Morgan Housel

The first I would say is there are so many social problems that don't seem connected to housing.

But if you actually dig into it, they are downstream of housing.

And so at the high level, most of the evidence will show that if a young person, a young couple in particular, cannot afford to buy a house, they are statistically less likely to get married, less likely to have kids, have higher rates of alcohol abuse, have lower rates of mental health, and go down the list of those problems.

Buying a house...

For better or worse, socially is a very important box to check of I am stepping into adulthood.

And if you don't, if you're unable to do that, you feel kind of like you are just suppressed into a lower level of not yet adulthood.

And it can kind of stem from there.

But you could take this in several different directions.

Almost unavoidably,

If housing gets very expensive and some people can't afford it to buy a house, you're just pushing people on the conveyor belt of you can't afford it.

A level of the population is going to become homeless.

It's unavoidable if there's not enough homes.

Of course, that's how it works.

What do so many homeless people do for a little bit of pleasure and comfort when they find themselves homeless?

heroin.

And so you can draw a straight line, a straight line from housing affordability to drug crises, to fertility crises, to decline in marriage, to all of these things from there.

And I think what can be so aggravating about this problem, most problems in economics are very complicated.

And so if we're talking about how do we extract more oil from the ground, like it's a hard problem.

So there's a lot of variables in there and there's technological challenges that make things much more difficult.

How to bring down housing affordability is the simplest thing in the world.