American workers are demanding almost $80k a year to take a new job

This is largely the result of 3 things, a giant shortfall of building where population growth has outpaced new home starts for 40 years, women joining the workforce in greater numbers since the 60s, and houses on average are much larger and feature more amenities.

And there's a ridiculous amount of cognitive dissonance among the Boomers I've talked with on this topic. There was a real confidence in their feeling that things were just as hard back then and there's just as much opportunity today for people to work hard and buy a home.

In their defense: every single one of them, when we got the pen and paper out and did the math to show it's not even remotely close, were shocked.

That's called cost-push inflation, and is an invalid theory. Inflation comes from government running the money printing press overtime.

This is just basic market economics.

If anyone wants to understand what effective economic policy is read Ha-Joon Chang’s work.

Wages are a good compromise they can all agree on.

Nah, don't think so.

We went from multigenerational homes and kids living with their parents, inheriting their houses, and if buying -- doing it after they grew up and saved / got help to buy their own house. To a situation where everybody thinks the first thing you have to do after you get your first job is to get expensive mortgage and buy your own house. And parents basically waiting for their kids to leave the house so that they can enjoy freedom.

You suddenly need way more houses for the same number of people because people no longer want to live together. And that is what has largely been driving housing prices.

The times of prosperity caused this change but also for a long time were masking the effects.

Then multiply it by people's inflated expectations on how large their living space needs to be (houses are much larger than in the past even as they are less affordable),

It does not help that people are brainwashed that borrowing money is the way to go. It is not. It is a way to stay a slave to the bank. As a side note it is funny that there is so much debate about freedom and yet completely miss the fact that the biggest reason people are not free is that most people owe money to a bank and and most are not making good progress paying the debt.

So I think this wave of growth in the need for housing space will pass and at some point it will get more affordable.

I think future is very much to be written. In ideal world people would get educated on how to deal with debt, how to pay it and stay debt free. Also how to not get overboard buying stuff you don't really need (which I am very guilty of myself). I know this last one might cool the economy a little bit but I actually think it would be fine if it meant people had healthier financials.

What I think is likely, though, is formation of a new class which will essentially be free people in name only. Slaves to the bank from the day they are born to the day they die. Monitored and controlled at every step (which is already happening -- with banks and insurance companies digging through your private data to figure out how big risk you are). Poorly educated with both parents working, with attention grabbed by a shiny rectangle from the first years of their lives, with a noise of AI generated "media". Unable to reach real information through the noise. With no real friends, no real social interactions, no hope to upend the system because of no way to gather critical mass of people to do anything of note.

For instance: the supply of eggs is somewhat variable, so in times of shortage the price has to go up to make demand = supply. The rich aren't eating fewer eggs when this happens, the poor are. If everyone was rich, the price of eggs would go to infinity. (This seems to be happening to private school tuition.)

Why hasn't this happened in the past? A lot of property makes a lousy investment unless you get value by living in it.

We now mostly work the same hours for money, then pay someone to do what mothers used to do for free; except possibly with some extra friction (tax, stress, commutes etc.).

Even nowadays, in the UK for example, many families are pushed to realize the soaring cost of childcare is greater than post tax earnings for one parent and skip employment to save money.

I'm not sure I really see anything interesting here, except this:

> The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation

Rising wages aren't the driving forces of inflation. The problem is exactly the opposite it seems.

The Federal Reserve and "easy money" policies put a lot of money into the system trying to deal with the pandemic. The fallout of that is inflation.

The fallout of THAT is people need more money to get by. Not just to deal with the inflation, but to deal with raising interest rates and everything else that comes along with trying to "fix" that issue.

So people demand higher wages.

Inflation is how we pay the bill.

I thought price increases were being driven by fiat money printing, sending pallets of that money to Ukraine, and high energy prices due to that conflict.

There is no evidence that employers have been trying to keep pace. There is ample evidence that they have tried to suppress wages.

For decades what they are calling 'keeping pace' has been performed by knocking the legs out of their employees.

This type of argument makes it seem that workers are at fault for inflation. That isnt true. Workers are stuck in an inflation loop until inflation is tamed.

The inflation loop didnt start with greedy workers, it started with prices going up due to monetary policy...catalyzing the loop.

Henry George laid this out 144 years ago in Progress and Poverty. Once you've seen it, you can't un-see it.

It's really hard for individuals or even corporations to "hoard" cash forever in offshore bank accounts and cause inflation (nor deflation).

The money isn't locked in vault (not physical, nor electronically). They generally end up right back into the market because those banks offers loans for a good chunk of their deposits. Or they buy bonds or MBS which are effectively the same thing.

Same for parking assets in a financial institution. Whatever assets you buy the original sellers gets the money you put in, and they use it on something else. The only real way you could personally take money out of circulation is to withdraw physical cash and burn it (Inadvisable, in some places this is illegal) or bury it in the ground.

MMT would disagree with this claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory

Even among Keynesian economists and others the exact causes are disputed and most seem to agree that it comes down to a combination of factors with "making more money" not necessarily even being the most direct or biggest contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

Opponents often cite historical examples of hyperinflation but arguably in most of those cases the government "making excessive amounts of money" was just a reaction to the hyperinflation itself. E.g. the collapse of the German "Papiermark" directly followed the defeat of Germany in the first World War, which also settled the country with extremely painful reparations and involved a republican revolution which preceded years of political instability (e.g. there were two different and conflicting Soviet republics in Bavaria alone).

So as correlation goes, states that go kerplunk tend to print a lot of money. This does not suggest that printing a lot of money makes them go kerplunk or vice versa. They might be going kerplunk for entirely different reasons and print a lot of money to address those reasons, desperately. It actually seems unscientific to assume societies work so trivially that printing too much money destroys them given how complex we know societies are (or failing that, at least how complex individual humans are and how complex therefore interactions between them must be).