[grey_whiskers]

What do you want to bet that Daddy Knapp lost his lucrative building trade job in the collapse of the building trades, a job which funded his mortgage and car payment for his son’s Mustangs in 2008-2009 and they lost the house which they bought on a Flex loan, and the car was repossessed? I saw way too many lower income people who bought McMansions they couldn’t afford because unscrupulous mortgage “bankers” illegally misrepresented their incomes to put them into houses they could never pay back on their real incomes when the flex loans readjusted to actual cost loans, to say nothing of those who could not survive a hiccough in their financial conditions.

I read here on HR, of a dishwasher at a restaurant who made $14000/yr begin approved for a $420000 "liars' loan".

Housing prices doubled right before I went to buy a house. I knew people at work, who told me that another house on their block, same builder, same model, went in price from $150,000 to $300,000 in a 1-year period.

When I did buy a house, all the "vast oversupply" of houses, were for structures which should have been condemned: cracks in the foundation or walls, major water damage, mold growing throughout the foyer and family room. Homes which had been bought (I presume) on liars' loans, but which the bank didn't want to mark to market to sell, lest it affect the book value of their remaining portfolio.

[Tax-chick]

I think you gentlemen have the dates wrong. Nicholas Kristof, the co-author, was born in 1959, and he was in the same grade as as the funny-named Knapp brother with the Mustang, which must have been 1975-76.

This is one reason I’m having difficulty seeing the relevance of economic trends or tropes of the last thirty years: because the key events occurred much longer ago than that.

The key events of the 1970s were not modern investment capitalism or the mass incorporation of Mexicans into the U.S. economy and entitlement structure. H1-B tech guys from India and Pakistan weren’t even dreamed of.

The counterculture revolution and the coincident (causes and effects not entirely clear) Vietnam War were the critical events when the Knapp family was misplacing its father, not graduating from high school, taking up drug dealing, and all the rest. IN THE 1970s.