Video of the day: greed vs. scarcity

Why is Edmonton cheaper?

To reach a different audience, I’ve started making short-form vertical video clips for TikTok and Instagram Reels. Geoff Lister knows the medium well, and he’s provided a tremendous amount of helpful advice.

Someone commented that housing in Vancouver is so expensive because of greed. But then … why is housing in Edmonton so much cheaper?

The problem with greed as an explanation is that people everywhere are self-interested. It’s not like housing in Edmonton is cheaper because people in Alberta are less capitalistic than people in BC.

What’s happening is that lots of people want to live and work in Vancouver. It’s not really about the weather. People move where the jobs are. Lots of people want to live in Edmonton as well. It’s actually growing faster than Vancouver.

The real difference is that Edmonton has lots of land. In Vancouver, because of the oceans and the mountains, we have limited land. So to add more housing, we need to build up. The problem is, almost all of the land here is reserved for super-expensive low-density housing, like single-family houses. If you want to build an apartment building, even a small one, you need to get special permission, which takes years. “It’s easier to elect a pope.”

If you’d like to know more, take a look at morehousing.ca.

If you’d like to see people’s comments, here’s the TikTok video.

Whenever I’m thinking through something, I find it really helpful to write it up and to get feedback (e.g. through Reddit). I’m still learning how to frame an argument for a short video, one where the audience is seeing it for the first time. It’s not possible to provide a long chain of reasoning. I’m thinking that I should always write it up first, and make the condensed video version later.

Why short-form vertical video?

Learning how to use this medium feels a bit like learning how to use explosives: both powerful and dangerous. But I believe that if we want politicians to have a better understanding of housing, what we need to do is raise the level of understanding of the general public. Politicians are people: their understanding of housing is going to be similar to that of the public.

Short-form vertical video, basically TikTok and its competitors, is an extremely powerful medium. It’s like a hyper-concentrated form of television: it’s entertaining and compelling to watch, and it’s available anywhere and at any time. It appears to be dominating more and more social-media platforms.

Jeremiah Johnson (Infinite Scroll), The Most Important Decision You’ll Ever Make:

Chris Hayes, as a television host, knows a bit about trying to get and hold people’s attention. The getting is the easy part. There’s a relatively simple list of tricks TV uses to grab your focus, like big faces with big emotions, high volume, colorful graphics and constantly changing visuals. These tricks are well studied, they’re reliable, and they take advantage of that second type of attention, the involuntary reactions we have to new stimuli we’ve just come across. It’s much harder to hold viewer attention. Once you’ve got them to stay on your channel, how do you keep a viewer for the full hour’s length of your show? Television executives are much less certain about this. The first type of deep, focused attention is the more valuable type and there aren’t many shortcuts to getting it other than putting out a high quality product.

That’s what is so insidious about the infinite scroll of social media. Vertical video feeds hacked that very difficult question - How can we get viewers to focus deeply on our content for a long period of time? - and realized they can bypass the first kind of attention entirely. It turns out that pure distraction is the answer. Rather than allowing us to focus, apps like TikTok hold us for hours by presenting a new “Hey look at THIS” endlessly. It’s a glass shattering, every ten seconds, forever.