A neo-feudal war on the people – spiked
The key issue is property. The changing class dynamics are reflected by patterns of land ownership. House prices have grown three times faster than household income over the past two decades, as the OECD noted in 2019. In this new order, writes economist Thomas Piketty, inherited wealth will make a comeback . In France, inheritance as a share of GDP grew from roughly four per cent in 1950 to 15 per cent in 2010. Millennials who received bequests inherited more money than many workers make in a lifetime. The growing importance of inherited assets is even more pronounced in Germany, Britain and the US.
These trends have been exacerbated by a climate-driven housing policy that seeks to pack people into dense urban areas. Such policies are reversing 75 years of expanding property ownership in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia as well as other high-income countries. Property ownership, widely seen as key to middle-class status, is morphing into a rich man s game. In the decade from 2010, the proportion of real-estate wealth in the US held by middle-class and working-class owners fell substantially, while that controlled by the wealthy grew from 28 per cent to 43 per cent. In this period, high-income households enjoyed 71 per cent of all gains from housing wealth, while the shares of middle- and lower-income families declined precipitously.
Joel Kotkin.