Finally, someone pointing out the disconnect with house prices. The news stories are interesting; no matter what happens with home prices, it's presented as a disaster. "Home prices increase, now they're unaffordable to new home owners." "Home prices decline in lost value bloodbath" Yes, both are true for different groups. It really highlights the fallacy of treating homes as one's primary investment. You can only profit from that investment when you die or move to very cheap area because you have to live somewhere. It's a lot of captive wealth that really only increases people's cost of living. So you end up with both people worth $1.5 million and can't afford lemons, and young people wanting to go where the jobs are, but they can't afford it, meaning they are also squeezed to the point where they don't feel like they can have kids.
More damaging than that is treating other people's homes as your primary investment, because then the interests of the person who owns the house and the people who live in the house are not aligned. And that's increasingly the case. Although we're at a peak of owner occupiers right now the proportion of them on a mortgage vs. owning outright is shifting in favour of the latter and that means the supply of *new* owners has been strangled off. The rental sector will increase and consolidate further, because the large owners can always afford to outbid the individual. So when granny does downsize to free up the value of her million pound home the up and coming family with three kids who would really benefit from living in it can't outbid the landlord with 80 other houses and can only end up renting forever. Which isn't just them not "building value" it's them building value *for someone else* at their own expense and also is a cost that never goes away. Even without considering the equity in the home having a *paid off mortgage* is a huge month on month cost relief to the average person's life that almost nobody born after about 1980 will ever see. That means that the people who own the houses will benefit from increased prices but the people who live in them will directly lose out from that same increase.
The UK really has dug a big hole for itself. House price inflation has distorted the economy. There are lots of households in London now where the value of the house is worth 10x the annual income of the occupants. We need a shift in the UK to tackle nimbyism and planning bureaucracy and so ensure that enough new houses are being built to stabilise house prices. If this can be achieved then we also need to make home owners aware that when they retire in 20 years downsizing won't pay for their retirement. Because this problem has just been ignored by successive governments it is now really difficult to solve.
@@formxshape partially, but if that was the only reason, it's strange that it took 10 years to materialize. Also, of that were the only reason, you'd expect a building boom to take advantage of the new demand. Instead construction plummeted in the entire English-speaking world. I'm not saying I disagree, you are right, but it's more complicated than just 2008's money printing. The fact that there are many other factors is a good thing, bc it means we have power to change things through local zoning laws, training more construction workers, etc. If it were only money printing, no one but the central bank could change anything
I like listening to Rory and much of what he says is interesting and accurate. The reason property prices are so high is down to the money lenders. When I bought my first flat, I could borrow two and a half times my income. The building society wrote…it was a long time ago….to my employer to confirm my declared income. Decades later a friend of mine was told he could borrow eight or nine times his income, one guy said make up your own figure, tell us how much you’d like, and have you got a partner ? they can borrow too ! Hence the price of property rises and rises and rises. As a pensioner it’s not my fault. I left school at fifteen, paid national insurance until I retired. Paid income tax, got a private pension with money I’d already paid tax on, I still pay tax on that. Other than two weeks on the dole between jobs I’ve not had, income supplement, housing benefit, nor child benefit. If employers paid their employees properly the tax payer wouldn’t need to top up their income.
Very sensible words from Rory on the economic 'monstrosity' and societal insanity of ever increasing house prices. His views very much align with my own. Indeed, his insights with regard to economics in general are very good. He is more use than all the conventional economists put together.
The more I listen to this guy the more he sounds like a genius. His thoughts on the UK housing market / taxation are a real eye opener. It's interesting that a lot of what he says chimes with the ideas of Gary Stevenson, another high achiever who seems to have understood where we're all heading if something isn't done fast.
I disagree with the train example Rory often provides. The aim of faster train journeys is to increase capacity on the railway line. There's only one railway line in each direction. Adding half an hour to a Eurostar train ride might lose one or two train journeys during the day, reducing the number of people who can make the journey each day. And it would increase the price of fares making less competitive with ferries and airlines. If you want an extra half an hour sipping coffee with your laptop, you can do that in a cafe at your destination.
Doesn't he say that trying to make it physically faster is not such a good idea and most people would actually happier with a more enjoyable comfortable ride... also this is cheaper to do..than to push the physics of train development..which is harder and more expensive
The contention isn’t the implementation of high speed rail. It’s the decision to spend extraordinary amounts of money to go from 300km/h to 340km/h when it came to hs2. The need to move high speed traffic off the west coast mainline to increase capacity has always been a conceit of his. But the increase in speed on the new high speed line of 40km/h gives no capacity benefits. The reality of hs1 is there isn’t enough high speed traffic to fill the line so a significant amount of freight moves along the line in the gaps. The majority of train delays in the uk are caused by signal faults. You could spend 1billion on fixing the signalling issues, increase the capacity of the network AND reliability that would be a fraction of what we have paid for those extra 40km/h.
@@DaveSmith-s6eno you couldn't just spend a billion on signals and sort out the UKs rail system. Firstly signalling isn't that cheap and secondly the busy bits of the UKs rail system are at capacity. Running HS2 at 300kph wouldn't save very much money so you might as well design for faster trains which are becoming standard as technology progresses. Something like a Velcro Novo would just less electricity at 350 than a Eurostar at 300 anyway.. Rory's argument on rail misses the wider question or how to optimise the rail system and ideas like models and champagne would cost more than the rail infrastructure and airlines proved people don't want to pay extra for food and attractive staff.
@@adodgygeeza the technology for signalling is outdated. It involves passing an electrical current from one side of the track, through the axel of the train, to the opposite track, and feeding that signal back to a control centre. Periodically, the NMT (big yellow train) goes around to check the signal strength and if a signal fails, those two sections of track on either side become a new single piece of track. The Europeans have been building out the ERTMS which integrates GPS into the system. I hope I don’t need to explain to you why integrating GPS into signalling is a good thing and why using satellite infrastructure is cheaper than physical infrastructure in remote locations And yes, running trains slower changes the requirements for stopping distances, signal distances, brake capacity, max track angle, max track bank along with many other things. Trains are big complex machines, it’s not like sticking a turbo in your Vauxhall nova. The decision to go 340 km/h was Boris’ ego.
London was swinging in the mid-late 1990s. Young people could afford to buy property (just) so you had a young stakeholding demographic that brought civic pride into many boroughs (termed gentrification, back then). Since about 2005, I've noticed fewer people can afford to buy property and the increase in the demogrpahic of renters has seen off the civic pride. It's dull now; desparately dull. Everyone is so miserable as Rory suggests in the video because everything is so expensive!
Such a Great Interview, especially the take on Real Estate. I Subscribed to your Podcat in the hopes you will interview more thought lesders like Rory. Well done!
34:01 I’d say the U.K. equivalent of trailer parks would be canal boats. Lots more people living on those because relatively it’s more affordable. But much like the million dollar trailer park in Florida that’s near a beach if you’ve got a canal boat in a good mooring in central London- a boat that anywhere else would go for 20k goes for a million! So 🤷
As a surfer I remember police taking out ppl from the water. Police trying to break in to my house party is another one. Funny how your memories from pandemic set's you as a sheep or almost guerilla fighter. Finally i just escape to Mexico. Another similarity to ww2 in my mind
Rory suggests a tax on unimproved land. Unimproved land is now an important part of our landscape. It relieves stress on our wildlife. Most of it is unsuitable for farming. We don't need more cafes and shopping outlets. Unused land in urban areas will be employed if people really want to live and work there. There are plenty of abandoned buildings in northern towns because nobody wants to live there.
It's not a tax on "unimproved land", it's a tax on all land *at its unimproved value*. It's a tax on the wealthy that they can't run away from by going abroad because they can't take a significant percentage of Surrey with them. There are lots of abandoned buildings all over the country because the value of the land they're on will appreciate no matter what pile of crap is there, and so it's worth hanging on to in order to do something profitable with later. (Remember that if you're a housebuilder, say, you get maximum benefit from building *slightly less* houses than people need at a time so there's always price competition maximising your returns.) If that land was taxed at its unimproved value, there would be much more impetus to do something with it that increases its value rather than hanging onto it and sucking up the value of appreciation caused by things you didn't do.
I think he means those building companies who 'land bank' buy chunks of land & dont build or submit plans, thus creating a shortage of similar land, which then makes it worth more , some do this for many years & rarely if at all is green belt. then prices rise, affecting us all. YES 100% they should be taxed
"I was a classicist in university - i then ended up in adverstising". So, he comes from a world that doesn't exist anymore, and even when it did, wasn't accessible to most people. He wasn't expected to have an advanced degree in particle physics to be given a look in at an entry-level position handing out sausage samples at a supermarket. Daddy got him a nice job in an office.
Interestingly the better product lower price probably explains some of the direct to consumer produceres. By suggesting the savings are from greedy middlemen, even if it isn't, you shortcircuit the problem by having it be a "different" product?
Not enough time and effort is devoted to thinking about what was actually great about the pandemic. Shutting down a poisoning, polluting and germ-spreading aviation industry for a bit - that was absolute class. Boris did that.
Wrong regards Irish travellers. Irish travellers are a relic from the old clan system which was semi nomadic. With the collapse of the Gaelic world, it was the ancestors of the travellers who failed to adapt.
There is absolutely zero logical argument (from the consumers perspective) against every single life essential/utility being owned by the state. Anything i need to survive in 2024, the state should have the monopoly of and be legally obliged to provide it.
But sometimes hands, arms etc do spontaneously fall off. 😧It's when someone's head spontaneously just falls off that it actually does become quite a big problem.
The goods were getting cheaper due to a combination of outsourcing the labour to the 3rd world countries fuelled by debt. Both of those things have been exhausted - labour in 3rd world countries is no longer cheap enough and the debt levels are now unsustainable.
@ back then, the cost of living was 3:1 in 1980. It’s 8:1 now and 11:1 in California. The pressure it’s putting on people isn’t reasonable and not sure it’s gonna change unless the people winning in and controlling the market can adjust it without losing money.
Mr Rory, You talked some time ago about an equipment for coffee making you money at home - no it hasn't, no it didn;t - your not making moneg off of it, unless you sell it, you spend less because of it - it's a very bad thinking about thath
Update 2: Add a black box 2/3 of the size of the video with static and boxing ring bells, quickly followed by removing it. No questions asked. No editors required. Update 3: Question if this is a marketing scheme, wonder what the video was even about, and initiate everlasting scepticism
He’s always on about the trains as if less time taken to travel between two points shouldn’t be the absolute one thing to focus on. Get me there and get me off, that’s it. (Still batting 900 on most other things though.)
this guy is always interesting to listen to. he is a talented speaker.
Finally, someone pointing out the disconnect with house prices.
The news stories are interesting; no matter what happens with home prices, it's presented as a disaster. "Home prices increase, now they're unaffordable to new home owners."
"Home prices decline in lost value bloodbath"
Yes, both are true for different groups. It really highlights the fallacy of treating homes as one's primary investment. You can only profit from that investment when you die or move to very cheap area because you have to live somewhere. It's a lot of captive wealth that really only increases people's cost of living. So you end up with both people worth $1.5 million and can't afford lemons, and young people wanting to go where the jobs are, but they can't afford it, meaning they are also squeezed to the point where they don't feel like they can have kids.
More damaging than that is treating other people's homes as your primary investment, because then the interests of the person who owns the house and the people who live in the house are not aligned.
And that's increasingly the case. Although we're at a peak of owner occupiers right now the proportion of them on a mortgage vs. owning outright is shifting in favour of the latter and that means the supply of *new* owners has been strangled off. The rental sector will increase and consolidate further, because the large owners can always afford to outbid the individual. So when granny does downsize to free up the value of her million pound home the up and coming family with three kids who would really benefit from living in it can't outbid the landlord with 80 other houses and can only end up renting forever. Which isn't just them not "building value" it's them building value *for someone else* at their own expense and also is a cost that never goes away. Even without considering the equity in the home having a *paid off mortgage* is a huge month on month cost relief to the average person's life that almost nobody born after about 1980 will ever see.
That means that the people who own the houses will benefit from increased prices but the people who live in them will directly lose out from that same increase.
The UK really has dug a big hole for itself. House price inflation has distorted the economy. There are lots of households in London now where the value of the house is worth 10x the annual income of the occupants. We need a shift in the UK to tackle nimbyism and planning bureaucracy and so ensure that enough new houses are being built to stabilise house prices. If this can be achieved then we also need to make home owners aware that when they retire in 20 years downsizing won't pay for their retirement. Because this problem has just been ignored by successive governments it is now really difficult to solve.
After 2008 UK printed money, that money had to go somewhere… it went into the property asset class.
@@formxshape partially, but if that was the only reason, it's strange that it took 10 years to materialize. Also, of that were the only reason, you'd expect a building boom to take advantage of the new demand. Instead construction plummeted in the entire English-speaking world.
I'm not saying I disagree, you are right, but it's more complicated than just 2008's money printing. The fact that there are many other factors is a good thing, bc it means we have power to change things through local zoning laws, training more construction workers, etc. If it were only money printing, no one but the central bank could change anything
@@Avlec1000 we need to ban HMOs and buy to let mortgages
I like listening to Rory and much of what he says is interesting and accurate. The reason property prices are so high is down to the money lenders. When I bought my first flat, I could borrow two and a half times my income. The building society wrote…it was a long time ago….to my employer to confirm my declared income. Decades later a friend of mine was told he could borrow eight or nine times his income, one guy said make up your own figure, tell us how much you’d like, and have you got a partner ? they can borrow too ! Hence the price of property rises and rises and rises.
As a pensioner it’s not my fault. I left school at fifteen, paid national insurance until I retired. Paid income tax, got a private pension with money I’d already paid tax on, I still pay tax on that. Other than two weeks on the dole between jobs I’ve not had, income supplement, housing benefit, nor child benefit. If employers paid their employees properly the tax payer wouldn’t need to top up their income.
The German sociologist Rory is talking about in 7th minute is Hartmut Rosa and the book is called Social acceleration ( Beschleunigung in German ).
Very sensible words from Rory on the economic 'monstrosity' and societal insanity of ever increasing house prices. His views very much align with my own. Indeed, his insights with regard to economics in general are very good. He is more use than all the conventional economists put together.
Did you not watch the video back before uploading? Wtf was that black box at 1:00
The more I listen to this guy the more he sounds like a genius. His thoughts on the UK housing market / taxation are a real eye opener. It's interesting that a lot of what he says chimes with the ideas of Gary Stevenson, another high achiever who seems to have understood where we're all heading if something isn't done fast.
I disagree with the train example Rory often provides. The aim of faster train journeys is to increase capacity on the railway line. There's only one railway line in each direction. Adding half an hour to a Eurostar train ride might lose one or two train journeys during the day, reducing the number of people who can make the journey each day. And it would increase the price of fares making less competitive with ferries and airlines. If you want an extra half an hour sipping coffee with your laptop, you can do that in a cafe at your destination.
Doesn't he say that trying to make it physically faster is not such a good idea and most people would actually happier with a more enjoyable comfortable ride... also this is cheaper to do..than to push the physics of train development..which is harder and more expensive
@tonyhussey3610 yes thats pretty much what he says. But tye point being made here is a very good one which is not considered in Rorys analogy.
The contention isn’t the implementation of high speed rail. It’s the decision to spend extraordinary amounts of money to go from 300km/h to 340km/h when it came to hs2. The need to move high speed traffic off the west coast mainline to increase capacity has always been a conceit of his. But the increase in speed on the new high speed line of 40km/h gives no capacity benefits. The reality of hs1 is there isn’t enough high speed traffic to fill the line so a significant amount of freight moves along the line in the gaps. The majority of train delays in the uk are caused by signal faults. You could spend 1billion on fixing the signalling issues, increase the capacity of the network AND reliability that would be a fraction of what we have paid for those extra 40km/h.
@@DaveSmith-s6eno you couldn't just spend a billion on signals and sort out the UKs rail system. Firstly signalling isn't that cheap and secondly the busy bits of the UKs rail system are at capacity. Running HS2 at 300kph wouldn't save very much money so you might as well design for faster trains which are becoming standard as technology progresses. Something like a Velcro Novo would just less electricity at 350 than a Eurostar at 300 anyway.. Rory's argument on rail misses the wider question or how to optimise the rail system and ideas like models and champagne would cost more than the rail infrastructure and airlines proved people don't want to pay extra for food and attractive staff.
@@adodgygeeza the technology for signalling is outdated. It involves passing an electrical current from one side of the track, through the axel of the train, to the opposite track, and feeding that signal back to a control centre. Periodically, the NMT (big yellow train) goes around to check the signal strength and if a signal fails, those two sections of track on either side become a new single piece of track. The Europeans have been building out the ERTMS which integrates GPS into the system. I hope I don’t need to explain to you why integrating GPS into signalling is a good thing and why using satellite infrastructure is cheaper than physical infrastructure in remote locations
And yes, running trains slower changes the requirements for stopping distances, signal distances, brake capacity, max track angle, max track bank along with many other things. Trains are big complex machines, it’s not like sticking a turbo in your Vauxhall nova. The decision to go 340 km/h was Boris’ ego.
This is probably the most middle class podcast I've ever listened to.
Ha yeah. I feel clever and posh just listening. Whilst looking out the window of our family 'one' bedroom council flat 😄
London was swinging in the mid-late 1990s. Young people could afford to buy property (just) so you had a young stakeholding demographic that brought civic pride into many boroughs (termed gentrification, back then). Since about 2005, I've noticed fewer people can afford to buy property and the increase in the demogrpahic of renters has seen off the civic pride. It's dull now; desparately dull. Everyone is so miserable as Rory suggests in the video because everything is so expensive!
Is it not the out of control none White crime that is more of a cause for misery?
South Africa only had TV in the mid 70's.
My family (Black) had it in 1979. A big wooden framed SALORA.
Fantastic impression of Miriam Margoyles.
If you get a power cut, call 105 to report it. Don't assume it's a general blackout and it will be fixed automatically.
An old boy decades ago told me that fish & chips is always approximately the hourly wage.
Such a Great Interview, especially the take on Real Estate. I Subscribed to your Podcat in the hopes you will interview more thought lesders like Rory. Well done!
34:01 I’d say the U.K. equivalent of trailer parks would be canal boats. Lots more people living on those because relatively it’s more affordable. But much like the million dollar trailer park in Florida that’s near a beach if you’ve got a canal boat in a good mooring in central London- a boat that anywhere else would go for 20k goes for a million! So 🤷
Whatsup with the rest of the video?
It just cuts off at the end.
As a surfer I remember police taking out ppl from the water. Police trying to break in to my house party is another one.
Funny how your memories from pandemic set's you as a sheep or almost guerilla fighter.
Finally i just escape to Mexico. Another similarity to ww2 in my mind
Rory suggests a tax on unimproved land. Unimproved land is now an important part of our landscape. It relieves stress on our wildlife. Most of it is unsuitable for farming. We don't need more cafes and shopping outlets. Unused land in urban areas will be employed if people really want to live and work there. There are plenty of abandoned buildings in northern towns because nobody wants to live there.
It's not because noone wants to live there. It's because developers sit on the land in the hop of building a high rise instead of four family homes
It's not a tax on "unimproved land", it's a tax on all land *at its unimproved value*. It's a tax on the wealthy that they can't run away from by going abroad because they can't take a significant percentage of Surrey with them.
There are lots of abandoned buildings all over the country because the value of the land they're on will appreciate no matter what pile of crap is there, and so it's worth hanging on to in order to do something profitable with later. (Remember that if you're a housebuilder, say, you get maximum benefit from building *slightly less* houses than people need at a time so there's always price competition maximising your returns.)
If that land was taxed at its unimproved value, there would be much more impetus to do something with it that increases its value rather than hanging onto it and sucking up the value of appreciation caused by things you didn't do.
I think he means those building companies who 'land bank' buy chunks of land & dont build or submit plans, thus creating a shortage of similar land, which then makes it worth more , some do this for many years & rarely if at all is green belt. then prices rise, affecting us all. YES 100% they should be taxed
No one said you couldn't have distinctions and carve outs for kand that provides a formcof utility that isn't commercial
A true scientist is creative. Modern science has become a set of bureaucratic rules. The university system destroyed it.
The flickering logo is distracting
I thought it was problem with my phone
25:05 I think he means "most of the things that are made in China..."
"I was a classicist in university - i then ended up in adverstising". So, he comes from a world that doesn't exist anymore, and even when it did, wasn't accessible to most people. He wasn't expected to have an advanced degree in particle physics to be given a look in at an entry-level position handing out sausage samples at a supermarket. Daddy got him a nice job in an office.
Interestingly the better product lower price probably explains some of the direct to consumer produceres. By suggesting the savings are from greedy middlemen, even if it isn't, you shortcircuit the problem by having it be a "different" product?
Excellent again🎂
Not enough time and effort is devoted to thinking about what was actually great about the pandemic. Shutting down a poisoning, polluting and germ-spreading aviation industry for a bit - that was absolute class. Boris did that.
Wrong regards Irish travellers. Irish travellers are a relic from the old clan system which was semi nomadic. With the collapse of the Gaelic world, it was the ancestors of the travellers who failed to adapt.
There is absolutely zero logical argument (from the consumers perspective) against every single life essential/utility being owned by the state.
Anything i need to survive in 2024, the state should have the monopoly of and be legally obliged to provide it.
Rory looks like he's missing a right hand just because of the way he's sitting.
This is why I read the comments... priceless sir...priceless 😅
Knowing him, that's deliberately contrived to subconsciously associate him with Napoleon
But sometimes hands, arms etc do spontaneously fall off. 😧It's when someone's head spontaneously just falls off that it actually does become quite a big problem.
The goods were getting cheaper due to a combination of outsourcing the labour to the 3rd world countries fuelled by debt. Both of those things have been exhausted - labour in 3rd world countries is no longer cheap enough and the debt levels are now unsustainable.
I have been saying real estate was the problem for 4 years now.
To be honest 4 year ago covid was just starting may be you are old like me and 4 year ago is 2012 or 2016 but it was 2020 4 year ago
@ back then, the cost of living was 3:1 in 1980. It’s 8:1 now and 11:1 in California. The pressure it’s putting on people isn’t reasonable and not sure it’s gonna change unless the people winning in and controlling the market can adjust it without losing money.
Dear Rory,
You can't put your finger on Why London is less enjoyable!!? 😂 Really? We can.
Yep! It's sad.
Food prices are killing middle class Americans
Mr Rory, You talked some time ago about an equipment for coffee making you money at home - no it hasn't, no it didn;t - your not making moneg off of it, unless you sell it, you spend less because of it - it's a very bad thinking about thath
Strong avuncular uncle energy here
why the cheesy music lol...
😃😊😊
Invisible pianist, check.
Begin video.
Update: the pianist just stopped after 40 seconds, there was no transition. It was only ever Rory to begin with.
Update 2: Add a black box 2/3 of the size of the video with static and boxing ring bells, quickly followed by removing it. No questions asked. No editors required.
Update 3: Question if this is a marketing scheme, wonder what the video was even about, and initiate everlasting scepticism
He really hasnt a clue over inflation, its debasment.
its
Georgism!!!
Georgism!!!
Real life penguin
Moore Kimberly Johnson Patricia Thompson Kevin
He’s always on about the trains as if less time taken to travel between two points shouldn’t be the absolute one thing to focus on. Get me there and get me off, that’s it. (Still batting 900 on most other things though.)
You are American though with vast distances
@@squirrelpatrick3670i am from India and if train like Europe with the Scenery from MI then I would like more time to take it
Shame about the unbearable musak track. Could not watch, had to abandon
Stop slagging off london’s trees and canopy!!
Incredibly boring hosts. Real shame
No ones richer a house is still only worth another house 32:02