EU referendum are you in or out

[gilesgoat]

*SNIP*

The median household income is the income of the household who happen to land on the 50% line of all the household incomes, that is to say, they don't have a 50% income of what the richest have, they are the ones who if you are counting households from richest to poorest, are the exact middle number, not the middle income. That's obvious if you know what median means, otherwise not clear at all.

EEEEEH???!!???

... what does that mean ??? ...

According to wiki .. 'The median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample' .. so if 1 is the least and 10 is the max the median is 5, but if 1 is the min and 9 is the max the median is (4+5)/2 = 4.5 ...

Anyway I think has to be seen if the data set is contiguous and/or has gaps or such.

And then again if you have 1000 houses with income 10 and 10 houses with income 500 I am still not sure "how you evaluate that". (*)

I am guessing "a single value is not enough", you should look at a histogram.

(*) I THINK the median could be still in the range of 400 ( if all values are continuous ) but the reality is the majority of people have 10 not 400.

[zip accident]

*SNIP*

The median household income is the income of the household who happen to land on the 50% line of all the household incomes, that is to say, they don't have a 50% income of what the richest have, they are the ones who if you are counting households from richest to poorest, are the exact middle number, not the middle income. That's obvious if you know what median means, otherwise not clear at all.

And then again if you have 1000 houses with income 10 and 10 houses with income 500 I am still not sure "how you evaluate that".

In that case the median is between the 505th and the 506th households, and the value is 10.

[tufty]

Poverty as 60% of median is very silly.

It is.

I would go so far as to say almost nobody (excluding children of malignant parents) in this country, or indeed the EU or the USA is poor, and they haven't been since WW2.

This, however, is bullshit.

There is, I'll grant you, a significant proportion of society who consider"poverty" to mean "not being able to afford the latest iPhone", but there are also a large number of people who are entirely dependent on, for example, food banks. I have, at several points in my life, been in the unpleasant situation of having to decide between eating at lunch time and putting petrol in the bike to be able to get to work.

It's very easy, when you're not in that situation, to paint the poor as workshy fuckpigs who waste everything they have on booze, fags, mobile phones and betting shops, and who deserve their poverty. Or to simply deny their existence. Nobody actively chooses to be poor. There's no honour or pride in being poor. It's shit.

[Rubisco]

*SNIP*

The median household income is the income of the household who happen to land on the 50% line of all the household incomes, that is to say, they don't have a 50% income of what the richest have, they are the ones who if you are counting households from richest to poorest, are the exact middle number, not the middle income. That's obvious if you know what median means, otherwise not clear at all.

And then again if you have 1000 houses with income 10 and 10 houses with income 500 I am still not sure "how you evaluate that".

In that case the median is between the 505th and the 506th households, and the value is 10.

And because nobody has an income of less than 6, then nobody is in poverty.

And if you have 1000 houses with income 10 and 10 houses with income 1 billion, the median remains 10, and still nobody is in poverty.

And if you have 501 houses with income 10 and 499 houses with income 1 trillion...

You could literally have a slave state where no slave was in poverty as long as there were more slaves than masters.

[snaff]

The biggest single jump in poverty was when Gordon Brown increased average house prices from 3 times average earnings to 10 times average earnings. Even people who appear to be doing okay are in a lifetime of debt servitude with both adults in each household working full time to pay 35 year mortgages and only one pay cheque away from ruin. It's not the bottom 10% who are in trouble, it's the bottom 50% and soon it'll be the bottom 60%.

[snaff]

ONS on median versus mean income:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... rovisional

The distribution of people’s household disposable income is skewed towards higher income people; mean income (£35,300) is £5,900 larger than median income (£29,400).

[Harlequin]

EEEEEH???!!???

... what does that mean ??? ...

According to wiki .. 'The median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample' .. so if 1 is the least and 10 is the max the median is 5, but if 1 is the min and 9 is the max the median is (4+5)/2 = 4.5 ...

Eh? If you mean Wikipedia, I think it makes it clear that the median of, e.g., '1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 8, 9' is 2; not 4.5 (nor the mean value of 3.2…).

On the subject of calculating poverty figures, I wonder how incomes are calculated for, say, homeless people.

[merman]

The biggest single jump in poverty was when Gordon Brown increased average house prices from 3 times average earnings to 10 times average earnings. Even people who appear to be doing okay are in a lifetime of debt servitude with both adults in each household working full time to pay 35 year mortgages and only one pay cheque away from ruin. It's not the bottom 10% who are in trouble, it's the bottom 50% and soon it'll be the bottom 60%.

That's some world-class bull crap you are ladling out there.

Exactly how did Gordon Brown cause that?
Maybe it had more to do with that little thing called the sub-prime mortgage market collapse leading to a worldwide credit crunch, perhaps?

[snaff]

The biggest single jump in poverty was when Gordon Brown increased average house prices from 3 times average earnings to 10 times average earnings. Even people who appear to be doing okay are in a lifetime of debt servitude with both adults in each household working full time to pay 35 year mortgages and only one pay cheque away from ruin. It's not the bottom 10% who are in trouble, it's the bottom 50% and soon it'll be the bottom 60%.

That's some world-class bull crap you are ladling out there.

Exactly how did Gordon Brown cause that?
Maybe it had more to do with that little thing called the sub-prime mortgage market collapse leading to a worldwide credit crunch, perhaps?

The bust was caused by the boom, which was caused by Gordon Brown's low interest rate, easy lending policies, faux-BoE independence and bringing his banking chums in on the scam with guarantees that the state would back all their gambles. Money being easy globally is no excuse - there was no need for Labour to line up at the trough. The high house prices bought Blair and Brown a load of votes, then locked in their policies as now those home debtors are paralysed by the fear that any minor change to the economy such as leaving the EU could knock their house values off their precarious position. It drove a massive wedge between generations as the older home owners got a lottery win while the younger generations and those to come get locked in debt slavery. All to buy a few votes in some long since forgotten election.

Since then the Tories have managed prices down in the north, for which the north has rewarded them, but to do the same in the south they are having to line up double digit inflation between now and 2026. Normally the Conservatives can tidy up after Labour in two terms but this mess of Blair and Brown's is a multi-generational one. Think, if Brown hadn't done that you'd probably still have your EU.

[Dio]

Firstly, you have your timing partially wrong. Pricing doubled in the 80s boom, fell back, then doubled again in the early 00s boom, but fell back sharply from 2008 (before Labour left office) and have not significantly changed since. It's less the policies of the specific government and more the macroeconomic conditions. Sure, cheap money was a factor, but the Conservatives would have been unlikely to do anything significantly differently in those periods.

I certainly agree that allowing the market to grow that fast was a mistake by Brown - although one that would have been difficult to control due to the growth in middle-class affluence during that period, and his overspending in the 2008-10 period caused by his bottling the election call in 2008 was total insanity, but I see no evidence e.g. Ken Clarke would have done anything slightly different about the former - Brown copied his playbook to the letter. My favoured solution for keeping prices down and in my opinion one of Labour's biggest missed opportunities would have been a massive council house building program funded by higher taxes for middle and higher earners, wealth taxes to reduce the profit available to private landlords and heavy regulation on corporate landlords - I'm presuming that's not a solution you'd think was a good idea, though?

Also, having lived in the north and bought and sold houses through that period, I'd dispute that there was any significant real terms drop in prices "up north". Prices did largely stop growing, but didn't fall back much, and any apparent drop was more than countered by the 15-25% loss of real terms income in 2010-13, a deficit which persists today. What happened instead is that the market slowed to a crawl, and there was very little activity. If the Tories are at all responsible for 'managing prices down' they did that by the simple expedient of making lots of people a lot less well off.

And let's not talk about what help to buy has done to distort the market in recent years. There's a truly criminal piece of government mismanagement of the market.

[gilesgoat]

... over too many years I am in UK ... and still one thing to me feels completely ALIEN is the way houses/house market/what people do with houses here works ...

First, houses in UK "in general" have prices that are "impossible" as in "you'd never buy them outisde UK, no one can afford them" ..

Second I really don't understand "all this thing about selling/buying houses in UK", coming from a country where "at most" you'd buy ONE house in your whole life ( unless you are lucky enough you inherited one ) then maybe it does not help that in my country we have quite an opposite problem of "excess houses construction" where in part they constructed shit "like mad" that then nobody has bought because nobody really asked for it.

Third "construction tecniques/materials" .. I continue to see houses even recently being built with "methods of 50 years ago" or such, maybe there are faster/cheaper ways to make houses that are not so much used here.

I really do not understand all this, but "from another set of eyes" it certainly feels like "UK HAS SERIOUS PROBLEM ABOUT HOUSES" .. but I can't really figure out precisely "what it is".

Overall yeah I can see "prices are strafucking mental" I think even with my whole work life in UK I could afford at most a dog house or a trailer if I am lucky, in some part out on the contryside, maybe.

And yet I suppose "in some way at least some people continue to pay" or dunno what, maybe that's why prices are still what they are ?

Yes if there's one thing I perfectly agree, in Italy as well, but they don't do that well even there is that government SHOULD put a limit/cap/something/control/etc. on the housing market and say "you have to have prices that are manageable", of course we are not speaking about "super luxury items" but "normal stuff for normal people".

I have the impression here that houses and prices are a way to enslave people into mortgages FOREVER !

And FFS STOP using wood to build houses, forget it exists please, you have that super famous Portland Cement we use it everywhere in Italy ! .. USE CEMENT !!!

Wood is expensive and rots and needs to be replaced !!

[merman]

The biggest single jump in poverty was when Gordon Brown increased average house prices from 3 times average earnings to 10 times average earnings. Even people who appear to be doing okay are in a lifetime of debt servitude with both adults in each household working full time to pay 35 year mortgages and only one pay cheque away from ruin. It's not the bottom 10% who are in trouble, it's the bottom 50% and soon it'll be the bottom 60%.

That's some world-class bull crap you are ladling out there.

Exactly how did Gordon Brown cause that?
Maybe it had more to do with that little thing called the sub-prime mortgage market collapse leading to a worldwide credit crunch, perhaps?

The bust was caused by the boom, which was caused by Gordon Brown's low interest rate, easy lending policies, faux-BoE independence and bringing his banking chums in on the scam with guarantees that the state would back all their gambles. Money being easy globally is no excuse - there was no need for Labour to line up at the trough. The high house prices bought Blair and Brown a load of votes, then locked in their policies as now those home debtors are paralysed by the fear that any minor change to the economy such as leaving the EU could knock their house values off their precarious position. It drove a massive wedge between generations as the older home owners got a lottery win while the younger generations and those to come get locked in debt slavery. All to buy a few votes in some long since forgotten election.

Since then the Tories have managed prices down in the north, for which the north has rewarded them, but to do the same in the south they are having to line up double digit inflation between now and 2026. Normally the Conservatives can tidy up after Labour in two terms but this mess of Blair and Brown's is a multi-generational one. Think, if Brown hadn't done that you'd probably still have your EU.

Utter rot.
The Tory con of owning your own home by flogging off social housing did more to cause the current misery than anything that happened while Brown was in power. Like most people you are forgetting Brown's careful handling of the economy in the first New Labour term when it was saddled with John Major's debt/deficit.

Oh, and the independence of the Bank of England works, so you don't get politicians manipulating interest rates to shore up the pound that has crashed because of their policies. If Boris the Berk had control he would have hiked the lending rates sky-high to counter the damage he has done to the markets by pushing on with Brexit to his inflexible timetable.

[Cloudane]

One way or another whichever government you point your finger at, house prices went ridiculous. That's pretty much irreversible as if they hypothetically went down, all the people who already own houses would kick off bigtime at the decreasing value of their investment. And investors being pretty much a direct link to running the country and economy, they're not just going to let the value of houses decrease.

[Harlequin]

One way or another whichever government you point your finger at, house prices went ridiculous. That's pretty much irreversible as if they hypothetically went down, all the people who already own houses would kick off bigtime at the decreasing value of their investment. And investors being pretty much a direct link to running the country and economy, they're not just going to let the value of houses decrease.

As Doi pointed out, though, prices did fall back after the booms of the 80s and 00s. It is conceivable that they could do so again for a longer period.

[gilesgoat]

.. a house is not "an investment" .. a house is a house ... a building maybe could be an investment ..