To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The super farms are as important as ever.
Because farms are hyper competitive, it means that the surplus and efficiency gains are not kept by the farmers.
And it's not just 'super farms' - its' transportation that enabled 'regular labour farms' in low cost areas.
So the benefits go to distributors, packaged food makers, grocers and consumers.
In this case, mostly to consumers.
You can see the charts for the kinds of work people used to do vs, now aka we used to all live on farms, now we do all sorts of things.
This is why we're seeing an pushback on globalization, economic optimization doesn't always balance out with strategic considerations aka food supply security etc. and those are hard to put on the books because they feel like a 'non-market force'.
A 'subsidy' feels like welfare, it's really and adjust of the balance of power.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was also developed by one person. Developers could also be absurdly efficient in the past, see valve and half-life 1 as an example.
It means little to give examples of cases where developers punched above their weight and arguing it was because of reason X they could achieve it in the first place.
How many people failed, was it because of missing tools?
Like before, people will attribute some of their performance to tools, that in reality didn't matter at all.
We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.
[1] https://fangamesdb.com/games/project-reclaimer-halo-3.html
The main difference I see is they used Claude to write patch notes. ReSkate is pretty strict about only using AI for code, all assets and official comms are human made. I guess it's because a lot of their players are real life skaters and that community hates anything that looks fake.
It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally what raises living standards for everyone.
The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.
China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 10 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.
Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.
In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to allow building new homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1,000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).
We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.
Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.
Overseas has so much film infrastructure now that Hollywood flies out the entire cast and essential crew (DP, etc.) to work on American productions overseas. They hire cheaper local crews (who are non-union), rent cheaper facilities, and even collect foreign tax subsidies.
It's far cheaper to produce everything in the UK, Eastern Europe, or Asia than it is to film in LA. Or even heavily tax-subsidized states like Georgia.
America can't compete on film production cost anymore. So it's halfway through the process of leaving, except for shots that need to film in iconic cities like New York for certain key scenes. But even then, you might see only part of the production happen in the US.
This started during the pandemic content streaming wars. There was a huge demand for content, American studios were shut down, and Amazon and Netflix dabbled with trying to shoot overseas. They found out the foreign infrastructure was just fine and that they just needed to teach the local crews a few things to be able to lift and shift the entire production pipeline. And it was so much cheaper that the choice to move everything was obvious.
Hollywood didn't lose its relevance overnight. It's been a slow moving process as the film -> digital -> portable transition made production cheaper, the internet made talent cultivation/distribution easier, studios and audiences expanded internationally, unions kept ratcheting up rates, LA refused to build homes while population ballooned, QE/ZIRP/0% rates re-inflated a housing bubble, unions kept raising rates to keep up with housing in LA, internet/social content began competing with studio productions hurting demand, the incestuous hollywood-to-traditional media marketing pipeline died (much of old print/tv media existed to market Hollywood stars and products), etc. etc.
Netflix is a global company marketing content for global audiences (the majority of their revenue is non-US) on a level that was unheard of during the heyday of Hollywood. There's a few billion people now who have TVs and enough leisure time to stream hours of film/tv content. This is just within the last 15 years.
Most of the markets growing the fastest aren't going to relate to blonde movie stars doing car chases around LA in the same way US or western European audiences (the bulk of film revenue in the early 2000s) used to.
Disagree. Good content is good content. International audiences show up for good American films, and Americans (increasingly) show up for good international films.
What are into the blonde movie stars is TikTok.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.
Except cinema tickets prices got raised, if we were still talking about Hollywood and its entertainment industry.
> Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people.
Quoting outliers and exceptions is not supporting your argument. Concurrently, a lot of people figured they are super shrewd and will make AI-generated games and guess what, barely anyone buys them. There are social and taste factors in art. It's not a chart with a line climbing up. A lot of normal folk, myself included, see AI-generated entertainment as low-effort and a plot to get their money while the other guy is snoring and is having 2x RTX 5090's make him money in his sleep.
People don't like that. They don't have to be proficient in IT to see what's going on and to dislike it.
> The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top.
Yes. That is what your parent comments are saying -- that they are not seeing the common folk get too many benefits (if any) when the dust settles, which it still has not. They/we are saying: it's going to get objectively and measurably better only for the richest class.
> That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The only thing at this point that is likely being revolutionized is our cooking skills because we should learn to cook rats and roaches -- because those on top care not about you and me. No, scratch that. They care. But they want us gone.
Almost nobody wants human workers per se, they just don't have a choice. The LLM era shows this acutely and clearly; many businesses rushed to fire people BEFORE they had proof LLMs will get their work done at all. The social and economic aspects of "nobody wants human workers" have been there forever but it was accepted as a necessary evil.
Now, many capital holders have an excuse _and_ a tool to want less -- or zero -- human workers. We are currently living in this boiling pot and your vaguely optimistic comment does not line with the reality I am observing.
Maybe, historically speaking / era-wise, i.e. 50-ish years from now, everything will be alright, a new equilibrium will have been reached and the humanity will be objectively happier generally and per-capita.
That will not comfort a talented VFX artist, a programmer, a sysadmin, a lawyer, and many others, when they have to get their half-paid house confiscated and go live in shanty towns and form a gypsy-like society so they can survive at all.
"Historically..." arguments are boring. What happens _now_? How is society and economy and the rich class handling the turbulent changes in the last 2 years? How will they handle them in the next 5 years?
The problem is, in a world running on next-quarter financials and bonuses, long-run disadvantages don't matter as long as the persons in charge of decisions can fuck off with golden parachutes before the house of cards crashes down.
> Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Or everyone tacitly agrees on a new low standard of product, maybe adds in regulatory capture to prevent competition from rising, and even if you want, you won't be able to find an alternative. Enshittification galore.
When one guy (this guy certainly isn't the first or the best) makes a thing that manages to catch fire a bit, the big players can simply buy it. They can even force a sale, or otherwise refuse to let it be widely distributed or marketed. That's the stick, the carrot is that if it's genuinely resonant with people, they can just throw you life-changing money (i.e. pocket change for them) and generate billions for themselves.
Music barely democratized when production got in reach of the masses; as film production got cheaper, quality indy films became fewer and harder to find, and never in a theater; and as video games become cheaper to produce, Steam can make or break any of them at will, and do the same as any other monopolistic distributor - if they don't, it is by choice. If it is by choice, the person who made that choice will eventually be replaced with somebody who mocks that choice, because they will pay the most.
"Efficiency" doesn't benefit individuals at all without antitrust; it is extracted like any other value. One thing that changed about the music industry is that when it was a thousand companies, you could just bring talent and they would put you where you would earn them money - now that all media is owned by a few companies you are literally expected to bring a hit album to a record company before you get signed, and getting signed then gets you access to the media, wide distribution, and venues. They don't really even pay you, you pay them. Since they control distribution, they don't even really need talent - they can just imitate it. The reason they're giving you a deal is in order to tax your success.
The impact of the Industrial Revolution was that people were forced off of their farms, which were merged into super farms, exactly as they expected. They went from working for themselves for six hours a day, and living in relative comfort, to working for 14 hours a day and living in crime and disease ridden tenements. Their lifespans decreased by a decade. The air, land and food was poisoned. They likely died before they saw any improvements in this, and those improvements eventually came from anarchist and communist unions, and their own education about how they were being used. Then those unions and organizations were crushed, and their names were cursed; even somehow the word referring to the members of the "People's Party" became an epithet to throw at people who thought government had a responsibility to the people. Term limits were introduced so they wouldn't have a president like FDR again, although FDR's reforms ironically served to weaken the unions that saved them, so they could be destroyed completely subsequently in the name of war.
Even today, people say "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" and don't know that it is something a judge said about a left-winger passing out antiwar pamphlets. They just repeat it, because they heard it. That's what happens when someone controls distribution.
I believe in efficiency. Efficiency under capitalism without effective devices to maintain competitive markets is simply more value for the parasites to extract.
Everybody found it easy to imagine the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That's why they broke frames.
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
Also, at the time (and still somewhat today), Netflix was the only one to really think globally about a content strategy.
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
Looking at an article from the CATO institute, over the last 30 years wages have climbed 169 percent, while food prices 111 percent.
But an even better measure is PCE, or personal consumption index. Rather than CPI, or any other "household basics" measure, which subjectively categorize goods and then tracks those, PCE measures the total dollar amount spent by the entire U.S. consumer sector on goods and services. This is what is used by the FRED database referenced in the reply above.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/why-dire-pronouncements-abou...
It’s 30 to 50% of most peoples paycheck, it’s really the piece that matters and the one that is most complicated to solve.
I'm semi-convinced that the reason why we see so many bad ideas in housing is because the good ideas negatively affect too much of the voting public. Or, they perceive the ideas as negatively affecting them.
Perhaps my view is too California-brained, but homeowners here like high prices because it gives more flexibility to downsell, they can get large home equity loans, and Prop 13 ensures they won't be paying full property tax (at least if they've been living there for a while). Even for those planning on living there until they die, their children would still like to inherit a valuable place.
At any rate, I didn't intend to limit the reasons to just price. The solution is to build more housing, but building housing is unpopular, and it isn't hard to see why. So we end up with bad policy like rent control instead.
This is not true.
Not that it matters as I don’t think this is what motivates NIMBY’s but for anyone reading that believes so, this is incorrect.
The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value. And this shows up county after county [1]. Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
[1] https://gardner.utah.edu/news/recent-apartment-construction-...
And this is why large property owners fund YIMBY organizations. I have no idea how they've managed to convince people of normal intelligence that relaxing restrictions on zoning lowers property values, and that's why the selfish senior citizens who stubbornly continute to live in the homes they've lived in for decades are against it. It doesn't make any mathematical sense at all. They just are willing to believe anything that promises to give them what they want, which is other people's homes who don't want to sell and who don't want to live next to 900 people on a tiny lot with no parking.
The most insulting part is when they pretend that this is racism, while YIMBYs have been gentrifying black people from the neighborhoods they've been in for centuries, into the woods. The reason they're so frustrated about senior citizens in San Francisco or wherever is because they can defend themselves, while black people can't. Black people are being annihilated from urban neighborhoods; you're seeing them replaced by rent-stressed immigrants who don't have families or connections in the country to retreat to.
> Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.
No, it's a win for people who sell. It's not a win for people who want to keep their homes, and their communities. It's a win for alienation and cultural destruction, pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away.
Community is still community in a condo.
>>"pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away"
Imperceptibly different from the argument JD Vance makes against immigrants. Maybe rethink that tack.
Go to Manhattan and tell me that housing isn't built because of NIMBYism. It's: RTO (very important!), cost of land (land isn't increasing in volume), end of tax subsidies (programs that gave developers tax breaks), zoning (hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing - is that what you consider the correct line?), jobs (the economics of people moving to a place) and many many many more factors.
About once a week someone with a singular conception of the world of housing comes and you need to open their minds up a bit.
You want to lower housing costs? Maybe increase public transportation, give workers rights to work from home, and invest in expanding the suburbs by making them more dense. But don't do that until AFTER you've established the infrastructure piece. Not everyone wants to live in LA or Austin and spend hours in cars.
If you don't do these things then people all want to live in the same place, which is far more impactful than this "NIMBYism" thing, not everything is your local HOA or little town's regulations.
“hey let's demolish all the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and replace it with affordable housing”
Or just rebuild them in the commercial space under the new taller condos, so more than just the nepo trust fund babies or lottery rent control people can live in them. These are all non-issues once you get over people’s aesthetic preferences.
This is not just a California issue, the space between downtown and midtown is severely under-built when compared to the economic output of those spaces.
How would Greenwich Village look if you turned it all into towers of rental apartments?
France uses expansion of the suburbs to make housing more available, and that includes trams, buses and yes, Metro expansion. You don't need to demolish the fucking bistros and parks to replace them with towers.
In NYC it could be done with NJ Transit being replaced, and better transportation. Then the border areas would become more dense because the investment returns would support it. People would want to move there to work in Manhattan.
Please don't turn world class cities into your LA or Houston Hellscapes of cars and highways. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a tiny one bedroom apartment in a real city than half the price in those soulless, cultureless places where you spend all day behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Back in the 1800’s when the more dense haussmanian architecture was put in. I’m sure their equivalent of pretty jazz clubs then were mowed down too. But over a 100 years the more housing made space for more people and better culturally richer city.
New York is a newer city, it’s time to densify is now.
I’m literally trying to densify, so that’s the anti-highway move. Tear down all of FDR and put in more NJ transit for all I care, I Love the Path.
We can do both, put more transit it and densify the low density sections of Manhattan. So more people have more choices.
Blocking this on aesthetic and legacy preferences is morally wrong.
Absolutely wrong. Haussmann's restructuring of the city was intended to REDUCE overcrowding and darkness due to the narrow alleyways, not to mention illness from the overcrowding. He lowered density, built parks, and then Paris expanded a lot when they absorbed the suburbs in the 1860's. Today Paris is extremely high density, and they're again expanding into the suburbs - look up Grand Paris projects. But the 6 story buildings aren't being demolished to make 30 story buildings like you seem to be suggesting is the thing to t do.
As much as I rail against a soulless place like Houston (with no housing restrictions like in NYC or Cali), I also don't want to turn our cities into Shanghai or New Delhi.
And by the way, what makes you think building more makes housing cheaper? It's not like making widgets in a factory. Gentrification makes things more, not less expensive - have you seen the history of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Rezoning it turned it into a lux neighborhood with an Apple store, and attracted people from around the world.
There’s no point fighting against known norms in economics now. Induced demand in housing is hogwash: there are a certain number of people who dream of moving to east village and that number doesn’t magically grow if you build more housing. After decades of underbuilding, yes the demand is high, but it’s not infinite. Build out the suburbs too, build good transit, split the difference and the housing prices stabilize.
I was there a few years ago in the summer, and figured I’d go see live music at night, and there just was literally not any to see besides at the megavenues. And surprisingly few bookstores for a city that size. I think it’s possible there are more independent bookstores in New Orleans than in Houston, a much larger and wealthier city.
As a homeowner I don't want to see my home price go down relative to all other homes as that leaves me in a precious position if I need to move, but if all homes fall in price together then that actually makes the prospect of moving less risky as, if I have to move into a house that is a step-up from the one I have, the cost to do so is lower. That would be an improvement over the status quo. High housing prices are a problem even for those with significant equity in a home.
But who doesn't want to see their wage go down is those who build houses. This is the bottleneck. The vast majority of people cannot afford a new house, which means they're stuck in their used houses, which means there is no inventory opening up for those with no houses.
> it's just that the solutions are deeply unpopular.
Is it? The solution in motion is to use AI to push software developers out of software development so that they have to become construction workers, thereby increasing the supply of construction workers, pushing construction wages down. It doesn't seem that unpopular (at least not outside of HN, but even on HN many welcome it with open arms). Maybe it will become unpopular once the motions are complete? That's a tad bit late, though.
Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.
About half of US adults own their home. It goes up to ~2/3 if you include adult children, grandparents, etc. that live in the house but don't own it.
I wasn't trying to dance around this fact; my point is that a large fraction of the voting public has their interests aligned with keeping home prices high (presuming that these non-owning residents share interests with the people that do own the home).
The problem isn't so much that housing has gotten expensive. It's that many of the existing places have moved up-market compared to what they were 30-40 years ago. 75 years ago, Scarsdale NY or parts of Long Island were expensive. But Palo Alto was a drab middle class suburb. As the tech economy has boomed, that has driven prices up in Palo Alto for the same reason they were already high in Scarsdale. And now you have to move to Gilroy.
That's a misleading metric for two reasons. First, "people" includes all the people who bought a house decades ago before the prices went up, and correspondingly paid the old prices instead of the current prices. And second, it assumes that if housing becomes more expensive what people all do is pay more for housing rather than being unable to afford it and then having to take a longer commute to access housing they can afford, live with their parents, become homeless, etc., which negatively impact the amount or type of housing they get instead of the amount they pay for it.
Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
And that's with the gap having reduced a bit in the last couple of years, since home prices have declined slightly since the peak in 2022 while median income continued its usual trend.
> Meanwhile between 1984 and today median income increased by ~290% while median new home prices increased by ~425%
The average FHA mortgage rate in 1984 was 13.2%. Today’s it’s 6.8%. The more expensive house with a cheaper mortgage costs $482 per month less and $173,000 less over the lifetime of the loan.
Both inflation and wages have not gone up uniformly since they started being tracked. We all know the Trump/Biden covid inflation was bad, but by the end of Biden's term wages had mostly caught back up. The second Trump administration's policies reversed that trend.
Housing in particular cratered in some areas during the GFC, but then went wild especially around the covid.
People are moving out of opportunity zones (and you know…losing opportunity) or moving in with roommates to keep the average percentage low.
Feels like such a basic factor to miss for what is supposedly an economists blog. That metric means nothing.
From https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...
> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. And in inflation-adjusted terms, the median rent is up 75 percent over these six decades while the median renter income has risen by just under 15 percent.
Even when I was a kid in the 1980s I didn't know a single person whose household had multiple bathrooms, a dishwasher, or air conditioning. Not a single one.
Part of the reason why standards have increased is because incomes have increased.
I imagine they're in a high cost of living area, where tons of other people want to live. If that's the case, it probably shouldn't be any surprise that in a supply restricted market, the prices are also very high.
I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m only saying the metric “housing cost as percent of wages” isn’t enough to judge if people are doing worse or better
To take just one example: a 65inch tv costs just $700 compared to $4k just a few years ago
For examples:
1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
2. the glacial pace of issuing building permits for burned out homes in LA.
3. the sudden influx of many millions of immigrants pushes up the demand for housing, resulting in higher prices
That's about 2.4% of the total number of rented apartments, and about 1.5% of the total housing stock.
How long do you think those apartments are unoccupied, on average?
What portion of the stock do you think would normally be healthy to have on the market?
What's a healthy vacancy rate in your opinion, and what do you make of NYC having a lower rate than the average American city?
> 1. there are 57,000 unoccupied apartments in NYC because city regulations on rents make them unprofitable to rent out.
> According to state data, approximately 57,421 rent-stabilized apartments were vacant across New York City
Is it actually more complex than that? If the regulation that makes it unprofitable to rent them out is rent control, that's still an accurate statement of why they're not being rented out.
The market, left to its own, will keep building because someone will see the prices people are willing to pay and think “I want in on that” but then the government comes in and blocks them from building. No building = supply lower than demand which always equals higher costs
Further, It would only have taken you one 5 second search to see the ways government regulations can cause unoccupied apartments
https://www.google.com/search?q=in+what+ways+can+government+...
Please try again.
P.S. google "how many unoccupied apartments in nyc"
Which market are you thinking of?
Los Angeles? Where the homeowner vacancy rate is 0.7% and rental vacancy 4%?
If you literally weren't thinking of anywhere when your responded, where did you get the notion from?
[1] https://api.census.gov/data/missing_key.html +/- one percent
2. Shelter accounts for roughly 34% of the CPI, whereas it makes up only about 16% to 17% of the PCE which underplays the pressures of housing people face. Housing arguably is one of the most basic necessity and people will spend on it. For majority of the people in the country housing as a % of income is the biggest expense, so weighing it at 16% sounds almost ridiculous.
3. PCE also famously isn’t based on household surveys like CPI which means it doesn’t accurately represent the actual inflation either.
4. PCE also doesn’t accurately represent lifestyle downgrades even though it tracks them. PCE will capture if you swap chicken for beef (like people are doing right now) but the conclusion you’ll come to is that people have the same amount of spending power as before.
Tennessee suburbs are eyewateringly expensive. Your parents made a living wage at a job that doesn't exist in the US anymore, and definitely isn't located in Tennessee anymore. The mean homebuyer is older than your parents.
You can get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where all the industry was destroyed for imports, services destroyed for outsourcing and the retail was destroyed for the internet and big box chains, if you are a wealthy person who works remotely or at one of the local health insurance conglomerates.
If you are not a wealthy person who works remotely, you can't live there anymore; it is not cheap for you. In fact, all of your family (who has lived here, near each other, for generations) has to figure out where in the country they will have the best chance to feed themselves (or whether they should leave the country) and move there. Now, they're trying to get by without the support of each other, making them more alienated, isolated and dependent on corporations and the state.
There are natural limits to this sort of evil. People won't starve to death quietly.
By the people your parents voted in to do just that no less.
I also think it’s unfair to look at just food prices. Housing and healthcare have bloomed massively.
We should evaluate research by the research itself, rather than by the author’s subjectivity credibility alone. The is the point I was trying to make by providing alternative research and adding a little bit of nuance to the reply, but perhaps I should’ve been more forthright in addressing my own bias as well.
Why is this the argument when someone challenges your source, but when it comes to someone else's source your argument is:
> This is research from a labor advocacy group, with the explicit aim of the organization to advocate for this sort of thing. This doesn't mean the research is is automatically invalid, but it is bias worth mentioning.
Using CATO as a neutral source though, is sketch no matter what.
> Links the fucking CATO institute
Pot, meet kettle
I doubt there is a compelling argument why people should have to use CPI as the comparison index. I'd consider any investment that only matched CPI to be losing value for example; they should be tracking something one of the monetary aggregates.
The problem with the CPI basket is, it needs to be constant of products to be comparable, so NO technological advancement is considered in that basket. Instead, they use the price of butter and tomatoes. Well, a fictious 1950s person wouldn't care that is can buy more butter or tomatoes than we can, but would want smartphone and a plane ticket to thailand.
The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites
The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter
Have you looked at the actual weights?
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_10142026.htm
Airline fares make up a whopping 1.04% of the CPI basket. "Information technology commodities" makes up a whopping 0.752%. Meanwhile the weights of essentials are: Food (13.507%), Energy (7.418%), Shelter (35.323%), Medical care services (6.834)
It's a statistical tool concerning populations, not a sampling of what hacker news user cicko in their wisdom thinks increases quality of life.
The quality of the house your grandparents (for 1920 probably your grand-gran parents) is vastly different. Those houses cannot be compared at all, when I take my dump in the heated warmth in a nicely smelling place listening to some music over my airpods.
That house trades at 13x now.
There is no house of any size for 3x in most areas of the UK.
You can’t handwave that away by saying “central heating”. The cost of part-of-a-house is far less than the total - not 10x more on top.
Part of the issue is population doubled since then but house building didn’t. Part is cheap debt in the 2000s turned everyone and their dog into buy-to-let landlords then AirBnB hosts.
Let's look at some real numbers instead of a folksy parable about grandma. Here are recent stats about rent arrears:
https://www.baselane.com/resources/unpaid-rent-debt-statisti...
And rental affordability:
In 2026, a full-time worker needs to earn $34.73 per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. and $29.19 to afford a modest one-bedroom rental.
And mortgage affordability:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco...
None of these are heading in the right direction.
Aside from technological and scientific progress in the medical field, it's generally been shown that people's lives have gotten worse.
“If you would please look at the chart…” when it is known that inflation is a politically-charged figure that is indirectly manipulated to show much lower figures than the price increases the average person with average expenses (rent, car, fuel, food, etc.) experiences.
Let alone doing comparison of inflation over longer timespans. Garbage model in, garbage numbers out.
You can think of it with a thought experiment: A smartphone (with hypothetical internet) in 1920 would be worth almost all the money in the world. If you simply had one smartphone in 1920, the richest billionares would offer most of their wealth to have one. Hence in 1920, a smartphone would be worth at least $10M in todays money. Yet you can buy one for $500 today - so you are twenty-thousand times richer than 1920. The same applies for flatscreen TVs, antibiotics (really valueable when you need it), polio vacination etc.
You can't measure this with CPI, yet people complain about the CPI is fake. It is just a statistical average, no more no less. It always was irrelevant. It is the arguments people do with that number, that are bullshit. Basic statistics teach you never use an average to come to conclusions about the individual.
Owners' equivalent rent of primary residence (sub6): score=-9.9748, rel_imp=24.937, yoy=3.3
Health insurance (sub4): score=-10.3886, rel_imp=0.818, yoy=-9.0
New vehicles (sub4): score=-11.6188, rel_imp=3.748, yoy=0.6
Used cars and trucks (sub4): score=-13.9776, rel_imp=2.688, yoy=-1.5
Motor vehicle insurance (sub4): score=-22.0197, rel_imp=2.531, yoy=-5.0
And that is the cause behind so much distrust in politics these days!
The problem is, sure, inflation as a whole using the official metrics may "only" be 3% YoY.
But WHAT THE FUCK does that have to do with the reality of the 99%, who see their grocery bill, their gas bill, their rents increasing far, far more than "official inflation" says?
The inflation basket includes way too much stuff people buy like, what, once every two decades like new kitchen appliances. It is of no use for me if that price stagnates.
But these transformations are not complete, and thus comparing "what people are getting for their money" now vs. then is challenging, complex and subject to a lot of debate and disagreement.
Not what real means!
So to point out how inanely out of touch economists are.
The problem with that is the worker economic base unit is a family not one person. Now compare 1960-70s where one person in the household works 40 hours a week. Compare with a modern family where both parents are working a combined 70-80 hours a week.
So yeah workers are working slightly less hours and families as a unit substantially more.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
The reality is that requiring benefits imposes a cost, and employers manage that cost by limiting who qualifies. So yes, this hurt many workers - and disproportionately impacted disadvantaged people who didn't make the full-time cliff.
Ignoring increntives is actually shaking your fist at the sky.
Typically the real disagreement here is over whether workers should get benefits at all.
EDIT: can we get another `vouch` or two for groundzeros2015's currently [dead] reply? It's well-argued and an olive branch and deserves to be visible.
I addressed but one of your points here and ignored essentially the rest of your reply. A rather myopic one sentence reply to a more nuanced comment.
Sorry to sink to the lowest common denominator, friend. Thank you for making me see this.
re: regular people and their money, I will say, something about the bigger picture just feels off. I look at the graphs you linked to, and do not see it reflected in the people around me. I don't mean to be dismissive of the data, more that I feel like I am missing something, or it is, if that makes sense?
Furthermore, wealth applies more pressure against certain costs like housing[1] than against others like food or durable goods. Cheap toasters only go so far in making people feel like they aren’t falling behind.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-prices-surge-five-tim...
The reluctance to give up resources also an understandable aspect of human nature, but power concentration in the hands of the few is always problematic. I'm very much a capitalist but the last few decades have persuaded me that wealth taxes are a necessary and moral correction to capitalism's unfortunate spiraling acceleration of inequality.
For instance: marketplace competition requires some regulation, but recognizing that regulation is a necessary evil with many opportunities for abuse (e.g. regulatory capture) helps inoculate against socialism's worst excesses.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
Also, I chose weekly wages because annual wages are complicated by time off, which was the other item in question.
Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.
Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.
Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
When you consider that this conversation assumes we are talking about the US and not the rest of the world? It is sobering.
The AI bet hinges entirely on the new types of work that arise from it.
Of course there is. Permanently replacing labor is quite obviously and quite literally the point of AI. No previous tech shifts are comparable.
That's why the tall bank buildings that dot ~every small town (and plenty of big ones) in the US are full of bankers tending to paper ledgers, and with a secretary in front of every office. We still get milk delivered every day, as well as a block of river ice from last winter every 2 or 3 days (or more often if it's been particularly hot). We dig our ditches by hand, with hand-made shovels and pickaxes. The material for the clothes on our backs was woven on manual looms, from cotton that was harvested by hand, and carded by hand, and spun into thread by hand. We wear them in homes made with iron nails that were cut by hand, from ores that were mined by hand and smelted the only way we know how: With charcoal, in clay furnaces that were made with hands and that are stoked by hand.
Technology progresses. You're playing to an end-state of AI that assumes labor disappears entirely because you have yet to see what the new labor system looks like.
Oh please, do tell.
You people realize businesses used to have rooms full of humans who clacked away at typewriters right?
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
They have had 200 million in judgements against them by investors this year, and are filing Chapter 11 to reorganize debt and go private.
In other words, nothing to do with AI.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...
It is changing the economy. It is changing how work is done. We are not going back, even if the emphasis in the workplace and role it performs matures.
I'm not making a serious prediction that it will go away! I'm making an anti-prediction against the reflexive assumption of a massive increase in importance, to say that for all any would-be oracle knows, we could get the opposite, just as easily as their fortune-telling.
Economists (including but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt) also spent a decade arguing against Brooksley Born's 1998 warnings that unregulated over-the-counter derivatives would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.
Economists can be spectacularly wrong and short-sighted (and blinded by prior assumptions of how things work) until suddenly the thing that should have been obvious the whole time is no longer ignorable.
The supposed massive GDP growth and jobs losses just aren’t there at this time, whatever the future may bring.
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
When I was growing up movies were watched in cinemas. It was a big event and we saw maybe 5 a year.
Over time more start appearing on TV, but those tended to be a bit older, but also cherry picked the good ones. (I don't live in the US).
PayTV didn't appear until mid 80s. They had more movies, but again tended to cherry pick. VHS meant we recorded the ones we wanted to see. All these things together meant we tended to watch "good" movies.
Hollywood of course were making lots and lots of movies we never saw, or had and way to see. The bad stuff simply didn't have a channel to the world.
The arrival of Video Stores changed that. Suddenly the mediocre (and worse) had an outlet. And trust me, there was plenty of rubbish in there. But there was still a cost to distribute.
Today, distribution cost is zero. If Netflix commission a movie it'll get onto Netflix. Regardless of the result. Some really good stuff, most mediocre, lots of real rubbish.
Repeat for Amazon, Disney, Hulu, et al.
Overall movies haven't gotten worse. Objectively production values are higher. But your access to mediocre and bad movies has increased.
Judging past output though introduces survivor bias, which in turn makes comparison to today misleading.
The scene workers have gotten better though. And there are a lot of good movies being made still, but not by the mainstream industry that used to really deliver.
1. Beverly Hills Cop
2. Ghostbusters
3. The Terminator
4. Gremlins
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street
6. Police Academy
7. Dune
8. Repo Man
9. The NeverEnding Story
10. Karate Kid
11. Romancing the Stone
12. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Or pretty much any year from the 1980s and 1990s.
At some point we lost good writing in favor of silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle.
For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.
And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.
I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.
Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.
I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.
Funnily enough, those happen to be two movies I didn't enjoy beyond their historic relevance.
I'm not saying that spectacle and one-liners are bad - movies like that are included in my list for 1984. It is when you substitute good writing with funny lines and have spectacle instead of a compelling narrative that I see a problem.
...No wait, to be fair, they're very good at influencing. They can influence like no previous generation ever could.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, CA's labor-pool's own hostility to the film industry (via strikes) also played a big role. They gave the studios the finger, then are surprised that the studios took their ball and went elsewhere.
Also, I see this anti-union sentiment a lot on HackerNews: Whenever unions strike, there is near universal rejection as a strategy. The anti-union sentiment on HN is tiring, especially from the US and UK. Those big strikes in Los Angeles resulted in large pay increases and/or expansion of territory (better payouts for streaming, etc.) for those union members. In short, it worked.
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.
That's what AI companies are doing to cut costs dramatically, but since it's domestic, there's a sudden apathy towards the original claims.
Which(if any of this ever fucking mattered at all) would undermine the years long campaign of china-hate that at it's core, was large Capital holders being upset their outsourcing plan backfired once China was no longer a captive third-world backwater.
So here in the "west" we created our own machine to speed up the Chinese "Shanzai" and pretend like it's suddenly innovation instead of theft.
This whole situation is why one should never, ever trust the rich man's opinion on foreigners, as it's always always always just to line their pockets.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art
AI making things cheaper and faster makes it worse, not better because it drives competition up and strengthens the bridge trolls at the attention gate aka platforms while taking power from both viewers and creators.
I am quitting my job because I've just realized that everything, without exception, that I've done as a programmer has been done with the goal of making already rich people even richer.
Do you have an idea as to what your new job will be, and if so, and will you be doing to ensure that you won't be making rich people even richer in this new position?
Everyone who uses those products and services. Prices go down and people can get much more in aggregate. More entertainment, healthcare, etc.
> Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer.
Pension funds and investment vehicles chase profit growth. The vast majority of people have a stake in that.
You think profit is anti-human?
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
Profits über alles.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
There was nothing the business leaders could have done to prevent the effect of basically an unlimited supply of video entertainment being added to the market.
Before video this happened to text. Look at for example how NYT has shored itself up vs the many failed news outlets. Premium brand.
Most businesses in (professional) journalism failed and many jobs were lost.
Most business in (professional) video media production failed and many jobs were (or will continue to be) lost.
Supply greatly increases relative to demand, prices go down, only highest volume sellers can remain.
Ridiculous simplification.
Well, remind me not to hire you for an executive media position.
Hollywood got devalued because it is spending more money than before to get worse results than before.
If by "audience" you mean "people," sure, but I don't think that's particularly meaninful. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that podcasts and TV shows aren't even kind of comparable or able to replace one another.
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
I joined the VFX industry in 2007(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Compass_(film)), where a film like the golden compass required a large number of people to just make the fur look realistic (there were groomers who's job was to literally style hair.)
The huge increase in CPU power, and latterly GPU power meant that a few number of people could do a lot more. (software RnD was also crucial to this)
to hammer that home, the BBC version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials_(TV_series) had way more furry animals, much more extensive digital sets, and with a combined run time of > 480 minutes vs 110. It was also done much cheaper.
TLDR its not just AI thats doing this. although it will be more and more now. as world models really kick into gear.
No I don't like it, but what am I to do?
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.