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304 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 13h \ parent \ on: "Housing prices are not high by any historical standard" - evoskuil econ
Then I suppose the issue is that they're talking past each other. Nic Carter's original post was about housing. Why would you then want to make a point about overall economic situation?
By the way, I would agree that young people today are richer in real terms than young people of the past.
But I'd also argue that rich in material terms does not necessarily lead to life satisfaction. Just because you can afford $80,000 of doordash but can't buy a house... I don't think that would make you happier than having an $80,000 house and no DoorDash. I think young people are probably less satisfied than in the past. This may have to do with overinflated expectations, social media, any number of things. But let's focus just on housing for now.
We could argue about causality vs correlation, and how to truly interpret the data. But in this case: if the people are saying housing is too expensive, and most of the data is saying housing is too expensive, and most economists by the way are also saying housing is too expensive.... then housing is probably too expensive.
But I'd also argue that rich in material terms does not necessarily lead to life satisfaction.
This is a great point, and well said.
then housing is probably too expensive.
I need a go look back at newspapers from the 80s or 90s and see how people were talking about housing prices.
My (un-evidenced) suspicion is that they were saying it was expensive. In the same way that old people like to deplore the morality of the youth, the youth like to bemoan the expense of modern life.
You are probably close set to the truth of the matter than Voskuil, but I enjoyed his take because it is not something I hear very often at all, and I do think it has some well-reasoned argument behind it.
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You are right that people will probably be complaining about the same things in every generation, but I have a feeling that if you asked them to rank things in terms of how problematic they are, housing costs would be much higher ranked today than in the 80s and 90s.
Just a guess, I haven't looked at that kind of data.
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