Gide, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

It is the dangerous question that is most likely to be on the tip of the tongue of a certain

cohort of middle-class, middle-aged people at barbecues or bars.

And that is, why are houses so bloody expensive? What has happened in the past

half century in rich Western countries to put houses into the millions of dollars far out

of the reach of the average working man? Last month I got on this show, Peter Tulep, one of

Australia's leading economists, to give us the answer,

the conventional economic answer for this. And it was absolutely fascinating. You should go back

and listen to that episode if you're interested in this, basically saying, look, there's more

demand than there is supply. We are NIMBY's. Our councils love heritage protections.

We don't want big skyscrapers right next to us.

We don't want lots of townhouses crammed together.

We like our streets the way that we are

and therefore we prevent people from building

and logically, if you have more demand than you have supply,

prices will go up.

After that episode dropped, we got pushback

from a small cohort of economists who said,

actually that can't really explain what is going on.

And if you really think about it carefully and you do your economics right,

you may be led to a very, very uncomfortable conclusion indeed.

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