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Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThere aren’t enough homes or jobs. What do?
- JackMorgan 1y agoWe're heading further into a reality where there just aren't enough jobs. All the money has been hoovered into the stock market. There's just not enough floating around to pay people, it's all going into LLM electricity or graphics cards. We should be living in a time of ease, where the whole planet is sustained with all of us only working a few hours a week. Instead most people are fighting for scraps barely able to afford rent. It won't continue like this forever. The line doesn't always go up.
- Avicebron 1y agoTentative book title: The Line Stops.
- abbycurtis33 1y agoMoney doesn't sit in the stock market. Value, sure, but the money goes right back into the economy.
- dismalaf 1y agoMoney only goes to the company to get reinvested when the company sells shares, so at IPO time, when an insider sells, when more shares are issued, etc... Otherwise, it's one asset holder selling to another asset holder, usually at ever increasing prices. So yes, a lot of money is simply sitting in the stock market. Now, some does come back in the form of share buybacks and dividends. That being said, the average dividend yield is significantly less than the long-run average (it's less than 2 percent right now, long term average is above 3%).
- robjan 1y agoWhen I buy a stock the seller gets the money. The money doesn't "go in to the stock market".
- Ekaros 1y agoQuestion really comes to what does the seller do with that money? Buy some other stock? Buy some other asset. What fraction they actually spend to buy goods and services?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mathiaspoint 1y agoThe secondary market drives the primary market.
- simpaticoder 1y agoWouldn't it be nice if individuals decided at the start of their career how much money was "enough" for them, and made a pledge to retire once they hit that number. Then society can give them an "I won!" hat or gold card or something, and the next guy can take the role. In this way all enterprises become an engine pulling new hires off the street, and emitting independently wealthy people to go and enjoy their lives. But instead we have a tiny minority of people who control more and more capital. This has well-known and terrible consequences for society from almost every angle. What I don't understand is why the .1% don't want to step aside and let someone else have a turn. It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough". But money doesn't get stored in the body.
- sidewndr46 1y agoYou'd have to have some guarantee that the government would never alter the amount of inflation they create for that to be reasonable
- charlie0 1y agoNo one can guarantee that but if you place your dollars into assets, those assets will inflate.
- Uvix 1y agoExcept when they don't, like Japan's stock market from 1989-2024.
- charlie0 1y agoJapan has had relatively low inflation until recently.
- sidewndr46 1y agoThen you have a bunch of assets, not money.
- deleted 1y ago
- graeme 1y agoIf you buy a stock from a new share sale, that goes to the company as capital. The company then spends the money. The unenployment rate is quite low. There are complaints you can make about the economy but the model of money you laid out is completely wrong.
- chao- 1y agoEDIT: I wrote this in a rush intending to refer to general market entry. In a broad sense, what I ended up writing is incorrect. To preserve the accuracy of the comment history I will not remove my mistake. >All the money has been hoovered into the stock market. I think you might misunderstand what the stock market is. Or perhaps you misunderstand what what stocks are? When you purchase stock, it doesn't get locked in a vault, with your name written next to it, and the number of shares it got you on that day. That money goes to the company, and they use that to finance their operations (and ideally, further growth). That financing may go directly to salaries, or even if it goes to services, those services are paid to someone who pays salaries. If your claim is instead that "all" of that money, or some meaningful majority of that money, is going to electricity and AI silicon, I would invite you to do some basic math on the companies involved.
- keernan 1y ago>>That money goes to the company When you purchase stock, your money goes to the seller of that stock. That's what makes a "market". The stock market isn't a bunch of companies selling their stock to the public.
- jaco6 1y ago[dead]
- sszz 1y agoThis is not how stocks work at all outside of stock offerings…
- chao- 1y agoYes, I was intending to discuss stock offerings. They are just another form of financing. One of many. I incorrectly explained what I meant, and broadly speaking, what I wrote is incorrect. However, I stand by my statement that "all" of the money is not going to electricity or AI silicon.
- Zambyte 1y agoMake it legal to build homes
- FiatLuxDave 1y agoAs far as I can tell, the problem isn't so much a lack of jobs or a lack of homes but rather that they aren't in the same place. In small town America, the problem isn't a lack of housing stock, it's that it is hard to afford it with few good paying jobs. In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock. I think this is a large reason behind the polarization in America today. We aren't all facing the same aspect of this imbalance. I was hoping that the work-from-home movement was going to help with this, but RTO seems to be in full swing. So, I think our best bet would be to stop incentivizing the concentration of job creation. Absent a fix, we will have to wait a few decades for the imbalance to even out.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoAlways hated how every startup sets up office in downtown San Francisco or similarly absurd cost of living area… Could pay people well but half as much and have nice office in Colorado mountains, Vermont, or somewhere else beautiful… Of course, startups rarely seem interested in saving money…
- alpha_squared 1y agoIt's a little unfair to blame startups, they largely just set up shop where the capital is. Most VCs required startups to be headquartered near by for easier management/communication. The tech scene in SV had such exceptionalism that it quite literally viewed any startup not in SV as an inevitable failure. Even YC mandated startups be in SV.
- csomar 1y agoNot sure why you are down voted. This is a requirement for many of the VCs in the valley. You have to be both US-based and “nearby”.
- rpcope1 1y agoMost of the real estate "in the mountains" here in Colorado is basically SF prices, with a whole extra set of challenges. Even the front range I think has even worse home price to median income than a lot of the other places people think about when bitching about housing affordability.
- dkiebd 1y ago[flagged]
- UmGuys 1y agoBuild jails and send in the troops ...duh
- petra303 1y agoWhy get out of a 3-4% loan just to get into a 7-8% loan?
- Esophagus4 1y agoI think if you believed 7-8% loans were normal, you might be more likely to bite the bullet and make your move. But if you believe 3-4% is normal, then you’re probably waiting for rates to return to “normal.” I think it’s a side effect of years of low interest rates… people are conditioned now to believe low is normal, and they want to hang on until we get back to that. I was hoping rates would stay “high” for a while which I thought would soften the housing market so I could buy, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead of prices dropping, inventory just dried up. Shows how silly I am for thinking I could time the market.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoReal estate market will soften as the economy comes off the rails [1]. 6-12 months from now should have more motivated sellers depending on market (foreclosures in Clark County Las Vegas market are up 32% year over year June 2025, for example [2]). Short sales and foreclosure auctions are also options. If you still want to buy down the road, be in the strongest financial position possible to get financing and make an offer when the market conditions turn more buyer favorable. Seller concessions can be used to buy down the mortgage rate, if that’s useful information. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/us-housing-markets-falling-prices.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/us-housing-markets-falling-p... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907838
- willis936 1y agoThe housing market won't soften until we build a shit ton of houses which will never happen until there are a lot of very angry people willing it into existence.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
- la64710 1y agoHomes are unaffordable to most. Even if you sell your house for a million dollar where will You move to? As far jobs are concerned the job market is completely fucked up. Their is oversupply and there are no wage increase. It does not take a genius to understand why there is no mobility.
- DANmode 1y agoBecause you've all treated housing as a financial instrument, instead of what it should be: safety for your family.
- jmclnx 1y agoI look at it as an expense. If you can sell and make a few bucks, great. But I doubt any new buyers will make out. I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one.
- s5300 1y ago[dead]
- gottorf 1y ago> I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one. Only if the current insanity around zoning and regulation persists. In many real estate markets, it's literally illegal to increase the supply of housing; in others, price controls make it unappealing to invest in increasing the supply of housing. I don't know what kind of toxicity is unique to the Anglophone world that exacerbates this problem, but at some point we just need to rip off the band-aid, tell existing homeowners to cry more, and just build, build, build. There's no inherent reason why the price of houses should so far exceed income in this vast country.
- jmclnx 1y ago>just build, build, build. There's no inherent reason why the price of houses should so far exceed income in this vast country You are right, but there is always a but :) Seems right now the "good jobs" are only being create around a few mega cities. DC, NY, SF and a few others. DC stalled a bit I think due to DOGE. In a lot of those areas NIMBH is big. So if you build like crazy in many "fly over" states, where is is plenty of land, at best the builders will not make a profit. But probably the houses will stay empty. As with everything else, politicians will not make the hard decisions due to fear. I use to be against term-limits, but the last 25 years proved me wrong :(
- bsder 1y agoNobody is switching jobs because if you move you likely have to switch two jobs rather than just one. Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare. Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.
- rr808 1y agoI'm surprised you were downvoted because it is a huge difference with previous generation. Its also a reason people move to big cities because its easy to get a variety of jobs for each partner.
- Hammershaft 1y agoThe problem with building more homes and bringing down the cost of housing isn't a couple billionaires as much as a massive geriatric class of NIMBY homeowners.
- donatj 1y agoI've been casually job hunting for a couple months since rounds of layoffs started at my company. I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.
- khernandezrt 1y agoI’m in the same boat. I’ve been employed since 2019, got laid off 3 weeks ago. I’ve applied to over 70 jobs and not a single has replied other than to reject me. This is brutal.
- abnercoimbre 1y agoI'm sorry to hear that. I have close friends who are brilliant (and seniors) but spent 6-8 months finding a new job. Plan accordingly.
- sqircles 1y agoThe thing that seemed to work best for me was reaching out to dev shops in my area and starting a conversation even if they didn't have a position posted. Go to meetups and talk to people, join their discord, etc... and job fairs, as lame as they seem, produced contacts for me that are still reaching out "just in case" even though I found a position eventually. What's old is new again. Get those soft skills warmed up and go out and shake hands.
- Smeevy 1y agoI completely agree with you. All the best jobs I've had have come from personal relationships.
- saguntum 1y agoJob fairs are super underrated. When my spouse and I were a bit in flux years back for where we were going to live long-term, we ended up living in the city where we met which is very much not a tech hub - only a few big companies that hire engineers - despite spouse applying to various places in SF, Denver, and Seattle. He landed the local job first by going to a career fair that I randomly discovered on Twitter. Affected the whole trajectory of our life.
- yolovoe 1y agoJust a single data point against this. I got interviews with 4 companies out of 30 or so I applied to. Cleared all the onsites. Think FAANG, famous hedge fund, popular data analytics platform, and defense. 4 different industries. Job market's not the best, but it's also not that bad if you have 5 YOE+. Offers were good, ~$50-100K over my current pay. So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
- winter_blue 1y agoWas this very recent? The job markets for software engineers has been horrid, at least from mid 2022 to mid 2025. Maybe it’s changed now? Anecdotally, I know a few engineers with 10+ YOE in NYC, Seattle, and California, all with actual FAANG or FAANG adjacent work experience, who couldn’t find jobs. One of whom even took a minimum wage job, and another who nearly did the same as well. Maybe the tax code change is kicking off an industry revival?
- itake 1y agoMy friend that left cruise got a 2.3x pay bump (post-ipo) moving to Figma in Feb 2025. He also had interviews at Meta and other FANGA (where he used to work). If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.
- nlawalker 1y ago> interview […] AI use Can you elaborate? People don’t do well in the interview and say they could do it if they had AI with them? Or…? Edit: Sorry, I missed “using AI during the interviews to cheat”.
- tiltowait 1y agoNot the OP, but I interviewed a candidate for a remote position. He was kind of halting in his responses, until he suddenly wasn't. Borderline erudite, and I recognized some LLM speech patterns. I told my manager I thought he was using an LLM, but we hired him anyway. After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.
- chao- 1y agoIt is difficult to balance the competing priorities of "home ownership is widely affordable" and "home prices must always go up". When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
- Dig1t 1y agoThere are many places in the US where you can buy a house for less than 50k. If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
- mingus88 1y agoI think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles. I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn. These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous. In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
- gottorf 1y ago> Build a town, not a subdivision. I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism. I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
- 1y ago
- daedrdev 1y agoIt's basically illegal to build dense homes in most cities. And despite what people say, the vacancy rate is at historic lows so its not just "people are keeping them empty" Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
- Hammershaft 1y agoHousing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income. As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.
- sovietswag 1y agoI wonder what you'd think about this video from Gary's Economics about the housing crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4 It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective
- Ferret7446 1y agoDevil's advocate, I don't think we should keep building more housing insofar as it encourages population growth (which it does). Like highways, there will always be barely enough, no matter how many lanes/houses we build. But population growth is the overwhelming factor in all of our sustainability issues.
- daedrdev 1y agoSo in response to the rapidly rising prices, we should not build any housing because it doesn't matter? Surely there is still a positive benefit since there must be less than one person wanting to move in per new unit otherwise they would have already moved in?
- happyraul 1y agoThe reason there will never be enough lanes is not population growth. It's that we generally don't provide people with alternatives to driving, and adding more lanes just makes even more people have to drive, since things get even farther apart.
- RickS 1y agoWSJ seems to block the normal archives, but absent a gift link, this twitter referral seems to work: https://x.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040 https://x.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040
- UmGuys 1y agoWith an appropriate amount of x: https://xcancel.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040 https://xcancel.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040
- anal_reactor 1y agoUnprecedented mobility allowed unprecedented competition. The core of the problem is that when there's a job posting or a house for sale, you're competing not only with people in your local area, but also with people from all over the world. For example, in my city HALF of home sales are to foreigners. The effect is that top x% keeps amassing wealth, while the rest suffers from brain drain and depopulation. Literally same problem as Tinder - it promised men to date all over the world, in effect it made them compete with other men from all over the world, and nobody's getting dates. The problem will fix itself when moving to a big city completely stops being a viable option, and average Joe will be forced to live in bumfuck nowhere. Once enough Joes stay in bumfuck nowhere, they'll eventually build a working small-scale local economy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- roncesvalles 1y agoLack of universal healthcare is the single greatest hurdle to job mobility and entrepreneurship in America in my opinion.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoAlmost no one under 40 cares. In fact for most of us we'll net a profit (not expected, straight up in most cases including one or two events) just self insuring.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoIn a way this is the ultimate goal of conservatism in its literal sense to conserve. The rich want have their place in society safely entrenched at the top, with no risk of people rising from below to displace them. Those at the bottom should stay locked in there and work and toil because that is the natural order of things.
- Herring 1y agoAccording to the election and the polls, this is exactly what Americans want. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-views-of-government-aid-to-poor-role-in-health-care-and-social-security/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-vi... > 41% of Americans say the government should provide more assistance to people in need > 30% say it's providing about the right amount > 27% say it should provide less 41-57? If there are issues in America, it's because Americans want it that way.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoMobility is not just about assisting the those in need, its also about having opportunities for advancement. If you're trapped in a job because of its health coverage, that's restricting mobility. People can' take the risk on changing jobs/locations or even something like starting their own businesses because of the would lose coverage and don't have the wealth to self-pay. If you're working so many hours just to cover essentials like rent you just too exhausted to look for better work or take courses for a new profession. If costs and prices rise way faster than your wages, then you start losing ground and do so at an ever increasing rate while those at the top who live on investments and passive income benefit because the value of their assets rise faster. If opportunities for high paying jobs dry up because, for example, AI replaces those jobs. If fees and interest on student debt keeps you locked down forever. If all best and highest paying jobs just go to family members of the already rich through systemic nepotism. The list goes on. I'm not which of these the American public voted for. - people trapped in poorly paying jobs and/or jobs with terrible conditions by blocking or dismantling unions. - locking people out of high paying jobs via network effects. Like nepotism in hollywood or firms only hiring from certain universities which you can only get into
- neonate 1y agohttps://archive.md/ZH1ab https://archive.md/ZH1ab
- mathiaspoint 1y agoThe economy isn't doing bad, it's just not there and everyone is still pretending.