Gerald Butts
speaker
1,669 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Some people take the debate on the developers versus environmentalist piece, James, but though that is a very funny line.
I find that very funny.
Um I I I think the
The housing issue, uh listening to James describe it, it's a perfect example of how affordability becomes a problem, right?
James identified three or four structural factors factors.
I would accentuate the last one that we've allowed homes to become uh financial and speculative assets that are bought, sold, and traded like commodities.
And I think that's a real problem.
And it used to be, you know, I look around my neighborhood here in Ottawa, there's still a few of those famous strawberry box posts.
Warehouses that were built.
God forbid, for families to live in, rather than something to be invested, traded, sold, apportioned, uh, and traded in parts.
And I think that's that's a big problem.
But
All of the other factors that James mentioned were 30, 40 years in the making.
And they happened at a time when people's incomes became divorced from productivity growth and the uh economy writ large.
This is the big problem in the United States.
I posted this chart from the Economic Policy Institute on my um LinkedIn feed last week and watched the fireworks go.
Because it was like a Rorschach test to see where everybody stood on the ideological spectrum.
But there's no doubt that it used to be in the post-war period, incomes grew with productivity in the United States.
And somewhere in the early to mid 70s, those two things got divorced.
More of the fruits of the economy's labor was absorbed by the wealthiest people in the
Showing 361–380 of 1,669 · page 19 of 84
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