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- Hacker News
- Isn‘t this an example for something that will pay off later? Public baths come to mind. Those generally don‘t make sense from an economic point of view and are prohibitively expensive for private owners to build and maintain.
But they pay off by keeping society clean and healthy and prevent loss of workforce from mental or physical disease?
by fzeindl - Is the problem really the economy when these types of places were more prevalent in a time of even less economic regulation than we have today? I don't think that these "third spaces" really ever existed as the intentional stimulators of social interaction that they are conceptualized as today. Rather, I think that they were established in order to complement already existing social structures.
These structures no longer exist, and my conjecture as to the cause of that, especially in the US, is cultural fragmentation. Almost half of this country believes that the other half of the country is evil, or at least hold profoundly evil beliefs. Why would someone want to spend time in a place where there is a 50% chance that the next person you run into is evil? Why would you want to take your children to such a place?
And if you want to establish a place where you can spend time with just the 50% percent of people who are good, it's not gonna be a public space. If it is, you can't prevent the evil people from coming, and once they do, all the good people will stop coming. Public third spaces existed in a time of greater cultural homogeneity, where it was more likely that the people in your general area held more or less the same beliefs as you do and much more importantly, had more or less the same standards of public behavior.
This is all to say, I believe these spaces are diminishing because there is not a real desire for them, even in the people who claim to desire them. There IS a desire for a place where you can gather with people who are either in your subculture or in one that is not antagonistic to it, and who behave in a way that you believe is appropriate. This is not possible in a public space of today. To apply the regulation and exclusion required, a majority with enough power to apply it legally needs to be established. And in the case where you have such a majority that agrees on standards of public behavior, you again have a sort of cultural homogeneity.
by un-diletante - In India, by law, companies above a certain size are required to spend 2% of profit on social responsibility activities. So in my city, you see lots of things around adopted or funded by companies.by clapthewind
- This room is an example of a public good[0] (something that is non-excludable and consumed in a non-rivalrous way, like a park or like clean air. Contrasted with private goods like a slice of pizza).by cobber2005
- As a parent, I've always wished that something like that would exist in the united states. I live in a nice town in the northeast but kids hang out at a local dunkin donuts or gas station or cvs. We have some of the highest property tax rates in the country and families move here specifically for the school system so there are a lot of young kids and there are a few playgrounds for younger kids but for 10-18 year olds there really is not much.by readgrounded
- Do you have a garage? Is it fully occupied by a car?by inigyou
- It existed in my old town, although I think it got shut down.
If many people with kids move into a town, they can create it by voting in the town government and/or pooling together money.
- The act of visiting grandma doesn't need to be legible to the economy, rather the time that might possibly be used to visit grandma needs to be illegible to the economy.
Speaking from a US perspective, the straightforward solution to this was defining full time work as 40 hours per week, and then incentivizing companies to not go over this (by automatically increasing pay rates). In addition, the setup where men worked in economically-legible employment while women did not effectively halved this number.
That number was never updated with women entering the workforce, nor with automation, offshoring, etc. Meanwhile the whole idea was undermined with the dynamic of "exempt" salary positions. That limit of 40 hours per week should be something like 15 hours per week in the modern world!
Furthermore, the surplus income from all this extra employment didn't end up going into workers' savings, thus creating a natural market feedback where workers would have more market power and insist on working less (as the marginal utility from the dollars for each hour worked would be less). Rather it went into nearly-zero-sum competition for housing (aka rent), which the article touches on as the forcing function that demands continued high-hour employment.
by mindslight - Part-time jobs are available and they are often taken by people who work multiple jobs.by skybrian
- Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here.
I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.
It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.
by cameldrv - see also: "Bowling Alone"
- We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.by layer8
- The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.by derektank
- > You cannot sell “a place for lonely teenagers to feel less lonely.” The value is real, but it spills out sideways
The economic notion of value is wealth-weighted. This is very, uhh, unique -- other notions of value are generally not. Whenever the economic notion of value is saying that (obviously good thing) is worthless or that (obviously evil thing) is supremely valuable, it is worth remembering this and asking "valuable for whom?"
- Valuable for Moloch.by pixl97
- Here is where we’ve found those rooms: 1. In scouts gatherings at churches or campgrounds (zero religious connotation - just use of unused space during the week). 2. In play dates with other families. 3. In sports clubs that have regular practice. 4. In local libraries which are a fantastic resource, especially for caregivers of young kids. 5 In local elementary schools where playgrounds are open and older kids can ride bikes in the yard. 6. In local parks. The market tries to capture the surplus capacity of people with no other obligations or kids. The hard part is finding the trustworthy people who will be a part of your community and the fellow families who want the same community for their children. Trust-based communities will carpool, and take turns for hosting play dates, and ignore messes to enable social interaction, and keep screen time off to ensure social interaction instead of zombie mode. There is market incentive to it and it is rare and it is hidden because it is rare and fodder for abuse. Trust networks exist in parallel to the market but they take offering value to receive value and not in a monetary way and they are also very unevenly distributed. The market profiting from gambling, and addiction, and alcohol means there are fewer safe places for this kind of network to build. But it can be started with as little as 2-3 families banding together.by dzink
- Unfortunately were I live...
The sports clubs were bought out by private equity and charge large fees. The local park is rented to the same private sports teams 7 days a week. The local elementary closed it's playground. (been open for 40 years, installed gates 5 years ago) Only scouts at the church remains, and it has become oddly focussed on getting fairly rich kids into college.
by grumpy_coder - In my experience, the key element is slack.
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
by nicbou - I live my life with no slack and no way to get any.
I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.
by Mezzie - I'm a father of 7 children. I'm the youngest of 5 siblings and my wife is the youngest of 6 siblings. Both of our mothers had college degrees and jobs and chose to stay at home with the children, and neither of our fathers had anything other than middle-class incomes.
My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).
We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
- Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us want to live and so these markets should be contained within a superstructure that has motives other than profit.by ixtli
- The market may be performing at a local maximum, if kids without third spaces grow up unproductive.
- We had youth clubs where I live when I grew up, but it never crossed my mind to go to them unfortunately I thought they’d be hostile places.by zeristor
- another POV is that many problems are political, they're not solved by markets or even math. that is, the hard part isn't "optimizing." how to use land is a political problem. the "optimizing" you are talking about is apathy, it's one of many valid, if inferior, political choices.
- Or what if the average consumer wants to live a different life than what you want? I long for the memories of my childhood where I spent it outside for hours on end or when I had the opportunity to use the phone line to use the internet but I am not fully convinced what people what are third spaces. It’s hard to answer and I think partially for better or worse why markets are often a useful tool to o help figure it out. Never perfect but maybe better than the alternatives.by infecto
- Note that this actually exists in a mixed economy: it's a private members association, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverok , which is basically a big D&D club that has achieved a small amount of government funding.by pjc50
- It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors.
I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
by kubb - In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.by Wilsoniumite
- An alternative view is that rooms like these would be a lot more feasible if market pricing of real estate was not being artificially driven up by planning restrictions. Historically, communities were able to afford their own versions of this in their own localities, but this isn’t possible anymore because of property prices. There was a community hall where I grew up that was funded like this along with a local sports club, and I’ve lived in a few North American cities where there are still community club/social houses for different groups (and not just wealthy ones) that were built decades ago.