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Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

Singapore is surveyed as either the happiest or second-happiest country in Asia (IIRC), with at one point a >95% homeownership rate due to government policy (although I believe that's now closer to 90%, in part due to foreign immigration?). It seems self-evident that having a home is somewhere on the order of 1000000x more important than being able to buy lots of cheap junk that barely matters.

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Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world and has a home ownership rate comparable to the US. Denmark ranks 3rd and has a slightly lower home ownership rate than the US. Oh, and Singapore ranks 36th[1], while the US is 23rd[2].

So you're probably wrong on all points here.

[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP

[2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA

I'm curious what people are quibbling with here? Romania has the world's highest rate of home ownership at 96% and only ranks as 34th in happiness. Or maybe Kazakhstan but I can't verify the data on that, and it's right beside Romania in happiness. Switzerland has the world's 4th lowest rate of home ownership and ranks 10th happiest. It seems like from a data perspective there is no empirical support for the idea that home ownership directly correlates to societal happiness.

I might also point out that Finland has very good social programs, probably some of the best in Europe

Right, my point is that you can't boil happiness down to a single causal factor and if you could the evidence doesn't support home ownership being that factor.

> my point is that you can't boil happiness down to a single causal factor

This is not a claim I ever made. The claim I made was that homeownership was of significantly higher importance than affordability of cheap consumer goods. Obviously there are other factors.

Well your alleged correlation doesn’t support that claim, and I showed a number of counter examples.

> I'm curious what people are quibbling with here? Romania has the world's highest rate of home ownership at 96% and only ranks as 34th in happiness.

which means they are happier than 35th, the France, which has double GDP per capita

So you're probably wrong on all points here by your own data

I'm sharing Gallop survey data about happiness, it's the "happiness" data everyone uses, and what OP was referring to as well. I'd challenge the idea that GDP per capita correlates to happiness. Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than France and I'm not sure that tells us anything about who is happier.

> probably wrong on all points here by your own data

again, it's not my data its the data OP referenced initially, I just linked to it.

Also if you buy lots of cheap junk for your apartment and then have to move, you will not be happy.

In some ways I actually liked the moving every few years aspect of renting. Every move made me really re-evaluate all the junk I had and if it was really worth it to hold on to. Do I really want to have to move this thing I didn't even really use to yet another place? I got to live in a lot of different places, have some different lifestyles, have some different roommates, and live a pretty different kind of life every now and then.

Living in the same place now for years makes it too easy to just hold on to junk, it makes it too easy to just fall into the same routine.

There's some pros and cons each way. It really depends on what you're wanting in life at the moment.

True, although I've also moved houses and turned everything over. Having lived at the current place for a while I find it's important to, every five years or so, turn everything over and re-evaluate it. Even if my domicile isn't changing I'm still changing as a person.

Singapore is also a city state and has a land and housing policy that can't be easily replicated elsewhere. Tell Americans they will be shoved into government built high rises with racial quota and see what happens.

This is a misrepresentation of Singapore's policy. Nobody is being "shoved" anywhere, it is voluntary. And it is possible to replicate elsewhere. Taiwan reached 88% at one point; the Soviet Union was also known to have virtually eliminated homelessness, although in that case your description would have been accurate. Still, a home is better than no home. Government policy absolutely should be making a baseline of cheap housing available for everyone, even if it's not a 5 bedroom McMansion on an acre of land.

A lot of that cheap junk is clothing and food, which now both make up a much lower percentage of total income than they did 100 years ago.

What's the point of being able to spend less on cheap junk if the surplus is eaten up and outspent by important things that inflated during that timespan?

And you don't even have a choice. If junk was expensive and houses were cheap, you could scale your junk consumption. You can't scale your house consumption.

You can to a degree. You can buy/rent a way too small house/apartment for your large family (what many immigrants do). You can also get roommates. If worse comes to worst, you can move another hour or two away from the big city.

> If worse comes to worst, you can move another hour or two away from the big city.

It is rarely the case that someone who can't afford housing in their current location can afford to move away from their support networks to a place with no jobs. Places with significantly cheaper rent almost invariably give you significantly less income, if you can even get a job without connections (which are important in general, but especially important in rural areas where everyone knows each other). That can work out for you if you have substantial savings or a comfy remote tech job, but if you have those you probably don't need to move in the first place.

Your other points are valid ways to technically scale housing down but, I think, bring with them a significant decrease in quality of life that far outweighs what is gained by being able to afford 500 big macs and 10 pairs of shoes.

You misunderstand. Keep your job. Move away. Drive to work 3 hours one way everyday. Have no life except work, commute, sleep and family.

And yes, it will drive your QoL to the ground, I'm fully aware of that. I'm just saying it's neither impossible nor infeasible nor unheard of. It's "merely" undesirable. Extremely undesirable. But possible.

If your solution makes your life so bad that suicide is better, it isn't a solution.

I'm worried about your unusually low threshold for suicide.

I feel like these are much worse than the alternate reality where I simply have to spend more on or lose access to consumables, if I had to choose one or the other. For people that use the same smartphone for 10 years, never shop for clothes, never go out to eat, etc., it seems unfair that we'd construct a dichotomy (assuming it's even a valid one) and choose the one that worsens the resources that everyone needs rather than the more fungible one.

I didn't say it's nice to downsize. I said it's possible to downsize.

Fair enough, you're correct. It is... possible

Which is an extremely important point to make when the claim is "you don't even have a choice" and "you can't scale".

There is a choice. We would just prefer nobody had to make that choice. We consider it a failure of the modern society that this choice is on the table. But housing consumption can be scaled, and that it can has important economic implications (such as, social housing can be made cheaper by making units smaller. It literally wouldn't be possible to pull it off if housing consumption was perfectly inelastic.)

> If worse comes to worst, you can move another hour or two away from the big city.

I would loose a job, easy access to friends, access family nearby in the process. All those matter, I value all three.

Meanwhile, if I dont buy latest toy, whether phone or sports equipment or netflix subscription, I adapt and dont care in 3 days.

That's why I said "worse come to worst". Where I'm from, it's not that uncommon to drive 3 hours to work, and as a result have no social life outside closest family. People do it because the alternative is homelessness.

I would argue that their situation straightforwardly sux. And no amount of gadgets, fridge connected with wifi, etc etc will really unsux it.

I would argue that a reply to "you can't scale your house consumption" doesn't need to say how much the situation sux or what amount of gadgets will or will not unsux it.

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