking where is that money going. And then you will see its because of mismanagement by the government. Trillions in debt, for what?
Potholes are a visible manifestation of society saying it's better to vote for people who vibe with you, than people who can provide essential services.
You are assuming that the obsession with maximizing profit is limited to private industry, where the post you are replying to makes no such assumption.
I agree that the government ought to work for the public good, and not doing so is mismanagement and corruption. But following the logic of the parent poster, the postulate would be that the mismatch between what the government ought to do and what it does is an outgrowth of a society that values maximizing profit over satisfying needs. Which I find hard to deny if we are a bit flexible with the question "whose profit is maximized". This is just a different way to arrive at the word corruption, but it provides a frame for possible societal causes for that widespread corruption
The way greed applies to the public purse is mediated by zero cost accounting wherein a government agency is compelled to spend all of their year's allocation without completing their work so that they can justify getting more in the next budget cycle.
>Trillions in debt, for what?
In the US, the Republican party for the last 40 years has had a policy of starve the beast. They actively choose policies that provide worse services/break the governments ability to provide services/pile on unsustainable debt so that they can make the very same argument you are. Government is broken (yes, because Republicans have chosen to intentionally break it for 40 years. It is hard for a country to function when half of politics is intent on making the country worse in order to reach their political agenda).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
The tax rates in the US are low; that's why there is so much debt and so few services.
Anti-tax groups have long followed the 'Starve the Beast' strategy (and their opponents are completely incompetent and fall for it every time):
Now we're at point 2. It's not spending, it's lack of revenue. Some large corporations pay no tax. The US has cut IRS enforcement even though it pays for itself many, many times over. The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary), and because their taxes are cut over and over and they have endless loopholes - e.g., trust funds!> The wealthiest people pay a much lower tax rate because their typical form of income (capital gains) is taxed at a much lower rate than other people's (salary)...
A different way to think about this would be to say that a lower tax rate for capital gains is a trick (incentive) to get the wealthiest people to invest their wealth in the market, which provides capital for people trying to grow the economy and provide jobs, rather than spend their wealth on luxuries for themselves. In this way, we have an economy focused more on the needs and wants of regular people, and less on producing what wealthy people want.
Can you spot a flaw in that line of reasoning?
Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market. Compare that to spending wealth on luxuries, a money sink that also creates a job market and grows the economy (people have to make the luxuries). The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.
I vaguely remember Adam Smith talking about directing the vanity of the rich towards spending great amounts of money on proper objects in exchange for recognition. 4:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJRhn53X2M
> Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment and venture capital, so the rich can grow their wealth faster than the poor, while creating a job market.
You forgot the most important part. Let me add it for you: "Low capital gains tax incentivizes investment..., while creating a job market, [and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole]."
> The former creates more liquid assets (stock) with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. The latter creates more solid assets with no clear connection towards meeting the needs of regular people.
These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits. You cannot eat a stock certificate, nor can you use it to heal an infection, nor can you ask it to repair your refrigerator. To receive a tangible benefit such as these, you must consume a good or service. And what is the economy but a machine that produces the goods and services that the people within it consume? Therefore, it is the mix of goods and services consumed (which equals that produced) that determines how society benefits. And, as you've already admitted, a low capital gains tax incentivizes the wealthy to buy paper assets instead of luxuries for themselves. But luxuries are real goods and services, aren't they? In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
>[and, more importantly, providing goods and services that are beneficial to society as a whole].
I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel this out, muddying the connection towards meeting the needs of regular people. For example, we needed cap-and-trade to internalize the costs of acid rain back onto power plants.
>These claims are demonstrably false. Paper assets provide no tangible benefits.
I think my rhetorical bait worked: you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)? Adam Smith argues to take that vanity and drive it towards public recognition. For example, many universities put the names of rich donors on the opulent buildings they donate to build. That's good! (My college's music building was amazing!)
>In other words, doesn't that policy incentivize wealthy people to consume less and, therefore, claim a reduced share of economic benefits? Consequently, doesn't an increased share of economic benefits go to "regular people"?
I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game? Money supply is a zero-sum game (I think), and I want money sinks to spread the money. We want them to spend their stored money to generate more tangible wealth for all. Luxury goods often push the limits to what can be done, advancing technology and generating wealth while also depleting their money stores. But while investments and venture capital might also advance technology and generate wealth, they continue to concentrate the money supply to the rich. Not good!
> I think enshittification, cost externalization, and rent-seeking behavior cancel [general societal benefits] out.
While I agree that the factors you cited are drags on the economy, I think historical evidence suggests strongly that they do not cancel out net benefit to society in general. The fact that poor people today benefit from refrigeration, air conditioning, electronic computers, vaccinations, safe anesthesia, cancer drugs, dialysis, HDTVs, cell phones, and a host of other things that the wealthiest people of yesteryear could not have purchased with all their wealth, suggests that the net trend of the economy has been to produce benefits for all of society, including regular people.
> you seem to agree with incentivizing luxury spending on real goods and services (instead of incentivizing capital gains)?
No, that is the opposite of my original claim. My claim, put simply, is that a low capital gains tax shifts the economy's output away from luxuries and toward meeting the needs of regular people.
> I thought trade doesn't make a zero-sum game?
But resource allocation is a zero-sum game. In any given year, there are only so many productively employable atoms and human hours. If less of those resources are being used to produce luxuries for wealthy people, they can be employed to produce goods and services for regular people.
Very interesting perspective. Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy (I would need to prove this, and in recent years the distribution of wealth has increased towards the wealthy), then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
This might not result in problems, as historically the increases in resource production have increased regular people's resource allocation in absolute terms, but I see no necessity in this trend. I might argue that the poor can lose resource allocation in the zero-sum game, but I'd need to prove that (something like, inflation hurts poor people more than the rich? incomplete thoughts). I could also argue that currents trends place financial assets (intangible) above production assets (tangible), slowing the benefit to regular people.
I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.
First, thanks for continuing this interesting conversation!
> Let me try and repeat it back. Resource allocation is a zero-sum game within any given year, resource production increases yearly as technology increases, technology increases more as capital increases, so a low capital gains tax will increase resource production more than a high capital gains tax.
Actually, this line of reasoning is tangential to the thrust of my argument. Let’s get to it now:
> If I got that right, here's my best shot at a contradiction. If resource allocation is a zero-sum game, money (liquid assets) determines resource allocation, …
Okay, here’s what I think you’re missing. Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does! Only by spending money do you get to consume goods and services. Therefore, by getting wealthy people not to spend but to invest almost all of their wealth, we get them to give up their claim on where today’s resources are allocated. They control wealth but not resource allocations.
> … and low capital gains tax further concentrates money to the wealthy, …
I believe that this claim is more or less true.
> … then the wealthy gain a greater share of resource allocation next year.
But this claim does not follow. Wealthy people gain a greater share of the wealth allocation next year, but they do not spend that wealth, nor the new wealth they gain each year. They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest. Thus, most of this “extra” wealth that wealthy people gain is invested, with resource allocations from that wealth to be determined by spending across the population in general, not by the wealthy who invested it.
> I claim that if the wealthy were to put their money in luxuries (things that don't give capital gains), they would control more allocation in a given year, but then they would decrease their share of resource allocation the next year. I also claim that resource production would increase just fine, as technology initially benefiting luxury production expands toward general production.
Let’s say that the wealthiest 1% of people control half of all wealth. If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people. For a very long time, the remaining 99% of people, especially the lower 80%, would find it very hard to purchase goods and services, for their spending would be dwarfed. Resource production would increase, but I doubt it would be “just fine.” Factories producing mega-yachts, doctors providing exotic cosmetic surgeries, and master chefs preparing one-of-a-kind meals with luxury ingredients such as hand-massaged beef fed grasses from the richest soils on Earth… These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.
By getting those wealthy people to invest their wealth instead, we get them to give up their ability to dictate where today’s resources go. In exchange, they (as a group) get the promise of earning more wealth tomorrow from their investments.
I agree, however, that concentration of wealth is a problem for society. When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good. But a low tax rate on capital gains is only one contributing factor to the concentration-of-wealth problem.
>thanks for continuing this interesting conversation!
Cheers!
>Money does not determine resource allocation. But spending money does!
Very good point. Investors have some say as to where the money goes, but you're right. Often said that the economy runs on debt.
>They spend only a tiny fraction of it – and invest the rest.
Well said. I suppose their wealth only represents a potential for resource allocation.
>If we forced them to spend that wealth, much of the economy’s resources would be redirected to provide goods and services to the top 1% of people.
Under most theories of value, this extreme demand and labor would cause the price of such luxury goods and services to skyrocket! The money would quickly distribute to the hands of those who provided such goods. Then the masses can spend the money.
I now see our discussion as a classic debate of supply-side vs demand-side economics. I'll steal "the unity of means and ends" from the anarchists for this: I fully believe that the masses must have the resource allocation potential in order to achieve greater wealth for all. That exists in a positive feedback loop with businesses, increasing technology and production, and increasing the general standard of living. But, investing gives the resource allocation power to the businesses. With enough wealth and power, large businesses can keep the investment cycle flowing between businesses and owners, underpaying the workers and buying out competitors. At the most extreme result, a vertically closed system where the workers must meet the needs of the business (company towns).
>These are not easily adapted to produce things that regular people need.
So many goods start out as expensive luxury goods. Refrigeration, commercial airlines, air conditioning, computers, HDTVs, cell phones...
>When a small number of people can, in effect, buy the government with pocket change, that’s not good.
Then they morph government policy towards further enriching themselves, hurting the masses in the process. Very bad!
Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
> Would you advocate for a 0% capital gains tax? Or a capital gains tax-break? How would you calculate the ideal number? (I would place capital gains tax included in income tax.)
I wouldn't advocate for any particular tax rate for capital gains without it being part of comprehensive fiscal and government reform. The point I was trying to get across in my original comment was that, when people talk about raising the capital gains tax because they think it's an obvious way to tax the rich without affecting working people and that the only reason we're not already doing it is because the rich have rigged the system, the reality is way more complicated. There are no easy fixes. Changing the capital gains tax substantially (outside of more widespread reforms) is likely to have unwanted consequences. And even with widespread reforms, we're likely to suffer unwanted consequences.
Reality is way more complex than talking points.
Of course, proper systems analysis would really require modelling and simulation.
Thanks for chatting.
I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself) but my view is that it's the same old talking point: Help the wealthy, and the Nth order effects will benefit others. The only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy.
(I think that's a good way to analyse any policy - the 1st order effects are the ones you can count on; the Nth order effects are just BS that magically costs nothing, but gets others to go along - 'the people will pay for this stadium for my privately owned franchise (1st order) and it will bring business to the community (2nd order).' That's repeated over and over, and the 2nd order effect is well known to not happen, but it sometimes gets enough votes from those uneducated in the issue.)
I think in the 1980s the Reagan administration called it 'trickle-down economics', such an incredibly revealing name!
Okay, but you didn't refute the line of reasoning. You called it "the same old talking point" and then jumped to the conclusion that "the only thing these policies deliver on reliably is the 1st order effect - helping the wealthy." But you didn't show that your claim was true. Or that the claim you were responding to was false.
Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
> Can you offer a substantive argument that getting the wealthy to invest their wealth instead of spending it on themselves is a policy that benefits only the wealthy and makes life worse for everyone else?
Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments (share buyback is very often a good tell), then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
> Not gp, but if the investment is made in either a non-productive asset, or in the secondary market toi buy share in a company that is downsizing/stabilizing their investments..., then the wealth does not benefit society in general but either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class.
That if is doing a lot of lifting. What percentage of investments do you believe satisfy that if condition? If that percentage is p, then do you agree that it's generally beneficial for society, for approximately 100% − p percent of the time, when wealthy people decide to invest in the economy instead of spend on themselves?
(Further, even when companies downsize, don't they release their resources, such as people and equipment, back to the market? And doesn't the evidence of economic history suggest that, on the whole, the market tends to take up resources, including those released from downsizing companies, and use them produce goods and services that benefit both the owning class and the working class? For example, for most of history, even the wealthiest of the owning class lacked electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, radio, television, electronic computers, the internet, cell phones, HDTVs, antibiotics, vaccines, generic drugs, medical imaging, DNA testing, video conferences with health care professionals, and so on. Today, don't even working people benefit from these things? So, even when your if condition holds, the claimed consequence, that such investments "either inflate a bubble, or separate the owning class from the working class" seems hard to believe.)
More than two third of all public investments are on the secondary market, and this do not benefit investments or the 'real' economy. It's this beneficial to society at best 33% of the time (I'm counting MIC in 'benefic for society' only for the sake of the argument to be clear).
While a worker is beneficial to society 100% of the time.
You might have overlooked this part: "I'm not taking a test (feel free to answer yourself)".
I didn't ignore that part. I interpreted it as your way of saying that you intended to state your opinion without offering supporting argument.
You misinterpreted it: It meant I (and others) aren't here to take your tests nor are interested in your grades.
If that's what you think is happening – tests and grades – when people come to a site whose purpose is to foster thoughtful and substantive discussions, and then on that site they share ideas and invite criticism of them, you might consider whether you're missing something.
It was only your comment.
I'm curious. What specifically about my comment made you believe it was a test and that I would be assigning grades to responses, as opposed to an idea for which I invited criticism?
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False dichotomy. We should tax the lot of them until they are not wealthy any more.
Many years ago a US friend told me that the way to tell the true state of a nation's finances is to look at its infrastructure, because when money is tight that's the first thing that gets cut. Don't look at the imaginary numbers in the stock market, look at the roads, sidewalks, bridges, railway lines.
I was kinda shocked, when working in South Africa, to find that the roads and sidewalks there were often in much better shape than ones I'd seen in the US. And from the other side, the only place I've ever seen roads as patched and potholed as ones in US cities was in rural Russia.
Looking at the stats, the US public spending is about 40 per cent of the American GDP, which, though lower than most of the EU, is not really "low". 40 per cent of something as huge as the American economy is huge as well. Given that the US economy is a quarter of the global economy, US public spending is one tenth of the economic output of the entire mankind. That is not low.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/general-government-s...
BTW Swiss public spending is lower (32 per cent), and Swiss sidewalks and roads are uniformly nice. At the same time, Germany is at 48 per cent and it has a big problem with aging infrastructure, railways, bridges etc. Swiss rail authority regularly refuses delayed German trains at the border in order not to cause chaos in the reliable Swiss railway network. Given the 32 vs. 48 per cent of public spending, you would expect it to be the other way round, but it isn't. The mapping between the volume of public spending and quality of public services is not that simple.
Maybe the problem in the US is that too much money gets siphoned away by various legal or illegal means. Famously, whenever places like California or NYC try to build something like a new subway line or a new high-speed rail, their project budgets balloon into absolutely insane volumes, much higher than comparable projects in France, Italy or Japan, and the main reason is that various special interests need to be satisfied, from the construction unions to various NIMBYs.
With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
I appreciate the the public spending statistic, which adds a dose of reality to the discussion. At the same time, a few cherry-picked examples (Swiss and German railways) is meaningless. It's true the US spends a lot in absolute terms, but a huge economy with 340 million people has a lot of roads and other expenses.
And the US is inefficient at building some things (subways) and probably more efficient at others. Again, it's cherry picking unless we have broader data.
> With such a flawed model of public spending, higher taxes will only result in higher waste.
As I said in the GP, there is waste (inefficiency) in everyone and everything, and larger organizations unavoidably have more. The cherry-picked examples don't prove the US and every local goverment in it are somehow less efficient, but certainly there is inefficiency.
But the statement "higher taxes will only result in higher waste" is logically wrong: higher taxes (and assumed higher spending) will lead to more waste - unavoidable for anyone and any org - but also more productivity; you can't have one without the other. E.g., if 15% of every dollar is wasted then higher taxes increase both waste and output. The US does have roads, schools, healthcare, sewers, etc., and even some urban light rail, paid for by taxes. The money does produce things, and many of those things can only be accomplished with taxes.
On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste. That's probably not what you mean but that's what some anti-tax groups say and what they do - cut everything regardless of outcome, which is what has been done on a national level recently. The simplistic answers are dangerous and not useful.
"On the basis of what your comment, the US should cut all taxes because they are all waste."
Nope, I didn't express a conviction that this is a linear function from 0 to 100. My statement should rather read as "If, at current, the American public sector is unable to provide good roads and sidewalks while redistributing 40 per cent of the domestic GDP, I find it hard to believe that the situation would improve much if it redistributed 45 per cent instead."
Good roads and sidewalks aren't that expensive. The Romans and the Incas could maintain them with a more primitive economy, and a well-run modern city should have no old potholes anywhere.
How many of those unemployed people want to get a job filling potholes, or mowing the lawn at the park? How many are qualified to do anything about pollution in whatever specific sense you mean? What job does your average unemployed person get to "fight housing shortages" or whatever you're trying to say?
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
Any system that isn't designed from the outside? Any system that's goal is not simply maximizing employment? Surely you can imagine a scenario with two civilizations, one has 99% employment, one has 80% employment, but the people in the 99% employed society are, on average, worse off?
> As long as we're choosing to make work about making someone else wealthy rather than satisfying all our needs
Most people would not say the number of potholes they encounter or the level of park maintenance is so poor that their needs aren't being met.
I haven't done the math, but my guess is that a pothole might do hundreds of dollars worth of damage over its lifetime, maybe thousands. If society was willing to pay 1/10th of that sum per pothole to anyone willing to fill it, there'd be a lot more applicants. (Though it might lead to people making potholes on purpose, so the payment needs to depend on road health over time, not number of potholes filled.)
Well your last sentence shows exactly why it wouldn't work and so you're not really talking about "1/10th of that sum per pothole" you're talking about, I don't even know - paying random people random sums of money at arbitrary times based on overall road health?
A map, posted on the municipal or county website. You, a private citizen, bid to fill a hole. The city accepts. You upload a geostamped 'Before' picture. You are given a time window to fill the hole (often at night). You fill the hole. Upload 'After' pictures. Get paid in the next cycle.
You take a sledge hammer to the street a block over. Repeat. Profit.
You do a bad job filling the hole. Some hits it and their car breaks. They sue you and the city. The city attorneys successfully push the blame onto you since you're a contractor. You have no liability insurance because you're not a professional because that's the whole point of this thing, right? You're on the hook for the car, a few grand for a medical check-up, and a spurious mental anguish claim. You declare bankruptcy and on the way back from your last visit with your attorney, you hit another pothole and your car breaks. Full circle.
Taking a sledge hammer to a street is a crime.
Yes, it is, and this is a financial incentive to commit a crime.
You take care of my needs I'll fill potholes. Plenty of folks would.
Yeah, you will fill the potholes to the limit of your abilities and the society provides for your needs. This had been tried many times and does not work because the balance of abilities and needs comes out unbounded: even if your abilities to fill potholes were greater than your needs initially, having all needs satisfied generates more needs and diminishes the ability to work. Even sending someone to poke you with a bayonet in order to have more abilities won't work because, again, the dude with the bayonet is the subject to the same abilities/needs disbalance. So it ends up with very little needs satisfied, a lot of bayonet poking and tons of waste since the ability/need balance is calculated by vibes instead of market.
I wonder how much of roads today being worse are because we have added a large amount of buried services under roadways? There are streets in my town that are a patched up messed. Thinking about it, all of those streets/the worst streets in town are ones without overhead lines.
What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
a system that doesn't provide enough education for its citizens. this is why education needs to be made available to everyone, and not just those who can afford it. especially, if you get education for free you also won't need to get a high paying job to pay off your debts.
Because governments and councils waste money on paying private contractors do do stupid bullshit like installing statues or gardens or other vanity crap meanwhile grass areas are overgrown and the roads are filled with potholes.
The general populace aka the voters are too apathetic and absorbed in their little consumer lives and tribally motivated political quibbles to know or care that so much tax money is wasted.
Man, we make enough food for everyone, but throw away tons because poor people can’t pay for it. Our economy is based on scarcity. It seems to create scarcity even when there is none.
> What kind of system has work to be done but not enough jobs
A system where citizens complain about potholes but don't want to chip in to pay people to fix them - that is, they won't pay the taxes necessary. I've seen some very clean, well-financed, high-tax places in the world.
That's just one part of this issue but it's a necesssary one. And before you say, 'government just wastes money', I say, 'that's just an meaningless talking point against chipping in.' First, everyone and every organization wastes money; larger organizations have both much more power to do things but more inefficiencies, unavoidably - that applies to large software companies too. Government inefficiency can be dealt with if we want to do it; if you don't pay attention and don't vote, others will be very happy to do without you.
> Potholes, park maintenance, housing shortages, pollution. As long as we're have unsatisfied needs, there's work to be done. I also see unemployment.
Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.
This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.
This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.
And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?
I have stopped. I get chastised constantly for it. Leftist candidates are rare, most mainline dems are center right. I catch so much flak from vote blue no matter who types (who then go out and don't vote for Mamdani).
If candidates want my vote, they can offer literally anything as a concession. I'm not holding some purity standard.
> You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.
You doing think there are other needs people have? Social needs, where years of customer service experience would be desirable? Or financial advice? Potholes are a stand in. Think bigger.
> Think bigger.
Think clearly, correctly and grounded in reality.
But socialist culture leads to corruption repeatetly in all socities where the experiment is run ?
Same with capitalist governments?
I don't think corruption is a left/right axis like that.
And I don't know, maybe it's early days, but Mamdani seems less corrupt than his predecessors.
It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
> It's almost as if government corruption is not a byproduct of the system of government, but a byproduct of the fact that it's filled with people, and when people accrue power they will, by and large, abuse it.
If only there were a system to align incentives toward a common good under the assumption that everyone is corrupt and will therefore seek to maximize their own interests....
What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy? No one's making any money from that. But it causes damages to everyone.
You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
> What are the incentives for corrupt people to fix potholes under a purely capitalist economy?
Well, in a purely capitalist economy, the answer would be property rights, competition, and liability. For example, a road would be owned by someone, and you could sue that someone for damages if the road damaged your car. A road owner could discharge liability risk by purchacing insurance, and insurance underwriters could require some minimum standard of maintenance from owners in exchange.
> You need some kind of government for such things as education, healthcare, roads... fixing potholes...
The whole point of the article that spawned these discussions is that society has already delegated the responsibility for fixing potholes to the government, and the government is doing a crappy enough job of fixing potholes that "art activists" need to make potholes into public art projects to get the government to actually do its job.
Some libertarians moved in the small town of Grafton, NH [0], with the explicit goal of turning it into a "Free Town".
> This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and the Grafton Police Department being reduced to one officer (the police chief), who said he was unable to answer calls for service as the town had no money to repair the one police vehicle left. Other issues were inconsistent basic public services, such as trash collection.
Most roads are unprofitable individually, but still beneficial to the greater economy. It's very unrealistic to expect private individuals to build and maintain them. And the logistics of paying for every street one drives one, and the profiteering this enables sounds hellish.
There was a time when the government was able to build and fix stuff. We should probably get to fixing that, by kicking out the parasitic contracters, actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages, taxing the ever-increasing wealth of the top 1%, etc. Not by privatizing roads, which is a nonsensical idea that failed miserably anytime it was tried.
The golden age of America (and the West) happened when redistributive taxation was maximal and the government had the means and the will to improve citizens life. We've been privatizing stuff ever since the 1980s with arguably disastrous results. It's time we came back to first base.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafton%2C_New_Hampshire
You can be a libertarian without being a capitalist, and you can be a capitalist without being a libertarian, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with a [completely accurate] libertarian dig when the original point was that if the system was more capitalist, it would get fixed faster and better.
> actually hiring competent civil servants at competitive wages
I think most people would be open to increasing cash government salaries if the rest of the job also matched the broader economy - at-will employment, no public sector unions, etc. You trade some of your cash compensation in the government for the cushy benefits, sub-40 hour work week and lots of time off, and the near impossibility of being fired especially once you've been there for a few decades.
The golden age of the West happened due to a war-time manufacturing boom that would put the industrial revolution to shame. If you're making a ton of money and your marginal tax rate is 90%, what incentive do you have to work another ten hours a week or open another factor or release a new product if you're only keeping 10% of what you earn?
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No but you don't understand they're on the right team so I have to vote for them.
Or we’ve invested far too much money in building a road network and the economic value from it either isn’t captured to sustain it OR it’s insufficient to cover costs and it’s being subsidized. Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine. Pretending like capitalism is the thing that creates economic tradeoffs is incorrect and it’s just scapegoating capitalism - of course every economic system will have problems, but potholes are not uniquely a capitalism problem but more a problem of maintenance after huge capital investments for building infrastructure - maintenance is always harder and a debt that previous generations saddled us by building said infrastructure and that’s true whatever economic model you follow. China will have a similar problem in ~100-200 years as the cost to maintain all the roads, power plants, and buildings start to become a reality.
It's funny how the "hard choices" fingerwagging never comes out to scold the parts of the economy where rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are, and it's such a dogmatic article of faith that the gross excess over there couldn't possibly have anything to do with the deprivation over here.
Equally dogmatic take. A lot of scarcity is artificial.
Yep. Move all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and whoops! The well ran dry! Better cut social programs, nothing else to be done, no sir!
I'm not sure what your point is, are you complaining about... compound interest?
No, I'm complaining about r>g.
Last I knew China's new train system wasn't generating the income needed to pay down the construction debt. It's going to be interesting to watch how things play out long term.
I mean, I don't disagree with you. But potholes are a stand in for infrastructure repair. I bike everywhere, my bike lanes and paths have holes. Water systems still dump lead, electricity and broadband networks aren't resilient. Potholes are just visible failures we can just to analogize.
Don't get too locked in on the specific.
Profit isn't exactly the problem here. We could pay people to fix various kinds of infrastructure, they could make big profits, that would be great - if only they existed and had figured out their business plans.
If they have profit, we should be splitting that money towards addressing other needs. Maybe some profit is fine for ensuring sustainability or whatever, but like, potholes aren't the only need.
If money was duct tape, that would follow. I think of it as like gratitude (when paid) and influence (when gained). So we'd be grateful to the road-menders, or broadband-stabilizers, and they could accrue a big pile of influence. What will they do with it? Perhaps they want something stupid and pointless, like building a pyramid.
If we're not going to allow that, there's no need for money at all. We'd vote on what needs doing, and it would always be something like mending roads, and we'd all have to knuckle down and do it, through a conscription-like system, on pain of pain. It would never be fixing the broadband, though, because broadband is a crazy imaginative project, like building a pyramid, so there wouldn't be any.
The mistake was made but the entrenched interests of unrestrained capitalism ensure that a new direction will never be pursued.
> Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine.
Have you ever driven on a cobblestone street? There are a few in the city where I grew up and it's pretty obvious why we don't build that way anymore. It's like driving on an uneven dirt road, you're lucky to get above 25MPH consistently lest you want to risk damaging your car.
My point is that classifying it as a “need” is strange because it’s in no way the same as eating or drinking or love. It’s useful for modern society but “need” feels wrong.
I think a healthy proportion of HN would view a "<=25mph or your car breaks" as a feature, not a bug.
> Potholes being a “need” to be fixed is an interesting take when we had cobble streets and people survived fine.
Nobody was going 55-75mph+ with multi-thousand pound vehicles on cobblestone streets.
Potholes lead to vehicle damage, property damage and death.
Commerce drives the economy, and commerce needs roads. Even ancient Rome understood this. Once Rome could no longer protect the roads and travel ranges became shorter the economy declined much more quickly.
If society can't afford roads and therefor can no longer afford to conduct commerce, society can't afford to exist.
My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day.
Spraypainting the pothole distorts the triage process and makes a pothole jump the queue, putting it ahead of more severe or older issues than it otherwise would have been.
It might not be zero sum, if it causes the agency to act with more haste to avoid embarrassment, but it seems like it could be close? Plus it probably takes more resources to clean up the spraypaint afterwards.
Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around with abundant materials and machinery neglecting their duties, so I guess I just have some questions about what the real cost of this tactic is. What's giving.
If we're making stuff up with no basis, I'll go with it distorts the process by bringing attention to and prioritising the potholes that bother people enough to make the effort of painting them. But really I think most municipalities are not as good at planning as you give them credit for.
Although if a big pothole remains for several years amid many complaints, it's reasonable to think there's no such list. Or there is a list, but it's so long that it might as well not exist.
> Most road maintenance crews probably aren't sitting around
Assuming that's true, the most likely explanation is that they are working on Big Projects. Pothole maintenance is (probably) behind these projects, even though it can be done without affecting their timeline.
In many parts of then world you can't repair these (properly) until the weather gets warmer. Leads to a big initial backlog in the spring.
"Projects" (whatever that means to your municipality) are almost always contracted out. The maintenance crews maintain. Sometimes they do a little pre/post work for the big projects but mostly they maintain stuff. It's not like they're being pulled off a bridge replacement to fill a pothole.
> My model of municipal maintenance is that a city's road maintenance workers have a long list of known potholes to fix which is triaged with some formula and dealt with day-by-day.
What makes you think that?
I'm sure it depends on the city. I reported several large potholes in my city via an online form, and was disappointed to see them unrepaired for several months. Then one day I came and found that they'd repaved the whole street for 50m.
Yep, this kind of stuff can be extremely complicated because there are a lot of layers.
Potholes have different causes. For example if there is a slow water leak that's compromised the road sub base that needs to get fixed first or you're just throwing money in a hole.
I see road workers repairing potholes, and otherwise notice that potholes get repaired over time.
Presumably there is an intelligent process that leads to this. What alternative is there?
I agree about the distortion, and it omits what is typically the greatest distortion: Wealth and power. I've been on bumpy, deteriorating roads in poor neighborhoods that suddenly turned into smooth, paved roads in wealthy neighborhoods.
Also, the person of a certain class, ethnicity and age who spraypaints is called an 'artivist'. For someone else it would be called graffiti and they might be arrested for vandalism.
I don’t imagine all government work has been perfectly prioritized on a well calibrated sliding scale.
Citizens should have a say in how municipalities order work. If they're not given that say through less-disruptive means, then they can choose to harmlessly tag places where maintenance is failing.
Why are we excusing civic inaction because it might cause an unexpected schedule change for road crews? Why am I supposed to be so full of concern for the ease of their schedule that I'm ok with broken streets?
In short, c'mon, man.
This is just a dressed up way of saying "I don't care how the road crews work or who else they might be helping, I want them working on the problem I care about". You don't know if the crews are working on bigger problems (or bigger potholes), or they're working in a neighborhood you don't drive through and thus don't care about...if they aren't patching up your annoyance right now, then screw 'em, they suck at their job.
I've gone to our municipal planning meetings for these types of things, and there is always at least one person there with this sense of entitlement. They want to talk about "excusing civic inaction" or similar just like you, but when shown "this is what the crews are working on", the retort is "yeah, but that's not the pothole on my street" (with the usually unsaid "...so why should I give a phuk about those people").
These people usually show up at other meetings to complain about having to pay taxes to pay for those repairs. But that's another little joy of local politics...
Just so we’re clear, “screw them” in this case means spray painting holes in the road. Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here.
I find it very hard to fault that person coming to the meeting wanting their street fixed early. What real sin are they committing except noticing that there’s a piece of infrastructure that they depend on that’s messed up? The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.
If I believed that the city schedule was optimal in every way, I could be convinced that nothing should change as a result of that person‘s complaints, but I don’t believe that. And even if I did, that person is providing a valuable service in the case that the city made a mistake somewhere. They do not know that the schedule is optimal (if it even is). They know their street is messed up.
Just so we’re agreed that that is what is objectionable here.
I never said a single word about painting the pothole; I think it's a clever hack. I should have tried that when we were negotiating with the city about scheduling our much needed street repaving. But since you clearly assume whatever your opinion is is sacrosanct, I suppose it's not surprising you would assume I agree you are unquestioningly correct.
The city does not get a pass just because it claims to be busy elsewhere.
Yes, it does, particularly if it is. At least for the adults in the room. Resources are finite. They have to be allocated. They have to be paid for. No, that's never "optimal" for everyone, especially for people for whom 'optimal == 'what I want, done immediately, even at the expense of other citizens'.
>At least for the adults in the room.
I think the idea that the city is already allocating resources optimally is pretty historically contingent, to put things mildly. Even in cases where it is, it's making *choices* about what to allocate and where and citizens are allowed to think those choices are wrong. In fact, well functioning cities use that information to better understand where those choices are wrong.
If you want to be mad at someone who is annoying at city meetings because they can't see your picture that's fine, but don't conflate that with adulthood. It's certainly not the only bigger picture to have.
After the second time someone obviously doesn't even think about what I wrote and continues to blather on with the same irrelvancy they're committed to hammering on, there's not much point to continue. Have fun with your FYIGM world view, you're clearly committed.
Genuinely what are you talking about? I thought about what you wrote and disagree lol.
I appreciate the pushback, but I wasn't actually saying people shouldn't do this. If a neighbourhood is being neglected because of some incentive structure they're powerless to affect, then yeah, take some action.
I'm just compulsive in pointing out trade-offs, and this blog post (understandably) doesn't have an interview with the civil servant on the other side presenting their perspective, so I wanted to raise the question here in case someone knew how it worked.
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Someone in the UK did this years ago, but they painted rather cruder designs around the potholes. Naturally, the media dubbed them 'Wanksy'.
This was exactly what I thought of when I read the headline. Very amusing at the time, and it somewhat unsurprisingly was effective.
I lack your laudable sense of decorum, so I'll post the link...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/street-artist-wanksy-spray-...
There have been copycats...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/guy-paint-penis-potholes-new...
That seems like a huge missed opportunity to draw the goatse guy.
Agreed.
In less...anatomical...inspiration, there's a guy in Chicago who took this idea straight to the fine art phase:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/11/11/pothole-...
There's also a gent in Horsham who's recently been planting flowers in potholes to draw attention to them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mgjklmzwvo
Alright, it's worth a try. I'll do it at night in a balaclava though, because I live in the USA and no matter whether it's local, state, or federal government they'd rather spend $100k prosecuting this than $1k fixing the hole.
Ah, we did it in plan sight, but I guess in the US is different. I head about people arrested while truing to fix the pothole themselves, but not for painting it, yet.
> but not for painting it, yet
https://cbsaustin.com/news/offbeat/greater-cincinnati-man-ch...
Do we know the outcome of the case?
Thankfully the case was taken to the Hamilton County Municipal Court, which I imagine was a much fairer trail than he would've received at Lockland's Mayor Court. He was cleared of all charges[0].
[0] https://local12.com/news/local/man-cleared-charges-spray-pai...
>He was cleared of all charges[0].
At what cost? The process is the punishment.
Sadly, @scrumper is 100% correct! In many, many areas and gov-levels of the U.S., the incentives have become so perverse that a municipality will spend 10x or 100x to prosecute people instead of spending 1x to fix things in the first place.
Some areas are even worse, because they'll use the event (e.g. "we have rampant crime now that criminals are spray-painting and ruining our potholes!")...as an excuse to then drastically increase funding for law enforcement agencies! Its bonkers and sad all around!
if you can send some pictures later, on the page there is a anonymous way to send us stuff
Or, if you're Arnie, you give the city three weeks to fix a pot hole and then just go out and fix it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veCUOwd8Ye0&t=73s
I don't know if it will help fixing it, but it might help drivers avoid them more easily if they're painted in bright colors, which still sounds like a plus. Nobody wants to drive into a massive pothole at full speed unaware or try to dangerously dodge at the last moment.
In 1961, Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, read a newspaper story about two Portuguese students who went to jail for making a toast to freedom. He wrote letters to the Portuguese government and got others to do so as well, and it got media attention, and they were freed.
That was the start of Amnesty International, which to this day, simply asks people to write a letter when they see an injustice. The spray painting potholes story has the same theme: "Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness."
A friend of mine planted a small tree in one, after many months of notifying the local council. It was fixed very quickly.
I still want an iPhone app that uses the accelerometers to "geotag" bumps in the road.
You'd think a low-pass filter of a collective database of this data would quickly draw attention to the legit "bumps in the road"…
And you would think a city municipality could use this data (within a geofence, sorted by "popularity" and Newtons) to determine which potholes to tackle.
Waymo would be smart to offer this service to municipalities, especially those with supposed concerns about "safety".
my bmw already does this somehow, always gives me a "rough road ahead" warning. I wonder if they use accelerometers
That's a good idea. Seriously. I think with a decent LLM tool you could get a POC going pretty quickly, and Code for America [0] is a pretty good resource for interfacing with governments on projects like that.
[0] https://codeforamerica.org/
I could knock it out—it's adoption that is the issue. It's only useful at scale.
As someone else pointed out, Waymo (or Waze, or Google Maps, or Apple Maps) ought to adopt this as an opt-in feature. You would get rich pot-hole data fast.
From 2015 in the UK:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-01/an-interv...
https://themanc.com/art-and-culture/manchester-graffiti-arti...
Other UK examples:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tees-48068866
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3q1p6502o
Here is a really inspiring book that touches on this sort of citizen led activism and democratic change. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/533225/teardown-by-d...
It was also turned into a short documentary series. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgBne2KTlDUzDQasv65PtT9Lq...
I was wondering why potholes in my city in the UK have got outlines of dicks and balls sprayed around. Maybe this is why.
Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does. True story, plus the moment Sofia copied us a year later
> A pothole on a road is a pothole on a road. But a pothole sprayed bright, photographed, shared, and laughed at, is something else. It is a small proof that the citizen and the system are not as far apart as we like to think.
Next to where I live there is a sign to caution drivers because of kids playing. The sign was very worn to the point that it’s just white from the distance of a driver. So I repainted it with an ink pen, making the kid’s head into a balloon. It draws a lot of attention now. I think the speed bumps in the road probably do more for the safety, but the sign does more for laughs.
> A few neighbours who told us “nothing will change” went quiet. A few said “OK, but this was a fluke.”
Are they wrong? This is the equivalent of getting customer support from an otherwise unreachable tech company because your story went viral. It's the exception that proves the rule, not the status quo.
Undeniably it's a good reminder of the power of publicity for accountability, but at some point the news media won't be interested in airing another "neighbors taking action" human interest story.
This TED talk from a former NYC official about small changes leading to big impact on city life is great: https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_ma...
EDIT: Realized I meant the video below but both are great: https://www.ted.com/talks/janette_sadik_khan_new_york_s_stre...
It's interesting to see lack of tolerance towards potholes - the government has a lot of other issues to work on (healthcare, education, pollution) yet potholes, being a problem we are affected by daily seem more important to people than the "remote" problems caused by underfunding in other areas.
Even if this trick works, would it be ethical, knowing it draws money away from other areas? What would be the road SLO we would agree be acceptable?
Motorcyclists in Romania had a campaign a few years ago. They spray-painted a body outline near potholes, as if they were crime scenes / fatal accident sites.
https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/social/groapa-ucide-o-campanie...
What about mosaics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Pothole_Bandit
Portland Anarchist Road Care took it to an effective extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Anarchist_Road_Care
Here in Zurich there's a city office where you can report graffiti that's on city property and they eventually will fix it but they have a big backlog. I learned though that if it's obscene graffiti they move it to the top of the list - there was a typical FCZ (football club Zurich) on a wall near where I live for months then one night someone spray-painted a big penis over it and the graffiti was fixed in just a couple of days later...
Is It Against the Law for Citizens to Fix Potholes?[2023]
https://www.wweek.com/news/dr-know/2023/04/29/is-it-against-...
In New Orleans, pot holes get dressed up and become part of the community https://neworleansmom.com/perspectives-in-parenting/confessi...
This is what the Deutsche Bahn does on their train platforms as well. I thought it was one cohort that marks the damage and then comes another and fixes them. But true to Deutsche Bahn they just leave it as that. Now I understand that this can be considered fixing it.
I find that potholes in my area generally get fixed, but it may take a while for them to get around to it. Furthermore, if it's a major divot on an interstate, you have to do more than just pothole repair: you have to scrape it down and completely re-pave the entire area.
One thing I've noticed in my travels is that it's rather difficult to have a pothole on a train track.
Flock anyone?
The squeaky wheel gets the grease!
There is a goatse stencil, just saying
In Texas, you could probably paint a rainbow around it in the morning and the governor would have somebody on it that afternoon.
/s
What you stated is so sad but true, because i could see that happening, and not just in Texas. :-(
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