'Please grant me the green juice to change the things I can. And yoga to accept the things I can’t'
the tension of wages and real estate in the utopia of gain without labour, in a society of personal, servile relations between dependents (intro to Gorz, part three)
Note to readers: this post runs long. I always adhere to Pascal’s quip, ‘I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time’. Please prepare yourself, or read as hastily as I’ve written; for some reason it’s important to me to get this stuff out as quickly as possible… and, after all, this is a blog.
~
In the first of these three posts, I looked at the double ‘Bicentennial’ of Australia[1] and industrial modernity, the better to trace the latter’s possible disintegration point through the former’s past few triumphal decades. I ventured the tentative hypothesis that, in Australia at least (but not only here), labour’s utopia had been quite deliberately traded for that of postindustrial capital, replacing a society of ‘wealth for toil’ (the culturally Australian utopia of labour) for a neotopia of ‘gain without labour’. This also nuances Gorz’ point: it’s not as if the old utopia had disintegrated with nothing to replace it; in the Anglocapitalist countries at least, a replacement has very much been tried, and coercively foisted on everyone else in these decades. That’s what globalisation was, from a certain angle in a certain light.
In the second, I explored Gorz’ suggestive, broad-brush synthesis[2] of what he thought this disintegration might produce, the political economy of this entropic society as it looked to him, writing from France in ’88. What we glanced was a society where the impersonality of industrial society (and the dialectic of labour and capital playing out through public-political conflicts over wages and working conditions, captured so well by Marx in the mid 19C), had been replaced by one of personal, servile relations between dependents, where one side of the dependent relation commands all the resources and purchasing power[3].
Keeping Gorz’ characterisation of this world alongside where Australia has drifted since ‘88, on what terms and in what conditions do ‘Deliveroo and deliveree’ actually tend to interact in a total economy in which access to resources is defined by one’s relation to capital and property[4]? In other words, what happens when a minority of (relatively) ‘luxuriously wealthy and comfortable, yet overburdened’ professionals tend to live in cities where they get their needs and wants met via exchange relations with the many precarious service providers, that mass of ‘operatives’ who must trade the scarce time and bodily resources they have for the money they need to survive?
In Gorz’ view, what it really means is that no one has any free time and everyone is overburdened, while a huge number of services with no utility or benefit end up being produced for the pampered-overburdened elite. Farces like Juicero, and the banal availability of two-hour delivery butt plugs and vibrators (from as little as 24.95), seems to be some results we’ve seen. To quote one of Juicero’s tag lines:
‘Please grant me the green juice to change the things I can. And yoga to accept the things I can’t’.
Much of what disruption produced was and is of no use to anyone, and much of it is also fucking meaningless in a way that *adds* nihilism to the world. Yet this kind of thing is offered up as the daily palliative on offer in a world where meaningful change and acceptable conditions are impossible through the public, organised contestation formerly known as politics.
So then: in Gorzworld, a professional-elite minority command a huge share of the financial reward, make most of the decisions, and work such long hours that they need to ‘buy back’ the fruits of the activities which formerly they would have had free time to do and make, and they do it by using their purchasing power to procure niche services. The majority, “a mass of operatives” – precarious, relatively excluded – serve, buzzing around providing one-click fulfilment.
How well does this model characterise the fate of labour by 2022, since ‘88? What do labour, work, and jobs tend to mean in Gorzworld?
The fate of labour in contemporary Australia, as well as the extent to which labour factors in to the work people do in the jobs they actually have – or the services they have to provide as contractors – tends not to be exactly as Gorz considers it. Gorz’ “irreplaceable and over-worked decision-makers and technicians”, the professional elite driving demand for whatever niche services they feel like paying for, do tend to work insane hours these days, but typically without needing to ‘labour’ in the sense of cracking a sweat, in the way a ‘brickie’s labourer’ still labours.
(Yet: imagine explaining the phrase ‘emotional labour’ to anyone who was part of the labouring working class in any previous generation of workers back to the 1800s, by way of quick thought experiment.)
What then is work, now? What are jobs?
The ‘work’ of these elite-professional ‘jobs’, such as it is, tends to be about being online, and making online smoother and more profitable and efficient for other people who are online. Work is about being flexibly available, being solicitously, compliantly responsive to clients and bosses: from the public crisis of the commons, to the personal crisis of the summons.
At the higher levels, work can seem to be about generating work for the people who serve them – outside and inside organisations. So as it turns out, existence in the ‘winner’ capitalist countries presents a kind of doubling of Gorzworld, for the servile dependencies pop up both outside and inside organisations. And in a world of pervasive high-speed wireless internet on smartphones, the likes of which Gorz only lived to see the beginning of, this has not tended not to produce actual productivity or ‘excellent work which will benefit mankind’: mostly it tends to the reproduce of the an intensified relation of servile dependency within any given organisation (with Deliveroo and deliveree pressing the buzzer with one gloved finger at the street entrance outside).
Work in contemporary Anglocapitalist society is a Matrushka doll of servility platforms and end user experiences. The programmers who developed computers in a language of servers, clients and users unwittingly pinpointed the social relations of the world they contributed to bringing into being.
Gorz also refers to “irreplaceable and over-worked decision-makers”, but do all or most of Gorz’ technicans actually do anything; and are they irreplaceable? For the latter factor, it strikes me that modularity, replaceable parts, interchangeability, an Ikea-fication of work roles, is more the order of the day. Everyone is replaceable – and we know it: we sell parts of our life until we are no good for selling, then we are sold for parts. Every unique Alan is just another Alan key to turn a few planks into a sofa, every sofa just a place to lie until you are carried away, or back to work.
MOVE IN ON CATALOG -- ON PHOTO of COFFEETABLE SET...
JACK (V.O.)
If I saw something like clever coffee
tables in the shape of a yin and
yang, I had to have it.
PAN TO PHOTO of ARMCHAIR...
JACK (V.O.)
Like the Johanneshov armchair in the
Strinne green stripe pattern...
INT. LIVING ROOM/DINING AREA/KITCHEN
The armchair APPEARS. PAN OVER next to armchair...
JACK (V.O.)
Or the Rislampa wire lamps of
environmentally-friendly unbleached
paper.
The lamps APPEAR. PAN OVER to wall...
JACK (V.O.)
Even the Vild hall clock of
galvanized steel, resting on the
Klipsk shelving unit.
The clock APPEARS as the shelving unit APPEARS on the wall.
JACK (V.O.)
I would flip through catalogs and
wonder, "What kind of dining set
defines me as a person?" We used to
read pornography. Now it was the
Horchow Collection.
A dining room set APPEARS. Jack, the cordless phone still
glued to his ear, walks INTO FRAME and continues.
JACK
No, I don't want Cobalt. Oh, that
sounds nice. Apricot.
Jack opens a cabinet, takes out a plate.
JACK (V.O.)
I had it all. Even the glass dishes
with tiny bubbles and imperfections,
proof they were crafted by the
honest, simple, hard-working
indigenous peoples of wherever.
As for what the “over-worked decision-makers” do… I can’t speak for all professions and sectors, but the picture is apt to be a very diverse and (another signature) highly uneven distribution of efforts and load: the lawyers and public servants I know work insane hours and under huge pressure to deliver, as does nearly anyone involved in bringing projects together on time and on budget. In high end corporate, 60-80 hours a week seems to be the norm. Those who work in middle-class caring professions, like general medicine and tertiary and secondary-primary teaching, are increasingly squeezed between Deliveroo and deliveree (this is another groups whose fate, like the fate of those still in industrial and proletarian labouring jobs, isn’t yet captured by the parts of Gorz’ arguments I’ve been recombinating here).
But we have to think about the centrality of the client in Gorzworld. Professions who service rich clients may (or may not) be amply remunerated, but as the rich client is demanding, fickle and has outrageously high expectations, they most work crazy hard, from architects through to people in IT and digital. If we follow Gorz’ framing some more and nuance it, then, we could say: these ‘technicians’, they are high-end servicers of clients: and wherever there is a client, and that client is the source of all money and future work, the client is sovereign, and often a mad king at that. There are many people who turn themselves inside out 60-80 hours a week, earning excellent money, but doing haute servile work for rich idiots whose work is to throw tantrums and make unreasonable demands of people who are not allowed to say no or ‘fuck off’.
Yet alongside those who service clients and produce gold-plated monkey tennis at manic pace, there now exist a veritable army of high-end functionaries: this is the managerial class and those who report to them, people who dwell where spreadsheets become pie charts and PowerPoints become dashboards and executive summaries. Given the size of insurance, banking, telcos, tertiary education, and consulting and contracting for the public and private sector, there are heaps of people working in these sectors, the huge parasitic winners in the transformation since ‘88.
These strange silos exist across the private and public sector, the post-industrial progeny of the white collar. What interests me here is how little of the neoliberal ideology of the private sector, supposed to be dynamically competitive, efficient and decisive, actually exists here. Actually what’s tended to happen is that this whole chunk of society has taken the fat rewards and expectation set of the corporate sector, and married it to the indefinite, indecisive, bloated digital paper pushing of the old bad public sector. In fact, it’s a striking fact that the IT revolution, which promised to remove paperwork and get rid of administrative bloat, has generated this excrescence of the postwar US office space and bureau, a world of unaccountable, overpaid managers.
In Australia there are now many people earning 2-500k/year who seem to do nothing but produce action plans, attend insane numbers of meetings, watch dashboards, read executive summaries, dream up thoughtbubbles, and send emails, in a way that induces emails. Much of their work appears to be about producing makework and busywork for underlings. To Musil’s ‘pseudo-reality prevails’ is added the very particular beige thickness of non-responsible non-accountability that has proliferated in the private and public sectors over the past few decades. There are hugely complex reasons why it’s come to be like this, but in another sense, Weber already nailed it by 1905 as a result of rationalisation:
“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
Many among the above cohorts also tend to have poor work/life, work/home boundaries and like to keep working – especially outside of ‘business hours’, especially on work comms (which are always work ‘requests’ to underlings). This pattern of out-of-office-hours work, which, for many, intensified from the onset of covid with WFH, can often be part of super macho cultures, especially in super elite professions and organisations. Here, it’s typically driven by ego, competition, and masochism: he who suffers most, hardest, for longest, makes partner first (if he never cries is never seen crying).
But it seems to me that larger numbers of this professional elite do anonymous work just below this radar, in bigger organisations. with a more bureaucratic dynamic, more specialised niches, and more places to hide (as above: telcos, insurance, uni admin, ‘departments’). Here, just below the titans, just under the radar, the picture here seems to be more conformist, other-directed, fear-driven – more like postwar Japan, more like The Office (in either Atlantic variant). People ‘stay at work’ (now meaning: stay online) because no one wants to be seen to be clocking off before anyone else. In Japan, this was usually because the boss didn’t like his wife or family, and was an alcoholic, had no friends, and wanted people to affirm his opinions and laugh at his gags while drinking. In contemporary Australia, this usually has less to do with after-hours karaoke and hostess bars, and more to a boss who evinces ‘hyperactive hive mind’ tendencies and is multitasking on reply all email, group chat threads, or Slack at all hours – usually (if Boomer) while multi screening on their iPad while watching TV as well).
Among those who serve (and whom among us has not served, at some point… ), this can induce crazy amounts of attentive-reactive tethering to laptops and phones, especially where ambitious and eager-to-please underlings are trying to second guess what boss wants (often also on another simultaneous group chat thread excluding said boss). For sure, this takes time and requires attuned thought and precise attention, but is it labour, is it work? Technically at least, most of these jobs are definitionally more like Graeber’s bullshit jobs, “which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist[5]”. According to Graeber in 2018, nearly half the working population feels like they’re in a bullshit job.
Collectively, then, why are we doing all this? Why are we doing this to one another? Why are we doing this to ourselves?
To click out of Gorz’ headspace for just a second before responding to this, recall Keynes in 1930: the whole point of technical innovation was to save on labour; compound interest could do the rest. As for labour saving and the meaningful difference a ‘simple’ machine can make to a human life, I can attest to this: where before I spent 3-5 hours a week pegging and unpegging washing, my purchase of a dryer this year meant I now often have another 30-45 minutes in my day, which in practice means I now have time for the cup of tea or twenty minute powernap before picking up the kids. This was time I formerly did not have, *given* that we have a family of five people whose soiled clothing needs washing. It has been subtly revelatory, and a genuine saving of objectively pointless labour that is better done by a machine: James Boyce has a great piece on this.
Yet the ‘whatever happened to using technology to save labour and thus time…?’ actually boomerangs back to Gorz’ precise point: it is precisely in a society in which it has become technically possible for all people to enjoy free-time, and thus emancipation from labour, no one has any free time, nearly everyone is trapped in a servile relation of dependency on some client or boss, and hours seemed to have ramped way, way beyond the 40 hour week they’re supposed to be. This is a world in which we’re so busy and frazzled that we come upon the ponging washing we forgot to remove from the machine last night, after putting the load on yesterday afternoon.
So again: how did it come to this? If we come back in to contemporary Australia, the reason of reasons is surely to do with the structure of urban space and the price of real estate in it, and the all-structuring relation –or non-relationality – between wages and housing, as rents and as mortgages. Starting with wages, it shakes down like this.
Let’s assume a body was earning the state minimum wage of $21.38/hour (14.2 USD/hour[6], 14 Eur). If you were able to work 38 hours a week, that’s a raw income of 812.44/week. If you managed that 38 hours for 52 of the weeks of the year, you’d have a raw annual income of a little over 42k. Income tax on that, simply calculated, is $4522. So if you’re working 20C ordinary full-time hours, you’re living on 38k/a year. What can that get you as a place to live, in Sydney or Melbourne (or Auckland, or Toronto)? Unless you are independently wealthy or have the Boomer Handshake, you can’t service any mortgage on that, so if you’re living out of home, you’re renting. So then: where and how will you rent, and what would it cost?
250-350 a week is the base norm for a room in urban Melbourne now[7], which means that between 12,000-18,000 a year is going on rent, or 28-42% of your gross annual income if you’re doing entry level client servicing, as many are. Let’s boil this to a very rough average and say that most people renting have a 1/3 of what they receive go right back out the door as rents: usually to someone much wealthier than them. This is already above the threshold deemed acceptable, according to this reporting. But what if you’re studying, and so can only work 18-25 hours a week; what if you’re casual or a contractor working for one of the disruption platforms, and you don’t get as many shifts as you need and want, or your shifts aren’t great? What if you’re disabled and are unable to buzz around servicing clients? In such situations, 56-84% of your income could be going on rent. This puts you and traps you in the category of rental stress.
What if you are or become unemployed, and you were already renting, and didn’t have a mum-n-dad’s place to move back to? If you’re an adult with no dependents, JobSeeker is 668/fortnight, or 17,368. If you’re living unemployed in Melbourne and your rent is at the low end and you’re paying 250/week, this means that 74.8% of your income is going back out as rent, which also means you’re living on $84/week – twelve bucks a day for everything else, when a pint of beer is 10-15 dollars, and smashed avocado is north of twenny. There is also rental assistance, but, as the Guardian reported in 2021 (link above), “A single person solely reliant on jobseeker payments and rental assistance would require an income nearly triple the current level of about $19,802 per annum to move into the ‘acceptable’ affordability category, in which only 20%-25% of household income went on rent”. And what if you’re one of the many students doing 8/hour cash in hand ‘cos it’s off the books: assuming you work 38 hours, you’re pulling in a bit over 300 dollars a week, or a bit over 15k/year. As with JobSeeker – but with the difference that you worked and probably laboured for 38 hours a week – this just gets you to rent.
So for people toward the rump, just getting by, anywhere in an urban area, is going to be very difficult. Ironically (or just sadly), the mortgages on better quality small units might be slightly less than the rents quoted above[8], but the notion that someone trapped in these conditions (with that kind of credit history and prospects) could ever be eligible for a mortgage is laughable.
On the capital side, we need to think for a moment at just how much urban housing prices have increased since 1988[9]. In Sydney in 1988, the median house price was $364, 811; in March 2022, it was 1,590,932. In Melbourne in 1988, $281, 864; in March 2022, $1,092,144. Of course: this has to be adjusted for inflation (a dollar in 1988 bought a lot more) and wages (which were lower in the past, though see previous parenthesis). But if we purloin the summary-synthesis from one site playing with this data (from 1970), the following pops up:
1. “In inflation adjusted dollars, house prices are at or near all time highs. In 1970, an average house in Sydney cost around 20% of what an average house costs today. In other words, the $1.1m sale price of an average Sydney house today would buy you roughly 5.2 houses back in 1970. The trend is similar, though often not as significant, in all capital cities.
2. The trend is similar if we look at average annual income as a proportion of average house prices. In 1970, the average Sydney house cost 4.5 times average pre-tax income. In 2020 it was 12.2 pre-tax income.
3. Even though house prices are at or near all-time highs, in pretty much all cities, mortgage payments are NOT at record highs. The reason is that interest rates are unprecedentedly low. If house prices continue to grow, or interest rates go up again, mortgage payments are likely to become unsustainable, particularly in Sydney.
4. Population growth doesn’t seem to account for the increase. For example, Sydney’s population has grown by 70% in the last 50 years and its average house price has increased by 520% after accounting for inflation. Perth, on the other hand, has seen a population growth of roughly 300%, but its house prices have only increased by 260%” (source).
Housing prices mean something different when they are running at 12x a person’s income[10], especially when – in Sydney and Melbourne – there are not houses for 480,000 (12x minimum full-time wage) available in the urban area[11]. But what does it mean even when you’re a public servant who (could and did) pay 1.8 million dollars for a renovated workers’ weatherboard in Flemington, or a doctor who paid 4.2 for a nice double brick in Hawthorn? It means ‘you’ paid for it (or could afford the deposit of 360-800k); it means you didn’t pay for the balance of the house; it means the bank 80% paid for it; it means that even you, an extraordinarily wealthy person in global-and-local relative terms, do not and could not possibly afford to pay for ‘your’ house, or even foreseeably pay it off in your own lifetime. What it really means is that some bot-powered assessment app of the banks looked at your credit history and gave you permission to become a person servicing a mortgage for the bank, in exchange for remaining at ‘escape velocity’ beyond the overpriced, poor-quality hell of renting.
Aside from those who are independently extremely wealthy and still just pay cash for such an asset without blinking – landed money, scions, CEOs, HNWI retirees, cryptolords, OnlyFans 1%ers – on a societal level, what this fundamentally means is that the banks, by and large, own the large majority of Australia’s housing, while the servile servants are servicing mortgages.
In most cases with Gorz’ technical-professional elite, ‘we’ pay them, so that we can say ‘we’ own it – which we do for legal purposes, when we sell it to another person, for whom a bank, probably the same bank, is standing 80% of their money. Does this mean, ultimately, that the deliverees, the haute servile winners who are the differential beneficiaries in this system, nonetheless really serve the banks? Who, or what, do the banks serve? The circulations by this stage are so recursive that one would need to be both a bank employee and shareholder to stabilise these ebbings in a way were you could defensibly say you were ‘winning’ in this game.
So then
We are working like this – 50% of us in bullshit jobs – to pay for a place to live.
The rich own the renovated houses in which they also live, and many own many other properties, from which they can draw rents and hold as a blue-chip asset they can also transmit to their progeny.
The middle class ‘and up’, we happy deliverees, are servicing mortages of 3-8000k/month, usually in the hope of capital gains when they sell, and mostly for the best lifestyle and amenity the bank allows them to access via borrowing, in the meantime.
The rest, the mass of precarious operatives? Of course they are living from home or renting somewhere, ordinarily paying a screaming fuckton of money for substandard digs. This is where the class structure of the servile service economy comes screaming back.
To conclude by returning to the two motifs I worked up from Gorz over the past two posts: the structuring relation to real-estate affects everything and everyone in a post-industrial society with the utopia of ‘gain without labour’, characterised by ‘servile relations between Deliveroo and deliveree’[12]. Leaving aside anyone’s subjective investment in ideologies of competitive individualism, or being a driven person who deeply enjoys busyness as a powerful extrinsic motivator that also assuages the deep-seated anxieties you’re running away from and the love of acknowledgment, reward, achievement and ‘success’ you’re running toward, if anyone is hustling, delivering for a client, delivering their body to a john, or just delivering a $24.95 vibrator anywhere within an urban radius of 30km in <2hours, we’re doing it for housing, because of housing, and because of our current relation to our past-and-present housing.
This in turn is fundamentally determined by the property and capital we’ve inherited or acquired, if we have; or else, the only way to get in on the racket is via indebting oneself to obtain credentials good enough to make one a competitive applicant, then, if we do get the job, by relentlessly delivering for clients, for long enough that we develop a good enough credit history and deposit so we can get into a an interest-only loan on a median house of >1.mill, hopefully within the radius of the decent public schools. The desire towards gain without labour, and the reality of thirty years of ‘client delivery’ as a way toward it, is only truly enjoyed by the rich, who for personal-historical reasons can exclusively enjoy the power of labour-saving devices and compound interest. For the rest of the middle class trying-and-maybe-able to attain this by the age of 70, this is dynamised by a very complex fantasy of home ownership –that is by now only about 20% true for most people. Thus, in 2022, not only do the ‘winner’ ½ of us secretly know, or not so secretly know, that we’re doing a bullshit job; we also know that we’re housed by assets we draw a differential benefit from as capital, yet do not and will never probably-actually own.
And it rains, and rains, and rains.
[1] There are two reasons I wish to persist with Australia as island-paradigm, aside from the low-hanging one of having grown up here and come to know it by studying its political history a little. Firstly (and this gets back to the first post), there are few places on earth where one can see ‘all of the above’ – Anglocapitalist hegemony, neoliberalism, the economic rationalisation of everything, and what Gorz theorised it would produce – having been pushed as far as it can be pushed. Gorz’ France, which by ’88 was still very much the France of Mitterand, is a much less clear-cut case of the eclipse of industrial modernity by economic reason. Of course, by Sarkozy and Macron, we have arrived at neoliberalism with French characteristics, but France is also deeply French socialist in a way that precludes it ever unambiguously being just neoliberal: France is a people and a nation, not just an economy. Secondly, Australia is a high wage country with a middling social safety net and welfare state, yet where the rackets of real estate have boomed as hard as New Zealand and Canada. It is thus one of the places where one can see, more than any other, one of the sets of factors which are also producing pervasive servility and useless niche services, while the ecology unravels.
[2] Of Marx, Weber, Arendt, and 80s Habermas… what I find so exciting about Gorz is that, although he repudiated his Austro-Hungarian background after WWII and adopted Francophone culture and Anglophone romantic love, he kept reading the Germans and critical theory, and eventually used it as a way out of existentialist Marxism and a way through French poststructuralism.
[3] Very interestingly, the recrudescence of a society structured by servile relations of personal dependency is also a hallmark of racket society as Horkheimer, Neuman and Kirchheimer noticed it; and also of the post-communist mafia state in Masha Gessen’s telling. There are rackets and mafia states, but if I keep my eyes on contemporary Australia, as a ‘winner’ country of the Anglocapitalist half century just past, the dominant structuring relation, or ‘major key’, is between the deliverers and the serviced, rather than the permeation of insider groups and ‘nasty clique battles’, or familial relations of life and death loyalty-omerta to the Father (both of which, to be sure, also exist everywhere). The truly theoretically interesting question might then be how Gorz’ sketch for the political economy of a terminally econo-rationalised society could also be permeated byrackets and even take place in a mafia state… (another post… ..maybe book length… )
[4] I say *total* economy to capture the sense in which there is only the economy, and/or a world in which ‘the economy’ overdetermines all other spheres… as for scarcity, this is precisely the point (and also explored well in Peter Frase’s Four Futures): is there actually scarcity, on a material-technical level; is there any need for it? Gorz and Frase would both say ‘no’, we could be living in a world of what Frase calls ‘fully automated luxury capitalism’. Postwar US-led industrial modernity in fact *over*produces food and stuff and things (hence we need marketing, advertising and consumerism to force people to consume too much to retain profitability): the (current ‘first world’ urban) problem is one of uneven distribution of resources, rewards, and the actual scarcities are of free time, attention, affordable housing, and reasonable commutes.
[5] https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-david-graeber-occupy-wall-street-karl-marx
[6] roughly double the US minimum wage. In Germany it’s supposedly 12 euro/hour, 18.58 AUD/hour
[7] People in my networks are paying 250/week for an average room in an apartment (so: living with one housemate in a unit); 15-18k/year, or 360/week, gets you to a nice, small rental of your own in urban areas in Melbourne. My guess is it’s >400 in Sydney.
[8] Eg in my local area, which is gentrified and where the median house price is an eye-watering 1.2 million, there are still quite a few one-bedroom apartments that go for 350,000-400,000. Assuming you could get approved and borrowed 350k at slightly less than five percent, if you were paying interest only, the monthly rent would be just shy of 1500 pcm, or 350/week.
[9] You can see how this shakes down in terms of national median prices between 1993-2018 here, or have a look at the same source’s exciting-terrifying racing bar charts for the raw price change (and same, adjusted for inflation). Adelaide remains the least unaffordable of Australia’s cities (but has commensurately lower wages and fewer jobs). I also think it’s worth sticking with Sydney and Melbourne, because this is where 40% of the population live (and do so because of the jobs). Moreover, the many people who service serviced people in Sydney and Melbourne still have to live in Sydney and Melbourne somehow, and this is the true horns of the dilemma, as it is in New Zealand and Canada.
[10] In fact, with the 12x factor, I noticed an interesting (if very rough) correlate: in the gentrified areas where I live, where professionals might earn 150k/year, people do buy houses for 1.8 million. In the areas where surgeons and executives live, houses are a little over 4 million now. The ratio does hold.
[11] A block of land in Wyndham Vale, on Melbourne’s urban periphery (35km from the CBD), of between 350-500m2, goes for 330-400k, a family house and land in the same area is 550-600k.
[12] In the United States, as Alec MacGillis traces, this has created a one-click fulfilment society that has differentiated on a city-by-city basis: ‘winner’ cities like Seattle and Washington, where the Gorzian technicans live, are now so expensive that even they can hardly afford it, and meanwhile, the cafes and bars, let alone galleries, warehouse clubs and art and music scenes, have all evaporated: it’s not only stupendously expensive, it’s also lame and boring. ‘Loser’ cities like Dayton, Ohio and Baltimore, on the other hand, are caught in a viciously entropic dynamic of high unemployment, low opportunities, high crime and hard drug dependency, white flight, civic entropy, and abandonment.