As usual, "empowering" the FTC to issue fines, or even allowing private suits, is ineffective on its own. The fines need to be required, their levels set by law in a manner proportional to the size of the companies involved, and it needs to be made clear that there is no statute of limitations and that all growth built on ill-gotten gains from past surveillance will (not can) be rolled back when the hammer finally drops. That means, e.g., if you start using surveillance pricing in 2016 and you get caught for it in 2026, everything your company (and its executives and board members) gained in the interim will be rolled back. Current conceptions of punishment for these types of things are simply way too low. The entire tree that has grown from these kinds of activities must be pulled out from the root to adequately deter potential malefactors.
Just eyeballing those graphs, the striking thing is the difference from the beginning (early 70s) to the peak in 2012. During that period, reading scores only increased by 8 points while math increased by 19 points.
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.
One thing I notice is there seem to be far more students who finish elementary school unable to comfortably do basic math in their head (stuff like 17+36 or 144 or even basic multiplication tables like 38).
It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.
The question is whether the well-off person moved in from the same market, or from elsewhere. (Also, whether they vacate their previous unit or, e.g., keep it as a vacation home.)
None of those are really pertinent because it doesn't change the fact that the well-off person is going to occupy an additional housing unit in this scenario no matter what.
The question is whether it's going to be new construction that they occupy or existing construction. If you're not well-off you'd want that decision to end up with "new construction" so you can move into "existing construction" at a lower rent/mortgage than if new construction didn't exist.
I don't think that is necessarily true. I believe there are, for instance, many reasonably wealthy people who live somewhere outside California and would not move into a dumpy old apartment in LA or SF but might move into a fancy new one. In other words, they will not occupy an additional housing unit (in a given market) unless it is "nice" enough.
I am in favor of building new housing, but I'm even more in favor of reducing wealth inequality. I think we can do both, but we need to be deliberate about it.
> I believe there are, for instance, many reasonably wealthy people who live somewhere outside California and would not move into a dumpy old apartment in LA or SF but might move into a fancy new one. In other words, they will not occupy an additional housing unit (in a given market) unless it is "nice" enough.
That's the point, the "dumpy old apartment" was never going to be the thing stopping the rich person from moving in.
Due to overlap in preferences amongst a multitude of people, the rich person would free up the housing they like by buying it from whoever, who would then free up slightly-less-good housing in the area by kicking out someone else (with money, to be clear) and so on down the chain until you get to the "dumpy old apartment", whose rent now rises because there are more people interested in moving into it due to lack of other options.
New housing, even if it's new 'luxury' housing, breaks this chain of housing migrations in the area before it gets to buying people out of their dumpy old apartments.
Taken to extremes you'll have all wealthy people living in California, and the rest of the country available to us plebs.
The greatest tool we have to reduce wealth inequality is make it so people can buy homes - and the biggest levers we seem to have there are making supply available in general, and making jobs available where there's already supply.
> Taken to extremes you'll have all wealthy people living in California, and the rest of the country available to us plebs.
Which is exactly what people are afraid of happening, and what they mean by the crisis of housing affordability.
You can go and buy or rent a cheap house today in probably 90% of the localities of the USA. Of course, if you already live in those places, you probably don't have the money, because good work is very hard to find.
The problem of housing is that regular people want to live in NYC, and Chicago, and LA, and all of these places, and relatively near to where their jobs are, and they're seeing the rich own more and more of the space that could have allowed them to do so.
"The problem of housing is that regular people want to live in NYC, and Chicago, and LA, and all of these places, and relatively near to where their jobs are"
It's not clear in your phrasing, but it sounds like this is a casual correlation. It's not... Many people only want to live in these cities because it's the ONLY way to get work, given a choice they would quickly move out.
Or, maybe the jobs are there because people companies want to hire want to live there. We have a way of testing this now given that remote work is a thing. We can see if people would rather work remotely from a cheap house in rural Kansas and have nothing to do in the evenings or live in an expensive apartment in an exciting city where their job is.
It is a cycle that always leads to increased population density, and has done so since the dawn of agriculture. People tend to go where there are more people, and then work and entertainment happens where most people are, which attracts more people, and so on. This was as true in Ur as it is in NYC.
>I am in favor of building new housing, but I'm even more in favor of reducing wealth inequality. I think we can do both, but we need to be deliberate about it.
For a website to stay online, it is not required that the website itself make money, let alone that it do so via ads. For instance if your website is directly selling an actual product, you can make money by selling that product. Or you can make money by having an actual job, and use that money to pay for the website.
And if the place you work at has a website and internet presence which they get traffic for and use for inbound customers?
If they can't pay you because they don't have customers, how will you (in a job) pay for the website to stay online without a job without using your savings?
I would go further and say that there is just no such thing as "this future is coming regardless" once you get out of the realm of physical facts. One of the things that by turns depresses and enrages me about so much punditry (especially in tech) is this notion that there is some sort of inevitable socio-techno-psychological force propelling human society in certain directions regardless of the will of actual humans.
Nonsense. We as humans make our society; it is nothing but what we make of it; we can make it what we want.
As you point out, people who say otherwise are usually really saying "too bad for you who don't want the future to be this way, because I do want it to be this way and I'm working to make it happen".
Federalism is a red herring. For every case of "federalism is good because it let the states do this good thing" you can find a case of "federalism is bad because it let the states do this bad thing".
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