It’s important to bring in the longer history. Before large numbers of Americans were reliant on rising housing prices, there existed these things called pension plans, which would pay out from when you retired until when you died, and you could live on that money. But the capitalists didn’t like that, because they didn’t want to pay people for doing nothing over the last few decades of their lives. So then we got the current system, which has people speculating on property and throwing money into IRAs. In other words, we had a system with guaranteed benefits and we replaced that with one based on gambling and the ridiculous belief that the value of property would always outpace inflation. And this all happened in our parents lifetimes, or in our grandparents lifetimes, depending how old you are.