Comment by numbers_guy
12 days ago
I would not necessarily say that the envy is unjustified. If you live in a rich country you ideally want all citizens to become wealthy. Else, irrespective of income, you will be lorded over by those who are magnitudes richer than you.
I'm not talking about billionairs or the ultra wealthy. I am talking about the 60-90% top earners category.
You can cut out the top 10% of earners in the country and it still wouldn't do much to change the situation for those in the <60% earning percentiles.
To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock. It's because the other bidders have STEM masters degrees and dual income high paying jobs, and probably a few hints of financial literacy thrown in too.
> To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock.
When one person holds the wealth equivalent to the total yearly economic output of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, yes, it's going to introduce distortions, even if only because the people who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less in order to better fund the equities that make up the wealth of that person.
And that's before getting into the other problems with the housing supply.
>who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less
No, that's where you have it backwards they are being paid more. That's the exact reason why they are buying that house when you say "who the fuck can afford that".
Ironically, they are also the ones being exploited the most by the top 1%.
An amazon warehouse sorter will never create or do anything that makes amazon much more money than what they are paid. They get $18/hr for producing $21/hr of value, doing the same static task all day everyday. Amazons "profit margin" on these workers is almost nothing.
The lead cloud architect though gets paid $350k/yr, but can design a single change that will make amazon $30-40 million/yr. The profit margin on them is insane. And they are the ones outbidding everyday people on things, driving up costs.
Back 60 years ago, everyone was much more clumped around the same (lower) income, so the houses where smaller and the prices more amenable to more people.