I have considerable experience in the Real Estate backend software industry, and so am occasionally contacted by headhunters hiring for Real Estate Investment startups. Here's a typical reply that I give to them:
I am philosophically opposed to "investing" in real estate, as your industry exists entirely to snatch up affordable housing from actual homeowners as a get-rich-quick scheme, benefiting those who are already rich at the expense of those who would otherwise be rising up out of their own financial situation.
Nothing personal, but I wish you - and everyone in your predatory industry - swift failure in your endeavor, for the benefit of the average homeowner.
Have a good day!
Same, By this definition you shouldn't invest anywhere where the supply is low and demand is high, which by very consequence rules out all investments.
I'm sure OP would be OK investing in a company who focused on building equitable housing solutions. That is way different than what they are talking about and I feel like you're just being obtuse.
What is equitable? and to whom? This argument is moot.
Why do you think you should get to decide how much profit somebody should make. Would you agree with the same if somebody decided to cap your salary, to make some end service/product affordable?
I probably shouldnt even reply to such a poor attitude, but I never said I should decide anything or that I agreed with OP. Just clarified their position, which seems to be the same as saying "I like to invest in companies who I believe are morally sound" etc.. which is not something that is crazy.
I believe the unsaid prerequisite here is the investment subject being a human necessity (whether or not owning a home is a human necessity is another argument)
Unfortunately yes. Even the pie fallacy argument is subject to certain conditions which are often false. For economy to work beyond pie fallacy you need situations where most of the economy is driven by people who make wealth by creating things out of nothing. That is purely knowledge work jobs. Almost any where, where you need a raw material as an input to make a thing, the supply of that is limited, and therefore subject to these demand-supply issues(predatory behaviour/rent seeking). This extends to things like buying a plumber's service. If the number of plumbers are limited, and their time is limited(which it is), and there more people who need their services than plumbers going around. Plumbers are going to charge a premium for putting you up their priority queue. That is what you are ready to pay to buy their services before others could get a chance. This doesn't mean its predatory. Its what you are willing to pay to buy their time. Any other way of settling this is bonkers, If the price is fixed and the queue if FIFO, why should you be given a special exception and moved up the queue. And more importantly why should the plumber settle for lower pay when clearly there is a demand for his services.
But on the short run, everything even in knowledge economy work, money is made literally by moving it from person A to person B. Hence A wins at the expense of B.
Even on the longer run most people lack the resources, patience and overall life situations to make decision over such long periods of time.
I had trouble parsing this argument. You lost me way at the beginning:
> For economy to work beyond pie fallacy you need situations where most of the economy is driven by people who make wealth by creating things out of nothing.
It's unclear whether you're trying to propose an alternative model here ("beyond?") or are expanding upon something you call a fallacy but still use as the basis of your argument.
> Almost any where, where you need a raw material as an input to make a thing, the supply of that is limited, and therefore subject to these demand-supply issues(predatory behaviour/rent seeking).
I don't see how rent-seeking fits into that, so I'm going to assume you're talking about predatory investments here. Why we are fixating on goods and specifically on acquiring them for some process I don't know either.
> But on the short run, everything even in knowledge economy work, money is made literally by moving it from person A to person B. Hence A wins at the expense of B.
The other way around maybe? Does either make sense? If I invest in your company, I am giving you money: Am I winning or am I losing? Am I behaving predatory? Are you?
To most people the answer can be found by looking at the transaction in a broader context, you don't seem to even care.
I get that predatory is ill-defined in economics, but your interpretation of it seems to be useless at best. If "predatory investment" means the same as "investment" to you, then predatory is not a useful qualifier in this context. You'll have to come up with a new word to describe what others simply call predatory.
The only way for your construction to make any sense would have been to show that all investments must be made with the goal of rent-seeking and/or be predatory, while both terms each would describe only a subset of investments.
There is no point to having this conversation if we don't even share the same useful terminology.
But even if we sorted that out, the argument likely would still be incomprehensible to me. I wouldn't know where to add the words "Therefore all forms of investment are either predatory or rent-seeking." if you held a gun to my head.
When it concerns basic necessities it certainly is. It would be sensible if nations restrict access to these markets and heavily tax people not using their real estate themselves with a progressive tax that increases quickly with additional objects. It could be fixed quickly if there was political will to do so.
You seem to have contacted me even though I explicitly told Amazon that I'm not interested in pursuing opportunities at this time. It's been very bothersome the number of mails I get (2+ on certain weeks). I've patiently requested earlier to be removed from your reach-out list, but alas here we are again!
Sent from an auto-drafted template that I've set up for specifically Amazon Recruiters.
I worked for several years at a small company whose primary products/services involved aggregating/normalizing/warehousing/publishing listing data, which grew to handle a large percentage of all listings in the country. I knew every quirk and metadata mis-feature of every MLS software in use, and was on the technical standards board of the National Association of Relators. Our company was bought out by one of the big user-facing Real Estate websites, and our team was responsible for the listing collection/normalization pipeline.
