Individuals seem to run on invisible currencies, not money.

Earning and spending money does influence our decisions, but to me most people seem to have other invisible drives.

Even businesses have goodwill: a $ valuation of many non-financial values.

I haven't done economics at university: is utility and externalities the only words that covers that concept?

For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.

Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.

I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.

Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways

The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"

I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.

It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.

These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?

And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.

This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?

One thing I notice is that very busy people, are often busy by choice. Yes they have work, but they're not slaves to working those extra hours... they choose to pick up that laptop at home because it is there.

Folks after school, their kids are busy, because they signed the kid up for a dozen things.

Not to say some people aren't super stuck in a cycle, the working poor with multiple jobs, I used to do that and it was exhausting. That's still a problem.

But even people with choices seem to choose to be busy.

The market is the cumulative wants and needs of the people matched against the cumulative offerings of the same people. Nothing more and nothing less. This room is clearly a need and a want for people and the market only prices it in a way that best reflects its cost when compared against all the other wants and needs and offerings.

I bet you can get people to pay it out of their pocket and not depend on the whims of a public organism.

The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.

Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.

Some even have seperate kids/teens rooms...

Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.

That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!

Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.

UBI's are extremely expensive (do the math on what it would cost the US to pay a measly $1000 a month for each citizen). Most economists are split on whether it's even possible to implement on a large scale.

There's a load of good posts on r/AskEconomics that go into the bitter realities of implementing a UBI if you're interested in reading more.

These positive externalities are supposed to be paid from the owners of capital, primarily via tax. This is how it very successfully worked for quite some time. However, most western societies have decided in the last few decades to believe two things -

1) The government and elected representatives (and thus, voters) cannot be trusted with the allocation of capital spent on social welfare

and contradictorily,

2) The government and elected representatives can be trusted with the allocation of capital when it comes to the market and the owners of capital

Both of those things cannot be true at the same time.

The article talks about picking up another shift instead of visiting grandma, but for some people, they can't pick up another shift. If most people pick up the extra shift, that becomes expected and locks out the people who can't and, in a society where all that matters is your income, you become homeless and die.

I'm actively preparing to end up homeless in 5-15 years because of this.

I have a full time job, but I also have MS. The ordinary financial advice for someone in my situation is to get another job/a side hustle/etc. to dig myself out of the hole, but that's not possible. It's also not possible for me to dedicate my 'outside of work time' to career progression (e.g. creating a portfolio since I can't use my work on the job since it's all proprietary) because I don't have 'outside of work time'. All of my outside of work time is either spent recovering from work or handling my health issues.

So I'm slowly drowning, and I know that there will come a time when I won't be able to make it. I can't work over 40 hours a week, so my society thinks I have no value and deserve to die.

I'm just hoping to hold on until I'm old enough to be ugly, because being a visually impaired homeless woman is just asking for constant assaults. Maybe that won't be true if I can make it to 50 or 55 with a roof over my head.

Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.

It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.

The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.

The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces are - gets priced out of existence. That park in the middle of the city? What a prime real estate location (see e.g. Berlin Tempelhofer Feld). That kindergarten in the next housing block? Creates noise, everyone complains, yeet it in favor of yet another overpriced restaurant that generates much more in terms of rent for the building owner, who is in more and more cases some huge ass REIT backed by pension funds. That youth center? Tear it down, it's all used only by migrants (yes, I've seen that take way too often for my liking), and replace it with yet another soulless office building in a city that already has too much of it.

It would be one thing if this issue were only limited to the US. They voted for it, they should suffer from their choices. But unfortunately, there is so much money in the system it spills over to Europe, and now US backed investment funds are buying up healthcare and real estate here as well.

It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.

Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.

Heck, the article mentions Internet cafes but those died out once computer and smartphone penetration reached high double digits.

There are fewer of these third spaces because there is less demand for them than before due to changing preferences, as could be seen with the decline of church members as well as pubs or innovations making them irrelevant like Internet cafes.

Instead of trying to push back against what is now the norm, maybe try to think about how to minimize the negative impacts of what are now common attitudes? But that requires admitting a lot of people on here are absolutely out-of-touch boomers.

He wrote 2 major treatises: failings of capitalism, AND Communism.

This falls squarely under failings of capitalism. And you don't have to be a Communist to acknowledge failings of capitalism. But we can still identify failings under the correct name.

Naming the problem allows us to start fixing the root causes.

The rest of the article can basically be summed up with "work takes too much time and pays too little", which is absolutely true.

I am not sure what the jab at stay at home moms or grandparents who help with childcare is supposed to be. Probably some other communist drivel. Grandma absolutely did not do unpaid childcare, she was insistent she had to teach us right and also got tons of labour and money from my parents. If the exchanges of money and labour between parents and grandparents in the context of childcare were measured, it would probably double the nation's GDP.

> And the economy looks at you taking the shift and concludes, smugly, that the shift must have been the most valuable thing you could possibly have been doing, because look, you chose it

I struggle with economics as a discipline. Or more precisely, I struggle with the parts of economics that get treated as if they are describing human life with scientific precision, when they often seem to be describing a very strange fictional creature who happens to resemble a spreadsheet.

There is a lot in what we might loosely call microeconomics that I find genuinely useful. It gives us a language for trade-offs, incentives, constraints, opportunity costs - all the little pressures and choices that shape daily life. Used well, it can help us understand the world more clearly and make better decisions inside it.

But then there is the other stuff. The grander stuff. The part that starts making confident claims about whole economies, whole societies, whole populations of supposedly rational actors - and this is where my patience starts to wobble.

Because so much of it depends on assumptions that feel heroic at best and comic at worst. Take something as ordinary as buying a loaf of bread. How much time do you spend, in that moment, weighing your expected future tax burden? For most people, across most of human history, the answer is: none. Absolutely none. The bread is there. You need bread. You buy the bread.

And yet models that assume people behave as if they are constantly running these elaborate forward-looking calculations end up informing policies, forecasts, and decisions that shape the conditions of everyday life. That is the part I find hard to swallow. Not because models are useless - they are not - but because the gap between the modelled human and the living human can be treated as a rounding error, when sometimes it feels like the whole problem.

> A basic floor of income that everyone gets,

Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.

"The Market" (God) would never have built such a place! The market (God) punishes any behavior that is outside its predilections! We must sacrifice to appease the The Market in order to gain its favor!

Back to the 3rd space for teens. What is the first issue you think of when teens gather in that 3rd space? Behavior, what are they doing, how will it influence them and eachother. This is where the religious moral code and moral guidance comes in. At a church (or w/e) there will be someone there who would at least monitor them. And sure its beset with issues but so is everything at some level.