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There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universa

There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that. It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing. Also, doesn't help that laws and government policy heavily favor home owners (perhaps because home owners vote at a lot higher rate than renters)

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applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
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.
- sarchertech 3mo ago
  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.
  - usui 3mo 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?
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      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.
      - Xirdus 3mo ago
        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.
        usui 3mo ago
        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.
        Xirdus 3mo ago
        I didn't say it's nice to downsize. I said it's possible to downsize.
        usui 3mo ago
        Fair enough, you're correct. It is... possible
        Xirdus 3mo ago
        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.)
- ch4s3 3mo ago
  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 https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP [2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA 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.
  - deleted 3mo ago
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  - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
    > 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
    - ch4s3 3mo ago
      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.
  - vablings 3mo ago
    I might also point out that Finland has very good social programs, probably some of the best in Europe
- threetonesun 3mo ago
  Also if you buy lots of cheap junk for your apartment and then have to move, you will not be happy.
  - vel0city 3mo ago
    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.
    - threetonesun 3mo ago
      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.
- pibaker 3mo ago
  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.
  - applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
    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.
smaudet 3mo ago
What crack was the YTber on? Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value... Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...
- sarchertech 3mo ago
  What is the time period for you numbers?
- smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a commercial like that? A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.
    - smaudet 3mo ago
      > A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. Like the previous poster mentioned, I'm not sure that's really such a quality of life improvement. First of all, food. I don't know where you shop, but the cost has definitely doubled, even tripled. Second of all, the idea that it's some "good" that these things are "cheap" relative to wages - before they may have been expensive, but they were also investments. It doesn't really matter that much, because you can save to obtain them, and don't need to worry about re-obtaining them. Being in a situation where durable goods are cheap, but cost of living is high, means that you are disproportionately struggling - you can't save anything, any good that these products provide is outweighed by it being too expensive to live...
smallmancontrov 3mo ago
Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative choices that will make people angry and until then the problems will continue to get worse.
- CGMthrowaway 3mo ago
  >this is all downstream of structural incentives You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)
  - __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
    Nothing to do with poisoning the non-AI parts of the economy to drive investment in AI? Its not like this bubble was gonna blow itself. It's clear that there's plenty of money to go around. It's just that none of it is being spent on things that improve people's lives, mostly due to corruption.
    - paxys 3mo ago
      These problems have existed since well before AI.
      - __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
        Sure, it's only the most recent example of how lopsided economies like ours cyclically shoot themselves in the foot.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    I don't see how. National debt is just a form of money-printing. And it has to equal private savings.
twoodfin 3mo ago
Owning a home creates a stable, personal nexus with a set of vital institutions: Family, community, local economy, government, … As a driver and measure of well-being, it’s probably at least 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.
- ch4s3 3mo ago
  > 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete. This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.
  - twoodfin 3mo ago
    I’m not sure you’re disagreeing with me: Those who owned the land and didn’t have to migrate / soldier around or work someone else’s land to survive were doing well for themselves!
    - ch4s3 3mo ago
      The people farming didn't really own the land, in many cases they were captured or corralled in place and forced to farm. The were also forced to dig canals and occasionally do the soldiering. All of the early Mesopotamian city states use corvée labor. Being an early farmer was super shitty, and no one did it by choice.
      - twoodfin 3mo ago
        Right, I’m saying the jerks who did the capturing and the forcing (the owners!) were doing well, not the proto-feudal farmers.
  - trimethylpurine 3mo ago
    This seems reasonable without negating the previous comment. With no army to protect the farm, there can be no farm. A return to hunting and gathering would occur as an effect of warfare, regardless of whether or not the farmers have any choice. But hunting and gathering is still obsolete, whereupon agriculture is possible. Obsolescence does not by definition imply permanence.
lotsofpulp 3mo ago
Your comment got me thinking how youtube videos are a bad place to get any information that is not showing how to do a hands on activity.
eagerpace 3mo ago
I love to see metrics that evolve over time. Land is a finite resources, as such it inevitably trends up as the best and easiest locations are consumed. So I think the correlation here has to be understood from that baseline.
- Zigurd 3mo ago
  Land as a finite resource only affects first tier real estate market markets. You can see this vividly in China where there's a housing glut on aggregate, but not in first tier cities.
- everforward 3mo ago
  Land is finite but not meaningfully so at this point. If my early morning napkin math is right, we could give every person on earth about 6.4 acres of land. Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.
- dfxm12 3mo ago
  That's too simplistic. The best (and maybe even easiest) locations and local population evolve over time as well. Land can be developed in different ways, allowing for different density. Different people buy property for different reasons, which affects its value.
Zigurd 3mo ago
Making the concept a little more abstract can help: if you have personal access to capital because you've got collateral, that has numerous beneficial effects, as some of the other commenters here have pointed out. This effect might be less strong in the US because we have relatively well run capital markets that you can invest in. This would be a book length post to dive into all of the details of it but the net effect is plain to see. It's one of those things that looks a little irrational but in practical terms it's a proven benefit.
throw0101d 3mo ago
> It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours […] Do a search for "the housing theory of everything". It has been an idea growing in popularity over the last few years, especially in the Anglo-sphere where housing/shelter costs seem to be worse than other places. (One hypothesis I've seen for this is because of Common law, which can give NIMBYs more power to challenge (new) things.)
paxys 3mo ago
Not hard to see why that is the case. No amount of flatscreen TVs is going to make up for the lack of food, shelter and medicine.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  CPI disagrees.
jordanb 3mo ago
Manufactured consumer products and food have gotten much more available. Housing, education, and healthcare have gotten less available. Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.
dktp 3mo ago
There was an interesting video by Ben Felix that makes a case that home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.
- alexjplant 3mo ago
  > home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder". The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.
  - vablings 3mo ago
    One issue is that if you plan to have an expanding family your home needs to retain its resale value to allow you to sell it and move into a larger home to suit your family needs.
- shmolyneaux 3mo ago
  Here's a follow-up video by Ben Felix posted more recently about the case for home ownership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16eA5ebWMQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16eA5ebWMQQ In the end, home ownership is more based around the kind of life you want to live than costs/benefits of the house as an asset. As a Canadian I see that many of my friends would choose to pay a lot more each month on the principle of a mortgage than they would ever save in a registered account.
gravypod 3mo ago
"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." - William Levit (the Levittown one)
- pbhjpbhj 3mo ago
  His point appears to be that each person should only look after their own interests? Is that your intent in posting it? Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.
  - bell-cot 3mo ago
    > His point appears... No, Levit said that in 1948, when Americans were vastly better-connected (socially) than today, "Godless Communism" was their #1 fear, and everybody was aware of communism's easy appeal to those who felt dispossessed. I'd read the quote as a clever way to say "let me sell millions of cheap houses to Americans, and you'll never have to worry about the commies".
    - gravypod 3mo ago
      Yes, exactly. The idea was that people could be content with our system if people's material conditions were good. We seem to have lost this insight and continued for the next 50-60 years to degrade the quality of life.
    - pbhjpbhj 3mo ago
      Thanks for expanding on the quote with some context, appreciated.
  - PunchyHamster 3mo ago
    I think it's more that communism appeals to those that didn't really made it or worked for what they have. > Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine. commonly mistaken with communism, yes. Country having strong social services and caring about their citizens is not the same as communism.
dfxm12 3mo ago
Many forms of media and social pressure point to owning your own home as a measure of personal success. It probably is. If it wasn't, rich people wouldn't buy so many. Plus it's harder to kick you out of a place you own than a place you rent. Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.
ipdashc 3mo ago
> disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing It's probably not just homeownership, but the cost of real estate as a whole. And not even just residential. Isn't the often-lamented "loss of third places" at least in part due to those places not being able to pay rent unless they heavily monetize? I've also heard the theory that the arts often take off in an area when real estate prices drop and it suddenly becomes possible to build cheap art studios and such. No proof or anything, just something I've heard random people talk about online, but it makes some sense.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
  The arts are often the first step towards gentrification. The artists move in for the cheap rent, then the rest see all the arts and think "I want to live there!" Then pretty soon the artists can't afford it any more and move somewhere else.
xnx 3mo ago
Possibly referencing the "Chart of the Century": https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...
- JKCalhoun 3mo ago
  Oh, thank god, TVs are less expensive. ;-)
  - pixelatedindex 3mo ago
    Can’t really spy / collect data if they’re expensive
- krackers 3mo ago
  This may not account for enshittification. Clothes are "cheaper" in both senses of the word. Same for furnishings.
  - xnx 3mo ago
    Possibly. The source data does include hedonic adjustments.
anovikov 3mo ago
The catch here is that homeownership rate is the highest in history now except 2000s speculative subprime bubble when a lot of purely investment properties were bought at 103% mortgage by people who could not afford the risk.
carlosjobim 3mo ago
In almost every place in the world, at almost any point in history, the propaganda will always tell you that you've never had it better than you have it now. But once you start digging and thinking, you start realizing that it's not true. I understand that most hackers reading the above sentence are already raging, but were you actually there to know that things were worse in the past, or has it been hammered so strongly into you that you're now greatly offended at suggestions that it isn't true?
- bluGill 3mo ago
  There are a lot of factors. Some things are worse than the past. However other things are better. There is no universal correct weighting of these different factors. In general I think that nobody would be willing to go far back in time. You don't need YouTube, but would you want to live without it? How about electric lights? Safe drinking water? Flush toilets?
  - carlosjobim 3mo ago
    It depends on what your situation would be and where, when you go back in time. Most people in the world today live in absolute misery, so that's not much argument. The enormous abundance of game animals in the past is just one factor which is mostly forgotten today. In a world without clocks, no electric lights are needed. The safest and highest quality drinking water comes from springs and streams, still today. Flush toilets aren't needed if you live rurally. And so on. Not to forget, that the less you are used to comforts, the more physically and mentally fit you will be as a person.
    - bluGill 3mo ago
      Game animals were rarely that in abundance. It happened after plagues but then populations rebounded and life was a constant struggle.
      - carlosjobim 3mo ago
        You've been told that life was a constant struggle, you weren't there. Many would say that life today is a constant struggle. But we have abundant evidence in art, architecture, inventions, and every fruit of human creativity, showing that people weren't in a constant struggle. Especially, we have evidence in literature from the past, giving a more nuanced picture than that of constant struggle for everyone everywhere.
cucumber3732842 3mo ago
>policy heavily favor home owners Policy doesn't "favor" favor homeowners. It screws everything else because it can. You wanna add a deck to your home. You pay the people the government says you need to pay a grand or two and you're GTG (by which I mean, good to spend further money actually doing the project). Landlord wants to add decks to his triple decker so that he can make the place nicer (more $) while also hitting the egress requirements bird with the same stone and it's an instant 4-5 figure bunch of bullshit where half a dozen worthless interests who add nearly no value in the base case exercise their enshrined in law right to sink their teeth into what should be a petty project. And it's not just some slum lords triple decker, it's a 10-unit condo, it's those new luxury apartments and on and on and on and on. Everything about owning property, improving property, etc, etc, is ungodly expensive and exclusionary because there's a mile long list of jerks with their hand undeservingly in the pot. Don't get me started on the financialization that underpins all this, it's just as tileted too. Policy "favors" homeowners by somewhat exempting them from the worst of this because the buck stops with them. When they get screwed there's nobody else to pass it on to, so they push back.
frig57 3mo ago
Everything better now than it once was? Hard disagree, take me back to the early 2010s
- JKCalhoun 3mo ago
  See ya, I'm time-traveling back to the 70's, ha ha.
- shipman05 3mo ago
  The early 2010s, the age of financial bailouts, Occupy Wall Street, and two "forever" wars. No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.
  - cpburns2009 3mo ago
    The 2010s were the beginning of the decline. The '90s and 2000s were the Golden Age.
cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
When it comes to housing I think the key thing is stability. Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it. At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased. Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.
mlinhares 3mo ago
Life is much harder when you don't have a roof over your head or when that roof can be taken away from your or take more from your salary than you were anticipating. I don't think people understand the psychological safety of knowing you will not pay a single dime more on a loan for your home for 30 years. It completely erases that worry from your head.
- nxm 3mo ago
  Then come the property taxes
  - 100percentjake 3mo ago
    This seems like FUD. Anecdotally, even with property taxes, insurance, and all the rest of it, my 1,000 sq-ft 40s constructed house is 60% the cost of what my girlfriend was previously paying to rent a 1bd apartment on the outskirts of our town. And that is with a "first time homebuyer" $0-down mortgage I got through a local credit union.
    - mlinhares 3mo ago
      The landlord also pays property taxes, so this comment must be trolling.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3mo ago
  I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lived in the city my whole life and have seen rents rise. That’s been extremely frustrating for me because I’ve been at the mercy of market trends and have worried about what would happen if, at some point, I didn’t earn as much anymore, or if rents rose so much that they became too expensive even for me. What would I do then? The worry that, despite a relatively good income, I might be at risk of poverty in old age because I have to hand over a good portion of my take-home pay to a landlord month after month is very frustrating in the long run. A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.
watwut 3mo ago
The articles with similar claim I have seen attributed disproportional value to, basically, stupid crap: better phone, more entertainment (streaming movies), cloth I buy once in a while, cheaper gym nearby, some or other luxury I would miss for roughly 3 months and then forgot. And that leads us to "only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income" - precarity does matter. If I am one sickness or two paychecks from not being able to pay rent, it causes a lot more actual real material insecurity then "having slower phone while everybody else has equally slow phone". Likewise, if you have trouble to find a job, fear of loosing it makes you work 12 hours a day in a job you hate, it affects you a lot more then whether you can stream movies.
PunchyHamster 3mo ago
It's very likely. It's place we rest, do some of the fun part of life and a place to call our "own" in world where increasingly nothing is. On top of that having that high mortgage or even rent hanging over your head, making sure you can't really downgrade work to something more fun but maybe less paid can be stressful too. Especially in the firing season where you might be let go and take months to find new job. And housing taking higher and higher part of the income is also effectively getting us poorer or at least stagnate.
surcap526 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago

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applfanboysbgon 3mo ago

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.

sarchertech 3mo ago
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.
- usui 3mo 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?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    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.
    - Xirdus 3mo ago
      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.
      - usui 3mo ago
        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.
        Xirdus 3mo ago
        I didn't say it's nice to downsize. I said it's possible to downsize.
        usui 3mo ago
        Fair enough, you're correct. It is... possible
        Xirdus 3mo ago
        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.)
ch4s3 3mo ago
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 https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP [2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA 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.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- PunchyHamster 3mo ago
  > 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
  - ch4s3 3mo ago
    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.
- vablings 3mo ago
  I might also point out that Finland has very good social programs, probably some of the best in Europe
threetonesun 3mo ago
Also if you buy lots of cheap junk for your apartment and then have to move, you will not be happy.
- vel0city 3mo ago
  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.
  - threetonesun 3mo ago
    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.
pibaker 3mo ago
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.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  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.

smaudet 3mo ago

What crack was the YTber on? Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value... Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

sarchertech 3mo ago
What is the time period for you numbers?
smallmancontrov 3mo ago
Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"
- rayiner 3mo ago
  It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a commercial like that? A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.
  - smaudet 3mo ago
    > A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. Like the previous poster mentioned, I'm not sure that's really such a quality of life improvement. First of all, food. I don't know where you shop, but the cost has definitely doubled, even tripled. Second of all, the idea that it's some "good" that these things are "cheap" relative to wages - before they may have been expensive, but they were also investments. It doesn't really matter that much, because you can save to obtain them, and don't need to worry about re-obtaining them. Being in a situation where durable goods are cheap, but cost of living is high, means that you are disproportionately struggling - you can't save anything, any good that these products provide is outweighed by it being too expensive to live...

smallmancontrov 3mo ago

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative choices that will make people angry and until then the problems will continue to get worse.

CGMthrowaway 3mo ago
>this is all downstream of structural incentives You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
  Nothing to do with poisoning the non-AI parts of the economy to drive investment in AI? Its not like this bubble was gonna blow itself. It's clear that there's plenty of money to go around. It's just that none of it is being spent on things that improve people's lives, mostly due to corruption.
  - paxys 3mo ago
    These problems have existed since well before AI.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
      Sure, it's only the most recent example of how lopsided economies like ours cyclically shoot themselves in the foot.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  I don't see how. National debt is just a form of money-printing. And it has to equal private savings.

twoodfin 3mo ago

Owning a home creates a stable, personal nexus with a set of vital institutions: Family, community, local economy, government, … As a driver and measure of well-being, it’s probably at least 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.

ch4s3 3mo ago
> 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete. This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.
- twoodfin 3mo ago
  I’m not sure you’re disagreeing with me: Those who owned the land and didn’t have to migrate / soldier around or work someone else’s land to survive were doing well for themselves!
  - ch4s3 3mo ago
    The people farming didn't really own the land, in many cases they were captured or corralled in place and forced to farm. The were also forced to dig canals and occasionally do the soldiering. All of the early Mesopotamian city states use corvée labor. Being an early farmer was super shitty, and no one did it by choice.
    - twoodfin 3mo ago
      Right, I’m saying the jerks who did the capturing and the forcing (the owners!) were doing well, not the proto-feudal farmers.
- trimethylpurine 3mo ago
  This seems reasonable without negating the previous comment. With no army to protect the farm, there can be no farm. A return to hunting and gathering would occur as an effect of warfare, regardless of whether or not the farmers have any choice. But hunting and gathering is still obsolete, whereupon agriculture is possible. Obsolescence does not by definition imply permanence.

lotsofpulp 3mo ago

Your comment got me thinking how youtube videos are a bad place to get any information that is not showing how to do a hands on activity.

eagerpace 3mo ago

I love to see metrics that evolve over time. Land is a finite resources, as such it inevitably trends up as the best and easiest locations are consumed. So I think the correlation here has to be understood from that baseline.

Zigurd 3mo ago
Land as a finite resource only affects first tier real estate market markets. You can see this vividly in China where there's a housing glut on aggregate, but not in first tier cities.
everforward 3mo ago
Land is finite but not meaningfully so at this point. If my early morning napkin math is right, we could give every person on earth about 6.4 acres of land. Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.
dfxm12 3mo ago
That's too simplistic. The best (and maybe even easiest) locations and local population evolve over time as well. Land can be developed in different ways, allowing for different density. Different people buy property for different reasons, which affects its value.

Zigurd 3mo ago

Making the concept a little more abstract can help: if you have personal access to capital because you've got collateral, that has numerous beneficial effects, as some of the other commenters here have pointed out. This effect might be less strong in the US because we have relatively well run capital markets that you can invest in. This would be a book length post to dive into all of the details of it but the net effect is plain to see. It's one of those things that looks a little irrational but in practical terms it's a proven benefit.

throw0101d 3mo ago

> It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours […] Do a search for "the housing theory of everything". It has been an idea growing in popularity over the last few years, especially in the Anglo-sphere where housing/shelter costs seem to be worse than other places. (One hypothesis I've seen for this is because of Common law, which can give NIMBYs more power to challenge (new) things.)

paxys 3mo ago

Not hard to see why that is the case. No amount of flatscreen TVs is going to make up for the lack of food, shelter and medicine.

inigyou 3mo ago
CPI disagrees.

jordanb 3mo ago

Manufactured consumer products and food have gotten much more available. Housing, education, and healthcare have gotten less available. Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.

dktp 3mo ago

There was an interesting video by Ben Felix that makes a case that home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.

alexjplant 3mo ago
> home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder". The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.
- vablings 3mo ago
  One issue is that if you plan to have an expanding family your home needs to retain its resale value to allow you to sell it and move into a larger home to suit your family needs.
shmolyneaux 3mo ago
Here's a follow-up video by Ben Felix posted more recently about the case for home ownership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16eA5ebWMQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16eA5ebWMQQ In the end, home ownership is more based around the kind of life you want to live than costs/benefits of the house as an asset. As a Canadian I see that many of my friends would choose to pay a lot more each month on the principle of a mortgage than they would ever save in a registered account.

gravypod 3mo ago

"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." - William Levit (the Levittown one)

pbhjpbhj 3mo ago
His point appears to be that each person should only look after their own interests? Is that your intent in posting it? Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.
- bell-cot 3mo ago
  > His point appears... No, Levit said that in 1948, when Americans were vastly better-connected (socially) than today, "Godless Communism" was their #1 fear, and everybody was aware of communism's easy appeal to those who felt dispossessed. I'd read the quote as a clever way to say "let me sell millions of cheap houses to Americans, and you'll never have to worry about the commies".
  - gravypod 3mo ago
    Yes, exactly. The idea was that people could be content with our system if people's material conditions were good. We seem to have lost this insight and continued for the next 50-60 years to degrade the quality of life.
  - pbhjpbhj 3mo ago
    Thanks for expanding on the quote with some context, appreciated.
- PunchyHamster 3mo ago
  I think it's more that communism appeals to those that didn't really made it or worked for what they have. > Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine. commonly mistaken with communism, yes. Country having strong social services and caring about their citizens is not the same as communism.

dfxm12 3mo ago

Many forms of media and social pressure point to owning your own home as a measure of personal success. It probably is. If it wasn't, rich people wouldn't buy so many. Plus it's harder to kick you out of a place you own than a place you rent. Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.

ipdashc 3mo ago

> disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing It's probably not just homeownership, but the cost of real estate as a whole. And not even just residential. Isn't the often-lamented "loss of third places" at least in part due to those places not being able to pay rent unless they heavily monetize? I've also heard the theory that the arts often take off in an area when real estate prices drop and it suddenly becomes possible to build cheap art studios and such. No proof or anything, just something I've heard random people talk about online, but it makes some sense.

amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
The arts are often the first step towards gentrification. The artists move in for the cheap rent, then the rest see all the arts and think "I want to live there!" Then pretty soon the artists can't afford it any more and move somewhere else.

xnx 3mo ago

Possibly referencing the "Chart of the Century": https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

JKCalhoun 3mo ago
Oh, thank god, TVs are less expensive. ;-)
- pixelatedindex 3mo ago
  Can’t really spy / collect data if they’re expensive
krackers 3mo ago
This may not account for enshittification. Clothes are "cheaper" in both senses of the word. Same for furnishings.
- xnx 3mo ago
  Possibly. The source data does include hedonic adjustments.

anovikov 3mo ago

The catch here is that homeownership rate is the highest in history now except 2000s speculative subprime bubble when a lot of purely investment properties were bought at 103% mortgage by people who could not afford the risk.

carlosjobim 3mo ago

In almost every place in the world, at almost any point in history, the propaganda will always tell you that you've never had it better than you have it now. But once you start digging and thinking, you start realizing that it's not true. I understand that most hackers reading the above sentence are already raging, but were you actually there to know that things were worse in the past, or has it been hammered so strongly into you that you're now greatly offended at suggestions that it isn't true?

bluGill 3mo ago
There are a lot of factors. Some things are worse than the past. However other things are better. There is no universal correct weighting of these different factors. In general I think that nobody would be willing to go far back in time. You don't need YouTube, but would you want to live without it? How about electric lights? Safe drinking water? Flush toilets?
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  It depends on what your situation would be and where, when you go back in time. Most people in the world today live in absolute misery, so that's not much argument. The enormous abundance of game animals in the past is just one factor which is mostly forgotten today. In a world without clocks, no electric lights are needed. The safest and highest quality drinking water comes from springs and streams, still today. Flush toilets aren't needed if you live rurally. And so on. Not to forget, that the less you are used to comforts, the more physically and mentally fit you will be as a person.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    Game animals were rarely that in abundance. It happened after plagues but then populations rebounded and life was a constant struggle.
    - carlosjobim 3mo ago
      You've been told that life was a constant struggle, you weren't there. Many would say that life today is a constant struggle. But we have abundant evidence in art, architecture, inventions, and every fruit of human creativity, showing that people weren't in a constant struggle. Especially, we have evidence in literature from the past, giving a more nuanced picture than that of constant struggle for everyone everywhere.

cucumber3732842 3mo ago

>policy heavily favor home owners Policy doesn't "favor" favor homeowners. It screws everything else because it can. You wanna add a deck to your home. You pay the people the government says you need to pay a grand or two and you're GTG (by which I mean, good to spend further money actually doing the project). Landlord wants to add decks to his triple decker so that he can make the place nicer (more $) while also hitting the egress requirements bird with the same stone and it's an instant 4-5 figure bunch of bullshit where half a dozen worthless interests who add nearly no value in the base case exercise their enshrined in law right to sink their teeth into what should be a petty project. And it's not just some slum lords triple decker, it's a 10-unit condo, it's those new luxury apartments and on and on and on and on. Everything about owning property, improving property, etc, etc, is ungodly expensive and exclusionary because there's a mile long list of jerks with their hand undeservingly in the pot. Don't get me started on the financialization that underpins all this, it's just as tileted too. Policy "favors" homeowners by somewhat exempting them from the worst of this because the buck stops with them. When they get screwed there's nobody else to pass it on to, so they push back.

frig57 3mo ago

Everything better now than it once was? Hard disagree, take me back to the early 2010s

JKCalhoun 3mo ago
See ya, I'm time-traveling back to the 70's, ha ha.
shipman05 3mo ago
The early 2010s, the age of financial bailouts, Occupy Wall Street, and two "forever" wars. No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.
- cpburns2009 3mo ago
  The 2010s were the beginning of the decline. The '90s and 2000s were the Golden Age.

cosmic_cheese 3mo ago

When it comes to housing I think the key thing is stability. Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it. At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased. Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.

mlinhares 3mo ago

Life is much harder when you don't have a roof over your head or when that roof can be taken away from your or take more from your salary than you were anticipating. I don't think people understand the psychological safety of knowing you will not pay a single dime more on a loan for your home for 30 years. It completely erases that worry from your head.

nxm 3mo ago
Then come the property taxes
- 100percentjake 3mo ago
  This seems like FUD. Anecdotally, even with property taxes, insurance, and all the rest of it, my 1,000 sq-ft 40s constructed house is 60% the cost of what my girlfriend was previously paying to rent a 1bd apartment on the outskirts of our town. And that is with a "first time homebuyer" $0-down mortgage I got through a local credit union.
  - mlinhares 3mo ago
    The landlord also pays property taxes, so this comment must be trolling.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3mo ago
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lived in the city my whole life and have seen rents rise. That’s been extremely frustrating for me because I’ve been at the mercy of market trends and have worried about what would happen if, at some point, I didn’t earn as much anymore, or if rents rose so much that they became too expensive even for me. What would I do then? The worry that, despite a relatively good income, I might be at risk of poverty in old age because I have to hand over a good portion of my take-home pay to a landlord month after month is very frustrating in the long run. A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.

watwut 3mo ago

The articles with similar claim I have seen attributed disproportional value to, basically, stupid crap: better phone, more entertainment (streaming movies), cloth I buy once in a while, cheaper gym nearby, some or other luxury I would miss for roughly 3 months and then forgot. And that leads us to "only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income" - precarity does matter. If I am one sickness or two paychecks from not being able to pay rent, it causes a lot more actual real material insecurity then "having slower phone while everybody else has equally slow phone". Likewise, if you have trouble to find a job, fear of loosing it makes you work 12 hours a day in a job you hate, it affects you a lot more then whether you can stream movies.

PunchyHamster 3mo ago

It's very likely. It's place we rest, do some of the fun part of life and a place to call our "own" in world where increasingly nothing is. On top of that having that high mortgage or even rent hanging over your head, making sure you can't really downgrade work to something more fun but maybe less paid can be stressful too. Especially in the firing season where you might be let go and take months to find new job. And housing taking higher and higher part of the income is also effectively getting us poorer or at least stagnate.

surcap526 3mo ago

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