Own Your Own Home

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pages: 93 words: 24,584

Walk Away by Douglas E. French

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, Elliott wave, forensic accounting, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, loss aversion, low interest rates, McMansion, mental accounting, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, unbiased observer, wealth creators

But if it’s close to being right, the number is a fraction of the 11 to 15 million homes estimated to be under water right now. It is a wonder that the foreclosure filings are not double or triple what are currently being filed. Government has built a huge stake in the housing market since before the Great Depression, starting with Herbert Hoover’s “Own Your Own Home” initiative. Government has standardized suburban living through its mortgage guarantee guidelines. Government has provided the secondary markets to make 30-year mortgages and the securitization of those loans possible. Owner-occupied housing not only provides employment, but each homeowner has a stake in their community and their country.

So, there were typically only two types of homeowners; the wealthy who paid cash and working folks who built their own homes. As Thomas J. Sugrue, history and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania points out, “even many of the richest rented—because they had better places to invest than in the volatile housing market.” But after WWI, the federal government launched an “Own Your Own Home” campaign with the objective being to “defeat radical protest and restore political stability by encouraging urban workers to become homeowners,” Weiss writes. In his book American Individualism, Herbert Hoover defined individualism stripped of the “the laissez faire of the 18th Century.” but instead viewed American individualism as Abraham Lincoln’s “ideal of equality of opportunity” and “fair division can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and dominant.”

Disturbed that the 1920 census reflected a decline in home ownership, “Hoover offered a vigorous, new approach to the housing problem through the application of federal, voluntary, and business cooperative activity,” Janet Hutchinson writes in “Building for Babbitt: The State and the Suburban Home Ideal.” At Hoover’s direction the federal government threw its weight behind four organizations to promote home ownership: the commercial “Own Your Own Home Campaign” and Home Modernization Bureau, the nonprofit Better Homes in America Movement, and the professional Architect’s Small House Service Bureau. This concentrated effort served to foster, as Hutchison points out, “an idealized vision of American home life rooted in the ownership of a suburban residence replete with modern amenities.”


pages: 229 words: 64,697

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

The truth is that housing in most parts of the country is ridiculously expensive. The Economist magazine has labelled the Aussie housing market the biggest financial bubble in history. And yet, regardless of what prices do in the short term, I still passionately believe that owning your own home is one of the best financial decisions you'll make. Why? Well, owning your own home is like a 30-year forced savings plan — and any gains you make over that period are tax free. Yet buying a home isn't just a financial decision, it's an emotional one. After all, it's where you'll raise your family. It's your castle. The day I bought my first place was one of the proudest moments of my life.

At any stage of the game — regardless of your educational level, upbringing or age — you can decide to leapfrog the pettiness of people to achieve your goals. When you make a commitment and have the courage to stick with it through thick and thin, you'll double your income — and more. Over to you. STEP 4 BUY YOUR HOME You can use your buckets to save up a deposit — fast! I still believe in the Great Australian Dream of owning your own home. However, I've also seen the dream become a nightmare for many first home buyers, who catch Hills Hoist envy and take on too much debt. So next we'll cover the practical realities of making the biggest purchase of your life: Should you wait for the housing market to crash before you buy?

In the real world there are off-spreadsheet factors, one being that as a renter you don't have the security of tenure. And that extra cash can easily be frittered away, especially if you move every 12 months or so. Mistake #5: They don't consider other options There are options if you really want to own your own home. You can move into the city: A few years back I made a bold prediction that inner-city apartments (especially in the Melbourne CBD) would be selling at fire-sale prices within the next few years. Even as I write this, brand-new off-the-plan apartments are selling at steep losses in many parts of the country as the oversupply of apartments starts to bite.


pages: 322 words: 77,341

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

The broad distinction is that in some countries, home ownership is regarded as a good thing but not an essential. If you can afford it and if you prefer owning to renting, then by all means own your own home. If you can’t afford it or temperamentally don’t want to be tied down by a long-term, highly leveraged, highly illiquid investment, then so what, you rent. In other countries, however, home ownership is an unquestioned primary good. It implies safety, prosperity, full participation in society. Owning your own home could almost be seen as a fundamental right. It follows that in these countries, governments will pursue policies designed to increase home ownership.

He’s trying to save his money to that he can get an apartment, but it takes time to get on his feet, it’s probably going to take him another month or two. He’s not looking to live in the Taj Mahal, he just wants a one-room apartment. So that’s it. If they’re lucky they get taken in by relatives, or they find a cash job and a renter who’ll take them in for cash. But mainly, nobody knows.” And that’s where the dream of owning your own home, combined with innovative new financial derivatives, has brought us. This is the other end of the causal chain behind the bank collapses and the seizing up of credit. It’s easy to lose money in the housing market. I’ve done it myself. One of my most vivid memories of the late-1980s property bubble was how insanely boring it made so much conversation.

In practice, most of us own our home through a mortgage, which means that we don’t own our home at all. Back in the days of my first flat, you didn’t even hold the property deed of your own property if you had a mortgage: the bank held the deed. There was something brutal about that, but at least the point was stark: if you have a mortgage, you don’t own your own home, and it’s a good idea to remember the fact. If you have a mortgage, though, your life is in thrall to a number: the interest rate. In continental Europe, policy wonks and bankers care what the interest rate is, but no one else does. Here, the interest rate has the potential to dominate your life.


pages: 201 words: 62,593

The Automatic Millionaire, Expanded and Updated: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich by David Bach

asset allocation, diversified portfolio, financial independence, index fund, job automation, late fees, money market fund, Own Your Own Home, risk tolerance, robo advisor, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Of all the secrets to financial security that I share in this book, there are three that stand out in terms of importance and effectiveness. The first is to decide to Pay Yourself First 10 percent of your pretax income. The second is to Make It Automatic. The third is to… BUY A HOME AND PAY IT OFF AUTOMATICALLY In this chapter, we’re going to look at why you should own your own home—and even more important, how you can pay for that home automatically so you can be debt-free before you’re too old to enjoy it. So let’s get started. Young or old, you want to own the place you live in. Why? It’s simple. You can’t get rich renting. As the old saying goes, landlords get rich and renters stay poor.

As a renter, you can easily spend half a million dollars or more on rent over the years ($1,500 a month for thirty years comes to $540,000), and in the end wind up just where you started—owning nothing. Or you can buy a house and spend the same amount paying down a mortgage, and in the end wind up owning your own home free and clear! The fact is, you aren’t really in the game of building wealth until you own some real estate. THE FIRST LANDLORD YOU SHOULD BECOME IS YOUR OWN Study after study has shown that people who own their own homes wind up with an average net worth many times greater than that of those who rent.

The higher your tax bracket, the more the government is helping you buy a home. If you are in the 30 percent tax bracket, the government is basically subsidizing almost a third of your mortgage payment (particularly in the early years, when most of your monthly payment goes to pay interest). 5. Pride of Ownership. When you own your own home, you own a piece of the American Dream. You put down roots, become part of a community, and enjoy the sense of pride that comes with ownership. This is more than just a warm, fuzzy feeling; it’s something that gives you and your loved ones a real sense of security. 6. Real Estate Has Proven to Be a Great Investment.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

The History of Homeownership Promotion In another element of the real estate narrative, history shows a succession of advertising promotions for homeownership itself, not just for the sale of individual properties. In the United States, these promotions began with the “Own Your Own Home” campaign, launched by real estate agent Hill Ferguson in 1914 under the auspices of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (precursor to the National Association of Realtors today). The Own Your Own Home campaign, like the savings and loan association movement that preceded it in the United States and the even earlier building society movement in the United Kingdom and Europe, was an attempt to help people build up some savings. The Own Your Own Home campaign set out to change the widespread presumptions that borrowing is disreputable or dangerous, that people should never go into debt, and that they should accumulate savings to buy a home with an all-cash offer.

Bush heavily used the slogan “Ownership Society” during his 2004 reelection campaign. The slogan was a variation on the American Dream theme; Bush was calling attention to a society that respects ownership and in which people “take ownership”—that is, take responsibility for themselves. He said in 2002, “Right here in America if you own your own home, you’re realizing the American Dream.” He spoke of the good feelings homeownership lent: “All you’ve got to do is shake their hand and listen to their stories and watch the pride that they exhibit when they show you the kitchen and the stairs.”46 Controlled experiments have shown that marketing of consumer products may be enhanced by appeals to patriotism.47 By attaching the term American Dream to moral rectitude and to patriotism, this narrative epidemic probably raised the homeownership rate in the United States, as well as stimulating business in general.

In the earliest part of the twentieth century, people didn’t think of saving for retirement, as they in many cases did not think they would live long enough to spend much time in retirement. Rather, savings were put aside as a safety measure against illness or other misfortune. The savings bank movement and the Own Your Own Home movement were a moderate success. The homeownership rate rose, and even today low-income people in the United States and other advanced countries tend to have some savings, mostly in the form of home equity. Next came the Better Homes in America movement launched in 1922 by Marie Meloney, the editor of a woman’s magazine, the Delineator.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

One ongoing example is the push to encourage homeownership in the United States. Studies over time, not to mention common sense, suggest that communities where people own their own homes are safer, more stable, and attractive to investment.7 As far back as 1918, when the U.S. Department of Labor started a campaign called Own Your Own Home, federal and state governments have promoted this goal with tax policies, regulation of financial institutions, and direct support for homeowners.8 As President Johnson said in his proposal to create the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1968, “Home-ownership is a cherished dream and achievement of most Americans.

See machine learning neurons, 23, 27, 29 programmable, 24 New York Times, 170 Occupy Wall Street, 170 oil spill (2010). See BP oil spill online sales, 7, 90, 136, 177–78, 181–82 advertising and, 64–76, 132 employment effects of, 139–40, 142 product reviews and, 55, 143. See also Amazon Onsale.com, 96 Oracle, 114–15 OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health) rules, 37 Own Your Own Home program, 168 Oxford University, 152 Pandora, 16 paralegals, 148 part-time work, 185 pattern recognition, 25, 55 payroll taxes, 14, 154 PBI. See public benefit index Pearson, Harry, 193 pension funds, 12, 14 Perlman, Steve, 127 personal public transit. See autonomous vehicles personhood, 90, 215n9 corporations vs. synthetic intellects, 199–200 persuasion, 70, 136 pharaoh (ancient Egypt), 115–16 philanthropy, 58, 113, 118–19 phonograph, invention of, 192 pictures: AI recognition of, 39 website links to, 65 pixels, 65, 66 pollution reduction, 168, 195 poverty, 3, 12, 15 preceptrons (programmatic neurons), 24 prepaid cell phone cards, 55 prices: advertising space bids, 69, 70, 71 Amazon practices, 97–105 automation effects on, 73, 132 comparison of, 14, 54, 100–101 public-interest systems and, 56 stock fluctuations (see stock markets) Princeton University, 113 productivity, 12, 132, 136 professions, 11, 145–46, 157 professors, 11, 151 profits, 55, 72, 103 progressives, 163–65 prostitutes, 40, 144–45 protein folding research, 58 psychopaths, 79–80 public benefit index (PBI), 14, 15, 180–81, 182 public interest, 56, 163–65, 169, 178 public service, 58, 114, 184, 185 public transit.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Before we can nurture the new industries of the future, develop new forms of health care and biotechnologies, or even explore new forms of education or more experiential forms of entertainment and recreation, we first have to free up capital by producing the goods of the old industrial order more cheaply and efficiently. We’ve reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the “ownership society.” Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house that can’t be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to economic opportunity. Not only has that piece of the American Dream grown dark, but it’s also clear that financial excess in the housing sector was one of the central causes of the economic crisis.

The percentage of Americans owning their home increased from 27 percent before 1920 to 45 percent by 1950, reaching more than 60 percent during the 1960s—the exact year my working-class parents bought a suburban home of their own.6 For my immigrant grandparents and their peers, the American Dream meant one thing: economic opportunity. But the Second Reset redefined and broadened that dream, making owning your own home a central part of it. Most of all, home ownership radically transformed the way people consume. The amount of money the average family spent for food fell from almost half at the turn of the twentieth century to a third in 1950 and less than a fifth by the mid-1980s. Spending on basic needs—that is, food, shelter, and clothing combined—declined from more than three-quarters of family budgets at the turn of the century to less than half by 1960.


pages: 245 words: 78,125

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness by Michelle Ogundehin

clean water, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Indoor air pollution, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, McMansion, microplastics / micro fibres, Own Your Own Home, placebo effect, sharing economy

CLEARING THE WAY The solution to a home that no longer seems to meet our needs is almost always thought to lie in an upgrade of some sort: more rooms, a larger garden, an extended kitchen. And while sometimes a few architectural interventions can indeed make a significant difference to the way you live, what if you don’t own your own home or you can’t afford to move or make extensive renovations? Besides, believing more is always the answer only reflects the pervasive conviction that a newer, bigger, faster, updated whatever must be better. This is nothing more than marketing, often based on a model of built-in obsolescence, which can blind us to the opportunities of the here and now.

ALWAYS START WITH YOUR FLOORING Whether you want your home to be relaxing, calm or invigorating, always start with your floor, then follow with the colours for your walls and know that everything will flow from there. This is because floors are often overlooked, or left until last, whereas they should be one of the very first things you think about, as they will be in your eyeline from all viewpoints, underpinning everything in your home both visually and quite literally. Plus, if you own your own home, it’ll be one of your biggest investments, so better to get this sorted before you buy anything else, on the premise that you can sit on a cardboard box on a wonderful floor and it will look magnificent, but anything on a cheap floor will be instantly, and permanently, compromised. Of course that’s a dilemma if you can’t afford to install a new floor, or if you rent and have a hideous carpet or faux laminate in situ to contend with.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

A 2012 study by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard found “little evidence to suggest that individuals’ preferences for owning versus renting a home have been fundamentally altered by their exposure to house price declines and loan delinquency rates, or by knowing others in their neighborhood who have defaulted on their mortgages.”75 A 2013 survey by the University of Connecticut found that 76 percent of those polled believe that being able to own your own home is necessary to be considered middle class.76 THE GLOBALIZATION OF DISPERSION Suburbanization is now a global phenomenon. In Tokyo, like other large cities, the movement to the suburbs began with the expansion of commuter railways, most of which were privately owned. Some Tokyo suburbs were designed, at least in part, with notions borrowed from planner Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities” concept.

In the last half century, that has changed radically.109 Edgardo Contini, a prominent Los Angeles architect and planner, observed in the 1960s: The suburban house is the idealization of every immigrant’s dream—the vassal dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs, even by the worst sprawl. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.110 Contini, for one, would not have been surprised that the fastest growth in immigrant populations now overwhelmingly takes place in the suburbs; between 2000 and 2013, suburbs accounted for three-quarters of the growth among newcomers.111 More than 40 percent of non-citizen immigrants now move directly to suburbs.112 For minorities, notes a study by Arizona State University geographer Deirdre Pfeiffer, the fastest integration into the middle class and American norms comes in the most disdained geography of all—the farthest-flung, newly minted suburbs.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The Chancellor’s support package made no mention of financial assistance for anyone who lost their job and fell into rent debt to their landlord as a result, but instead a flimsy suggestion that landlords – who could access mortgage holidays – should be ‘flexible’ and ‘negotiate’ with renters whose finances were damaged. That is how Anthony – like many others – found himself caught in the crosshairs of two social and economic disasters: a global pandemic and a housing emergency. If you do not own your own home in Britain, precarity is a fact of life. It comes in the form of rent rises, eviction notices and knowing that, ultimately, your landlord has control over the one place in the world you should feel safe. Banking on Housing My grandparents, though they had the chance to, didn’t buy their flat in Dorrington Court through Right to Buy.

There’s so much stigma about not having money that, ironically, you spend money you don’t have to appear as though you do, and time you could spend on other things worrying about it. From where I stand, no policy area has reinforced or rejuvenated Britain’s wealth-based class system as much as housing. You can do everything right and it doesn’t necessarily mean you will ever own your own home. House prices are now so high, whether you attain the social ‘success’ of becoming a homeowner has much less to do with traditional class markers (such as whether you went to university or do a ‘skilled’ job) and much more to do with what your parents have in terms of actual assets on which they can draw.


Emergency Admissions: Memoirs of an Ambulance Driver by Kit Wharton

Own Your Own Home

They don’t want to put her through needless suffering, or waste treatment on someone who has little quality of life or is going to die anyway. The doctors stand at the bottom of the bed, staring at her, firing questions. They haven’t introduced themselves. She sits there, naked from the waist up, covered in wires, terrified. —Do you own your own home? —Do you get out much? —Do you see much of your friends? —Do you do your own shopping? Our lady is now confused and baffled as well. No one makes any attempt to cover her up, so I go back to the bed with a blanket to keep her warm and try and reassure her. Then I answer some of the doctors’ questions for her, making sure I give the right answers, since she – thank God – doesn’t realise these shouted questions might decide her fate.


pages: 368 words: 145,841

Financial Independence by John J. Vento

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, low interest rates, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, passive income, retail therapy, risk tolerance, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, young professional, zero day

Americans currently reaching retirement age—the infamous Baby Boomers—have not planned or saved adequately for retirement. Somehow over the last several decades—I believe since the end of World War II—many people in our society have come to believe many incorrect notions about money. These financial myths include such ideas as: • • • • “Owning your own home is everyone’s right.” “The real estate market will always rise.” “You can live ‘large’ on credit and never pay any consequences.” “If you need to work, you can always find a job.” These myths—a warped conception of the American Dream— exploded in a puff of smoke in 2008. (In fact, they were eroding for many years, but most people failed to heed the warnings.)

Sooner or later, you will run out of money, and you will find yourself in even worse financial shape.) Other Surprising Resources for Reducing Debt If you do not want to raid your savings or money-market accounts, you can consider other potential resources for putting your out-ofcontrol credit-card debt back in line. Here are a few suggestions. Take Out a Home-Equity Loan If you own your own home and have sufficient equity, you might want to consider taking out a home-equity line of credit and using it to pay off your credit-card debt. A homeequity loan helps you in several ways. First, by using the loan to pay down the debt, you are trading 18 to 20 percent interest (on your c04.indd 77 26/02/13 2:42 PM 78 Financial Independence (Getting to Point X ) credit cards) for 5 to 6 percent interest (on the home-equity loan).


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

Encouraging homeownership has long been a political priority in this country because of the belief that homeowners are intrinsic stakeholders in society and that growing this group enhances the social stability and economic aspirations of citizens. As early as 1918, the Department of Labor undertook an “Own Your Own Home” campaign, and in public-private partnership thousands of Better Homes committees promoted the advantages of home ownership in the 1920s.1 However, the government was most effective in encouraging home ownership through the promotion of financial innovation in three different phases, leveraging the power of finance to accomplish this social and political goal.

., 180 Obama, Barack, 218, 225 Oeconomicus (Xenophon), 18 Ohio National Bank, 81 oil: crisis, 143; dealers, of Oyamazaki, 45; prices, 114 Oksanen, E. H., 207 operating foundations, 127–28 options pricing, 235–36, 237 Oregon Investment Council, 296 orphans’ funds (Jianjiao-ku), 29 Ottoman Empire, 52, 55 ousiai (estates), 21 Over the Counter Bulletin Board, 180 “Own Your Own Home” campaign, 321 “Own Your Share of American Business” campaign, 92 Packard Motor Car Company, 111 pairs trading, 267 Pajcin, David, 187–90 Panama Canal, 90 Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, 182 Panic of 1792, 177 Panic of 1907, 200, 204 Paris, stock market in, 85 Pasion, 25–26 Paulson, John, 266 pawnshops, 30–31 P/E.


Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

This is why the emerging group of downshifters—people who have voluntarily reduced their income—is so important. Each downshifter has, so to speak, put their money where their mouth is. The defenders of consumerism—the advertisers and the neoliberal commentators, think-tankers and politicians—repeat the comforting stories. It’s good to aspire to own your own home, surround yourself with nice things, look after the needs of your children, and save for your retirement. Yes, we are lucky that in a 17 AFFLUENZA rich country such as Australia many of us can do these things, but most people reach a point in their lives, some at eighteen and some at 88, when they ask, ‘Work, buy, consume, die: is that all there is?’


pages: 200 words: 63,266

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins

delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, financial independence, follow your passion, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Own Your Own Home, passive income, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Stanford marshmallow experiment, time value of money, Walter Mischel

Let’s say your net worth at age 25 is $2,000, and then your net worth at age 30 is $10,000. By age 35 it will most likely be some number higher than $10,000—and it will typically be higher than that at 40, and higher still at 45. The statistics on household net worth (by age of head of household) bear out this trend. Or look at the rates of homeownership, since owning your own home is a common way to build wealth. (You might not think of your home in the same way as you do about money in the bank, but there’s no denying that owning a house adds to your net worth.) Whereas only about 35 percent of Americans under 35 own their own place, the homeownership rate for Americans aged 35–44 is nearly 60 percent, and it is nearly 70 percent for Americans in the 45–54 age bracket.


Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

In order to do this, you need to develop a more coherent and comprehensive view of your actual self and integrate your experiences, character traits, values, and drives into a unified whole. And this ideal will serve a crucial guiding role in proper goal-setting. Chapter 4: Cognitive Self-Mastery and Wisdom The Decoys to Well-Being The goals that you have set for yourself may be ones sold to you by the larger culture - ‘Make money! Own your own home! Look great!’ - and while there may be nothing wrong with striving for those things, they mask the pursuits more likely to deliver true and lasting happiness. In this case, your priority should be to discern which goals will make you happy in the long term and to follow them. - Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness In the previous two chapters, we have looked at the methods for developing rationality and self-awareness.


pages: 230 words: 79,229

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

(Anyone would think class divisions are needed in order to maintain the sanctity of the political spectrum.) Most people’s lives are sustained and at times improved through the application of large doses of pragmatism, both at an individual and a political level. One clear example of this is home ownership. The majority culture in Britain favours owning your own home, even though it has become less, not more common to do so. Many who favour renting, because of the flexibility it offers, eventually make the decision to buy a home if they can afford it simply because private renting in Britain is expensive, inconvenient and legally biased towards landlords as opposed to tenants.


pages: 246 words: 74,341

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

The number of members of various minority groups who owned their homes would be 5.5 million higher by 2010, and that would be achieved by means of Fannie, Freddie, federal loans, and government subsidies. In Bush's own words: It means we use the mighty muscle of the federal government in combination with state and local governments to encourage owning your own home.' Indeed, the Republicans endorsed virtually all the decisions made by Henry Cisneros and Andrew Cuomo-and upped the ante. Bush designed new federal subsidies for first-time buyers, whom he wanted to be covered by federal insurance even if they did not deposit a single cent as down payment.


pages: 241 words: 75,516

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, attribution theory, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, income per capita, job satisfaction, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, peak-end rule, positional goods, price anchoring, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, science of happiness, search costs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

My monthly expenses, including mortgage, taxes, insurance, and utilities, will be the same as they would be in a rental. So, in effect, for an investment of $50,000, I get to have my monthly housing costs work for me, building up my equity rather than my landlord’s. And I’m sure that I’ll get more than that $50,000 back when I sell the house.” No doubt about it, owning your own home is usually a smart investment. But what buyers leave out of this line of reasoning is the opportunity cost of putting that $50,000 into the house. What else could you do with it? You could put that $50,000 into stocks or Treasury Bills, or you could use it to finish law school and increase your earnings, or you could travel around the world and write that novel that you hope will utterly change your life.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home. Since 2007, despite the Global Financial Crisis, real GDP per capita has grown a little – UK society as a whole is a little richer than it was a decade ago. In fact, taken as a whole, UK society is richer than it has ever been (as is the US). GDP per capita today in both countries is more than 80 per cent higher than it was in 1980 – and in both countries it has risen above the pre-crisis peak.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

But for the people lucky enough to be part of the basic Eisenhower-era bargain—high wages and labor power for workers along with overall economic growth driving increased revenues for business—life without a college education was mostly fine. It was possible in those days to forgo college and still own your own home, get a new car every few years, raise a family, and put kids through college. Today, that looks like an increasingly distant past. The economic gulf between those with college diplomas and those without them is vast. In 1965, the college wage premium (in 2012 dollars) was $7,400 a year; by 2012, that figure had risen to $17,500 a year.19 In 1979, the share of people in the top income quintile with bachelor’s degrees was about 40 percent; by 2016 it was almost 80 percent.20 In 2016 a worker with a high school diploma could expect to make $800,000 over the course of their working life.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Rather than trying to undo suburbanization, Berger’s approach is based on interdependence between suburbs and denser urban areas, and trying to imagine ways to make suburbs more environmentally sustainable. People like living in suburbs. At the moment, it means being dependent on a car to do almost anything, but that is widely considered a price worth paying for a bit more space and privacy, and the opportunity to own your own home. Millions of suburban dwellers have voted with their feet—or, it is more accurate to say, with their cars. 8 Car Culture The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, 1964 THE INVENTION OF THE TEENAGER In December 1944 Life magazine introduced its millions of American readers to the customs and culture of a group of exotic creatures, under the headline “Teen-age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own.”


pages: 773 words: 220,140

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, invisible hand, Kickstarter, moral panic, nuclear winter, Own Your Own Home, Socratic dialogue

"What's going on here, then?" Proudly, Dad told him the idea. "The Great Australian Dream, huh?" "Sorry?" "I said, you're going to pursue the Great Australian Dream. I think that's a very good idea." "What do you mean? There's a collective dream? How come nobody told me? What is it again?" "Owning your own home." "Owning your own home? That's the Great Australian Dream?" "You know it is." "Wait a minute. Haven't we merely appropriated the Great American Dream and just substituted the name of our country?" "I don't think so," Dr. Greg said, looking worried. "Whatever you say," Dad said, rolling his eyes so we both could see it.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Anne noted later that her husband’s problems with alcohol had resulted in “the only times we’ve been dreadfully upset,” and she alluded in a letter to “that nasty night in Chicago when you stayed out so long and then sort of banged me around when you came in.” * * * Shortly after his resignation, Fuller appeared at the Own Your Own Home Show at Madison Square Garden, which was part of a campaign by the United States Housing Corporation to encourage small buyers to invest in residential developments. According to Fuller, as he was putting together his exhibit, the president of the Common Brick Manufacturers’ Association “wantonly approached and destroyed” part of the display in a gesture of contempt.

John of Jerusalem, 427 Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory, 356 O’Ryan, John F., 149 Osawa, Eiji, 463 Osborn, Peggy, 157 Osborn, William H., 157, 160, 164 Ossoli, Giovanni Angelo, 39 Ossoli, Nino, 39 Ouroussoff, Nicolai, 468 Ouspensky, P. D., 507n111 “outside-in” globe, 189, 227 Oval Intention, 408 Own Your Own Home Show, 91 Oxfam International, 418 Oxford University, 370, 371–372 Pacific High School, 368–369, 378 Packer Collegiate Institute, 53 Paepcke, Walter, 266, 271 Page, Ruth, 133 Pahlavi, Farah, 375 Pahlavi-Nia, Shahram, 419–420 Papanek, Victor, 348 Papen, Franz von, 60 paperboard dome, 270–272, 272fig, 281, 286 Paradise of Childhood, The, 23fig Paris Peace Conference, 68–69 Park, David, 527–528n179 Park, Edwin, 179–180 Parker, Grace, 23 Parkhurst, William M., 152–153, 205, 209 Passing Show of 1913, The, 44–45 Patterson, James, 439 Pawley, Martin, 215 Paxton, Joseph, 568n342 Peabody, Elizabeth, 38 Pearce, Peter, 367, 470 Pearl Harbor, 176 Pearson, Philip C., 147, 149, 154 “peas work,” 23, 23fig Pease Woodworking Company, 295, 309 Penn, Arthur, 229, 230–231, 232–233, 316, 348, 449 People’s Computer Company, 4 Perk, Bill, 328 Perky, Scott H., 83 Peterson, Gunnar, 266–267 Phelps Dodge, 157, 159, 160fig, 163, 528n179 Philip, Prince, 411 Phillips, Kenneth, 52–53, 54 Piano, Renzo, 469 Pidgeon, Monica, 315 Piel, Gerard, 182, 187 Pierce, John B., 126 Pierce, Lincoln, 25, 31, 42, 58, 59, 61–62, 68, 87, 398 Pierce, Vassar, 25, 32 Pierce Foundation, 126, 127, 131, 133, 160, 207 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard), 399 Pillow Dome, 369 Piñero, Emilio Pérez, 567n338 Plattsburg military camp, 57–58 Playboy, 376–377 playdome, 286 Plumbe, John, 40fig plydomes, 286 Plydomes Inc., 286 Poe, Edgar Allan, 173 polar air routes, 113, 176 polar warfare plan, 187, 192 poles, geography of, 119 Police Reserve Aviation Division, 74, 76 polio virus, 301, 317 Pope, Ted, 246 Popular Science, 355, 381 Portola Institute, 4, 352, 356 Post, Marion, 175fig Pound, Ezra, 233, 348, 375, 380, 389, 397 Poznań International Trade Fair, 286–287 Prance, Ghillean, 470 precession, principle of, 172 Preparedness Movement, 57 Presidential Medal of Freedom, 443 Price, Cedric, 559n316, 560n318 Price, Edison, 304, 306 Price Tower, 299 Princeton University, 267–268, 268fig, 279, 308 Principia Mathematica (Newton), 393 Project One, 4–5 Proud Shirtfront, The (Morley), 496n53 Pullman railway coach, 127 Pushcart Prize, 411 Queen of the Sea, The, 62 Quintet, 580n387 Rabbit, Peter, 361 race/racism, 371, 390 Racquet and Tennis Club, 151 radio, 64, 69, 115 radome, 261, 273, 275, 277fig, 278, 279, 295, 304, 305–306, 387 Ragan, Philip, 172 Rahman, Habib, 390–391 Randolph Hall, 42, 45–46 Rasch, Bodo and Heinz, 106 Ratia, Armi, 348 Rauschenberg, Robert, 233 Raymond, Dick, 352, 356 Reagan, Ronald, 443–444 Real Great Society, 373 Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 192 Reeves, Alfred, 135–136 Reeves, Emma Lucilla, 36 Reich, Charles A., 387 Reichstag dome, 468 Reid, Ogden, 153 remote learning, 313 Rendleman, John, 382 Reuther, Walter, 192, 193 Rice, John Andrew, 227 Richards, Atherton, 187 Richards, Mary Caroline, 232 Richert, Clark, 334 Richter, Donald alternate grid and, 261 American National Exhibition (Moscow) and, 301 aviation and, 454 Black Mountain College and, 238 commissions and, 440–441 Epcot and, 599n441 Fuller Research Foundation and, 246, 250 Hawaiian Village Hotel and, 284–285 Institute of Design and, 235 at Kaiser Aluminum, 283–284 pragmatism of, 248 prototypes and, 252 South Pole dome and, 387 Temcor and, 355 Rivera, Diego, 129–130, 143, 158 Rizzo, Frank, 433 Roadside Home, 503n88 Robbins, Tony, 437 Robertson, Donald W., 254–255, 285, 286 Robeson, Paul, 119 Rock Hall, 54, 62, 253 Rockefeller, David, 325 Rockefeller, Nelson, 281 Roerich, Nicholas, 123 “Romany Marie.”


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

Later that night, over a chicken curry with my friend Laura, I went into a rant about how much I hated that I could not afford a decent house in this city. Here I was about to turn 40, and I was still renting. What kind of success was a person if he was a tenant this late in life? Wasn’t it the American dream to own your own home, to live in a place that you loved and knew would be yours for decades to come? I explained my dilemma. I could afford a nice house in a place that was less expensive than San Francisco, but I felt pressure to stay in this city. So many wealthy people were here that it would be suboptimal for Room to Read to have me live somewhere else.


pages: 364 words: 103,162

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

It has to do with a sense that they are making an investment, that money borrowed to buy bricks and mortar is money that is working for them, unlike money spent on rent, which is working for the landlord. But it speaks to some deep sense of the importance of individual possession, too. Historically, participation in the political life of the country depended upon owning your own home. Before 1832, you could only vote if you had property valued for land tax at more than forty shillings a year; and every time the franchise was extended in the nineteenth century, the right to participate in democracy was dependent upon being a male householder. The Abbey National Bank, originally a building society, began life as two organizations, one of which, the Abbey Road, had the declared ambition of enabling young men to buy their homes, in order that they could vote, while the National Building Society additionally hoped to convince them there were better things to spend money on than drink.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

As I was writing this chapter, one Sunday morning, Pienaar’s Politics on Radio 5 Live began with luxuriantly moustachioed presenter John Pienaar asking, ‘Are you listening to this in bed, or in the bath? … then you are lucky. Fewer and fewer Britons own their own home.’ The bizarre assumption here is that if you don’t own your own home, you are therefore and by definition homeless, or some kind of couch-surfing oddity. No other country in Europe, possibly the world, has become so obsessed with home ownership, so fixated on house prices and ‘getting on the ladder’. It isn’t healthy. Indeed, it’s making us sick. ‘We’re stuck with this obsession about being a property-owning democracy,’ says Lynsey Hanley regretfully, ‘this notion that full citizenship only goes with owning property, even to the extent that you couldn’t vote once if you didn’t own property.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Because Congress wanted to encourage home ownership and the values associated with it, it gave the homeowner two important tax breaks: (1) Although rent is not deductible from income taxes, the two major expenses associated with home ownership—interest payments on your mortgage and property taxes—are deductible; (2) realized gains in the value of your house up to substantial amounts are tax-exempt. In addition, ownership of a house is a good way to force yourself to save, and a house provides enormous emotional satisfaction. My advice is: Own your own home if you can possibly afford it. You may also wish to consider ownership of commercial real estate through the medium of real estate investment trusts (REITs, pronounced “reets”). Properties from apartment houses to office buildings and shopping malls have been packaged into REIT portfolios and managed by professional real estate operators.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Because Congress wanted to encourage home ownership and the values associated with it, it gave the homeowner two important tax breaks: (1) Although rent is not deductible from income taxes, the two major expenses associated with home ownership—interest payments on your mortgage and property taxes—are deductible; (2) realized gains in the value of your house up to substantial amounts are tax-exempt. In addition, ownership of a house is a good way to force yourself to save, and a house provides enormous emotional satisfaction. My advice is: Own your own home if you can possibly afford it. You may also wish to consider ownership of commercial real estate through the medium of real estate investment trusts (REITs, pronounced “reets”). Properties from apartment houses to office buildings and shopping malls have been packaged into REIT portfolios and managed by professional real estate operators.


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

Bosselman, “Suburban Zoning and the Apartment Boom,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 111, no. 50 (1963): 1040, 1046; Kenneth A. Stahl, “The Suburb as a Legal Concept: The Problem of Organization and the Fate of Municipalities in American Law,” Cardozo Law Review 29 (2008): 1193, 1253. 129. Herbert Hoover, commerce secretary, “How to Own Your Own Home” (1923). 130. Stahl, “Suburb as a Legal Concept,” 1253; Miller v. Board of Public Works of L.A., 234 P. 381, 387 (Cal. 1925). 131. Mason, Buildings and Loans, 107. 132. Ibid., 106–108. 133. Ibid., 78. 134. Herbert Hoover, “Statement about Signing the Federal Home Loan Bank Act,” (July 22, 1932). 135.


pages: 519 words: 118,095

Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, estate planning, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, index card, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, mortgage tax deduction, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Paul Graham, random walk, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, traveling salesman, Vanguard fund, web application, Zipcar

When you make a little money from your hobby (see Money-Making Hobbies), that's extra income, which is part of the fun. But when you flip the switch and it becomes your sole means of making a living, some of that fun vanishes—sometimes all of it disappears. Working for somebody else is like renting an apartment, whereas working for yourself is like owning your own home; both have their rewards and drawbacks. Having to generate your own income can add a lot of stress to your life: You have to draft the business plan, find the customers, send the invoices, and pay the bills. Sure, there's pressure when you work for somebody else, too, but there's also a sense of freedom: You're not responsible for the daily decisions, and if you don't like the job, you can quit.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

In the place of an historic train station, he erected the Tour Montparnasse, at 59 stories France’s tallest skyscraper. He allowed the construction of the riverfront highway that still cuts Parisians off from romantic strolls on the Right Bank of the Seine. And he actively encouraged sprawl by subsidizing an own-your-own-home scheme that saw 70,000 cheaply built detached houses going up on the urban fringe. Had Pompidou not died in 1974, a webwork of urban highways would have put eight lanes of high-speed traffic within a hundred yards of the Madeleine church, and transformed Haussmann’s boulevards into urban speedways.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Faced with the exhaustion of the nonmonetized commonwealth that it consumes, financial capital has turned to devour its own body: the industrial economy that it was supposed to serve. If income from production of goods and services is insufficient to service debt, then creditors seize assets instead. This is what has happened both in the American economy and globally. Mortgages, for example, were originally a path toward owning your own home free and clear, starting with 20 percent equity. Today few ever dream of actually one day repaying their mortgage, but only of endlessly refinancing it, in effect renting the house from the bank. Globally, Third World countries find themselves in a similar situation, as they are forced to sell off national assets and gut social services under IMF austerity programs.


pages: 433 words: 53,078

Be Your Own Financial Adviser: The Comprehensive Guide to Wealth and Financial Planning by Jonquil Lowe

AltaVista, asset allocation, banking crisis, BRICs, buy and hold, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fixed income, high net worth, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, place-making, Right to Buy, risk/return, short selling, zero-coupon bond

As Figure 6.1 in Chapter 6 shows, since the 1960s, in most years, house prices have risen, often by substantial amounts. Typically property is bought with a mortgage, so gains are magnified through the effects of leverage (see Chapter 1). Not surprisingly, nearly half of the people in the UK see housing as the most significant part of their future financial security.7 If owning your own home has delivered such good returns, it is a small step to consider rental property as a superior investment. But is this view justified? The return from rental property takes two forms: income from rents and a capital gain or loss when you sell the property. According to a survey of landlords by the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA), just over 6 per cent invested for the rental income, 45 per cent were seeking a combination of rent and capital growth and the remainder had capital growth as their main goal.8 ARLA tracks the return on buy-to-let investing and, despite the housing market downturn, the average annual return over the five years to summer 2009, including capital appreciation, was 9.13 per cent for landlords who bought outright and 22.18 per cent for those who bought with a mortgage and so benefited from the effects of gearing.9 While these are persuasive rates of return, some points to bear in mind are: OO Capital risk and liquidity.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

The U.S. homeownership rate peaked in 2004 Q4 at 69 percent while the unemployment rate peaked in 2009 Q4 at 9.9 percent exactly five years later. In 2016 Q4 the homeownership rate had fallen to 63.7 percent, back to its level in 1990. Declining homeownership may have contributed to the rising malaise. The wave of foreclosures that occurred in the Great Recession caused a decrease in well-being. The American Dream meant you could own your own home, but it increased unemployment and lowered mobility. Recent work by Hsieh and Moretti (2018) attempted to quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across U.S. cities and its aggregate costs and showed they are enormous. Misallocation arises because high-productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent NIMBY restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Its defined contribution retirement products are connected to a global stock index and two TIPS bond portfolios with different durations, intermediate and long. Its Target Date Retirement Income Funds are similar. Merton’s own Perfect Portfolio is similar to these products but includes a hedge fund. He also owns residential real estate, which brings us to his last point: Think about owning your own home in a place where you plan to live for the indefinite future. Leibowitz’s Perfect Portfolio For Marty Leibowitz, the Perfect Portfolio is all about how much risk you can bear. If stock markets suffer a major decline, the usual course of action is to do nothing—but not always. While you want to avoid an emotional reaction of wanting to de-risk at the wrong time, if the level of risk in the market is higher than your ability to tolerate it, then you may need to reduce your equity exposure so you can sleep better at night.


pages: 543 words: 157,991

All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, break the buck, buy and hold, call centre, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, the long tail, too big to fail, value at risk, zero-sum game

Because, like Johnson, Gramm saw the political fruit that homeownership could bear. According to a former banking committee staffer, the Republicans studied what it was that made people vote Republican. “The number one predictor of voting Republican was a job in the private sector,” he said. “Number two, and it’s a close second, is that you own your own home.” He adds, “Gramm preached that gospel to all who would listen.” Then again, maybe Fannie’s tendency, as Maloni later put it, “to throw one brick too many rather than one brick too few” wasn’t so surprising after all. When you got right down to it, there was something about the GSEs’ business model that made no sense.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Any reform of this nature faces an uphill battle as long as Corporate America, the mutual funds, and the banks are reaping huge financial benefits from the current 401(k) system and while politicians at the state and federal levels are pushing public employees away from the old lifetime pensions into 401(k)-style programs. For a people-first program, it will take a populist revolt among baby boomers—the people who face possible poverty in retirement, unless the current system is changed. CHAPTER 13 HOUSING HEIST PRIME TARGETS: THE SOLID MIDDLE CLASS Right here in America, if you own your own home, you’re realizing the American Dream…. That’s why I’ve challenged the industry leaders all across the country to get after it … by achieving the goal of 5.5 million new minority home owners. —PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, June 2002 I didn’t think I was in an economic position to buy a house.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They had made fun of us because we wanted to do things in our spare time like visit local museums and castles and read the poetry anthologies from the library. Having aspirations wasn’t normal—or perhaps it just seemed pointless when you were unlikely to escape poverty or ever leave County Durham. But owning your own home was certainly something. They were right about that—apart from the fact that Mam and Dad didn’t really own it for decades and were struggling to pay the mortgage. At St. Andrews, some of my classmates were seriously, genuinely posh. They were from the uppermost upper reaches of the upper classes—members of the British aristocracy and landed gentry, even relatives of the Queen, as well as the children of prominent members of Parliament and government ministers.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

President George Walker Bush, a former investment banker, set out his administration’s agenda for “an ownership society in America” clearly on December 16, 2003: “We want more people owning their own home. It is in our national interest that more people own their own home. After all, if you own your own home, you have a vital stake in the future of our country.”1 Unknown to most, the housing boom was driven primarily by strong growth in the availability of money. Banks and mortgage brokers fell over themselves to lend to new homebuyers. Innovative mortgage products enabled people traditionally denied loans to borrow.


pages: 747 words: 218,317

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

cakes and ale, cotton gin, fear of failure, index card, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Own Your Own Home

You can't lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone's throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here's your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources--gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees."


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

These are trusts that own big chunks of commercial real estate (or mortgages) and sell shares to small investors, like mutual funds. REITs trade like stocks, and you can also buy shares of a REIT index fund, which gives you a diversity of many different REITs. For growth, the Nobel economist Robert Shiller told me that you’re better off investing in REITs than owning your own home (which belongs in the Security Bucket, anyway). “Buying an apartment REIT sounds to me like maybe a better investment than buying your own house,” he said, “because there seems to be a tilt toward renting now.” That could change, of course. And, as with any investment, you’ve got to pause and think, “What am I betting on?”


pages: 932 words: 307,785

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

On screen, pictures of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan dissolved to show the terrifying features of Michael Foot and Tony Benn, while a narrator warned that Labour would confiscate ‘your bank account, your mortgage and your wage packet’. ‘It wouldn’t take much more of a move to the Left,’ the commentary went on, ‘and you could find yourself not even owning your own home.’ On screen, a young couple’s house obligingly vanished. Not surprisingly, Wilson was furious, playing back the tape at his morning press conference to show how low the Tories had sunk. And not unreasonably the Nuffield study later called it ‘a sorry broadcast in its ethical blindness, its clumsy cascade of visual gimmicks, and its abysmal view of the electorate’s intelligence’.


Melody Beattie 4 Title Bundle: Codependent No More and 3 Other Best Sellers by Melody Beattie: A Collection of Four Melody Beattie Best Sellers by Melody Beattie

Albert Einstein, call centre, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, fear of failure, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson

We had three stories of a dilapidated home, with a kitchen table, two chairs, a high chair, a bed, a crib, and two dressers, one of which had broken drawers. About two weeks after we moved in, a friend stopped by. We stood talking on what would have been the lawn if grass had been growing there. My friend kept repeating how lucky I was and how nice it was to own your own home. But I didn’t feel lucky, and it didn’t feel nice. I didn’t know anyone else who owned a home like this. I didn’t talk much about how I felt, but each night while my husband and daughter slept, I tiptoed down to the living room, sat on the floor and cried. This became a ritual. When everyone was asleep, I sat in the middle of the floor thinking about everything I hated about the house, crying, and feeling hopeless.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

Black workers did not. Through no agency of their own, Chicago’s white ethnics were the beneficiaries of an urban-planning miracle. The National Association of Real Estate Boards—the same group that turned itself into a political machine to lobby against open occupancy in 1966—launched an “Own Your Own Home” crusade in the 1920s to coax families into putting down payments on single-family houses of their very own; simultaneously, idealistic reformers coming out of England’s Arts and Crafts movement devised a new form of cheap and felicitous housing unmatched in the history of the industrial working class: the urban “bungalow.”


pages: 1,631 words: 468,342

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson

biofilm, Boeing 747, Broken windows theory, clean water, deskilling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Jacquard loom, Own Your Own Home, sensible shoes, spice trade, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer

The Court reached a different conclusion, however, when asked to consider an East Cleveland, Ohio, zoning ordinance that, because of the way it defined “family,” did not permit a grandmother, her son, and two grandsons who were merely first cousins (not brothers) to live together. It struck down the ordinance as an impermissible intrusion upon the family. Rules of the House: Co-ops and Condominiums. Some of your rights to do as you like in and with your home depend on the nature of your ownership. You have the greatest freedom when you own your own home. Landlords of rental properties are in a position to impose special restrictions on you, but these usually must be spelled out in your lease agreement. Cooperative and condominium owners agree to abide by rules that may be highly restrictive. Condominiums and cooperatives, for example, are permitted in some jurisdictions to forbid you to have long-term guests or roommates, or to operate a bed-and-breakfast in your home.


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

If you do not give the right measure of power to the right kind of people, then the wrong people will take more power than they need and they will use it the way they want, not the way you want. “Ladies and gentlemen, that's why your duty tomorrow to elect the right people to serve you is so important. Many of you operate your own businesses and you hire people to work for you. Most of you own your own homes, and sometimes you hire plumbers, electricians, carpenters to do work for you. You try to hire the right people for the work because you pay for that work, and you want it done right. When your child is sick, you try to pick the best physician-and you pay attention to what that doctor does and how well he or she does it.