> Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union
My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west").
in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though.
I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
Because, to the surprise of literally nobody who's ever been on the receiving end of these sorts of policies they cook up in far away think tank offices and the ivory towers of academia, there's a million ways to make the number go up that doesn't actually make normal people any better off.
A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.
Gotta love HNers who never read articles and use it as a soapbox:
"The scale of the destruction that followed the debt crisis was extraordinary. Between 2009 and the trough of the bailout years in 2016, average household wealth fell by roughly 35%, wiping out more than a third of Greek families' assets"
...
"The labour market has improved markedly since the darkest years of the crisis, with unemployment falling sharply and the informal economy shrinking. But structural weaknesses remain deeply embedded. Long-term unemployment, low participation in the workforce and a high reliance on self-employment continue to shape opportunities and outcomes"
----
Tl;dr - Greek households still haven't recovered from the Eurozone and Greek Debt crisis.
I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP.
2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) perception that things were good under Trump 1. The European war starts and China is left to dominate Asia.
- Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature.
- Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.
While income taxes are low for the majority ( the salaries are low anyway) the indirect taxing is the way the Greek Goverment managed to recover.
The prices of everyday goods rose (sometimes more than double) and the profits from VAT(24%) with them.
High duties on fuel + fuel price went up, combined with rent prices (living far away from your workplace) => longer work commute, bad infrastructure and older vehicles ( no money to buy a fuel efficient one when you are poor)
Liberalization of the energy market forced by EU which lead to extreme prices.
(new companies that don't produce anything got in the middleman position with only goal higher profits)
In summary, everything has been and continues to be done at the expense of the majority (low-wage earners), while making them even poorer.
I live here. Few facts: normal salary €1000 per month; houses €150–200–300k; house prices are rising because of foreign investors; seasonal workers from the philippines earn €500+ per month.
Officially, it's a 6-day working week - 48 hours (!)
The tourism economy requires only cheap labour, ideally buying all the properties and bringing in seasonal workers. That's sad.
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[ 134 ms ] story [ 745 ms ] thread> Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union
My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west").
in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though.
I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
"The Rentier Black Hole"
A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.
"The scale of the destruction that followed the debt crisis was extraordinary. Between 2009 and the trough of the bailout years in 2016, average household wealth fell by roughly 35%, wiping out more than a third of Greek families' assets"
...
"The labour market has improved markedly since the darkest years of the crisis, with unemployment falling sharply and the informal economy shrinking. But structural weaknesses remain deeply embedded. Long-term unemployment, low participation in the workforce and a high reliance on self-employment continue to shape opportunities and outcomes"
----
Tl;dr - Greek households still haven't recovered from the Eurozone and Greek Debt crisis.
https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/pho...
I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP.
2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) perception that things were good under Trump 1. The European war starts and China is left to dominate Asia.
If everyone gets 10x richer, half the people will still be in the poorer half, and will still feel poor in some sense.
This is surely not the only factor in this story, but it's you need to keep it in mind in these discussions.
- Per capital GDP still awful
- Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature.
- Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.
The prices of everyday goods rose (sometimes more than double) and the profits from VAT(24%) with them.
High duties on fuel + fuel price went up, combined with rent prices (living far away from your workplace) => longer work commute, bad infrastructure and older vehicles ( no money to buy a fuel efficient one when you are poor)
Liberalization of the energy market forced by EU which lead to extreme prices. (new companies that don't produce anything got in the middleman position with only goal higher profits)
In summary, everything has been and continues to be done at the expense of the majority (low-wage earners), while making them even poorer.
Officially, it's a 6-day working week - 48 hours (!)
The tourism economy requires only cheap labour, ideally buying all the properties and bringing in seasonal workers. That's sad.