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.
Trump beat lots of men to get the GOP nomination. If all it takes is balls to beat Trump then he would never have been candidate in the first place and Bill Clinton's wife would have faced George Bush's brother.
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.
Well alright. I've forgotten it already. The river of debate flows on.
You deserved a 'like' for the KB comment even though it was you.
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.
we have sent international aid for donkeys years and it is obvious it si mainly wasted money. Money has poured into these countries all my life and few are any more developed, just made a few grifters and the usual charity big money earners rich.
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.
Put your pointy hat on and get back on your stool in the corner
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.
Trump beat lots of men to get the GOP nomination. If all it takes is balls to beat Trump then he would never have been candidate in the first place and Bill Clinton's wife would have faced George Bush's brother.
It's hard to assess how big a factor misogyny was in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Polls say 15% of the electorate would be uncomfortable with a woman president. So it will be higher since this relies on self reporting a character flaw.
OTOH there will be those (a much smaller % but still some) who will vote for a woman because of that fact. But then how many of the first group are GOP anyway and how many of the latter group are DEM anyway? You have to allow for all of that in your calc.
Upshot: Both HRC and KH did lose because they are women. In such tight elections it's inconceivable that the net gender effect wouldn't be enough to make the difference. But they didn't lose only because of this or perhaps even mainly because of it. There were several other reasons and some of them were arguably more influential.
It’s quite astonishing that there appears to be no-one in Germany seriously exploring what it would take, to get at least some of these nuclear plants re-commissioned. They’ve had nearly three years.
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.
Trump beat lots of men to get the GOP nomination. If all it takes is balls to beat Trump then he would never have been candidate in the first place and Bill Clinton's wife would have faced George Bush's brother.
Exactly. The only man or woman to have beaten Donald Trump is Joe Biden. It's bonkers but that's how it 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.
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.
Trump beat lots of men to get the GOP nomination. If all it takes is balls to beat Trump then he would never have been candidate in the first place and Bill Clinton's wife would have faced George Bush's brother.
It's hard to assess how big a factor misogyny was in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Polls say 15% of the electorate would be uncomfortable with a woman president. So it will be higher since this relies on self reporting a character flaw.
OTOH there will be those (a much smaller % but still some) who will vote for a woman because of that fact. But then how many of the first group are GOP anyway and how many of the latter group are DEM anyway? You have to allow for all of that in your calc.
Upshot: Both HRC and KH did lose because they are women. In such tight elections it's inconceivable that the net gender effect wouldn't be enough to make the difference. But they didn't lose only because of this or perhaps even mainly because of it. There were several other reasons and some of them were arguably more influential.
Probably. Though it's not necesarily obvious to me that the number of voters who vote for a woman because she is a woman exceeds the number of voters who vote for a man because he is a man.
The (male) protagonist of this novel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Translator_(Crawley_novel) votes for a female PM on the basis she is a woman, and the author presents it in a "well of course he would" way. Though the first chapter was such unexpurgated horseshit that I can give you no further insight.
It’s quite astonishing that there appears to be no-one in Germany seriously exploring what it would take, to get at least some of these nuclear plants re-commissioned. They’ve had nearly three years.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
Oh bugger, that’s a shame for Edinburgh. Stood on the Royal Mile a few times at Hogmanay over the years.
Good for Edinburgh's dog population !!!!!
The stuff they sell in the fast food stalls? Surely not.
I'm being buried in dog food adverts on Youtube for a company called pure that talks about Kibble, and parades itself as doing subscription value-added fast food for dogs, having been on Dragon's Den and rejected the offers.
The adverts involve a bloke from Yorkshire telling us about his mum and complaining about thawing things for dogs from the freezer as being "Brrr ! Cccccooooollllddddd !", which is not credible unless softies have occupied Yorkshire and gone anthropomorphic.
Since 2012, they claim to have delivered 47,612,301 "meals for pets".
Is anyone from Yorkshire buying this? (It involves spending more money than is strictly necessary).
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
Oh bugger, that’s a shame for Edinburgh. Stood on the Royal Mile a few times at Hogmanay over the years.
Good for Edinburgh's dog population !!!!!
The stuff they sell in the fast food stalls? Surely not.
I'm being buried in dog food adverts on Youtube for a company called pure that talks about Kibble, and parades itself as doing subscription value-added fast food for dogs, having been on Dragon's Den and rejected the offers.
The adverts involve a bloke from Yorkshire telling us about his mum and complaining about thawing things for dogs from the freezer as being "Brrr ! Cccccooooollllddddd !", which is not credible unless softies have occupied Yorkshire and gone anthropomorphic.
Since 2012, they claim to have delivered 47,612,301 "meals for pets".
Is anyone from Yorkshire buying this? (It involves spending more money than is strictly necessary).
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
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.
Actually the only time he faced a real old woman he lost. Hillary and Harris are proper fighters.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
Over the last few weeks, the rouble as crashed against most currencies, including the dollar. It then rebounded to about 100 to the dollar, then crashed again, before rallying to the same 100 to the dollar level. IMO it does look as though it is being artificially propped up, with the 100 to the dollar level being the target level. If so, I wonder how they'll be able to afford to continue doing 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 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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
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?
Agreed. What they have clearly said so far is they don't want the Mauritius deal. Which, given they weren't even consulted on it, and themselves don't recognise Mauritius' claims to the islands, is hardly surprising.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The price of a house doesn't remotely reflect the cost of building a house, since a very hefty chunk of the cost of the house is the cost of land and of course the cost of labour is inflated by the cost of housing.
The cost of land is roughly a third or more of the cost of the house, not a penny of that goes to the cost of either building or maintaining the home.
Prior to the economic disaster that should be repealed of the 1940s planning act, in the 1930s when we were last building houses at the rate the country requires, the cost of land was 2% of the cost of housing. The bulk of the cost of housing was absolutely the cost of things such as materials and labour to build it . . . the costs you seem to be under the misapprehension of what forms the cost of housing today. It should, but it does not.
Oh bugger, that’s a shame for Edinburgh. Stood on the Royal Mile a few times at Hogmanay over the years.
Good for Edinburgh's dog population !!!!!
The stuff they sell in the fast food stalls? Surely not.
I'm being buried in dog food adverts on Youtube for a company called pure that talks about Kibble, and parades itself as doing subscription value-added fast food for dogs, having been on Dragon's Den and rejected the offers.
The adverts involve a bloke from Yorkshire telling us about his mum and complaining about thawing things for dogs from the freezer as being "Brrr ! Cccccooooollllddddd !", which is not credible unless softies have occupied Yorkshire and gone anthropomorphic.
Since 2012, they claim to have delivered 47,612,301 "meals for pets".
Is anyone from Yorkshire buying this? (It involves spending more money than is strictly necessary).
Unfortunate name. "Pure" = dog shite, in Victorian times. Was collected for tanning leather.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
The thing is our disastrous planning system does not just stymie small building developers (it is of course by far the number one issue blighting small developers according to the small developers themselves) but it leaves a toxic legacy for all small businesses who rely upon having either anybody working for them, or needing a property to work out of themselves.
Since our chronic housing shortage does not just inflate massively the amount needed to pay on labour just to keep people with a roof above their heads, but it also massively inflates commercial property prices.
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?
Agreed. What they have clearly said so far is they don't want the Mauritius deal. Which, given they weren't even consulted on it, and themselves don't recognise Mauritius' claims to the islands, is hardly surprising.
The Malmesbury Solution
1) Phone Estonia - "The online citizenship stuff - could you give us a crash course, please?" 2) Identify and issue Chagos Citizenship to the Chagos Islanders and descendants who have rights. 3) Setup an online consultation with them (see (1)) - they are scattered all over the place. Bring them together. 4) Create a a range of solutions. 5) Vote them Off The Island, one by one. Rounds of renegotiation etc. 6) With a solution that the Chagos Islanders and the UK likes, implement that. Mauritius can go swivel.
Oh bugger, that’s a shame for Edinburgh. Stood on the Royal Mile a few times at Hogmanay over the years.
Good for Edinburgh's dog population !!!!!
The stuff they sell in the fast food stalls? Surely not.
I'm being buried in dog food adverts on Youtube for a company called pure that talks about Kibble, and parades itself as doing subscription value-added fast food for dogs, having been on Dragon's Den and rejected the offers.
The adverts involve a bloke from Yorkshire telling us about his mum and complaining about thawing things for dogs from the freezer as being "Brrr ! Cccccooooollllddddd !", which is not credible unless softies have occupied Yorkshire and gone anthropomorphic.
Since 2012, they claim to have delivered 47,612,301 "meals for pets".
Is anyone from Yorkshire buying this? (It involves spending more money than is strictly necessary).
Unfortunate name. "Pure" = dog shite, in Victorian times. Was collected for tanning leather.
... not surprisingly, it features in Tony Robinson's Worst Jobs in History series - 27:23 here.
For some reason - though appropriately for the discussion - it's filmed in what I rather think is a close off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, though the job itself is far more famous from London and Mayhew's books.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
The thing is our disastrous planning system does not just stymie small building developers (it is of course by far the number one issue blighting small developers according to the small developers themselves) but it leaves a toxic legacy for all small businesses who rely upon having either anybody working for them, or needing a property to work out of themselves.
Since our chronic housing shortage does not just inflate massively the amount needed to pay on labour just to keep people with a roof above their heads, but it also massively inflates commercial property prices.
More of Bart's ill informed lunatic ideas. He is like a stuck record, unable to change his tune in spite of being comprehensively wrong on the subject at every turn.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Isn't Barty, tbf, claiming that rents (or mortgages) drive wages? But there must be so many other things - and of course the linkage isn't going to be that tight.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual sitiation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Well, if we reduce the component of house prices that is the land price, then there is a huge amount of price reduction possible.
Since, in many parts of the country, housing costs are the biggest part of the household budget, reducing them would reduce upward pressure on wages.
In the short term, materials prices are simple supply and demand*. But in the medium term, supply is increased to match demand. The medium and long term prices are based on inputs. Of which wages are a significant portion.
*There have been a number of quite childish attempts to ramp prices for building materials. Followed by whining as people sent lorries to Spain to collect tiles etc - "How dare people source things cheaper?"
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Malmesbury claimed it and I agreed with him, he's completely right.
The cost of labour is seriously inflated by the cost of housing, since people need to earn more just to keep a roof above their heads currently.
As for the cost of materials, if those materials need to be handled by people (labour) or stored anywhere (land) then its affected in the costs there too, but I agree with Malmesbury that the wages are the bigger concern that are directly affected by housing costs.
When your employees number one expense is housing, then that has an affect on your labour costs, which is problematic when that's your number one expense yourself.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
The thing is our disastrous planning system does not just stymie small building developers (it is of course by far the number one issue blighting small developers according to the small developers themselves) but it leaves a toxic legacy for all small businesses who rely upon having either anybody working for them, or needing a property to work out of themselves.
Since our chronic housing shortage does not just inflate massively the amount needed to pay on labour just to keep people with a roof above their heads, but it also massively inflates commercial property prices.
More of Bart's ill informed lunatic ideas. He is like a stuck record, unable to change his tune in spite of being comprehensively wrong on the subject at every turn.
You're the ill informed one pretending that small developers aren't stymied by the planning system when the small developers themselves state that planning is the number one problem they face.
Almost as if you won't entertain anything that challenges your worldview.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
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.
Trump beat lots of men to get the GOP nomination. If all it takes is balls to beat Trump then he would never have been candidate in the first place and Bill Clinton's wife would have faced George Bush's brother.
It's hard to assess how big a factor misogyny was in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Polls say 15% of the electorate would be uncomfortable with a woman president. So it will be higher since this relies on self reporting a character flaw.
OTOH there will be those (a much smaller % but still some) who will vote for a woman because of that fact. But then how many of the first group are GOP anyway and how many of the latter group are DEM anyway? You have to allow for all of that in your calc.
Upshot: Both HRC and KH did lose because they are women. In such tight elections it's inconceivable that the net gender effect wouldn't be enough to make the difference. But they didn't lose only because of this or perhaps even mainly because of it. There were several other reasons and some of them were arguably more influential.
Probably. Though it's not necesarily obvious to me that the number of voters who vote for a woman because she is a woman exceeds the number of voters who vote for a man because he is a man.
The (male) protagonist of this novel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Translator_(Crawley_novel) votes for a female PM on the basis she is a woman, and the author presents it in a "well of course he would" way. Though the first chapter was such unexpurgated horseshit that I can give you no further insight.
Ah no, I'm saying the number who vote against a woman because she's a woman exceed that who vote for because she is (a woman). My sense of things is in this case backed up by polling data.
Well I won't bother with that novel then. As it happens I'm about to dive into a contemporary feminist masterpiece (I hope), The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Christmas present from my brother who knows the sort of stuff I like.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Isn't Barty, tbf, claiming that rents (or mortgages) drive wages? But there must be so many other things - and of course the linkage isn't going to be that tight.
I think one thing to bear in mind is that for many people housing simply isn't that expensive. I only spend less than 10% of my net salary (+ other income) on my housing; my parents own multiple properties and pay nothing at all.
So whenever you look at the overall cost of housing, it hides vast inequalities between people with mortgages and in a relationship (me), single parents renting privately, pensioners owning outright, young people saving up for a deposit and so on. The cost of housing isn't driven by desperation in most cases, but rather a simple preference to live somewhere nice and a willingness to pay for it.
While that sounds benign, it causes immense harm to those not yet on the housing ladder.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Isn't Barty, tbf, claiming that rents (or mortgages) drive wages? But there must be so many other things - and of course the linkage isn't going to be that tight.
I think one thing to bear in mind is that for many people housing simply isn't that expensive. I only spend less than 10% of my net salary (+ other income) on my housing; my parents own multiple properties and pay nothing at all.
So whenever you look at the overall cost of housing, it hides vast inequalities between people with mortgages and in a relationship (me), single parents renting privately, pensioners owning outright, young people saving up for a deposit and so on. The cost of housing isn't driven by desperation in most cases, but rather a simple preference to live somewhere nice and a willingness to pay for it.
While that sounds benign, it causes immense harm to those not yet on the housing ladder.
How much do you need to live comfortably "sans mortgage " ?
I'd probably say £2k cash a month. Which suggests you need a retirement income of £25k plus a year (post tax) to be comfortable.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
I don't run a business yet (I might if I make partner in my new job) but quite frankly it sounds a nightmare. Loads of risk and compliance for uncertain and heavily taxed profits and returns.
Can anyone give me a rundown of the new BA tier points system? It looks ridiculous from what I've read
They're moving to a system where everyone's years are aligned for tier point collection.
Which is stupid, for many reasons.
It also means there's a weird transitional period when you might have just a three month "year" (or alternatively a 14 month one) for tier point collection purposes.
Fortunately I'm Gold for Life, so these things don't affect me. But, blow me down, it's a stupid change.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Isn't Barty, tbf, claiming that rents (or mortgages) drive wages? But there must be so many other things - and of course the linkage isn't going to be that tight.
I think one thing to bear in mind is that for many people housing simply isn't that expensive. I only spend less than 10% of my net salary (+ other income) on my housing; my parents own multiple properties and pay nothing at all.
So whenever you look at the overall cost of housing, it hides vast inequalities between people with mortgages and in a relationship (me), single parents renting privately, pensioners owning outright, young people saving up for a deposit and so on. The cost of housing isn't driven by desperation in most cases, but rather a simple preference to live somewhere nice and a willingness to pay for it.
While that sounds benign, it causes immense harm to those not yet on the housing ladder.
I think I've mentioned this before, but my street consists of retired factory foremen who bought in the 80s, middle-aged teachers who bought in the noughties and young city types who have bought in the last few years. And the genius thing about a mortgage is that you lock your price of housing in at the date of purchase. That price is always "as much as the seller thinks they can get away with".
But if you're young and not making a fortune in the city, where are you meant to live?
Can anyone give me a rundown of the new BA tier points system? It looks ridiculous from what I've read
They're moving to a system where everyone's years are aligned for tier point collection.
Which is stupid, for many reasons.
It also means there's a weird transitional period when you might have just a three month "year" (or alternatively a 14 month one) for tier point collection purposes.
Fortunately I'm Gold for Life, so these things don't affect me. But, blow me down, it's a stupid change.
Just to add: tier point years for everyone will now end on 31 March.
Can anyone give me a rundown of the new BA tier points system? It looks ridiculous from what I've read
They're moving to a system where everyone's years are aligned for tier point collection.
Which is stupid, for many reasons.
It also means there's a weird transitional period when you might have just a three month "year" (or alternatively a 14 month one) for tier point collection purposes.
Fortunately I'm Gold for Life, so these things don't affect me. But, blow me down, it's a stupid change.
Yeah that's a stupid but old change, I mean the new one announced today. I'd also check that your GGL is still valid, the bar looks considerably higher now than it was before this change.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Isn't Barty, tbf, claiming that rents (or mortgages) drive wages? But there must be so many other things - and of course the linkage isn't going to be that tight.
I think one thing to bear in mind is that for many people housing simply isn't that expensive. I only spend less than 10% of my net salary (+ other income) on my housing; my parents own multiple properties and pay nothing at all.
So whenever you look at the overall cost of housing, it hides vast inequalities between people with mortgages and in a relationship (me), single parents renting privately, pensioners owning outright, young people saving up for a deposit and so on. The cost of housing isn't driven by desperation in most cases, but rather a simple preference to live somewhere nice and a willingness to pay for it.
While that sounds benign, it causes immense harm to those not yet on the housing ladder.
I think I've mentioned this before, but my street consists of retired factory foremen who bought in the 80s, middle-aged teachers who bought in the noughties and young city types who have bought in the last few years. And the genius thing about a mortgage is that you lock your price of housing in at the date of purchase. That price is always "as much as the seller thinks they can get away with".
But if you're young and not making a fortune in the city, where are you meant to live?
The price is only "as much as the seller thinks they can get away with" because the seller knows they are guaranteed a sale as there's insufficient supply.
If there were sufficient supply then sellers would be faced with a "what can I get" scenario rather than than a "what can I get away with" one.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
The thing is our disastrous planning system does not just stymie small building developers (it is of course by far the number one issue blighting small developers according to the small developers themselves) but it leaves a toxic legacy for all small businesses who rely upon having either anybody working for them, or needing a property to work out of themselves.
Since our chronic housing shortage does not just inflate massively the amount needed to pay on labour just to keep people with a roof above their heads, but it also massively inflates commercial property prices.
More of Bart's ill informed lunatic ideas. He is like a stuck record, unable to change his tune in spite of being comprehensively wrong on the subject at every turn.
You're the ill informed one pretending that small developers aren't stymied by the planning system when the small developers themselves state that planning is the number one problem they face.
Almost as if you won't entertain anything that challenges your worldview.
The planning system may be tricky for the smaller firm to navigate.
The convenience of a few thousand aspirational builders is worth some thought but the wider context is important.
Improving their access to market would be hugely helped if the 1.5m unbuilt extant planning permissions were released into the wild.
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?
I’m just grateful that we are not playing the mighty Bournemouth again.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Russia is currently run by an ultra-nationalist mafia group. The rules are
1) Putin gets half. 2) If the piece of the country you are given actually collapses through you stealing too much, he kills you.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Russia is already trading missile technology for North Korean troops. It's already pretty bloody bad.
This was an excellent header, worthy of appearing in a top publication.
My instinct would be to try to use cricket to act as some sort of beacon for women in the country - oblige all participating teams to employ women on equal terms to men, or even field a women's team, or some such, and work with them on that basis. I realise that that is probably an impossibility, in which case a boycott is justified.
According to the ICC's own rules, Afghanistan should not be a member or associate member so should not be playing in international cricketing competitions. So the ICC can enforce its own bloody rules.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
Indeed. But Bart is claiming (wrongly) that the cost of labour and materials is derived from the cost of the land. The exact reverse of the actual situation. Materials in terms of bricks and concrete operate largely on a simple supply and demand basis. As demand goes up then so does the cost of the materials. To try and claim that reducing the cost of the land will reduce the cost of the materials is just stupid.
Isn't Barty, tbf, claiming that rents (or mortgages) drive wages? But there must be so many other things - and of course the linkage isn't going to be that tight.
I think one thing to bear in mind is that for many people housing simply isn't that expensive. I only spend less than 10% of my net salary (+ other income) on my housing; my parents own multiple properties and pay nothing at all.
So whenever you look at the overall cost of housing, it hides vast inequalities between people with mortgages and in a relationship (me), single parents renting privately, pensioners owning outright, young people saving up for a deposit and so on. The cost of housing isn't driven by desperation in most cases, but rather a simple preference to live somewhere nice and a willingness to pay for it.
While that sounds benign, it causes immense harm to those not yet on the housing ladder.
I think I've mentioned this before, but my street consists of retired factory foremen who bought in the 80s, middle-aged teachers who bought in the noughties and young city types who have bought in the last few years. And the genius thing about a mortgage is that you lock your price of housing in at the date of purchase. That price is always "as much as the seller thinks they can get away with".
But if you're young and not making a fortune in the city, where are you meant to live?
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Indeed. But neither can we let those fears stop us from doing the right thing. That's at the heart of Putin's nuclear threats: to get us to fear him, allowing him to get his way.
This is a bad time to tackle Putin. It would have been better if we had tackled him after Litvinenko in 2006; Georgia in 2008; Ukraine in 2014; or Salisbury in 2018. Instead, we did the minimum possible (though to her credit, May tried after Salisbury). Germany deserves special censure over this. He could have learnt that as well as his own red lines, there are red lines Russia cannot cross.
But although now is a bad time to tackle Putin; there is a worse time: and that is in the future. Let him get away with what he is doing now, and we'll be in a much worse position to tackle him again in five or ten years.
(And I'd argue that Russia under Putin is essentially being run by a mafia-style ultra-nationalistic group with him as don, that performs terrorist acts abroad.)
Can anyone give me a rundown of the new BA tier points system? It looks ridiculous from what I've read
They're moving to a system where everyone's years are aligned for tier point collection.
Which is stupid, for many reasons.
It also means there's a weird transitional period when you might have just a three month "year" (or alternatively a 14 month one) for tier point collection purposes.
Fortunately I'm Gold for Life, so these things don't affect me. But, blow me down, it's a stupid change.
Yeah that's a stupid but old change, I mean the new one announced today. I'd also check that your GGL is still valid, the bar looks considerably higher now than it was before this change.
I'm not Gold Guest List (don't do nearly enough travel anymore), just Gold For Life. And my status there - as I understand it - is unaffected.
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
Maybe Starmer just pips it with the lent votes of never-Farage Tories, a third of the Labour voters having defected to Reform.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
(Snip) Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
(Snip)
AIUI my dad had the first minidigger in the East Midlands. I think it was a little Kubota, imported from Japan for a very particular job that a Bobcat skid-steer couldn't manage. An electric version might well have been handy for that job.
I've also seen the after-effects of when a JCB backactor (the arm at the rear) struck a high-pressure water main. All the paint was stripped off it to bare metal, and virtually everything non-metal needed replacing.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
So what happens if, as Dr Evil, you stumble upon a far better plan than any political party in the UK currently has? Surely that'll be a blow to the brand?
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
I would say without the slightest doubt. It would be like Le Pen in France but much more so. The country knows how to make FPTP work against the likes of Farage
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
I would say without the slightest doubt. It would be like Le Pen in France but much more so. The country knows how to make FPTP work against the likes of Farage
Maybe but this is the same country that voted for Brexit, by some margin.
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
I would say without the slightest doubt. It would be like Le Pen in France but much more so. The country knows how to make FPTP work against the likes of Farage
I'm not sure it does. Starmer just won a landslide with his nativist campaign of wrapping himself in the flag and deporting people to Bangladesh so it shows that there is a market for that kind of politics.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
So what happens if, as Dr Evil, you stumble upon a far better plan than any political party in the UK currently has? Surely that'll be a blow to the brand?
Number Two : Over the last thirty years, Virtucon has grown by leaps and bounds. About fifteen years ago, we changed from volatile chemicals to the communication industry. We own cable companies in thirty-eight states. [the thirty-eight states illuminate on a map] Number Two : In addition to our cable holdings, we own a steel mill in Cleveland. [a steel mill miniature illuminates in Cleveland] Number Two : Shipping in Texas. [a ship off the coast of Texas illuminates] Number Two : Oil refineries in Seattle. [an oil refinery illuminates in Seattle] Number Two : And a factory in Chicago that makes miniature models of factories.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
So what happens if, as Dr Evil, you stumble upon a far better plan than any political party in the UK currently has? Surely that'll be a blow to the brand?
Number Two : Over the last thirty years, Virtucon has grown by leaps and bounds. About fifteen years ago, we changed from volatile chemicals to the communication industry. We own cable companies in thirty-eight states. [the thirty-eight states illuminate on a map] Number Two : In addition to our cable holdings, we own a steel mill in Cleveland. [a steel mill miniature illuminates in Cleveland] Number Two : Shipping in Texas. [a ship off the coast of Texas illuminates] Number Two : Oil refineries in Seattle. [an oil refinery illuminates in Seattle] Number Two : And a factory in Chicago that makes miniature models of factories.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
Guerilla gardening is a thing, too.
There's a local wildlife site which has been mismanaged by the council - it is supposed to be a remnant of lowland heath with an interesting and locally rare species on it. Most of the site was destroyed to build a leisure centre in the 1980 but a tiny piece remains.
All they needed to do was strim it once a year at the right height, and they couldn't even manage that.
I am very very tempted to the job myself with a brushcutter (I do have a ticket) and some official looking clothing but it is a bit public so it might have to be hand tools at dawn.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
Guerilla gardening is a thing, too.
There's a local wildlife site which has been mismanaged by the council - it is supposed to be a remnant of lowland heath with an interesting and locally rare species on it. Most of the site was destroyed to build a leisure centre in the 1980 but a tiny piece remains.
All they needed to do was strim it once a year at the right height, and they couldn't even manage that.
I am very very tempted to the job myself with a brushcutter (I do have a ticket) and some official looking clothing but it is a bit public so it might have to be hand tools at dawn.
Jobs like that you'll probably get more attention if you do it at dawn.
Do it like you belong there and people won't look twice.
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.
Overcrowded slums are the apotheosis of a free market, resulting from the fact that the 'dwellers' are too poor to afford a nice house for themselves. Nice houses cost money and lots of people don't have much. The price of a house reflects the cost of building and maintaining it, not just the land value. Even if your libertarian anti-planning solution were to reduce the land value to zero (it won't) the rest of the cost is irreducible. Of course, we can always tax the working, productive part of the population to build nice homes for those who neither toil nor spin - a timely Christian policy.
The cost of building housing is heavily related to... the cost of housing. Both in direct labour and the cost of materials.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
No it isn't.
I am a minor partner in a building company. Wages, wages, wages & materials. In that order. On many jobs, direct labour is more than 50% of the project cost.
No doubt there's more to it. but it seems to me that your Wages, wages, and wages costs are explained by a chap working, one watching him, and one supervising. I've been entertaining this theory for many years - and where you can be reasonably sure you get the whole picture - streetworks and the like it's as I say, or slightly more watching and less doing on average.
Not on the sites we work. Skilled trades have rocketed in cost. Because the ungrateful sparkies etc. refuse to sleep in garden sheds. Some of them even want a bathroom for sole use by them and their family.
But what I observe isn't untrue is it?
Massive inefficiency is common on bigger sites. Jobs stopped because of a single tool missing!
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So what's happening whereby we have in our streetworks perhaps 200% overmanning?
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
Digging holes shouldn't be done by hand - reserve that for clearance around delicate stuff.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
Well get yourself to London and do the streetworks.
I actually fixed a couple of pavement slabs with a neighbour (builder), over Christmas break.
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
Would it be presuming too much on our nascent friendship then to ask you to pay some attention to the whole area?
It's part of an evil plan - we create a parallel state that works, then gradually take over the county.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
Guerilla gardening is a thing, too.
There's a local wildlife site which has been mismanaged by the council - it is supposed to be a remnant of lowland heath with an interesting and locally rare species on it. Most of the site was destroyed to build a leisure centre in the 1980 but a tiny piece remains.
All they needed to do was strim it once a year at the right height, and they couldn't even manage that.
I am very very tempted to the job myself with a brushcutter (I do have a ticket) and some official looking clothing but it is a bit public so it might have to be hand tools at dawn.
Jobs like that you'll probably get more attention if you do it at dawn.
Do it like you belong there and people won't look twice.
You need some friends to stand around in work clothes, with really, really big coffees.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Russia is currently run by an ultra-nationalist mafia group. The rules are
1) Putin gets half. 2) If the piece of the country you are given actually collapses through you stealing too much, he kills you.
But this falls into the category of 'how could things be any worse'? It's basically signalling intensity of dislike of the current regime, which I share.
We heard a lot of this before the General Election.
Trust me: things can get worse. Much, much worse.
The fact it's not obvious to see what that would look like at this stage doesn't mean that doesn't exist.
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
I would say without the slightest doubt. It would be like Le Pen in France but much more so. The country knows how to make FPTP work against the likes of Farage
I'm not sure it does. Starmer just won a landslide with his nativist campaign of wrapping himself in the flag and deporting people to Bangladesh so it shows that there is a market for that kind of politics.
I wouldn't say that was nativist. It was a lot of posing.
Transparent and facile as hell to anyone paying attention.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Russia is currently run by an ultra-nationalist mafia group. The rules are
1) Putin gets half. 2) If the piece of the country you are given actually collapses through you stealing too much, he kills you.
But this falls into the category of 'how could things be any worse'? It's basically signalling intensity of dislike of the current regime, which I share.
We heard a lot of this before the General Election.
Trust me: things can get worse. Much, much worse.
The fact it's not obvious to see what that would look like at this stage doesn't mean that doesn't exist.
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
After another four years of Starmer in government I don't find it hard to see Farage winning as the least worst option of two terrible options, just as Trump has won against Harris.
Incumbency is pretty unpopular right now, and Starmer barely won a third of the vote from the luxury of opposition.
Plus, of course, he only has five MPs. It's not hard for me to see how he might make hundreds of gains because FPTP does weird things when the vote share are split weirdly, but will his victory look possible enough to scare disgruntled centrist and left voters into voting for the status quo?
OK, PB Brains Trust, how much would it cost to build a two storey house, 3.5metres by 10metres, bathroom and bedroom upstairs, living room and kitchen downstairs.
The points are as follows:
Assume the land has been purchased and detailed planning permission has been granted.
Assume conventional building techniques: bricks and mortar for the walls, tiles for the roof.
Do not include the cost of fitting out the bathroom/kitchen as that's variable.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Russia is currently run by an ultra-nationalist mafia group. The rules are
1) Putin gets half. 2) If the piece of the country you are given actually collapses through you stealing too much, he kills you.
But this falls into the category of 'how could things be any worse'? It's basically signalling intensity of dislike of the current regime, which I share.
We heard a lot of this before the General Election.
Trust me: things can get worse. Much, much worse.
The fact it's not obvious to see what that would look like at this stage doesn't mean that doesn't exist.
Worse would be a return to Yeltsin style free-for-all-stealathon. What else is there?
OK, PB Brains Trust, how much would it cost to build a two storey house, 3.5metres by 10metres, bathroom and bedroom upstairs, living room and kitchen downstairs.
The points are as follows:
Assume the land has been purchased and detailed planning permission has been granted.
Assume conventional building techniques: bricks and mortar for the walls, tiles for the roof.
Do not include the cost of fitting out the bathroom/kitchen as that's variable.
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.
I don't think he has a particularly well thought out policy platform beyond immigration. And, indeed, I'm not even that convinced his immigration platform is that well thought out.
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
I think in a forced choice between Farage and Starmer, Starmer gets a second term.
I would say without the slightest doubt. It would be like Le Pen in France but much more so. The country knows how to make FPTP work against the likes of Farage
There's always doubt, but I agree. Nothing would get out the Labour vote better than Farage leading in the polls.
OK, PB Brains Trust, how much would it cost to build a two storey house, 3.5metres by 10metres, bathroom and bedroom upstairs, living room and kitchen downstairs.
The points are as follows:
Assume the land has been purchased and detailed planning permission has been granted.
Assume conventional building techniques: bricks and mortar for the walls, tiles for the roof.
Do not include the cost of fitting out the bathroom/kitchen as that's variable.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
If there's a chance that Russia will collapse then better to let it do so. Huge risks either way, but an organised flailing about is probably better for others than an unorganised one.
Hmm. Not sure about how good it thing it would be for a nuclear armed power with well north of 100 million people collapsing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for a nuclear armed power to be going round meddling in other countries affairs and cutting undersea power and internet cables.
Yet here we are.
Sure, but a Russia taken over by a mafia group, ultra-nationalists, terrorists or collapsing in chaos with a civil war and nukes sold to the highest bidder isn't good news either. And, in fact, could be even worse.
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Indeed. But neither can we let those fears stop us from doing the right thing. That's at the heart of Putin's nuclear threats: to get us to fear him, allowing him to get his way.
This is a bad time to tackle Putin. It would have been better if we had tackled him after Litvinenko in 2006; Georgia in 2008; Ukraine in 2014; or Salisbury in 2018. Instead, we did the minimum possible (though to her credit, May tried after Salisbury). Germany deserves special censure over this. He could have learnt that as well as his own red lines, there are red lines Russia cannot cross.
But although now is a bad time to tackle Putin; there is a worse time: and that is in the future. Let him get away with what he is doing now, and we'll be in a much worse position to tackle him again in five or ten years.
(And I'd argue that Russia under Putin is essentially being run by a mafia-style ultra-nationalistic group with him as don, that performs terrorist acts abroad.)
Totally agree, but we should also have one eye on what comes next in Russia.
I don't think we should punish the whole Russian people. They've built up centuries of paranoia about the West as it is, which we don't need to feed.
Comments
You deserved a 'like' for the KB comment even though it was you.
OTOH there will be those (a much smaller % but still some) who will vote for a woman because of that fact. But then how many of the first group are GOP anyway and how many of the latter group are DEM anyway? You have to allow for all of that in your calc.
Upshot: Both HRC and KH did lose because they are women. In such tight elections it's inconceivable that the net gender effect wouldn't be enough to make the difference. But they didn't lose only because of this or perhaps even mainly because of it. There were several other reasons and some of them were arguably more influential.
Interesting things happening in Denmark.
Politicians are discussing whether Denmark can buy the decommissioned German nuclear power plant, Brokdorf, to reopen it.
The plant is around 2 hours away from the Danish border.
https://x.com/ziontree/status/1873718453313605758
The (male) protagonist of this novel:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Translator_(Crawley_novel)
votes for a female PM on the basis she is a woman, and the author presents it in a "well of course he would" way. Though the first chapter was such unexpurgated horseshit that I can give you no further insight.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-long-anti-nuclear-protest-ends/a-60278006
https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-germanys-reactors-feasibility-and-schedule
The adverts involve a bloke from Yorkshire telling us about his mum and complaining about thawing things for dogs from the freezer as being "Brrr ! Cccccooooollllddddd !", which is not credible unless softies have occupied Yorkshire and gone anthropomorphic.
Since 2012, they claim to have delivered 47,612,301 "meals for pets".
Is anyone from Yorkshire buying this? (It involves spending more money than is strictly necessary).
Just today.
Trump has an opportunity to bring Russia to heel - simply by saying he will continue supporting Ukraine. Putin's strategy has been to use all his men and material to get him to January 2025 in the expectation of a political reset. If that doesn't come about, then he cannot continue as he has. As well as a military at breaking point, Putin has an economy that has been writing cheques it cannot cash. It's collapse could be rapid - and spectacular.
So if we reduce the cost of housing on the land and markup side, the construction and material cost can come down as well.
'Green' ferry emits more CO2 than old diesel ship
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy87e72yg3o
The cost of land is roughly a third or more of the cost of the house, not a penny of that goes to the cost of either building or maintaining the home.
Prior to the economic disaster that should be repealed of the 1940s planning act, in the 1930s when we were last building houses at the rate the country requires, the cost of land was 2% of the cost of housing. The bulk of the cost of housing was absolutely the cost of things such as materials and labour to build it . . . the costs you seem to be under the misapprehension of what forms the cost of housing today. It should, but it does not.
Since our chronic housing shortage does not just inflate massively the amount needed to pay on labour just to keep people with a roof above their heads, but it also massively inflates commercial property prices.
1) Phone Estonia - "The online citizenship stuff - could you give us a crash course, please?"
2) Identify and issue Chagos Citizenship to the Chagos Islanders and descendants who have rights.
3) Setup an online consultation with them (see (1)) - they are scattered all over the place. Bring them together.
4) Create a a range of solutions.
5) Vote them Off The Island, one by one. Rounds of renegotiation etc.
6) With a solution that the Chagos Islanders and the UK likes, implement that. Mauritius can go swivel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0VSVQonb9g
For some reason - though appropriately for the discussion - it's filmed in what I rather think is a close off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, though the job itself is far more famous from London and Mayhew's books.
17 from the 49 men convicted have appealed against sentences:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg1plx12x2o
She used an apparently old quote that I haven't heard before: "The odds were good; but the goods were odd."
Well, it made me laugh.
Since, in many parts of the country, housing costs are the biggest part of the household budget, reducing them would reduce upward pressure on wages.
In the short term, materials prices are simple supply and demand*. But in the medium term, supply is increased to match demand. The medium and long term prices are based on inputs. Of which wages are a significant portion.
*There have been a number of quite childish attempts to ramp prices for building materials. Followed by whining as people sent lorries to Spain to collect tiles etc - "How dare people source things cheaper?"
The cost of labour is seriously inflated by the cost of housing, since people need to earn more just to keep a roof above their heads currently.
As for the cost of materials, if those materials need to be handled by people (labour) or stored anywhere (land) then its affected in the costs there too, but I agree with Malmesbury that the wages are the bigger concern that are directly affected by housing costs.
When your employees number one expense is housing, then that has an affect on your labour costs, which is problematic when that's your number one expense yourself.
Almost as if you won't entertain anything that challenges your worldview.
The Taliban's treatment of women is even more outrageous than South Africa's treatment of non-whites. English cricketers should not travel there.
Well I won't bother with that novel then. As it happens I'm about to dive into a contemporary feminist masterpiece (I hope), The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Christmas present from my brother who knows the sort of stuff I like.
They tend to use larger numbers of cheaper (lower skilled people). Because managers get all upset by wages going up. But not by hiring lots of people to manage....
In reality, you want fewer, better skilled people.
So whenever you look at the overall cost of housing, it hides vast inequalities between people with mortgages and in a relationship (me), single parents renting privately, pensioners owning outright, young people saving up for a deposit and so on. The cost of housing isn't driven by desperation in most cases, but rather a simple preference to live somewhere nice and a willingness to pay for it.
While that sounds benign, it causes immense harm to those not yet on the housing ladder.
Strangely, it sort of applied to the 10% who were female as well.
I'd probably say £2k cash a month. Which suggests you need a retirement income of £25k plus a year (post tax) to be comfortable.
(I do recognise that digging holes in streets is very hard work, and apparent loafing around may just be recovering)
It's like with Le Pen in France: I totally get why people would vote for her. But her economics platform is basically "France needs more national champions and more deficit spending and it's really bad to raise the retirement age." That's Corbyn-like in its delusion.
Yet here we are.
Far too few people do it. But why should they?
Which is stupid, for many reasons.
It also means there's a weird transitional period when you might have just a three month "year" (or alternatively a 14 month one) for tier point collection purposes.
Fortunately I'm Gold for Life, so these things don't affect me. But, blow me down, it's a stupid change.
But if you're young and not making a fortune in the city, where are you meant to live?
We shouldn't like our schadenfreude blind our imaginations to the fact that it could be much worse still.
Runs on electricity. Here it is about to be lowered into a basement
If there were sufficient supply then sellers would be faced with a "what can I get" scenario rather than than a "what can I get away with" one.
The planning system may be tricky for the smaller firm to navigate.
The convenience of a few thousand aspirational builders is worth some thought but the wider context is important.
Improving their access to market would be hugely helped if the 1.5m unbuilt extant planning
permissions were released into the wild.
Say by taxing them.
1) Putin gets half.
2) If the piece of the country you are given actually collapses through you stealing too much, he kills you.
This is a bad time to tackle Putin. It would have been better if we had tackled him after Litvinenko in 2006; Georgia in 2008; Ukraine in 2014; or Salisbury in 2018. Instead, we did the minimum possible (though to her credit, May tried after Salisbury). Germany deserves special censure over this. He could have learnt that as well as his own red lines, there are red lines Russia cannot cross.
But although now is a bad time to tackle Putin; there is a worse time: and that is in the future. Let him get away with what he is doing now, and we'll be in a much worse position to tackle him again in five or ten years.
(And I'd argue that Russia under Putin is essentially being run by a mafia-style ultra-nationalistic group with him as don, that performs terrorist acts abroad.)
Hi-Viz, some workman's gear and some cones. No one challenged us.
I've also seen the after-effects of when a JCB backactor (the arm at the rear) struck a high-pressure water main. All the paint was stripped off it to bare metal, and virtually everything non-metal needed replacing.
Once you control all the pavements, then even the PM can't get out of No. 10.
{Laughs in Dr Evil}
Number Two : Over the last thirty years, Virtucon has grown by leaps and bounds. About fifteen years ago, we changed from volatile chemicals to the communication industry. We own cable companies in thirty-eight states.
[the thirty-eight states illuminate on a map]
Number Two : In addition to our cable holdings, we own a steel mill in Cleveland.
[a steel mill miniature illuminates in Cleveland]
Number Two : Shipping in Texas.
[a ship off the coast of Texas illuminates]
Number Two : Oil refineries in Seattle.
[an oil refinery illuminates in Seattle]
Number Two : And a factory in Chicago that makes miniature models of factories.
There's a local wildlife site which has been mismanaged by the council - it is supposed to be a remnant of lowland heath with an interesting and locally rare species on it. Most of the site was destroyed to build a leisure centre in the 1980 but a tiny piece remains.
All they needed to do was strim it once a year at the right height, and they couldn't even manage that.
I am very very tempted to the job myself with a brushcutter (I do have a ticket) and some official looking clothing but it is a bit public so it might have to be hand tools at dawn.
Do it like you belong there and people won't look twice.
We heard a lot of this before the General Election.
Trust me: things can get worse. Much, much worse.
The fact it's not obvious to see what that would look like at this stage doesn't mean that doesn't exist.
Transparent and facile as hell to anyone paying attention.
Wouldn't touch either even if my life depended on it.
Liverpool vs. Manchester United could be the last time they play each other in the Premier League for years, enjoy it.
https://x.com/DaveOCKOP/status/1873828062871380054
I am still putting a £100 on a United victory on Sunday.
They could also get better.
Incumbency is pretty unpopular right now, and Starmer barely won a third of the vote from the luxury of opposition.
Plus, of course, he only has five MPs. It's not hard for me to see how he might make hundreds of gains because FPTP does weird things when the vote share are split weirdly, but will his victory look possible enough to scare disgruntled centrist and left voters into voting for the status quo?
The points are as follows:
I don't think we should punish the whole Russian people. They've built up centuries of paranoia about the West as it is, which we don't need to feed.