why I'm anti-YIMBY

Programmers don't become more productive when they move to Silicon Valley or Seattle or NYC.

Why do you believe this?   I definitely became a better developer when I moved to NYC.  How do you know that everyone else didn’t either?

correlation of wages with housing prices and with wealth is stronger.

I think this is just recursive?  Of course wages are higher in places with more wealth.  Higher wages causes more wealth.  And housing prices can follow, just cause of supply+demand (there’s a higher supply of dollars, so people are willing to spend more of them).

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Anyway, it’s incredibly effective to take very talented people, and put them together on the same team. They build on each other’s talents, and it becomes multiplicative in a lot of cases. I like the story about the IBM black team as an example (though admittedly it may be apocryphal).  

Achieving this requires gathering them, which requires paying them well, which means you need somewhere like SV or NYC where that can happen.  

I mostly don’t think remote work is nearly as effective.  It massively reduces the compounding effects of having smart people work closely together.  But this is just based on my personal experience so far.

When you say "force demand to spread out more", what policies do you propose, and how confident are you that this is both easier to accomplish than the YIMBY solution and leads to better outcomes?

My default (weak) assumption is that a policy requiring more explicit force is more likely to produce unintended negative consequences as well as greater harm if unpopular. So a ban on A has a higher bar to clear for me to be on board than a subsidy of B over A. My initial reaction to the sentence "force demand to spread out more" is both worry at how heavy-handed that sounds at first blush, as well as confusion as to what the upside of this is over the YIMBY solution, besides preserving the utility of some currently-exurban houses/land that would otherwise go unused. That's good, but I don't see why it's so good that it justifies not pursuing greater density instead, since as you say the money is already in the city.

I am confused by your number 3.  Edited for what I think you mean, and using NYC (high cost) and Tulsa (low cost) to make your example more vivid:

"Building more in [NYC] causes people to move [to NYC because now it's cheaper to live there,] which causes jobs to move [to NYC], which causes more housing to be unused in [Tulsa, which causes housing costs to drop in Tulsa]."

If my understanding is correct, then housing prices drop in NYC, and housing prices drop in Tulsa.  Therefore, housing prices drop on a national level.  But you say, 

"...which means housing costs don't decrease significantly on a national level ..."

But clearly they do.  

Unless you're saying that the average American's housing cost doesn't drop.  That's possible; it's just Simpson's Paradox.  Housing is cheaper in NYC than before, and housing is cheaper in Tulsa than before.  But housing is more expensive in NYC than Tulsa.  Because you now have a higher population ratio NYC:Tulsa, the average housing cost might not drop.  

But I would argue that kind of "housing costs don't decrease" is misleading.  If the price of both types of housing drop, and that leads people to choose more expensive housing because it's now more affordable, that's not the cost increasing.  That's people spending more money for a higher quality/quantity of product.

For instance, suppose the quantity of all types of housing increases 50%, and the price per square foot drops 33.3%.  Now, everyone gets 50% more square feet for the same price as before.  The total expenditure on housing is the same, but housing is definitely cheaper.  Any apartment size that was $1500 before is $1000 now.  Any house size that was $3000 before is $2000 now.  

Substitute "in New York instead of Tulsa" for "50% more square feet" and it's obvious the cost has dropped, which makes the quantity demanded increase.  

The fact that people spent 100x as much on face masks in 2020 doesn't mean that the cost of face masks increased 100x.  People just bought 100x as many of them because the benefits increased by 100x.  It's the total amount spent on face masks that increased 100x.  

It seems to me that your argument conflates two different senses of "cost."  One, cost per unit of housing; second, total amount spent on housing.  If the first decreases, the second can increase, decrease, or stay the same.  But it's the first that's the important one for the argument.  Because the issue is, does building more housing change the cost per unit.  

Having said all this, it's possible that I've misunderstood your argument.  

I think you are underselling the networking advantages of cities.

Most people are eventually part of a couple or family. Most couples make compromises in terms of one or the other taking not-the-best position for their career because they want to live in the same area as their spouse. In a big city (my experience is London) their are enough jobs in enough industries close together that a typical couple can both usually pursue their ideal careers (or close) without being in different places.

Add into this that your job might change. If you live in Boeing town: population - high, employers - one, then you work at Boeing, and if you stop working at Boeing you move house and your children change schools etc. If you live in a big city and you are a career-ist you can do the whole "monkey bars" thing where you keep jumping between companies as you think you can do better, all without moving home every 2-3 years.

Other rich people are there, which is good for networking.

I think a good portion of your argument hinges on whether this kind of networking is overall positive-sum for the economy or whether it's zero-sum or negative-sum. 

Do you agree that this is a major crux?

Yeah, or adversarial collaboration-style. I'd be especially curious about (1) what would change your mind (same for the YIMBY proponent) (2) empirical data

So to summarize:

(1) YIMBY policies, if enacted, would be to increase national average incomes by allowing more people to concentrate in high wealth producing areas

(2) the policies would essentially be to disempower local authorities to control land user or zoning, except in a very deterministic way where all projects are automatically approved if local authorities don't respond by deadlines

(3) you acknowledge that it would increase national incomes and well being for many people

But...your objection is that because capitalism is inefficient/the inequality is not merit based we shouldn't do this because...

I simply can't make a connection here, I don't see any worked examples proving you're correct about capitalism, and there's pretty strong evidence that you don't know what you're talking about.

The evidence is simple : if companies "close to the money" paying more for services (financial, software, etc) were getting less value per dollar than getting those services elsewhere, over time they will be outcompeted and lose to companies that hire remote workers from cheap areas or on site workers from cheap areas.

It's the efficient market hypothesis repeated again.  Monopolies and oligopolies make the market less efficient but don't disprove it. 

But suppose you convince me that in fact EMH is incorrect in this scenario.  Ok, now what?  We live in capitalism, it's the rule, it's the best of the bad systems so far found.  This is not the time to abandon it.  Or rather, selectively abandoning it in only the case of housing makes no rational sense.

Like if you were convinced that capitalism needs a reform, that's fine, but your article should be "how capitalism is broken and here's how to fix it" not something about YIMBYs.  It's a total non sequitur.   Any reforms or fixes need to patch all of capitalism, zoning policy is completely unrelated.  

I might point out that in a communist system, the local committees in tier 1 cities refusing to allow enough housing would be replaced.  You see what China does in those cities, it's build build build.

Many people can work as well remotely.

This is vacuously true because of the underspecified word "many". Otherwise, I don't see how it's meaningfully true. Programmers can work well remotely, but most employed people are not programmers.

It might be nice to include suggestions (and measurements, where it's been tried) about moving housing demand to low-cost areas.  There's always a big question in economics about how and why supply/demand/price curves change, and it's usual to take them as pretty static.  If you believe it's a first-order impact that they can be changed, it falls on you to explain how.

My first question, of course, is "why not both"?  Seems like YIMBY laws (forced relaxation of restriction on building in popular areas) allow more housing to be built (BOTH more square footage AND more families in given areas), which is a good thing, even if prices rise - that's an indication that the housing is even more valuable, presumably because of increased network effects.

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