This blog consists of comments from my real blog, http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/, which I don't want to publish there. Plus some other stuff convenient to place here. And its becoming a convenient place for me to dump my comments on other blogs so I can find them again.
Oh, go on then, I'll bite. Take:
ReplyDelete"Ordinary people in London, working hard, in full time jobs, are unable to make ends meet because housing costs are inflated by the super-rich. With no hope of buying a house and unable to afford the rents people are forced to move elsewhere..."
This isn't true. There are 8.5 million people living in London. Only a tiny number of them are the super rich. Being very generous to you, that leaves say 8 million people ranging from poor to really rather well off who live in London. And London's population is not shrinking, as your logic would have us conclude. The super-rich are not, for example, buying up terraces of hundreds of houses containing thousands of people and converting them into mansions for the few; no, they are buying already existing mansions.
Of course, you haven't defined "super rich" so I've no idea what your threshold is. You talked about wealth; you need ~ $700k to be in the top 1% (http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/050615/are-you-top-one-percent-world.asp) so in that way any couple with a house in a decent part of London and a reasonable pension is in the top 1%. This will include a great number of "ordinary people".