Comment by ehnto

When young I use to work in construction. (With diplomas) The wages for 18 year olds in the Netherlands at the time were such that I got 340 euro per month for 40 hour weeks. It's a truly shit salary but you could also see it as a wonderful formula to build cheap houses. As my boss billed the customers 28 euro per hour for my work and those houses cost roughly 35000 to buy(!) and it took roughly 80 hours of work each. (Very rough estimates but that oddly doesn't matter) You could say I build 6.4% of the houses. They roughly cost 350 000 euro today which seems 10 fold but since people can't afford that they need a mortgage and pay 3 times that amount over 30 years. That would mean my labor now costs 10 000 per month. At the time I tried to calculate the savings escape velocity and discovered that if I saved 100% of my income I would be able to buy my own house in never years. If I build 6.4% of a house in 2 weeks that would be 3.2% per week or 32 weeks to build 100%.

Say 64 weeks and the process produces one whole home for someone else. I get that there should be some people between the construction worker and the citizen eventho they never did anything useful to the result but the margins are so preposterous that the original salary is a mere rounding error.

Then I look at Amish barn raising videos and the laughter becomes uncontrollable. I would definitely go there and help out - for free of course. If I had to keep doing that I would look for some vegetables and uhh my own house? Even if they would never build it for me it would still be more enjoyable than the western extortion scheme.