I have been interested in city planning for a while and the idea of an 'urban growth barrier' is a key concept with massive benefits. Basically, when you limit a resource, like available land, it simplifies thinking, forces inward development and and very often the 'impossible' problems go away because creative solutions come out. Maybe the chip industry will see something similar if a barrier of 'just wait till the new smaller process hits' gets put in place.
> Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality.
Creativity has been unlocked but it's not the magic kind, it's the rather mundane Robber Barron kind, where the robbers occupy the sources and hoard a bunch of goods to resell or rent at higher profits. It's true for housing, GPUs, RAM, etc. [1]
[1] Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Maybe Malta is just too small of a world for that magic toggle, since entrenched interests can basically just prevent the government from approving certain strategies, like building more large buildings with apartments like the Mercury Tower. But on the global stage, not even the biggest player(US) can dictate what China, India, the EU does, so if the US self-limits because of entrenched interests, that's just more juice for the squeeze for other players not aligned with the US.
Its definitely mostly entrenched interests that are the issue.
Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.
For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.
So I remember urban growth barriers being all the rage in the late 00s, and Portland specifically was held up as a shining example. Many Western cities (eg. Portland, Seattle, SF & the Peninsula, Salt Lake City) followed this general pattern though.
What I actually see, living in one of those metro regions that is land-constrained, is very little infill development and actually implemented creative thinking, and lots of homelessness and unaffordable homes. Sure, being supply-constrained gets people thinking about infill development and mass transit and densification and walkable neighbors. But there's always a barrier, usually multiple ones, to actually putting that into practice. Instead, you get the obvious effects: the supply of homes is constrained, their price rises to the point where only rich people can afford them, everyone else either goes homeless or moves out of the area. Sometimes, very often, a supply constraint simply means that people do without. Even when there is multi-family infill development, people don't want to live there. Everybody wants their SFH, even though intellectually they know it's unsustainable.
I suspect it's going to be the same here. More expensive CPUs and GPUs are just going to mean more expensive CPUs and GPUs with no real silver lining.
> I suspect it's going to be the same here. More expensive CPUs and GPUs are just going to mean more expensive CPUs and GPUs with no real silver lining.
Presumably, higher profits will incentivize other players to enter the market and increase supply, and/or the company earning high profits plows at least some back into R&D to at least create better chips, which can result in eventually lower prices for the previous generation of chips.
This isn’t a possibility with land and land rights, however, so I wouldn’t expect the same dynamics to play out.
Over a long enough time horizon, yeah. Over a long enough time horizon the same happens in land too - we are finally getting decent amounts of infill development in the Bay Area, but it's 15 years after prices started to skyrocket.
Starting a semiconductor company and constructing a few fabs at cutting-edge process nodes takes at least that amount of time, so I'd expect semiconductors to have similar dynamics.
A bit OT but I live on a very land constrained island with the highest population density in Europe (see Malta).
There has been major increase in demand for housing and supply cannot be built fast enough to match. Its turned most of the island into a construction site so rampant that I made an online tracker for urban planning permits so folks can get ahead on knowing whats going on around them.
Idk if you have any wisdom but there's no creative solutionising happening, just the rich able to buy whatever property they want causing prices to rise which is pricing out the middle class, causing a whole lot of grief and downstream issues (such as plummeting fertility rate because homes are too expensive).
Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality?