The Week: The Cost of Being Young in America

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is a bottleneck, what's the point?
Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Ask any developer, it's a great database. Start building at mongodb.com/ai.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:36)
This monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines, while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy. Create your own AI agent today on monday.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:52)
I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now.
But home projects, I second guess everything.
Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? And who should I even call? That's where Thumbtack comes in. Upload a photo or voice note and their AI-powered search helps diagnose the issue and match you with the right top-rated local pro. Instead of second guessing or searching for hours, you get clarity and can hire the right pro with confidence. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. They know homes. Hire the right pro today.

**George Hahn** (1:30)
Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn and it's Friday, July 17th. Today, the housing market is doing exactly what it was built to do, just not for anyone under 40 Then, Washington's refusal to pass the baton, and finally, what happens when a generation decides the system isn't working for them?
Let's get into it.
For most of the last century, buying a house was the on-ramp to the middle class. This year, the median American home hit a record, just over $408,000 and three-quarters of the homes on the market are unaffordable to a typical household. On Monday's Prof G Markets, Ed Elson and finance professor Patrick Boyle argued that this isn't simply the market malfunctioning. Expensive housing may be the result of a political choice.

**Patrick Boyle** (2:39)
You know, in the very long run, if you look at a very long history of housing prices, there's no reason to think they should go up, but it's become sort of an investment class. You know, years ago, if you speak to your grandparents, they'll never talk about the concept of real estate investing. They bought a home that they needed to live in. Once it became an investment, and we'll say in places like the UK, where it is by far the biggest investment, like it's what people do with their savings, is sort of either buy their own home or buy to let a property. You end up with this situation, where the government have incentivized people to buy homes. They want prices to go up or at least stay steady.
In an election year or whatever, are you going to permit a load of new building that will hit house prices? Are you going to allow changes that would make it affordable to young people? For the last 20, 25 years, the answer has been no.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:47)
You said in your video, I think this quote really sums it up. You said, quote, once a country decides its houses are supposed to make everyone rich, it has to keep prices rising forever, which means restricting supply, blocking development and quietly pricing out each new generation which works until it doesn't. I think what I appreciate about that view, I think is right, is the fact that it is a choice. I mean, it is an intentional policy decision to decide that if you're starting from a place of people expect the value of their homes to go up, then we have to do whatever we can to make that happen. I think this was really crystallized for me earlier this year, when the president who had sort of said that he wanted housing to become affordable, I thought we had all agreed that that was something we all wanted to figure out.
He said the following, and we'll just play this clip and get your reaction.

**Patrick Boyle** (4:47)
So much talk about, oh, we're going to drive housing prices down. I don't want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes.
And they can be assured that's what's going to happen.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:59)
This is the problem, right?

**Patrick Boyle** (5:00)
Because that's who votes, right? Like, that's who votes, you know. Homeowners, the elderly vote. Young people don't vote, so they don't get a say.