Fair enough, and I concede that housing prices are not going to plummet 90%, as plenty of Nasdaq stocks did. Real estate aficionados ridicule comparisons to the stock market bubble by pointing out that a home is a concrete asset of inherent value, not some piece of paper promising a share of future earnings. Worse, in markets such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, they are doing so with the expectation that their investment will appreciate about 20% in value every year. If TV had been around in the 19th century, no doubt the characters in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” would have watched “Extreme Makeover” and fretted about whether they could afford Sub-Zero refrigerators.Īmericans are plowing far too much of the national wealth into real estate, an unproductive economic asset. It’s a bubble that brings to mind those English Victorian novels that featured a named estate as a central protagonist and land values as their theme. You may have been smart if you bought EBay stock early on, but you were virtuous and responsible if you bought property as early as possible in your adulthood, and now you are being rewarded for your upright character. There is a tiresome provincialism and self-righteousness to the real estate bubble. Partly because we got so burned by abstractions and by talk of the brave new world, the current exuberance is mind-numbingly concrete - centered on one’s own nest and the obsession with remodeling it. The exuberance then, when people droned on and on about how much money they’d made on Cisco or, was all about technology shrinking the world, in ways real and imagined. People who drone on and on about how much money they’ve made on their house - and some days it seems hard to get anyone to talk about anything else - really make me miss the last bubble.

Betting against the house is gambling