The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
Chagos - £800 million a year for something we already own
Thats more than the Farmers are getting screwed for
Starmer really is a prat.
I do not know the details, but Starmer and Lammy need to come clean on this and explain the agreement and cost
All the details are in The Times today and it's as excruciatingly boring as one would imagine. Ultimately Starmer is going to do whatever Trump tells him and the only person Trump will listen to on the subject is Modi.
The only interesting bit was that the law firm that The Ludicrous Cox works for is advising the Mauritian government.
And he doesn't need to travel to Mauritius. They can hear him from here.
Seems fairly clear that Mauritius has gone into “ask for everything mode”
Well that's the art of the deal apparently. As if.
It's a weird sort of stand off because the situation on DG with the US Naval Support Facility isn't going to change no matter what is agreed or not agreed.
The Mauritians want money and the British want the matter settled and their reputation to be slightly less besmirched in international law and in actuality. As several African nations have pointed out, it's a bit much for the UK to be mounting the tall steed over the SMO when they relatively recently forcibly occupied part of Africa and shot all of the inhabitants' dogs.
Fuck the African nations. Most of them are taking the Chinese Renminbi and to the extent they actually care it's because they view DG as the first move for Reparations™. They couldn't give the tiniest shit about the SMO and wouldn't lift a finger to do anything about it even if we surrendered that plus Gibraltar and the sovereign base areas on Cyprus. We need to get beyond this naive belief that the UN and the ICJ play with a straight bat, whereas in reality they're far more like FIFA.
We're in a geopolitical streetfight. David Herdson is quite right: Mauritius should be told to do one, who have zero real claim anyway.
Yes. I think it is profoundly improbable that compliance with the ICJ ruling on DG would have the slightest bearing on the situation in Ukraine.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
Check your data.
The 1930s achieved more housebuilding than the 1950s, 60s or 70s despite the fact that the 1930s came at a time when the country wasn't having to rebuild post-war.
Its almost as if the 1940s town and country planning act was the cause of the problem. Oh wait, it was.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
Developers would still be reluctant to build as there would still be more homes than the market demanded then if existing homes + proposed new homes were more in supply than the number of new home buyers were in demand
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
Developers would still be reluctant to build as there would still be more homes than the market demanded then if existing homes + proposed new homes were more in supply than the number of new home buyers were in demand
In a competitive economy it doesn't matter how reluctant a developer is to build, if they drag their heels then any competitor can beat them to the market and make the profit instead.
If you have a monopoly then you want a high profit, but if there's competition then making some profit is better than no profit at all.
That's how competition lowers prices in almost any sector.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
Developers would still be reluctant to build as there would still be more homes than the market demanded then if existing homes + proposed new homes were more in supply than the number of new home buyers were in demand
In a competitive economy it doesn't matter how reluctant a developer is to build, if they drag their heels then any competitor can beat them to the market and make the profit instead.
If you have a monopoly then you want a high profit, but if there's competition then making some profit is better than no profit at all.
That's how competition lowers prices in almost any sector.
Why would a competitor developer want to build more average and affordable homes either if there was then more supply than demand and no profit in it?
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
Developers would still be reluctant to build as there would still be more homes than the market demanded then if existing homes + proposed new homes were more in supply than the number of new home buyers were in demand
In a competitive economy it doesn't matter how reluctant a developer is to build, if they drag their heels then any competitor can beat them to the market and make the profit instead.
If you have a monopoly then you want a high profit, but if there's competition then making some profit is better than no profit at all.
That's how competition lowers prices in almost any sector.
Why would a competitor developer want to build more average and affordable homes either if there was then more supply than demand and no profit in it?
Because there is profit in it.
Firms are quite good at making a profit by producing things, there's nothing wrong with that.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
Why? Just rent them out and make the money back. In somewhere with high housing pressure in Edinburgh that would be straightforward.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000 Overall median cost. £165,000
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
You can't eliminate scarcity because the whole market is interlinked; you can only mitigate it.
Desirable homes aren't like desirable smartphones. You can't just make as many of them as people want.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
Developers would still be reluctant to build as there would still be more homes than the market demanded then if existing homes + proposed new homes were more in supply than the number of new home buyers were in demand
And yet, when the Victorians and Edwardians had cooperative house building - local monopolies were actively blocked - completion rates were through the roof.
House often went unsold, for a time. The market rarely fully cleared.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
Why? Just rent them out and make the money back. In somewhere with high housing pressure in Edinburgh that would be straightforward.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000 Overall median cost. £165,000
That £165k feels low for median house price - is that what you mean?
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
You can't eliminate scarcity because the whole market is interlinked; you can only mitigate it.
Desirable homes aren't like desirable smartphones. You can't just make as many of them as people want.
Drop the adjective desirable, but of course you can.
We did in the 1930s.
In the 1930s we built record numbers of houses, privately, at levels that were never seen again. With developers making a profit and selling houses with 85% of new build homes costing less than £750 (£45k with inflation).
There is absolutely no reason besides politics that can't happen again.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
Why? Just rent them out and make the money back. In somewhere with high housing pressure in Edinburgh that would be straightforward.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000 Overall median cost. £165,000
That £165k feels low for median house price - is that what you mean?
Scotland all residential sales (and it's actually £185,000 - sorry).
Are the Republican money men behind Plan 2025 and their control of women's reproductive rights really that much better than the Taliban in their attitudes to women? At least the Taliban don't try to hide behind any pretence of democratic legitimacy.
You think hiding behind a delusional theocracy is better?
Democracy at least has a clear route to change. People tied to a book written in an entirely different society do not.
Chagos - £800 million a year for something we already own
Thats more than the Farmers are getting screwed for
Starmer really is a prat.
I do not know the details, but Starmer and Lammy need to come clean on this and explain the agreement and cost
All the details are in The Times today and it's as excruciatingly boring as one would imagine. Ultimately Starmer is going to do whatever Trump tells him and the only person Trump will listen to on the subject is Modi.
The only interesting bit was that the law firm that The Ludicrous Cox works for is advising the Mauritian government.
And he doesn't need to travel to Mauritius. They can hear him from here.
Seems fairly clear that Mauritius has gone into “ask for everything mode”
Well that's the art of the deal apparently. As if.
It's a weird sort of stand off because the situation on DG with the US Naval Support Facility isn't going to change no matter what is agreed or not agreed.
The Mauritians want money and the British want the matter settled and their reputation to be slightly less besmirched in international law and in actuality. As several African nations have pointed out, it's a bit much for the UK to be mounting the tall steed over the SMO when they relatively recently forcibly occupied part of Africa and shot all of the inhabitants' dogs.
Fuck the African nations. Most of them are taking the Chinese Renminbi and to the extent they actually care it's because they view DG as the first move for Reparations™. They couldn't give the tiniest shit about the SMO and wouldn't lift a finger to do anything about it even if we surrendered that plus Gibraltar and the sovereign base areas on Cyprus. We need to get beyond this naive belief that the UN and the ICJ play with a straight bat, whereas in reality they're far more like FIFA.
We're in a geopolitical streetfight. David Herdson is quite right: Mauritius should be told to do one, who have zero real claim anyway.
Under my Greater Anglospheric Confederation, the Chagos are administered from Western Australia. The Heard & McDonald Islands are Australian, and just as distant from Perth as the Chagos.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I knew I was taking the risk of triggering your monomaniacal drum beating.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
What "negative externalities"?
Most of them typically quoted are to do with people and not houses.
Its our current planning system that leads to a "misallocation of resources" - if you have a planned economy then if your planning is wrong you have a misallocation of resources, whereas if you have a free market then the invisible hand means that people change their actions in response to market conditions dynamically and that leads to a better reallocation of resources.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with resources being "misallocated" anyway, and if they are, a free market should fix that.
A free market only gets allocations right of the full costs are considered. Private housing should be fully loaded for infrastructure, loss of amenity value, dorect environmental impact, water impact, etc. and all other costa that are associated with it. Otherwise the price signal will be wrong and too many houses will be built
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I knew I was taking the risk of triggering your monomaniacal drum beating.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
What "negative externalities"?
Most of them typically quoted are to do with people and not houses.
Its our current planning system that leads to a "misallocation of resources" - if you have a planned economy then if your planning is wrong you have a misallocation of resources, whereas if you have a free market then the invisible hand means that people change their actions in response to market conditions dynamically and that leads to a better reallocation of resources.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with resources being "misallocated" anyway, and if they are, a free market should fix that.
A free market only gets allocations right of the full costs are considered. Private housing should be fully loaded for infrastructure, loss of amenity value, dorect environmental impact, water impact, etc. and all other costa that are associated with it. Otherwise the price signal will be wrong and too many houses will be built
You contradict yourself.
If the people aren't there and the houses are empty, then what impact is there on any of those things you mentioned?
And if the people are there, then its not too many houses.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
It doesn't matter if developers go bust, what matters is can would-be developers build a property at a commercial rate. If they go bust the skills of the people still exist and can be redeployed to another firm that isn't bust.
Our behemothic developers are a result of our planning system that gives local monopoly or oligopoly permission to a developer to build an estate while denying anyone else the right to compete.
In a healthier, freer economy then anyone with the right skills and materials can build a house, one house or more, without requiring permission or entire estates to be built at the same time.
You have just said all developers should be made to build surplus homes nobody will live in. Do that and they will all go bust
No I did not say that.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
Developers would still be reluctant to build as there would still be more homes than the market demanded then if existing homes + proposed new homes were more in supply than the number of new home buyers were in demand
And yet, when the Victorians and Edwardians had cooperative house building - local monopolies were actively blocked - completion rates were through the roof.
House often went unsold, for a time. The market rarely fully cleared.
I lived on, or near, Canvey Island for quite a while in the later twentieth century. After the 1953 floods commercial developers wouldn't touch Canvey with a bargepole, so dozens of small scale developers moved in. Quite often they would buy a shack with a large garden..... and there were quite a few of those, due to inter-war development ..... live in the shack and build a house in the garden. Then they would move into the house, pull down the shack and build a couple of houses in the garden. Still goes on, I think. Did mean that houses on the Island are, or certainly were, cheaper than the mainland. As time went on of course some of the more efficient developers tried their hand at larger estates.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
You can't eliminate scarcity because the whole market is interlinked; you can only mitigate it.
Desirable homes aren't like desirable smartphones. You can't just make as many of them as people want.
Drop the adjective desirable, but of course you can.
We did in the 1930s.
In the 1930s we built record numbers of houses, privately, at levels that were never seen again. With developers making a profit and selling houses with 85% of new build homes costing less than £750 (£45k with inflation).
There is absolutely no reason besides politics that can't happen again.
The value of houses is always relative. Even on a new build estate with a standard design, the corner plot or the house situated furthest from the main road will command a premium compared to the others.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
You can't eliminate scarcity because the whole market is interlinked; you can only mitigate it.
Desirable homes aren't like desirable smartphones. You can't just make as many of them as people want.
Drop the adjective desirable, but of course you can.
We did in the 1930s.
In the 1930s we built record numbers of houses, privately, at levels that were never seen again. With developers making a profit and selling houses with 85% of new build homes costing less than £750 (£45k with inflation).
There is absolutely no reason besides politics that can't happen again.
The value of houses is always relative. Even on a new build estate with a standard design, the corner plot or the house situated furthest from the main road will command a premium compared to the others.
So what?
There's nothing wrong with some homes being more expensive than others.
The problem is when all homes are far too expensive as today.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
Why? Just rent them out and make the money back. In somewhere with high housing pressure in Edinburgh that would be straightforward.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000 Overall median cost. £165,000
That £165k feels low for median house price - is that what you mean?
A huge portion of those costs is the cost of labour. Which has rocketed, due to the cost of… housing.
Similarly, many materials have rocketed in price, due to labour costs.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
But if there's competition then you can have more housing units than occupier units and that competition cascades to improve quality while maintaining affordability.
Equilibrium in most countries is 1.1 housing units per occupier unit, with about 10% of houses being empty at any one time. Which is healthy as it allows for vacant properties for frictional movements (eg people wanting to move house) and also means that overvalued/run-down homes are left vacant with higher quality/more affordable properties getting taken instead.
And ultimately means lowest quality homes can be demolished and their land repurposed to something else, potentially a newer, higher-quality home instead taking its place.
The UK by contrast is running at about only 1% of properties being vacant, which is very problematic and means that inflation has run rampant and means that even decrepit homes are let by people who can't find anything better.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I knew I was taking the risk of triggering your monomaniacal drum beating.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
What "negative externalities"?
Most of them typically quoted are to do with people and not houses.
Its our current planning system that leads to a "misallocation of resources" - if you have a planned economy then if your planning is wrong you have a misallocation of resources, whereas if you have a free market then the invisible hand means that people change their actions in response to market conditions dynamically and that leads to a better reallocation of resources.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with resources being "misallocated" anyway, and if they are, a free market should fix that.
A free market only gets allocations right of the full costs are considered. Private housing should be fully loaded for infrastructure, loss of amenity value, dorect environmental impact, water impact, etc. and all other costa that are associated with it. Otherwise the price signal will be wrong and too many houses will be built
You contradict yourself.
If the people aren't there and the houses are empty, then what impact is there on any of those things you mentioned?
And if the people are there, then its not too many houses.
No, I’m not contradicting myself. I’m just guessing that you don’t understand basic economic concepts.
Housing has multiple direct cost inputs, eg. land, materials and labour. They also have other costs: direct pollution, for example, the reduction in the amount of unbuilt space, the impact on the visual environment, etc.
If you don’t properly include these other costs in the analysis of a cost of a house then the house will appear relatively cheaper to build than its actual total cost.
Hence, regardless of occupancy, too many houses will be built because the price signal is wrong.
The dog is hoping that our NY fireworks will be cancelled due to the incoming high winds, like they were last year. He doesn’t enjoy an evening spent quivering under the bath.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
Which is why we need to build until we are looking at a surplus of housing.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
I knew I was taking the risk of triggering your monomaniacal drum beating.
To quote Jean Valjean: you are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Yes housing is a scarce asset and addressing that is part of the solution. But to ignore the negative externalities, as you do, would result in a misallocation of resources.
What "negative externalities"?
Most of them typically quoted are to do with people and not houses.
Its our current planning system that leads to a "misallocation of resources" - if you have a planned economy then if your planning is wrong you have a misallocation of resources, whereas if you have a free market then the invisible hand means that people change their actions in response to market conditions dynamically and that leads to a better reallocation of resources.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with resources being "misallocated" anyway, and if they are, a free market should fix that.
A free market only gets allocations right of the full costs are considered. Private housing should be fully loaded for infrastructure, loss of amenity value, dorect environmental impact, water impact, etc. and all other costa that are associated with it. Otherwise the price signal will be wrong and too many houses will be built
You contradict yourself.
If the people aren't there and the houses are empty, then what impact is there on any of those things you mentioned?
And if the people are there, then its not too many houses.
No, I’m not contradicting myself. I’m just guessing that you don’t understand basic economic concepts.
Housing has multiple direct cost inputs, eg. land, materials and labour. They also have other costs: direct pollution, for example, the reduction in the amount of unbuilt space, the impact on the visual environment, etc.
If you don’t properly include these other costs in the analysis of a cost of a house then the house will appear relatively cheaper to build than its actual total cost.
Hence, regardless of occupancy, too many houses will be built because the price signal is wrong.
"Too many" would be desirable and lead to more housing units than occupier units which will drive down prices and mean that the least desirable homes are left vacant.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
House building becoming suddenly uneconomically sustainable does not help - we saw that in 2010 and after. House prices fell by 14% between 2007 and 2009, leaving many new build developments under water everywhere, which just stopped; house building subsequently collapsed by 40% (223k to 135k between 2007 and 2010), and took until 2018 to break 200k again.
We can't afford to do that. A shock therapy like that won't work without a social sector able to take up the slack, and it will be 5-10 years at least for that to develop.
I make it that the interim planning changes whilst the full detailed changes are being worked out apply pressure of about 3% overall to developments over the next few months through affordable quotas being +15%. That is, an extra 15% of houses in a development have prices set at 80% of market not 100% of market (20% reduction * 15% of houses = 3% of value).
That sounds to me like being approximately far off the max that could be done in step one without causing major disruption and loss of houses being built - based on the previous numbers.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
Which is why we need to build until we are looking at a surplus of housing.
This is what happens in some other countries.
I don’t disagree with that point at all. Just with @BartholomewRoberts ”let it rip” approach which doesn’t factor in the true cost of housing correctly
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I think St Paul, and other church fathers, did most of the work on working out that particular (mis?)-understanding by the very earliest church.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
Which is why we need to build until we are looking at a surplus of housing.
This is what happens in some other countries.
You can never reach that point if you have uncapped positive net immigration.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
Why? Just rent them out and make the money back. In somewhere with high housing pressure in Edinburgh that would be straightforward.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000 Overall median cost. £165,000
That £165k feels low for median house price - is that what you mean?
Scotland all residential sales (and it's actually £185,000 - sorry).
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
Which is why we need to build until we are looking at a surplus of housing.
This is what happens in some other countries.
I don’t disagree with that point at all. Just with @BartholomewRoberts ”let it rip” approach which doesn’t factor in the true cost of housing correctly
What "true costs" are missing that are about the "cost" of the actual house bricks and mortar and no people inside?
As opposed to "costs" that are to do with people?
Empty houses don't put a demand on schools or the NHS or create traffic etc, etc, etc
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays or fancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
No they wouldn't, as long as most women choose to work full time again after having children and maternity leave and using childcare (while most men also don't want to be house husbands) then the demand for the average house would still match the average income of 2 partners combined full time incomes
No it wouldn't, not if supply of houses wasn't being artificially constrained.
Lift the restrictions on housing and if houses become too expensive then rather than paying over the odds for an existing home they can competitively just get a new home instead, at construction costs plus a margin.
Which if land prices aren't artificially inflated would be significantly lower costs than they are today too.
Anyone left holding an asset which people don't demand any more would have no choice but to sell it for cheaper if they want rid of it. Its this thing we economists call "competition".
Yes it would, unless you want to build lots of homes nobody will live in as the average home will still be lived in by a 2 earner couple.
Yes there is absolutely no reason why people should not be able to build homes nobody will live in.
Or moreover, have the ability to do so, in which case the mere threat of doing so lowers prices down because sellers have the choice of either accepting the appropriate price or they're left with the empty home while a new build is built which has people living in it while the older stock is left idle as nobody will buy it at too high a price.
There isn't, except it would send most developers bust and stop the building of new homes we actually do need
You say that like the large developers going bust would be a bad thing for the housing market.
Quite the opposite, they’re a huge part of the problem.
If they can't afford to build and make a profit on new homes none will get built at all
Unless local authorities do it, as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s (and achieved more housebuilding than at any other time in the 20th century).
Private developers are perfectly entitled to engage in profit generating activity. But that doesn't necessarily mean providing lots of housing at affordable prices in places where it's needed.
They could but that requires higher council tax for the local authorities to fund their building new social homes
Why? Just rent them out and make the money back. In somewhere with high housing pressure in Edinburgh that would be straightforward.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000 Overall median cost. £165,000
That £165k feels low for median house price - is that what you mean?
A huge portion of those costs is the cost of labour. Which has rocketed, due to the cost of… housing.
Similarly, many materials have rocketed in price, due to labour costs.
So if we bring down housing costs….
Sounds like a good use case for increasing the state of technology in housebuilding.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
Imagine that you wave a magic wand and an extra 50m Barrett homes suddenly materialise. How much will Buckingham Palace be worth?
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
Imagine that you wave a magic wand and an extra 50m Barrett homes suddenly materialise. How much will Buckingham Palace be worth?
Who gives a shit?
The question is how much people will be paying on their own housing costs. That would be much less with 50m extra homes on the market.
That’s very unfortunate. We were going around the back of the castle again to watch the fireworks for free.
Will be interesting to see if my train runs. Amber warning up here.
I’m in Livingston picking my daughter up from hospital. I then have to drive her home in Edinburgh and then get across the bridge. I think it would be fair to say the timing has not been optimal.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
What you’re failing to grasp is that there will always be scarcity, no matter how liberal you make the planning regime.
No there wouldn't be.
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
Demand for the most desirable houses will always exceed supply of the most desirable houses. That's the nature of desire.
Why are you introducing the caveat "most desirable", that wasn't a part of the conversation.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
He’s amplifying the point I made
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
Which is why we need to build until we are looking at a surplus of housing.
This is what happens in some other countries.
You can never reach that point if you have uncapped positive net immigration.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think after your USA election recommendations, I can't see many people wanting to put their money where your mouth is.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
Imagine that you wave a magic wand and an extra 50m Barrett homes suddenly materialise. How much will Buckingham Palace be worth?
Who gives a shit?
The question is how much people will be paying on their own housing costs. That would be much less with 50m extra homes on the market.
What some other homes cost is utterly irrelevant.
It all depends. A glut of housing can coexist with a lack of affordability if it doesn't meet what the market wants. Even in the UK market today there are houses that you metaphorically can't give away.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
Best podcast episode of the year for me, in case anyone was asking, was an econtalk episode with Haviv Rettig Gur, “Terrorism, Israel, and dreams of peace”
It’s a narrative / analysis (defence?) of Israeli public opinion over the last 30 years, vis-a-vis the Palestinians, but focussing heavily on the Israeli experience.
I learned some things, disagreed with a lot and find some stuff difficult to reconcile with my fairly superficial understanding of ME history, even if I probably know more than the average joe.
A particular criticism, if I may, is the absence of analysis of the pflp as an ideological partner for the Israeli left.
If you want to do morality on hard mode, pair with visuals of the destruction of Gaza on the social media of your choice.
Still, a really excellent episode, imo. For me the best of 2024.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
Worth noting in passing a distinct lack of global centre-right leaders too. Who? Macron, maybe? But he's unpopular, heading towards the end of his term and not the easiest to pin down ideologically anyway (he served in Hollande's government).
Meloni, though she leans more right of centre than centre right and Ishiba. By this time next year you will also likely have Merz and Polievre as centre right leaders of big western nations and of course the leaders of NZ, Ireland, Portugal, Finland and Sweden are centre right leaders of smaller western nations.
Macron is more liberal than centre right
He'd sit happily in a Cameron cabinet, I'd say - apart from thinking it should be Cameron sitting in his.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
We’re 8 points off the drop atm. And I don’t fancy our chances tonight.
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
Imagine that you wave a magic wand and an extra 50m Barrett homes suddenly materialise. How much will Buckingham Palace be worth?
Who gives a shit?
The question is how much people will be paying on their own housing costs. That would be much less with 50m extra homes on the market.
What some other homes cost is utterly irrelevant.
It all depends. A glut of housing can coexist with a lack of affordability if it doesn't meet what the market wants. Even in the UK market today there are houses that you metaphorically can't give away.
Good, there's nothing wrong with having houses that you 'can't give away' because better ones are available elsewhere. It means the ones you can't give away are inferior/too expensive/run down/in shit areas and they can be bulldozed and the area redeveloped to another purpose ratchetting up quality.
Better than people living in overcrowded, expensive slums because TINA.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
That’s very unfortunate. We were going around the back of the castle again to watch the fireworks for free.
Will be interesting to see if my train runs. Amber warning up here.
I’m in Livingston picking my daughter up from hospital. I then have to drive her home in Edinburgh and then get across the bridge. I think it would be fair to say the timing has not been optimal.
We drove over the old Forth Road Bridge on the day it opened in September 1964 and didn't know we had crossed into Fife due to the fog
At least that shouldn't be a worry but let's hope you are able to get across
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
We’re 8 points off the drop atm. And I don’t fancy our chances tonight.
Just so long as Ipswich get above you and into 17th place!
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
I think it is only unlikely because Ipswich, Southampton and Leicester are struggling, but I just cannot see where their next win comes from
Newcastle tonight, then Liverpool and Arsenal (FA cup) away
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
Imagine that you wave a magic wand and an extra 50m Barrett homes suddenly materialise. How much will Buckingham Palace be worth?
Who gives a shit?
The question is how much people will be paying on their own housing costs. That would be much less with 50m extra homes on the market.
What some other homes cost is utterly irrelevant.
It all depends. A glut of housing can coexist with a lack of affordability if it doesn't meet what the market wants. Even in the UK market today there are houses that you metaphorically can't give away.
Good, there's nothing wrong with having houses that you 'can't give away' because better ones are available elsewhere. It means the ones you can't give away are inferior/too expensive/run down/in shit areas and they can be bulldozed and the area redeveloped to another purpose ratchetting up quality.
Better than people living in overcrowded, expensive slums because TINA.
Does the fact that you can buy a terraced house for £10k in some places make your home any more affordable?
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
I think it is only unlikely because Ipswich, Southampton and Leicester are struggling, but I just cannot see where their next win comes from
Newcastle tonight, then Liverpool and Arsenal (FA cup) away
Interesting discussion recently elsewhere on Man Utd's "tough" upcoming run of league fixtures.
Rather crystalises how far United have fallen that essentially any set of six fixtures is now considered tough. Other than the trip to Anfield, which of those would have been considered a tough fixture under Sir Alex Ferguson?
The Democrats need to reach out to the kind of Red-State women that resent being told they should never be homemakers, but don't want their rights taken away.
The problem is that the incredibly binary and polarised nature of U.S. political discourse, nowadays increasingly represented by Bluesky and Twitter, and with that trend spreading here, makes all these kinds of nuances and conversations more difficult, than they should be.
I don't think that the Democrats have said "Women should never be Homemakers", so I would be interested in where you source that idea.
The "Trad Wife" influencer thing on Social Media is partly US ultra-Fundamentalism, and partly conspicuous consumption.
In order to be a "Trad-Wife" influencer, you need to be married to a wealthy man with their own significant wealth and property, as a sort of reinvented trophy wife. We see them spending hours on hobbies such as needlework, dress-making, artisanal baking etc, but not hours cleaning bathrooms or doing laundry.
30 years ago it was possible for an unskilled man working in a unionised job at the nuclear power plant to run two cars, have a detached house in a good neighbourhood, wife at home looking after 3 kids etc, but that Simpsons lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for blue collar Americans.
If you need 2 or more incomes to pay the rent, being a Trad Wife is not possible, and Trad Husbands earning enough to support such a lifestyle have gone the way of the crinoline petticoat.
Without wishing to come over all @HYUFD there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation on housing costs
1. Housing is a desirable asset 2. Housing is a scarce asset 3. Therefore housing costs will tend to increase to the maximum a family unit can afford 4. When the majority of women stayed at home the average income was X and housing costs a percentage of that 5. Women deciding to work increased housing affordability but, over time, resulted in an adjustment to the cost of housing 6. Consequently we are now in a non-Pareto equilibrium with more people having to work harder to afford the same lifestyle as previous generations had 7. There is no obvious solution: building houses in an uncontrolled fashion has non-economic costs; you don’t want to restrict the right of women to work; perhaps restrictions on access to capital to buy houses? Perhaps continued efforts to make them a less attractive investment for individuals? Perhaps restrictions on the rights of non-residents to own houses?
Except #2 is artificial.
There is no more a reason for housing to be scarce than there is for TVs, DVD players or anything else to be scarce.
There is little reason competition can't create more housing until supply and demand reach a better equilibrium, except for the fact we put hurdles in the way via our artificial planning system.
Fix #2 and the rest of your chain falls apart. There is then an obvious solution: build houses in an uncontrolled fashion, let the free market fix it. Supply and demand and let the invisible hand work.
Even then the average home would still only be affordable to 2 earner couples as most women still work full time, whereas 50 years ago the average home was affordable to a 1 earner couple as most women stayed home and were full time mothers after they had children or only worked part time after having a family
If house prices collapsed back down to where they should be instead of being artificially inflated then people would have the choice to either have only one person working, or the second person's income could be going on luxuries like holidays orfancier cars/homes etc rather than going on a necessity.
House prices are driven by affordability
Even in your scenario of unlimited housing there will always be someone who will pay more for the nicer house with the better view. And that will cascade. Houses are. It fungible assets.
(Not to mention a collapse of house prices would collapse banks and so people won’t be going on holidays or buying fancier cars in that scenario )
So what if some will pay more for a house with a nicer view? Many people just want somewhere to live.
Yes there are people who will pay more for a nicer view, while others will pay less for somewhere comfortable to live.
Just as some will pay more for a nicer car, while others will pay less for something that can do the job.
Currently people are paying more because they have to, in order to survive, not out of choice. Getting a "nicer" house is a luxury, getting any is a necessity. That is the distinction you are failing to grasp.
I’m not missing. The distinction. What I’m saying is that your utopia is an unstable equilibrium that won’t last
Why?
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
Because house prices change.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
No, supply and demand is the constraint.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
Imagine that you wave a magic wand and an extra 50m Barrett homes suddenly materialise. How much will Buckingham Palace be worth?
Who gives a shit?
The question is how much people will be paying on their own housing costs. That would be much less with 50m extra homes on the market.
What some other homes cost is utterly irrelevant.
It all depends. A glut of housing can coexist with a lack of affordability if it doesn't meet what the market wants. Even in the UK market today there are houses that you metaphorically can't give away.
Good, there's nothing wrong with having houses that you 'can't give away' because better ones are available elsewhere. It means the ones you can't give away are inferior/too expensive/run down/in shit areas and they can be bulldozed and the area redeveloped to another purpose ratchetting up quality.
Better than people living in overcrowded, expensive slums because TINA.
Does the fact that you can buy a terraced house for £10k in some places make your home any more affordable?
If you can buy a terraced house in good condition for £10k near me, yes it absolutely would. That's how competition works, but you can't.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
I think it is only unlikely because Ipswich, Southampton and Leicester are struggling, but I just cannot see where their next win comes from
Newcastle tonight, then Liverpool and Arsenal (FA cup) away
My team are pants, and have been all season. I'm not surprised as the FFP decision, bad finances and threatened points deduction all made that highly likely at the beginning of the season.
At least RVN is making it entertaining to watch us lose. Under Cooper it was dull watching us, and ultimately it is about entertainment. I quite enjoy the Championship, relegation is not the end.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think after your USA election recommendations, I can't see many people wanting to put their money where your mouth is.
I would like to withdraw this unkind comment after Mr Kinnabula 'liked' my other post. A most inconvenient act of seasonal goodwill.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
Re Farage v Starmer, at this point, I’d expect Starmer to win. In fact, I’d expect a1924 - type result. A big win for Labour, with Reform establishing dominance on the Right, and winning heavily in South Yorkshire, Wearside, South Lancashire, South Wales, East Anglia, and West Midlands.
Four years from now, it might be different.
I'd expect Farage to win, even though he'd try to be painted Fash it wouldn't work.
My bigger concern is that I don't think he or Reform would be effective (at all) in government; it'd be like a repeat of the Johnson administration on acid and he'd face hugely effective passive resistance from the civil service and deep-state he'd be clueless to thwart, so he'd turn to Protest-In-Office instead.
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It is an age-old dilemma (cf international aid). Do you engage hoping to change minds, or disengage as a punishment to force that change.
I don't know, historically, which has worked. I know the Taliban are both pretty stubborn, ideologically, and also realise to some degree that there needs to be some pragmatism when dealing with the West. Where that leaves this measure who knows.
But more than that, as has been noted, is the absurdity of the measure the root of which is adherence to religious doctrine. There's that root cause again - religion. It really would be a better world if religion was banned, because whatever took its place would struggle to be as corrosive and harmful.
What a load of rubbish, if the world followed more of the preachings of Jesus Christ it would be a far better place
What did Jesus say about gay marriage.
Nothing but he supported traditional heterosexual lifelong marriage which is a good thing
So if he didn't say anything about it why does the Church of England forbid it.
As it supports traditional heterosexual lifelong marriages as he did (with now prayers in services for same sex couples). The Old Testament and St Paul did also forbid same sex relationships even if Jesus didn't himself
The OT is quite harsh on a number of issues that were relaxed in the NT and St Paul never met Jesus so would be an extremely unreliable witness to his views on the matter. Jesus hung around with twelve men, no documented female partner and preached unconditional love... (though clearly not the non-consensual kind practised by a very large number of ordained Christians). Seems not unlikely that Jesus would have been fine with same sex relationships.
It's very hard to square Christ's message of love and openness to ostracised and excluded groups with a claim that he was (or would have been) opposed to same-sex marriages (and, implicitly, relationships). Not that that's stopped the many churches being very opposed to the idea for 2000 years or so.
But then it's quite hard to square a lot of the Old Testament with the New.
It's also hard to square Christ's message of the imminent end of the world with us being here 2000 years later.
I don’t recall Christ having a timeline?
The expectation of the earliest followers of Christ was that his glorious return would be within the lifetime of the youngest of them, certainly within 80 years of his death. That sort of slipped a bit
It’s worse than waiting for Man Utd’s next title ( which may well be the Championship).
You’re one of very few MU fans that seem to be even considering, let alone acepting, that possibility.
I think it is only unlikely because Ipswich, Southampton and Leicester are struggling, but I just cannot see where their next win comes from
Newcastle tonight, then Liverpool and Arsenal (FA cup) away
Interesting discussion recently elsewhere on Man Utd's "tough" upcoming run of league fixtures.
Rather crystalises how far United have fallen that essentially any set of six fixtures is now considered tough. Other than the trip to Anfield, which of those would have been considered a tough fixture under Sir Alex Ferguson?
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
Nonsense. She's smart, authentic yet polished, and charismatic. Whitmer I also like, yes, and Michigan IS the USA per the WH24 results. But that's right now and based on the election just gone. Things change. There's always that risk of fighting the last war.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
And whisper it, how much of Kemi's problem is good old sexism and racism?
In that poll Kemi has a 7% lead over Farage with LD voters and an 18% lead over Farage with Tory voters but only leads Farage by 4% with Labour voters.
Reform voters unsurprisingly prefer Farage to Kemi by a massive 74% margin.
Starmer leads Farage 37% to 25% meanwhile amongst all voters.
Labour voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a massive 65% margin unsurprisingly.
LD voters prefer Starmer to Farage by a big 37% margin.
Starmer DEM vs Farage GOP ... Starmer wins that do we think?
(here, I mean, not over there)
The important difference is that the UK is not a 2-party country any more. Those dissatisfied on the right have choices, those dissatisfied on the left have choices. Trump/GOP and Harris/DEM can rely on large voting blocks much more.
Yes. But our system does promote the "who do you want as PM?" question so Starmer vs Farage as a binary choice might be an important metric if there's a clear winner there.
May clearly beat Corbyn one on one as best PM in 2017 but Corbyn still got a hung parliament in a multi party system
Yes. But just hypothetically, humour me, if it were Starmer v Farage in a UK PM election, who do we think would win and what would be the approximate vote split?
Farage and it wouldn’t be close.
Really? We're screwed then.
I don't think so myself. I think Keir gets all the Remain vote and peels off enough non-tawdry Leavers to shade it.
More than shade it. 55/45.
I think after your USA election recommendations, I can't see many people wanting to put their money where your mouth is.
Ancient history from which we've all moved on. I'm now a sage again because of my 8/1 start of season bet on Liverpool for the title.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
"Weird" has just proved to be eminently electable.
Or maybe that's only if you're a man.
It did strike me the other day that there've only been two serious female candidates nominated for US president and they were both beaten by Donald Trump.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
"Weird" has just proved to be eminently electable.
Or maybe that's only if you're a man.
It did strike me the other day that there've only been two serious female candidates nominated for US president and they were both beaten by Donald Trump.
Two absolutely terrible and entitled candiates though, one of whom faced pretty much a free run at the primaries, and the other was put into place with no primaries at all. Neither were tested properly prior to their nomination.
It’s not enough to be a woman candidate, you have to be good candidate as well.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
"Weird" has just proved to be eminently electable.
Or maybe that's only if you're a man.
It did strike me the other day that there've only been two serious female candidates nominated for US president and they were both beaten by Donald Trump.
Kemi's problem is the same as Hague's . . . as it stands the country has simply had enough of the Tories for various reasons and has no interest in what they have to say.
That's an interesting comparison because it also highlights the difference between the position of Blair and Starmer. With the exception of a hardcore of malcontents, people were reasonably comfortable with Blair as PM, but Starmer provokes opposition from all quarters.
Things will settle down, I think. People will get used to him.
People are used to him and they fucking hate him. It's not particularly his fault, most people are completely alienated from most politicians because the system of systems is falling apart.
He'll soon be the only left of centre leader in the G7. This might engender some rarity value.
Scholz and Trudeau likely lose next year yes (and maybe Albanese too if looking at wider G20 western nations too which are not also in G7 like Australia) though likely Albanese scrapes most seats but loses his majority. VP Harris has already lost.
So soon could only be Macron and Starmer left as liberal left leaders from major western countries
And Macron isn't really left of centre. So that just leaves SKS. The leader of the pack as regards the global liberal left. The voice for - what? - 300 million people?
Albeit currently his party polling 20% yes than the Democrats and Harris got last month.
In terms of raw voteshare the Democrats remain comfortably the largest left liberal party in the western world but mainly because of the US being the only major nation left with only 2 parties having representatives in their national parliament
That's true. But they are leaderless and out of power. So if there is a single person who can be considered the voice of the global liberal left it's Keir Starmer. Although we can't expect him to prioritise that role. He has enough on his plate.
The “global liberal left” are doomed if Keir Starmer is the best they’ve got to act as their voice.
Maybe Lula in Brazil too if you want to include non western nations
AOC could yet emerge. However (back on topic sort of) she has the handicap of being female.
She has the much bigger handicap of being an idiotic loudmouth, who will convert almost no new voters to her party.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
"Weird" has just proved to be eminently electable.
Or maybe that's only if you're a man.
It did strike me the other day that there've only been two serious female candidates nominated for US president and they were both beaten by Donald Trump.
Yep. Trump has never beaten a man. The only time he faced one he got his ass kicked. It would make a good tee-shirt.
Re Farage v Starmer, at this point, I’d expect Starmer to win. In fact, I’d expect a1924 - type result. A big win for Labour, with Reform establishing dominance on the Right, and winning heavily in South Yorkshire, Wearside, South Lancashire, South Wales, East Anglia, and West Midlands.
Four years from now, it might be different.
I'd expect Farage to win, even though he'd try to be painted Fash it wouldn't work.
My bigger concern is that I don't think he or Reform would be effective (at all) in government; it'd be like a repeat of the Johnson administration on acid and he'd face hugely effective passive resistance from the civil service and deep-state he'd be clueless to thwart, so he'd turn to Protest-In-Office instead.
Chiming in while the kids and wife are out with my mother-in-law to see the lights in London.
On balance I'd vote for Nige over Starmer. I don't know what a Reform government might do. I know what the current Labour government has done and it's been a disaster, I don't see how Nige as PM could be any worse than two tier Kier. Taxing family farms into bankruptcy to give Mauritius £800m and a country. What a complete and utter joke. Nige would never sign such a deal, he'd tell the ICJ to get fucked.
Re Farage v Starmer, at this point, I’d expect Starmer to win. In fact, I’d expect a1924 - type result. A big win for Labour, with Reform establishing dominance on the Right, and winning heavily in South Yorkshire, Wearside, South Lancashire, South Wales, East Anglia, and West Midlands.
Four years from now, it might be different.
I'd expect Farage to win, even though he'd try to be painted Fash it wouldn't work.
My bigger concern is that I don't think he or Reform would be effective (at all) in government; it'd be like a repeat of the Johnson administration on acid and he'd face hugely effective passive resistance from the civil service and deep-state he'd be clueless to thwart, so he'd turn to Protest-In-Office instead.
Chiming in while the kids and wife are out with my mother-in-law to see the lights in London.
On balance I'd vote for Nige over Starmer. I don't know what a Reform government might do. I know what the current Labour government has done and it's been a disaster, I don't see how Nige as PM could be any worse than two tier Kier. Taxing family farms into bankruptcy to give Mauritius £800m and a country. What a complete and utter joke. Nige would never sign such a deal, he'd tell the ICJ to get fucked.
Which is another silly answer.
If you want to right the Chagos wrong, how about asking the Chagos islanders what they want?
Comments
There will always be a finite quantity, but finite and scarce have two extremely different meanings.
I said that developers should be able to build new houses for people to move in to undercutting the value of existing homes that could be left surplus to requirements then instead with people moving into a new build home while older stock is left empty.
I also said that if that threat of competition exists, then that threat alone would bring costs down to a more equilibrium level as faced with a choice of holding an asset that is surplus to requirements or taking less money for it, people take the rational option.
The 1930s achieved more housebuilding than the 1950s, 60s or 70s despite the fact that the 1930s came at a time when the country wasn't having to rebuild post-war.
Its almost as if the 1940s town and country planning act was the cause of the problem. Oh wait, it was.
If you have a monopoly then you want a high profit, but if there's competition then making some profit is better than no profit at all.
That's how competition lowers prices in almost any sector.
Currently getting any home, no matter how undesirable, is overly expensive as the entire sector is plagued with scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and affordable housing to meet people's necessities can be achieved just as other necessities have become cheaper over time, while luxury desires yes might be another matter.
But nothing wrong with people having more to spend on luxuries than necessities and deciding what luxuries suit them best, whether it be the luxury of a nicer home, or a nicer car, or foreign travel, or anything else.
Firms are quite good at making a profit by producing things, there's nothing wrong with that.
What we want is efficient use of valuable land, high quality, low maintenance costs for the council, close proximity to schools and workplaces, and most importantly cheaper than the currently available housing stock.
Each of those objectives is diametrically opposed to those of private developers, who want to maximise the value of their land, build as cheaply as possible, constrain supply, have no incentive to make the new estates cheap for councils to look after, and want to achieve the highest prices possible (as is their right).
New build median cost: £300,000
Overall median cost. £165,000
Desirable homes aren't like desirable smartphones. You can't just make as many of them as people want.
House often went unsold, for a time. The market rarely fully cleared.
We did in the 1930s.
In the 1930s we built record numbers of houses, privately, at levels that were never seen again. With developers making a profit and selling houses with 85% of new build homes costing less than £750 (£45k with inflation).
There is absolutely no reason besides politics that can't happen again.
Democracy at least has a clear route to change. People tied to a book written in an entirely different society do not.
If the people aren't there and the houses are empty, then what impact is there on any of those things you mentioned?
And if the people are there, then its not too many houses.
Still goes on, I think. Did mean that houses on the Island are, or certainly were, cheaper than the mainland.
As time went on of course some of the more efficient developers tried their hand at larger estates.
It lasted in the 1930s, the only reason it stopped was the war and the post-war government made the horrendous mistake of passing the town and country planning act.
It lasts in other countries with liberal regimes that let people build.
More desirable housing will go up in price because it’s scarce. That will displace people who can’t quite afford it into slightly less desirable housing. Hence price increases will cascade through the market.
Unless you have more than one housing unit per occupier unit (whether an individual, family, whatever) then house prices will increase to the limit of affordability.
There's nothing wrong with some homes being more expensive than others.
The problem is when all homes are far too expensive as today.
Similarly, many materials have rocketed in price, due to labour costs.
So if we bring down housing costs….
Equilibrium in most countries is 1.1 housing units per occupier unit, with about 10% of houses being empty at any one time. Which is healthy as it allows for vacant properties for frictional movements (eg people wanting to move house) and also means that overvalued/run-down homes are left vacant with higher quality/more affordable properties getting taken instead.
And ultimately means lowest quality homes can be demolished and their land repurposed to something else, potentially a newer, higher-quality home instead taking its place.
The UK by contrast is running at about only 1% of properties being vacant, which is very problematic and means that inflation has run rampant and means that even decrepit homes are let by people who can't find anything better.
Housing has multiple direct cost inputs, eg. land, materials and labour. They also have other costs: direct pollution, for example, the reduction in the amount of unbuilt space, the impact on the visual environment, etc.
If you don’t properly include these other costs in the analysis of a cost of a house then the house will appear relatively cheaper to build than its actual total cost.
Hence, regardless of occupancy, too many houses will be built because the price signal is wrong.
This is what happens in some other countries.
That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
We can't afford to do that. A shock therapy like that won't work without a social sector able to take up the slack, and it will be 5-10 years at least for that to develop.
I make it that the interim planning changes whilst the full detailed changes are being worked out apply pressure of about 3% overall to developments over the next few months through affordable quotas being +15%. That is, an extra 15% of houses in a development have prices set at 80% of market not 100% of market (20% reduction * 15% of houses = 3% of value).
That sounds to me like being approximately far off the max that could be done in step one without causing major disruption and loss of houses being built - based on the previous numbers.
Affordability is the constraint, not the number of houses.
When demand exceeds supply then prices go up.
When supply exceeds demand then prices go down.
If supply exceeds demand and people spend less on a necessity, they can then choose to spend any extra income on whatever luxury suits them - whether that be a nicer home (rather than any home), or a nicer car, or nicer travel or anything else.
Rather than paying through the nose for a damp-ridden shitbox squalor because that's all that's available and its either that or homelessness.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-house-price-index-for-july-2024/uk-house-price-index-scotland-july-2024
As opposed to "costs" that are to do with people?
Empty houses don't put a demand on schools or the NHS or create traffic etc, etc, etc
The question is how much people will be paying on their own housing costs. That would be much less with 50m extra homes on the market.
What some other homes cost is utterly irrelevant.
I think it would be fair to say the timing has not been optimal.
Q and fairly short A on what the West should and could do wrt the 'sexual apartheid' situation developing.
https://youtu.be/INya2IIByzw?t=20
It’s a narrative / analysis (defence?) of Israeli public opinion over the last 30 years, vis-a-vis the Palestinians, but focussing heavily on the Israeli experience.
I learned some things, disagreed with a lot and find some stuff difficult to reconcile with my fairly superficial understanding of ME history, even if I probably know more than the average joe.
A particular criticism, if I may, is the absence of analysis of the pflp as an ideological partner for the Israeli left.
If you want to do morality on hard mode, pair with visuals of the destruction of Gaza on the social media of your choice.
Still, a really excellent episode, imo. For me the best of 2024.
Anyone else have any contenders?
Better than people living in overcrowded, expensive slums because TINA.
If the Dems want the first woman president, they should go with a Gretchen Whitmer or a Katie Hobbs.
At least that shouldn't be a worry but let's hope you are able to get across
https://nypost.com/2024/10/10/us-news/why-is-gretchen-whitmer-feeding-a-left-wing-influencer-doritos/
Newcastle tonight, then Liverpool and Arsenal (FA cup) away
Newcastle (h)
Liverpool (a)
Southampton (h)
Brighton (h)
Fulham (a)
Crystal Palace (h)
Rather crystalises how far United have fallen that essentially any set of six fixtures is now considered tough. Other than the trip to Anfield, which of those would have been considered a tough fixture under Sir Alex Ferguson?
At least RVN is making it entertaining to watch us lose. Under Cooper it was dull watching us, and ultimately it is about entertainment. I quite enjoy the Championship, relegation is not the end.
https://x.com/GMA/status/874023453862486016
This year I shall not moan about the thing I usually moan about at New Year.
He is a wonderful talent and far the best footballer in the Premier League and will power Liverpool to the title
All this and a Manchester United loyal supporter since 1953 [ me - not Mo !!!]
My bigger concern is that I don't think he or Reform would be effective (at all) in government; it'd be like a repeat of the Johnson administration on acid and he'd face hugely effective passive resistance from the civil service and deep-state he'd be clueless to thwart, so he'd turn to Protest-In-Office instead.
Notice how few times she's even been mentioned on this thread, and those who have.
Or maybe that's only if you're a man.
Was the Newsagent out of stock of the National Enquirer?
It’s not enough to be a woman candidate, you have to be good candidate as well.
On balance I'd vote for Nige over Starmer. I don't know what a Reform government might do. I know what the current Labour government has done and it's been a disaster, I don't see how Nige as PM could be any worse than two tier Kier. Taxing family farms into bankruptcy to give Mauritius £800m and a country. What a complete and utter joke. Nige would never sign such a deal, he'd tell the ICJ to get fucked.
If you want to right the Chagos wrong, how about asking the Chagos islanders what they want?