One of the original sins of the modern economy was sidelining unions and social programs as a path to upward mobility and installing property speculation in their place. 1/
Converting the distribution of shelter (a human right and necessity) into a speculative asset had far-reaching consequences, and an eventual violent rupture was baked in from the start. 2/
A path to prosperity runs through the appreciation of your family home (not through wage-gains and access to education, health-care and pensions) recruits a vast army of everyday wage-earners who will fight for any policy that pushes up real-estate values. 3/
Last summer, I wrote a six-part series on the history, future and present-day of queue- and crowd-management strategies at Disney themeparks, summarizing my endless reading, rumination, and direct experience on the question.
If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Who gets to do what and when at a themepark may sound like a trivial question, but it's a perfect little microcosm for the distributional problems that are at the heart of all political economy - questions that the pandemic's shortages and shocks threw into stark relief. 3/
This week on my podcast, I read my @Medium column "Jam To-Day," a look at how slow antitrust enforcement can be, and what regulators can do to offer relief to the hostages in Big Tech's walled gardens right from day one: through #interoperability.
If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: