Seriously, money doesn’t actually create anything, and there are actually finite physical resources in the world.
Awesome—that’s normally my line of argument when someone starts talking about large-scale behavior as if it were financed by a single entity. I’m very happy to see the reminder occurring more often.
At smaller scales, however (at a city level, even), money is a fine proxy for resources. We’re talking about living space, not land area—steel, concrete, and labor are pretty elastic in their exchange rate for money. Heck, many of the speculators (or just rich people who want to live there, and everything in between) WOULD pay extra for the underwater/floating arcologies.
It seems to me that you really, truly only want to build housing (or anything else) if it’s going to actually get used.
It doesn’t seem that to me. I don’t think housing is all that special of a good, and I don’t feel entitled to judge people’s reasons for wanting the attributes they care about in their goods. I want to build housing (and everything else) if someone wants it enough to pay me more than I spent to make it. At larger scales, the exchange medium for “pay” may change from currency to other promises of future output of goods and services, but that doesn’t change the underlying desire to provide everyone whatever they want, at a (small, if competition is unconstrained) profit.
Awesome—that’s normally my line of argument when someone starts talking about large-scale behavior as if it were financed by a single entity. I’m very happy to see the reminder occurring more often.
At smaller scales, however (at a city level, even), money is a fine proxy for resources. We’re talking about living space, not land area—steel, concrete, and labor are pretty elastic in their exchange rate for money. Heck, many of the speculators (or just rich people who want to live there, and everything in between) WOULD pay extra for the underwater/floating arcologies.
It doesn’t seem that to me. I don’t think housing is all that special of a good, and I don’t feel entitled to judge people’s reasons for wanting the attributes they care about in their goods. I want to build housing (and everything else) if someone wants it enough to pay me more than I spent to make it. At larger scales, the exchange medium for “pay” may change from currency to other promises of future output of goods and services, but that doesn’t change the underlying desire to provide everyone whatever they want, at a (small, if competition is unconstrained) profit.