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Benja comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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Graffiti on the wall of an Austrian public housing block:
(German original: "Weiße Wände — hohe Mieten". I'm not actually sure it's true, but my understanding is that rent in public housing does vary somewhat with quality and it seems plausible that graffiti could enter into it. And to make the implicit explicit, the reason it seems worth posting here is how it challenges the tenants' — and my — preconceptions: You may think that from a purely selfish POV you should not want graffiti on your house, but it's quite possible that the benefits to you are higher than the costs.)
This makes sense as helping with a price discrimination scheme which is probably made very complicated legally (if the landlord is a monopolist, then both you and them might prefer that they have a crappy product to offer at low cost, but often it is hard to offer a crappier product for legal reasons) or as a costly signal of poverty (if you are poor you are willing to make your house dirtier in exchange for money---of course most of the costs can also be signaling, since having white walls is a costly signal of wealth). My guess would be these kinds of models are too expressive to have predictive power, but this at least seems like a clean case.
Signaling explanations often seem to have this vaguely counter-intuitive form, e.g. you might think that from a selfish point of view you would want your classes to be more easily graded. But alas...
Well, this is public housing, so the landlord is the government and thus is like to both have monopoly power and not be subject to the same laws as a private landlord.
Er... Why? The only reasons for that I can think of are aesthetics (but you can't ‘should’ that), economic value (but that only applies to landlords, not tenants) and signalling (but people who know what building I live in already know me well, so I can afford countersignalling to them),
Broken Windows? ( - If you live in an aesthetically unpleasing area, then people are more likely to trash the place.)
I often see really ingenious grafitti in Vienna. My favorite was somewhere in the 9. district someone wrote "peace to the huts, war to the palaces" and then someone corrected it to "peace to the huts, and to the palaces". I found it amusing because it sounded like a grafitti battle between anarchists and catholics.
A better house in a better neighbourhood costs more. How is this news?
I believe the implication is "I am doing you a favor by spraying graffiti on your apartment building, because that will cause your rent to decrease."
I don't know if this is actually true, but that's what I take to be the intent.
That is a lot to squeeze from four words. FWIW, they struck me as a snarl of rage against people who have more money than the perpetrators.
As a tenant in such an apartment building I would reply that nice white walls and a nice neighbourhood is the entire point of paying that rent, and that anyone who wants to live in a slum should go and find one, preferably a long way from me.
This happens in the context of gentrification. In a city like Berlin rents in the cool neighborhoods rise and some people have to leave their neighborhood because of the rising rents.
Putting grafiti on walls is a way to counteract this trend.
At least it is from the point of view of people who want to justify that they are moral when the illegally spray grafiti on the houses of other people
It's not just the words you're squeezing, it's the medium — the fact that the words are written in graffiti.
I agree that a nice neighborhood is the point of paying rent, and your comment about people who want to live in slums, etc. I'm not sure that graffiti by itself constitutes neighborhood-not-niceness, but of course it's correlated with lots of other things, and there's the broken windows theory, etc.
To a poor person, having walls at all is more important than having white walls.
To a poor person, having a car at all is more important than having one with no dents in the panels. I don't see that as justifying vandalising the cars at a second-hand dealer by night so as to pick one up cheap the next day.
But we're working from just four words of graffiti here, from an unknown author, and the site where Google led me from the original German text is dead.