Owning on Credit, or the Wager on Stability

Asked by Le Monde about French identity a few months before his death, the historian Fernand Braudel offered a diagnosis that has lost none of its force: “France does not succeed from an economic point of view; it succeeds politically, to a limited degree, because it triumphs precisely within its own limits. All its ventures beyond the Hexagon [mainland France] have ended unhappily, but there is a permanent triumph of French life, which is a cultural triumph, a radiance of civilization.” (Le Monde, March 24–25, 1985, interview with Michel Kajman, in French).

He is not describing a failure; he is placing France differently. If the country never stood at the center of the world-economy (a center that moved from Venice to Antwerp, from Genoa to Amsterdam, then from London to New York, always stubbornly bypassing Paris), it is because its power always lay elsewhere. Braudel went further still, judging that the capitalist framework of the country had always been deficient, and that this superstructure had never managed to discipline society all the way down.

We can draw a consequence from this. France, whose chief asset has never been economic performance, enjoys a freedom that other nations lack: the freedom to question the models that constrain it. Not out of nostalgia or resentment, but because a tightening material constraint makes that examination necessary. Yet the hardest models to question are not doctrines. They are everyday certainties, the ones no one thinks to discuss anymore because they organize our lives.

None weighs more heavily, or claims more years of our existence, than the way we house ourselves. Let us examine it through the ideal of homeownership.

Ivan Illich, or Price Translated into Lifetime

A detour is needed here, because the measuring instrument chosen is not in common use. We owe it to Ivan Illich, the priest who became a radical critic of industrial society and one of the thinkers of political ecology. In Energy and Equity, first published as a series of articles in Le Monde in the spring of 1973, a few months before the first oil shock, Illich sets out to calculate the real efficiency of the automobile, refusing to settle for the speed shown on the dashboard. He adds up the time spent behind the wheel, the time lost in traffic jams, and above all the hours of work needed to buy the vehicle, insure it, maintain it, fuel it, repair it and park it. Measured against the miles actually traveled, the average American driver of the 1970s moved, by his reckoning, at a “generalized speed” of about four miles an hour: close to that of a good walker, at the cost of infinitely more dependencies.

The calculation, admittedly, does not survive a rigorous audit. The data are dated, the choice of which hours to count is debatable, and the method ignores what the car undeniably provides: comfort, the loads it carries, the journeys that walking could hardly replace. We would be wrong, all the same, to dismiss it. Illich is not producing a statistic; he is turning a certainty on its head. The true cost of a thing cannot be read from its price; it is counted in lifetime. Once adopted, this unit of measure applies to more than transportation. It holds for everything we acquire on credit, and therefore through work. It holds, in particular, for housing. A banker will speak of the debt-to-income ratio, the share of income devoted to repaying a loan. Illich translates the purchase of a good into years of work, which is to say, since those hours never come back, into years of life.

Friggit’s Tunnel

There is a statistical series in France that is too often ignored. Jacques Friggit, a senior engineer in the French civil service, regularly publishes, for the government’s General Inspectorate for the Environment and Sustainable Development, the ratio between housing prices and household income. His curve has a singular shape: from 1965 to 2000, it barely moves. The ratio holds steady. For thirty-five years, give or take 10 percent, the same roof cost the same effort. This is what is now called “Friggit’s tunnel.”

The tunnel has since broken. As his curve shows, from 2002 onward prices come loose from incomes and never catch up with them again. Even today, households’ purchasing power in housing (the other side of the same ratio) remains more than a quarter below what it was in 1965 or in 2000.

The length of borrowing a first-time buyer needed to purchase the same home was fifteen years in 1965, and fifteen in 2000. It peaked at twenty-nine years at the end of 2023, before falling back to twenty-three in early 2026 as interest rates came down. The improvement is real, but it leaves today’s buyer eight years behind the buyer of 2000.

Those eight years are so many years during which a job, an income and good health will be required. This is exactly what Illich called counterproductivity. Housing has not changed in nature: four walls and a roof provide today the service they provided yesterday. But the tool meant to give access to it has never stopped being refined: longer loan terms, collapsing interest rates, zero-interest loans, public guarantees. And the result has only worsened. Each measure has been absorbed by prices, and the only net effect has been to shift the cost: fewer euros each month, thanks to lower rates; more years of life committed. One might object that demand has grown as households split apart: smaller families, more single parents, more people living alone. That is true, and it explains part of the rise. But household size was already shrinking during the thirty-five years of the tunnel, without the ratio to income moving. Demography alone, then, did not break the balance.

The Wager on Continuity

Cited in the previous essay, the biologist Olivier Hamant describes our era as a passage from a world of averages to a world of standard deviations. Robustness, that is, the capacity to absorb shocks in a fluctuating environment, must become the principle of our future actions. From that point of view, going into debt for twenty-five years to reach the ideal of ownership is, for a large share of households, pure counterproductivity.

The same contract does not carry the same risk for everyone. A household whose only resource is a salary stakes everything it has. It bets twenty-five years on continuity: a stable job, a couple that lasts, health that holds. If any of these conditions fails, things unravel quickly: missed payments, the loan called in, a forced sale, sometimes for less than the principal still owed. A household with other assets faces the same hazard from an entirely different position. A second property to sell, savings to draw on, a family gift that can be advanced, a down payment that lightened the burden from the start: so many ways out that turn an accident into an annoyance. Such a household does not suffer the shock; it manages it. The size of the margin each has is the key to the equation. That margin, that “play in the gears,” is precisely what Hamant identifies as the condition of robustness.

At a moment when our points of reference are toppling one after another, the worst response would be to cling to a model that has become too rigid to absorb fluctuations without breaking.

We should also remember that this model is recent. Mass owner-occupancy is not a natural state. In France it was built during the 1960s and 1970s, carried by cheap energy, a rising population and a growth that made the wager reasonable. Before that, people rented far more, and owning one’s home was the exception rather than the rule. What we take for the order of things is only sixty years old. A certainty of that age can perfectly well stop being one.

There is less renunciation in this prospect than it seems. To own less is also to commit less of one’s lifetime; and what one stops paying a creditor for twenty-five years can be devoted to other things: to places, to projects, to our fellow human beings. Material sobriety is not austerity. It is a redistribution of the time we have. It remains to be seen whether we will come to it by choice, or be forced into it.