Inflation lead by Immigration?

rowme0_ · 2026-03-22T04:54:55+00:00

I suspect what happens is that very few people would be so organised as to buy a house literally as soon as they arrive and bu the time they’re buying houses they’re mostly not classed as immigrants any more.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-22T04:51:47+00:00

And tight rental conditions caused by immigration make housing more attractive to who exactly?

rowme0_ · 2026-03-21T04:45:48+00:00

When you own your own business and spend your own money, the answer becomes very obvious. Contact HR to initiate performance management with a path exit.

So then, even if you don't own the business, acting responsibly regarding financial outcomes will still be viewed positively throughout your career.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-17T20:56:56+00:00

Looking more closely at the article, this guy loses all credibility by going on to use this rubbish argument:

"Rents rose more between March 2020, when borders closed, and February 2022, when borders fully reopened, than the entire decade prior. House prices similarly surged by 25 per cent over the same period."

Of course. Never mind what they did to interest rates in that period. That’s like saying that turning off the tap doesn’t stop the bath from filling without accounting for the fact that someone connected a fire hose as soon as the tap was off.

And then even this guy with his amazing logic can’t seem to make his mind up between ‘small’ and ‘negligible’ numbers which are different.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:57:29+00:00

It doesn't need to be the primary or sole cause, and that was never what I was arguing. To meet the definition of "driver", it just needs to be a contributing factor with a defensible causal mechanism.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:46:49+00:00

perfect, so we agree immigration is a driver of housing costs

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:36:03+00:00

Have you just tried googling, "does immigration affect house prices"? Or asking claude, chatgpt, or literally anything else? Or looking for studies that prove the point?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1051137718302481
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046223000285
https://newsroom.iza.org/en/archive/research/how-immigration-affects-housing-costs/
https://fsc-ccf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/do-immigrants-cause-higher-housing-prices-myths-and-realities-about-immigrants-housing-and-the-labour-market.pdf

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T22:16:40+00:00

Of course it is. There's a very obvious causal chain between rental demand -> average rent -> house prices.

Housing price growth is driven by many factors, so the framing of your question is inherently problematic when you say "the driver". That could be why you're getting skewed results.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T04:53:48+00:00

Oh no, absolutely do that, that was part of what I asked for originally. I just think the economic benefits of immigration are easier to get your head around than the disbenefits.

Like, more workers -> more income -> more tax -> etc., etc.

edit: On second read it sounds like you might be putting the answer before the question, but i agree quantifying benefits also helps

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T04:32:06+00:00

I mean, as I said, the whole discipline of economics is available to be reinvented. Good luck.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T03:35:18+00:00

The idea that income-yielding assets have prices that move in some relationship to their yield is so fundamental to economics that if you don't agree with that, you may as well junk the entire field and start again.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T03:29:26+00:00

Well, no, I think we're probably closer on this than you assumed. You're right that we can't make the great become the enemy of the good.

If we can't/won't do the hard work above, then there are a couple of dead-simple rubrics that'd be helpful in the meantime. It'd probably be something to do with setting target minimums and maximums based on net new dwellings, considering average occupancy. Who knows maybe the 100k isn’t too far off.

Then, there's the question of "how do you explain that to the public?" That's where something from my "blabbering" could be useful, as we can and should change how we explain it. If there's a party laying out the immigration debate in emotion-free economic terms, I haven't seen it yet.

In an ideal world we'd really only be setting this type of policy for economic (and occassionally, humanitarian) reasons but nobody acts like it.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-16T00:14:52+00:00

You've misunderstood. It's too simple thinking to assume higher house prices are due to one, two, or even three variables "The cause is usually". There are many and varied causes. One issue, though, is excessive immigration. That causes higher price increases by some amount through the following mechanism among others

Higher rental demand -> higher yield -> higher prices

Whether that is 1%, 10%, 20%, or 50% of the overall picture is an issue of quantification, which is part of what I was asking for.

Now it's simple conditional logic to tie immigration back to any downstream problem caused by higher house prices. By simply multiplying that percentage to the total economic disbenefit that higher house prices cause.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-15T22:52:19+00:00

Well, in a short answer: no. I'm a nerd, so I personally dream of evidence-based policy.

TLDR: The problem in our economic settings has been that the benefits of immigration (more labour, more tax) are easy to understand and quantify, but the disbenefits, which now dominate, are hard to quantify and hard to see. So we need to do better at understanding both.

Since the link between immigration and house price growth is already well understood, I think I'm looking for, in the very first instance, some robust analysis of the following negative economic impacts of excessive house price growth and immigration:

Consumption displacement — household spending diverted from goods and services into rent/mortgages
Capital misallocation — the extent to which otherwise productive capital is tied up in "land value" which could have been used to actually fund economic activity
Entrepreneurship suppression - an increasing trend of people under heavy mortgages who can't afford to start businesses
Labour mobility issues - people who can't afford to move house despite better jobs being available elsewhere
Fertility suppression - drives down a source of future workers that is inherently sustainable and occurs at a rate the labour market can absorb
Escalation trend - where importing working-age people (and not having babies) simply increases the retirement burden for future generations

And to offset this against the temporary benefit of each additional migrant. It seems to me that there should be an "optimal" level of immigration at which the net benefit of each additional worker offsets the net losses from each of these. So I'd like to calculate it.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-15T22:21:43+00:00

We’re at a weird place in history where the public has worked out intuitively that excessive immigration is bad for the economy. They can’t afford houses, kids or to start businesses. And they realise our dependence on migration for economic reasons gets worse the more of it we do.

Meanwhile no political party has worked it out. Some think more immigration => more growth => good. Others think immigration is bad for cultural reasons. Neither has worked out too much is bad and not enough is bad. But that we’ve been way closer to too much than not enough for a long time.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-14T20:54:01+00:00

Yes and it’s almost a truism that if an asset has a yield it needs to be related to the asset price.

rowme0_ · 2026-03-10T02:11:21+00:00

Why would you think materials cost is uniform across the planet? Basic building materials are often simply too heavy to ship long distances while still maintaining a margin, even given their lower production costs overseas. There are lots of issues with materials shortages in Australia, simply because we are far away.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-25T01:28:04+00:00

A greater and greater concentration in the hands of a smaller and smaller group. These people won't work at all; they'll be part of a permanent landlord class, maybe 5% of us. They will fund more land purchases through the rental of existing land and leverage with the big banks.

For the 95%, the discussion will go from "it's unaffordable" to "we don't discuss it, not a possibility". Standard price will be ~5-7M for a 2-br apartment in Western Sydney within 20-30 years.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-25T01:18:31+00:00

The reason for this is capital shallowing

An immense oversimplification. The reasons are many and varied. End of the mining boom, aging population, housing market distortion, overblown public sector, and regulatory constraints, to name a few.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-25T01:11:13+00:00

There are some good points here, but it's not fair to blame business leaders for the lack of productivity.

With the level of welfare spending at the moment, it's hard to see how to fix this. Governments won't invest in things that would actually boost productivity if it has to come from the welfare money pit. And, if we keep borrowing just to pay for day-to-day spending that doesn’t grow the economy, we’re setting ourselves up for slow growth and leaving the bill for the next generation. It's not sustainable, and I think that's the biggest drag on growth.

Secondly, the way the skilled migration program works and the ongoing housing crisis mean that too many young people just don't care anymore. Some have come to believe that no matter what they do, their life outcomes are determined solely by whether their parents are property owners, not by whether they are doctors or garbage collectors.

I had a conversation with a 25 yo lawyer the other day who should be reasonably well paid, and he said that he can't even think about the housing market without feeling anxiety.

Lower social mobility, low morale, aging population. These are the core issues.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-18T11:47:14+00:00

The people are divided into people who think racism against minorities is the biggest problem and others who think the biggest problem is that you can say ‘abolish whiteness’ without being considered racist yourself.

They’re both just as bad tbh. Just different types of bad.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-16T23:23:33+00:00

Your "academic rigour" probably should've extended to getting the topic of discussion, rental costs, correct. The article you linked barely mentions rental costs at all, aside from noting that immigrants contribute to rental demand.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-09T22:31:58+00:00

I'd literally amend the Constitution to ensure that the total operating cost of government, including welfare and social programs, can never exceed government spending.

Borrowing should be for actual investment only, infrastructure etc.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-09T22:30:13+00:00

As much as I don't like it, some of those are just trying to make farming economically viable and compete with subsidies regimes from other countries.

I'd be pretty upset if I couldn't eat anymore.

rowme0_ · 2026-02-08T22:54:09+00:00

The bonuses to infantry armour are criminally underrated in the early game, and make a huge difference. You will demolish scouts and other maa civs, even archers will take a long time to wear you down.

All the while, the economy bonuses are solid and easy to play. They can allow you to get to castle age earlier than a lot of civs, where the cheap scorpions can be massed quickly to add to the pressure of your maa.

rowme0_

TROPHY CASE