A really easy thing to confirm by travelling to literally any other country is that The United States and people in it are extremely wealthy by world standards. We use our wealth very badly in terms of translating to quality of life, but in terms of absolute "do people here have lots of money" we do
the per capita GDP of Canada is lower than every US state besides Mississippi. Euros are mostly markedly poorer outside of like Switzerland and the batshit tiny microstates. To say nothing of your real middle income countries. Pop down to Mexico sometime!
America's destruction of its cities to replace them with car mandatory suburbs have made housing and transportation are huge drag on quality of life. Suburban sprawl is ludicrously expensive to subsidize and maintain bsky.app/profile/frac...
There's both a cost of living crisis and a major spending habits problem with Americans. It's all kind of downstream from chiefly housing costs exacerbating the impacts of discretionary expenditures.
Yeah I'd buy that, but we have made so much progress on that since the Nineties, and additionally there is a political dynamic that should continue to work on that. Any Democratic President will try to move the forward on that front.
Yeah now I'd rate like 60% of America's problems as zoning related. And internationally I'd say 50% of our problems could be solved by open borders and upzoning. I'd love to know how others would rate our problems and in different decades. Like 1965 in the US, 70% racism ?
racism is still a pretty big problem. i don't think zoning is nearly that big a share of society's problems but it's one that has a very easy and painless solution to it
A big part of how capitalism made food and clothes abundant and cheap was by outsourcing the work to poorly paid and treated workers in other countries. I’m all for building more housing, but I’m not sure food and clothing show the path forward
there's a lot of labor exploitation within the agriculture sector here of course (including of immigrants from the third world) but the story in "cheap food" has mostly been about productivity improvements not declining labor conditions (which have been generally awful the entire time)
yes! mechanization improving agricultural productivity is a miracle precisely because it means fewer people need to work on farms. there's a reason the soviets were obsessed with producing tractors!
