I wonder what the housing market would look like if individuals couldn’t get mortgages, but investors couldn’t either?

Availability of credit has a huge impact on prices, and landlordism is mostly founded on cheap credit.

It's not important, it's the cornerstone of modern society. It's a really bad cornerstone though, like great filter level bad

What problem does it solve that couldn't be better solved in another way?

Not many societies developed a system of redistribution. We live in one of the extremely few that have, and it took a lot of smart people a lot of time (and infighting) to get into something that works.

We just need to apply it.

This comment on the post indicates that it's a CitizenWatch article, but that article's own listed sources don't support the 60% number either (as I call out in my response to that comment).

I swear there's barely anywhere online anymore where people practice basic skepticism. If it aligns with their existing biases they just slurp it up, no matter how absurd.

There are many examples of this being essentially the status quo in many places and historical eras and essentially it just makes housing availability worse since only the ultra wealthy can afford to build expensive structures and they just accumulate more wealth and power. Think about in the middle ages when a local lord would have to foot the bill to build townhouses completely up front but he and his descendants would retain ownership of them and demand payment to live in them for hundreds of years to come. There are places where access to credit is poor today where people basically live in makeshift shacks if they don't rent because they can't afford to buy houses otherwise. There are a lot of ways to fix land ownership and exploitation by landlords, but historically speaking, this was not it. I know nobody likes living in debt and debt can be used for exploitation, but completely abolishing credit simply will not have good outcomes as a whole.

A split payment doesn't necessarily mean being destitute either. My wife and I keep our finances separate and do split payments when we go grocery shopping together.

Unironically, it used to be called "Horse and Sparrow Economics," with the rich eating grains, and the poors pecking their meals from the horseshit.

True story

Great search, thank you!

You (and the other guy that replied) are indeed thinking of usury (which is a very evil thing, even frowned upon by most religions), which is the situation of lending assets to for the sake of profit

Debt on the other hand is a more general concept, did you ever borrow a pen from another person? While you were writing you were in debt for that pen (but this is a silly example that can be disregarded)

Did your parents take care of you as a child? In most cultures, thar means you're in debt and owe them care when they get old (though I understand that this varies from culture to culture, but the idea is there anyway)
If you are friendly to your neighbors and they invite you home to dinner several times, you are also expected to pay back the favor sometime down the road, this is another form of debt

To sum it up, debt is much more intrinsic to our behavior as humans than we usually think, even though "formal debt" might not be

Why was your house worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because we use debt. How do you think people lived for thousands of years? Home mortgages weren't a normal thing until like 100 years ago

Societies without it found workarounds, because it's easy. It's tempting. It's a money dupe glitch combined with gambling. If anyone uses it, they get an insurmountable advantage over all players who don't. It's moloch, it's the demon of racing to the bottom

You should not be able to spend your future

People didn't own their houses for the most part. Have you ever taken even a freshman level economics class, by the way?

Sadly, Americans are groomed at a young age to dive deep into debt early in life. It has become normalized for most of the population to carry some form of debt (credit cards and student loans are popular choices).

Most people don't even bother making a budget — a task that only needs to be done once a month, and is easier now than ever, thanks to technology.

it never trickles down.

Try and make a budget for minimum wage. Many people can't afford to live even meagerly.

Why bother budgeting if you're just going to lose anyway?

Username checks out.

...You assume that I haven't? I originally had to learn to budget when I was making less than minimum wage, to avoid homelessness. Budgeting can be even more important with less money.

Should’ve been 96% or something—the same as the percentage of people I hope realized the number couldn’t possibly be accurate. Make it truly absurd if it won’t be accurate!

@[email protected] might consider swapping the image with an edit or adding brackets after the title or something - know you’re just resharing fuňe meme

I'm not quite at the bottom but I can see it from here.

Yes. And FYI, micro and macro economics are bullshit. They're easily digestible lies that don't hold up to the real world. There's real studies of economics going on at higher levels, but what gets boosted is essentially propaganda to justify political positions

Have you ever had a good history class, where instead of myths written by the winners they told the stories of people and how they interact? Where they break down the system into players, and go over the same event from many points of view? All the very human drives and politics, the infinite compromises that get grandfathered in, the true analysis of "how did we get here"?

The world is made up of systems. I build, analyze, and fix systems, it's what I do. The only way to analyze a system or a change is to run it through, turning it over in your mind from one perspective after another, until you start to understand how it fits together

Know what every society in the past has done? Collapse. The ones with debt collapse after about 250 years, every time. It's an inevitability... Some societies fail into the next iteration instead of going through a dark age, but they all collapse.

Debt creates a boom bust cycle that grows exponentially. It's inherently unstable.

But some failed from external factors. From disease and colonization. There's one empire that I find very interesting in that regard...the incas

Maybe they would've collapsed too, but their system seems a lot more stable to me. And I don't think it had any idea of debt, of selling the future

noticing harder