Looking at that same street on Zillow it looks like there are a few 3br 2ba homes for around $200,000.
Most places that aren't deep blue cities. That seems like hyperbole but is true.
Picking just a few cities, the median house prices/sq footages are:
- Houston, TX: $238K, 2031 sq ft
- Indianapolis, Indiana: $196K, 1853 sq ft
- Oklahoma City, OK: $152K, 1455 sq ft
- Atlanta, GA: $399K, 1586 sq ft
Each one of these places has a cost of living (excluding real estate) less than 50% that of CA as a whole. All >1M size metros.
The most expensive, Atlanta, has a combined monthly payment inc taxes of $1700 a month on a 30-yr. That's $20,400 a year. Median plumber salary in Atlanta is $63K a year, so this would be 1/3rd their income.
Once again, that's median salary and salaries rise sharply at mid-career, and median home price.
People just live on a lower standard of living and get by with less. For example, my sister just bought a $28,000 3 bedroom house. It's a boring old company home, in a boring and uneducated area of the country. But, she has lived there all her life and enjoys the people and culture.
Make $20/hour like most folks in this working class neighborhood do and you are all set. Get a roommate or a spouse that works part time if you can't earn $20/hr.
Maybe it's all about [over]population and age distributions.
* https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
A sizeable portion live on the coast:
> As of 2014, nearly 40% of the population lived in counties on the coast.
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
So presumably there's a decent amount of space 'in the middle'.
GDP would be enormously increased, if eg more people could move to New York City or Silicon Valley.
See also https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o...
The problem historically has been the distribution of that additional wealth. It's common to see cycles of increasing rent seeking, followed by de-urbanization/migration, and then a gradual return to cities.
Though if more and higher construction were legal, they could afford a bigger place in dense urban cities, too.
(Of course, the number of plots for single family houses is limited. But there's no limit to how big your apartments can be, if you are willing to stack them.)
Increase in GDP means that someone is making more money. And you seldom have to _require_ anything to get people to make more money. Companies and workers already have the option to negotiate remote working arrangements. And had for a long time.
> Imagine if every small town in the country had HN types bringing money into the local economy instead of taking it out.
They'd just take it out to another 'local' economy. What makes some random spot more deserving than some other random spot?
And in any case, on a macro scale there's basically as much money in the national economy as the Fed wants there to be.
If there's some process that makes money magically vanish (eg perhaps those wacky foreigners selling you goods but then just burying the cash you pay them, instead of spending it), then the Fed will just issue more money to make up for the shortfall.
Similarly, if those foreigners dig the money back up, the Fed will just sell a few items off their balance sheet to soak up the extra money.
Inflation adjusted GDP is a completely independent measure/concept/entity/quantity from money supply.
The first was about real GDP, and natural incentives vs legal requirements.
The second was about money supply vs worrying about keeping money in the local economies.
(I agree that the parent comment is unconvincing.)
They are independent entities as measured state of an economy at single points in time. Money supply doesn't tell you what GDP is, or vice versa. Normalizing GDB for inflation is about removing even that connection.
But as far as the dynamics of an economy everything is related to everything. Changes happening to one spill into effects on the other, although as we both know, often not in a simple way.
Productivity is really mostly a measure of value capture.
So when we say 'productive' we can just mean 'rich people in specific companies hoarding profits and income' and then assume that this is 'productive' by the more common definition.
The problem is that those areas may not quite be more 'productive' per say, but that there's a power imbalance.
I believe that actually they are more productive, but the White Collar workers are playing on a global scale, but the plumber can still only work on a local scale.
It probably would require a 'multi pronged' solution of tweaking taxes, services, building more homes, upping the interest rate, getting companies to spread out a bit etc..
Those people who want to be crammed (in return for higher income) should be allowed to cram.
As a nice side-effect, that leaves more of the rest of the world free for non-crammers.
China and India (to take just the two biggest countries) have become massively more productive and massively richer since those bad old days. Thanks to their integration into the world economy, today blue collar workers can afford riches undreamt-of in the 1970s.
All the luxury you could dream of, as long as you don't dream of a home or medical care.
For medical care: 1970s style medical care is basically outlawed today, and there's lots of regulation. Eg if you want to open a new hospital, the existing hospital in your area that you would compete with have veto rights, and use them. See eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... or look for 'Certificate of Need' in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-co...
For housing: see eg https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o...
Basically, building houses used to be legal in the 1970s. Now it's illegal in many parts of the US.
Essentially they're screwed up because American union power was destroyed by oligarchs and blue collar workers subsequently lost political representation.
"Everything bad is caused by government regulations!" was a story told repeatedly in many different forms by lavishly funded Koch think tanks (mercatus, which you cited, being just one example) and filtered through other oligarch run mainstream media outlets.
It was inspiredly largely by their battles with their nemesis - the EPA in the 70s/80s and was largely successful at promoting the "overregulation = bad" meme amongst the American proletariat. This was subsequently leveraged by Koch-funded politicians to democratically strip EPA regulations on their behalf.
Who said that? I mentioned two things that are bad because of regulations. But that doesn't mean that regulation is to blame for everything that's bad. Eg try as they may, regulation isn't what's keeping me from running 100m in 10s.
> Essentially they're screwed up because American union power was destroyed by oligarchs and blue collar workers subsequently lost political representation.
Huh? American auto union just got the fisc to pay them about four thousand dollars per electric car they make. I'm not sure how they lost political representation.
It's a common theme in the source you linked to which I gave the Koch backstory for.
>But that doesn't mean that regulation is to blame for everything that's bad.
Clearly not.
>Huh? American auto union just got the fisc to pay them about four thousand dollars per electric car they make.
The Build Back Better Act hasn't passed yet.
Big societal problems don't have one simple solution because if they did they'd be solved and they wouldn't be big societal problems.
Well, have you looked at those other countries?
Housing become more expensive has been a fairly broad trend in many countries. Looking at specific examples (and looking at their other problems) is instructive, indeed.
Most goods are tradable, and for decades now manufacture of consumer goods relocates relatively quickly in search of low cost labor. This leaves a surplus of workers behind, suppressing wages in industries with low costs of entry--remaining manufacturing but especially non-professional services.
IOW, labor markets are strongly globalized from the perspective of capital. A little less so from the perspective of laborers, though their wages remain stagnant all the same, so in many ways it's a distinction without a difference.
That's something we can look into.
Not necessarily, as the laborers displaced by off-shoring are now competing in the labor pool for many other non-tradeable industries. That's what I meant when I said, "suppressing wages in industries with low costs of entry--remaining manufacturing but especially non-professional services." An increase in supply relative to demand usually will mean a lower clearing price (i.e. more people for fewer jobs usually means lower accepted wages).
The U.S. population growth rate right now is easily the lowest it's ever been, except for the 1930s.
Agreed that housing and medical constriction are a big part of what's going on.
And it's a shame that it ain't larger: people migrating to more productive areas of the country is one way to increase the standard of living.
In the 70s a blue collar worker could buy a house and look after their family. Now we have massive asset price inflation due to low interest rates and not enough growth in housing assets. This can lead to future social unrest on a massive scale (not just occasional riots/protests).