[photonthug]

> It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day. People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.

This is an oversimplification naturally but the gist of it is spot on. Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere. One thing leads to another, and that's how most wealth is created by robbing the future. But the future actually arrives some day, and we're seeing some of that now.

There's no exit strategy for this behaviour though. Since so many people did exactly what they were incentivized to do, they of course don't want the rules to change now. The current generation will always need to pay 10x whatever a house is worth, because otherwise all of the people in the last generation can't afford to settle debts / retire / pay unreasonable amounts for healthcare. This puts the current generation in debt, so that they have to rob the next, and so on until there's some collapse. Most millennials have had a rough time waiting for that collapse though, so lots have bought something on credit to build equity rather than continuing to throw away money on rent. Soon instead of cheering on any kind of collapse in the housing market, they also will want it postponed because they will need to rob the next generation. But each iteration of this same game isn't exactly the same, because every generation does a little worse while more wealth gets concentrated in the hands of the already-wealthy.

[AnimalMuppet]

> Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere.

2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.

Much more generally: Think in terms of supply and demand. If nobody is going to work any more, then the price of work goes way up. So does the price of things that work produces.

[photonthug]

> 2008 showed that to be a very unsafe assumption.

Totally. Just because it's the game that capital wants us to play doesn't mean that there's any guarantee that you win. It's just also that it's the only way to maybe win. This supports parent's argument that wealth distribution is arbitrary. One person wins and another loses, playing the same game the same way, just because they entered the market at different times. The uncomfortable contradiction that we're supposed to generally agree with is that the first person is "smart and hardworking", and the second person "is financially irresponsible, obviously living outside their means".

> So does the price of things that work produces.

Not sure if this a comment re: UBI, antiwork, or housing costs, but housing in particular is always a special kind of crazy because we've insisted on looking at it as a financial vehicle instead of you know, a place to live and work from. Prefab things that could cut costs are illegal most places. In Florida they build labor-intensive houses out of match-sticks even though the next hurricane is always coming, because that's what's easy to permit, that's what people historically wanted to insure, and it keeps construction rackets and developers in business. Further from the coasts, even in the more sparsely populated mountain/desert states, you can go to the edge of any larger town and look out at the "supply" of hundreds of miles of empty, and still get forced into paying half a million for a crappy place on half an acre. Supply and demand is certainly some kind of a factor, but like parents point about wealth-from-work vs wealth-from-asset-appreciation, it's a small factor and getting smaller. The market's already intensely manipulated.. it's just done in a way that makes problems worse instead of better.