I’m not sure if this post fits the Effective Altruism forum. It sounds like a pretty known problem and I except the tractability of possible solutions to be extremely low.
I think it’s currently intractable because a lot of people (and probably policymakers) have the wrong intuition that high rent isn’t extremely wasteful, it’s just money flowing from tenants to landlords, and if they offset that with wealth distribution in the other direction then little is lost.
If they see that a lot of work is lost, they might change things.
I’m not sure the assumption “awareness of problem → people will change” holds (though probably a necessary condition), especially when there are strong and entrenched power dynamics in place, with the opposing side having a lot to lose. At a minimum, you need an alternative model to point to that works.
So it’s part of the problems I place in the category “too hard, let’s focus on something else”.
You’re probably right, and I admit I’m not planning to devote very much of my life to solving this problem either :/
But from the point of view of costs and benefits, it (probably) isn’t that costly to make a few policymakers aware (of the enormous economic waste due to high rent). And even if the new city idea is stupid, it’s plausible policymakers will change their behaviour sufficiently that rent prices actually will go down by a bit.
I’m not sure if this post fits the Effective Altruism forum. It sounds like a pretty known problem and I except the tractability of possible solutions to be extremely low.
I think it’s currently intractable because a lot of people (and probably policymakers) have the wrong intuition that high rent isn’t extremely wasteful, it’s just money flowing from tenants to landlords, and if they offset that with wealth distribution in the other direction then little is lost.
If they see that a lot of work is lost, they might change things.
I’m not sure the assumption “awareness of problem → people will change” holds (though probably a necessary condition), especially when there are strong and entrenched power dynamics in place, with the opposing side having a lot to lose. At a minimum, you need an alternative model to point to that works.
So it’s part of the problems I place in the category “too hard, let’s focus on something else”.
You’re probably right, and I admit I’m not planning to devote very much of my life to solving this problem either :/
But from the point of view of costs and benefits, it (probably) isn’t that costly to make a few policymakers aware (of the enormous economic waste due to high rent). And even if the new city idea is stupid, it’s plausible policymakers will change their behaviour sufficiently that rent prices actually will go down by a bit.