Skids wrote:It depends how hard someone WANTS to work. We have a young bloke here. He works in the store and his salary is around $120k. On his time off, he drives an Uber and earns another $100k a year doing that.
Is the store on-site, FIFO, and is his Uber run also a FIFO gig? How many hours a week is he working? Where are these houses? Does he have kids? Did he leverage the bank of mum and dad? Do you know how many hours he'd have to drive to earn that minus operating costs?
Remember, as said above 90% of the population can't move to Dimboola, just as 90% of the population can't head to South Korea like I did. That's my way of saying that the economic geography is as it is, even if a handful of people like myself head to South Korea, live underground and dig for opals, or whatever. Exceptions do not a country make, while if everyone drove Ubers to the Woomera Rocket Range or wherever that too would revert to the mean. You've got to reference mainstream data, not stories about data.
Just because economists ask these questions doesn't mean they think working hard isn't important. That goes without saying. But you can't just quote a bloke from work and dismiss actual field professionals who have the data in black and white. This is exactly what happened with global warming, remember? Thinking it might cost them or detract from their self-perceived exceptionalism, people allowed the unqualified to howl down reality, with that delay now set to cost trillions of dollars in drought, fire and flood relief.
stui magpie wrote:The myth is that our generation had it easy because housing prices were low. We still had to work and save and go without to get there though. Life is about choices, you can't have everything.
There's no myth whatsoever about housing being far more affordable in the past. Also, it's no just about
far lower housing prices: real wages were far higher, government support was higher, government-subsidised services cheaper, educational requirements lower, and plenty of space such that the outer suburbs weren't that far out by today's standards.
The numbers aren't even controversial; we know exactly what everything cost when, and what everyone earned when, what everyone could save when, how much extra work people could do when, and what the interest rate differential meant in real terms to the cent.
Virtually everyone
always thinks they work harder than everyone else, just as they always think the past was better. We're smart enough and dignified enough not to fall for that card trick, surely.
I for one can't countenance doing that to the young and strugglers even though I'm fine; there's a clear element of responsibility about it. Advanced society was clearly heavily built on a foundation of affordable housing, and the free kick accompanying it.
There's nothing wrong with scepticism, but people actually have to put the work in to confirm or deny the known facts, not just cling to whatever nonsense benefits them or makes them feel more entitled than others.
Sometimes, it's not possible to square the circle for a win-win, but that's the task, surely. That's why, for example, I mentioned the idea of forcing sub-division, density and height
after people leave their homes or transfer ownership, so density happens over time and everyone's prepared for it, but it doesn't impact people until they move. And so on.
Remember that idiot Abbott and the hordes of Facebook dimwits scuppering climate action and the green energy transition? Those people cost the country trillions of dollars over the coming decades, and won't pay a dime for it. Watching this again and again with the same kinds of mistakes on repeat is not my idea of a good time, that's for sure.
Anyhow, that's the end of the topic for me, so don't worry I'll leave you in peace on the matter.
