this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
233 points (94.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43792 readers
896 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To simplify it, when capitalism answers "is it worth the cost?", it is not answering "is the benefit of this thing to society worth the cost?". They're answering "are the profits I would get out of this and the risk worth the cost?". And profits do not always agree with what's good for society.
One example of moderate-to-low cost investments that are of demand in society but not very profitable and hence does not see focus is low-income housing (at least in the US). Housing developments disproportionally target high income or even luxury housing, as the margins on those are far better (but the costs are also much higher). Even nowadays, that this trend has been going on for a while, and luxury housing has really fallen out of demand (which greatly increases the risk), it continues. Luxury housing still looks a better investment to investors, when society does not need more luxury housing. It needs more moderate and low income housing.
Perfect