[Stephen_0xFF]

Nostalgia more than anything. At the time a factory job could buy you a home out of high school, have a wife that stays home and takes care of the children. The factory job itself is a red herring. What people actually want is a post WW2 baby booming economy.

[thuridas]

Without post WW2 taxes.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).

The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.

Another big cost is the university.

[walthamstow]

Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th century that meant either still agrarian (China) or rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique moment and it's never coming back.

[mschuster91]

China wasn't a factor in global economics until the 90s, and Europe only was relevant for US growth for a very short time following WW2 and the Marshall Plan.

[pessimizer]

This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war.

What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.

[dustincoates]

You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf