Garys Economics
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2025
28:07 · 1M views · Jul 20, 2025
Gary's Economics argues that the UK housing crisis stems from wealth inequality, treating housing as an asset like shares that rich people bid up. He contends that simply building more housing won't fix affordability.
HN commenters share it as a counterargument to the YIMBY build-more-housing view, linking wealth concentration to asset prices.
4 comments from Hacker News
> Now suppose construction is cheap and zoning doesn't prohibit this. For 10% of the cost of the land, we could build a condo tower on that same piece of land. Ten stories, 100 housing units. The cost of a unit just went by down by a factor of ~100. The price of the land doubling is dwarfed by the increase in the number of permissible units per plot of land. That's a brilliant plan! Let me buy the piece of land where that high rise stands with money you can't afford. Oh, you mean you have split ownership between all the owners of the units so you now can afford it? I'll buy half of the units then and rent them out. And when things are not looking good for people, I buy some more when they can't afford their loans anymore. Can't let those units depreciate, can we? My friends are in on the party and together we're keeping the demand up. And those prices go up and up. Oh, the cost of each unit has now doubled and tripled while your wages haven't? Too bad for you. I can still afford them and now you have been out competed by me. It's the same game just with a lower starting point. Maybe this former financial trader can explain it better this video
This situation has played out in every developed nation, do you really think NL is unique? Look at any country in Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, China, … and they all have a huge issue with inflated asset prices (housing, stocks, gold) because wealth is becoming more concentrated and rich people need to park their wealth somewhere, and that somewhere is gold, stocks, real estate, bonds, and mortgages. Also notice that asset prices started increasing across the world way before we had green energy policies. I live in a place where they canceled a bunch of green energy policies (mainly carbon taxes) and guess what happened to asset prices? Nothing. Also note that the top 10% of wealthy people own over 50% of the wealth in NL [LINK] If you don’t feel like reading Piketty I would recommend watching this short video which shares a bunch of views with Piketty: this video
I wonder what you'd think about this video from Gary's Economics about the housing crisis: this video It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective
Gary's Economics claims wealth inequality is at the root of housing unaffordability. Basically as wealth concentration grows, the ultra-rich bid up the assets. See the price of gold doubling in the past few years. Government stimulus is also captured by the richest. It's also a global phenomenon, i.e., every major city is now unaffordable for most people. this video