Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

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I apologise for the following unstructured stream of unconsciousness. It would be interesting to know what age group you are in as that could well colour your perspective.

For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live in a world where (thanks to things like QE) it's easy to make money if you have money - equity markets have gone through a sustained bull period and housing prices have seen a sustained period of growth which has only in the past few years cooled down.

An easy thing for many people to relate to is house prices (which is often most people's entry into wealth). If you live in a major city like London, good luck buying a house without parental help. The past decade has seen growth which has basically been faster than most people can save at. What's even more crazy is that the gap is small enough to see within (half) a generation - I have an older brother and people in their mid 30s face a very different situation to people in their mid 20s now. If you got on the housing ladder around or before 08 you'd have made widened the gap between those who didn't in a stepwise fashion.

Meanwhile, my father was able to buy a house and have a kid when he was 27 after arriving in the UK with nothing on his back - he didn't even have a university degree. Contrast that with today, people who work in classically "elite" jobs live paycheck to paycheck in the city. Do you know any junior doctors in London? Most of them are amongst the most miserable people I know - they work all kinds of crazy shifts (night oncall) then have 1-2 hour commutes home.

So if you're in a situation where most people are struggling to move out of home, let alone get on the ladder, while it is known that the rich are getting richer can we say that we live in more equal times?

What is your comparison point? Things get better all the time, but it really depends on what apples you compare which oranges to, and which flavour you prefer, how the comparison is viewed.

So, is the comparison point Roman London? During the Blitz? When Pea Soup was a common pollution issue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog)? Or is it a period post war until about 1980 when assets hadn't caught up to a booming economy?

Some parts of life are more expensive in a few world cities that are more than their local population, places like London, SF, NYC, Paris. In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones. On the flipside, supply has not kept up, as most world cities have housing approval procedures that are glacially slow, and held back by NIMBYs.

But even then, the London of 1950 wasn't the place it is now, and lots of things like air quality have improved vastly, as has what is available to do - from eating to drinking and general entertainment.

Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.

>What is your comparison point?

I guess my parent's generation i.e. post-WW2. Your insight about assets not catching up is valid, although social mobility was very high for the times.

>In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local ones.

This is presentation of facts I've previously struggled to articulate so thank you for framing it much more lucidly than I ever could have. This particular insight unfortunately somewhat agrees with my viewpoint that "global inequality has gone down but local inequality has gone up globally". Like I said, I haven't got any data to prove it, but I would willingly put money on betting that there is some Simpson's paradox schenanigans going on here. China, if anything, is a great example of this - the Beijing middle classes are doing "o.k." and there are tonnes of billionaires in China, but equally, there are plenty of people still living on 100USD a month (or less).

>Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so > $100K with expenses under $1K a month.

I think that is a fair point, the only difference I'd argue, is that my parents came to the UK and did well for themselves by playing the same game as most the people around them. Sure, I could move to China on an expat salary (I have recollections of 200k PA USD for "english teachers" in South Korea being passed around a while back, or teachers at Harrow Beijing getting paid 100k+ PA) but is that really something any of the locals can do there? That's almost soft colonisation in my eyes. I recently had a chance to discuss local software engineer salaries with a local mainlander and he quoted salaries of 20-30k USD for fresh CS grads in ShenZhen. And he scoffed as if that was a big number. Really puts things into perspective when you compare that to Ivy CS fresh-grads in SV (120-200k when I last checked)...

> most people are struggling to move out of home

This smells like selection bias. The people who aren't struggling that badly aren't complaining about it!

32% of americans 18-35 live at home [0], but that isn't an all-time high -- in 1940, for instance, approximately 35 percent of people in that age range lived at home.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/24/479327382...

Forgive my hyperbole, and yes I probably live in a London bubble which biases my personal anecdata set, but the data you've shared is a U shaped* which starts at the 1940s and is on a trajectory for arriving back there.

* with the exception of the Black demographic

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