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archive.is is caching error messages for this page. Is WSJ now immune to paywall bypasses? As fun as it is to have discussions entirely based on headlines, it threatens to turn HN into yet another low information high emotion discussion forum.
I agree with some of the commenters who note that the author tries hard to portray this as "financial savvy" but without a whole lot of evidence. Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?
> Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents? Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents. This is just the WSJ-reading "haves" justifying the increasing stratification of society by reframing a clear regression[0] as a "responsible individual choice" which that crowd LOVES. (EDIT: it's a…
> Landlords do not create value. They merely charge others to use natural resources (like land) that were already there
and
> Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed
Plot twist: these are actually Adam Smith quotes. Karl Marx quoted the second in particular.
There is a contemporary economist and former wealth manager by the name of Henry Fudge who describes the housing markets in Western countries as a "rentier asset black hole" [1] and has written a paper called "The Housing Theory of Everything" [2]. The idea is fairly straightforward: capital moves to housing instead of and at the expense of productive output (eg factories) because of tax advantages, inelastic demand, artificial constraints on supply and it being a political goal to make sure that housing prices always go up.
China had made this same mistake as well. Real estate was one of the few ways people could build wealth prior to Xi Jinping who came in and quietly popped a trillion dollar real estate bubble, famously saying in 2016 [3] "Houses are for living, not for speculation".
My personal view is that ever-increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation, a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. It has so many negative effects on society too because it makes everything more expensive. It's an input to every cost (through commercial real estate, which either has to hafve a similar return to residential real estate or it gets replaced with such).
I say all this because the WSJ is defending this generational theft by arguing that people are being "financially savvy" when people seek independence ultimately and this is simply a product of the affordability crisis and declining real wages. It's asinine.
[1]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-rentier-asset-...
[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6571818
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents? Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents. This is just the WSJ-reading "haves" justifying the increasing stratification of society by reframing a clear regression[0] as a "responsible individual choice" which that crowd LOVES. (EDIT: it's a…
> Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents. So? This practice of moving out for no particular reason is very US-centric. To me the "normal" obverved in most peer households of my youth is that people live with their parents until they get married, often late 20s.
I agree with some of the commenters who note that the author tries hard to portray this as "financial savvy" but without a whole lot of evidence. Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?
You assume the goal is to move out, but it might not be. Extended families have lived together in many parts of the world throughout history. Expectations of living alone are relatively new.
Here are two quotes by Karl Marx on landlords: > Landlords do not create value. They merely charge others to use natural resources (like land) that were already there and > Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed Plot twist: these are actually Adam Smith quotes. Karl Marx quoted the second in particular. There is a contemporary economist and former wealth manager by the name of Henry Fudge…
Indeed. There's this common trope in modern journalim of pretending that these financial moves are pure results of personal choices and nothing else. So, tweens going back to their parents is them "being financially savvy". Americans spending more on groceries and rent rather than other goods and services is them "adopting new consumer preferences".
It's always chosen, never suffered. Once you start seeing it, you notice it everywhere.
I agree with some of the commenters who note that the author tries hard to portray this as "financial savvy" but without a whole lot of evidence. Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?
Yes. Or they stayed put. I had a friend who lived at home and drove a Jaguar. He helped his mom occasionally, but it was a financially great deal that allowed him to live large.