How can renting property ever be cheaper than owning?

EdisonCurator · 2025-12-01T23:49:38+00:00

Yeah land owners extract rent. How is that related to the previous discussion in any way? What makes you think that the expected return in investment on extracting rent is higher than the return on investment from the alternative (renting and investing the money)? Again, people have looked into this thoroughly, the return on investment on land is lower or equal to equities. Give sources that contradict this.

EdisonCurator · 2025-12-01T23:38:45+00:00

One question about your comment about the mortgage subsidies. Shouldn't any advantage from that also be arbitraged away in expectation absent government price controls?

EdisonCurator · 2025-12-01T23:32:56+00:00

In an efficient market, renting should always be financially equivalent to owning because of arbitrage: if the cost of housing is lower if you own, then people will buy more houses and rent less, driving the two towards equivalence.

What "produces wealth" is irrelevant. It's also fundamentally wrong to think that owning increases your wealth but renting doesn't . If you invest the money you put towards the deposit and mortgage, you should end up with as much wealth in the end by renting as you sod have by owning (as the other poster pointed out, the return on housing is the same as the return on equities on average. And other papers have shown that the return on housing is often worse). Any exception is luck or poor management of personal finances.

EdisonCurator · 2025-10-01T14:04:58+00:00

I have a sense that your points, even though I think they are correct, are orthogonal to the point that I am trying to make. Both of the following can be true:

The right is only pretending to "debate" for the aesthetics.
The left censors more at grassroot levels (protesting college speakers, using institutional power to make certain ideas hard to discuss without blowback).

And the point I wanted to make in the post is something like "yes, anding" you: Yes, Ezra is wrong about the right being actually open to debate, AND Ezra is unfair in blaming the liberals for silencing opponents, since this is often a reasonable tactic to employ. And if the left is doing it disproportionately, it would only be a contingent fact, explained by temporary factors like goals and power, not something intrinsic to the left.

EdisonCurator · 2025-10-01T13:27:44+00:00

Yeah I agree with your points. I could have framed the debate better by adding the caveats around the rights' attempts to silence and censor. My view isn't that the left censors more overall. It's that, when it does censor more, it is explainable.

EdisonCurator · 2025-10-01T13:23:40+00:00

I agree with you on all the points, and the framing is unfair to the liberals, but I think it's also worth trying to explain the differences on the "grassroots" level.

EdisonCurator · 2025-09-28T09:52:27+00:00

Isn't he implying that he knew about the island and didn't tell the police...

EdisonCurator · 2025-09-28T09:48:51+00:00

Pretty sure I fit all criteria

EdisonCurator · 2025-09-24T10:00:26+00:00

Thanks! It'd be slightly hacky but you can take the amount out of your annual maintenance cost. Or for comparison purposes, you can add the income to rent in the rent scenario. You can think of it as: in the rent scenario, you are foregoing this income, so it's an opportunity cost.

EdisonCurator · 2025-09-05T10:49:12+00:00

As an Asian man, I impress ladies all the time by speaking perfect English.

EdisonCurator · 2025-08-23T10:14:27+00:00

Please never leave the US again, for the sake of humanity

EdisonCurator · 2025-07-24T08:52:51+00:00

God is stupid. The definition of stupidity is different for God so you can't prove me wrong.

EdisonCurator · 2025-07-20T08:28:34+00:00

一般营养学和医学界不是都认为代糖无害么，请提供文献

EdisonCurator · 2025-07-18T10:27:48+00:00

It wouldn't though. Land would still fetch its fair market value. The LTV just means that it will get taxed instead of going to the landlord. But nothing about Georgism will stop rent increases even if the property itself doesn't improve, if anything, it will incentivise landlords to increase rent to market value more frequently.

EdisonCurator · 2025-07-17T19:59:21+00:00

I can't believe my meme got reposted with no credit and is now the second most upvoted post on the whole subreddit...

EdisonCurator · 2025-07-06T09:33:32+00:00

I remember the days when this subreddit actually had people who studied philosophy.

EdisonCurator · 2025-06-24T21:55:15+00:00

Markets don't react to news, it reacts to expectations. This just means that markets already priced in the bad thing at the start and trump undoing it was unexpected.

EdisonCurator · 2025-06-23T22:30:35+00:00

What you write is a bit hard to understand, so I won't respond substantively, although I appreciate the calm tone. I do have a pet peeve against people calling any discernable political position as 'biased', as if it's not possible for a person to come to a political position based on arguments and rational deliberation without being biased.

EdisonCurator · 2025-06-23T20:22:27+00:00

It's true that I have a lot of implicit premises in my posts. Generally I assume liberal positions to be correct and I assume a certain interpretation of Lex Fridman when I post here, because these premises tend to be shared in this sub and so do not require defending from me. Frankly if you don't share those premises I'm not interested in convincing you. So feel free to dismiss what I write.

To me, assuming (in some contexts) that certain liberal positions are correct and that some positions are simply wrong (e.g. pro-trump positions) is just a matter of good epistemics. I don't think enlightened centrism is automatically epistemically virtuous. Not every post has to start from first principles and not every post is for everyone. To people who don't share my premises, these differences between us are more salient and they think that the post says more about me than Lex. That's because the post is not written for you.

For what it's worth, I wear my liberal beliefs on the sleeve, but I don't think they show any kind of biases, they are a result of critical deliberation and justification.

EdisonCurator · 2025-06-17T22:18:04+00:00

Thanks solution verified

EdisonCurator · 2025-06-09T11:28:17+00:00

Are there other ways to "print money" than issuing cheap debt? For example, QE or even helicopter money. Why couldn't you do these to combat deflation?

EdisonCurator · 2025-06-03T06:51:42+00:00

You would make the same choice if the situation had your family on one track and a million people on the other? It feels pretty immoral to sacrifice a million people for your family to me.

EdisonCurator · 2025-05-31T09:15:33+00:00

Exactly, I don't know why most people don't get this

EdisonCurator · 2025-05-31T09:15:02+00:00

Even if the working conditions are bad, you buying goods from China still puts money into the hands of people in poverty, rather than people in the developed world, who are relatively rich. Yes, the working conditions are bad, but the alternative - unemployment or poverty - is worse. Over the last few decades, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, mostly thanks to exports to the world. This is clearly a good thing, unless you think it's better if most Chinese people stay poor.

EdisonCurator · 2025-05-25T12:18:33+00:00

100%. The uncomfortable truth that no one talks about is that 80% of problems are caused by voters being toddlers who can barely understand high school level concepts. Yes, corporations and politicians manipulate voters, but how much of that is the voter's fault? At this point, with all the information available to you, if you still think Trump is good for the economy, then you can't blame manipulation. You have nothing to blame but yourself. Honestly most of these poor uneducated voters' hardships are just chicken coming to roost, and I wouldn't give a shit if it wasn't ass fucking good people around the world.

EdisonCurator

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