In a market, value comes from scarcity; in a democracy, value comes from number. It’s interesting to see how diametrically opposed these dynamics are, and what that entails.
For instance, within market dynamics, the decrease in working age population would cause salaries to increase (due to scarcity of workers) and therefore workers’ material conditions to improve, whereas, within democracy dynamics, this decrease in working age population, and a concomitant increase in retired population, would cause the amount of salaries extracted by retirees via taxes and social security to increase, and therefore workers’ material conditions to worsen; it is not clear, a priori, which effect would dominate.
In practice, market conditions end up being changed by importing immigrants, which would appear to demonstrate the supremacy of democracy in its prioritization of protecting retirees’ rents; however, this is also due to the political influence of capital, which requires broadening the simplified characterization of “democracy” made above.
(And, of course, to progressive ideologies, which are not fundamentally self-interest-based at all…
In housing, which may well be the cause for all of society’s issues, this complexity extends itself across multiple levels of interactions: owners, renters, NIMBYs both self-interested and ideological, YIMBYs, activists, urban planners, …)
Confissões de um gajo possuído 