let them buy houses

[marnanel]

"The peasants have no bread."
"Let them eat cake!" (brioche)

Marie Antoinette didn't actually say that. The story spread because people were so worried about bread, which was the staple food. You might well spend 50% of your income on buying bread.

We were talking about this, and Kit said that the modern equivalent would be:

"Minister, the people say rents are too high."
"Well, they should just buy houses!"

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Good point. And I've been that guy.

[simont]

Mmm. And it is one of those notions that almost makes sense – once you observe that a lot of landlords are buyers-to-let, so that they charge enough rent to pay off their own mortgage and make a profit on top, it seems obvious that cutting out the middleman and buying the house yourself will reduce your monthly outgoing, even before you take into account the extra advantage that in 25 years' time the mortgage payments will stop but the rent won't.

It's just that, well, all the other things, such as that footling little issue of a gigantic deposit, the increased difficulty of uprooting yourself and moving, the risk of negative equity, maintenance costs on the house that the landlord would have been paying, etc...

[marnanel]

exactly, yes. This seems to be a case of the general rule that it's expensive to be poor.

[odd note: I originally wrote "a special case", i.e. a species of the genus. But "special case" as a phrase means it works differently to the general case. Strange.]

[simont]

[odd note: I originally wrote "a special case", i.e. a species of the genus. But "special case" as a phrase means it works differently to the general case. Strange.]

Hmm, yes. As a mathematician, I find I'm exactly balanced between seeing "special case" in the sense of "specialisation" (applying the general case unchanged to a specific circumstance and seeing what drops out), and "special case" in the everyday-usage sense of "exception".

But I think this might also tie in with the idea that "general" itself is a word which can mean "always" if you're a mathematician or "mostly" if you're not. In non-maths usage I think it's common to hear sentences like "Well, generally it works [this way], but occasionally..." whereas in maths the typical use of "general" means that a theorem applies everywhere.

(There is the occasional use of "general" to mean excluding some fiddly case that doesn't quite work, e.g. general position, but I think it's an exception to the, er, general rule.)