There is a viral post doing the rounds on my Facebook feed at present. that expands on the fatuous trope that young adults could afford houses if they didn’t buy nice lunches. While I used to”viral” in its modern, derived, sense of spreading from user to user across the internet, it fits pretty well with the original meaning of “virus” as poison, too.
I might be a member of the last generation to be soundly taught Arithmetic in primary school. After my time, children got increasingly faddy Maths instruction, and that seems to have handicapped many of them for life in understanding numbers, and money. I will consider the obnoxious sentiments of the post further down, but the first refutation is to address the egregious innumeracy of it.
The post I refer to lays the blame for most of the current generation of young adults being unable to buy homes of their own on extravagant lifestyle spending. It is getting reposted a lot by the kind of people who complain about German executive cars parked outside social housing, too, and rests on the same inability to meaningfully compare numbers. In the Britain I was born into, a modest family house cost about three years’ average wages, and, although a little out of reach for an unskilled labourer, a clerk or tradesman could buy a house for their family on a single wage. Indeed, there was a need for frugality to make ends meet, but they were austere times with not much to miss out on. Much of a 2020s lifestyle was unavailable, or even not yet invented.
Move on two-thirds of a century, and things are very different. A family home will cost ten or twenty years’ average wages, according to location, and needs both partners paying large chunks of good wages. To root the general argument in personal example, in the late 50’s my father bought a house. He spent three years’ salary on it. I now earn about thirty times what he did then, although he had a better job than me, so a fairer figure would be that his job would bring in forty times as much. However, that house is now worth three hundred times what he paid for it, and would still be worth one hundred and fifty times as a “fixer-upper”, had it been faithfully kept in its Fifties configuration. Taking the upper wage figure, but also the upper price figure, as we are comparing the house ready to move into, 300:40 reduces to a seven and a half to one ratio for how much more expensive buying a house has got in real terms, and multiplied out by the three years’ earnings we started with, the actual cost/wage ratio is over twenty-two years’ earnings to buy a house. Potential borrowers and potential lenders alike are going to look at that and say “Nope!”. Those calculations seem trivially easy to me, and it is a sad indictment of 70s teaching that people a decade younger than me cannot understand, themselves. Or maybe they could understand, but have darker reasons to avoid the necessary thought.
There is a world-view, the broad left one, that all people matter. There is a competing world-view, the broad right one, that we are here to serve the elites, most of us don’t actually matter, and we should not get ideas above our station. Both sides are perplexed that the other can think such things, but the hard truth is that both schools of thought do have to share an uncomfortable co-existence in the real world. For myself, I will happily and even proudly endorse All People Matter as one of the foundations of my sense of morality. However, I can see how those on a mission to abase themselves to their lords and masters could resent seeing fellow members of the hoi polloi having a few of the trappings of wealth. It appalls me that they are too enraged by it to be able to do the simple calculations I went through earlier,though, but like I said, later cohorts didn’t get the privilege of the boring but effective arithmetic tuition mine did, so maybe the calculations aren’t simple to them. I suppose some of them are dreaming of cashing out homes they bought decades ago for many times what they paid, and want to see eager customers queuing to pay top prices, so they don’t like to see money that could have gone towards buying their property going on nice lunches instead.
Lastly, let us take a look at the matter from the perspective of the non-buyers. If buying a house is out of reach, it is a self-punishing vanity to divert the money they could have lived comfortably on into saving a deposit that can never be enough. So an office clerk might as well take avocado toast and a latte back to her desk at lunchtime, or a carpenter put the proceeds of a particularly good contract into a ten year old Audi to park by his housing association flat. That so many people can get angry about their peers having things that they think should be for their betters is a terrible thing really. Neither the snobbery of thinking some people should not have nice things, nor the arrogance of telling them how to spend their own money are good. The deterioration of public morals is causal to the rise of the right wing. You can’t stop people thinking bad stuff inside the privacy of their own heads, but we need to be more ready to shut them down when they start saying it out loud. Human nature will be what it is, but there have been plenty of times and places when good has been encouraged and bad discouraged, to the benefit of all, and we could do with being less tolerant of being bad. Did any serious philosopher ever propose a Right To Be Nasty? I think not, so it disappoints me to get nasty copypasta in my social media.
