Is the economy good or bad, and what is the economy, and how much should a person care about it

How much of the home price rise is because of stuff like this?

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I don’t know what should or could be done, and I’m not informed or educated enough to argue about what “economic indicators” really mean and whether or not things are good based on various graphs, etc. Your point about home values increasing vs decreasing makes sense but then you follow it up with, “hey it just means people have more money to spend” and “4% savings are good” and “well my cousin just bought a home” and you just seem Lucille Bluth banana levels out of touch.

I don’t see how anyone could disagree that it’s become extremely difficult to purchase a home in this country in recent years. I’m not putting the blame on anybody because I don’t have that macro level understanding of all the factors that go into it but houses cost twice as much and my salary didn’t double, but hey the people who already own homes and have big savings accounts are doing great, so I guess I should be happy about the state of things.

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So to recap.

Lucky ducky Lucille Bluths:
Homeowners
Anyone who saves money
Married people
People who live in reasonable housing markets like Kansas City
People with good jobs in a red hot economy

The only people we should be concerned about:
Single renters with no savings and not-great-paying jobs who live in expensive housing markets and are getting by but can’t afford a home (but as soon as they do, they become part of the problem).

No other economic indicators matter. Never mind that anyone who wants a job in this economy can get one, and work their way up pretty quickly.

I’m not saying it’s easy to buy a home. And yeah it sucks that it’s not like the 50s when Ward Cleaver could buy a house and support a family on his generic office job. But I still think we’re ignoring a ton of good economic indicators to focus on one bad aspect, when there will always be bad aspects to any economy. This is so much less bad than a real recession with massive unemployment imo.

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You threw this out there pretty casually. I don’t think this is true.

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What else would you call record low unemployment? If it’s hard to find workers to hire, do you think most places want to let actual competent workers go? I know they don’t in my industry. Maybe people can chime in about other industries.

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Gonna stop you right there. If you’re willing to pay, it’s not.

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Which is good for workers. Thanks Biden!

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Interesting data here. There was another post in a different thread about homebuying which had wildly different numbers (0.4-44%), but I think the distinction in the other thread is “institutional investors”, which means owns >1000 homes.

Lol. What a ridiculous post. I didn’t imply homeowners were “lucille bluths”, just that your general tone was, and continues to be out of touch. We shouldn’t “only” be concerned with single income househoulds, or younger folks, or whoever you wanna lump into the group you are clearly trying to shame, but we should ALSO be concerned for them and understanding of their struggle. A little empathy might do you some good

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Suzzer gonna suzzer.

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I am sympathetic. I’m just being snarky about your ridiculous claim that I’m out of touch because I don’t consider this one thing (single renters not being able to buy houses like they could in the 50s) to be proof that we live in a terrible economy. And it’s certainly been implied in this thread that anyone who owns a home or has savings is part of the problem.

My cousin fits every bill you could ask for (except not staying single I guess) of a working-class normal person. She’s worked all kinds of jobs, never made or had a lot of money. Same for her husband. But she works hard and so does he, and now they have a beautiful baby and a house. If we were in an actual recession, they might be in worse shape.

I don’t see how holding her up as an example that normal people are doing ok = me being Lucille Bluth levels of out of touch. I’ve been clear that I’m not saying the economy is perfect. But some of you are holding up housing affordability as evidence times are really bad right now, to the exclusion of all else, and then ignoring it when I point that out.

We’re going around in circles.

I’m all for keeping home flippers out of the market somehow, or limiting them to a certain number of homes or w/e. When I bought my condo there was no chance of buying a fixer-upper single family home unless I could put down 100% cash. But that feels like a separate conversation than “Does the economy suck right now?”

Time for everyone to stop being incels.

And if you want a tradwife, you better not be a broke boy.

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My rent is $2,185 a month and similar apartments in my building are listed at closer to $2,600.

A young single red blooded American man can’t even buy a nice sizeable fuck pad in an affluent city anymore with his income. What is the world coming to?

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Also on the subject of families with single-earners vs. dual earners, it’s a different world than the 50s and 60s. A lot of women weren’t fulfilled being housewives. Wanting a real career was a big thrust of the women’s lib movement. For many women, work was something they wanted to do, not something they had to do. And couples wait a lot longer to have kids now.

More people in the workforce = bigger economy = house prices go up.

I’m not sure that you can have a world in which families switch from majority single income to majority dual income, and still retain 50s and 60s levels of housing affordability for single incomes.

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Sincerely, that’s great for them. Literally nobody is making them a villain here, but this statement is either giving the subtle implication that people who can’t make this happen don’t work hard or showing your ignorance to the fact that many people work very hard but can’t afford a home.

Further, I prefaced this all by admitting I do not understand the economy to the degree many other posters here do and I am not arguing that the rough housing market = bad economy.

While all the big brained posters here will mock the simpletons for not understanding that the economy is actually “red hot”, in suzzer’s words, how the working class feels and what they’re actually able to afford should concern us all in an election year, regardless of who’s to blame for what.

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Economy is doing great right now but with a lot of weird stuff going on. Economy was doing great but in a pretty normal way in 2019. This is the actual electoral problem Biden faces versus Trump next year.

For an actual bad economy remember all the way back to 2008. Most of us posting here are pretty smart and talented, if I must say so myself. And back then alot of us were spending our time clicking buttons online trying to take each others money…. not for fun, to gamble it up or as a side hustle, but as a career path. That is an actual bad economy.

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You could get rid of a 100 million people from the population…

#Thanoswasright