There was a great @jwmason.bsky.social piece talking about why "wealth" measured as market values seems so much less in Germany than in countries obviously much poorer than Germany. This one I think. jwmason.org/slackwire/we...
@robertmanduca.bsky.social has a series of remarkable papers on related issues, eg bsky.app/profile/robe...
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These aren't about housing questions per se, but the throughline is that what constitutes private wealth is very institutionally determined. Home-ownership and renting are closer in Germany because many of what in the US are the rights of owners institutionally belong to renters.
How we allocate those rights is a choice. Many of the ways that we measure "wealth" presuppose that certain choices are natural and should be measured, while other choices are odd and should be relegated to the netherworld of qualitative description. Of course we privilege what we quantify.