What book are you reading?

My husband has been saying this for some time.
He said that unlike Middle Ages, the new first estate has no sense of noblesse oblige. the old upper classes wouldn’t have been able to get away with indulgent space flights while the surrounding serfs starved or died of preventable illnesses.

 

Not very highbrow, but Minette Walters “The Last Hours”.
“June, 1348: the Black Death enters England through the port of Melcombe in the county of Dorsetshire. Unprepared for the virulence of the disease, and the speed with which it spreads, the people of the county start to die in their thousands.

In the estate of Develish, Lady Anne takes control of her people's future - including the lives of two hundred bonded serfs. Strong, compassionate and resourceful, Lady Anne chooses a bastard slave, Thaddeus Thurkell, to act as her steward. Together, they decide to quarantine Develish by bringing the serfs inside the walls. With this sudden overturning of the accepted social order, where serfs exist only to serve their lords, conflicts soon arise. Ignorant of what is happening in the world outside, they wrestle with themselves, with God and with the terrible uncertainty of their futures.”

 

Unfortunately, I have to agree with your husband and the oligarchs in the new First Estate compare just as poorly, if not worse, to the industrialists of the 19th and 20th Centuries. It's one of the major problems that Klotkin lays out for his audience and one of the most valuable aspects of the book is that it confirms many of our own worst observations, intuitions and suspicions.

One of the things that concerns me most, and the author repeatedly mentions this in his book, are the prospects for freedom and democracy in a world where the middle class is being eviscerated. History has shown us time and time again that the prerequisite for democracy and the republican forms of government we enjoy today is the existence of a vibrant middle class. It was the emergence and assertiveness of the hoplite middle class in Ancient Greece that gave birth to democracy in Athens under the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes. During the Medieval Agricultural and Commercial revolutions it was the emergence and assertiveness of a new middle class that brought democracy back to life in Medieval Europe's communes and boroughs and eventually the countryside. During our own times, it was the unprecedented strength of our middle class that elevated us to unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity. Now, all of that progress is grinding into reverse and the pandemic and responses to the pandemic (lockdowns, etc.) that have destroyed countless businesses and jobs have compounded and accelerated that process exponentially. It's something that all of us - Left, Right and Center - have to be concerned about.

 

A pretty good read.

 

I’ve just ordered it for him.

 

Great, and I encourage you to read it after he's done. I finished reading it last night and I've convinced my wife to read it, too. An issue that she's been talking about lately is the decline in home ownership and the corresponding rise in renting, which is becoming increasingly (and depressingly) widespread, particularly amongst younger Americans, many of whom are buried under student loans. The prospect of fewer property owners in our country is a matter of serious concern on many levels.

 

German translation of Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries (originally in Polish).

 

Same situation here. Home ownership is out of reach for many young people now. Housing is much more expensive than it used to be. Our student loans aren’t as onerous but the median house price in my city is AU$1,022, 000.

 

Wow - that's right up there with some of our most expensive cities (scroll down to list):

https://www.realtor.com/research/june-2021-data/

Housing in U.S. suburbs isn't a lot better, and new home prices skyrocketed during the pandemic when the cost of raw materials- lumber, copper, etc. - exploded over the past year and a half. Our rural areas are about the only place you can find affordable real estate anymore.

 

Living in the suburbs is certainly cheaper but if you have to travel into a city to work, running a car adds to your costs. Many of our newer housing developments are cheaper but have fewer public transport options.
Apropos building materials, there’s a shortage of pine framing timber here, owing to the 2019 bushfires which took out several large pine plantations.
It’s all complicated.

 

And if you move out to the country to save money on real estate, the additional expense of purchasing, maintaining and operating the reliable transportation you need to live in a rural area can make the price of owning a home higher than renting one in the city. I know this from personal experience.

It certainly is complicated, and this is the specific problem my wife has been talking about - she works for a financial services firm and she's been watching this happen for quite some time:

The Real Reason it Matters that Investment Firms Are Buying Up Houses

https://www.fatherly.com/news/investors-single-family-home-market-rentals-wealth/

Below is the article that is citied in the article above, and while I don't necessarily subscribe to the author's "solution" to this issue I think she does a good job of illustrating it:

Investment Firms Aren’t Buying All the Houses. But They Are Buying the Most Important Ones.

https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-investment-firms-real-estate.html

 

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

 

They are leeches!

 

The edge of a small town would be better.. But it is absolutely true that we travel a long way for groceries.. that may be mitigated by not putting on many miles when home... 4 miles a day back and forth to the office... and nothing city people would deem to be traffic

(a favorite joke of mine.. traffic backed up today.. Sra. Hernandez's chihuahua got out again and was in the street! Blocked traffic as Roberto (in the lead car) gathered it up and took it back to la Duena.

 

That's an insult to leeches.

 

In Oz, many houses are bought by retirees (for rentals) who are managing their own superannuation funds.
There are reports of foreign investors buying houses and leaving them empty, for resale later I suppose.
Lot of different influences on the market.

 

i have just started reading man in high castle by Philip K dick loving it so far

 

Really? I read that years ago, and although I love the genre, I found that particular version of Nazi's winning World War II a very boring one. It turned me off so much I could never watch the TV show.

 

The Apostle by John Pollack.. very good biography on Paul of Tarsus.

 

I love Philip K Dick's writings. He's maybe the most prolific of sci fi writers - certainly has had a lot turned into movies. I found it amusing to have found several years ago he has a fan club named...Dick-Heads.

 

Just about everything Dick wrote has an overriding theme of "What is Reality?" He himself was schizophrenic and freely admitted to being addicted to amphetamines which he said he took to treat his mental dysfunctions and some doctors agreed.

"The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick " is his journal, and a very interesting study of his unique visions and writing processes

 

Right now I’m reading Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. This is his first work I’ve read, and it won’t be the last. He develops characters better than almost any author I’m familiar with.

 

I see a liberal bias , it's easy to read but it takes forever to fact check , so many lies

 

Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows - flat out best book I ever read. The wisest man I ever read about.

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History - second best book I ever read.

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about 3-months ago and just finished The Gulag Archipelago.

 

I agree about Empire of the Summer Moon. Found my PF screen name there.
Currently reading A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan.