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Yet living standards aren't improving an inch. Housing price to income ratios are higher than at any time on record. Outside the city, populations are decayin

Yet living standards aren't improving an inch. Housing price to income ratios are higher than at any time on record. Outside the city, populations are decaying year after year, and the only chances of benefiting from global economic trends are in the city. There's a housing bubble in virtually every major city of Europe due to speculation and migration from smaller towns. To put an example, in London median house price hovers around half a million, while median London salary is about 30k. Sure, your washing machine is cheaper than 40 years ago, but the basic element in any economy -housing- has become more expensive. Cities are saturated in every sense. Except maybe the idea The Economist wants to push is somehow that we need millions and millions more ex-EU immigrants? Because they have seen a spike in underpaid IT vacancies.

umeshunni 7y ago
I'm curious about your comment about the migration from smaller towns - this isn't something I've heard about in the US where the recent domestic migration trend is for people to move from midwest/central states to coastal states. Are smaller towns in UK shrinking? Are there stats I can look at on internal migration in the UK? Is this trend true for other western EU countries as well?
- iak8god 7y ago
  > I'm curious about your comment about the migration from smaller towns - this isn't something I've heard about in the US The percentage of Americans living in rural counties has been shrinking. Gains are mostly in the suburbs: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...
- arethuza 7y ago
  It probably depends on a lot on the region within the UK - towns in ex-industrial areas might be shrinking but those within commuting distance of a city or in areas with particularly high quality of life and good communication links seem to be thriving - Inverness and Aviemore being in the latter category. I live near a small town on the Fife coast directly across from Edinburgh and all of the neighbouring coastal towns seem to be doing well - the ex-mining towns 10km away not so much. Main constraint on development being local planning authorities rather than demand. This article mentions the growth of Aviemore (very much a centre for outdoor activities) but also the decline of some other more out of the way towns: https://www.strathspey-herald.co.uk/news/aviemore-hailed-as-a-boom-town-100760/ https://www.strathspey-herald.co.uk/news/aviemore-hailed-as-...
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    > I live near a small town on the Fife coast directly across from Edinburgh and all of the neighbouring coastal towns seem to be doing well - the ex-mining towns 10km away not so much. Main constraint on development being local planning authorities rather than demand. If I had the choice between living on the coast, and living in an ex-mining town, I'm probably going to pick the coast (other things being approximately equal). The coast is scenic; ex-mining areas are usually not scenic. That is, I think that demand is exactly what's making the coast do better. The local planning authorities may be an effect rather than a cause - the ex-mining areas may know that they don't have as much to work with, and therefore may have less that they can realistically do.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      Yes - you can see the differences between the coastal towns and the ex mining towns in this map of social deprivation in Scotland: http://simd.scot http://simd.scot
EGreg 7y ago
This is because automation and outsourcing has created a race to the bottom. We work longer hours for less pay. Similar to how farmers before the Great Depression were disrupted by combines and the govt stepped in to pay them to not plant. They created the dust bowl by dessicating the land.
- jahewson 7y ago
  Combine harvesters were not widely used on the Great Plains before or during the depression. It was the Homestead Act which opened up the native grassland to mom and pop farmers which resulted in the dustbowl when drought conditions occurred. These were good old fashioned horse and plough farmers.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    Wikipedia disagrees with you. However, agriculture became increasingly mechanized with widespread use of the tractor, other heavy equipment, and superior techniques disseminated through County Agents, who were employed by state agricultural colleges and funded by the Federal government. The early 1920s saw a rapid expansion in the American agricultural economy largely due to new technologies and especially mechanization. Competition from Europe and Russia had disappeared due to the war and American agricultural goods were being shipped around the world.[47] The new technologies, such as the combine harvester, meant that the most efficient farms were larger in size and, gradually, the small family farm that had long been the model were replaced by larger and more business-oriented firms. Despite this increase in farm size and capital intensity, the great majority of agricultural production continued to be undertaken by family-owned enterprises. World War I had created an atmosphere of high prices for agricultural products as European nations demand for exports surged. Farmers had enjoyed a period of prosperity as U.S. farm production expanded rapidly to fill the gap left as European belligerents found themselves unable to produce enough food. When the war ended, supply increased rapidly as Europe's agricultural market rebounded. Overproduction led to plummeting prices which led to stagnant market conditions and living standards for farmers in the 1920s. Worse, hundreds of thousands of farmers had taken out mortgages and loans to buy out their neighbors' property, and now are unable to meet the financial burden. The cause was the collapse of land prices after the wartime bubble when farmers used high prices to buy up neighboring farms at high prices, saddling them with heavy debts. Farmers, however, blamed the decline of foreign markets, and the effects of the protective tariff.[48] Farmers demanded relief as the agricultural depression grew steadily worse in the middle 1920s, while the rest of the economy flourished. Farmers had a powerful voice in Congress, and demanded federal subsidies, most notably the McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill. It was passed but vetoed by President Coolidge.[49] Coolidge instead supported the alternative program of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Agriculture Secretary William M. Jardine to modernize farming, by bringing in more electricity, more efficient equipment, better seeds and breeds, more rural education, and better business practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_... The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.[4] During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
ars 7y ago
You are saying contradictory things. "Yet living standards aren't improving an inch.", yet people are moving into the city in record numbers, and are willing to pay for it. Why would they do that, if not to improve their living standards? You are complaining that house prices are high, yet simultaneously saying people are moving into the city? Which is it? If the prices were high, people wouldn't move, but since they are moving, clearly there's a reason for it. Are you trying to say you don't want people to move? You want to keep them in rural locations? But wouldn't the only way to do that, would be to make sure they don't have enough income to live in the city?
dexen 7y ago
>Yet living standards aren't improving >There's a housing bubble in virtually every major city of Europe The former stems from the later, and from the lags inherent to markets. Wage adjustments lag behind employment numbers. Right now while the employment numbers are increasing, there is still quite a bit of 'slack' (unemployed and underemployed people) that can be, and indeed is getting, picked up. Thus we still don't have significant wage increases. Living standard change lag behind wages changes. Once the wages start significantly increasing, people will go ahead and spend on that one or three things they always wanted to, but couldn't previously afford. And the list is way longer than just the usual consumer goods: investment, savings, healthcare, vacations&leisure, shopping around for better job. Housing market is a great example: there's major imbalance between supply and demand, and it will take a few decades to significantly improve[1], due to both changing populations and building out. The prices will go up even higher before the correction comes. [1] it will significantly improve in a few decades, barring some heavy-handed governmental interventions.
lbotos 7y ago
I'm just a young punk, but isn't it cyclical? - Youth Makes money in city - Grows tired of city and wants space, moves out of city - Starts family - Needs supporting culture/services outside of city - Small town grows - Small town can't grow bigger due to geo/resources/politics - Economic opportunity in town shrinks - Child seeks city to make money
- dawhizkid 7y ago
  Birthrates in the US are falling every year. The assumption that your typical young person hitting late 20s/30s will get married or have kids and move to the burbs is outdated.
  - beat 7y ago
    Birthrates are falling worldwide, and rapidly. We're already at a point where the birth rate worldwide is just at replacement level - the current growth in population is due to increased lifespans from 1-2 generations ahead of the flattening. Only a handful of desperately poor countries - places like Yemen and Afghanistan - have high birthrates. To give a sense of how much it's changed, Iran's birthrate is lower than Europe or the US. In 1980, Iran's birthrate was four times higher than it is now.
    - betaby 7y ago
      No.
      - beat 7y ago
        No what? Are you disputing any of the facts stated here? I'll give you my reference... Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. If you seriously intend to disagree, cite sources. If you're just saying no to something that is a demonstrably true, objective fact... maybe ask yourself why that is.
        betaby 7y ago
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> Outside the city, populations are decaying year after year, and the only chances of benefiting from global economic trends are in the city. We keep expecting the internet to change this, and it keeps not happening. Why doesn't it? Why haven't remote workers or remote teams spread into the smaller towns and countryside?
- tehbeard 7y ago
  Ignoring internet access issues in rural areas, What is there to do in your free time in smaller towns and the countryside? That's the reason.
  - PerfectElement 7y ago
    It depends on what you like to do. Countryside living is appealing to many people.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Technologists are probably not typically the ones that find it appealing.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        What do you think is so special about technologists that they uniquely prefer urban (or suburban) living?
        seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        It really isn’t a mystery: they like tech obviously, they probably went to a big university with lots of diversity and eat out options, they feel a strong need to network. All hint toward city living rather than country side living. Also, many techies in the USA aren’t even Americans, they are even less likely to be craving for the countryside lifestyle.
lostmymind66 7y ago
Housing price increases, at least in the US, are due to regulations..plain and simple. If you make it easier for houses to be built, the supply will out pace demand and the market will force these prices down.
- beat 7y ago
  Nonsense. Land is a scarce resource. Neighborhoods aren't getting any bigger - they can't get any bigger. So the only way for a city to increase its housing supply is to increase its density, and that runs into a buzzsaw of local politics. In theory, supply is infinite because you just build somewhere else. But people don't want to live somewhere else. They don't want to commute an hour and a half each way because that's where the cheap land was. The price I pay for my 1800sf 1/10 acre in south Minneapolis would buy me three times that in the burbs, but I don't wanna live in the burbs. I want to live in Minneapolis.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    >...and that runs into a buzzsaw of local politics. That's exactly what needs to change in "make it easier for houses to be built". Make it easier means don't let NIMBYs block housing.
    - beat 7y ago
      What does "NIMBY" mean in these contexts, though? I think this is more handwaving. I live in a city that is taking active steps to increase its density and affordability (https://minneapolis2040.com/ https://minneapolis2040.com/). This directly affects my neighborhood. There are two kinds of construction going on around us. First is higher-density apartments/condos in the 3-5 story range, often with first level retail. These aren't replacing homes, though - they're replacing light industrial like warehouses. Second, and this is an interesting rebuttal - some of the 100 year old houses are being torn down and replaced with new, larger (and much more expensive) houses on the same lots. So a worn-out 1200sf bungalow on 1/10 acre gets turned into a 3200sf quasi-mcmansion on the same lot. These new houses cost 50-100% more than the old houses in the neighborhood do (more like 100% for the run-down homes they replace). But they are contributing zero to the overall density - they're still single-family dwellings. Even the old two-flats in the neighborhood contribute more density. So rather than increasing density, they're increasing cost of living. That is your #invisiblehand in play, without NIMBYism stopping anything.
emn13 7y ago
The median UK salary is 30k pounds (https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/average-uk-salary); https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/average-uk-salary); it's higher in london, but I find differing numbers depending on where I look. But in any case: Although house prices are a problem - and one UK politics feels uncomfortable addressing. You imply impure motives on the economists's side in that they're what exactly? In any case, it was the economist that suggested an annual tax based on property value, which would be a step towards a solution of that problem. But this is primarily a political problem. Extra taxes, particularly on something that is near to voters hearts and will hurt their investments, albeit in a bubble - those aren't an easy sell. Still, while you're right that house prices are problematic, it's not reasonable to compare rising house prices to stagnant median incomes, and thus imply that housing is less affordable than previously: interest rates are extremely low, so the cost of housing is low too. The high price merely means the risk and reward of ownership is high; but low interest rate means that the amount of income you need to support a given price of housing is much lower than before. I'm not saying this is good or healthy or anything; it's just not so simple as that previously housing was affordable and now it's not. Nor is the political problem of housing - which voters really have themselves to blame for, nobody else - any reason to ignore the employment boom. Not everything in the world is going great; what else is new? But we can still appreciate what is going well while acknowledging that other - distinct - problems exist.
- jajag 7y ago
  The cost of housing is not low. For one thing, a lot of people can't get a mortgage due to deposit amounts being higher (because of higher house prices) and so are paying over the odds in overheated rental markets. On the other hand, those that can get a mortgage might be paying lower interest but they are still paying larger amounts overall because of the higher house cost.
  - emn13 7y ago
    Yeah, not disagreeing with there being a problem. Just saying that it's a little more complicated than "stagnant wages + rising prices = boom". Because it's nontrivial: what's the best fix? Does it render the jobs boom irrelevant?
adventured 7y ago
> Yet living standards aren't improving an inch. That isn't true. Living standards have improved for some large demographics and not for others. You're entirely discounting the massive improvement the eg poor in the US have seen in the last 40 to 50 years. It was horrific to be in the bottom 1/4 in the US just as recently as 1980 and prior, far worse than it is now. Just look at welfare state related spending as a share of GDP in the US in 1960 or 1970, versus today (hint: it barely existed at all in the 1960s). Over 40 years, spending on low-income programs increased by 10 fold. Look at homelessness just as recently as the 1980s vs today, it has been cut in half. Look at the poverty rate in the 1960s vs today (23% down to ~12.x% today, near a record low). Look at violent crime and murder in the 1970s and 1980s vs today, both rates have plunged (the poor are far more likely to be victims of both). There was no widespread free healthcare for the bottom 25% in 1970, for another example. That socialized healthcare costs the US an enormous amount of money to fund. That's a dramatic quality of life improvement for poor people who a generation prior would have had no consistent access to healthcare.
jdietrich 7y ago
I can't speak for anywhere else, but the key problem in the UK is casualisation and underemployment. Lots of people are in work, but it's not good work. On one side, we've pushed people off welfare benefits through an increasingly punitive sanctions regime; on the other, we've allowed for a proliferation of insecure temporary, part-time and gig-based work. The unemployment rate is low, but there's still a severe shortage of work, we've just spread the jam thinner. According to the official statistics, anyone working for at least one hour a week is counted as employed. If your objective is to reduce the unemployment figures, that's a loophole big enough to drive a bus through. We've got a million people in part-time work who want a full-time job but can't find one. We've got two million self-employed people earning less than the minimum wage. More people are working, but they aren't enjoying most of the rewards we associate with work. That's before we consider the statistical black hole that is "economic inactivity" - about eight million people who aren't in the labour market and aren't seeking work. Maybe they're contented housewives and househusbands, maybe they've won the lottery, maybe they've been unemployed for so long that they've given up looking. We don't know and we don't care to ask. https://www.businessinsider.com/ons-underemployment-double-unemployment-rate-2017-9?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/ons-underemployment-double-u... https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/two-million-self-employed-adults-earn-less-minimum-wage https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/two-million-self-employed-adults...
DeonPenny 7y ago
Wages are growing but housing is increasing but eventually, I think wages will outpace.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
api 7y ago
If little new housing is built, density remains the same, and transportation is not upgraded, then this applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent When it comes to what's squeezing the middle class and imposing a glass ceiling, housing prices are the #1 problem. Student loans and healthcare costs might tie for #2. I think we're getting to the point that we need a "war on housing prices" in the developed world. That's going to mean going to war politically against NIMBYs, property speculators, and others who profit from restricting supply. Here's a few of the major things we need: * Huge (to the level of punitive) taxes on excessive property speculation especially when the speculators are from elsewhere. I was chatting with a friend about it a while back and coined the term "financial pollution" for when foreign capital does socially destructive things to communities like hyper-inflate house prices. In California a start would be to abolish proposition 13 for properties that are not owner-occupied. Housing can't simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. It exists to be lived in, not to act as a financial instrument. * Apply full KYC/AML and other anti-dirty-money regulations to all real estate transactions to chase the money launderers and flight capital away from real estate. This one is rarely brought up but it would go a long way toward limiting runaway property speculation in certain "hot" markets. A lot of this money buying houses sight-unseen is dirty money. * Restrict the power of NIMBYs to limit density by enacting laws at the city, county, or state level. Go as high as necessary. * Greatly expand transit to enable cities to physically expand. This includes light rail, commuter rail, highways, EV infrastructure, etc. A lot of this boils down to fighting NIMBYs since existing property owners have a financial vested interest in opposing all of the above.
ThrustVectoring 7y ago
What is increasing, though, is the retiree-to-worker ratio. This is intractably linked to the housing price-to-income ratio, too. Retirees pay for goods and services in one of two ways - they either receive tax receipts through government programs, or sell off assets they have accumulated in their working career. Every asset seller has a matching buyer, so this implies that workers provide for retirees through a combination of taxes and buying assets with their savings. Housing and mortgage debt is an absolutely enormous pool of assets, and one that large numbers of retirees naturally accumulate over their working career.

umeshunni 7y ago

I'm curious about your comment about the migration from smaller towns - this isn't something I've heard about in the US where the recent domestic migration trend is for people to move from midwest/central states to coastal states. Are smaller towns in UK shrinking? Are there stats I can look at on internal migration in the UK? Is this trend true for other western EU countries as well?

iak8god 7y ago
> I'm curious about your comment about the migration from smaller towns - this isn't something I've heard about in the US The percentage of Americans living in rural counties has been shrinking. Gains are mostly in the suburbs: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...
arethuza 7y ago
It probably depends on a lot on the region within the UK - towns in ex-industrial areas might be shrinking but those within commuting distance of a city or in areas with particularly high quality of life and good communication links seem to be thriving - Inverness and Aviemore being in the latter category. I live near a small town on the Fife coast directly across from Edinburgh and all of the neighbouring coastal towns seem to be doing well - the ex-mining towns 10km away not so much. Main constraint on development being local planning authorities rather than demand. This article mentions the growth of Aviemore (very much a centre for outdoor activities) but also the decline of some other more out of the way towns: https://www.strathspey-herald.co.uk/news/aviemore-hailed-as-a-boom-town-100760/ https://www.strathspey-herald.co.uk/news/aviemore-hailed-as-...
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > I live near a small town on the Fife coast directly across from Edinburgh and all of the neighbouring coastal towns seem to be doing well - the ex-mining towns 10km away not so much. Main constraint on development being local planning authorities rather than demand. If I had the choice between living on the coast, and living in an ex-mining town, I'm probably going to pick the coast (other things being approximately equal). The coast is scenic; ex-mining areas are usually not scenic. That is, I think that demand is exactly what's making the coast do better. The local planning authorities may be an effect rather than a cause - the ex-mining areas may know that they don't have as much to work with, and therefore may have less that they can realistically do.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    Yes - you can see the differences between the coastal towns and the ex mining towns in this map of social deprivation in Scotland: http://simd.scot http://simd.scot

EGreg 7y ago

This is because automation and outsourcing has created a race to the bottom. We work longer hours for less pay. Similar to how farmers before the Great Depression were disrupted by combines and the govt stepped in to pay them to not plant. They created the dust bowl by dessicating the land.

jahewson 7y ago
Combine harvesters were not widely used on the Great Plains before or during the depression. It was the Homestead Act which opened up the native grassland to mom and pop farmers which resulted in the dustbowl when drought conditions occurred. These were good old fashioned horse and plough farmers.
- EGreg 7y ago
  Wikipedia disagrees with you. However, agriculture became increasingly mechanized with widespread use of the tractor, other heavy equipment, and superior techniques disseminated through County Agents, who were employed by state agricultural colleges and funded by the Federal government. The early 1920s saw a rapid expansion in the American agricultural economy largely due to new technologies and especially mechanization. Competition from Europe and Russia had disappeared due to the war and American agricultural goods were being shipped around the world.[47] The new technologies, such as the combine harvester, meant that the most efficient farms were larger in size and, gradually, the small family farm that had long been the model were replaced by larger and more business-oriented firms. Despite this increase in farm size and capital intensity, the great majority of agricultural production continued to be undertaken by family-owned enterprises. World War I had created an atmosphere of high prices for agricultural products as European nations demand for exports surged. Farmers had enjoyed a period of prosperity as U.S. farm production expanded rapidly to fill the gap left as European belligerents found themselves unable to produce enough food. When the war ended, supply increased rapidly as Europe's agricultural market rebounded. Overproduction led to plummeting prices which led to stagnant market conditions and living standards for farmers in the 1920s. Worse, hundreds of thousands of farmers had taken out mortgages and loans to buy out their neighbors' property, and now are unable to meet the financial burden. The cause was the collapse of land prices after the wartime bubble when farmers used high prices to buy up neighboring farms at high prices, saddling them with heavy debts. Farmers, however, blamed the decline of foreign markets, and the effects of the protective tariff.[48] Farmers demanded relief as the agricultural depression grew steadily worse in the middle 1920s, while the rest of the economy flourished. Farmers had a powerful voice in Congress, and demanded federal subsidies, most notably the McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill. It was passed but vetoed by President Coolidge.[49] Coolidge instead supported the alternative program of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Agriculture Secretary William M. Jardine to modernize farming, by bringing in more electricity, more efficient equipment, better seeds and breeds, more rural education, and better business practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_... The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.[4] During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

ars 7y ago

You are saying contradictory things. "Yet living standards aren't improving an inch.", yet people are moving into the city in record numbers, and are willing to pay for it. Why would they do that, if not to improve their living standards? You are complaining that house prices are high, yet simultaneously saying people are moving into the city? Which is it? If the prices were high, people wouldn't move, but since they are moving, clearly there's a reason for it. Are you trying to say you don't want people to move? You want to keep them in rural locations? But wouldn't the only way to do that, would be to make sure they don't have enough income to live in the city?

dexen 7y ago

>Yet living standards aren't improving >There's a housing bubble in virtually every major city of Europe The former stems from the later, and from the lags inherent to markets. Wage adjustments lag behind employment numbers. Right now while the employment numbers are increasing, there is still quite a bit of 'slack' (unemployed and underemployed people) that can be, and indeed is getting, picked up. Thus we still don't have significant wage increases. Living standard change lag behind wages changes. Once the wages start significantly increasing, people will go ahead and spend on that one or three things they always wanted to, but couldn't previously afford. And the list is way longer than just the usual consumer goods: investment, savings, healthcare, vacations&leisure, shopping around for better job. Housing market is a great example: there's major imbalance between supply and demand, and it will take a few decades to significantly improve[1], due to both changing populations and building out. The prices will go up even higher before the correction comes. [1] it will significantly improve in a few decades, barring some heavy-handed governmental interventions.

lbotos 7y ago

I'm just a young punk, but isn't it cyclical? - Youth Makes money in city - Grows tired of city and wants space, moves out of city - Starts family - Needs supporting culture/services outside of city - Small town grows - Small town can't grow bigger due to geo/resources/politics - Economic opportunity in town shrinks - Child seeks city to make money

dawhizkid 7y ago
Birthrates in the US are falling every year. The assumption that your typical young person hitting late 20s/30s will get married or have kids and move to the burbs is outdated.
- beat 7y ago
  Birthrates are falling worldwide, and rapidly. We're already at a point where the birth rate worldwide is just at replacement level - the current growth in population is due to increased lifespans from 1-2 generations ahead of the flattening. Only a handful of desperately poor countries - places like Yemen and Afghanistan - have high birthrates. To give a sense of how much it's changed, Iran's birthrate is lower than Europe or the US. In 1980, Iran's birthrate was four times higher than it is now.
  - betaby 7y ago
    No.
    - beat 7y ago
      No what? Are you disputing any of the facts stated here? I'll give you my reference... Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. If you seriously intend to disagree, cite sources. If you're just saying no to something that is a demonstrably true, objective fact... maybe ask yourself why that is.
      - betaby 7y ago

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

> Outside the city, populations are decaying year after year, and the only chances of benefiting from global economic trends are in the city. We keep expecting the internet to change this, and it keeps not happening. Why doesn't it? Why haven't remote workers or remote teams spread into the smaller towns and countryside?

tehbeard 7y ago
Ignoring internet access issues in rural areas, What is there to do in your free time in smaller towns and the countryside? That's the reason.
- PerfectElement 7y ago
  It depends on what you like to do. Countryside living is appealing to many people.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Technologists are probably not typically the ones that find it appealing.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      What do you think is so special about technologists that they uniquely prefer urban (or suburban) living?
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        It really isn’t a mystery: they like tech obviously, they probably went to a big university with lots of diversity and eat out options, they feel a strong need to network. All hint toward city living rather than country side living. Also, many techies in the USA aren’t even Americans, they are even less likely to be craving for the countryside lifestyle.

lostmymind66 7y ago

Housing price increases, at least in the US, are due to regulations..plain and simple. If you make it easier for houses to be built, the supply will out pace demand and the market will force these prices down.

beat 7y ago
Nonsense. Land is a scarce resource. Neighborhoods aren't getting any bigger - they can't get any bigger. So the only way for a city to increase its housing supply is to increase its density, and that runs into a buzzsaw of local politics. In theory, supply is infinite because you just build somewhere else. But people don't want to live somewhere else. They don't want to commute an hour and a half each way because that's where the cheap land was. The price I pay for my 1800sf 1/10 acre in south Minneapolis would buy me three times that in the burbs, but I don't wanna live in the burbs. I want to live in Minneapolis.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  >...and that runs into a buzzsaw of local politics. That's exactly what needs to change in "make it easier for houses to be built". Make it easier means don't let NIMBYs block housing.
  - beat 7y ago
    What does "NIMBY" mean in these contexts, though? I think this is more handwaving. I live in a city that is taking active steps to increase its density and affordability (https://minneapolis2040.com/ https://minneapolis2040.com/). This directly affects my neighborhood. There are two kinds of construction going on around us. First is higher-density apartments/condos in the 3-5 story range, often with first level retail. These aren't replacing homes, though - they're replacing light industrial like warehouses. Second, and this is an interesting rebuttal - some of the 100 year old houses are being torn down and replaced with new, larger (and much more expensive) houses on the same lots. So a worn-out 1200sf bungalow on 1/10 acre gets turned into a 3200sf quasi-mcmansion on the same lot. These new houses cost 50-100% more than the old houses in the neighborhood do (more like 100% for the run-down homes they replace). But they are contributing zero to the overall density - they're still single-family dwellings. Even the old two-flats in the neighborhood contribute more density. So rather than increasing density, they're increasing cost of living. That is your #invisiblehand in play, without NIMBYism stopping anything.

emn13 7y ago

The median UK salary is 30k pounds (https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/average-uk-salary); https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/average-uk-salary); it's higher in london, but I find differing numbers depending on where I look. But in any case: Although house prices are a problem - and one UK politics feels uncomfortable addressing. You imply impure motives on the economists's side in that they're what exactly? In any case, it was the economist that suggested an annual tax based on property value, which would be a step towards a solution of that problem. But this is primarily a political problem. Extra taxes, particularly on something that is near to voters hearts and will hurt their investments, albeit in a bubble - those aren't an easy sell. Still, while you're right that house prices are problematic, it's not reasonable to compare rising house prices to stagnant median incomes, and thus imply that housing is less affordable than previously: interest rates are extremely low, so the cost of housing is low too. The high price merely means the risk and reward of ownership is high; but low interest rate means that the amount of income you need to support a given price of housing is much lower than before. I'm not saying this is good or healthy or anything; it's just not so simple as that previously housing was affordable and now it's not. Nor is the political problem of housing - which voters really have themselves to blame for, nobody else - any reason to ignore the employment boom. Not everything in the world is going great; what else is new? But we can still appreciate what is going well while acknowledging that other - distinct - problems exist.

jajag 7y ago
The cost of housing is not low. For one thing, a lot of people can't get a mortgage due to deposit amounts being higher (because of higher house prices) and so are paying over the odds in overheated rental markets. On the other hand, those that can get a mortgage might be paying lower interest but they are still paying larger amounts overall because of the higher house cost.
- emn13 7y ago
  Yeah, not disagreeing with there being a problem. Just saying that it's a little more complicated than "stagnant wages + rising prices = boom". Because it's nontrivial: what's the best fix? Does it render the jobs boom irrelevant?

adventured 7y ago

> Yet living standards aren't improving an inch. That isn't true. Living standards have improved for some large demographics and not for others. You're entirely discounting the massive improvement the eg poor in the US have seen in the last 40 to 50 years. It was horrific to be in the bottom 1/4 in the US just as recently as 1980 and prior, far worse than it is now. Just look at welfare state related spending as a share of GDP in the US in 1960 or 1970, versus today (hint: it barely existed at all in the 1960s). Over 40 years, spending on low-income programs increased by 10 fold. Look at homelessness just as recently as the 1980s vs today, it has been cut in half. Look at the poverty rate in the 1960s vs today (23% down to ~12.x% today, near a record low). Look at violent crime and murder in the 1970s and 1980s vs today, both rates have plunged (the poor are far more likely to be victims of both). There was no widespread free healthcare for the bottom 25% in 1970, for another example. That socialized healthcare costs the US an enormous amount of money to fund. That's a dramatic quality of life improvement for poor people who a generation prior would have had no consistent access to healthcare.

jdietrich 7y ago

I can't speak for anywhere else, but the key problem in the UK is casualisation and underemployment. Lots of people are in work, but it's not good work. On one side, we've pushed people off welfare benefits through an increasingly punitive sanctions regime; on the other, we've allowed for a proliferation of insecure temporary, part-time and gig-based work. The unemployment rate is low, but there's still a severe shortage of work, we've just spread the jam thinner. According to the official statistics, anyone working for at least one hour a week is counted as employed. If your objective is to reduce the unemployment figures, that's a loophole big enough to drive a bus through. We've got a million people in part-time work who want a full-time job but can't find one. We've got two million self-employed people earning less than the minimum wage. More people are working, but they aren't enjoying most of the rewards we associate with work. That's before we consider the statistical black hole that is "economic inactivity" - about eight million people who aren't in the labour market and aren't seeking work. Maybe they're contented housewives and househusbands, maybe they've won the lottery, maybe they've been unemployed for so long that they've given up looking. We don't know and we don't care to ask. https://www.businessinsider.com/ons-underemployment-double-unemployment-rate-2017-9?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/ons-underemployment-double-u... https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/two-million-self-employed-adults-earn-less-minimum-wage https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/two-million-self-employed-adults...

DeonPenny 7y ago

Wages are growing but housing is increasing but eventually, I think wages will outpace.

deleted 7y ago

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api 7y ago

If little new housing is built, density remains the same, and transportation is not upgraded, then this applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent When it comes to what's squeezing the middle class and imposing a glass ceiling, housing prices are the #1 problem. Student loans and healthcare costs might tie for #2. I think we're getting to the point that we need a "war on housing prices" in the developed world. That's going to mean going to war politically against NIMBYs, property speculators, and others who profit from restricting supply. Here's a few of the major things we need: * Huge (to the level of punitive) taxes on excessive property speculation especially when the speculators are from elsewhere. I was chatting with a friend about it a while back and coined the term "financial pollution" for when foreign capital does socially destructive things to communities like hyper-inflate house prices. In California a start would be to abolish proposition 13 for properties that are not owner-occupied. Housing can't simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. It exists to be lived in, not to act as a financial instrument. * Apply full KYC/AML and other anti-dirty-money regulations to all real estate transactions to chase the money launderers and flight capital away from real estate. This one is rarely brought up but it would go a long way toward limiting runaway property speculation in certain "hot" markets. A lot of this money buying houses sight-unseen is dirty money. * Restrict the power of NIMBYs to limit density by enacting laws at the city, county, or state level. Go as high as necessary. * Greatly expand transit to enable cities to physically expand. This includes light rail, commuter rail, highways, EV infrastructure, etc. A lot of this boils down to fighting NIMBYs since existing property owners have a financial vested interest in opposing all of the above.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago

What is increasing, though, is the retiree-to-worker ratio. This is intractably linked to the housing price-to-income ratio, too. Retirees pay for goods and services in one of two ways - they either receive tax receipts through government programs, or sell off assets they have accumulated in their working career. Every asset seller has a matching buyer, so this implies that workers provide for retirees through a combination of taxes and buying assets with their savings. Housing and mortgage debt is an absolutely enormous pool of assets, and one that large numbers of retirees naturally accumulate over their working career.