Once you hit that bar, your job becomes buying up housing like it's a Monopoly board.
As an individual you can either choose to win or lose this game. We're not going to change it, at least not within our lifetimes.
Trouble being, this most likely takes the form of steeply rising taxes, which are ever-unpopular, and needs careful design. I also suspect just about everybody aspires to “make it” and then stop striving; this is somewhat antithetical to that (although the leak would be tiny at regular-people levels of wealth)
Dark ages are a thing. It's not at all guaranteed that you can preside over an injustice engine of this nature and have it persist at all: externalities will bite you.
I guess the follow-up is, 'given that this is going to blow up, how hard of a landing do you want? Do you want an apocalyptically ruined planet, or heads on pikes, or massive asset seizure, or all of the above in various combinations?'
We need to start treating housing as a vital resource, not an investment, and rationing it.
Japanese homes are generally prefabricated and have a lifespan of 20-30 years before they are disposed of and a new prefabricated home is put in its place. This is why housing is "cheap" in Japan.
Because you know none of it actually pays for the building, it's just all for the artificial scarcity.
It depends on the quality you want for the build. There are homes being built today that use premium materials and the materials are expensive. You can easily spend $50k on windows, for example. Of course, lower end construction that price drops to like $10k.
You can buy prefabricated homes in the USA but it would be cool if "trailer" wasn't the only option. I don't think many people in the West would feel comfortable in a Japanese home though.
This doesn't explain why rent for apartments is cheaper in Tokyo than in the greater metropolitan area of similar cities in other countries like the US.
I agree with your comment, but I enjoy the irony of it even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Magie#The_Landlord's_Ga...
TL;DR Monopoly was based on The Lanlord's Game--a board game demonstrating the issues with land monopolism.
> In 1906, she moved to Chicago. That year, she and fellow Georgists formed the Economic Game Co. to self-publish her original edition of The Landlord's Game.
Real estate speculation is just such an utterly unproductive endeavor just on the face of it, it's incredible it got this bad.
We might be able to support more idle people, but not at everyone’s current quality of life. That “excess capital” goes off to chase prestige goods like paintings and handbags that soak up a small fraction of the labor pool.
If a huge percentage of the labor economy were devoted to the quality of life for billionaires, then I would very much agree with “eat the rich.”
We've gotten to a point where capitalism in it's current incarnation motivates a decrease in efficiency, which we call rent-seeking. it's maximise the dollars per productivity rather than maximise productivity.
It's not like people would do nothing without work, either. We've had periods of history where there was more time and more resources than there was work to be done, and it caused explosions of fields like art and science, both of which are stagnating under the current paradigm (relative to the capabilities we have as a species * population)
The issue is relative to a lot of people. There was a much large "middle class" 50 years ago and most people were much closer to each other. That middle class has shrunk because a lot of it graduated into a new upper middle class. The upper middle class has no problems buying up property in the most sought after areas as they are close to the places these people work. 50 years ago, it was a larger group of similar middle-income people competing for these places. Today, they can't compete and are pushed out to less desirable places or they rent and complain they'll never be able to buy a home. When really it's that they won't be able to buy a home in the place they dream to live because there's more people that can outbid them than there are properties.
In several nations, we're in a unique moment in time as the majority of the population is old-ish. Old people are conservative in that they're looking for the exit, they've worked longer (more time to save/invest) and they've benefited from favorable macro conditions.
So you might as well say the opposite: a lot (most) wealth is locked up in an enormous group of people (the majority), so not in a tiny group of people.
On top of that, yes, there's also a small group of super rich.
The other aspect you didn't mention is globalization. The former middle class is now the lower class. The "mail man" in the 60s that could own a home and run a family on unskilled labor no longer exists, nor will it return.
This is the tendency of every economic system that has ever been seen or theorized. The wealth creation is what makes capitalism distinct.
I don't mean to say that 'capitalism' is the answer to the world's problems, but I point out that it's not the source of that particular intractable problem.
I mean, how do you think the Western world become so wealthy? How did China raise tens of millions out of poverty.
Capitalism!
You'll find very few people that actually want to whole-hog entirely get rid of capitalism. When you find people critiquing it, it's generally from the vantage point of "this is a rough edge that needs addressing via some government intervention". Housing (in addition to healthcare, education, transportation, and countless other areas) seems like one case where this is very obviously true.
Not really.
True! It's exactly what happens with, for example, the richest man in the world right now. Everyone loves him because they think he has so much merit, but he's just a glorified recruiter and/or magnate, he doesn't have any technical knowledge at all.
I get the hate about him, but it's reached the point where people just make stuff up and it gets swept up into "truth" just because it feels good.