20 September

Human groups and whole societies will not make important changes until total disasters force those changes. Without those disasters (wars, pandemics, natural disasters), humans only ever do one thing. They fight for status. In groups or teams. Those teams battle each other, like sports. You can see it with housing. All the nonsense about ‘the housing market’. It doesn’t exist. Only one thing ever gave us mass home ownership. Two wars, WW1 and WW2, and a pandemic, the Spanish Flu. Those catastrophes in quick succession forced emergency action, bypassing our usual status games. Without catastrophes disrupting the status games, housing will just become a status symbol, with values going up and up into the stratosphere. Tell me that’s not us right now.