Updating plausability
A minor detail can be enough to spoil an entire paper or book for me. Often enough, I read an argument in a field I do not know well, and it unfolds with a kind of internal coherence that feels persuasive, even elegant, with each claim seeming to follow naturally from the last, so that I find myself inclined to accept it without much resistance.
Then, at some point, the author touches on something I do understand.
It is rarely a dramatic mistake; more often it is a small one, a claim that is just a little too neat, or a generalisation that overlooks something obvious, yet it is enough to unsettle the whole structure, because it makes me question not only that specific point but also the parts I had previously taken on trust.
A recent example is the idea that desk-based labour will stop being scarce (as argued here: https://sahajgarg.github.io/blog/cognitive-labor/), which strikes me as broadly plausible, since if cognitive work can be replicated or scaled, its scarcity, and therefore its value, should diminish.
The contrast offered is property, presented as something that remains scarce and therefore insulated from this shift.
But that does not quite hold, because while certain locations are indeed scarce, such as a house on Lake Zurich or a flat in central London, that scarcity depends heavily on where people need to be, rather than on any absolute shortage of habitable or even desirable places.
If work becomes less tied to location, that constraint begins to dissolve, and with it the concentration of demand, since there are many lakes, many cities, and many landscapes that are currently considered “out of reach”, not because they lack value, but because they sit outside existing commuting patterns. In that sense, property is not nearly as insulated as it first appears.
What unsettles me is not the specific oversimplification itself, but what it reveals about the argument as a whole, because if the part I understand does not hold up particularly well, it becomes difficult to assume that the parts I do not understand are any more robust.
