While manufacturing may comeback to US, the employment in Manufacturing sector may not increase as much due to automation.
Go take a look at what labor pulled in per hour in 1890.
When looking at developing countries that are actually developing (instead of stuck in the middle income trap) what we see is a picture of a more developed country decades ago, except with access to modern tech. While the modern tech makes them move faster, you should expect them to be more like the US or the EU every year. Look at pollution: China has a huge pollution problem, but that's not unlike LA in the 70s and 80s. People are getting wealthy enough to demand environmental regulations, and in a decade their government will care about environmentalism.
So instead of thinking about how China or India have things that we've lost and try to turn back the clock, it's more productive to think that we have to deal with our own problems today, as China will also have them in 20 years.
The idea of buying a house with the promise of selling it later to make a profit is very modern. My great-grandparents and grandparents all owned one house and lived it in for the majority/entirety of their lives, so the value of he house was inconsequential to them.
My parents and their siblings have mostly owned multiple houses. They never moved for pragmatic reasons, like relocating for a job. Instead, they took to the modern notion of "starter homes", where a family continues to move up to a better house by "using the profits" from the sale of their previous home.
Yes, because the idea was established when the leading edge of the Boomer generation was young adults and became dominant fairly quickly.
So, it's been a common belief for three generations that have reached adulthold. Hence, my statement in GP.
I'd be better off renting from someone else losing money.
I'm not necessarily saying that prices should have significant downward trajectory. Of course desirable locations will command a premium over time and so on. But as a society we probably shouldn't be excited that housing sometimes goes up substantially, even as the stock deteriorates.
Most housing suffers from use and age.
(Note where I conceded the point about some land having value due to location or such)
No, you wouldn't, because if the rental market wouldn't support recovering the full costs to the owner, no one would bother owning land and renting it. Whatever costs fall on land owners will, inevitably, be fully (and then some, usually) distributed to renters of the land.
This is what's happening in Toronto right now. You can rent a condo for less than the mortgage interest + property tax + condo fees + maintenance.
Certainly, if houses stop appreciating rent prices will increase to cover some of the difference.
The problem with these thought experiments is you have to assume some reason why housing prices have stopped increasing, but also that nothing else about the economy has changed. Otherwise the thing that stopped housing prices increasing has probably also had some other pretty serious effects on the economy.
It's like asking "what if World War 2 never happened"? Well, why didn't it happen? The same forces would have pushed us in the same directions. If it didn't happen, well, that world doesn't look very much like the one we live in, so who can really say what would have happened?
In general, making as tiny a change as possible, housing still would be priced the same as it is now - i.e. based on what the market will bear, rather than some weird idea that landlords would get vindictive and crank rents just because their asset is no longer appreciating. To the extent possible that's what they already do, and they would price themselves out of the market with further increases.
But if landlording is still a revenue-positive activity, then people will do it, and housing prices would continue to increase in anticipation of future gains. People would still want to move to desirable locations like big cities, and that increases housing prices too.
So I don't see how exactly this happens without a major, major shift in the housing market - something like "landlording is a revenue-negative activity" or "there is a significant chance of losing your asset value in a fashion that it will definitely never recover within the span of several generations". i.e. nothing like the world we live in.
Reducing the lucrativity of owning a house will put pressure into less housing stock and higher rent prices. If it is a fast change the rent price will almost certainly not keep up with it, because the housing stock is kind of fixed at the short term. And yes, some unrelated action may overwhelm that factor. Some unforeseen consequence may also do that, but this one is much less likely.
Now, the fact that it is a policy goal with that kind of support may be a failure on a more fundamental level, but that's a different issue.
"We should also start"...
Obviously I didn't go on and on about it, but it is implied there that attitudes would need to change.
My point was directly that it is, in fact, not a policy failure in the usual sense since it is working both as policy makers and voters intend, and, on a deeper level, that --given that people who, in fact, benefit from housing price appreciation are overrepresented among those who actually vote -- changing this is likely to require either changing who actually votes or getting people to vote against their own financial interests.
I said We should also start treating rising housing prices as a policy failure.
It's a prescription for what society should do, not an assessment of whether current policy aligns with voter wishes.
In the comment I replied to initially, rising prices are treated as a measure of economic success. Treating them as a policy failure would contrast with that current attitude...
Full data, cut off 1% at each end, 5% at each end, and 10% at each end.
I think we'd get much more out of the A-1 or A-5 than the raw average.
(Of course, the real answer -- like with the weather -- is that you need to use distribution information, not a single value.)
We have economic indicators that do that, such as median income and various distributional measures. They don't tend to get covered as much in the news because most of the people with power and influence don't like people paying attention to the stories they tell.
But the same government agencies that publish the headline figures publish my more useful ones for assessing how most people are experiencing the economy.
Can you take a look and help me pick which of those 421,000 pieces of time-series data are the conspiracy ones so that I know not to look at them any more?