Earlier quoted context omitted.
I apologise for the following unstructured stream of unconsciousness. It would be interesting to know what age group you are in as that could well colour your perspective. For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live in a world where…
What is your comparison point? Things get better all the time, but it really depends on what apples you compare which oranges to, and which flavour you prefer, how the comparison is viewed. So, is the comparison point Roman London? During the Blitz? When Pea Soup was a common pollution issue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog )? Or is it a period post war until about 1980 when assets hadn't caught up to a b…
I guess my parent's generation i.e. post-WW2. Your insight about assets not catching up is valid, although social mobility was very high for the times.
>In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones.
This is presentation of facts I've previously struggled to articulate so thank you for framing it much more lucidly than I ever could have. This particular insight unfortunately somewhat agrees with my viewpoint that "global inequality has gone down but local inequality has gone up globally". Like I said, I haven't got any data to prove it, but I would willingly put money on betting that there is some Simpson's paradox schenanigans going on here. China, if anything, is a great example of this - the Beijing middle classes are doing "o.k." and there are tonnes of billionaires in China, but equally, there are plenty of people still living on 100USD a month (or less).
>Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.
I think that is a fair point, the only difference I'd argue, is that my parents came to the UK and did well for themselves by playing the same game as most the people around them. Sure, I could move to China on an expat salary (I have recollections of 200k PA USD for "english teachers" in South Korea being passed around a while back, or teachers at Harrow Beijing getting paid 100k+ PA) but is that really something any of the locals can do there? That's almost soft colonisation in my eyes. I recently had a chance to discuss local software engineer salaries with a local mainlander and he quoted salaries of 20-30k USD for fresh CS grads in ShenZhen. And he scoffed as if that was a big number. Really puts things into perspective when you compare that to Ivy CS fresh-grads in SV (120-200k when I last checked)...