That's a good point, and according to the board game Monopoly, you're totally right. In the above post I complained that housing costs don't reflect the qualit

That's a good point, and according to the board game Monopoly, you're totally right. In the above post I complained that housing costs don't reflect the quality of the housing itself. Land speculation is probably a huge part of that, if not the dominant contributor. But my whole point is about "rentier capitalism", and it applies whether you're talking about land, houses or SaaS. In a free market, of course there's gonna be ebbs and flows as people and industry come and go, but look at this chart: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/08/daily-chart-20 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/08/daily-c... Those huge, correlated roller coaster curves aren't based off of natural fluctuations in land values in all those different places. They're based on a kind of big distributed Monopoly game where a bunch of people frustratedly flipped the board over in 2008. Now we're going in for another round. Meanwhile, the north pole is melting, and there's tons of work to be done in retrofitting houses for climate change, in switching to new kinds of fuel, planting gardens sustainable agriculture, fixing broken stuff. What are people doing instead? A lot of people spend much of their time doing dog eat dog capitalism. Chasing rent checks and debt repayments. Doing the 9-5 grind. Driving 40 miles a day to work jobs they don't believe in. Not everyone of course, but too many people! We really need to shed this feudalistic way of doing things, and that's going to take people evolving how we participate in markets, what's considered "smart" or "dumb".