In Australia most of the narrative on the housing affordability crisis is around lack of supply and nimbyism. In the meantime Melbourne has dropped to 4th most expensive city in the country and becoming more affordable. Most likely reason - land tax change in that state which is turning off accumulating multiple properties through investment and investors turning to other states where prices are still going up. So, while supply is relevant, I would say it is investor demand that is driving prices up.
It’s not a coincidence that many abundists see nothing wrong with rent-seeking. They’re incentivized by it. Rent-seeking has corrupted market forces. Mao 2.0 will arrive eventually.
This reverses causation. Investors are involved because prices are going up, not the other way around.
"Investors buying up housing" is a common explanation alongside "short term rentals taking over" but neither make up a large enough portion of the demand to explain prices.
In a feedback loop, every element in the loop is both a cause and an effect. The way to stop the feedback is to shift one or more relationships in the loop.
If you are lucky there can sometimes be arranged some convenient control elements- but in many difficult problems a lever that you can pull that only affects that one thing doesn't exist. You have choices of levers that affect a multitude of things, maybe many of which go counter to the desired independent effect
I don't know what's so hard to understand about the idea that prices are high because the people who have the most influence over the prices want the prices high.
Peak free-market unregulated capitalism failed when GFC happened. We have been bailing it out ever since. US has not had a surplus since 2001. I don't know what this 'socialize losses, private profits' is but it does not look like capitalism. GFC showed that capitalism has to be regulated IMO. And tariffs could be part of this regulation.
The Paris Gun would seem to qualify as an attempt to bomb civilians in WW1.
>...When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an airplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and qualify under the (later) formal definition of large-calibre artillery.
>...The German objective was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself.
>...The projectile flew significantly higher than projectiles from previous guns. Writer and journalist Adam Hochschild put it this way: "It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 40 km (25 mi) at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where the shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere"
You should read a bit of Dostoevsky for his analysis how 'rational' people are. Not to mention what decades of absolute power do to your ability to reason. I am also not sure what the end game is here and what 'defeating' a country with nuclear arsenal looks like. And why there is no more calls for negotiation (like there is in the case of Gaza).
In Australia few years back the highest paid CEO was not from industries you might expect like mining, banking... but a company doing international student placements, whatever that is -
My son put effort into dressing up for his Year 10 formal as that is what you do. But during the event he observed that most kids focused on how they looked rather than noticing others, and thought he should have spent a lot less effort into his outfit :)
Or that's bad, because all those kids who spent time looking good, didn't get as many compliments for their effort than they expected, or perhaps even deserved.
There are many caveats with judging people by their appearances, but complimenting someone on the part of their look they put unusual effort in for some unusual occasion, seems pretty healthy to me.
(Well, there's also the caveat that the rich ones will have better access to exquisite clothes to begin with…)
I think the point is more around the collective distraction of dressing to a formal (and for kids, unfamiliar) standard, rather than enjoying time with the people around you at a party.
I see a lot of talk of this 'increase supply' in Australia where house prices are out of control. Personally I think insatiable demand is a bigger problem and no increase in supply will fix it. Over last couple of decades we have had financial deregulation and cheap money - 30 year mortgages are a norm (used to be 20 years), tax system favoring property investment (losses claimed as tax return), global economy where anyone in the world can bid for local housing (e.g. rules change so foreign students can buy property), huge liquidity in pension funds (superannuation) allowed to do leverage/borrow so investment property can be purchased - again policy change in last decade or so. This is without even talking about stock reduction due to temporary rentals. I see big part of the problem interest groups driving policy change, rather then people wanting to live in desirable places.
(edited - typo)
it's pretty impossible to take anything the media, lib/alp or industry say seriously when they got us where we are and are proposing more or of the same.
