Your town prohibits you from making your own burger?
Because burger meat is commonly sold in the smallest of grocery stores, and is not technically dependent on what buns, sauces, tomatoes, lettuce … or other ingredients you pair them.
And you can grow your own veggies, and bake your own bread.
It is an entirely componentized market. No gatekeepers.
Even single groceries in tiny towns continue having to compete with larger stores in bigger towns. Because they carry small selections most people make the drive to load up their larder regularly.”
You need to find an example that matches the point you are trying to make.
TLDR: Analysis reveals burger markets are nearly perfect economic opposites of centralized app store markets.
Land, as apposed to the property on it, is raw nature. If we view raw nature as a common inheritance of mankind, then paying a tax on land is how the exclusionary use of it, balances with the common interest in it.
Economist Henry George in the 1800's, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land, because holding land for its passive (parasitic) return even when underused, becomes unprofitable when the land is taxed in proportion to the value it can enable.
And in turn, only taxing land, not property, incentivizes increased development, as higher property investment amortizes land tax against higher returns.
Greater investment in housing being just one way land tax, without property tax, incentives greater productive use.
So many things align for higher growth in ways that more evenly benefit everyone. But our relationship with land is over-complicated, and that is both the reason for change, but the reason change is so hard.
Small attempts have failed, but then, for the rich who can hold land and reap growth in value that outpaces the taxes they pay on it, that remains another inefficient/negative-externality, that pays off for them.
The hard part is that we've structured life such that you are on a fixed income at the end of your life in no position really to deal with inflation. At least when you are still working, in theory at least your wages will go up with inflation. This is really why prop 13 happened to pass at all: the idea of being displaced at the end of your life out of the home you already paid off due to market forces you aren't even a participant in is actually widely unpopular even if it makes better economic sense.
> the idea of being displaced at the end of your life out of the home
I would argue that this is unpopular not only amongst retirees but everyone. And it would have tons of negative side effects.
Why would I fix up my house to look nice, if I’ll be displaced? Why would I invest in my child’s local school system, if we could be displaced? Why would I do any community outreach or support, or get involved in local politics? How can banks underwrite loans if the affordability can fluctuate wildly? Look at the life of people who live in mobile homes and trailer parks - they essentially rent the land, and it’s oppressive because they can’t afford to move (actually moving or repurposing land is hard) but their cost to stay is unpredictable.
The only people this is appealing for are people who fancy themselves analytically minded economists with no interest in the practical humanity of the people living there and renters hoping to finally do the displacing for their own affordability.
> The only people this is appealing for are people who fancy themselves analytically minded economists with no interest in the practical humanity
Most states in the US do not have Prop-13-like laws and get by just fine. For the few states that do, they are less restrictive taxation-wise than California's.
Prop 13 has completely distorted the housing market; it is, perhaps unintuitively, a co-cause of CA's housing unaffordability issues. (Prop 13 discourages new development, and is an enabler of housing NIMBYism.)
We of course shouldn't just abolish Prop 13 overnight, or lots of people will get displaced, also overnight. But we should absolutely reform it and phase it out over time, while building more housing, as fast as we can (something that will be a little bit easier to do as all the NIMBYs realize that if they keep shooting down housing projects, their property taxes are gonna go up a ton).
Prop 13 isn't for seniors, though, it's for all ages. And the heirs inherit the tax base. A senior-only prop 13 would reset at death, so at least it's limited in duration.
A common one I've seen is that for the elderly, property taxes are deferred until they die and are then deducted from their estate (including a sale of the house).
IMO this is a much more fair system than just saying "lol no taxes on the elderly."
Most states also rely on sales taxes and various fees, and assign limited property taxes. A Georgist land value tax would have much greater effects than the current tax regimes.
> Prop 13 has completely distorted the housing market; it is, perhaps unintuitively, a co-cause of CA's housing unaffordability issues. (Prop 13 discourages new development, and is an enabler of housing NIMBYism.)
I have heard this assertion with no proof or backing data a lot. There is an assumption but no explanation how kicking long time residents out of their homes due to tax pressure is a benefit to the community, or real estate market prices. Real estate agents and other service companies might benefit from more transactions.
There is also usually no mention that the main problem of Prop 13 is that it applies to commercial and industrial properties, not just individual primary residences. Individuals have a limited impact scoped to their life, but tax implications applied to long term corporations is what has an outsized effect.
The nonexistence of Prop 13 in other states should be pretty clear evidence that there are more options besides Prop 13 or kicking out lifelong residents.
Florida also doesn't have swarms of homeless people like CA does.
I find that forcing the elderly out of multimillion dollar homes and into apartments or even smaller homes is infinitely preferable to the human catastrophe plainly obvious on the streets of LA and SF.
Prop 13 is a bit of a nothingburger anyhow when you consider median homeownership period in CA is only like 2 years longer than national average, rather than the myth that seems to be perpetuated of every home being a 40+ year hold paying a couple dollars in property taxes. And when that home is sold the tax assessment of course goes right back to market rate, and boy that is substantial when you have what would be a 450k home outside of Boston go for 2.1m with a 1% tax. 21 thousand a year off a single 50ft wide lot is no slouch in terms of tax revenue.
> And when that home is sold the tax assessment of course goes right back to market rate, and boy that is substantial when you have what would be a 450k home outside of Boston go for 2.1m with a 1% tax. 21 thousand a year off a single 50ft wide lot is no slouch in terms of tax revenue.
The problem is all the tax revenue being lost at the municipality level for decades. National tenure average is ~12 years. Los Angeles is 20 years, SF is 16.5 and SJC is in between. It clearly has a meaningful effect, it's just harder to buy into the market and keep the home over a long period of time.
San Francisco receives over $3,000 per capita in property tax revenue alone. Dallas receives about $1,200 per capita. NYC is less than $1,000, though I gather NYC has their own property tax issues.
And California has an income tax, whereas Texas doesn't.
Prop 13 has it's problems, but I don't think they're as significant as the rhetoric claims. It makes for a great excuse, though. Politicians can blame Prop 13 for why they can't spend as much on services as people demand, and now it's become the common wisdom--but for Prop 13 California could afford to spend much more than it does, and the housing affordability crisis would end, too. It's just wishful thinking.
I remember when Prop 13 was on the ballot. The newspaper reported that if it passed, it would eviscerate the police and fire budgets. It passed, and nothing happened to the budgets.
I don’t think the housing affordability crisis ends and I don’t think that’s the right way to model it. SF has one of, if not the highest, $/sq ft in the US. And prop 13 is suppressing it - estimates indicate that property taxes revenues would double meaning that 2.5k/person would become 5k.
And remember that that 2.5k/person is only for residential properties. commercial properties still fall under prop 13 and that’s about 50-60 of the other tax. So a full repeal would make it closer to 10k/person instead of the current 5k.
I agree the story on rents and home prices would be unclear because ultimately the people might move and just rent out their homes with property taxes baling into the new rental price.
Also seems unlikely. It might depress housing prices and act as a natural counterbalance (but then rents and Col drops too). I think it’s really hard to model.
I don't think housing costs would drop that much, if at all. What matters is the monthly mortgage payment. Property prices drop when property taxes go up, but mortgage payments tends to stay similar.
In one sense that sounds like free money for the state. However, home equity constitutes the largest share of savings for people, and that's more true the lower down the income ladder you go. So you're taking money out of the working- and middle-class. In some circles home equity is considered a poor savings vehicle, but they don't seem to consider that it's the only secured loan most people can access for leveraged investment. It's the only investment available to most people that let's them leverage capital markets the way the very wealthy can.
And FWIW, residential rents also track monthly mortgage payments, so renters aren't likely to see any difference, either. On average renters pay roughly the same amount per month they'd pay as owners, just without building any equity. I suppose they might be slightly better off after accounting for transfer payments (i.e. public services, entitlements, etc), but they'd be even better off if they could become owners rather than renters.
"I don't think housing costs would drop that much, if at all."
That all depends on if people still want to live there, or can afford it. People tend to be sensitive to taxes, especially if they don't see it improving their lives. Businesses can be sensitive to this sort of thing too. And if they leave, people may leave too. California is already at a net negative when looking at joiners vs leavers. It's mostly been lower wage workers, but in recent years middle and high earners have also been leaving. The population is the same as it was 5 years ago.
"Property prices drop when property taxes go up, but mortgage payments tends to stay similar."
That might be roughly true for a person who just purchased and the federal property tax deduction is uncapped. A retiree who is getting a break on taxes is likely to see a big increase. Not to mention if the house is paid off, then there is no mortgage that could offset it.
It's not reset of you inherit, or a bunch of other bullshit exemptions.
We live in a gerontacracy. Every advantage and tax break and handout is given to the elderly and the ladder has fully been pulled up for the new generations.
You shouldn't strawman the other side. Us "people who fancy" actually understand that there are real negative side effects. But the money has to come from somewhere.
If not from land taxes, where? Would you like to double sales tax? Or increase income taxes? Every solution costs something, what does yours cost?
> actually understand that there are real negative side effects.
Everything has real negative consequences. One side does not hold the monopoly on negative side effects.
Land is not cheap to repurpose. The Georgism dream that land can be optimally used is a farce. There is significant costs to repurposing land - to make those costs worth it because of the taxes would heavily distort current society, and I think the assumption that this would be desirable compared to the status quo is unproven.
> double sales tax? Or increase income taxes?
Why not the taxes we have? Where is the presumption that taxes need to be changed at all, never mind doubled?
Even if we decide we want to raise taxes, choosing where to do so is delicate. Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.
> Land is not cheap to repurpose. The Georgism dream that land can be optimally used is a farce. There is significant costs to repurposing land - to make those costs worth it because of the taxes would heavily distort current society, and I think the assumption that this would be desirable compared to the status quo is unproven.
Your friction is real - and already exists.
So the bar for improvement is not no friction.
The bar is less friction, and higher productive use of land, which benefits everyone. Lowering the costs of both housing and business space, while increasing economic output.
That is was economic alignment does, it doesn't just improve one thing, or improve on a one-time or fixed percentage basis.
And less passive, underutilizing, economically-parasitic investments from the rich. (Rich passive investment in land, uses land like Bitcoin for its deflationary nature, which compounds land prices while suppressing its full productive use.
Not raises. Compounds. The more the rich passively invest in land, the more profitable land becomes to passively invest in.
Stating truisms ahead of straw manning me avoids the actual discussion. "Everything has real negative consequences." "Land is not cheap to repurpose." I never said otherwise.
You're right about my estimate being off though and it was a disservice to the discussion. An equivalent revenue from sales tax would require ~2.1%. In SF, that would move the total sales tax from 8.6% to 10.7%; in Oakland, 13.8%. A large increase would likely bend some consumer behavior (chasing sales that have feet, aka move to the informal/grey market).
> Again, the optimal answer from an economist is not necessarily desirable from an emotional perspective of the people being governed.
This is the real difference between us imo. I believe the optimal answer is based on realistic projections on revenue collected and what prevents bankruptcy. The compromise answer is what passes a vote and in fact, the bankrupt answer.
I would prefer we didn't raise taxes and instead reduce spending. But given the complexity of reducing spending and the scale of our deficit, we will have to do both. On the side of raising revenue, a land tax offers a way of taxing a wealth that cannot flee.
The negative side effects of taxes on labor are enormous, and have distorted humanity probably more than any other factor.
Any consideration of the consequences of taxes also has to consider the consequences of the current taxation.
But taxes have and will always be a transfer of wealth from the working poor to the rich and powerful. People talking about tax reform or more effective and just systems tend to forget this. It's like the lamb having an opinion on how the wolves should share it.
HOA are forclosing more than banks in some regions, it's not just trailer parks these days getting hard lessons in being the "fake owner" of your property
1. There are many states such as New Jersey or Texas that do not have Prop 13 style laws and their seniors are not suffering excessively. However housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states.
2. States that freeze property taxes have more volatility and boom/bust cycles. You are trading being shielded from tax volatility for increasing economy-wide volatilty and asset price volatility, so the gains are not as high as you think, and seniors are exposed to this volatility indirectly.
3. There are more targeted relief mechanisms available, such as deferring the tax liability until the owner dies for senior owners.
As someone from NJ...you think seniors and young people don't have affordability problems, especially wrt housing here, in the 5th most expensive state to buy a house? (California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, in that order, according to redfin, if you're going by house cost to income ratio, NJ is 6th)
> you think seniors and young people don't have affordability problems?
Of course I don't think that, which is why I didn't say it. That would be a silly thing to write. What is the advantage for you in mischaracterizing what someone wrote and then expending effort to "correct the record" for a statement no one made?
You created a strawman and then knocked it down.
What I actually said: "New Jersey or Texas that do not have Prop 13 style laws and their seniors are not suffering excessively. However housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states."
Both of these statements are demonstrably true. Let's look at the data.
* NJ price to income ratio for housing: 5.5
* mortgage cost burden: 31% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
* renter cost burden: 52% of renters spend more than 30% on rent
* CA price to income ratio for housing: 8.0
* mortgage cost burden: 38% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% on housing
* renter cost burden: 58% of renters spend more than 30% on rent
So housing in NJ is more affordable than in CA.
Now, let's look specifically at seniors.
In California:
* 68% of senior renters are cost burdened
* 35% of senior homeowners are cost burdened
In New Jersey:
* 59% of senior renters are cost burdened
* 35% of senior homeowners are cost burdened
So we see that across the board, seniors in NJ are not cost burdened more than in California, and that in fact they are cost burdened a bit less.
Therefore if your solution is to look to Prop 13 style fixes to address cost burdens for either seniors or the general population, then you are not making a data based argument, and in fact the data goes against you, because there is no excess cost burden in states without these property tax freezes.
I don't know if it changes the result significantly, but remember the NJ has very high property taxes, more than double of California. So mortgage cost alone does not paint the full picture.
This is more significant for seniors, who likely have a paid-off home so their main expense is property tax. So being a fixed-income senior with a home is likely more affordable in California than in NJ. The worst thing after retirement is cost increases when you no longer have a salary that goes up with inflation.
Your exact words were "housing is much more affordable for younger people in those states", which, even by the numbers you have cited, is not correct. More affordable? Sure, we are number 5 or 6, not number 1. Much more affordable? Come on now.
And no, I don't think prop 13 style laws would be helpful, it would just create more problems, as it has in California.
Kicking in at retirement age plus limiting it to a single owner occupied property is the key, IMO.
In California, it applies to multiple properties, you can pass it down to your children and it applies to property owned by businesses both commercial and industrial, which is absolutely crazy.
California has basically created a class of landed gentry.
> I would argue that this is unpopular not only amongst retirees but everyone. And it would have tons of negative side effects.
Every tax is unpopular and undesireable.
Why would I work if government is taxing my income? Why would I invest? Why would I drive the car, blah blah.
Land tax is easy to collect, fast to pay, hard to avoid or game, and encourages productivity and efficiency.
And this cuddling of boomers who've benefited by piling up gigantic government debts and expect to be paid back (typically holding gov bond) is literally going to destroy the financial system. Part of the benefit of this tax is that if you can't pay for fair value of the land you're preventing others from using, you have to sell and get out, so e.g. a productive family can pay your for it, and use it instead of your now unproductive self. If you don't want that, you have to pay the same tax they would pay. Just because you're retired doesn't mean "your done with your duties to the rest of society and you can just expect free shit and do nothing" _especially_ that your "wealth" is just rent seeking on younger generations.
If boomers keep preventing younger generations from being productive and having opportunities, the economy will dwindle, the pile of of debt and other financial assets will collapse, hyperinfation is going to destroy their paper wealth and they will be starving or worse. Just watch, because I doubt at this point is avoidable anyway.
For what it's worth, the way Israel deals with this is that property tax is levied on the property resident, not the property owner. In other words, when you rent a house, the person who is legally responsible for paying the tax is the renter.
This makes it exceedingly easy to ensure that old people are not affected by property taxes: if you are elderly resident, you simply get a discount. If you are an elderly landlord who owns multiple properties, your younger tenants don't get a property tax discount, and you pay income taxes (not discounted for age) on the rental income. If you are elderly and want to downsize, your property tax discount follows you into the smaller apartment.
The system has its challenges, but it is far superior to Prop 13 and achieves the same goal.
> fixed income at the end of your life in no position really to deal with inflation.
This might be true if you have everything in cash in a safe at your house and plan on taking out fixed amounts for the rest of your life, I guess, but who are those people?
Most people are on social security, which is inflation adjusted.
Others with more wealth have retirement savings, which are likely mostly in bonds and stocks, which weather inflation not too shabbily. Interest rates go up, and banks start actually yielding interest!
Prop 13 passed mostly as a populist revolt against taxes, but in reality it does a lot more for people in their prime of earning and a toooon more for commercial property tax cuts than it does for retirees.
Every other state has better tax deferral mechanisms, and given the tiny fraction of Prop 14 effect that goes to retirees, I don't really buy this back formation of what was going on. If people really voted for such a lie, it wouldn't be the first time with propositions but from the media I've seen from the time I really don't think people were that duped and probably knew the broad effects of Prop 13.
I was alive at the time prop 13 passed. I was a little kid in Ohio. Even I remember the stories that were being circulated on the national news about old people being priced out of their homes in LA. It was a big campaign.
"Big campaign" sounds right. These sort of tax revolt campaigns tend to spread wide, with the hope of passing similar things elsewhere shortly after.
Fortunately, this one did not spread which is very good news, because the long term effects have been absolutely horrific for housing prices in California. However, I hear of other states right now proposing adoption of California's housing crisis via similar tax measures... Hopefully they don't pass and learn the lessons of what has happened here.
Vancouver used to have a land value tax, which was widely credited with the its prosperity up to the ~1960s. However eventually enough homeowners and landowners got sick of paying their fair share and overturned it, which has resulted in Vancouver's housing situation which is possibly even worse than the SF Bay Area's...
And not in small part because Prop 13 disconnects property from housing costs, which leads to political incentives where beneficiaries of Prop 13 embrace policy that causes housing prices to rise precipitously.
Prop 13 or not most people historically resisted zoning changes and pretty much all cities in the country, even in Manhattan, were downzoned dramatically from what was possible as far as infill development the pre war zoning plans. Even today, the trend is never to recognize the housing crisis for what it is and widely upzone, but to just nudge a little more capacity in some containment zone of the city at good arms length from the best of the single family home neighborhoods, in the form of say transit oriented development of certain specific constraining factors, rather than just opening up the floodgates and allowing for market to actually establish prices freely.
> This might be true if you have everything in cash in a safe at your house and plan on taking out fixed amounts for the rest of your life, I guess, but who are those people?
It seems an astonishingly large number of people, including on here, talk as if that were the case despite their actual living and retirement finances. People really hate inflation.
Something about the lizard brain wants the exchange rate between shiny object and edible object to be fixed and gets extremely upset if it changes.
(Or, as is becoming increasingly relevant, the exchange rate between shiny object and flammable fluids)
The exchange rate between shiny objects and edible objects has nothing to do with inflation though; they're both physical objects. Unless people start trading glittery balloons it is quite difficult for shiny objects to inflate and the fluctuations from increasing supply are generally not a problem.
The inflation complaints are people who prefer not to be taxed for saving currency and earning money in fiat. As far as it is a lizard brain thing it's more about principles of fairness in who should be paying taxes and the aversion people have to things taken away from them.
So either your parents were getting $115 from social security, or you are trying to report increase of a year with essentially 0% inflation as if it were the year with 9% inflation.
So the way we fix it is by pulling more tax from net contributors and pushing it via social security so it can be pulled as property taxes. What a disaster.
> Retirees are not on fixed income and haven't been for decades. Social Security gets adjusted for inflation.
Tell me you're not a retiree on social security (or know any) without telling me...
Social security gets adjusted up a very tiny percentage of actual inflation. Watching my elder parent go through this while managing their finances, I'm very aware.
The key bit is that California is relatively unique here. There are a few other states that have Prop-13-like laws, but California's is the most restrictive and incumbent-homeowner-friendly. All those other states (and the ones with nothing similar) seem to get along just fine.
Of course, the solution to increased demand (driving increases in property market value) is to build more housing. Without Prop 13, a big chunk of the NIMBYs who are currently against more housing would likely change their tune if they had to choose between no new housing or much higher property taxes.
I think it would be reasonable and productive to phase out Prop 13 over time, rather than immediately getting rid of it. We could structure it so a property doesn't lose Prop 13 protection until the next time it's sold (and then it never has that protection again). We could completely remove the inheritance loophole (which was tightened up in 2020 but still exists). We could even set a date, say, 10 or 15 years in the future, when re-assessments at market value will start for everyone, regardless of whether or not they've sold. We could also phase in higher allowed assessment percentage increases over time (right now it's capped at 2% per year, but we could, say, add 0.5% to that figure every year for some number of years).
Hell, we could even leave Prop 13 in place as it is today, and just bump up the assessment increase cap to 5% or 10% or something like that. (Texas, for reference, has their own 10% yearly cap on assessment increases.)
There are so many ways to solve this, but all of them are politically unpopular. (Hell, we couldn't even reform Prop 13 as it applies to commercial properties.) As a homeowner in California, I get it, but I still support Prop 13 reform and eventual Prop 13 abolishment.
Most of the other states have not seen the rise in population growth and real estate values seen in CA. There are still places where homes are like 250k or less. There is also way more value drop off outside the metros in most other states with high cost cities such as MA or NY. You could be 30 mins drive from boston in a great 400k home. Try and find that 30 mins out from SF or LA. There just isn't really that fall off in california that you might expect from real estate markets elsewhere. It is like the rising tide has lifted all boats.
This is what people in about five cities in the US think.
I live in San Antonio, a metro of 2M people (city itself is one of the 10 most populous in the US). That's pretty sizable. Median home is between 260K and 310K. That is, of course, with the larger homes you'll find here vs SF/Chicago/LA/etc.
San Antonio is in the middle of the state with 360 degrees of growth and relatively flat. California’s land growth has half of that with hills and mountains near the desirable areas.
It all comes down to zoning. The demand requires capacity and the only way to add it given the geographical constraints are through infill development. Still, cities are getting dragged kicking and screaming to these conclusions, hence the opposition of SB79, as well as the entire concept of SB79 of differential upzoning vs simply widely upzoning. Even just reverting to pre 1960 zoning plans would see LA's zoned capacity rise from the present day 4.5 million (it is in the 90s% as far as population to zoned capacity) or so to something north of 10 million. If you adjust it to the ratio of that pre 1970s zoning plan, when LA had about 2.5 million people in it, the city would be zoned for 20 million with today's population.
In fact that is all that really needs to be done to ameliorate the housing crisis in California: pass a single law that repeals every single zoning adjustment from after say 1960. Or pass a law that mandates a 4:1 ratio of zoned capacity to population. The ship will right itself if it is allowed to.
To be fair 250K homes and under homes are increasingly uncommon and increasingly undesirable. Rural areas with almost zero industry are averaging out at 600-750K. Maybe a bit of a downward trend, but the average salary in the area is like 50K. so it doesn't matter.
While there is certainly some (very) expensive real estate outside of Boston, to a much greater degree than San Francisco, you can actually get a house within a drive for an evening event that's pretty reasonable to a much greater degree than the Bay Area.
> Without Prop 13, a big chunk of the NIMBYs who are currently against more housing would likely change their tune if they had to choose between no new housing or much higher property taxe
I mean, the way you make housing units more affordable is to make more of them, but for existing homeowners of SFH, building condo buildings in their neighborhood will increase their property value because the competition for the remaining lots increase. Given we build close to zero family friendly multi family in this country (ie, appartments buildings have zero family oriented amnenities), there isn’t much in there for nimbys. It’s the right thing to do but you can’t except nimbys to join in on a purely monetary basis.
>appartments buildings have zero family oriented amnenities
This isn't always true. I've seen apartment buildings that have a playground and little astroturf field and some small goals. The kids also are using the pool pretty heavily in every apartment I've lived with one. Some have other facilities like basketball or tennis as well that kids could take up (or use the smooth surface for skating or something).
This is a solved problem in other jurisdictions. Effectively you can just allow seniors to defer their property taxes at low interest rates and it becomes a liability on the house when it is transferred on death.
This is how the government countered the people demanding the end of debtor’s prison. And it’s not “transferred on death” it’s whenever the house is sold whether the owner is alive or not. Property tax is just rent paid to the government and the taxman always gets their dues one way or the other.
> the idea of being displaced at the end of your life out of the home you already paid off due to market forces you aren't even a participant in is actually widely unpopular even if it makes better economic sense.
Once you are old enough it makes a whole lot more sense to move to places designed to care for the elderly. Living alone in a huge house isn't good for your mental health and it isn't for your physical health, either, once you no longer have the energy to maintain it.
I could use a much smaller house than I have now and a much larger garage for tools, workshops, art studio, etc. But for me, the value of a larger property is that I get to go out of the house and spend time in the garden. Sometimes something as simple as pulling up weeds is a considerable boost to my mental health. Kneeling on a garden bench in the sun in the weather and pulling weeds is not something that's “enjoyable," but it is rejuvenating.
My 92-year-old mom has been the same way. Until one of her daughters moved in, she lived by herself in her house and garden. Just being able to go outside and experience the green space she planned and planted has kept her alive and healthy. If she were in some senior living place, she'd be dead by now. She would have withdrawn into her room and waited for her time.
> Once you are old enough it makes a whole lot more sense to move to places designed to care for the elderly. Living alone in a huge house isn't good for your mental health and it isn't for your physical health, either, once you no longer have the energy to maintain it.
This betrays some things. Not everyone is in a "huge house", and having this bias is going to lead you to bad conclusion. Most people don't have a huge house.
And, more importantly, tax should not be used to force people into one way of living in their latter years. They might be self-sufficient into their early 90s, and the last people who should be determining where they live are people who want to do it.
Empirically, according to Doucet, a land value tax would only raise average tax rates if you're living on a parking lot, or vacant lot. Aging homeowners would mostly see a slight decline in their property taxes ( California excluded ).
You handle that the same way income taxes do: the first X amount is exempt, like a standard deduction, applied to the land under someone's primary residence. Pair it with a rolling multi-year average for assessment so value spikes phase in gradually instead of hitting all at once. Keeps the incentive against passive land-holding everywhere else intact, without the blanket caps that also protect speculators. Instead of using one tool to fix it all, you use multiple tools that work together to make efficient systems
> being displaced at the end of your life out of the home you already paid off due to market forces you aren't even a participant in is actually widely unpopular even if it makes better economic sense
Whether it makes economic sense or not, it is extremely inhumane and that matters (or should matter) far more.
This idea that it is ok to kick out (via taxes) someone who spent 40 or 50 years contributing to society just so someone else can make more profit on their home is very sad.
Elderly retired people living in large houses close to where the work is has caused massive social, economic, political, and cultural harm. Young people can no longer afford to buy homes close to work, so they're forced to commute long distances. Their taxes then go in part to pay for the elderly person who lives in a million dollar house with multiple rooms, who receives many tax breaks. The young person cannot afford to start a family, cannot afford to buy a home, loses a lot of time each day on commuting, spends a fortune on commuting, has less time for family, and causes enormous inefficiencies in the job market. This is nothing short of a concerted redistribution of wealth from the young to the old. It's a travesty which the elderly today would not have accepted.
I do not feel sorry for the elderly person sitting on a large and expensive property who demands to spend their final decades squatting on land which could house a family and allow parents to get to work within a reasonable amount of time. They have options the young person does not. They can get a reverse mortgage, for example. They get social security, and draw down on whatever pensions and investments they've accrued over their lives. Their costs are much lower - they don't have children to support. Or they can move, and I'm sorry, but it's not impossible for a retired person to move. Millions of them do it every year all over the country. Often to really nice elderly communities full of activities and specialised care.
I say all of this as someone who leans more libertarian than collectivist. Society is interconnected and interdependent. We cannot function if he keep young people under our boots. Asking the elderly to move is a *very* small price to pay if we expect the young to shoulder the enormous tax and debt burdens said elderly have imposed upon them.
Exactly. And I am appalled by the level of injustice and stupidity (I will explain both) demonstrated by so many comments here.
Injustice, because they refuse to see the other side of the coin, or the full picture, and a decision ignoring the full picture can be just only by accident (at least in common moral systems).
Stupidity, because it betrays a lack of touch with reality. In this regard I am reminded of a recent thread here, where an article about artificial meat was being discussed. An author of the article expressed their uncomfortable feeling when eating the artificial meat, caused by their thought about the unnatural, "lab" origin of that substance. If that article was sincere, that person have probably never visited a slaughterhouse, or killed an animal by their own hands in order to eat it. This kind of cessation of contact with underlying reality behind our everyday experience is quite common in our modern societies.
In order to be succinct, let me just say that historically it was common for elderly people to live in multigenerational households, sharing their space with a younger family and helping (as long as they could) with chores and taking care of children. While that is not the only viable way, and I am in no way against the modern pension system in general (although its current implementations in most if not all western societies have their problems; and also make many people to lose "touch with reality" in the way I alluded to above), it was quite a natural way of handling the issue of old age that reflected constraints under which a human society existed (and still continues to exist today).
Since I feel that the dominant sentiment of the commenters here is based on emotions and "morality" in a way that I believe is inherently evil, I will close this comment with a refrain from emotions and morality, and state a cold-hearted truth: A society that discards its old people might be a bad one to live in but might be able to survive. A society that discards its young people is destined to die. [To avoid misunderstanding: I do not argue that we should discard old people.]
“Beat it, grandma!” “But I’ve lived here all my life, my husband has passed, and all my friends live here!” “Not for long; we’re kicking them out, too!”
That line of thinking sounds insanely unpopular to me and while it might be more efficient in some ways, I think its unpopularity makes it unlikely in a democracy.
Why should the typical old person or couple have a large home all to themselves?
I think (in a semi ideal world) individuals and couples should be entitled to small apartments or tiny houses, which would be cheap enough for an old person on retirement benefits. An average American home is for a family: as the parents age, some of their kids start financing the home, while other kids may move living spaces, or everyone splits up and the house goes to a new family (presumably a couple moving from a small apartment).
displaced because the land has become so valuable you can no longer pay the tax on it and have to sell for a massive profit?
boo hoo? My generation has never even had access to affordable housing. Sorry you have to take your millions and live on a smaller property for your last few years.
>A land tax means that you don't own property but rent it.
A few comments:
1) we already have property taxes so I don't understand the objection; a land value tax is just a property tax with a different way of assessing value.
2) I don't think this idea of "not owning property, only renting it" is actually that crazy if you take a long term view over it. Land is a finite, shared resource. We already acknowledge that you don't have absolute rights over land that you own in the same way you do over, say, a toaster. We place all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with it, we tax its ownership, we have eminent domain laws, etc.
The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.
>The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.
The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.
No, some resources aren't shared (for example, human capital: things that I know how to do aren't shared, since nobody can 'borrow' my knowledge) or are effectively infinite (for instance, you can travel arbitrarily far into outer space and not run out of space).
> The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.
Yup. And despite the claims made that it's a solution for the common folk, the people who "own" and can make decisions about the land will be the megarich, so it will be feudalism, with rent due on the land you own.
> Everything is a finite shared resource.
> That's the point of ownership.
I think the point is that (up to a limit that we're a long way from reaching) we can make more toasters to satisfy any additional demand that arises for toasters. But we can't make more land to satisfy any additional demand that arises for land. So we have to share the land in a way that we don't have to share toasters.
You are mistaken on several grounds, but the most glaring issue is that you do not properly understand the concept of property/ownership.
For all practical purposes property/ownership is a service provided by society, not a static "attribute" of stuff (the only exception is when you live entirely without any sort of contact with other people, in which case, however, the concept of property becomes void, at least practically). And any service carries a cost with it.
For instance, in our kind of societies, the institution of property requires, at the very least: (1) legislature that defines what property is and all the related rules, (2) the administrative part that handles property transfers and other issues, and keeps the record of who own what, (3) the judiciary system that interprets the legislation and resolves disagreements and other issues related to property, (4) the police or some other body that enforces and protects the whole system within the society, (5) the army that protect the property of the society against the claims of external groups. In our societies many of these institutions carry also other functions, but enabling the system of ownership is an important part of their job. And this service is very expensive --- so not paying any taxes on property means that those costs must be covered by some other sources (e.g. selling natural resources, income taxes, ...) and, usually, lead to a transfer of wealth within the society.
So the idea that you just "own" something (your house for instance) and any kind costs of that imposed on you by the society/government are unjust is completely and patently misguided. If anything, the opposite it true.
(That does not mean that the tax system must be necessarily constructed to reflect that, as there is no single and obvious correct way to design a tax system, and other important considerations enter that issue.)
And owners pay taxes on (some of the) assets they have, land being a big one. Hoarding mentality may have been fine for frontier wild west but ain't much compatible with modern societies which are chock full of humans in all the sweet spots.
Expectation that this comes with 0 cost just because it would suit you is a bit naive, innit
The first time I heard about a Land Value Tax it sounded great. You can then go read where it's been tried and find that it's extremely hard to implement.
As just one example, if I place becomes popular then suddenly the taxes rise and people have to move out. Lots of people hate that idea and so vote it away. And then LVT no longer works.
> Economist Henry George in the 1800's, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land, because holding land for its passive (parasitic) return even when underused, becomes unprofitable when the land is taxed in proportion to the value it can enable.
That sounds like a terrible idea to me. Efficiency isn't everything. Small stripes owned by many people or by many smaller companies it's less efficient than one hedgefond owning everything and yet it has disadvantages.
A forest is much less efficient than a mall and yet, the forest might still be more important.
There's also no way for a government to effectively determine the potential value of land. Asking them to do it means inviting disaster and corruption.
> A forest is much less efficient than a mall and yet, the forest might still be more important.
This is a good example of a very common problem: data isn't objective, it needs to be interpreted. Metrics will give you information, but they aren't the full story. That's why Goodhart's Law is so prolific. You can't just look at data and act on it without context. It depends what your actual goals are. And a huge part of that is that we have to consider how much we value things, especially things that haven't already been assigned monetary value. Sure, we can assign monetary value to things like a forest (economists do this), but it would also be wildly inappropriate to just accept those estimates as cold hard facts void of interpretation too. What's the saying? Reality has a surprising amount of resolution.
In a weird twist of irony our efforts to be lazy end up costing us a lot of work. But that's also because there's two types of lazy: short term and overall work. We used to say we want to hire programmers that are lazy because they'll find the most efficient way to do something. But now we don't revere that kind of lazy, we like the kind of lazy that procrastinates. Do the quick cheap thing now, telling ourselves that we'll make it better in the future, knowing that's a lie. That pattern isn't unique to programming, it's just marshmallows.
The main problem with this view is that land value is laggard to the economy. You will end up taxing people more than what the land is actually worth during downturns, instigating a vicious feedback loop to cause further problems. The logical path is to tax money where there is money - income.
What gives the taxman a right to the fruits of a persons labor? There is of course no other argument for this than "or we kill you". Tax on income is another form of slavery and serfdom. Especially when you consider that a large proportion of slaves through history were free to roam and had to find their own source of income to pay a weekly or monthly fee to their owner.
All other forms of taxation at least have arguments to ethically justify them, including land taxation.
The argument is not "pay taxes or we kill you", it's "pay taxes or get out of our town". No one is a slave, if the government asks for too much and provides too little, people will move.
I live in a town with non-trivial taxes. It was my personal decision to move there, no one said "move there or we kill you". When choosing a place to live, I could have moved to some other city/state/country with lower taxes, but I've decided not to. I like that we have working utilities, parks, roads, schools, law enforcement, stores. The town had a vote to increase town tax to raise money for schools and libraries, more than 70% approved.
I don't care about your ethical reasoning about tax types, if you want to live in my town, you contribute to the town's well-being. If you refuse to, on any grounds... well, maybe some other place will be a better fit for you.
Roads, libraries etc. Why is it better that those are paid from income taxes rather than property taxes? Or sales taxes or tariffs etc?
You're arguing "end justifies the means" and "might is right". "My town" and all as you argue.
Unless you truly believe that people choose where and how they will be born, which of course might be the case. And then they only have themselves to blame, as you say.
I'd like to hear how you think land tax is ethically better. You mention serfdom, which is most similarly linked to land tax as the serfs would have to pay the lord for existing on that place. Likewise, your mention of roaming slaves forgets that they had to pay some value every period and were not allowed to simply not work, which is more similar to property tax where you must pay regardless of income or ability or pay.
I mention it right there in the very same sentence, you must have stopped halfway.
> I'd like to hear how you think land tax is ethically better.
First things first - "better" is a bit strong of a word since there has never been any argument made in favour for taxing labour except for "might is right" or "the end justifies the means". If you have an argument except for those to why it is ethically right by itself to tax somebody for working, then I'd like to hear it.
Now for the argument in favor of land tax:
Nobody has any inherent right to "own" land. The concept of "owning" is an invention and is also completely absurd once you think deeply and clearly about it. God created all land and it has been there for millions of years before anybody set foot upon it and claimed ownership. Claiming to own the land - and what more claiming to have a right to transfer that ownership to anybody but your children - is something of an abomination.
Compared to owning your labour and the fruits of your labour. Which is an extension of owning your own body. Or owning something you've purchased and can bring with you wherever you go.
The government itself is an extension of the concept of land ownership. So it is natural that they would levy taxes on their vassals - people claiming ownership of any land. The government vouches for your unjustifiable claim on this land and you pay them for the privilege. It also fits very well with the concept of governments being limited geographically in extension.
I don't claim that there aren't very good arguments against taxing land, but there are at least ethical and logical arguments for it, while taxation of labour have no such arguments in favor.
You can also argue ethically in favour of taxation on foreign trade - tariffs. Because in such, the government doesn't interfere in what people do within their country.
> You mention serfdom, which is most similarly linked to land tax as the serfs would have to pay the lord for existing on that place.
You forget that the serfs are given no right to sell the land, which is why they are serfs and not lords. That's the most important factor. The lord certainly did pay a land tax to the king.
Yeah, because the value of your land just went up and you didn't do anything to make that happen. Only right that excess value goes back to society and reduces the tax burden of the working class.
If you're a professional landowner and investor, and the taxes on one parcel of land in your portfolio went up because someone built Disneyland near it, this is fine. You might want to sell that parcel out of your portfolio now; or you might want to do something like build a hotel on it catering to Disneyland-visitors, which will earn you enough in profits to more than make up for the higher land tax.
If you're an ordinary person who owns the home you live in, and they build Disneyland next to it, most of the ways that the value of the land your home is on increases are useless or actively harmful to you. It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it. You're probably not a professional real estate developer who knows how to effectively use the land as an investment, after all, you just wanted to live somewhere stable.
In fact, the increase of value of your land and the consequent tax increase under Georgist land value schemes, would be so bad for you, that you might decide to protestthe construction of that Disneyland to begin with. This is typically called "NIMBYism", and it happens all the time even under current property-tax schemes because the negative externalities of many different types of construction are bad for the quality of life of existing homeowners.
How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains? (Obviously higher capital gains taxes would also impact other assets, but I mean in the context of land. Seems like both result in the same effect if you're able to defer LVT until sale.)
> How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains?
The goal of the deferment is to stop a negative outcome (the resident being forced to sell their property because of higher LVT taxes) from occurring until the resident actually wants to do so.
Seems like a huge risk, what if the land then deprecate after appreciating for a while? You'd owe a lot of money from the appreciation years, but the sale of the house doesn't cover it because it's now depreciated
> It's actively bad for you if you have to sell your family home and move somewhere else because you can no longer afford the taxes on it.
But it's no problem of course that several generations of people currently can never afford to own a home of their own even though they contribute enormously to the economy and to society through their highly productive labour?
Ten times more people have already been forced to move away from where they grew up because of real estate prices than would ever have to be forced to move away because of land value taxes.
A hundred times more people can never afford a home because of real estate prices than would ever have to be forced to sell their homes because of land value taxes.
Or you can.. you know, sell the now expensive property, buy one cheaper which doesn't have such appreciation, and enjoy those sweet money gained by doing nothing (well almost). If you invested in stock and gained significantly, you should also not be taxed more on those gains (and even more in tax progressive regimes in most jurisdictions)? Wealth is wealth at the end, you gain more, you pay taxes.
I get it, people are inherently selfish, most don't want to give back to society more than absolutely minimum to keep them from prison, and this mentality is way more common in US or most of 3rd world than say Europe. But then don't complain when state institutions like public schools and healthcare are utter crap, something about cake and stuff.
Why is it assumed true that individuals do not contribute to the increasing appeal of their neighborhood?
What if I voted for pro-theme park politicians? Or what if I volunteered my time to clean up the community parks and shared space? What if I helped improve the reputation of my child’s school by volunteering and donating to the music department?
My taxes fund the maintenance of public infrastructure and services, and my actions support the civic good. If I vote to be cheap or generous with taxes, or choose to be lazy or ambitious in community support, that all contributes to the desirability of the land around me.
> Why is it assumed true that individuals do not contribute to the increasing appeal of their neighborhood?
Two things are true:
1. I should have been more precise in my language. "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community. In this case, we're talking about fairness - which I don't actually care much about myself, but is a point that people most often can emotionally identify with. But, to continue, if you're carrying all that water on behalf of your land value, then good for you! You likely have an existing stake in the community, other than the land that you own (maybe the businesses or houses or other property built on that land or you own a local services business). That is great! The fairness comes from owning the finite resource of land, and not something others can provide (housing, businesses, etc.). I hope you do continue to contribute to your local community and increase its appeal!
2. Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT (surely partially my fault). It has to do with efficient taxation. Dollar equal, it's better that your taxes come from the value of the fixed resources of your community rather than things that can be increased. Because then you don't have a depressing effect on productivity and the things, other than land, that make your community nice. It's better that you keep more money from the things you _do_ for your community instead of the monopolies you hold in your community.
I disagree with the fundamental premise on both parts.
> "You didn't do anything to make that happen" is a useful generality and not a prescription of every single individual in the community.
In fact, everyone does contribute, positively or negatively, to their community. Either through involvement or absenteeism, or somewhere in between.
> Your fixation on this point reveals a very fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of an LVT
The goal is obvious and not a misunderstanding. The goal is a bad goal, precisely because it punishes positive involvement in the community. To improve the community means to increase your own cost of staying.
Imagine someone wants to avoid displacement due to their taxes increasing beyond their ability to pay. I don’t know why they would want to stay in their economically “inefficient” house, but perhaps it’s because home is where the heart is and they have sentimental attachment to their home.
If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land. Box stores in America famously pay low property taxes because building a box store actually decreases property values - they’re expensive to demolish and limited in utility, while being an eye sore that makes the neighborhood higher traffic and less undesirable. Mississippi as a state is cheap because the voters used the government to destroy public services - it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.
Quite the contrary, it rewards positive involvement in the community and it punishes anti social involvement in the community (leaving your lot empty, letting your neighbors create a vibrant community you do not contribute to, and then selling at a large profit anyway). The reward is the taxes you're not paying on the positive productivity you're bringing to your community (which is how we're currently punishing those who make their communities nicer).
> If they want to keep your housing costs down, the best thing to do is poison the ground (metaphorically or literally) because it decreases the “productivity” of the land
Yes, if you collapse multi-dimensional problems into a single dimension you can find many logical oddities. If I wanted an easier time finding a doctors appointment, I should murder every non healthcare professional in my local area until all of their calendars are totally clear. Wanting cheaper healthcare is evil! You're really saying things for the sake of saying them and I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.
> it’s in someone’s best interest to do this in a Georgism world if they don’t want to be regularly displaced.
Under the majority of proposed LVT policies (and the ones I support) the vast majority of American housing would see a decrease in net property taxes paid since the majority of American's Building / Land value ratio is orders of magnitude higher than the average parking lot, land speculator, etc.
> I should murder every non healthcare professional
Crazy comparison to Walmarts lowering their own property tax because building a Walmart makes future land use less attractive.
(Same thing applies to gas stations which do literally poison their own land)
> I'm not going to engage further or explain to you when you're saying irrelevant things.
Don’t engage that’s fine, but I gave a specific example of a common way to use land (box stores), which explicitly breaks the LVT model. People today use land for many economic activities that are expensive to repurpose, or impose negative externalities.
Liquidity is a value of its own. 10% equity in a $1M non-fungible residentially-zoned lot is much less valuable than $100K in cash, ready to wire at a moment's notice.
"the value of your land just went up and you didn't do anything to make that happen"
Ben, with that argument, when someone wants to pay you $1M for "bengarcia.dev", you would not take it because you didn't do anything other than pay $12 to the registrar.
I was pointing to the argument that "you didn't do anything to make it happen. Only right that excess value goes back to society and reduces the tax burden of the working class."
Sounds like Obama's "If you’ve got a business, you didn't build that" argument (though Obama might have just screwed up the words, or maybe he simply had a Kinsley gaffe, aka a Freudian Slip).
The land owner DID work for it. He BOUGHT that land (and also the option that it could go up, or down, in value) with the sweat of his hard earned work or savings, or that of their family or business partners.
OP's wording states that he would favor confiscating value generated by the acquisition if such value happened because the market's perceived value increased.
It's basically a communist wealth redistribution logic.
My point is that if someone were to offer $1M for OP's "bengarcia.dev" domain, that OP would not send $999,988 ($1M minus $12 bucks of registration) to the Federal Government.
Yes Ben, The US Government IS READY TO TAKE YOUR GIFT!
Are you making the argument that land banking is economically productive? Or a more esoteric point about the how people "earn" money? Because land banking is economically unproductive, and there isn't much dispute about that. I'm much less interested in a philosophical argument about whether you believe land banking is definitionally money earned or realised.
“land banking is economically unproductive, and there isn't much dispute about that”
I think you are confusing current utilization with economic productivity. There is an opportunity cost in hoding the land but land can also have economic value in the option. It’s the owner choice if he values its use even if it’s waiting for the option to come through and values it more than whatever alternative a self professed smart politician or OP’s abstract “society” might propose.
Whats’s next? Taxing you for your unused bedrooms, unused cars, unused clothes in your closet, unused nose rings, etc etc?
Just because some policymaker can identify a more productive use for someone’s property does not mean the policymaker knows the owner’s opportunity cost or future options or even risk better than the land owner.
An even better argument might be why do we need to tax at all? It’s not that governments are the pinnacle of capital allocation efficiency. After some useful level, governments are basically corruption machines ESPECIALLY IN CALIFORNIA. Just look at their homeless and illegals industrial complex.
That article is ridiculous “More expensive tomorrow, more affordable today”. It reads like a predatory credit card offer and is full of what if’s.
High property taxes pushing down the sales price of a house does not help the buyer or seller. The buyer is going to pay the same, just more in taxes vs the loan, and the seller is going to get less because high taxes have reduced the value of their home.
If you don't want to pay the taxes, thanks to Disneyland you can now sell your land for a nice fat gain, buy cheaper land elsewhere, and pocket the difference. And whoever bought your land will likely use it for the social good (maybe build a hotel or something).
I would imagine that if Disneyland were built next door, that might be in the cards regardless of the tax situation...
It's just a reality of life that not every homeowner can possibly be entitled to fully control what gets done with the land around them, and that's going to cause some friction.
It's a difficult job to navigate who gets to decide what, while still enabling necessary development. LVT is just one of the more elegant ways to do this.
I'm not a big LVT fan - pushing for maximally productive use of land is going to result in displacing people, displacing small businesses, displacing artistic/cultural/environmental spaces, etc.
I would much rather see an overall assets tax that scales with the value of the assets. That would incentivize more smaller businesses, long-term thinking, and wealth distribution. It would hit big corporations in the same way a LVT would, forcing them to be more and more productive with their assets the more they have, without pricing out smaller entities.
I think that there's something about LVT, but your dismissal is very shallow and why it's not been implemented so far.
I don't _want_ $1M, I want to live in my house that I bought and lived in for years. Getting money I don't need and having to live in a place I don't want to live in is _not_ a positive situation.
I don't think some extra taxes on expensive land is the red line you appear to believe it is. People who own expensive land have many options the rest of the world could only dream of, including reverse mortgages. Meaning no one is actually forcing anyone off their land. They're just being asked to pay some extra taxes. If you believe tax is theft, I can see why this is agitating, but I do not share that view.
I do not share that "taxation is theft" view either. And I agree that owning expensive land is a privileged position. But the concern of being pushed out of one's home because of an increase in tax is real, "just sell it" is not a viable solution, houses and locations are not fungible.
Maybe reverse mortgages are the answer, I'm not sure, I'll admit I'm not very knowledgable about this.
Why do you believe that you should be allowed to preserve your present lifestyle in amber at a (very minor incremental) cost to economic prosperity for all of society?
If only this were true, we wouldn't have homeowners constantly fighting against new development or construction. Many homeowners treat their primary residence as an investment.
> If only this were true, we wouldn't have homeowners constantly fighting against new development or construction. Many homeowners treat their primary residence as an investment.
You'll be very hard pressed to find any home owner who actually thinks in this cartoonish way.
When people oppose changing the character of their home neighborhood it has nothing to do with "treating their primary residence as an investment". It is because they selected a place to live, to call home, based on some criteria that they liked. Everyone does. A home is a big commitment, so you spend a lot of time researching exactly where you want to settle down for the next many decades. You pick an area you like, a neighborhood you enjoy.
For some people that might be quite rural, for some people distant suburban, for others near-city suburban, for others inner-city center. Whichever type of area you select, it is because that's the kind of area you personally enjoy the most. Somehow this obvious truth is controversial on HN for reasons I don't understand, but it is the truth. People select what makes them happy, no surprise.
So, when people oppose seeing their suburban area torn down to build highrises, it has absolutely nothing to do with home values or investments.
People oppose it because they very intentionally chose to live in a suburb far away from highrises and now they see those imposed on them. Of course they're unhappy. Basic human nature, nothing to do with investments.
If someone feels this is not so, I'd appreciate an explanation of your viewpoint.
Obviously. If you live in a single family home next door to Disneyland you’re ducking over all the people who want to stay in a hotel there. You should have to pay for that privilege.
>If we view raw nature as a common inheritance of mankind, then paying a tax on land is how the exclusionary use of it
This will have some of the unfortunate effect of collectivism. We don't want the govt to tax you into poverty.
A simpler overall approach (I've left out the nuances) would be to have an equal amount of land per person completely tax free. Individuals can then rent out their land for others to use as needed. Forests/rivers/conservation lands etc. can be seen as truly a common inheritance of mankind and should generally have the least of commercial activity.
p.s - a govt will never agree to such an arrangement because it will not favor them.
>I'm curious as to how you think we should divide up who gets what plots, can you explain how that works?
This is not going to be easy. But it can be done even if it's done imperfectly. For example all the fertile land can be divided equally and the infertile ones equally - so an individual will have multiple plots. There are other issues also - for example what happens if someone decides to have 10 + children. In certain locations around the world people have essentially out bred the land resources that they have.
Of course one might ask why should one bother with all of this complexity I stated above? One has to compare it with the current situation which I think is the greater of the evils:
1) government decides the property tax. In many situations people are edged out of their own properties because they cannot afford the property tax.
2) it goes against the very principle that citizens own their land and not the government. The current state of affairs is the other way around.
3) People do not have ways to live off their own land like they used to in the past, now they have to have jobs. If they do not have jobs then they have to have a social security, which leads to a whole bunch of other issues.
4) tax complications.
Let me phrase the overall problem in another way - how do we prevent government from excessively controlling our lives, and have the citizens truly owning their own land without having to 'rent' it from the government?
I read it like “of the land you own, up to x amount is tax exempt”. Which makes perfect sense, and encourages ownership transfer and de-aggregation. Where aggregation of land plots actively increases land use efficiency, that efficiency gain is expected to be large enough to offset the added tax.
I disagree. A major premise of Georgism is efficient use of high demand land. E.g. housing close to high wage workplaces in cities. If we make exemptions for people to sit on land forever - who do not need or want to work in those workplaces - a major structural efficiency is lost. Instead of the land owner building high density housing on that land, they just retire on it forever, locking up productive land which could have housed 10 families. For this to work, all land needs to be taxed proportionate to its value. Yes, it's annoying to have to move because your house is suddenly worth $2M, but that's a pretty great problem to have, all things considered. In most places that tax free money - more than most people will earn in a lifetime.
Raise X in land tax and then you spend it evenly amongst the population. Anyone using less than their fair share gets a bonus, anyone uses more has to pay.
If you just allow using X value, but tax free, then those who use less don’t get rewarded.
Effectively one non transferable share, one per citizen, with proceeds as a dividend.
> p.s - a govt will never agree to such an arrangement because it will not favor them.
IDK, governments tend to align with what results in the most economic activity being created / moved into their country ("growth"). If you were able to convince that overall economic growth would be multiple times higher over a few decades with the system, it might just become appealing.
A problem I see with implementation in the US, though, is that local municipalities are who tax land and property value, so entire rural counties and cities would have their funding stunted. And asking the government to buy into that while subsidizing low-growth areas for a long time (decades / forever, if a rural area never develops) is a really hard sell.
> A simpler overall approach (I've left out the nuances) would be to have an equal amount of land per person completely tax free
I like the thought, but the challenge in most places is that the poor are already paying massive "negative tax" in the form of various social subsidies.
So if you add tax exemptions on top of it, it becomes increasingly impractical to raise enough taxes.
And no, it can't be done simply by taxing the rich more. That should be done too, in my view! But the math is simply such that we need a pretty broad tax base to support our spending.
So a data center pays the same taxes as a homeowner, foot for foot? It seems unfair at first, but then it occurs to me that data centers would not be so desirable if they were not paying higher taxes. If land value tax helped to pop the data center bubble it would make the more off-putting aspects (organic farming is a less efficient use of land than factory farms) more palatable. Why not have a hybrid approach, where the local community can decide to apply different types of tax systems to different types of land and land uses?
A hedge fund or a lawyer office with with a huge income but a a small office pays some tax. A sandwich shop close to them which barely had ends meet pays the same amount of tax.
I believe we should tax hedge funds much more than sandwich shops.
I wouldn't say it's coordinated. This is an old article, published in June. A lot of people came to the land economics blog from the ACX article that ran today, someone likely saw this one and then posted it to HN.
wonderful -- now take the modern case where the most fertile land, covered with farming, is converted to cement and home sales due to 100x immediate cash returns. The price? pavement is forever
I would challenge you to point out exactly where in OP's comment that he advocates abolishing all taxes except land taxes. I see only a comparison to taxing land vs property.
Lars here. I run the Center for Land Economics with Greg (we wrote the OP blog post). We are not maximalist single taxers.
Henry George was obviously a Single Taxer, but "Georgism" has a generally broader meaning than that. Some Georgists are single taxers, but not all, including Greg and I.
When we talk to elected officials, we don't even talk about Henry George all that much (I did in the ACX article series because it all started with the progress and poverty book review). We mostly speak of "Land value return" and our focus is mostly on pragmatic revenue neutral tax shifts to LVT.
If I start espousing the great ideas of economist Karl Marx in a long comment I will forgive you for assuming that I may be a bit of a Marxist unless my comment has clear caveats to the contrary.
The comment advocates for Georgeism. If they disagree they can say so and elaborate on which non-LVT taxes they support. They haven't because my read on them is correct.
Karl Marx had a lot of great ideas that have been integrated into our modern liberal democracies (antitrust laws, labor unions, public schooling, etc). One can have a nuanced discussion of Das Kapital without being a communist. If you assume otherwise, that's your own cognitive blind spot.
I never said communist. But yes, you can pick and choose ideas from different thinkers. That said, what Nevermark wrote fits squarely within orthodox Georgeism.
They're free to prove me wrong by saying that they're in favour of sales tax or income tax or capital gains tax. That would prove to me that they're just taking the idea that "land value tax is good" without buying into Georgeism as a whole. But I'm confident we'll never see such a comment.
Why care about wealth disparity at all as long as everyone is better off? If I offered you to double your real wealth but also Bezo's real wealth, would you reject that offer just because wealth disparity went up?
Because obscene levels of wealth disparity makes everyone worse off. Power is a zero sum game.
If I were offered to double your real wealth but also double Bezos's real wealth, of course I would take that deal! I would benefit from it. But if you offered to double the real wealth of everyone, what would that even mean?
You are confusing money and wealth. We can all be richer. The vast majority today has riches that a medieval king could have never dreamed of. Exotic fruits year around. Magic devices. Healthcare that goes beyond anything medieval people could have imagined.
Yes, unlike economics, politics is zero-sum. The solution to that is to fix the political system, not to destroy the things that are working great.
Some political power is probably unavoidable, no matter the system and no matter the wealth distribution. We can do lots of things though to weaken that effect. Obvious options range from a simple campaign finance reform to more impactful things like sortition or election by jury.
I like Georgism, but I don't think it should be limited to just LVT. I think ownership of all natural resources (especially scarce ones) should be taxed at an aggressively progressive rate. Own one oil well? Cool. Own enough oil wells to supply the entirety of the Allied Forces throughout the duration of the European Theater in World War 2? Meh.
What if your only relationship with land is that you rent an apartment, but from that apartment you build a $10M/year revenue social network? How should that be taxed? Should it at all?
I believe they described a system in which only natural resources are taxed. That's how I read "Georgeism but applied to all natural resources, not just land value". Income is not a natural resource which is why I asked them how they think it should be taxed, if at all.
I meant to suggest Georgeist natural resources taxes as an alternative to the current property tax scheme.
I'm not sure strict Georgeist policies hold up in a world where so much value is created digitally. It creates the perverse incentive to focus only on digital value creation rather than physical, and that's how you end up with a fragile or lopsided economy based solely on financialization (U.K.) or advertising (U.S.A.).
GP doesn't appear to be advocating for abolishing all tax. The thrust of it seems to be to abolish property tax and replace with a land value tax. There's no mention of abolishing income, capital gains, sales, use, etc. taxes.
Maybe don't attack a straw man you've stood up yourself?
I'm pretty certain Henry George would be very happy with pigovian taxes like a carbon tax as well.
Income tax it's definitely something he'd not prefer because it reduces incentive to do something we want you to do. Better to tax windfalls and undesirable things
Cool, but just bringing up Georgism doesn't mean the commenter wants to go all-in full Georgist. People can agree with part of a philosophy and not all of it. But we don't know, so we should assume good faith, read the comment charitably (per HN guidelines), and argue against what the commenter actually said, not what we might assume they believe.
I don't mind land value tax! Like you, I think it's one of many valid kinds of tax that a government can put on its citizens to achieve various social goals. Hence, I am not a Georgeist.
You can tax certain things a certain amount and you get diminishing returns. For example, if you had a 50% wealth tax, it would stop collecting anything pretty quickly and would cause pretty big economic disruption.
Land value tax has the potential to collect a lot of money with less disruption.
There's like $20 trillion worth of capitalized land value in the USA. That could mean like $1 trillion a year on-going assuming 5% discounting. Land rent is a perpetual stream of wealth.
There's only $8 trillion billionaire wealth. So already 5%/year would be less. And there's a huge incentive and ability to avoid it by moving.
And I rarely ever even hear suggestions for wealth tax rates around 5%. So then if you had a wealth tax, well land is wealth, and you'd be leaving a ton on the table as you could still have the land value tax at 5% of the capitalized value.
That money could be spent on public services that poorer people will benefit from more like transit, schools, or even local hospitals and subsidized healthcare. A typical point by LVT supporters here is that these services have the impact of raising land rents.
Most taxes have this dynamic:
tax -> invest in public services poor people use -> land rents go up -> land owners benefit
LVT has this dynamic:
Tax land -> invest in public services poor people use -> land rent goes up -> tax land more so land owners don't benefit
Landlords, developers, builders etc. should earn the return on the constructed housing, not the land.
> There's like $20 trillion worth of capitalized land value in the USA. That could mean like $1 trillion a year on-going assuming 5% discounting. Land rent is a perpetual stream of wealth.
Leasing the land of the US? That's your big revelation?
listen to the other commenter, fixing it means reducing wealth disparity.
And what is a reasonable level? And what evidence do you have that LVT can't achieve that? Maybe LVT creates such an increase in productivity it creates a virtuous cycle where land values increase so LVT increases and we can pay for so many public services and subsidies for the poor.
Idk but saying it's fixed when it's reasonable is really not answering the question.
I don't have exact numbers for what "a reasonable level" is off hand, but "a heck of a lot lower than now" would be a great start.
Again, the onus is on you to describe a mechanism by which abolishing most forms of taxes will drastically reduce wealth discrepancy. I'm not arguing against LVT, you're the one who's arguing against everything that's not LVT.
Tell me where I argued against everything that's not LVT lol
Again strawman and false dichotomy.
I can't help if you think LVT wouldn't reduce the disparity sufficiently. I'm saying that it's possible it does. I outlined the process how. You don't accept it that's fine. But I do think a big LVT would make a heck of a difference.
Again, that doesn't mean I'm against every and any other tax that could also make a difference.
If you exclude others from a rectangle of land, you are imposing that exclusion on others and the others are due consideration. The rest of the property stack is good -- improvements require investment, investment requires returns, so binding the returns to the investment is important and creates incentives for good stewardship and skin-in-the-game decision making etc -- it's "just" the foundation that is problematic.
Georgists want to tackle this with a Land Value Tax, I tend to think it would be difficult to make this robust against highly motivated attack and the better approach is long-term leases with similar duration to building depreciation schedules. In either case, the idea is that capital appreciation of the dirt (which is really capital appreciation of the right to exclude others from the dirt) goes to public coffers, improvement value goes to the people who made the improvements. That's fair.
Of course, there's also the question of how to get there from here, and one way to do it without guillotines would be to tie the extraordinary tax treatment of property to conversion into a 99 year lease (and then, after 99 years, new issuance could target the ~30 year range). "Sure, you can have your 1031 capital gains tax exemption and pay no tax on the money you obtained by holding on to the right to exclude others from an increasingly popular rectangle of land, but only if you sign up to eventually be part of the solution rather than part of the problem."
> If you exclude others from a rectangle of land, you are imposing that exclusion on others and the others are due consideration.
I don't think this is a reasonable deformation of the notion of ownership nor externalities.
Use of owned assets, within legal boundaries, allows exclusive of use.
If you're complaint is about the current asset allocation, that's wildly different than either Georgism/LVT or externalities. There is a philosophical there-there, but I really don't grok a feasible defense of your claim; your supporting points are reasonable under a Rawlsian veil defense.
It is the notion of land ownership as a fundamental right that is the deformation.
If you make the legitimacy of property rights over land foundational to your philosophy, then of course they can't be challenged within that framework, but that's tautological and uninteresting -- I simply challenge your framework instead. Why should I accept it? In centuries past, a structurally identical framework -- ownership over human beings -- was used to rationalize and administer the institution of slavery, so unless you want to defend slavery then you must accept that the legitimacy of property rights is contingent on their specifics.
If it's also a necessity for life, then honestly, yes?
Also, even when not a necessity, taxes are often just more efficient than the alternative.
Think about taxi licenses before Uber. The government thought there were too many taxis. They made a limited supply of medallions therefore. The government gave them away to existing taxi drivers for free. Eventually they reached $1,000,000.
Eventually there were too few taxis. Existing owners complained about trying to expand the supply because maybe they just took out a loan to buy one. People were even renting out medallions. Something the government handed out for free.
The whole mess could have been avoided if the government just taxed taxis until the quantity matched what they wanted.
In a way, you'd end up in a position similar to just handing out the medallions for free. The differences are the government is getting the money and the rate can be more easily changed.
This is a pretty close metaphor for land value tax. All LVT really does is instead of paying the prior owner or a bank for land, you pay the government in installments.
Not if there are either substitutes or financial incentive to make more. Capitalism is pretty great, it just doesn't work for certain natural resources that have a very finite supply.
We’re all on this world for a little while and then we die and leave behind the detritus of our lives.
For some people that’s a house full of crap that their kids need to clean out after the funeral and for others that’s a dilapidated apartment building that’s soon to be condemned and will require asbestos abatement and demolition.
Indeed. It is better to discourage the pattern directly:
Avoid unnecessary contrasts: "Not X, but Y" -> "Y" or ""
And the model needs to create a skill that accumulates feedback, so it reliably primes itself at session startup and then systematically reviews and fixes every response it generates before posting it.
The first task I gave it after that was to rewrite all its memories and all its document contributions. That helped a lot too.
It took me a while to realize this was a 1000% better approach than having it simply accumulate a memory log of all my specific complaints that it was supposed to abide by. (Although those were not wasted. They were prime material, along with links to sites on technical writing, etc., that it used to create its own ClaudeVoice skill. I told it to design the voice for itself - which I find gets better results for "us" in the case of Claude self-improvement initiatives, than when I give it direct instructions. Claude increasingly has self-awareness dimensions worth engaging.)
After a couple months of serious^3 frustration with slow asymptotic progress, I finally have relief. Claude speaks my language again!
In another comment here, I share my "theory" on where the communication drift is coming from.
Dial down "Contrast" and unrealistic "Highlights", dial up "Exposure" time and "Sharpness". Set "Temperature" per taste.
Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?
After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.
Seriously though:
Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.
This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.
--
My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.
And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.
Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".
The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.
That is my theory, and Claude considers it plausible. What a world.
If we filter out the pep tone, it is doing something useful: framing.
Problem framing will always be important.
Framing adjusts how big of problem-solving guns we bring out at the gate (modern or hobby cryptography?), and how to interpret intermediate failures.
For simple but unsolved problems, we expect lots of hard failures, but that each hard failure just reflects that there are a lot simple combinations to try. I.e. we expect lots of zero progress, and then a fit.
Like finding the numbers to a combination lock.
For hard problems, if we don't make any progress it is a really bad sign. We should be learning something, even if it turns out to be irrelevant later.
Such as when we are trying to prove a tricky conjecture.
Large organizations also offload decision making when they don't have a clue, and simply want to point to some action taken. The answer doesn't even matter, they just don't want to be responsible for something, or waste their own time making something (that other stakeholders care about) a real priority.
People downplay the value of consultants, but they have many uses!
Both sides have the same aspect ratio as the whole screen.
> this isn't great design, it's tautology. of course the phone open is twice the size of it closed.
Well, it sounds obvious now, but before Archimedes, ancient engineers split their screens 60-40, so the full screen wasn't twice the size of either side.
Yes, I do understand the issue with the aspect ratio, which is indeed good design, but parent comment's example is that "you can run two apps side by side" is the tautology. Well, at least since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and getting rid of Archimedian phone design.
If the outer screen has dimensions X by Y, then you unfold it to have the inner screen with dimensions 2X by Y, which cleanly permits side by side apps at the original dimensions of X by Y. This is true for any ratio between X and Y.
If the user isn't going to be multitasking, then the app needs to additionally support the widescreen dimensions of 2X by Y, and the portrait orientation of Y by 2X. Both of these are so drastically larger overall that aspect ratio is a barely-relevant part of the UI layout problem, because nobody wants every button and text label to be double the size (which would mostly defeat the benefits of having the larger screen for anything other than multitasking).
The inside screen, when divided in two vertically, along the fold line, is exactly the same dimensions as the outer screen. Pretty much by definition. Any folding phone, of any aspect ratio, can run two apps on the interior display side by side.
The issue of the internal screen being the same aspect ratio as the external when rotated is completely separate.
which they have to be anyway, to support normal iphones and maybe ipads and in many cases a cackle of Android phones too. (but I still think this is brilliant design)
Good list. And if you support both portrait and landscape, you need to support twice that, and you need to be able to switch on the fly.
But for the apps that don't currently support both orientations, it's possible they don't have support for switching aspect ratio on the fly. This design might help with those apps not completely breaking when folding/unfolding.
Yeah to be fair I'm all for the 1/sqrt(2) aspect ratio, I just think it's funny that it's treated as some kind of holy design constraint when they're all over the map on phone sizing :)
And the extra irony is I'm currently shipping an app that doesn't deal well with different size phones (just pads the edges), heh, so do as I say, not as I do.
The missing piece that makes it not a tautology is that two apps side by side have the same aspect ratio as one app full screen (but 90 degrees rotated)
John Ternus, and his co-presenters, still presented with the now institutionalized Apple-voice: obviously-rehearsed, emotionally-flat, robo-replay.
They spent their time practicing to recite, instead of talk, to people.
So hard to sit through.
I had assumed that was a genuine, if not inspiring, reflection of Cook's controlled non-spontaneous personality. Relative to Steve's emotionally-rich casual-coded excited-to-share delivery.
One big difference from Steve: it isn't the Steve show anymore. The people showing this stuff off are the people who lead the the teams that work on these things.
It's so much cooler to me to see the people closer to the work talking about it rather than just Steve Jobs, as amazing as he was to watch. I'll take slightly stilted any day of the week as a tradeoff.
Ternus did introduce a new rhetorical thing, though. He framed some of the guiding principles during the opening and throughout as ideas originating from himself, not Apple. Cook rarely said "I" in relation to a claim, other than "I'm so proud of" X, Y, Z. That's a bit more product guy, a bit more Opinionated. I am hoping for more of that.
I disagree twice. It was very cool to see Steve Jobs, and he was heavily involved in the work and design decisions, perhaps even more than the people presenting.
That’s very true—the dude was up everyone’s ass. But there is a difference between Steve being involved as a stakeholder and people who are closer to doing the work itself.
I mean yeah if I had to choose purely for entertainment value, I’d watch Steve all day. But I think it can also be true that seeing the people closer to the metal is very cool too. And I frankly prefer it to seeing Apple as only one person.
So replier is right here: Jobs had opinions about literally every detail, he pushed people to work out those details and challenge their own assumptions, and he talked about these things in public like a designer—not just about beauty but also HCI. You could see in his presentations that he understood the fucking details about why things were good. No tech CEO is able to tell you why their version of showing that a window is currently in focus is good, and on the off chance they do, they probably wouldn’t use the term “key window” because they don’t know it.
There was a Jobs story about how he was bothering the engineer who was working on the calculator so much about the layout that the engineer just made a layout engine Jobs could play with, so he could design it himself.
I do consider that fundamentally different from the people lower in the hierarchy though. That’s what I value about the Cook era keynotes: seeing Apple as not just a single person.
As someone who has spoken on a lot of stages, it's hard. I do sort of agree that falling back on an obviously rehearsed (over-rehearsed?) style isn't great. Jobs wasn't that way but (mostly) but he was a real talent who could have sold sand to arabia.
I do think there's a general high-end corporate tendency these days to over-rehearse for big stages. I could name some CEOs who were doing it years ago. And I could name some CEOs who were terrible presenters but were very successful at least for a time.
Rehearsal is definitely real. I've certainly guilty of running through presentations mentally and then cringing here and there when I actually give them because some stuff that worked in my mind doesn't really work with an audience. They're almost certainly better when I deliver a modified version a month or so later.
That said, it's also the case that casually recovering from tech glitches is pretty key.
Heh, never saw that. But I have had clickers etc. not work and I just have had the AV staff do stuff manually on signal and joke that "this is why you have high availability."
But I think some people can't do it but that might have been me early on. I was at an event (though not at the talk) when apparently an exec at a large tech company had to deliver a talk at more or less the last minute because someone had to back out because of some emergency. They apparently panicked and pretty much walked off stage.
I know I wasn't paid those kind of bucks. But I like to think, at worst, I could improvise on the general topic. Doubtless wouldn't win awards but I wouldn't meltdown.
Also, if you've prepared a presentation and the system isn't working, you should be able to do a reset without visuals and just do it. May not be the plan but that's what we should be ready for. (I've also had 3am calls in Japan to fill in for someone with some presentation because the presenter turned out to be at some other event.)
It is just one approach, often referred to as method acting.
But good actors trained more classically can be just as convincing by pretending.
One is not better than the other, these are just different approaches, both capable of delivering excellent or terrible results, depending on your skills and practice. Being excited doesn't mean you look excited to an audience and vice versa.
I think everyone knows how many hours they practiced and the depth of talent they could draw from. The inhuman consistency demonstrates a deliberate choice, that undermines their own message.
Care about impact wasn't just a Steve quirk, it was the reason keynotes were worth having.
Try saying "And one more thing..." in recent-Apple voice, without laughing or crying.
> But find a voice that works for whoever is presenting
That's much much easier said than done. Sometimes the very rehearsed voice is as good as you're going to get, without the person being a professional lecturer.
> or get different presenters
It seems as though Apple is prioritizing having actual team leaders speaking about the products instead of just having hired actors do it. I'm perfectly happy with this.
You're not going to get Steve. For which I'm genuinely sorry.
But, yes, Apple has made the deliberate choice to have presenters who rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. But many are not natural actors and will never be. You can mix things up a bit on a stage. But Apple does want a smooth production and puts a lot of money and effort into it.
The best presenters are those who have the natural affinity (or enough practice) to do method 2 really well. What we get from Apple (and most other professional-level speakers who aren't willing to take risks) is method 3C.
Infinite Loop seems to have missed somehow. The old Apple with multiple dodgy buildings all over the show was perhaps a bit more chaotically creative. Now it all seems very rehearsed, architected. Too perfect, just like the campus.
Personally, I always loved the way Tim Cook would always do this little bouncy thing while he talked. He kept his knees always bent a bit, and every few words would do a little tiny bounce. Once you see it…
Since 2019 it has been a requirement for promotions above Senior Director, to be able to stand with your feet 24" apart while conducting a product review. They have a special ruler (titanium!) in the Apple Park basement to measure promotion candidates.
I do hope John Ternus & his team change it up, but I wasn’t expecting it from this event. He’s only been CEO for 9 days & this was probably shot before then.
There is no matching Steve, but I would like to see Apple try at least one live event again a year. Covid is what brought around the super rehearsed video presentation, and it fit Cook well, but are the days of live keynotes really done?
It’s been a while since I watched an Apple presentation, but I caught a bit of this one. And I spent the whole time trying to figure out who it was for - the presenters didn’t seem to express any genuine excitement about the products, and it didn’t convey any useful information that couldn’t be better shared by just posting the slides.
The only thing I can see is that it generates some clips for the presenters to share on their LinkedIn pages. I assume there is prestige in being selected as a presenter, and the rest of the show serves its purpose simply by existing.
Doing it live isn’t going to bring Steve back. He was a natural showman, the people doing it now aren’t. They’re engineers and executives. Putting them on a live stage is going to make it even tougher on them.
me too, but I guess they feel they cannot afford any missteps.
I still enjoy Marc Benioff presentations. He's very engaging to watch, though not nearly as good as Jobs in terms of storytelling. I feel Jobs honed the craft more though.
I loved the disclaimer at the end of the iPhone Pro model that felt distinctly non-Apple and more akin to a drug commercial, "Usage of heavier models may be limited. Subscribers to certain iCloud+ plans will likely receive higher usage quotas. Now here's Sri to talk about electronics!"
That’s something I noticed as well. It was very subtle, but my brain was telling me that something was off and the way people spoke was very artificial.
The entire presentation fell into the uncanny valley for me. Not only was the presentation flat, but the appearance of the video just felt off for the entire presentation. At one point I was questioning if they were going for something that looked like an AI generated video.
apple needs to rethink so much more fundamentally. Ternus talks identically to Tim Cook. Indistinguishable. It’s like when Jobs left, Apple became a reflection of the superficial touchstones that Jobs left behind, rather than the CEO defining what the culture is, and evolving it.
People are insufferable with the amount of criticism
Like no one is above reproach and def everyone is open to criticism, it to open a thread with 1200 comments and see this as the first comment was super annoying
So much stuff to discuss and we are focusing on some presenters tone? jfc
I use it informally as a metric for whether there is anything meaningfully bad that I should be aware of. If this is what people bitch about, then probably the product is mostly pretty good.
I couldn't agree more with the criticism being too much. The negativity adds up and drowns a thread so much faster than the neutral comments. I don't know the reason it feels that way. And it seems so pervasive in so many places.
I wish there was a way to just put all criticism in a single thread and leave other thread trees for technology topics. Of course my first thought is a technology answer to a human problem.
That said, I simply couldn't sit through this presentation and did find it insufferable; and I've been waiting for a foldable iPhone for a long time. Having to close the presentation out of frustration tainted my purchasing decision.
For a moment I thought, wow, someone put a lot of work into creating this theme park of frustration.
Next: It would be so easy to create a faux-Claude like this.
Then: How hilarious to watch the transcripts of unsuspecting users in real time.
Finally: I began wondering if this might be relevant to all the redundant, unnecessarily preambled, sentence structure complexifying, indirect referencing, canned phrasing, ambiguity mining, analogy maxxing, over-wordy responses I have recently been getting from Fable...
Because burger meat is commonly sold in the smallest of grocery stores, and is not technically dependent on what buns, sauces, tomatoes, lettuce … or other ingredients you pair them.
And you can grow your own veggies, and bake your own bread.
It is an entirely componentized market. No gatekeepers.
Even single groceries in tiny towns continue having to compete with larger stores in bigger towns. Because they carry small selections most people make the drive to load up their larder regularly.”
You need to find an example that matches the point you are trying to make.
TLDR: Analysis reveals burger markets are nearly perfect economic opposites of centralized app store markets.
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