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> The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation. The wealthy are buying up all the tangible asset

> The numbers are significant in that wages increasingly have been recognized as a driving force in inflation. The wealthy are buying up all the tangible assets and price gouging everyone with high rent and subscriptions for everything imaginable, but it’s the workers asking for enough money to keep up that’s driving inflation. Ok. The western world has gone from single income homeowners in the 80s to dual income homeowners today. That’s 80 hours of work per household per week instead of 40. IMO we’re trending towards multigenerational home ownership where it may require 4-6 income earners to own a house. We’ll all be living paycheck-to-paycheck with 3 families to a house and the economists will still be blaming inflation on the working class having too much money. Maybe it’s time to start asking if a lack of competition is allowing the ownership class to manipulate supply so they can set unfair prices.

birdyrooster 3y ago
We need anti-trust, break up these companies into smaller competitors and give workers a chance to buy into the American dream again.
- hnhmp 3y ago
  While I don't disagree with the notion of breaking up big companies, a have a small bone to pick about the last thing you said. The American dream was never intended to apply to more than a very specific subset of the population; those that we see with the majority of wealth today. It's already worked for those it was meant to work for, and consequently it will never be fought for again. At least, not by those with any real power today; they got what they wanted and have been pulling up the ladder on everyone else ever since. Let's quit trying to buy into the American dream, and try buy into a just and fair society for all. If only that were the goal all along :/
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    The American Dream to me is a just and fair society for all and I see equitable (as is feasible) ownership of the means of production as being foundational. We need everyone to be cut back into the deal somehow and anti-trust is one way to do that. I think we are looking for the same things.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > The American dream was never intended to apply to more than a very specific subset of the population In recent times it's still been sold to everyone as if it were equally obtainable and anyone who found themselves unable to get ahead despite their hard work was told it was their own fault and they should have tried tugging harder on their bootstraps. I agree it's time we stop thinking about the American Dream the same way. We need to either accept that it'll be out of reach for many no matter how hard they try or we change things so that's no longer the case. We can't fix it as long as we continue to buy into the fantasy that it's not broken.
ch4s3 3y ago
> The western world has gone from single income homeowners in the 80s to dual income homeowners today This is largely the result of 3 things, a giant shortfall of building where population growth has outpaced new home starts for 40 years, women joining the workforce in greater numbers since the 60s, and houses on average are much larger and feature more amenities.
- afavour 3y ago
  > women joining the workforce in greater numbers since the 60s In the most literal sense yes, of course the increase in dual income homeowners is because of a greater number of women joining the workforce. But that masks the true reality, which is that those families require two incomes to a lifestyle that used to be achievable with one. It’s a result of the lack of affordability, not a cause.
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    I think you have it backwards. Houses could only be priced such that a single income could buy them when most women did not work. Or nobody could buy them. Once you have couples competing to buy that same housing stock, it becomes increasingly hard for a single income to compete and the price rises to match what the market can support.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      This is exactly the point I'm making. Home ownership rates are still at about 66% of households in the US but median household income has risen dramatically and interest rates have been very low so there has been a lot of room for home prices to increase. Supply has also lagged and labor costs have also risen.
    - afavour 3y ago
      > Houses could only be priced > the price rises ah, the swirling anonymity of "market forces"! These are all active decisions made by people, not forces of nature. The money from these increased prices doesn’t just disappear into the ether. You're not wrong, of course, but it's worth looking at it from another angle. A house for a dual income family does not cost more to build than a house for a single income family. In a world where housing is considered more of a human right than an investment vehicle prices could have stayed low, more could be built, faster. Instead we live in a world where everyone must work more in order for their quality of life to stand still. I think it's permissible to be angry about that.
ralusek 3y ago
What's interesting is that neither of those drive inflation. Inflation is the expansion of the money supply, and there is a sudden attempt to redefine it as increased costs of goods and services. Money supply goes up, costs of assets follow, then costs of goods and services, and then wages. None of the things downstream from expansion of the money supply "drive" inflation.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The most successful government propaganda ever is all the supposed reasons for inflation, anything but the real reason.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  No, inflation is a generalized increase in prices / decrease in purchasing power for goods and services. Many people believe that this kind of broad increase in prices can only be driven by the expansion of money supply, but this is a contested thesis, not the definition of inflation. (For what it's worth, I tend to think it's correct.)
- 21eleven 3y ago
  I am not sure if this is accurate. I think money "throughput" matters more than absolute money supply.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    The voltage supply doesn't matter at all if the resistance or impedance of a circuit is wrong.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  Except historically there have been periods where increasing the money supply hasn't driven up inflation particularly (because most of the increased supply was used to fund increases in productive output) and times where high inflation has been triggered without any significant increase in money supply (often due to unusual factors restricting supply of key goods/services). But at a sufficiently large scale, then sure, inflation will tend to follow money supply. But arguably such baseline inflation is largely a reflection of the fact that the overall output of the economy has grown, and not any indication of general decreased affordability.
gsatic 3y ago
God Save the Rentiers is the American way. Everyone is trained from birth to aspire to be one.
Waterluvian 3y ago
In a lot of cases in Canada it's dual-income renters. And there's a ridiculous amount of cognitive dissonance among the Boomers I've talked with on this topic. There was a real confidence in their feeling that things were just as hard back then and there's just as much opportunity today for people to work hard and buy a home. In their defense: every single one of them, when we got the pen and paper out and did the math to show it's not even remotely close, were shocked.
- taylodl 3y ago
  That's not a defense. They could have gotten the pen and paper out themselves and ran through some numbers to quickly verify their view of the world was way out of alignment with reality - but they didn't do it. Why? Because they preferred their view of the world, reality be damned.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    So… they’re boomers? This isn’t just a Canadian phenomenon. Makes you wonder why they by and large are that way.
    - dwaltrip 3y ago
      It’s expected generational behavior. Younger generations want to change things and think they are unique and special, older generations are like “nah you don’t get it just wait until you are older”. Both are right to varying degrees and depending on the circumstances. But those seems like the default views, and it takes effort to see when they don’t apply.
      - throwaway5959 3y ago
        And you’d think Boomers would understand how that mentality is bullshit.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    I think the past number of years has shown us that anyone willing to change their world view should be applauded. Standards are now very low. Maybe they'll go back up with the interest rates.
trylfthsk 3y ago
Isn't this mean reversion? The US seems to have exhausted much its cheap developable land near major city centers, and I think you'll eventually see the same pattern that seems to play out through the bulk of the world: Extremely expensive land relative to salary, and an entrenched (hereditary?) land-holding baronage.
- efields 3y ago
  We have not done that. There's still plenty of developable land close to cities, and plenty of inefficient uses of space that can be better utilized. The problem is who owns it.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > still plenty of developable land close to cities Hell, there's plenty within cities [1]. [1] https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gc6w0vd/qt5gc6w0vd_noSplash_97f9b183fdbb7e2ee0bcd342e7590bd4.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gc6w0vd/qt5gc6w0vd_noSpl...
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      "On average, 22% of all land in city centers of metropolitan areas with over a million people was dedicated solely to parking." https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/
WalterBright 3y ago
> price gouging everyone That's called cost-push inflation, and is an invalid theory. Inflation comes from government running the money printing press overtime.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Inflation is going to keep getting worse as the government has to print more and more excess money to service the national debt. Meanwhile, the government will blame inflation on greedy corporate profiteers and excessive wage demands by workers. Oh, and the oil companies.
  - argentinian 3y ago
    > the government will blame inflation on greedy corporate profiteers and excessive wage demands by workers. That's exactly what happens in Argentina. The democrats are following the steps of Juan Domingo Perón.
taylodl 3y ago
Also, Boomers are aging out of the job market - they're either unwilling to work any longer and/or unable to work any longer. This has been known for decades. Guess what? The day of reckoning has come. As the labor market contracts the cost of labor will rise. This is just basic market economics.
thoughtstheseus 3y ago
Economists have failed policy makers with their narrow focus on neoliberal economic policies and mathematical models grounded in fairy dust. If anyone wants to understand what effective economic policy is read Ha-Joon Chang’s work.
pydry 3y ago
There are other drivers of inflation, but they'd likely involve hurting the interests of one group of elites over another - e.g. land owners seeing their asset values and rents slide, industrial magnates watching their profits decline or imperialists being forced to sign peace deals they really don't want to. Wages are a good compromise they can all agree on.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
> IMO we’re trending towards multigenerational home ownership where it may require 4-6 income earners to own a house. Nah, don't think so. We went from multigenerational homes and kids living with their parents, inheriting their houses, and if buying -- doing it after they grew up and saved / got help to buy their own house. To a situation where everybody thinks the first thing you have to do after you get your first job is to get expensive mortgage and buy your own house. And parents basically waiting for their kids to leave the house so that they can enjoy freedom. You suddenly need way more houses for the same number of people because people no longer want to live together. And that is what has largely been driving housing prices. The times of prosperity caused this change but also for a long time were masking the effects. Then multiply it by people's inflated expectations on how large their living space needs to be (houses are much larger than in the past even as they are less affordable), It does not help that people are brainwashed that borrowing money is the way to go. It is not. It is a way to stay a slave to the bank. As a side note it is funny that there is so much debate about freedom and yet completely miss the fact that the biggest reason people are not free is that most people owe money to a bank and and most are not making good progress paying the debt. So I think this wave of growth in the need for housing space will pass and at some point it will get more affordable. I think future is very much to be written. In ideal world people would get educated on how to deal with debt, how to pay it and stay debt free. Also how to not get overboard buying stuff you don't really need (which I am very guilty of myself). I know this last one might cool the economy a little bit but I actually think it would be fine if it meant people had healthier financials. What I think is likely, though, is formation of a new class which will essentially be free people in name only. Slaves to the bank from the day they are born to the day they die. Monitored and controlled at every step (which is already happening -- with banks and insurance companies digging through your private data to figure out how big risk you are). Poorly educated with both parents working, with attention grabbed by a shiny rectangle from the first years of their lives, with a noise of AI generated "media". Unable to reach real information through the noise. With no real friends, no real social interactions, no hope to upend the system because of no way to gather critical mass of people to do anything of note.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  > We went from multigenerational homes and kids living with their parents, inheriting their houses, and if buying -- doing it after they grew up and saved / got help to buy their own house. To a situation where everybody thinks the first thing you have to do after you get your first job is to get expensive mortgage and buy your own house the situation is pretty much the opposite of this, we went from where folks could afford a house pretty quickly, sometimes even on a single salary, to double incomes not being enough, and the only hope of housing for some now being multigenerational and/or inherited
tlb 3y ago
It's true, though, that consumer price inflation is mostly regulated by customers at the lower end of the income range. For instance: the supply of eggs is somewhat variable, so in times of shortage the price has to go up to make demand = supply. The rich aren't eating fewer eggs when this happens, the poor are. If everyone was rich, the price of eggs would go to infinity. (This seems to be happening to private school tuition.)
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> The wealthy are buying up all the tangible assets and price gouging everyone with high rent Why hasn't this happened in the past? A lot of property makes a lousy investment unless you get value by living in it.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Unless you buy a lot of rental properties and take some of them off the market. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-rebellion-how-one-country-worlds-biggest-commercial-landlord-denmark https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-...
rich_sasha 3y ago
The increase in hours worked is somewhat illusory. Primary care giver (eg. in the past, usually mothers) worked full time to look after the children, cook, organize family life. We now mostly work the same hours for money, then pay someone to do what mothers used to do for free; except possibly with some extra friction (tax, stress, commutes etc.). Even nowadays, in the UK for example, many families are pushed to realize the soaring cost of childcare is greater than post tax earnings for one parent and skip employment to save money.

birdyrooster 3y ago

We need anti-trust, break up these companies into smaller competitors and give workers a chance to buy into the American dream again.

hnhmp 3y ago
While I don't disagree with the notion of breaking up big companies, a have a small bone to pick about the last thing you said. The American dream was never intended to apply to more than a very specific subset of the population; those that we see with the majority of wealth today. It's already worked for those it was meant to work for, and consequently it will never be fought for again. At least, not by those with any real power today; they got what they wanted and have been pulling up the ladder on everyone else ever since. Let's quit trying to buy into the American dream, and try buy into a just and fair society for all. If only that were the goal all along :/
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  The American Dream to me is a just and fair society for all and I see equitable (as is feasible) ownership of the means of production as being foundational. We need everyone to be cut back into the deal somehow and anti-trust is one way to do that. I think we are looking for the same things.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > The American dream was never intended to apply to more than a very specific subset of the population In recent times it's still been sold to everyone as if it were equally obtainable and anyone who found themselves unable to get ahead despite their hard work was told it was their own fault and they should have tried tugging harder on their bootstraps. I agree it's time we stop thinking about the American Dream the same way. We need to either accept that it'll be out of reach for many no matter how hard they try or we change things so that's no longer the case. We can't fix it as long as we continue to buy into the fantasy that it's not broken.

ch4s3 3y ago

> The western world has gone from single income homeowners in the 80s to dual income homeowners today This is largely the result of 3 things, a giant shortfall of building where population growth has outpaced new home starts for 40 years, women joining the workforce in greater numbers since the 60s, and houses on average are much larger and feature more amenities.

afavour 3y ago
> women joining the workforce in greater numbers since the 60s In the most literal sense yes, of course the increase in dual income homeowners is because of a greater number of women joining the workforce. But that masks the true reality, which is that those families require two incomes to a lifestyle that used to be achievable with one. It’s a result of the lack of affordability, not a cause.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  I think you have it backwards. Houses could only be priced such that a single income could buy them when most women did not work. Or nobody could buy them. Once you have couples competing to buy that same housing stock, it becomes increasingly hard for a single income to compete and the price rises to match what the market can support.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    This is exactly the point I'm making. Home ownership rates are still at about 66% of households in the US but median household income has risen dramatically and interest rates have been very low so there has been a lot of room for home prices to increase. Supply has also lagged and labor costs have also risen.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > Houses could only be priced > the price rises ah, the swirling anonymity of "market forces"! These are all active decisions made by people, not forces of nature. The money from these increased prices doesn’t just disappear into the ether. You're not wrong, of course, but it's worth looking at it from another angle. A house for a dual income family does not cost more to build than a house for a single income family. In a world where housing is considered more of a human right than an investment vehicle prices could have stayed low, more could be built, faster. Instead we live in a world where everyone must work more in order for their quality of life to stand still. I think it's permissible to be angry about that.

ralusek 3y ago

What's interesting is that neither of those drive inflation. Inflation is the expansion of the money supply, and there is a sudden attempt to redefine it as increased costs of goods and services. Money supply goes up, costs of assets follow, then costs of goods and services, and then wages. None of the things downstream from expansion of the money supply "drive" inflation.

WalterBright 3y ago
The most successful government propaganda ever is all the supposed reasons for inflation, anything but the real reason.
sanderjd 3y ago
No, inflation is a generalized increase in prices / decrease in purchasing power for goods and services. Many people believe that this kind of broad increase in prices can only be driven by the expansion of money supply, but this is a contested thesis, not the definition of inflation. (For what it's worth, I tend to think it's correct.)
21eleven 3y ago
I am not sure if this is accurate. I think money "throughput" matters more than absolute money supply.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  The voltage supply doesn't matter at all if the resistance or impedance of a circuit is wrong.
wizofaus 3y ago
Except historically there have been periods where increasing the money supply hasn't driven up inflation particularly (because most of the increased supply was used to fund increases in productive output) and times where high inflation has been triggered without any significant increase in money supply (often due to unusual factors restricting supply of key goods/services). But at a sufficiently large scale, then sure, inflation will tend to follow money supply. But arguably such baseline inflation is largely a reflection of the fact that the overall output of the economy has grown, and not any indication of general decreased affordability.

gsatic 3y ago

God Save the Rentiers is the American way. Everyone is trained from birth to aspire to be one.

Waterluvian 3y ago

In a lot of cases in Canada it's dual-income renters. And there's a ridiculous amount of cognitive dissonance among the Boomers I've talked with on this topic. There was a real confidence in their feeling that things were just as hard back then and there's just as much opportunity today for people to work hard and buy a home. In their defense: every single one of them, when we got the pen and paper out and did the math to show it's not even remotely close, were shocked.

taylodl 3y ago
That's not a defense. They could have gotten the pen and paper out themselves and ran through some numbers to quickly verify their view of the world was way out of alignment with reality - but they didn't do it. Why? Because they preferred their view of the world, reality be damned.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  So… they’re boomers? This isn’t just a Canadian phenomenon. Makes you wonder why they by and large are that way.
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    It’s expected generational behavior. Younger generations want to change things and think they are unique and special, older generations are like “nah you don’t get it just wait until you are older”. Both are right to varying degrees and depending on the circumstances. But those seems like the default views, and it takes effort to see when they don’t apply.
    - throwaway5959 3y ago
      And you’d think Boomers would understand how that mentality is bullshit.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I think the past number of years has shown us that anyone willing to change their world view should be applauded. Standards are now very low. Maybe they'll go back up with the interest rates.

trylfthsk 3y ago

Isn't this mean reversion? The US seems to have exhausted much its cheap developable land near major city centers, and I think you'll eventually see the same pattern that seems to play out through the bulk of the world: Extremely expensive land relative to salary, and an entrenched (hereditary?) land-holding baronage.

efields 3y ago
We have not done that. There's still plenty of developable land close to cities, and plenty of inefficient uses of space that can be better utilized. The problem is who owns it.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > still plenty of developable land close to cities Hell, there's plenty within cities [1]. [1] https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gc6w0vd/qt5gc6w0vd_noSplash_97f9b183fdbb7e2ee0bcd342e7590bd4.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gc6w0vd/qt5gc6w0vd_noSpl...
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    "On average, 22% of all land in city centers of metropolitan areas with over a million people was dedicated solely to parking." https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/

WalterBright 3y ago

> price gouging everyone That's called cost-push inflation, and is an invalid theory. Inflation comes from government running the money printing press overtime.

WalterBright 3y ago
Inflation is going to keep getting worse as the government has to print more and more excess money to service the national debt. Meanwhile, the government will blame inflation on greedy corporate profiteers and excessive wage demands by workers. Oh, and the oil companies.
- argentinian 3y ago
  > the government will blame inflation on greedy corporate profiteers and excessive wage demands by workers. That's exactly what happens in Argentina. The democrats are following the steps of Juan Domingo Perón.

taylodl 3y ago

Also, Boomers are aging out of the job market - they're either unwilling to work any longer and/or unable to work any longer. This has been known for decades. Guess what? The day of reckoning has come. As the labor market contracts the cost of labor will rise. This is just basic market economics.

thoughtstheseus 3y ago

Economists have failed policy makers with their narrow focus on neoliberal economic policies and mathematical models grounded in fairy dust. If anyone wants to understand what effective economic policy is read Ha-Joon Chang’s work.

pydry 3y ago

There are other drivers of inflation, but they'd likely involve hurting the interests of one group of elites over another - e.g. land owners seeing their asset values and rents slide, industrial magnates watching their profits decline or imperialists being forced to sign peace deals they really don't want to. Wages are a good compromise they can all agree on.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

> IMO we’re trending towards multigenerational home ownership where it may require 4-6 income earners to own a house. Nah, don't think so. We went from multigenerational homes and kids living with their parents, inheriting their houses, and if buying -- doing it after they grew up and saved / got help to buy their own house. To a situation where everybody thinks the first thing you have to do after you get your first job is to get expensive mortgage and buy your own house. And parents basically waiting for their kids to leave the house so that they can enjoy freedom. You suddenly need way more houses for the same number of people because people no longer want to live together. And that is what has largely been driving housing prices. The times of prosperity caused this change but also for a long time were masking the effects. Then multiply it by people's inflated expectations on how large their living space needs to be (houses are much larger than in the past even as they are less affordable), It does not help that people are brainwashed that borrowing money is the way to go. It is not. It is a way to stay a slave to the bank. As a side note it is funny that there is so much debate about freedom and yet completely miss the fact that the biggest reason people are not free is that most people owe money to a bank and and most are not making good progress paying the debt. So I think this wave of growth in the need for housing space will pass and at some point it will get more affordable. I think future is very much to be written. In ideal world people would get educated on how to deal with debt, how to pay it and stay debt free. Also how to not get overboard buying stuff you don't really need (which I am very guilty of myself). I know this last one might cool the economy a little bit but I actually think it would be fine if it meant people had healthier financials. What I think is likely, though, is formation of a new class which will essentially be free people in name only. Slaves to the bank from the day they are born to the day they die. Monitored and controlled at every step (which is already happening -- with banks and insurance companies digging through your private data to figure out how big risk you are). Poorly educated with both parents working, with attention grabbed by a shiny rectangle from the first years of their lives, with a noise of AI generated "media". Unable to reach real information through the noise. With no real friends, no real social interactions, no hope to upend the system because of no way to gather critical mass of people to do anything of note.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
> We went from multigenerational homes and kids living with their parents, inheriting their houses, and if buying -- doing it after they grew up and saved / got help to buy their own house. To a situation where everybody thinks the first thing you have to do after you get your first job is to get expensive mortgage and buy your own house the situation is pretty much the opposite of this, we went from where folks could afford a house pretty quickly, sometimes even on a single salary, to double incomes not being enough, and the only hope of housing for some now being multigenerational and/or inherited

tlb 3y ago

It's true, though, that consumer price inflation is mostly regulated by customers at the lower end of the income range. For instance: the supply of eggs is somewhat variable, so in times of shortage the price has to go up to make demand = supply. The rich aren't eating fewer eggs when this happens, the poor are. If everyone was rich, the price of eggs would go to infinity. (This seems to be happening to private school tuition.)

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> The wealthy are buying up all the tangible assets and price gouging everyone with high rent Why hasn't this happened in the past? A lot of property makes a lousy investment unless you get value by living in it.

cratermoon 3y ago
Unless you buy a lot of rental properties and take some of them off the market. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-rebellion-how-one-country-worlds-biggest-commercial-landlord-denmark https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-...

rich_sasha 3y ago

The increase in hours worked is somewhat illusory. Primary care giver (eg. in the past, usually mothers) worked full time to look after the children, cook, organize family life. We now mostly work the same hours for money, then pay someone to do what mothers used to do for free; except possibly with some extra friction (tax, stress, commutes etc.). Even nowadays, in the UK for example, many families are pushed to realize the soaring cost of childcare is greater than post tax earnings for one parent and skip employment to save money.