When figuring out your personal financial budget, you're right. There's risk involved in being paid in equity, and stocks can go down as well as up. Plus, people paid in cash can also receive an equivalent deal by buying futures when they start their job, effectively paying a premium to take on that same market risk.
When explaining why houses are priced the way they are, the market value of today's stock compensation absolutely matters, because that's the resources that your competition has available to buy houses. You can look at it as an asset swap: you are trading 1000 shares of GOOG, and the rest of the homebuying demographic also has 1000 shares of GOOG. If GOOG is trading at $1500/share, that's worth $1.5M; if GOOG is trading at $3000/share, that's worth $3M.
To use your analogy - imagine that you're paid in lottery tickets, but everybody else in your town is also paid in lottery tickets with the same numbers. If your lucky number does not come up, you all remain poor and houses cost $100K. If your lucky number does come up, you all get $100M, but suddenly houses cost $100M too because new houses have not magically appeared for everybody to buy.
When figuring out your personal financial budget, you're right. There's risk involved in being paid in equity, and stocks can go down as well as up. Plus, people paid in cash can also receive an equivalent deal by buying futures when they start their job, effectively paying a premium to take on that same market risk.
When explaining why houses are priced the way they are, the market value of today's stock compensation absolutely matters, because that's the resources that your competition has available to buy houses. You can look at it as an asset swap: you are trading 1000 shares of GOOG, and the rest of the homebuying demographic also has 1000 shares of GOOG. If GOOG is trading at $1500/share, that's worth $1.5M; if GOOG is trading at $3000/share, that's worth $3M.
To use your analogy - imagine that you're paid in lottery tickets, but everybody else in your town is also paid in lottery tickets with the same numbers. If your lucky number does not come up, you all remain poor and houses cost $100K. If your lucky number does come up, you all get $100M, but suddenly houses cost $100M too because new houses have not magically appeared for everybody to buy.