Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market…
Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource, for massive profit. /1
We have no AFFORDABLE housing. A completely different thing. Many Australians own multiple properties, while others can’t afford even to rent. Turning housing into a market led to accumulation of it, for profit. Every new ‘supply’ into that market is quickly gobbled up. /2
Not by first homebuyers, but by investors. Or first homebuyers willing to take on loans that cripple them financially for the rest of their lives. The industry of course calls for more ‘supply’, just as the gas industry does. More of what it sells. /3
Politicians are big recipients of donations from both industries. So that’s where we end up, another win for elections, which open the door to widespread political corruption. Popularity politics fails again, and will always fail. It’s not greed, as the anti-capitalists say. /4
Capitalism isn’t even a thing. It’s a label made up by theorists to apply to a society that has never once deviated from the basic social behaviours that have been with us for all of our history. Conformity, status, hierarchy. That’s it. No socialism or communism either. /5
Al of those -isms are idealistic tosh, assuming society could ever be organised enough to come even close to organising itself across its entire extent, with one set of ideas. We can’t even fix potholes in roads. Let alone faff about with all of the ‘means of production’. /6
Housing right now is a status instrument, as everything is, in a society. That’s why we accumulate it, not just to get wealth, but to achieve status. That’s what all groups do, of whatever size. There are only 3 things that ever interrupt this process, which I’ve said before. /7
Natural disasters, plagues, and regulation. Regulation only tends to work if coming on the back of the first two, otherwise the great (social) push is always to de-regulation i.e. unchallenged hierarchical status games. We need to regulate the housing and gas markets. /8
As with masks and Covid, regulation is not a restriction on activity. It enables social activity that violates existing social norms/hierarchies. That’s why humans invented the law, to short-circuit the social processes of conformity, hierarchy and status. /9
We are all ‘equal before the law’. In theory, as above, without a cattle prod up the arse from natural disasters and plagues the law also tends to be captured by the same social games. We know this, it was our high school life. The ‘cool’ people (high status) always won. /10
Societies that succeed in the longer term don’t change this basic social mechanism of conformity, hierarchy and status. (it can’t be changed, we’re social animals.) They re-purpose it, so that status accrues to those who do useful things. Difficult but not impossible to do. /11
Look at the Germans today, where engineering and trades are very high status activities. Germany is a fantastically pragmatic, can-do society in modern terms, relative to the free-market fantasies that govern most of its major competitions. Not perfect, because nothing is. /12
But they get stuff done, they build things. Lots of things. Lots of useful things, that are desperately needed. As do the Chinese, the world’s factory. Expertise has always attracted status in China, in modern times at least. In the West it’s now considered an ‘elite’. /13
Instead, in the West, we have social media now running countries, aggregating the moronic opinions of all of us on topics we know nothing about, acting as roadblocks to action in just about every critical area of need. Countries run by ‘likes’, by popularity. /14
By social media, by elections. You will never, ever succeed as a society hitching social status games to popularity. It’s impossible. Anything can be made to be liked, it’s just marketing. No matter how useless or even lethal. Even doing nothing against a pandemic virus. /end