Mia Wong (14:59)
So what does this actually have to do with abundance? Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I explained rent on this show and this is specifically here. Rent in the context of what you pay to your landlords. I promise this will circle back to this will circle back to sort of abundance yimbyism in a second. I attempted to explain rent by drawing on the work of the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronel to argue that the rent that we pay to our landlords functions similarly to oil rent, where price is not set by supply and demand, but instead by the social power of oil producers. Now, people got very, very mad at me for this, but the longer of history has vindicated me in the real world, it turns out I was right. The most powerful example of this in the housing market is the case of RealPage, a service that allowed landlords to get recommendations on their pricing based on information from all the landlords who submitted their data, thus creating an algorithmic machine for price fixing. This got bad enough that even the Biden Justice Department got involved. Here's from the Department of Justice's lawsuit against RealPage. RealPage acknowledged that its software is aimed at maximizing prices for landlords, referring to its products as quote, driving every possible opportunity to increase price, avoiding the race to the bottom in down markets and a rising tide raises all ships. A RealPage executive observed that its products help landlords avoid competing on the merits, noting, quote, there is a greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps entire industry down. A RealPage executive explains to a landlord that using competitor data can help identify situations where a landlord may have a $50 increase instead of $10 increase for the day. Another landlord commented about RealPage's product, I always like this product because your algorithms use proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and terms. That's classical price fixing. Now I was derided for arguing that landlords would band together using Their social power to prevent rents from falling even with units sitting empty. And it turns out I was right the whole time they were doing exactly that. It turns out in the actual real world of the market, all of these companies and all of these landlords had found a way to band together in order to use their social power and use the information in their possession to fix the price of rent. Here is from Reuters, drawing from yet another lawsuit, this time from the attorney general of D.C. a monthly report from W.C. smith in 2022 showed the company had increased revenues per unit by 4.6 to 4.7% despite decreased occupancy levels, according to the lawsuit. So what is that saying? That is saying that the actual number of people in these apartments is decreasing. The number of apartments staying open that have no one in them is increasing, but the price is not going down. Even though there's more supply, the price is still going up. Why is the price still going up? Well, well, well. The Justice Department calls this price fixing large scale collusion to disrupt the functioning of the perfectly normal competitive market. The anthropologist Fernando Coronel, as I argued before, calls it absolute rent. Rent extracted by virtue of the social power of the landowner. As I wrote in that, absolute rent does not obey the law of supply and demand. It is the product of social power, of the power of land ownership itself and the organization of the landowning class and their backing by the state and its militaries and police. And this causes economists attempting to use supply and demand to explain rent to get very, very important events very wrong. Morris Edelman, the famous soil economist, predicted in 1972 that the price of oil was going to collapse based on oversupply and competition. Instead, it increased 400% between 1973 and 1974 because oil producers banded together to exercise their power and their organization, known as opec, became a genuine world power, as Coronel put it. The sharp increase of 1973 and 1974 in oil prices did not result from a world shortage of oil. It was rather the outcome of a long historical process by which OPEC nations, acting as landowners, developed a means to extract a rent on the basis of their ownership of the oil fields, an absolute rent in addition to the differential rents they had collected in the past. In 1973, a set of converging political and economic conditions helped establish their collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil. With this power, OPEC felt entitled to set the market price of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from the previous constraints of market price. Now, rent itself, absolute and differential would determine the market price of oil. What does that sound like? Oh, it sounds like RealPage's price fixing algorithm. Why does it sound like RealPage's price fixing algorithm? It's because in the real world, markets are not neutral institutions that operate according to neutral laws. They're institutions created and enforced by the state. Landlords can jack up your rent because they wield collective power together and have the ability to use the state to drag you out of your home at gunpoint. Abundance is, to a large extent an attempt to harness widespread discontent over the price of goods, the price of rent, the price of food, and argue that you can simply produce more and this will make all of the prices go down. But as we've seen here, as long as the social power is held by the rent extractors, they can simply set their own price. None of this is addressed in abundance. And there's a simple reason for that. The people funding the abundance agenda are the very same people profiting from their social power. So let's talk about the money. I'm going to be quoting here from a report from Prospect, which is very good. The Institute for Progress, which co hosted Abundance 2024 and is listed as a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, has a bevy of corporate ties. In 2022, IFP received $110,000 from FAI and has FAI s executive director on its board. Now FAI is the foundation for American Innovation. I'm going to read this is also an Abundance co host, which is very funny. I am going to read a quote from Kate Willett, who has also done some excellent reporting on this. And she describes how the FAI hosted another conference in 2024 called Reboot. Quote, the quote, surprise guest of the conference was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage foundation and Chief Architect of 2025. Now back to the Institute for Progress. Part of what's going on here, right, is that this is, this is an incre, you know, and what, what I'm trying to emphasize by how confusing this whole thing is, is that Abundance is composed of a series of think tanks and weird institutes that are all tied into a bunch of tech money, right? Keeping the acronym straight is very difficult. You do not need to hold all of them in your head. The other thing that you need to understand about this, right, is if you look at who is co hosting these conferences and who is behind these books and who is behind these media outlets, a very, very clear picture starts to emerge. I'm going, I'm going to go back to Quoting from Prospect. One of the funders of the Institute for Progress was Emergent Ventures, which is a product of the Kochbak Mercantis Institute at George Mason University. Emergent itself was launched by a grant from Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is a right wing billionaire with a vast influence network at the intersection of techno futurism and anti democratic thought who has called technology an alternative to democratic politics. Small D democratic. By the way, he means the concept of democracy to quote, unilaterally change the world. Vice President Elect JD Vance is a known scion of Peter Thiel. Let's look at the Chamber of Progress, another one of the groups that is heavily involved in abundance. Chamber of Progress, which self identifies its work as part of a growing abundance policy movement, is a trade group started with Google seed money by Google alum Adam Kovakovich. Kovakovich proudly touts his college activism leading an effort to cross a United Farm Workers picket line. The Chamber of Progress's partners, reed funders, include A16Z, Circle, Coinbase, Google, Kraken, Ripple, Waymo, Andreessen Horowitz or A16Z is a venture capital firm heavily invested in AI and crypto. Co founder Mark Andreessen believes the technology is the solution to every problem. He's also on Meta's board. He is also a theolite tech fascist. This is it in some sense, a very, very interesting collusion of forces. Right? We have the Koch brothers who are, you know, sort of the ancient libertarian right side of Republican dark money. They are, you know, the people who have traditionally funded right wing movements in the past. They are the Tea Party people. They are, you know, they are sort of the boogeyman under the bed for anyone who has wanted to make the world a better place for a very, very long time. And they and their organizations are working with the emergent tech fascist rights. You know, people like, people like Marc Andreessen, people with Peter Thiel and these are the organizations that have gotten in bed together in order to do this. Now these people have a bunch of absolutely hideous beliefs. We're not even going to get in to the eugenics here. But like these, the people funding this thing are huge eugenicists. We literally do not have time to do the, all of the eugenic shit associated with this. Because if, if, if I were to actually do the eugenic, I mean we talked about some of like Matti and glaciers bullshit on this podcast earlier. But like if I actually went through and did this, this episode would be like 12 hours long. I am going to cover this sort of Network State Pure Theolite Eugenics Circle at some point later. That is a forthcoming episode. But yeah, for now. Here are these ads which hopefully are not Eugenics Woo.
