Ok, you caught me! I knew '73 would be a bit early for disco but I thought it read well! How do you want your No-Prize sent?
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Ah, there must have been something disco-esque about in '73. “Kung Fu Fighting” was from '74!
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Especially realtors, bankers, and homebuilders.
I may be one of the few conservatives who realizes that young people who see their future as twenty different jobs and relocates over their lifetimes tend to not do things that conservatives like, such as getting involved in a community, joining a church, getting married and having kids.
Very few conservatives I talk to are willing to confront this. The few who do get it believe that a protectionist economy (which was a topic long before Trump) is the way to solve it.
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I spent my early childhood in a Chicago bungalow which dated from circa 1910. Built hell for stout compared to a lot of the crapboxes I saw on the market last time I was house hunting.
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The data is from the census. As they’ve defined for hundreds of years.
" As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that
are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own
their own home."
So yes - lots of family members live in the household with the homeowner.
But - it’s the traditional definition.
Money quote:
“For higher education, a major factor driving up costs has been a growth in the number of highly-paid non-teaching professionals. In 1988, for every 100 full-time equivalent students, there were on average 23
college employees. By 2012, that number had increased to 31 employees, with a shift toward the highest paying non-teaching occupations. Managers and professionals now outnumber faculty, who comprise just a
third of the higher education workforce.”
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And most families- who know that their wealth will be in their home.
Especially with no pensions, social security being targeted & the average
retirement account being nearly nonexistent.
No ones making you buy a home. Those realtors can’t fool you.
Want to or have to?
I live in nyc. Everything I buy has a premium on it compared to most other places in the country. A big proportion of that premium is rent. Rent is fundamentally pathological for economic efficiency. Nobody in nyc is better off because of the rent paid other than the rent owner. Put another way, landlords don’t produce very much.
The rents paid are just our modern form of feudalism.
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To be fair, that is very dependent upon where you live, where you go to HS, and sometimes, how much money one has.
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That’s because most people who call themselves “conservatives” these days are, in fact, reactionaries. Very different mindset, and thus a very different end result.
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I can second this. Chicago bungalows are well known and loved for a reason. They might not fit 21st century living perfectly, but their pros very much outweigh their cons.
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I was thinking of this:
from this paper.
It’s easy to forget there’s pretty hefty selection bias as much of the substandard housing stock didn’t survive and what did survive usually has had substantial improvements, additions, etc. It’s often illuminating and interesting to ask what the daily life of one’s grandparents or even parents when they were children was like to get an idea of what we would now consider deep privation nowadays (and yes, they often have fond memories of).
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Except rental stock, a fact for which I was rather grateful for the substantial section of my life when I was renting.
Honestly, I’m not certain about how landlords charging what the market will bear for rent is a lot different from me charging what the market will bear for my services as a programmer. Sure, the few that hold rental stock in the right areas do very well for themselves, but if my specialty was in machine learning, I’d have done very well as well. I’m not certain why one is more “greedy” or inefficient than the other.
I don’t worship the economics of supply and demand any more than I worship gravity. But I give heed to the fact that they can’t be ignored. If one is lucky, they can be channeled to maximum social gain.
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But landlords don’t produce rental stock. Builders produce rental stock. Landlords just rent it to you.
The difference is that when you charge for your services as a programmer you produce something that didn’t exist before. A rentier doesn’t do that.
To clarify the difference, imagine I do a deal with all the programmers on the west coast to have the exclusive right to sell their services for a fixed rate. Anything above that fixed rate I get to keep. Have I really produced anything or do I just have a dominant market position?
The only theory of rents I’m aware of is Ricardos. However all neoclassical economic theory is based around the notion of a competitive environment. Well the theory says that “rents” disappear in a truly “competitive” environment.
Ricardo would define a “rent” as a payment which was unnecessary to incentivize the production of a product or service. As such it represents merely a transfer.
I didn’t use the term “greedy” cos it wouldn’t have any analytical content. However I could describe “rents” as inefficient or without an economic rationale.
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Silent Running.
Afraid that was 1972, according to IMDB. Apparently The Exorcist was the highest grossing film released in 73 (albeit the end of the year). Incidentally, I would never have expected a horror thriller to top a year’s box office.
How many relatives do you know who bought a house right after WW2, and stayed there? In my case, there are a bunch of them. It is probably different for urban people, but all of the elderly people in my family paid off any mortgages long before retirement. Their housing costs are very low. Of course, the source article does not define housing costs, which include rent, property taxes, utilities, day care(?), furniture, electronics, appliances, dorm rooms, parking, but does not include mortgage payments, which are apparently not included in any of these categories. Also, it seems that other loan payments, such as credit cards, are not included as expenditures.
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Oh, I should have guessed that even. I wasn’t doubting you nor the data you supplied. I just didn’t know, was impatient and annoyed because I didn’t know immediately and wanted to.
It would be interesting to see how much of those homes was “owned” by banks (financed) in a graph like that.
Didn’t the “flipping houses bubble” happen when financing was too easy, driving prices and thereby making it harder to outright buy and own property?
Since the burst people default, banks hold massive real estate?
[quote=“tlwest, post:60, topic:91977, full:true”]
The trouble is that once the transition is finished and scarcity is almost artificial, it’s even harder to change the status quo and it’s really easy to be locked in to a world were 90% have almost nothing (and 10% are working their tail off to avoid being part of the 90%).
It’s a nasty treadmill, but we’re all running on it.
My other worry about UBI is that if we do achieve it, I’m afraid what it will do to people. I’ve known a fair number of people who’ve suffered from depression at one time or another, and for almost all of them, “earning their daily oxygen” was almost always a vital part of preventing from falling of the depression cliff.
Now maybe it’s just my handful sample size, but if if my observation is true more widely, I really worry about the mental health of a population that could easily feel they’re utterly superfluous.
The healthy can take up a hobby, become a care-giver, etc. but if your energy is already being sapped by depression, it becomes incredibly easy to just curl up in bed, which just makes things worse.[/quote]
As one of those who suffers from that degree of depression, I think the capitalist treadmill has a great deal to do with whether or not one feels truly superfluous.
I feel that once a basic-income cycle like that is attained, there would be more people who have the time and inclination to engage with each other more directly (fewer connections dependent solely on business and capitalist ideals), humanely (hopefully, with less classist behavior), and with more time to reflect on our existence in life.
I think this would at least provide some positive stimulation and interaction for the melancholy ones who desire it.
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