[Image description: a dining room with teal blue walls, with a pink neon sign saying “let them eat cake” written in cursive.]
[Image description: a dining room with teal blue walls, with a pink neon sign saying “let them eat cake” written in cursive.]
You have a point, but status symbols are positional goods so often their high cost doesn’t correspond to a large use of resources. If one rich guy buys a painting from another rich guy, ten million dollars changes hands but that’s it; ten million dollars worth of stuff isn’t being used up.
This isn’t always the case - I presume an expensive yacht really does take a lot of resources to build. And this mansion took resources to build too. Still, the most valuable thing about the mansion is its location - the same mansion but not in Beverly Hills might be worth ten times less. I think it’s more like the painting than like the yacht.
If the value is all about location, then by your logic, for each homeless person we can simply build a Beverly Hills style mansion out in the Midwest, and now it’s affordable housing.
You know, because the value is not in the mansion, it’s just in the Beverly Hills location.
You could certainly build a Beverly Hills style mansion in the Midwest for a lot less than you could build it for in Beverly Hills, although would still be a suboptimal use of public money…
(The problem is that the homeless don’t want to be in the rural Midwest. Even if you give them homes there, they still have no money and all the same personal problems that led to them becoming homeless in the first place, but now they can’t effectively have an income from begging.)
Plenty of homeless people get by here from begging. Biggest struggle is that summers hit a heat index of 120, winters drop to a chill of -30.
Milder climate is just better suited to a life without the privilege of climate control.
You think a mansion takes fewer resources to construct than a yacht?
It depends on the yacht. There are yachts a lot more expensive than this particular mansion.
That’s true, and you’re making an even better point for radicalization when society is creating superyachts for the superwealthy while lacking basic affordable housing.