alt Hacker News>In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you seem to leap from "it is hard to buy a house these days" to "this is the fault of people accruing capital".
I'm trying to understand this leap. I think you mean that generational wealth means some people start with all the cards, and their buying power decides what house prices are?
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Bob has enough assets he can buy an additional rental property each year.
Tim has to save for 10 years in order to get a down payment on a house (and borrow half of it from mom and dad).
Tim rents from Bob.
Tim has to compete with Bob when it comes time to purchase his home.
It is easier for Bob to acquire a house, and during the time Tim has saved, Bob has been able to add 10 homes to his portfolio.
Wealth consolidates more wealth at the top over time. The more consolidated, the more the velocity of consolidation speeds up (The point we are at) via not only how wealth/assets work, but also as Bob has more and more power/influence and the benefit grows of ensuring the system is in his favor he starts to exert more political influence. An orthodontist with two homes isn't bothering with political influence other than zoning around those homes. His son that inherited multiple homes and now rents out 50 is going to every government meeting related to renting in the town, taking the country planner to lunch, knows the council members on a first name basis, and exerts much more political power than his father. As wealth accrues, the ability/desire/benefit for manipulating/abusing power grows almost exponentially.
Until the late '70s-early '80s, overall productivity tracked very closely with wage growth.
Then wage growth flattened out, at the same time that the wealth of the wealthiest few started to grow by leaps and bounds.
It is the fault of people accruing capital. They have taken a vast percentage of all the wealth created in the past 50 years, which would have otherwise gone to the rest of us.
Then they used that wealth as leverage to prevent the rest of us from having the power to do anything about it.