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The article seems to contain a lot of hand-wringing about upper class' beliefs allegedly harming lower class families, but I don't see any mention about the main change in the labor force since 1960 - namely the participation rate of women. Men probably work less nowadays simply because it's easier to do in a two-income household vs a one-income household.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…
So would the economy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/17/immigrants-help-economy-job-...
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>I want a financial person to explain to me why we continue to expect exponential growth of companies’ revenue year after year, and why that makes any logical sense in a world with finite resources. Because entropy. When a living organism stops its exponential cell division, we call that death. In an economy, when things cease to grow, we call it recession. When that growth is in balance with the decay, we call it a…
Adult living organisms don't have exponential cell division. When they do, we call that cancer.
Sure they do. Your cells are dying and being replaced constantly. Cancer is just when the instructions for said division get messed up, i.e. runaway inflation in this analogy.
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> Most people can afford a home here. Correction, most people have been able to afford a home in the past in the US. Homes used to be affordable, now they aren’t.
Gen Z is becoming homeowners at a record pace: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/21/ge...
> Roughly 30% of 25-year-olds in 2022—the oldest of the Gen Z (born between 1997 to 2013)—owned their home in 2022, a slightly higher percentage than the 28% of Millennials (born between 1981 to 1996) who owned homes at that age and the 27% of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980)—but lower than the rate for Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), 32% of whom owned homes at age 25.
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Value growth isn't tied to physical resources anymore, it's increasingly ascribed to intangible things, such as intellectual property. I'm not saying that growth is guaranteed to continue, just that economies have already been growing based on more abstract values; it's not all about food and fuel anymore.
> it's not all about food and fuel anymore Is it, though? The biggest IP bubble now is AI, and the main bottleneck of AI is energy to power those datacenters. Doesn't google use as much energy as a few small countries now? Biggest pharma IP now is Ozempic, which let's be honest here, is because westerners are addicted to processed corn and fried stuff. And hectares of monoculture corn sprayed with Roundup and sprinkl…
Man, i wish Americans were just eating the corn with salt. Would be a lot healthier than corn starch+syrup whatever.
~75% of US corn goes to fuel and animal feed.
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Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…
A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…
A big subtext of this article is that individuals with low socioeconomic status are incapable of making good decisions and must be strictly governed, and that the upper middle class is just as guilty as the absent fathers for the erosion the nuclear family structure.
I find the argument that folks with disposable income set a poor example for those of lesser means to be specious, pernicious, and divisive. It's the kind of argumentation that sets lower middle class conservatives up against upper middle class liberals so that they're too busy fighting a culture war to consider what new atrocity billionaires are getting away with behind their backs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…
A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that". If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housin…
If all of the job growth is happening in select metro areas around the country, the existing domestic population is going to move into those areas, regardless of the level of immigration
We live inside the semi-decayed skeleton of a society built by deeply religious people who believed that society should be built and maintained because that is the moral thing to do. They weren't only motivated by per-capita GDP or the promise of weekends off or the pursuit of variety in breakfast cereals, as neoliberal economists seem to claim. They had deep underlying motivations to create a civilization in which they and their families could flourish and engage in the twin pursuits of culture and commerce.
We are now seeing the third-or-fourth generation that is growing up in an era where economic metrics are cited as the "core fundamentals" of a society; unfortunately, comfort and consumption are not motivating enough factors to drive people to feel loyal and energized to contribute to their civilization. Take away the glory and meaning from the basic acts of living among your peers and you will end up with large swaths of people who do enough to get by, and not much more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…
Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…
It's more than that; it's a standard free-rider problem.
If all the other districts in your city support development in their area, then your own property value will go up, but you won't be burdened by any local development costs. And if you develop in your district but nobody else develops in their district, then your property value won't go up (or will go up only slightly) but you're burdened by the local development costs.
It's classic prisoner's dilemma stuff.
The simple solution is to remove the local district's ability to veto local development. At least, as long as city-level/state-level planners don't have an agenda that favors certain districts over others.