Also, US is clearly able to be more productive overall, while Europe able to create a higher quality of life for a higher fraction of its population. Which of these facts will be sustained in the next decades remains to be seen.
* Different people value different things: am I better or worse off when I live in a small apartment in a city and go everywhere by bike/bus while my children cycle to the local public school themselves vs owning a big house with a big garden and a big car, driving them to school every day? Even to what extend such different lifestyles are by choice or necessity are hard to tell.
* Quality of life differences can be very different for different segments of the population (high vs low income, minorities, children, retirees, people with disabilities, etc). Is a country better or worse of when the QoL is a bit worse for a bottom quartile high school drop-out, but a bit better for a a top-quartile doctor, or a third quartile nurse or police officer?
Such questions can't be answered, because they depend mostly on subjective weights.
Don't leave us in suspense! Elaborate.
There are also other differences too, things like many more walkable cities, more modern infrastructure and public transit. I could go on.
Like I'm doing fine enough here but I wouldn't even kind of defend how we live over here. America is in many ways the international version of a person who makes a lot of money but is still check to check eating ramen most nights and playing video games because they spend it all on their hobbies and stuff. It's a way to live but I wouldn't call it a good one.
Also, UK doctors are compensated at internationally competitive rates when compared to average national income, especially so if they work in private practice in London with international clients.
I stayed in apartments in China and Italy where things worked and I never heard my neighbors. I could live with that. But now I live in a house in the US and I'm much happier for it.
As a dual eu / us citizen that's not my observation. What do you base this on? An average American feels wealthier than an average European to me even comparing to just western Europe.
There are ways to lose your quality of life against which guns are useful.
There are many more ways against which guns are not useful.
More of the latter apply in the US than e.g. Germany (which has very strict gun laws). Does this mean gun laws in Germany are better? Personally I don't think so. But it does mean the preference for guns over thse other benefits has more to do with ideology than realistic risk assessment.
If you want to complain about derailment, arguably OP derailed the conversation already by bringing gun control into a quality of life discussion and I merely recontextualized that. Especially because they were arguing for a practical necessity of gun ownership rather than merely for gun ownership simply being something they see as a quality of life improvement (like having an 8K TV or the newest generation of gaming consoles).
Also, that topic was raised by 3seashells. willcipriano was replying to that point. Then you said:
> Arguably the fact that you think owning a gun makes a practical difference in your own safety although a gun can not defend you against health issues or financial hardship (e.g. losing your job, interest/rent hikes) is a point against you.
You're using against willcipriano that he was addressing a narrower context. But the narrower context was defined by 3seashells. So your criticism is unfair. (Or, perhaps, mis-aimed.)
For your sake let's hope this historically aberrant period of political stability holds forever.
You don't have any such means, even if you own an actual M1 Abrams tank and suitable ammunition: you aren't awake 24/7; you aren't hovering around your family 24/7; and if a criminal planning to attack you already has a gun pointed at you, your reactions aren't going to be fast enough to take them down before you yourself are shot.
The way to be safe is to be in a society which minimises the degree to which criminals have access to guns, and where criminals know that killing someone is going to result in other people hunting them.
> For your sake let's hope this historically aberrant period of political stability holds forever.
I'm also pessimistic about it lasting, but I will consider it a sad day when I need to defend myself against bandits rather than letting the state do it for me.
Think about it this way: bandits and cops are doing it professionally, most of us (I don't know if you're a vet) are just amateurs.
Tell that to the Taliban or the Vietcong.
> consider it a sad day when I need to defend myself against bandits
Personally I'd feel shame if other men died in my defence.
That's my line. Those two kicked the USA's backside despite the superior firepower that the USA brought. Took a while, and they lost a lot of their own in the process, but they won.
> Personally I'd feel shame if other men died in my defence.
Why do you think that's a necessary, or even likely, outcome?
First: well trained forces are much less likely to die in any given encounter than random people in the same encounter. This is also part of why I asked if you're a vet: without that training, you're not really defending you and yours even a tenth as much as you think you are. (And even with: there's a reason the unit size isn't single soldiers).
Second: if you have a society worthy of the name, you can coordinate against bandits, making it harder for them to threaten the lives of anyone including those doing the groundwork of taking down criminal gangs. By way of comparison, the UK is sufficiently safe that even cops are not routinely armed — because they don't need to be.
The issue is, I don't have a great deal of faith in society generally or the people who inhabit it.
We couldn't even manage sharing the plentiful toilet paper resources available during the pandemic. The idea that the, to be frank, mostly obese often self proclaimed mentally ill masses are going to put forward a meaningful defence seems optimistic.
Think of it this way; If you are right, I won't have needed any of this training or equipment. If I'm right, you'll wish you were as prepared as I am. The price of being wrong from my position is much lower than from yours.
And they vote :P
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of dumb in society, and short term thinking does lead to bad choices in democratic elections; but normal people fund police and elect lawmakers — if they're doing it themselves that's called "mob justice" and generally ends badly.
> The price of being wrong from my position is much lower than from yours
Pascal's Mugging.
I can make the same argument for everything that societies do, not just policing: healthcare, firefighting, military defence, food hygiene standards, workplace safety laws, vehicle maintenance requirements and emergency responders to make sure highways don't get blocked by breakdowns, …
Some of those can't be done by individuals because of the way they scale, the rest you can be an expert at one or possibly two, so you can only be safe if someone else can fill in your gaps.
So: if you're right, you're still in a hellscape despite your guns.
My position is to try and aim for a world where society doesn't collapse. Not because I think it can't, but because I think it would be really bad if it does: there's so much more that needs to get done than any individual can manage, that we'd only survive by making a new society afterwards and dividing labour in similar ways, with law enforcement being a job rather than everyone's responsibility.
Europe is better than the US in many aspects, but I wouldn't call safety necessarily one of them. Well, in Western Europe. Eastern Europe is probably one of the safest places in the world.
So maybe your basing your position on stereotypes rather than reality?
A decent EU quality of living feels unattainable in the larger US cities and is available in the EU for most of the population.
A significant amount of quality of life improvement has happened as I've grown wealthier over the years. In the form of time alone, I have more personal time to do things I want to do rather than being forced to work for someone else to meet basic needs.
I have a fairly large yard and used to maintain it, it took a lot of time and wasn't something I enjoyed (just the final aspect of it). I now pay people to maintain it, I enjoy having a well kept yard by simply paying for it. When I had less wealth, a significant amount of brain cycles was spent looking for ways to reduce or optimize some cost around something. Now, unless I see a big price difference to where it may impact other aspects of my life, I don't fret a few dollars here and there.
When I had less wealth, even with healthcare, I'd probably push through work vs taking a day off because the risk of not having enough sick + PTO days off should I get more sick. Now, if I feel sick, I don't hesitate to use sick leave. Wealth also affords me more overall bargaining power in employment negotiations. Having enough "FU" money let's me dictates my terms with more authority leading to more enjoyable work environments.
Overall wealth allows me to pay a lot of things away I'd otherwise have to do. It also affords me opportunity to do things I want I might otherwise not. I take more international vacations since I became more wealthy and it's been great, just returned from a nice vacation. Part of that trip involved splurging on some nice dining options, paying for luggage delivery/management, and having more comfort in my transit options. With my new found increased time wealth bought my, I exercise frequently and my health has improved or at the very least, my overall feeling throughout the day.
There are a lot of things people get diminishing returns of in terms of quality of life vs wealth where it doesn't matter. My bed is just as comfy, I've been fortunate enough to never be short on food, and so on. If you're single, it can make you more attractive especially to women but it's not everything, physical looks and personality are still more important to most people (at least the people I'd want to meet).
So while wealth isn't a direct indicator of quality of life, it's certainly correlated and I'd argue for many, a strong correlate. It won't get you everything, some things wealth won't help you with (I still have to exercise my own body, I can't pay that effort away but at least it enables me to do that more readily and on my own terms, for example).
Or by not getting the wealth in the first place. I work 32 hours per week and not one hour of overtime; if some day I land a better paying job or the kids move out I'll work 24. That directly translates to better qol without becoming wealthy. Wealth mostly just means you can buy more useless crap.
Americans like to measure quality of life is square foot, but I think that’s more a measure of wealth than happiness.
most likely i earn a bit less than what i'd earn if i had an identical doppelganger twin in the u.s. - i mean, i earn a lot less right here than i could if money was the ultimate objective. i just value other things more, mostly time with my family and hobbies, peace of mind when it comes to external factors where the expensive social safety net comes in.
also, as a middle class earner i much prefer my lower class neighbors having a good social safety net and other guarantees because i really don't want my neighbors kids go hungry. not only because that's bad in itself, but the wealth and security disparity would also create a worse local environment (crime, drugs).
In the US kids don't go hungry. The truly poor have food stamps and other aid so I don't get this comparison.
https://apnews.com/article/free-school-lunch-child-hunger-7d...
It may not be any better for European kids, but it’s inaccurate to say that US kids don’t go hungry.
Case in point, earlier this year's my company laid off thirty percent of us.
Now to Europeans, they are worried about what we're going to do for healthcare, etc. Some of my colleagues paid out of pocket, thousands of dollars. This would seem crazy to Europeans..
It's also crazy to Americans. Because for me, at my mom's behest, I did not pay. Instead I applied for government aid. Now, despite making over 300k usd a year, I got free Medicaid for my family. Free.. no cost. Way better than Canadian or European health care because it's basically a private ppo plan the state pays for. If you can afford it, the American health care system is the best. And while I was unemployed it was free (just like it was while working, when I factor in company contributions, etc). I also got substantial unemployment.
Now we're going to have a baby and... There's paid leave.
In America, there's whole swaths of people who don't believe these programs exist and don't bother applying. It's really weird. I told my colleagues about Medicaid and they thought it wouldn't apply to them (it does) of wouldn't cover something (it covers everything. No cost).
That's a strange method to consider something better or not. It seems to lead to overpaying for stuff. And it seems to suggest that private is better without explaining why. Plus assuming that paying more is better without explaining why.
I'm in the same boat. Have lived and worked in both and definitely don't see this drastic difference that's always espoused on here between the US and EU QoL. They're both pretty good places to live, with some differences in how you manage things (less taxes in the US, more things you have to buy for yourself).
You're obviously going to do better in a nation/state with more social services if you're in a very low-income manual labor/blue-collar field. People here pretend that that's 100% of the American/European populations in their weird ego-flexing comparisons.
Either way, it's not worth arguing the point with people on the internet. If Europe is so great, go live there. And vice versa.
it ain't that easy bro. even with money and 133t programming skills.
But if skills are your only option, get one less easy to attain than programming, of which they have plenty of.
I found the last WP stories on life expectency and cronic illnesses very enlightening, in a non-pleasant way but still.
The very bottom of America is (of course) much worse off
Edit: did you change your comment or did I just misread it originally? I swear 'sports' was in there.
Is food really cheaper? That's not what I heard but I don't know.
But that's a weird take. Quality of life is not entirely dominated by your purchase power if you have enough to sustain life. What about having time for culture, friends, family, quality of the environment, safety, access to healthcare etc. The only exception may be housing.
Some cities here (in europe) have an absolutely incredible quality of life and I would never factor in the price of groceries because it doesn't matter. Everyone in the middle class can afford groceries. Housing maybe, in some cities it's a real issue, but I personally don't care as much because I don't really need an abundant apartment so I always find something. I want beautiful cafes just around the corner, vibrant, active culture from fine art to independent, small artists and beautiful parks and buildings.
I would never trade it for a big car and a big house in some suburb.
A friend of mine is working 32h a week and I am starting to think that he has figured out how to really improve his quality of live. On a programmers wage you're still middle class, you just earn so much. And he's travelling so much, meeting friends, getting into hobbies or just enjoying a really nice coffee in a cafe, taking in the beautiful autumn lights, while everyone else is working that you're always a but envious.
As always, only the rich can afford the cheapest-over-time options.
Any data on who reports higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction?
> Taking this approach, Aristotle proposes that the highest good for humans is eudaimonia, a Greek word often translated as "flourishing" or sometimes "happiness". Aristotle argues that eudaimonia is a way of being in action (energeia)[14]: 230–251 that is appropriate to the human "soul" (psuchē) at its most "excellent" or virtuous (aretē). Eudaimonia is the most "complete" aim that people have, because they aim at for its own sake. An excellent human is one who is good at living life, who does so well and beautifully (kalos). Aristotle says such a person would also be a serious (spoudaios) human being. He also asserts that virtue for a human must involve reason in thought and speech (logos), as this is an aspect (an ergon, literally a task or work) of human living.[1]: I.7(1098a)
That suggests that some of the extra wealth effect in the US is balanced by social safety nets in Europe, when it comes to life satisfaction.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder?...
All of these countries are pretty wealthy in the scheme of things: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
?
How can you overestimate your own happiness? Either you happy or you aren’t.
In my experience, comparing yourself to others, regardless of circumstances, only leads to unhappiness.
Wishful thinking for one:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
E.g., how many people are "happy" in abusive relationships?
An anectode from an Amartya Sen book: Uneducated women in rural India, when asked anout their health status, effectively said everything is fine. After getting access to better healthcare and health education, self reported health scores went down. Classic case of unknown unknowns: The women didn't know that live actually could be better than what they experienced so far.
The same is true for this discussion: I'd wager that thanks to Hollywood and world news coverage, the average citizen of a small EU country like Norway has (or at least thinks they have) deeper knowledge of live in the US than the average US person about live in Norway. So the Norwegian, when asked about their own happiness, can position themselves in context of this knowledge.
Maybe comparing each decile by country would be a meaningful comparison, if even possible.
Are you sure?
According to [1] (page 139), 36.4% of US adults have net worths between 100k an 1M, and 8.8% are millionaires. 26% are under 10k, 45.2% are over 100k.
But 32.8% of Europeans are under 10k, and only 29.5% are between 100k and 1M, and only 2.7% over 1M. So 32.2% are over 100k.
Median wealth for the US is 83k, and for Europe, it's 26k. (page 130).
Looks like Europeans have a far larger proportion of poor people, and far smaller upper middle + millionaire class.
[1] https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
Even if Europeans are twice as good at turning a dollar into a smile (and how could anyone believe such nonsense), the middle-class American still has three times as much money.
And either way, the problem to solve is creating the most overall wealth and well-being. Being better at a sub-problem (money->happiness efficiency ratio) is less important than overall effectiveness.
I know I'd trade a very large portion of my very large salary for assurances that that wouldn't happen. I don't have the option, though.
* Wealth includes house ownership, but in many EU countries living in a rented apartment is normal and even preferred, mostly because strong regulatory protection of tenant's rights. As an example our family could easily afford owning a house in the suburbs but still lives for rent in the city, because quality of life is better here.
* In the US, wealth includes savings for pension, whereas in many EU countries pensions are organized collectively, like an insurance. In other words most EU pension schemes are not visible in wealth statistics.
* Same for healthcare. I know of noone in my social circle saving for eventual healthcare crises because that is cared for by health insurance.
Guessing the way retirement works in the US is a large part of the difference in net worth and millionaire calculations.
Either way, lots of the difference is sure to be among the elderly (they’re who have any net worth of note, the actually-rich excepted) and you need a whole lot more money in your private accounts to have a comfortable retirement in the US than in the EU.
Once you account for in-kind and de-facto cash transfers, America's poor are supported at a lifestyle which is close to the median American household and significantly higher than the median European household.
Quality of life is a pretty subtle thing to measure. It’s not directly tied to the number of square meters in your home or how many cheeseburgers you can buy with an hour’s wage. It has more to do with the amount of fear and deprivation in one’s life. With a strong social safety net, low crime, strong employee protections, universal healthcare, inexpensive higher ed, plentiful time off, and a culturally rich environment with high social cohesion, Europeans live contented lives and don’t spend much time thinking about doom scenarios like what if they get laid off, get sick, or become a victim. Certainly they are jealous of American’s big paychecks and cheap iPhones.
The dark side of this is that wages and savings are quite low and the essentials take up most of people’s budgets, so something like the energy price shock can cause a lot of suffering. It’s sort of unthinkable in the US but lots of people sat in the cold last winter.
Yes, the grass is always greener on the other side. And people tend to be more aware of problems around them than those further away (baring extreme cases like third world countries and disaster areas).
I live in one of the richest European countries according to the linked article. I've often seen it held as shining beacon in English language press. But according to our local media and parliamentarians, a large and increasing share of the population is falling into poverty, increasingly has to choose between food or heating or sports/music activities for their children. In a national opinion poll 48% cites crime as a large/very large problem.
Having spent significant time in both continents, I believe regular people have it better in the EU. I think the rich have it better in the US with low taxes, extreme wages, and a market that offers them better versions of everything in life for those that can pay.
Perception of crime is isn’t the same thing as reality.
I don’t know what country you’re in so I can’t speak any further, but just going off of hard data, the US has a much higher violent crime rate than does Western Europe.
> according to our local media and parliamentarians, a large and increasing share of the population is falling into poverty, increasingly has to choose between food or heating or sports/music activities for their children
Similar vein to above, but also “increasing” means a different thing depending on the starting point. Doubling the poverty rate from 1 to 2% (obviously a made up number here, just making a point) doesn’t mean you’re doing worse than a place that is consistently holding at 10%.
It's weird, but the US _does_ have assistance for heating for low income families. This is not to say that it's always adequate, but it does exist. Do Europeans have similar programs? Are they just underfunded relative to need in times when fuel prices spike? Or are they too hard to get into?
That said, there were definitely programs to help out the hardest hit; it was tough for some, but people weren't freezing to death.
For instance it’s cheaper to live in Ohio than California.
But off the roof expenses for anything else, so in the end it evens out or even comes at an advantage for Europe.
Dunno about junk food, maybe that was more expensive.
the base was extremely low.
I imagine that Europe's demographic issues are going to force something needing to give on the QoL side of things.
It has downsides, esp to the xenophobes, but in the long run, redistribution/migration of populations from the south -- where climate change is going to have the most serious impacts -- is just going to be part of life.
Of course there are people just looking for better economic opportunities, and people who target specific Western countries to be a refugee in (e.g. Pakistanis that show up in Germany - if they were really fleeing from a critical situation they would stop in the first place that is calm and safe, not continue the journey to a richer country), but they aren't really refugees in the actual sense of the word.
Take France for instance, 10% of people living in France in 2021 were immigrants (born in another country). Net Migration is in the 100-200k range per year.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/03/30/one-in-1...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/686137/net-migration-fra...
Have you got any concrete examples? The temperature range for human habitability is pretty wide; the temperature regularly gets up to 50 degrees in summer in the Gulf States (like UAE and Saudi) yet the quality of life there is quite high, in spite of it being a literal desert. Most of the refugees entering Europe are fleeing good ol' fashioned wars, not environmental catastrophes.
I'm afraid the reality is likely to be that once the doors are blown open, electorates will vote for people that will man them with machine guns
why do you think this? it's next to impossible to completely stop piecemeal border crossings. but beyond a certain scale, it becomes something that militaries can oppose directly. are you suggesting the europeans would not have the stomach for military action against migrants, or that the migrants would somehow defeat them in sheer numbers? if it's the former, I would point out that were are already seeing questionable events with migrant ships in the mediterranean.
I don't know where does this argument come from.
I think it's much harder to get to USA.
An immigrant who finds themselves in New York City, to contrast, will see that the city provides government assistance in dozens of languages and proof of address and things of that nature aren't even required.
Smaller countries this is not the case. For example in nordic countries you can get by quite fine with English.
Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.
An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles.
Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading.
ETA: source: Bryan Kaplan's books & articles.
And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
Even historically Germany called immigrant workers "guest workers" because the expectation was that after spending 20 years in the country and building up our economy they would please go back to where they came from. This left most immigrants with one of two options: either full assimilation to the point of trying to out-German the Germans in order to fly under the radar, or sticking to their own entirely, resulting in what was first affectionally called "multiculturalism" and is now breathlessly reported on as "parallel societies". The middle ground, being integrated into Germany while maintaining some of their cultural identity was never seriously accepted as a valid option. Good luck if you also had the wrong skin color or eye shape or can't fake laugh about racist jokes about yourself.
And let's not get started on France's grandstanding about the Francophonique while shooing African immigrants into lawless slums to be neither seen nor heard until they get angry enough to set cars on fire and be beaten down by police again.
Europe's problems with immigration and refugees are entirely self-made. The handling of Ukranian refugees is evidence of this: as soon as Ukranians fled the war, European countries bent over backwards to lift all the sanctions that would normally apply to foreign refugees and treat them like EU citizens. Politicians would literally argue that it'd be inhumane to put Ukranian refugees into refugee shelters. And this had nothing to do with individual qualifications or skills.
I personally think that trying to draw lines around states on ethno-linguistic boundaries is frankly how a lot of the 20th century attrocities began. They are in large part artificial.
I was hoping we were headed towards a multicultural future. But unfortunately I see political and cultural trends going the other way again, including here in Canada.
Why "archaic"? Is it weird that natives should have the main word on how their countries - built by them and their elders - should be run?
I was an immigrant also and I never thought that: it's an egocentric and solipsistic view point that smells like neocolonialism.
If you pan the camera out over history, it's a bit absurd.
FWIW my Oma was Alsatian, German (dialect) speaking and my father was born in France at the end of the war... but is German.
This only works if it's difficult for migrants to get on welfare. Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, which doesn't contribute to supporting the growing retired population. (Not that migrants should be blamed for this; if you could get a better life for yourself and your family just by moving to a country that paid you for not even having to work, of course it's a rational decision).
This is a common misconception. Those people on welfare work, it's just that it's mostly illegal employment. This is a widespread phenomenon everywhere in Europe, particularly in construction.
This usually has to do with those jobs being too badly paid to attract enough people to do all the available work as well as those jobs not paying a sufficiently livable wage and welfare being tied to unemployment or fully deducting any income 1-to-1. A naive solution would be converting welfare to something of a reverse income tax (so e.g. for every €2 you earn your welfare would be reduced by €1 rather than €2, down to zero, and no income tax would be paid on any income up to 2x of welfare). But politicians seem to be more interested in squeezing welfare recipients harder because they think people who aren't working (legally) must be punished until they start working - nevermind that some of those welfare recipients are not part of the work force due to age or legal status and thus can't legally work.
There is however a state obligation towards asylum seekers while their claim is pending, and a basic interest in not allowing huge camps of starving homeless people to develop.
https://archive.ph/TSsQa#selection-1021.77-1025.92
So yes, it has downsides... The downside of not working at all. (In this comment, I am separating Western and non-Western immigrants, since you mentioned xenophobes)
Key word "descendants". Are those by any chance children, who were born in the country (therefore are not themselves immigrants) and need to be educated? It seems dishonest to count them as not contributing when they're not old enough to.
Again, most immigrants are not eligible for any welfare until they are fully naturalized.
> It has downsides […]
The main downside you have to counter is building enough housing, which Canada is not.
The federal government (AFAICT) sets immigration targets/numbers without consulting the provinces and municipalities to see what they can handle. The US (pop. 330M) brings in 1M immigrants in the last few years, while in Canada (pop. 40M):
> In 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and the number of non-permanent residents increased by a net 607,782 people. Both figures are the highest levels on record and reflect "higher immigration targets and a record-breaking year for the processing of immigration applications," StatsCan said.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-grow...
Notably not all parts of Canada have this problem, despite having high immigration rates. Immigration is still high to, e.g. Edmonton, and employment rates are good, etc. but housing affordability there is "fine" (relatively, for now).
I think you started to touch on the problem here, which is the dysfunction of our federal/provincial relations. Political trends right now want to blame Trudeau (I don't like him either, but whatever), so they're pointing the finger at immigration. But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying. Now that they're caught with their pants down here in Ontario their answer is to pave over farmland and build more low-density McMansions, which, well, it's blatant vote buying and corruption because the people in those 905-belt houses vote Tory and the developers contribute to the PC party.
That and building public housing is something people in western G7 countries have become disturbingly allergic to. The last time we had housing crisis at this level, that was one way out of the problem: we built massive rental towers all over the place, along with public housing projects.
In large part what we have here is a powerful baby boomer electorate that has up until now felt itself benefited by skyrocketing real estate prices. The increases in their home values allowed them to ignore their pathetic retirement savings. It was an "Eat The Young" mentality that just assumed "Number Goes Up" forever on real estate prices. And governments -- both prov and fed -- were perfectly willing to just keep feeding that fire.
It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low. So the numbers spiked afterwards for a bunch of causes, partially recovery from that, partially policy, and partially refugees from the war in Ukraine.
There are multiple things that need to look at, but we've had similar policies for decades on most other fronts, but the inflection point in prices started around 2015 which is coïncidentally when immigrations numbers—especially foreign student visa—kicked into a higher gear.
Mike Moffatt has done a lot of interesting research on this that's worth checking out.
* https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Moffatt
Good discussion on TVO from April:
* https://www.tvo.org/video/is-canada-doing-immigration-wrong
> But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying.
If provinces are only able to build at a rate of X units per year, why are we bringing in (e.g.) 2X the number of people? Yes, we should be building more units, but one of the factors in determining how many folks to bring in is being able to house them.
If we can build only build X units in 2023 then we should only bring in X. If we get to X+Y units in 2024, then that's how many people can be brought in.
You don't allow in X+Y (or 2X) people and hope that the units will magically appear.
There is no wand that can be waved to suddenly get more framers, plumbers, electricians, inspectors, urban planner, and capital.
If folks are told "in year 202X we are planning to bring in X people", they can plan for it: but that's not what is happening. Right now it's "here are X people, deal with it, it's your responsibility".
But this was my point. Because the health/survival of the Canadian economies requires that rate of immigration, that's what we do. But its on the provinces, not the feds, to manage housing & municipal issues. But there's a deep conflict of interest about how this is managed. Too many voters, real estate agents, developers, and contractors see benefit from rising housing prices, donors and voters for both parties.
What do you think would happen at the ballot boxes if a provincial government started building mass tracts of rental housing -- like governments did in the 50s in the post-war baby boom when we last had a serious housing crisis? Housing prices and rents would plummet, and landowners, developers, and upper middle class homeowners would be coming after the party in power with pitchforks.
Likewise, if immigration were to be throttled tomorrow, annual GDP growth would flatline and we'd be in recession and labour shortage territory. And the gov't that did this would also be punished.
When I see pundits on the TV about real estate prices: it's almost always some joker of a real estate agent or mortgage broker, not a real economist. It's like asking a wolf why the flock of sheep is thinning out.
Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan. I'm 50 next year. I've lived through both Conservative and Liberal governments. They've both made the same mistakes on this file, and they both suck. Housing has been precipitously rising since the end of the 90s. It was already in double-digit growth rates in Toronto and unaffordable for working class people when my wife and I bought our first house in 2005.
The reality is that the most serious "inflection point" was 2008, when US (and most global) housing prices collapsed and stabilized, while Canada's continued to grow exponentially.
Trudeau was not Prime Minister then.
For better or for worse we have a federal system, and the provinces play the role of managing housing stock and municipal affairs, not the feds.
But the provinces do not know ahead of time what needs to happen. The feds simply announce a number for the next year or so and then everyone else has to scramble. If the feds say that X people are coming, but you can only build X/2 units because that's all resources (trades, land plots) available, how do you suddenly get new capacity?
If we need X people to come in for a health economy, but can only handle Y<X, then we do not just let X people, we build up to being able to going from Y to X.
> Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan.
Nothing partisan about it:
> Up until 2015, Moffatt said, Ontario had a well-functioning real estate market, but changes to federal immigration policy under then Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and that have been expanded by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, increased the amount of newcomers to Canada.
> When the price of oil crashed in 2015, not only did more immigrants choose to settle in Ontario instead of Alberta and Saskatchewan, many Canadians who moved to Western Canada for economic opportunities started coming back.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ontario-build-housing-...
Net immigration in Ontario:
* https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com/ontarians-on-the-move-2022-e...
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More people arrived than could be handled because there was no prior preparation.
Yes: lower levels of governments need to up their game. But the upper levels can't just steam roll them and hope for the best: everyone needs to get on the same page on what's presently possible and then what's needed for the future.
While other government interference in the market is certainly a factor, it's not just a "narrative" that immigration is the main driving force behind the severe distortions in the Canadian housing market. It's reality, backed by numbers and what's going on on the ground.
> It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low.
The pre-2020 immigration numbers, even going back decades, really aren't much lower. It was over 300,000 people in 2018 and 2019, for example. It was well over 200,000 a year from 1990 through to 2017 (except for 1998 and 1999, although both were still near 200,000).
By Canadian standards, 200,000 to 300,000 people would be a larger mid-sized city. While there has been some property development, of course, I don't think that the equivalent of a new Saskatoon, or a new Gatineau, or a new Regina, or a new Burnaby is being built each and every year just to house and support the incoming immigrants for that single year.
An interesting thing about the lockdowns, especially after the foreigners who could temporarily leave had left, and when the higher education situation was uncertain and a huge number of foreign students didn't bother to attend in person, apartment rental prices in the major cities dropped significantly.
A number of my colleagues across the country who live in apartments, and who couldn't flee the country, ended up moving to new apartments to take advantage of this situation. Some of them were getting free months and other bonuses, and generous referral fees were being offered to existing tenants who found new renters, even in places like Vancouver and Toronto. That was certainly not common before, and not since.
Canada's flawed immigration policies are by far the main contributor to today's housing situation and other economic problems. The solution isn't to rush to build more low-quality housing. The solution is to put an almost complete halt to all immigration into Canada, including of permanent residents, foreign "students", "refugees", "asylum seekers", and every other type.
That worked great in the XX century, but the supply of potential immigrants from countries with a high(90%+) literacy rate is dwindling due to fertility rates falling below replacement in source countries. As it stands most such people currently reside in South East Asia.
This is not a viable strategy for the next 20 years, let alone 50 years.
The UK, for example, has significantly more empty homes than homeless people[0]. I don't know the physical distribution of these properties, so purely hypothetically: if the empty properties are in deprived areas of the country that don't have jobs, they might as well be in Montserrat for all the impact they have on the UK housing market in the places with jobs.
[0] exact number depends how you count, this link is obviously trying to do politics so pinch of salt, but it still illustrates the different measures: https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/news/national-empty-homes...
Bad location, shit quality, low density, small, expensive, leasehold, nothing being built...
We've already had a low birthrates for a while and property prices (where the jobs are) have gone nowhere but up, outpacing Inflation, wage growth and sometimes even the stock market.
Nobody cares the desolate countryside homes are sitting empty because there are no jobs there.
Another solution is automation and robotics. This is further away than the flashy demos from Boston Dynamics and Tesla suggest, but not fundamentally absurd especially as it doesn't really need the robots to be humanoid. Given the power/compute requirements and the difficulty of vision processing, I assume this will be about 5 years behind self-driving cars.