The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

Yes, it seems the under 30 crowd would rather go to college/university instead these days. A degree can cost about as much as a modest home. Almost nobody attended college in the 1950s. Hobbies always come with tradeoffs.

> And yes urbanisation has increased but not that dramatically.

15-20 points, at least in the USA. That is quite dramatic. If today's cities saw 15-20% of their population leave for rural areas, prices in those cities would drop like a rock.

> What hasn't really happened though is any significant new cities forming

Very true, and fantastically increased farm profitability since the 2007 time period has driven farmland values through the roof, which has made it much more cost prohibitive for cities to expand like they used it do.

I would have thought that "build to let" would be the rarer case, but like I said I might be blind to the idiosyncrasies of the US here

It's 50% more compared to that number. And for last 5 years it was only going up, it's not one successful year. So it's not 12%. Got it? I don't know of anyone talking about margins and talking about 20 years average, they had 0% in 2001, it's counted in that ~20 years, don't you see how stupid this is to include that into discussion? profit margins from 20 years ago.

Labor and material are the lowest costs on bags, highest is marketing. Why I need to pay more to workers if I can build new corporate HQ? When I can pay for bonuses of people at the top? or get ~20% profit. I have 50% of the company profits anyway and I make all the decisions[1]. You want me to tell that he (Bernard Arnault) can't pay people that make these bags more because he don't have money? come on, this is such a naive view. Some products/industries indeed can't but this is not one of them, software also with average of 25-30% NET profit margins.

1. At the end of 2017, the only declared major shareholder in LVMH was the Arnault Family Group, the holding company of Bernard Arnault. The group's control amounted to 46.84% of LVMH's stock and 63.13% of its voting rights.

They're now choosing to buy a > 200% size home. And this is because inflation adjusted median household income has gone up, tada! you guessed it! Over 200%!

And here's some real number voodoo for you - put inflation adjusted median income and median house size over time into Excel and look at the correlation. What do you think happens there?

So, here's the facts, which you don't care to address: 1) House cost is around flat per inflation adjusted sq foot for decades. 2) The main component of median house prices in the US is NOT land, as you claim 3) The reason houses now cost more is because they are bigger (and looks like a slight lower amount per sq foot than 1950), and.... 4) the reason houses are bigger is because household wages are equivalently bigger, correlating quite well for at least 70 years, so people choose bigger houses because they can afford them, as well as 2 cars, many TVs, more trips, relative food cost has declined, and on and on.

Now, I cited good data for all of these. Do you still dispute any of them?

Go ahead and cite some good data - median, complete US market, any time period, that supports any of your claims otherwise.

> Here's what I actually said:

>>the vast majority of the increase of property values is _land_.

The link where I gave you average per acre cost for housing completely blows that out of the water. Did you not look at it? Here are the steps: 1. Look at the per state average acre for housing price. 2. Look up median house acres (Here, I'll even do a decent estimate for you: from the list Florida has the median land price of around $35000 per acre for housing. Average house land is still under 0.25 (one site said it's now 0.19). So land per house in Florida is around say $8500. Zillow says average Florida house price is ~390,000. This likely has doubled in price and size since 1950 (and if it's an outlier, then some other place in the US counters it, thanks to the magic of medians).

Tell me again that the current cost of $8500 land in a $390,000 house is the cause of the near doubling in price? Did the land cost negative $400,000 in 1950?

So, keep claiming your claim. It's so mathematically impossible as to be ludicrous at this point. If you want to continue to make that claim, show me the numbers broken down just like gave you.

Or are we done since you keep ignoring facts you dislike, and misrepresent the double prices ~ basically flat by completely ignoring that the doubling in price is also a doubling in size which was my very first point (and a doubling of incomes which is why it all fits).

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos...