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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree with the sentiment, is there a quantifiable way to demonstrate this? For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group?

I'd imagine they do but I try hard to not just imagine data matches my priors. (Yes, this almost always makes me unpopular)

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> For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group?

Not really. Being a landlord takes a bunch of money to sink into the real estate assets. If you don't put it in there you'd just leave it in a mutual fund or whatever and be making passive income of about the same order. Real Estate is a solid investment choice but it's not *that* much better.

Basically this argument is for the form "being a landlord looks like a working class job but pays better and that's not fair".

But the actual truth on the ground is "being a landlord is just a different way of being wealthy, and you have to fix plumbing on the side instead of working a day job in an office".

So, you get to work a part time job while being richer than most working full time jobs. Not a bad gig, but it doesn't feel very fair to wage workers.

I mean to be really, truly Marxist about it, it's not the occupation of landlord but the rentier social relation that's problematic.

The theory is it extracts productive capital which could have a better multiplier effect allocated elsewhere such as education, research, public infrastructure, etc.

I'm sure there's some economic wonks that have long academic papers on this to support or refute this 170 or so year old idea, but I'm merely an amateur.

There was an economic movement after Henry George that very adamantly advocated for redoing this social relationship if you're curious. It was (most likely) the inspiration for the original version of Monopoly among other things. It might be regarded as a form of Economic Populism if you look at the adjacent beliefs of the prominent early 20th c. Georgists, but that'd probably be a 5,000+ word article.

Well, sure, but "get to" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's just wealth. Your complaint isn't about the "gig", it's about the wealth. People can hold wealth in any of a zillion ways, most of which are invisible (c.f. Vanguard accounts, BTC, yada yada). Don't be upset with your landlord just because you can see their assets.

Sorry to press but do you have evidence?

Maybe the number of bankruptcies of landlords versus other professions normalized for age (since many bankruptcies are health related and landlords tend to be older).

Is there some hard data somewhere that can be scrutinized rather than narratives and sentiment?

(see I told you I'm unpopular)

I know landlords, and most of them earn less from landlording than the median engineer. They do, however, do a lot less work!

They can be parasites even without being richer.

Merely the fact that a typical landlord works far fewer hours than most other careers. Even a property portfolio of 100 properties probably isn't a full time job if you have managing agents.

This is nonsense. The vast majority of landlords have to work a day job in order to finance the property in the first place.

Sure but many groups of people work to service debt, such as the purchase of a house, education, medical expense or a small business loan. Demonstrating that landlords are not all of the leisure class is insufficient to imply they are equally living hard scrabble working lives compared to the population writ large.

the vast majority of landlords are small potatoes not worth talking about. understand that, when people talk about landlords, they're probably talking about the landlords of the vast majority of rentals.

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