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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>It’s even worse because there’s an adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS and school system. So all the incentives are towards not just home ownership but also additional buy-to-let ownership so that those with the means can afford private health care, dentistry, school fees for their kids/grandkids, inheritance for the kids who are priced out of the market, and retirement.

It's also about rapidly declining population and people not willing to work. The result of welfare state.

If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

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If there's a finite resource, you can't just say "if only the population worked harder, they'd have more money to spend so they can buy the thing we're discussing". Money is used as the tool to ration in our society, but it doesn't therefore mean that insufficient money is the problem behind rationing. This financializing of everything is the problem with too many analyses these days - fundamentally we need to think about provisioning before financing.

Working hard doesn't influence housing supply vs demand in real terms at all. In fact it makes it worse because all those hardworking people will demand higher quality housing in exchange for their sacrifice. So end up with more people being unhappy with their current housing, not less.

Hi, the Cradle to Grave Welfare state has existed since the 1940s.

Were people not willing to work in the 1940s?

There is a problem that the age demographic has changed.

There is the ever increasing problem of more people drawing down state pensions, using the NHS and social care, than there are young tax payers to support them.

How would you incentivize people to have children?

Make it seem to be profitable, obviously. France’s system is genius - supposedly, income can be shared between all household members regardless of age.

So the marginal tax rate becomes very low if you have three kids. Even incentivizes one parent to work less.

> If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

I don’t know if this was sarcasm, but this is the sort of absurd nonsense spouted by conservatives who’ve already gotten “theirs”.

Home prices that are astronomically high relative to average wages means that most people can’t afford to buy a home no matter what they do (other than becoming millionaires).

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