iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Public housing set apart from market pays no dividend and produces no capital gain. Papers like the FT write for investors. Which brings us to the fact that a truth-seeking Press is a necessary good. Which again means that public funding is the only way to provision and allocate a functional Press.

So the question is always: who carries shelter on its balance sheet: private investors at today's real rates, or the government at its own? Housing is a necessary good. Stop pretending that it's an investment. The financial Press asks for more building and says nothing about who should own it.

220

In each case the government borrowed at its own rate, built the homes, kept them and let them by rules. When the public sector is the owner, the owner pays no risk premium on top of that rate, and it has no reason to hold rents up to protect the value of homes it already owns; that is the solution!

Vienna houses about 60 percent of its residents in subsidized buildings. Singapore houses 76 percent in public flats. Sweden built over a million homes in 1965–74 with public money and let them through housing queues (then Neoliberal policies privatized large parts of public housing).

The laissez faire warning that rent control causes shortages assume people stop renting and owners stop letting when the price changes. In the short run housing doesn't behave that way. Tenants still need a home and the owners still have the building.

Now to Econ 101. Housing is a necessity, people need somewhere to live whatever it costs, and new homes take years to build. So a cap on rents doesn't make housing disappear. The buildings are still there. The cap moves money from landlords to tenants.

We have seen it in the US recently. Austin built heavily while the real 10-year Treasury yield sat below zero in 2020–21. After it turned positive in 2022, multifamily permits collapsed, to 41 units in August 2025 on the Census count. Supply followed the rate, not the zoning reform.

The FT writes that a landlord raises rents "only when they are confident they will find someone willing to pay the higher price." True. And a builder adds homes only while new ones don't cut the price of the ones already held. Private supply slows and eventually before housing becomes affordable.

Why? A home is priced like a bond: net rent divided by a yield, and the yield rides the real interest rate. When real rates fall, every existing home is worth more, however many get built. When they rise, prices fall and building slows. Sometimes the market overshoots and crashes but prices rebound.

Ian Mulheirn then asked Monro to rerun that model with UK housing supply twice as responsive and everything else held fixed. Prices came out about 9 percent lower after 33 years. On that model, building alone barely moves the price.

The Bank of England's own modelling, by Miles and Monro, found that the rise in UK house prices relative to incomes from 1985 to 2018 "can be more than accounted for by the substantial decline in the real risk-free interest rate."

Start with England. From 1996 to 2018 its housing stock grew by 168,000 homes a year while households grew by 147,000. The surplus of homes over households rose from 660,000 to 1.1 million. UK real house prices rose about 160% anyway! (Mulheirn, UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence)

The FT says Spain, the UK and Ireland suffer from "acute housing shortages," and that the cure is more building. The record says otherwise. What these countries lack is affordable housing. That is a different problem, with a different cause. 🧵

Kristian @kltblom.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It's goofy that a Paper that presents itself as providing daily access to financial expertise, routinely ignores basic financial and economic theory when it doesn't support the politics of the editorial board. There is no housing shortage; there is a shortage of affordable housing. Here's why.

210

In our culture we carefully avoid letting such individuals know that we have their number. Only when someone reveals an inner hostility do we either turn the tables and use their foolishness for the benefit of others, or we put them in their place by whatever means are appropriate.

Kristian @kltblom.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

How different cultures manage fools is interesting, and often very funny. My family has connections with a rather diverse group of people that spans the globe. Wherever I go people are so very nice to me, but there is invariably someone that can't distinguish between opinions and knowledge.

Brazil is what the American institutional structure looks like without the long economic growth story: every boom in Brazil (rubber, coffee, the 2000s commodity cycle) produced a period of apparent stability, and every bust exposed the same dysfunctional underlying institutional structure.

We talk a lot about how out of touch with ordinary Americans the Democratic Party is, but let's talk about how ordinary Conservatives look at their political problems; they overwhelmingly blame Trump. That Conservatism itself is the problem in the modern world, cannot be discussed in those circles.

Learning how to engage/disengage with fools is probably one of the most important skills in life. Especially in a culture where fools are routinely elevated to positions of authority and wealth.

210

Parliamentary, but derived from the Ting tradition that produces a reverse dominance structure and observes the principles of subsidiarity. Quite different from the UK, French, Israel, Italy and other Imperial such structures. The extremes are mechanically diluted as the story of SD demonstrates.

Kristian @kltblom.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Haha you are making a hilarious, yet very serious, observation. People in service jobs have known this for centuries; having to engage with fools that were never weaned off of attention seeking, is a serious job hazard. Now millions do it for free!

220

The answer is that Brazil and the United States have the same fundamental flaws built into their institutional structures. Compare what has happened in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland over the last 20 years to what has happened in the US and Brazil over the same period.

160

The fight is on. We are taking our nation back from the haters and takers. Better days are coming.

The good news is that even in our backwards electoral system, it is increasingly difficult to retain power in the face of abject failure to deliver tangible improvements in ordinary people's lives; bigotry and tax cuts will only get a political party so far.

200

It's one of those catch 22 situations where people have a very difficult time accepting something until it has been demonstrated in real life (rehabilitation), but the necessary institutional evolution never happens because not enough people are aware that it is actually possible.

000

If you have been conditioned to believe that government is bad, tax cuts are good for growth, and that most people could become rich or at least do relatively well if they just tried hard enough, you will very likely vote for the GOP no matter how ignorant and destructive the party's policies are.

100

Why are many wealthy families strongly attracted right-wing policies and ideas? Because wealth does not change that many people are selfish and self-serving. Fascism is the marriage between state and corporation. German labor did not put Hitler in the Chancellor seat; German Capital did.

211

For 250+ years Poor and middle-class Whites have been manipulated by rich Whites by indoctrinating them with the idea that Blacks were a threat. Nixon used the strategy in the 60s. Trump replaced Blacks with "Illegal Immigrants" and won twice for the simple reason that bigotry is alive and well.

Our institutional structure was built to prevent democracy while protecting asset owners and asset rights. Capitalism is what the institutional structure makes it; our version is an exploitation machine. Functional Capitalism is what we want, and that fight is now live for the first time in the US.

200

The biological evidence is pretty clear on that humans are pulled towards altruism by poverty and particularly famines. So, what determines political outcomes in nations where subsistence is not a real issue, is propaganda and institutional structure. Our Press is a pathetic liar's cartel.

Functional democracies rewrite their constitutions as needed in response to something many people find confusing; new knowledge.

Insanely good. In 1616, Galileo was right and the Church was wrong until 1992. In 2026, Anthropic is wrong and the Church will be right forever.

The resurgence of Conservatism is a cultural death rattle. If one cannot square one's beliefs with what modern knowledge and science states very clearly; what does one do? Socially well-adjusted people update their beliefs. Maladjusted people attack and demonize cultures, institutions and knowledge.

The Southern Strategy. Yes, it worked for a long time, but I think the information age is killing it off along with a lot of old baggage like patriarchy. The Conservative backlash to immigration is but one facet of the fundamental conflict between Conservatism and modern knowledge and science.

price is simply rationing by net worth

000

Thank God for the internet. For all the bad things it has brought, it did bust open the information bubble we have lived in since forever in America. The # of people that are able to hide from basic facts is shrinking pretty fast even if the nuttery of MAGA makes it seem otherwise.

Healthcare insurance is fraudulent because healthcare is not an insurance problem. Healthcare is a necessary good that must therefore be provisioned and allocated by the public sector. Economics was created to solve problems of market clearing and capital allocation, not biological flourishing.

Yes, and my Swedish/Norwegian relatives have all the guns they need and way more freedom to move around both physically and financially. bsky.app/profile/kltb...

130

Growing up in Scandinavia in the 60s and 70s, we kids were taught how to observe how marketing and propaganda manipulates our minds to believe things that are not true.

170

We need way more anthropologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and psychologists on social media. These fields are far more relevant to the issues that face humanity today than the two that dominates public discourse and policy; economics and political science.

000

AI is a motivated reasoning machine in the hands of fools

031

The American Press is owned by Capital. Capital abhors the independent administrative state. The end.

100

"Hi, I am the archetypical patriarchal bully; you should vote for me so that I can abuse the entire world on a daily basis!"

000

I don't see what you are saying as wrong, I just see something shifting from the method of dialoging with oneself, others and the material, to verbal jousting. As someone from a different tradition, I see the fork in the Western tradition occurring on 24 November 1859.

000

What happened to Western education that created the weird belief that debate establishes truth?

270

The more we know the more we know that we don't know much. Everything old is new again in the information age. As always, only a small minority is asking the eternal questions.

000