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In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken. Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (except
by esotericn 7y ago
In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken.
Nothing else is an issue at all. Everything else is essentially trivially cheap (excepting cases of disability).
A year's worth of food costs about as much as 1 month's rent on a small flat in London. (Many people increase their food expenditure, but the basics are doable for that).
Even in the northern towns 100K for a house is fairly standard. That's a ridiculous amount of money - a home does not take 5 man-years to produce any more.
The only thing anyone works for is rent, indirect rent (e.g. paying 5 quid a pint because of the pub's rent and the pub workers' rent and so on), their mortgage, whatever.
- maxsilver 7y ago> In the UK at least the housing market is completely and utterly broken. Yes, and this seems true in basically all the similar-ish countries too. (It's 100% broken in the the vast majority of the US and Canada. It looks like it's mostly broken in Australia and New Zealand too)
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoWouldn’t it be true for any capitalistic economy. Owners will extract as much rent as the market will bear, and employees will pay as little as the market accepts. It seems only natural that those two forces would converge on having rent correlate strongly with wages
- esotericn 7y agoIt's more empirical than that I think. The situation in SE England in which 95%+ of those under, say, age 30 or so, will never own a home (and are currently in little rooms sharing with others if they're not partnered off) is not something that is a result of some sort of economic formula. Individuals still have to decide that it's better than their alternatives (e.g. lower cost towns, rural living, staying with parents, emigrating, ...). Beyond that there's also political action.