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Lalartu comments on Innovation's low-hanging fruits: on the demand or supply sides? - Less Wrong
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Village dwellers (at least here in Ukraine) don't have toilets and don't lack them much. It is only important in cities.
Lots of. As example, the most mundane of the important problems: housing is absurdly expensive.
No, they would be wrong. Teleporters would be indeed transformative technology. Among many other changes, they mean that "place where you live" and "place where you work" are not connected at all, at least within national borders.
I think there were a lot of predictions of this kind in the past.
Is it? We do mass produce housing in the form of trailer homes. It's not much but it is a roof, and I've never had the impression it's absurdly expensive. Manufactured yurts seem to be available at pretty low cost too. What's expensive is housing in particular locations, and as you say, that's tied to the necessity for a living space within reasonable distance of working space.
Maybe a good candidate for useful innovation, if not teleportation, is something else that decouples the location of work and residence. Teleconferencing helps with this, but not all jobs can be done by telecommuting and not all bosses are willing to allow it.
I've heard the theory that a large part of it is not wanting to live near people prone to violence. Since discriminating by proneness to violence is illegal in much of the west people wind up using wealth as a proxy.
Partially that, and partially it's the school system. Parents with school-age kids tend to select a town to live in on the basis of how good the public school system is and there is pretty good correlation between that and house prices. Wealth, of course, correlates well with all of that as well.
Part of that is whether the school is full of undisciplined kids prone to violence.
BTW, there's a topical blog post on MoreRight.
At the low end, yes. At the high end what matters is basically whether it's cool to be smart.
Either way, my point is that it depends on the other kids more than the schools themselves.
It's a feedback loop. The kind of kids you have (from what families they come, with what IQ and what culture) is very much determined by the kind of town this is and that certainly drives the school reputation.
Does “how good the public school system is” vary on a length scale short enough for that to be relevant?
What do you mean? Parents face a choice of where to buy a house at a given point in time and (statistically speaking) they are willing to pay more for a house in a good school district compared to a similar house in a bad school district.
Can the quality of schools change? Of course and, as usual, it can go down much faster than it can go up.
I mean, what sizes do you mean by “district”? 5 km? 50 km? 500 km? If the first, the kids can just commute to a different school (assuming halfway-decent public transportation, or a parent who passes there on their way to work, or a parent with enough spare time); if the last, no-one is going to move that far just because of what the schools are like; so I assume you mean something in the middle. Does the quality of schools actually change that much from place to place in such a range of distances?
Agreed, but that was not my point (I said length scale, not time scale).
Oh, I see.
In the US school-level education is local -- it's run by towns via school boards and is paid for in large part by local property taxes. It is not run by state or federal government. Typically each town has its own school district or several small towns might have a joint school district. The quality of school districts varies a LOT, even for districts physically close to each other.
One consequence of this arrangement is that if you go to a public school you must go to the public school of the town in which you live (there are some exceptions, but that's the general rule). You cannot go to the school of the neighboring town -- it will not accept you.
That is why buying a residence in a town is simultaneously a choice of which public school your kids will go to.
Obviously if you are willing to pay for a private school your kids can go wherever.
Thank you. Things make sense now.
For anyone reading this: The thread “Worth remembering (when comparing ‘the US’ to ‘Europe’)” is interesting. (I'd promote it to Main so that new additions to its comment thread are more likely to be seen.)