Million Dollar Babies: Economic Fact versus Popular Fancy in L.A.
I just got back from another vacation in Los Angeles. As they say, it’s a “city of contrasts,” but the most interesting contrast is rarely mentioned. On the one hand, even pretty ordinary Angelenos – especially the elderly – reside in homes worth about a million dollars. On the other hand, the people of L.A. – and its self-absorbed local media – never stop complaining about how bad they’ve got it. Any resident I talked to for more than five minutes starting ranting about crime, gangs, natural disasters, health care, and, above all, “illegals.” And these same issues dominate every newscast and the front page of every newspaper. Los Angeles media make the New York Times look like the Julian Simon Sentinel.
Unfortunately, vacation is so exhausting that I didn’t have the energy to set L.A. straight. But now that I’m home, here’s what I’d like to have said:
Angelenos: Turn off the news. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. If you want to really understand your city, all you need to do is take a look at housing prices. If your house is worth a million dollars, then life in your neighborhood is excellent, and will continue to be excellent for a long time. The problems you keep complaining about are minor drawbacks for people who live in cheaper areas. If your home is worth a million dollars, these problems barely affect you at all.
What makes me so sure? People don’t pay a million dollars to live in a hellhole. They don’t pay a million dollars to live somewhere that is going to be a hellhole in ten years. If popular opinion and local media imply otherwise, they’re wrong. In fact, they’re so wrong that they don’t deserve your time.
A useful comparison: Once a GMU grad student got a job offer in South Africa. He could have bought a glorious mansion there for $80,000. The drawback was that, by buying that house, he would have painted a big target on his back saying “Kidnap me.” He didn’t go, and who can blame him? There’s got to be something horribly wrong with a place where mansions go for $80,000.
Lest I be misunderstood: I am not making an “If you don’t like it in L.A., leave,” argument. If things were as bad as Angenelos keep telling me, they wouldn’t have attractive exit options. Their homes would be worth peanuts. They couldn’t afford to sell their homes and move somewhere good.
My argument, rather, is: “The fact that you stay, despite your enormous real estate values, shows that you do like it in L.A. Most people in this country would be happy to trade places with you. So stop complaining and appreciate what you have.”
The post appeared first on Econlib.
Complaining isn’t about an absolute scale. You complain when you observe that something should change to make things better.
If you have a wonderful life and your kid leaves some trash on the floor you shouldn’t say, well that’s fine because we’re a loving family. You should complain and say, pick up your trash.
So here in California yes life is good but I will still complain because some of our policies are obviously making things worse and people should simply adopt my preferred policies.
Question to Bryan and to the audience, and apologies if it comes off as nitpicking, I am just genuinely curious.
Is it really possible that so many indicators of how attractive a place is can be boiled down to “if real estate prices are good (exceptional even), there cannot be a good reason to complain?”. For the reverse case, taking the example of South Africa, my impression as a local is that low costs of housing for internationals comes mostly from a mismatch in cost of living (low relative minimum wage in SA), a weak local currency against the dollar/euro, and greatly lower service costs (e.g. for labour) than the USA has. I think many locals would indeed see that price as very high indeed, more like how many Americans would see the prices in LA as very high.
I do generally agree that people should turn off their news more, the tendency towards overwhelming negativity is pretty high, but I do wonder if many Angelenos are also just comfortable where they are and then complain as their base-level of happiness returns once they’ve settled in and initial excitement has worn off.
One aside: As an SA local, people being kidnapped for ransom, especially from their homes, is vanishingly rare from what I’ve seen/heard, especially depending on what area you are in. The crime rate is a lot higher than the US, but a large share falls on the poorer population, and I reckon your friend has a much bigger chance of “minor crime” such as burglary and mugging rather than something like a kidnapping. Just thought it was an interesting aside in an otherwise excellent article, probably just a throwaway line anyway.
All the best!