RE sovereign wealth funds, You might find it interesting that the Norwegian approach to natural resource management is also based on the classical principles of Ricardo and George:
It seems based on this that the appropriate sci fi metaphor is not the Terminator or the Paperclip Maximizer, but Mr. Meeseeks. A initially cheerful helper who gets more and more deranged and driven to extreme lengths when faced with an apparently impossible task.
Which has been the business model for a big chunk of the software industry for a while now.
If you watch videos from the 1980s about computers, it's all the same unfulfilled promises as "AI" now: we will work less, everything will be more plentiful, easier, autonomous robots, natural language perfected, computer vision perfected.
The demand for hardware and programmers has grown exponentially and we're still being promised the same breakthroughs 45 years later. We could probably have the same productivity and the same civilization with maybe a tenth of the data centers.
The demand exploded as so many business cases for computing and automation arose partly because the application of them helped suppress job growth in other areas while also attracting investor capital during heavy deregulation / liberalization trends so it's difficult to attribute any change to an effect in isolation. Let's not forget the old myopic sounding quote where someone thought the global market for computers was maybe $50 million or some other laughably small number.
The issue that hasn't been addressed with the latest wave of computing hype is whether enough new jobs for displaced workers can arise during a time when people are experiencing such economic turmoil and political strife where new jobs or other means of letting people find a way to have gainful employment in society when institutions are so weak now and everyone across professions is being worked to an early grave from sheer stress alone. This resembles Japan or Korea although the US and Canada I can't imagine having the same kind of social drivers although many trends from them are showing up in youth demographic trends. And frankly as I see it a large number of current social problems are from the past 50+ years of the decline of blue collar jobs in developed economies being accessible to as many people and the lack of a competition-driven economy as much as an extractive one in most OECD countries.
I would suggest perhaps the Matrix, where Agent Smith is speaking through his teeth to Morpheus:
> "I say 'your' civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became 'our' civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about: Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time."
Not many are technically and intellectually capable to understand how historic this incident was. I think we're about a year or so away from something that will blow up the world. AI won't serve humanity. AI will serve other AI. We're not dealing with software anymore.
It will be interesting to see how well it adapts and avoids regressions through future releases. The usual downfall of this vibecoded stuff is long term sustainability.
If you know what you're doing, have a solid vision and plan then AI amplifies the clarity I guess but I doubt something this polished was made in 2 weeks :)
We're directly inspired by Urban3 and our hope in releasing these tools is to enable more people to be able to do this work directly themselves and share it with their elected officials!
Author here: most people know that the city is "more" valuable, but drastically underestimate how valuable. I've asked people how much more valuable they think Manhattan is than the Bronx and they will say things like "5x" or "10x", which is off by an order of magnitude.
They also underestimate what this means. In many cities you can have 50%+ of land value concentrated in a rather small portion of area, and this has huge implications for what would happen is you, say, changed property tax policy to shift the tax burden towards land and away from buildings. Most people assume it would kill the suburbs, but in many of our models single family homes come out slightly ahead, or stay neutral.
It's not just zoning, though that exacerbates it. City centers are where economic activity tends to be concentrated so even without zoning you would see these exponential land value effects as you approach the centers of economic activity (and indeed, we did see these same relative patterns prior to the passing of modern zoning laws).
Weren't transportation and communication a lot slower if you go that far back? Zoning laws started getting imposed not long after the invention of the telephone and the internal combustion engine and before either of them were in the possession of the majority of people.
The value of land in an urban area is obviously going to be higher than it is in a rural area just as a matter of scarcity, but it's not at all obvious that the reason it's currently so much more expensive in Manhattan than in the places directly adjacent to it isn't primarily a result of zoning just because that might not have been the reason in 1890.
If you're talking about the Manhattan effect specifically, I'm sure that zoning has a large effect on the extremeness of it. If you're talking about "land gets exponentially more valuable in the city center", then you see that pattern everywhere and indeed we saw it in the historical pre-zoning period as well. Agglomeration effects are sticky regardless of what time period you're in, what changes is the coefficients on the exponential equation.
You keep saying "exponentially" but let's look at the median rent for e.g. a 1 bedroom in Manhattan vs. the Bronx. It's around twice as much in Manhattan, because now you're measuring prices per-unit of indoor space rather than per-acre of land.
In a formal sense you can call this exponential. It's twice as much in Manhattan as the Bronx and twice as much in the Bronx as in some location even further out. But if you're trying to explain the >100x difference in the price of land between the Bronx and Manhattan, the ~2x difference in how much people value living there because of agglomeration effects is not the dominant effect.
And you would expect the densest places like Manhattan to have the strongest agglomeration effects. You can ratchet up permissively zoned land costs through zoning just by increasing the level of restrictions elsewhere, e.g. ban >2 story buildings instead of banning >5 story buildings, but the willingness of people to pay more in order to live near things is proportional to the number of things they would be paying more to live near.
On top of that, the zoning restrictions exacerbate the agglomeration effects. If you could build taller buildings in the places you currently can't then the premium commanded by housing in a dense area would go down by increasing the supply of it.
Suppose you have three neighborhoods. A has 10 story buildings and a median rent of $2000, B and C both have 2 story buildings and a median rent of $1000. You then rezone B with the result that new construction happens and it now has 5 story buildings. Local housing supply just increased by more than 20%. Rents are now $1700 in A, $1300 in B and $900 in C, because supply increased and some people moved from both A and C to B, which became more desirable. People then say "look, you've increased rents in B by $300" and blame agglomeration effects and try to argue against doing it. But the average rent in the city went from ~$1700 to ~$1500 and >20% more people now have housing.
https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...
reply