Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <goods>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <good> for cheap".
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
You can argue the same for labor as well. Everything from off-shore competition to strained government budgets are excuses for why employers "don't have the option to just pay more".
The point is, shortages being a price phenomenon is not all that actionable. You can't avoid digging in to the details.
People that can't achieve home ownership right now want houses to be cheaper.
People that already got theirs don't. Yeah, supply is a problem but it's more than that. Housing cannot both be an investment and broadly affordable, those two goals are in conflict.
We need to change the way we treat housing so that it cannot be used to both store and generate wealth.
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
They're different for good reasons.
There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.
So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?
>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
Lack of demand for labor and skill can produce an asset shortage, but in an economy where supply and demand float, the theory is that shortages reflect supply-demand failures, and the degree to which supply of labor is invoked to solve shortages for goods depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply.
Someone here posted that the balance was better in the west in the past because the Soviet Union was sitting there on the sidelines like a boogy many to capitalists waiting if they pushed people too far.