A major reason that a lot of people are unhappy (that people don't talk about enough) is that our society has made housing about 6 times more expensive than it needs to be.

A huge amount of everyone's income disappears into a black hole that's caused by this.

Money is the universal representation of value; when you spend $20 in theory someone is doing roughly one hour of work just for you.

For example, I can get a weekly food shop for about $60 at Lidl. So making food for one person for one week takes 3 hours of work.

This is a great deal. At no previous point in human history could you feed a man for 3 hours of work.

So how much does accommodation cost?

I pay about $200/week for accommodation. But I know people in the USA who pay about $500/week.

And that $500/week is for a so-so apartment for 1 person in a so-so area of Los Angeles. That's 25 hours of work per week, for the whole of your life, just to not be homeless, or 8-10x what you need to spend on food.

Where does all the value go?

It essentially gets burned. Paying for housing is a zero-sum money-burning game that people play in order to compete to be in a nice neighborhood (i.e. to exclude from their lives the small number of people who generate huge negative externalities)

If we could just fix this one thing, life would improve by a huge amount.

It would be easy too; just pay existing homeowners a nice fat lump sum and then eradicate all the local planning regulations and zoning that restricts housing supply.

If you want to see what the process that creates this problem is, look at this from @reason:

Also (credit @nosilverv):

Also, instead of charging people loads of money to exclude people from nice neighborhoods, test people for criminality and other sources of negative externalities (whatever they are). But that conflicts with implicit vs explicit status hierarchies.

And just for the record, a lot of other people have already said this. I'm not claiming any original insight here. Well, except the part about criminality tests for neighborhoods, I haven't heard that one before. https://twitter.com/kartuzija/status/1318474461327331328

Speculation on houses is only a good investment if there is an under-supply of housing. If more and more new houses are built and house prices fall then it's a bad investment.

The problem is homeowners control the house supply

https://twitter.com/beowulf332/status/1318502551105527808