Wasn't even 20 years ago that housing was affordable by working class people.
We seem very far away from any sort of political shift that would change this.
There are plenty of places where you could get a cheap house, that's just not where people would want to live most of the time.
And we know pretty well what mechanism drive the insane prices in city properties. Its not that big a mystery and certainty not to the point where we should claim our modern economy is 'neo-feudalsim'.
I'd love a more nuanced term, but I don't think 'minimal social mobility' is snappy enough to catch on. What's a better label? Asking sincerely as a person with only a passing familiarity of historic economies.
> we know pretty well what mechanism drive the insane prices
Asking four people here would yield five different answers. And they'd all be somewhat correct and correlated!
Terms such a 'Neo-liberalism' is a become meaningless term that has been project into every possible direction by ever possible social scientist and amateur and have become so broad that it basically means 'it exists in the world currently'. The same fate would happen to uses like 'Neo-feudalism'.
At some point one just has to spell out what the actual problem is.
> Asking four people here would yield five different answers. And they'd all be somewhat correct and correlated!
I think we can argue about some of the drivers, but the fundamental reason is a simple supply and demand. One can argue why there is so much demand, or not enough supply.
I think we have a pretty clear understanding why in most western cities supply failing to grow as fast as demand.
'Sound byte' reductive labels seem to be a symptom, not a cause, of political tribalism. Or they are both side effects of attention driven add-supported platforms, where the degenerate strategy for attention is outrage. Or they're all mutually reinforcing.
I want to live in the world where labels still have value. But that will require a cultural shift back to people listening to each other. "Supply and demand" is a simple label, but we can still say it and unpack all the ways it's manipulated. We just need to let words be stepping stones and not lines in the sand.
Anyway, that's getting very meta and further from a chat on feudalism. Insights I'd love to hear from a historian include: How much worse was serfdom than current wage slavery? How much of that was a function of technology? What alternative (better?) systems existed at the same technology level? What forces led to feudalism being replaced? Do they have contemporary analogues that can now help us reduce wealth inequality and protect the middle class?
Asking just because it sounds interesting. Not trying to pigeon hole your politics OR have you write my undergrad history paper. Cheers.
We are at the point in British Columbia where this no longer the case. Doesn't matter if it's a quasi-ghost town in the deep interior of this province with zero economy. It's still priced beyond a working class salary.
These areas don't WANT to create cheaper housing.