YouSaid · the spoken record

Lars Doucet

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-01-09
most recent: 2023-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Seeing the cat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, thanks for gilling me. Thanks for all the hard questions. You know, it's like I really like to be challenged in that way and like really engage with the best faith, hard-hitting critiques, you know, to like make sure we really understand what we're talking about here. Because none of this matters unless it works. And so it's like I'm not here to like defend Henry George's honor. I'm here to like really explore whether this can actually be a solution or a problem. Yes.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I'm like, okay, well, I really see my life's work as like making Georgism possible and practical. And I think the way to do that is to measure the value of the land and to put those tools out there for anybody to be able to pick up.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that I think he's under the impression that land isn't a big deal. And how important you think Georgism is depends on how much the land is worth. And to do that, we have to measure it. And we're not super good at measuring it right now. And I think we need to get super good at measuring it. And I've decided, you know, when I was talking about this originally, you know, basically someone, you know, challenged me. It's like, if you really think you can do this, then the reason I don't think you can do this is because if you really could, then people would give you millions of dollars to go do it. And well, we just closed around. Led by Sam Altman, you know, and that's exactly what happened, and now we're going to do it. So I'm really grateful to that commenter for challenging me in that way.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if you think storageism isn't a panacea. One of the things about his critique of it not being a panacea, and I think it's a polysea, even if it's not a panacea, you know. I'll settle for curing multiple diseases, even if I'm not curing literally all of them.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This podcast airs, but if you go to geolandutions.com, it'll redirect to whatever our new website is. That is a municipal mass appraisal company. We're going to partner with local municipalities. We've already got a couple of customers who are interested in what we're doing. And we're going to massively update the state of the practice of municipal mass appraisal in America to be more accurate, more efficient, and more up to date with the latest models and more transparent leaning into open source and open data solutions wherever possible. I think that can be the practical step towards Georgism, not just to implement Georgism, but even to advocate for it. Because, you know, in the Edward Glazer interview, one of the, I'm super happy to have Glazers endorsement.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what is next for me? So, I'm still a game developer, and so nights and weekends I'm overseeing a project that'll release next year Defender's Quest 2 after a good decade of development. I'm happy for that to be finished. But then additionally, I am working on a startup, which is called Gualan Solutions for now. The name will almost certainly have changed by the time of...”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather than land value tax within a private city, and then everyone who lives there is de facto a shareholder of the city. And there's some people who are trying to build stuff like that, which I'm very much interested in.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like you realize that now Disneyland essentially is the government. And I think that's actually kind of literally true in actually existing Disney World because they have their own special district that operates essentially as a private government. And that's just its own kind of question. But the point is very much, yes. The rents have to be collected one way or the other, so they might as well be collected on behalf of the community. One way to implement that is through a government, right? You know, because we have this nice little democracy we can use. But there's also this movement, you know, there's this whole charter cities movement. And then the movement I like even better called starter cities, which is less like, let's find some, you know, third world country to like hope our sovereignty doesn't get revoked in five years. But let's build cities somewhere in America where zoning is pretty loose. You could have everyone who lives there basically be a shareholder of a private entity and share out the land rents that way. Another way to implement it would just be ground lease.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because not only will this fix the incentives, but then it also shares the wealth with the people actually produce the wealth. And if the community is itself this giant private city, then that kind of changes the equation a bit. And I have not like fully delved into the Disney World issue and the Disney World question. And that's a little separate academically from actually existing Disney World and how anyone feels about that institution in particular. The important thing to realize is that we're now dealing with a different domain, you know, because then the question is, it's like, you know, who is a citizen of Disneyland? Who is a tenant of Disneyland? What is the governance of Disneyland?”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rents will be collected one way or another. And if we leave it to the status quo, private actors free riding off their neighbors will collect them and make everything worse. They will cause less investment and they will hold the best land out of use. And there will be less building than there should be. And the rent will be too damn high. And the rent has to be collected one way or another, so it might as well be collected on behalf of the community.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the right mix of taxes and subsidies? And do you even want to have these sort of entities in the first place? And what is the governance question looks like? But the important thing to realize is that you are no longer dealing with a private landowner. You are dealing with a private city.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially when they enforce local monopolies, essentially like bad local laws where it's like you have to buy from the company store or whatever, which is mostly an issue of governance. But in terms of land use, actually if an entire landowner owns an entirely large enough area to internalize all of their positive building things, that actually, you know, they are actually, you know, that does change the situation. And then you need to see them less as the private owner of a parcel and more as a private operator of a city. Right. And that changes the governance question and it becomes a completely different category of problem. And so then there's questions of it's like.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's funny is, in a way, yes. And so what's interesting is this is often posed as a gotcha question for Georgists. But we actually internally like this is called the Disneyland or the Disney World question, you know, and it's actually a really interesting case. And the thing you have to realize now is who is Disney World in this situation? Disney World is the government in that case in point. Disney World is the community. Disney World is the city. It's a private city. And then there's all these questions of who is a citizen of Disney World and is it an equitable democracy or whatever, which we'll leave aside for the moment. But the point is that Disney World has fully internalized the positive externalities of their own building, right? And so the incentive structure has changed. We fully acknowledge that. We just bite that bullet. So the question then becomes, you know, what do you do about it? It's a really interesting situation. It's essentially a private city. And so there can be certainly issues with company towns.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, it's like if you wanted to create a model for bottom-up decentralized America, I would take that bargain. We still got to like fund the. Sounds good.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resource management policy with oil. They also have one from the early 1900s in hydropower, which was set up by Norwegian Georgists. And so the ruling center party coalition just put one in for salmon farming aquaculture locations, a new severance tax on that. And they name checked Henry George when they implemented it in the speech. And so I think if they are willing to stand up to the landowners in Oslo and pass a land value tax, that would be the next step. I'm not sure if they're brave enough to do that. But we're starting to see this kind of bubble up. And so I think a revenue-neutral property tax shift to land is the politically popular way to do it because it can be done on the local level without having to change a whole bunch of laws. It's a little complicated in Texas because that's stupid, state constitutional provision. But in other states, they don't have there's other states that any municipality could do it right now if they wanted.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, um, so why can't we, you know, like target just the land? And so if you had the right judge, maybe you could get away with that. But anyway, to go towards political feasibility, I think it could be more feasible than we think, especially pitched as property tax reform, because people are like, property taxes are too high. Hey, everyone, let's exempt all your buildings. I think you could build a coalition that's excited about that, and especially if you do the math and show who the change in your taxable rate is going to be. I think, you know, you know, just a revenue-neutral property tax shift to land can be quite popular. There's a lot of cities around the U.S. right now where this is being floated. You know, organizations like Strong Towns and the Center for Property Tax Reform are working on a lot in Lincoln Land Institute are like talking to places about it. Detroit is talking about it right now, and they could desperately use it. And I think it could pass. And then in terms of, I think Henry George's aliens is coming back. And especially in Norway, like the ruling center party coalition just passed a, you know, they're very successful.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's up to interpretation. There's some people interpreted that it's like that that clause was written to mean you can't tax this guy at a higher rate than that guy. You have to tax him based on the value of the property. And then you could claim that it's still being uniform or just taxing land. And we have all these exemptions and categorizations already. This is just another one of those. We tax agricultural land at a different rate. You know what I mean? Like if you put a bunch of cows on a property, suddenly it's like it's magically less valuable.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's a clause in the state constitution of Texas that says all property taxation has to be uniform. And that's interpreted as uniform across both the buildings and the land. You can't tax them at separate rates.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Land and therefore bone to pick with the Texas Constitution because Houston had a single tax mayor in 1911 and had an active Georgist land value tax. And it would have still had it today if it wasn't for the state for a state judge who basically shut them down.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because California has some of the lowest property taxes in the nation. And Proposition 13, and it creates, say, A entire layer of landed gentry and really, really, really expensive housing. Like housing's already getting expensive in Austin and property taxes have an effect of lowering property prices. Property taxes are an imperfect land value tax. And so basically it'll just reproduce the economic conditions that empirically exist in California”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's more politically feasible than we think. I think it just right now has low salience. And if more people start talking about it, I think it's going to make a lot of sense, especially if it's pitched as property tax reform. Like right now in Texas, you know, you have people like Huff Feins who are trying to abolish property tax, which will turn the state into California like that. Why?”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like at some point when an idea has become part of the cultural consciousness for like so long, it should become part of just the background collective commons, you know, because all ideas are essentially remixed and built on top of other ideas, but we want to incentivize people to create new ideas in the first place. It's not a perfect analogy to land, but there is something there about rent-seeking that needs to be addressed. And it probably just cashes out to just reducing copyright terms.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enclosure of natural monopolies, right? And economy is just based entirely around rent seeking. And it's clear we have this with eternal copyright. If we had eternal, if we had the copyright laws we had today when Disney was first getting started, the brothers Grimm would still be under copyright and they would not have been able to get off the ground with a lot of their early properties. And then they pull the ladder up right behind them. It's clear their rent-seeking in a lot of ways and refusing to give back to the commons from which they first enriched themselves. And the question then becomes like, you know, can you easily parse copyright as land? It's a very undercooked theory, but there's something there of like probably what a cash is out to is just copyright term should be.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was like copyright. It's not clear to me exactly what the implication of Georgism is. It's like Georgism, if you zoom out, it's not exactly just about land, right? That's where people, a lot of people kind of like, why are you so obsessed about land? It's mostly about...”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it's basically international water, so to speak, right? And once the actual possibility of having permanent bases shows up, then we will have to hash that out. But so basically, I think we should take that and run with it and basically be if you are going to take possession of interstellar bodies, you know, it will become a question of who exactly becomes the government in that scenario. Is it like some international coalition? Is it the UN? I'm not a huge fan of the UN. Or is it just like it turns out to be like whatever sovereign government gets there first just gets to claim it? But can you have Georgism within those confines? I think we certainly should. Know because otherwise what you're going to get is that you're going to get under investment, you're going to get so much.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interstellar Georgism is actually current international law. Through the outer space treaty, the outer space treaty currently says, and I think the outer space treaty will last for about five minutes once the interplanetary space race gets going in earnest. But the current law of the international order of the outer space treaty basically says that nobody's allowed to claim interstellar bodies like the moon or Mars for China or the US. Like we have a flag there, but it's not American territory.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was like Carmack's reverse was like this particular algorithm that they weren't allowed to use in Quake 3 or something because someone had speculatively patented it. And there's like no other way to do that thing. So Quake 3, this one particular subroutine had to be like 25% slower because someone had patented essentially like imagine if you could like patent the Pythagorean theorem, you know. So, like that kind of nonsense. And you can just run seek off that for 20 years”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then keep it. You know, and so basically like there's this huge first mover advantage that turns into rent seeking. And I haven't fully analyzed exactly how you apply George's theory there, but I do think there's something to it. I also think there's something to extremely long-lived copyrights and patents. It's a little undercooked at the moment. I don't have a fully-fledged theory of it, but certainly cases like other monopoly assets like Orbital Real Estate, Radio Spectrum, any kind of like being able to capture the right to the possibility space. Especially like, you know how like John Carmack had a lot of algorithms, like some of which were patented and he wasn't even allowed to use them in his own games because someone else had speculantly patented like”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, there might be some confusion. Like, I might be able to get some transactions that were meant for him. And so there's these other considerations to like kind of, and he deals with all of that. And so I wrote a policy paper about how to apply LVT in virtual worlds and stuff. That was more in these more kind of literal simulacra of the real world, in these virtual worlds than kind of the things you're talking about of like YouTube accounts and charts in basically app stores and stuff, which are user-generated content platforms. But I haven't fully analyzed user-generated content platforms, but I do think chart positions are a sort of virtual land. And you do essentially, they do essentially charge rent for that, not just to the platform in their flat 30% fee across everything, but also in the kind of advertising Red Queen's race you have to do to stay on those charts. You essentially have to buy that position.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he cross posted it. He posted it also on his own blog. But there's other considerations to remember when we go away from literal land is like, so for instance, in domain names, you know, especially with the Ethereum name system, you have issues of identity, right? That don't apply like, if someone buys this house from you, probably people aren't going to be, like maybe the next person who lives here is going to get some of your mail for like a week or two, but like no one's going to think that they're you necessarily. But if I buy vitalik.eth.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, progress in poverty.substack.com is not technically my blog. It's a group blog where a lot of us Georgists post. But so yeah, so my blog in the sense of our blog. Sure.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A permit to brew potions. You're a part of the witch's guild. You can brew potions. So like my apprentice witch, she has to pay rent to me to gain access to my permit to be allowed to brew potions. But all permits are fungible. So there's no locational value. And then a plot of land, right? Like we've talked about, where you can also, and so this becomes the real speculative asset. Domain names are probably the closest thing to this. And Vitalik Buterin has actually written a post about how to apply Georgia's theory to domain names and also all the wrinkles that are involved.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so I've actually written a policy paper on how to apply the theories of land value tax to virtual worlds. And so the question is virtual real estate is when does something actually operate like a landlike asset? And then to what extent does Georgist principles apply, right? And that doesn't necessarily mean just do LVT. It means that, you know, so first of all, let me define what I mean by a landlike asset. A landlike asset has three properties. It is scarce in supply. It is necessary for production and it obtains locational value by virtue of its position in some kind of graph, right? And so as an example, I create like a fictional MMO and I give the example of a unicorn, a permit, and a plot of land. The unicorn is scarce, but it's not necessary for production. Any value you could get from the unicorn you could get some other way. It's just really nice to have. And there's only like 10,000 on the server. A permit is like a...”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asian countries now and compare them to where they were and be like, well, the rule of law is weaker now than it used to be. But George isn't even advocating for that. He's just advocating for raising taxes on land and exempting all of the building taxes. So I don't think it amounts to seizure of land. And I think for those reasons, but even if it did amount to that, I think, you know, sometimes it's worth biting some bullets.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, is it's like, well, we have these rules and therefore we can never change them. And I think the best answer to this is that you need to acknowledge Gordon Tullock's transitional gainstrap. And if there's someone who's going to be, you know, put out, then you make sure that there's some compensation in the system to smooth over the transition. But the rule of law doesn't imply that any change to the status quo is going to undermine trust in it. And I don't think that And I think it's important to remember that George is not interested in seizing land. That's a very big distinction from the Maoist position, which is murder the landlords, or the more modest Asian reforms. Asian reforms are just like, we're just going to, so first of all, when you're talking about how Asia works, they took the land away from the big landowners, gave it to the peasants, and it made those countries way more productive, right? And like, I don't think anyone would like look at those.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop Well, this is a fully general argument against change. And it also is like, I don't agree with all the assumptions. Like, you know, if America doesn't honor its agreements, what are they worth? Well, we've violated all kinds of treaties, not like with the Indians especially, but also all sorts of international treaties. And, you know, I mean, like we've made all kinds of times where we've like changed rules on things and changed asset classes. You know, we had an entire period where we just banned all sales of alcohol and then we had a time where we completely undid that and brought it all back. There's been times where we've like made major, major changes to the rules of what kind of asset classes we have. I mean, this is kind of like brought up with like, you know, any kind of like labor protections and things is.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, right, right. The Spanish government's approach the sunken treasure basically incentivizes people never to go after.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you're gonna be rewarded for the discovery of that thing, but that thing is itself its value is going to be captured because it's the heritage of the British people. The opposite of this is the Spanish government whenever someone finds a shipful of a galleon full of gold doubloons on the bottom of the ocean. If you go and you invest the capital to bring that up to the surface, you know, and you're in Spanish waters or the Spanish government finds you, or you like take it not to Spain, a Spanish admiralty court is going to try to get its claws on that gold. In the view of the Spanish government, like, basically the incentives they're producing is to make sure that nobody ever, ever recovers a ship.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want that in a museum. So here's the deal if you find treasure, you're gonna get paid and the landowner's gonna get paid. So there's an incentive for people to go out with metal detectors and there's an incentive for a landowner to let people do that and then the government's going to put it in a museum.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as kind of an acknowledgement of Kaplan's like Search Theoretic thing, like you have something more like the Norwegian model where you need to basically give some incentive to someone to produce or to not withhold that resource, right? A good example would be the treasure law in England because England has all this ancient Anglo-Saxon treasure and Roman treasure. And so before they would have, someone would find it and like go like hide it or melt it down because they didn't want the government to Tax them. And so they pass this treasure law, which is not perfect, but it's okay where they're like, this is our heritage, right? Yeah.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like those are very severable. Like a lot of people are very interested in getting those mineral rights. And so usually, if you're not paying attention, generally speaking, you're not getting the mineral rights when you're buying land. And if you are, you're paying more for them. So, I mean, I think a good example of this is probably like, you know, you want to create some, I think with the case of minerals, you can't just have a full.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we need to talk about mineral policy in America because, especially in the state of Texas, like mineral rights and land rights are totally different, right? Usually when you buy land in Texas in America, like you actually don't have the mineral rights.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it is, it'll stick out on a map like a sore thumb, and if the data and the algorithms are all open source and open data, you should be able to check anyone's math, and you should be able to use that to then protest your taxes if they seem off. And that's kind of the argument for land value taxes is that, I mean, you can hide all kinds of stuff in income taxes and capital taxes. I mean, that's what the Caymans and the Bahamas are for. But if you want to, I mean, it's very easy to find people who are getting a break on their property taxes like all this corruption. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it'll be very easy to see because you'll be able to see just this mansion that suddenly has this discontinuity on the land value map. It's like, well, someone gave this person a break and maybe we should write an article in the local newspaper about this.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a really good argument. But the reply to that is that we need to move towards more transparency, right? Because land value follows certain rules that should logically make sense, right? We know some things that drive locational value. First of all, we should move towards open source models, right? Which is something that we want to do and open data whenever possible. A lot of these cities will post open data portals. Like my mission in life is to be able to advance the state of the art of this technology and make it so anyone can kind of check on stuff. You should be able to, in any city in America, some cities have this, but not enough. You should be able to look up your property tax assessment on a map and compare it to your neighbor. And what you shouldn't see is a Christmas tree effect where your neighborhood looks like Christmas tree lights of like green and red of people whose property tax assessments massively differ. That's the case in a lot of cities. Like if the value, like if the land values have incorrectly affected.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and there's a lot of other issues too. Is this like there's more value in the more, there's all sorts of reasons that you can have these things. You know, often from no malintent whatsoever, right? You know, but just like just out of date assessments can also cause all sorts of issues.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're more likely to protest their property taxes. And minorities tend to be overassessed and poor people tend to be overassessed. That's why property taxes are sometimes called regressive is the assessments need to be fixed.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another issue is that just a lot of those cost tables are very out of date. Assessments themselves are not always done every year. It's not unheard of to find places that haven't done reassessments in more than 10 years. Most places, it's like one to five. But even that, I think we should be doing everything we can to get all the latest mass appraisal technology and research. And so we've hired some people who have like I basically one of our first hires was one of the guys who was just first author on all these papers we were reading. And we're just here to update municipal property tax assessors on the latest methods so that we can accurately know what all the land in America is worth. And then this will solve a lot of aggressivity issues too, because we know that a lot of landlords are actually underassessed relative to homeowners, believe it or not.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The practice is pretty far behind. Only 15% of most property tax assessment offices even use multiple regression. A lot of them are using the cost approach, which is basically where you, it's what Ed Glazer talked about in your interview with him where you estimate the cost of building and you apply depreciation and you subtract it from the observed selling price to get the assumed land price. And that works okay. But a lot of assessment is not only using essentially only that method, but also”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, my new startup is, you know, so I'm transitioning out of video games and into mass appraise municipal property tax assessment, mass appraisal. And so my new startup, it's called Geoland Solutions for now. We'll probably have a new name for it by the time that this podcast airs. But the idea is that, you know, I think the best criticism to Georgism is, you know, how are you actually going to separate land value from improvement, from building value, right? You know, how like We can't do a land value tax till we put a price on every parcel of land, right? So how are you going to do that? And I thought that was the best, most good faith criticism remained. And it seemed like it's like, well, we got to get good at that, right? And so I looked into it and I realized that there's a lot of research papers that have been posted in the last 15 years about how to practically do this. And then I went and I started interviewing a bunch of assessors and I realized that the state.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the same we're doing property tax assessments right now. You know, we're doing mass appraisal all the time right now. And if you just keep it updated every year, I mean, you could do it every six months if you had the right technology, which is something I'm pushing for. And so you can see the prices change in real time as transactions come in. And you can use multiple regression and geographic weighted regression to work out the difference between the improvements and the land prices. And if you had a rental registry and knew what everyone was paying in rents, you'd be able to keep even better track on what's going on with that.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source