I wasted a quarter of an hour answering the first fifteen questions of the Oxford PPE entrance exam, as unearthed by Simon Clarke, which asks you inter alia to spot the underlying assumption in an argument and say whether it is logically flawed or not*.
Once you have sharpened your wits on that, I invite you to turn your attention to a practical, real life issue that affects millions of perfectly honest, hard working young (and not so young) people in this country - the 'priced out' generation.
The FT's article of today is a bonfire of hypocrisy. Go and revel in it in full if you have time! If not, let me highlight two findings ...
"A YouGov survey, conducted on behalf of the New Homes Marketing Board last week, indicated that 89 per cent of respondents thought that the cost of housing was a problem for first-time buyers...[but]...According to the Saint UK Index, an annual measure of attitude towards development, 83 per cent of people in the UK oppose any kind of local development".
To sum up: "We feel a bit sorry for you. But we're all right. So go f*** yourselves"
* and scored 13 out of 15.
Elevate their cause?
5 hours ago
4 comments:
Sorry you didn't like the test, I was bored so I did the whole thing :P
I don't understand how house prices could NOT be a problem for first time buyers. Even if the price was £100, that's still a problem...
It was a super test, I'll finish it off some other time.
Why would £100 be a problem? An average house costs £80,000 - £100,000 to build, that is not the problem. The problem is the underlying land price, which doubles that to £200,000-plus.
So the shortage is in land with planning permission. And one of the fundamental rules of tax must be, tax scarce resources (price rationing is the best form of rationing), but tax non-scarce resources (we have unemployment, so we have a surfeit of labour) at a low rate or not at all.
Roll on Land Value Tax.
Well £100 is not a very big problem, but it's still a problem. You can't just think "I want it" and acquire a house with a price tag of £100, you need to earn and then give away £100 in order to get it i.e. overcome the problem of price.
Of course prices are a problem. What they should have asked was "are house prices an increasing problem?" or "are house prices a bigger problem than they should be?"
I agree with you about land prices to an extent but I don't think they totally explain the prices. Currently, planning regulations make it very difficult to buy land and use it for housing so that's another factor in addition to the high price of land.
Restricxting planning permission = scarcity = high prices.
Property price = cost/value of bricks and mortar + value of land.
Post a Comment