Houses out-earn people

Philip K. Dick, call your office.

My house made more money last year than I did, and I am not unusual. According to a recent study by Zillow, last year, for the first time in human history, the increase in value for the median house in the United States exceeded the median wage in the United States. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic column.

I worked really hard last year! All my house did was occupy less than one-36-billionth of all the acreage on Planet Earth. But that, apparently, was enough. After I expressed my resentment on Twitter, my friend Jack Shafer replied that my house is a better writer. He then shared this dystopian passage from Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik, which imagines a future in which housing has gotten so expensive that everything inside is coin-operated:

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look at the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough, payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

Shafer quoted this passage eight years ago in the course of arguing that we shouldn’t fear the internet of things (even though the excerpt tends to make one fear it very much). Me, I’m afraid of the way capital, including real estate, is devouring national income at the expense of labor. You can read my New Republic column here.