Super useful post, thank you!

The condensed vaporized rock is particularly interesting to me. I think it could be an asset instead of a hindrance. Mining expends a ton of energy just crushing rock into small pieces for processing, turning ores into dust you can pump with air could be pretty valuable.

I was always skeptical of enhanced geothermal beating solar on cost, though I do think the supercritical water Quaise could generate has interesting chemical applications: https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/recycling-atoms-with-supercritical

Good framing! Two forms of social credit that I think are worth paying attention to:

1. Play money prediction markets and forecasting. I think it's fruitful to think about these communities as using prediction accuracy as a form of status/credit.
2. Cryptocurrencies, which are essentially financial credit but with its own rules and community. The currency doesn't have to have a dollar value to induce coordination it can still function as a reputation system and medium of exchange.

It's somewhat tangential, but Sarah Constantin discussing attestation has some insight on this I think (I put some comments here).

Note that these sorts of situations are perfectly foreseeable from the perspective of owners. They know precisely what they will pay each year in taxes based on their bid. It's prudent to re-value the home every once in a while if taxes drift too much, but the owner can keep the same schedule if they want. They can also use the public listing of local bids, so they know what to bid and can feel pretty safe that they will keep their home. They truly have the highest valuation of all the bidders in most cases.

The thing is, every system of land ownership faces a tradeoff between investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. This is a topic in the next post, where I'll discuss why the best growth rate of taxes closely follows the true growth rate of land values. Essentially, you want people to pay their fair share. Unfortunately, any system that has taxes move along with land values will risk "taxing people out of their homes", there are legitimate ways to do land policy on either end of the spectrum.

The neat thing about this system is that you can choose where on the spectrum you want to be! If you want high investment efficiency (i.e. people can securely hold their homes and don't have to worry about re-auctioning) then just set the tax growth rate to zero; that way the owner pays a fixed amount each year indefinitely. In net present value terms, the indefinite taxes will be finite and the tax rate can be set to adjust this amount up or down.

If for some reason you want allocative efficiency, you can crank the growth rate high enough to trigger annual auctions. This is bad for physical land, but this could be valuable for other types of economic land like broadband spectrum.

Land value taxation is designed to make land ownership more affordable by lowering the cost to buy land. Would it change the value of property as an investment for current owners? I'm not sure, one one hand, land values would go down, but on the other, land would get used more efficiently and deadweight loss of taxation would go down, boosting the local economy.

As for the public choice hurdles, reform doesn't seem intractable. Detroit is considering a split-rate property tax, and it's not infeasible that other places switch. Owners hate property taxes and land values are less than property values. Why not slowly switch to using land values and lower everyone's property tax bill? That seems like it could be popular with voters, economists, and politicians.

This proposal doesn't involve any forced moves, owners only auction when they want to sell their land.

So yes, taxing property values is undesirable, but it also happens with imperfect land value assessments: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759702

It looks like you have different numbers for the cost of land, sale value of a house, and cost of construction. I'm not an expert, so I welcome other estimates. A couple comments:

1. Land value assessors typically say that the land value is larger than the improvement value. In urban centers, land can be over 70% of the overall property value. I would guess this is where the discrepancy comes from with our numbers. AEI has a nice graphic of this here:

https://www.aei.org/housing/land-price-indicators/

2. Overhead costs of construction would act to reduce the overall distortion, since those are included in C_b in the formula for distortion. The construction costs look larger in that article than what I used, but I guess what we really need to know is the markup from construction.

Let's just keep all the construction and demolition costs the same and use your land value ($100K) and improvement value ($400K):

P = 400K + 0.5*(76K -(400K + 10K)) = 233K B = 100K + ((400-233) - 0.05*(400-233)*10)*0.31 = 126K

Total = 359K

So the buyer gets 500K of property for $359K, a 28% price reduction. The land tax is ~25% improvement value. It's easy to adjust land taxes down by 25% so that you tax the correct amount, but the implicit tax on property is a big problem in this case.

The thing is, I don't think land value being only 20% of property values is realistic, especially in urban areas. Median land share in the US is more like 50% so I'm not really sure where the discrepancy comes from.

As for skyscrapers, the interesting thing about this proposal is that hard-to-remove amendments essentially become land. For example, if you made a plot of land fertile, that improvement is difficult/undesirable to remove, so when you go to sell it, the owner pays for it as if it were land. I'll tackle this more in the second post.

Thanks for the clarification! Do you know if either condition is associated with abnormal levels of IGF-1 or other growth hormones? 

Are there examples of ineffective drugs leading to increased FDA stringency? I'm not as familiar with the history. For example, people agree that Aducanumab is ineffective, has that cause people to call for greater scrutiny? (genuinely asking, I haven't followed this story much).

There are definitely examples of a drug being harmful that caused increased scrutiny. But unless we get new information that this drug is unsafe, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

I agree that the difference between disease-treating interventions (that happen to extend life) versus longevity interventions is murky. 

For example, would young people taking statins to prevent heart disease be a longevity intervention?

https://johnmandrola.substack.com/p/why-i-changed-my-mind-about-preventing

See this post arguing that rapamycin is not a longevity drug:

https://nintil.com/rapamycin-not-aging

Broadly, I'm not too concerned with what we classify a drug as as long as its safe, effective, well-understood, and gets approved by regulatory authorities.

I personally don't expect very high efficacy, and I do expect that Loyal will sell the drug for the next 4.5 years. However, as long as Loyal is clear about the nature of the approval of the drug, I think this is basically fine. People should be allowed to, at their own expense, give their pets experimental treatments that won't hurt them and might help them. They should also be able to do the same for themselves, but that's a fight for another day.

Agreed! Beyond potentially developing a drug, think Loyal's strategy has the potential to change regulations around longevity drugs, raise profits for new trials, and bring attention/capital to the longevity space. I don't see many downside risks here unless the drug turns out to be unsafe.