Hacker News Reader

Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Rosling, Gates etc are right that things are overall getting better.

The rich are getting richer and the very poor are also doing better, but this is coming at the cost of the middle class in Western Europe and the US, where the average couple of working adults can no longer afford to buy a home and have to live with the fact that their jobs are significantly less stable compared to the past. Many are forced to work part time or take on gigs to make ends meet.

I could go on, but something's clearly rotten in the west.

View on HN

“Doctor Pinker, you’re killing the patient!”

“Well that’s a fairly narrow and bigoted way of looking at it. Look at how many people are benefiting from her blood and organs.”

Agreed. Let’s not forget another externality - the environment. Whether it’s climate change due to massive pollution or the destruction of the insect base or plastic in everything, there needs to be a more holistic context.

Why is "affording to be able to buy a home" should be our definition of living standard.

It seemed to me that we have chosen to increase the cost of living by spreading ourselves out and requiring cars and making homes investments.

Home and land ownership has been one of the main ways that the working class can accumulate wealth.

It's the average man's tried and true method of investing.

Is that actually true? I mean, it was true in the US in the middle of the 20th century but it seems at odds with what I know of conditions elsewhere, though I'm not an expert.

Yes it's actually true.

It's more that the counter-position broadly applied over the long run is untenable.

If you don't own the home you live in and/or the land it stands on then you are by definition renting that property. A portion of your labour is going straight to someone who owns at least one home and some land thus depending on how long this goes on for drives inequality.

It's not called “Rentier Capitalism” for nothing you know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism

If people have a decent chance to own their own home and land it gives them an avenue to a better life, if they don't it doesn't.

Sorry, I meant to ask if you had any evidence that it was true, rather than if you just had some reasoning that it was true. As far as I can tell social mobility in Europe is about as good as it is in the US despite the much higher home ownership rate in the US.

Yes, home ownership provides a way for people to accumulate wealth that is tax advantaged by US government policy. But does it provide the same benefit in countries without that tax advantage? And is that advantage enough to offset the reduced labor mobility that home ownership brings[1].

[1]https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/05/link-betweeen-high-leve...

I see what you're saying.

That's too counter-intuitive for me. I'd need a lot more than one article to change my mind on this.

All other things being equal, if you're paying down a mortgage rather than lining someone else's pocket that has to be a good thing for you. Because when you have the mortgage paid off you own a property.

Just because in some places (like parts of Europe) there are tenant councils and strong tenant rights which makes being a tenant less bad doesn't then make the reverse situation (working towards owning your own home) less good.

And just because there are negative externalities to homeownership in a certain job market says just as much about that particular job market as it does about homeownership.

It is an unfortunate conflict that homes cannot be both stay affordable and be a good investment. Houses accumulated wealth in the 20:th century because they increased in value quickly, but that means they are no longer affordable to many people. We should allow building more homes so people can buy them. But then they won't go up as much in value as when the supply is restricted.

Homes can be a good iinvestment even if prices aren’t rising (or at least aren't rising faster than inflation). You have to have shelter, so you have to purchase that some how. If you choose to rent theoretically you need to pay for the raw cost of the real estate you are living, the cost of maintaining and managing that property, and a small profit for the owner. If you own the property you can choose to do much of the maintenance and management yourself, and can keep the profit portion. Sweat equity is a real thing, and there is no other asset type I can think of that allows average people to casually invest thier labor like that.

Absolutely. Housing can be an ok investment compared to renting without becoming unaffordable. Buying vs. renting comes down to a trade-off of how long you will stay, how much work you are willing to put in, etc.

For you last point, the gig economy is partially filling that role for non-homeowners. You can drive around or deliver things almost as casually as doing home improvements. Not quite as easily, but the payoff more direct.

Tom Waits joked between songs on one of his live records, how in his travels he realized there is no over-population, just that everyone wants to live by each other.

Which got me to thinking, there is a lot of space, but it's privately owned. Heck, the first police groups north of the Mason-Dixon line were established explicitly to collect taxes for landowners. One of Trump's first big scary acts was to sell off thousands of acres of public lands to wealthy business partners. Yet in all the current talk of wealth redistribution, nobody includes land ownership, even though it has been the main measurement of wealth for as long as we've entertained civilization.

Rosling was such a strong communicator that few people are left unimpressed by him. But his message was never one of complacency. His concern was that if people didn't realize that things were getting better they wouldn't think they could be.

I can see his point. I agree with you about housing. But if we conclude that things are getting worse it is hard to gather hope. There has never been more affordable quality housing as today. Everything of concern is better from financing and construction to communication.

So why is affordability down in these regions? Because the powerful has convinced us that there can be no other way. And we are, just as Rosling didn't want us to be, ignorant enough to believe them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com