There was a time when the US government built homes for working-class Americans
theconversation.com86 points by pseudolus 10 months ago
86 points by pseudolus 10 months ago
This is one of those things that sounds radical now but was completely normal policy 70 years ago. The federal government used to directly build housing—lots of it—for working-class families. Projects like the New Deal and post-WWII housing initiatives weren't perfect, but they did provide millions of people with stable places to live.
What changed? Mostly a shift toward neoliberal policies in the '70s and '80s that framed government intervention as inefficient and market solutions as inherently superior. We offloaded housing policy to private developers and then acted shocked when affordability cratered.
We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
Instead of addressing systemic issues like housing, wages, climate change and healthcare, we started screaming about the culture wars (thanks Reagan). It was easier (and more profitable) to stir outrage over symbolic issues than to solve material problems. We could’ve been building homes, but we got tricked into yelling about bathrooms and book bans instead.
You ignore the administrative/legal barriers to any new project that greatly increased since that time, due to legislation pushed mostly by left. Today it is substantially harder to build anything, both for public and private sector (although private sector can push through by throwing more money at the problem).
> We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.
We are in vetocracy, because cheapest way way to placate your political supporters is to give them power to veto what they do not want (instead of accomplish anything positive).
See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-...
Your initial take is bizarrely politically charged for something that transcends the left-right divide.
Many non-“left” barriers have been raised too and ignoring that only contributes to the mess we’re in. For example: zoning and planning. Plenty of folks would like to claim they want more homeless housing, just not near them.
I find the divide between what people want nationally versus locally very amusing: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/44611-opinions-na...
> To meet demand, there needed to be sufficient worker housing near shipyards, munitions plants and steel factories.
There was an era where the landed gentry were aware of this. There was an era where company owners were aware of this. There was an era where governments were aware of this.
Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
In fact, it’s the middle and upper class, whose largest asset is their home, who keep it illegal to build more housing.
Is it really the case that primary residence is the largest asset of most of the upper class? My impression is that many upper class people have far more money invested in stocks and businesses than in their house.
Basically, everyone bar the top 1-2% of wealthy people have most of their "wealth" in their home. It's not liquid though, and assuming you don't want to move (which most people don't) it doesn't actually benefit you as you'd need to spend the gains to get another place to live.
I guess my question was really one of definitions. I assumed the upper class are a subset of the top 1-2%, but maybe they're in a league of their own?
Yeah, most of my information on this comes from Piketty's capital in the 21st century which is a very good read. Even if you dislike his politics, the dataset he and collaborators have built is very informative.
It benefits quite a bit as you can use its equity for retirement.
People tend to avoid that though, as they don't want to lose the relationships they've built up in that area.
For the vast majority of the upper middle class, it probably is. Think of all the millionaires in California who are millionaires because they bought their houses 40 years ago and managed to control the supply of housing since then.
>Now it's bad for return on capital and/or socialism.
As fun as it might be to dunk on strawman republicans, those developments weren't exactly showered with praise from the left either. The same housing was being decried as being "company towns" or whatever.
Company towns absolutely do still exist and are absolutely still built up.
Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
>Company scrip is what a lot of people take issue with, I assume, as they should.
No? People also complain how it limits your career prospects (because there aren't any competitors to jump ship to), or how the company ends up with outsized political influence.
Weeeell let’s see what that translates to today. Assuming 30k houses for 100,000 people this effort would have budgeted… $77k per house in today’s dollars.
record stops
The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented
waiting for Godot
Supply and demand.
There's huge demand and not enough supply.
You act like that number should be the target. If the government were to start pumping out houses, supply goes up, reduced demand drops prices.
Are you sure you're talking about same type/size of housing with the same amount of amenities?
>The median home today is $350k-ish
Sale price at market yes. Let's see cost of goods on that please.
When I was a baby, my Baby Boomer parents and I lived for a year or so in a Quonset hut, which was military housing repurposed for civilians after World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut
My Grandparents, mother and a couple of the older aunts lived in Rodger Young Village [1] when they first moved from Pennsylvania to Southern California just after the war. My grandparents picked strawberries until they could find "proper" jobs. Grandmother and Mother worked eventually doing keypunch for Kaynar (sp?), which was a contractor for the aerospace industry. Stories of pallets of punchcards... Grandfather ended up becoming and efficiency engineer.
They raised 8 kids.
My pet theory is that we could solve 80% of society's problems by providing affordable housing. Most other things that plague us are just symptoms of this one issue.
I’m a gigantic believer in this and will hop on the nearest soapbox at any chance to evangelize it. High housing prices are literally destroying civilization, pricing the next generation out of existence and fueling every form of resentment.
Home equity or the future. Choose one.
If we keep pricing the next generation out of existence eventually the pyramid will collapse due to population decline. But I suppose the older homeowners living on it now will be dead so they don’t care.
> Home equity or the future. Choose one.
The masses (sadly) will choose home equity every time.
I have witnessed bitterly resentful people turn into local activists protesting against any new build the day after they purchase a property.
Houses should not be investment vehicles and almost required for retirement as they are now. Doing so means they need to increase at a rate salaries can never catch up with. It makes zero sense. We tell the younger generation they need to buy housing to retire then lock them out in areas they can have a career. It’s sick behavior. Our society basically deserves to fail at this point if we don’t fix this.
When it comes to collective action, people will exhaust every option except the one where they work together for the common good.
I see a lot of working together to stop any new properties being built, for them it is the "common good" - by common they exclude all "outsiders".
It’s mostly about home equity, and this is a very common collective behavior called a cartel.
It’s illegal for corporations to do this in most cases, but individuals certainly can. Housing is probably the main area where they do, with neighborhoods forming organic cartels to restrict supply to raise price.
As with all cartels the solution is to break it up or take away its ability to restrict production using lawfare and other means.
Clearly that’s not what I meant, and you seem to have figured that out yourself. I meant the common good of society. The greater good, if that makes more sense.
I was at risk of falling into that trap. When we purchased our current home we did so within a few months of $major_national_shitty_homebuilder having closed the real estate transaction and submitting plans to raze a huge forested natural area directly behind our home and develop almost 100 new townhomes.
It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.
And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.
We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.
>We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.
An optimistic theory is that new high-value housing leads to good outcomes for everyone: developers make a better profit, the area becomes more appealing, wealthier families can upgrade to the new houses, the local government gets more real estate taxes, and the previous houses of the relocators can be bought by less wealthy families (repeat this last step down the wealth scale).
The Housing Theory of Everything.
Anyway, instead of the government building housing, we have the government stopping the building of housing as much as possible.
There’s government and there’s government. Cities block housing through zoning and permitting. They literally refuse to permit. It’s madness.
You'd need to build a lot more around the houses. Many "bad neighborhoods" in various countries started as affordable housing projects, but that's not enough to have a healthy social situation.
We need the housing, but it doesn't solve most issues.
I agree with GP. I would amend their claim with "most problems* could be solved by building high density housing and services in areas with jobs." I.e., build real cities.
Building homes on federal land in the middle of no where will not do anything for people. We just need to allow people to build housing where there is a demand for labor.
Some things I think would be solved include:
- the housing crisis
- mobility => it would be easier for people to move to other parts of the country because they would be less tied to their homes - labor mismatches
- climate change => less reliance on cars
- funding infrastructure => more dense infrastructure means you don't have as much infrastructure to repair and you have more people paying for it
- city government budgets => high density areas are more tax efficient
- home insurance => the homes on the outskirts of cities are most likely to burn down; if housing is cheap the cost to insure it will be cheaper as well
IMO, if housing is 30-60% of peoples budgets and transportation is another 10-20%, if you can bring those costs down you can de-stress a lot of people. That might make politics less intense too.
* "Most problems" is not strictly accurate. But "more problems than you might think are directly related to housing" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
If only there was a model that worked that we could copy and paste from. Some sort of plan for building healthy communities that would last a hundred years. Read the article.
A sufficiently high housing price is a feature, not a bug.
The price isn't the feature - the growth in price is the feature.
Inflating away debt is less consistent but more miraculous than compound interest.
Canada use to build social housing but stopped around 1995[1] and the housing affordability situation deteriorated over the next 30 years[2].
[1] https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969 [2] https://external-preview.redd.it/UGgkJlBT0dV7DwLgbEnJpgQzj4i...
Germany - where I live - built Housing like there‘s no tomorrow in the 60s, which lead to the most prosperous phase of the country‘s existence. Then we stopped. And now we‘re where we are. Companies can’t hire because people can‘t move. There‘s sub and 0.1% empty apartments in cities.
I was reading this yesterday and it's wild to me how much changed in Canada in 1995: https://progressingcanada.com/ - Seems like 95 through 97 set in motion some bad things for Canada?
Around the turn of the millennium many countries seem to have decided to underproduce housing, both by ending government programs like you describe and by erecting government barriers to private home construction.
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
In a local election we had to stop talking about "Housing Afforbabiliy" as homeowners perceived that as "Shitty Apartments Brining Down My Property Value."
Sadly... they're kind of right.
“I’ve got mine, fuck you.”
The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
I think it's too simple. Housing is but one symptom of our dysfunctional societies. That said, I'm all for decommodified housing.
As long as capital allocation is decided undemocratically, there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
It would make a huge difference though. Cheaper housing would mean more people could walk away from shitty jobs with low risk of ending up homeless.
This increases the power of the labor class and would hopefully lead to better working conditions.
My pet theory is many of societies problems would significantly improve if we gave more people the ability to walk away.
Decommodification of housing is the exact last thing that you want if your goal is to make housing more affordable. How did that particular buzzword get off the ground?
How so? If housing was a right instead of a commodity, it wouldn't be a burden on anyone.
The scarcity of ground to build on is the only artificial supply limiting factor in these examples.
> there won't be enough housing, food or medicine for everyone.
This scarcity of resources is true and it has nothing to do with capital allocation methodology. It's just economics. Human beings collectively have unlimited wants. You can't solve it by changing the allocation method.
The want for food, medicine and housing is not unlimited.
When there's a stable supply of food, medicine, and housing people reproduce. More aggregate people implies more aggregate demand.
Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing. It won't take long for that cultural subpopulation to dominate.
Humans are not unlike microorganisms in a petri dish when one adds nutrients. All life is.
Wtf are you even talking about. Do you feel like some people should be starved, homeless and sick because else they would "breed like rabbits"? What a deranged view to hold.
If you really believe this shit, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
Humans are very much unlike microorganisms. Populations don't explode when their needs are met, quite the contrary.
I said human wants are limitless. You said no they're not. I said yes they are, giving the example of population growth as a way that aggregate demand increases even if some people are completely satisfied. This is ECON 101 and a small amount of biology. That's what I am talking about. Notice "need" and "want" are 2 distinct words and you are reading past the difference.
Demographic transition in one culture does not imply universal demographic transition across the species. Because those who haven't yet transitioned will control population growth rates.
Now why did I say this? Because you opened by presuming that socialism would solve human wants. Which is nonsense. Nothing solves human wants.
Demographic transition is absolutely a universal phenomenon, no country has ever been observed taking another path.
I reiterate, the need for food, housing and medicine is not unlimited. The population is not infinite and humans have a limited need of these things. Do the math: finite×finite=finite
"Nothing solves human wants": what about prices? It seems like it does. It's a flawed solution that leaves some with nothing, but it does solve it. Now, what if we distributed the basic utilities on an as-needed basis. That too would solve "human wants" on those things, and would ideally leave none lacking.
Please don't quote "econ 101 and basic biology" at me without actually engaging with what I'm saying. You're ignoring material reality and using abstract nonsense to deter from the subject.
People reproduced much more when food, medicine, and housing were much more scarce. Humans are quite a bit different from micro-organisms. Humans are a K-selected species - the optimal strategy for passing on our genes is to invest as many resources as possible into the smallest viable number of offspring. In the past people needed large numbers of children because infant mortality was very high - the average number of children that actually survived to reproductive age in rural, pre-industrial populations was less than 2. Now that infant mortality is low, there is no need for spares.
We see this quite clearly. Wealthy nations have much lower fertility rates. Wealthy individuals tend to have fewer kids. Even those pursuing large families have smaller families than they did in the recent past - my grandfather was the youngest of 12, when was the last time you met someone with 12 kids? Even Elon Musk, one of the richest people in human history whose net worth exceeds what a medieval peasant would make in their lifetime a million times over and who has an obsession with maximizing his reproduction has a number of offspring that would not be seen as exceptionally large by a medieval peasant, particularly when spread across multiple women.
Realistically, no one is going on a breeding frenzy because they can suddenly afford a 3 bedroom apartment.
Thank you for the detailed response.
> Humans are a K-selected species - the optimal strategy for passing on our genes is to invest as many resources as possible into the smallest viable number of offspring.
It's certainly fashionable these days in the West. I don't know that I would call it optimal. Optimal now for passing along genes is probably donating at a sperm bank after getting into a regionally swanky university. A joke, of course, but notice it stacks! Certainly the donating to the sperm bank plus what you profess dominates what you profess in isolation. Since I just improved the strategy, it wasn't optimal.
> People reproduced much more when food, medicine, and housing were much more scarce.
Yet the population was smaller. You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
We successfully produce more viable adults now in absolute terms than ever before, the number of live births notwithstanding. Otherwise, global population would drop. Which it hasn't. Definitely slower growth but not shrinking: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growth rate
That site says "The latest world population projections indicate that world population will reach 10 billion persons in the year 2060 and 10.2 billion in 2100."
> Humans are quite a bit different from micro-organisms
Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density. This species-wide growth, regardless of the optimal reproductive strategy for any single individual, is like a microorganism spreading across a petri dish. We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad. But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
Going back a step: My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine. Human beings aren't special. We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth. I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
> Since I just improved the strategy, it wasn't optimal.
You did not improve on the strategy.
> You're talking per capita rates and I am not.
Because per capita rates are all that matters. specifically your concern was "Suppose only 5% of the population breeds like rabbits in the presence of food, medicine, and housing." This requires individuals to have more children per capita.
Population growth has been dominated by demographic momentum. Because a few generations ago infant mortality fell, those generations that had high birthrates produced much larger subsequent generations than thir immediate predecessors. These later generations had much lower per capita birthrates but they were larger, so as you say, they have more aggregate children. Subsequent generations after this have very similar numbers of children, but these generations are replacing smaller generations from when the infant mortality rate was higher. Once you get far enough from industrialization that no one from before the infant mortality decrease is left to be replaced, the population stops growing, at least from births. In the developed world which is now well over 100 years from this transition, population growth is purely from immigration, and in fact without this immigration the populations would be decreasing (as it is in a few less desirable locales like eastern europe). East Asia which went through this transition about 60 years ago is plateauing now. World population growth is only continuing in parts of the world where infant mortality is still falling, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.
You conveniently failed to mention in your link that it shows the world population dropping to 10.2 billion in 2100 after peaking in the 2080s.
> Humans increasingly inhabit inhabitable parts of the Earth with increasing density.
False. Huge potentially inhabitable parts of the earth remain uninhabited and are unlikely to ever be inhabited, and population densities in most inhabited areas are falling. There are a few distinct areas, namely urban centers, where population density is large and increasing, but this only proves that population density is not resource constrained.
> We're starting to run into the edges of the dish so we're slowing down a tad.
False. Resources are more abundant than ever, and our rate of production is growing faster than ever. Places with the most resources, the most petri dish available, have the lowest birthrates.
> But, likely growth for at least the next 75 projected years per the above 10.2B people in 2100 projection.
57 years based on the above projection
> We consume all available resources, in part due to population growth.
False. See above.
> I did not expect population growth to be such a controversial topic. Population, it grows.
Because you were uninformed on the topic.
> My point is there's no end in sight for needs around housing, food, and medicine.
There very clearly is an end in sight for the need for higher levels of housing, food production, and medicine production. Specifically it's in decades, not centuries, barring some future demographic shift comparable to the reduction in infant mortality during industrialization.
There is a lot of affordable housing; it's just that no one wants to live there for reasons such as work, location, crime, etc. Sure, there is no affordable housing in places like NYC, because too many people want or need to live there.
A quick search on realtor.com for a place like Cleveland. Plenty of houses for 150k.
it stops being affordable when you take the Cleveland salary
Yeah, the problem is that if housing is cheap, chances are you can't afford it unless you have an independent income stream (say retirement). And those who benefit from it usually prefer more expensive areas and/or have a need for more premium services like specialist hospitals in the area because they are old.
This has been expressed as "the housing theory of everything," and there's some truth to it.
> we could solve 80% of society's problems by ... magically generating billions of dollars worth of resources out of thin air
Yes, resource scarcity is a key factor underlying society's problems.
Most of the scarcity around houses are artificial. Home owners want housing to be scarce because they have an expectation of property value going up, forever.
If housing becomes more abundant, a lot of middle class people become decidedly poor. Well... that's bad. And they're the voters, so is that going to happen? No.
We can build denser, cheaper per-unit housing. We decide not to, because the only people that want that are the ones who don't have a house. As soon as they get a house their opinion will change.
Yeah, I unironically think buying a house as a primary residence should require being an accredited investor.
Probably among the least popular political ideas I can think up, though.
If you did society would collapse as the housing Ponzi scheme collapses.
In corporate environments people often get into a frame of mind where they acknowledge they are behaving irrationally but are convinced - convinced! - that behaving rationally would bring terrible results and everyone is going to move in mad lockstep. I think it is some sort of groupthink-related phenomenon. They're pretty much always wrong about the bad results if someone can force change.
It can be true that sudden change can lead to bad results and I wouldn't necessarily advise shock therapy, but making the basis of a system more rational usually leads to good outcomes. Being honest about how valuable something is won't cause society to sink beneath the ocean and neither does letting people just build houses on land they own. Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much. Letting them do better will surely outweigh the negatives.
I don't advocate for the current system - but the western capitalist system is (rightly or wrongly) based heavily around property.
> Someone is already eating economic losses here, we just don't quite know who or how much.
It's an intergenerational transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Rough and dirty you could probably reverse back the amount by taking the change in Average house price-to-earnings ratios. Very basic estimate is from 4x earnings to 7x, which on the stock of US housing is about $20 trillion.
I never know the attribution of the quote but it springs to mind, "If it can be destroyed by the truth then it should be destroyed."
Ireland had a property bubble that popped and society didn't exactly collapse there.
If you believe this site economics are equivalent to reality and rich people losing money is the end of the world. I don't think you're going to convince them.
As did the US, for that matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_United_States_housing_bu...
Government borrowing 100% of GDP over a few years helped ease the collapse (and re-inflate the prices again).
> (and re-inflate the prices again)
That's not what re-inflated prices. Basically, no houses were built from about 2007 to 2017, and then far too few houses were built. Meanwhile, loads of people immigrated to Ireland for jobs (mostly in tech and finance).
Then, because lots of people spotted that Irish property was a good investment, people started piling in using rents as their baseline for investment, driving rents up, which pushed prices up etc.
But fundamentally property prices are increasing in Ireland because of population growth and a lack of supply (driven by poor planning for water and services, along with a culture of property owners objecting to the opening of an envelope).
Quite the opposite; the state should instead have borrowed 105% GDP and kept the construction industry on life support (during the financial crisis many countries did this, generally with public works stuff, but Ireland essentially let its construction industry die). As is, almost no housing was built between about 2010 and 2016, resulting in a massive shortage.
The extremely high cost of the Irish bank bailout was largely down to bad bank practices and not merely the fact that there was a property bubble.
The noughties Irish property crisis was largely driven by a speculative bubble, and there was not really a huge supply shortfall. Unfortunately, he _current_ one is supply-side. In 2023 Ireland built more housing per capita than any other OECD nation and it was close to the top last year, but, even optimistically, that is only stopping the shortfall from getting _worse_.
(A lot of this is down to catastrophically bad estimates made early last decade, which had Ireland returning to its traditional economic pattern of perma-recession, and draining the working age population off via emigration.)
I mean there is currently a housing crisis in Ireland, particularly in Dublin.
I just want a home for my kids and a garden to grill. I don‘t care about it’s value, or the increase of it.
… because?
If you dig down deep enough it’s always about valuing money over humans.
I think if you go even deeper: it's that humans primitively require novel and emotional experiences, it got us out of the cave. These systems are a way to generate.
There are places in the West where this has been done and all you get is ghettos full of scum and crime. You have to pair this with jobs and a way of promptly removing undesirable elements from the neighbourhood. Cf. section 8.
[flagged]
All that’d require is making it legal to build, in most cases.
Which might reduce the value of existing homes 20%. Current homeowners (who are more likely to vote) really don't want their homes to decrease in value 20%.
The plain reading of “There ought to be more affordable housing,” is not “Society needs 100% taxation administered by a genocidal ministry of housing.”
> The West isn't ready for the conversation about what would be necessary to "provide" affordable housing.
The majority of the developed world (including the United States) has already built affordable housing developments. Austria and Japan both have extensive public housing projects.
If you build all those houses, people will have a ton of babies, and you'll be back to square one within a generation: only with more pollution, more ugly, more traffic, more crowded parks, trails, and parking lots, and a less water and beauty. And lots more carbon in the air. This is how the planet is choked off: one house at a time. Habitat control is the only solution.
Lots of breathless waxing about the ambition and scope of the project, so I was surprised that when I followed through to source material I found this:
> 9,543 single and 3,996 semi-detached homes while 5,000 apartments
So 18.5k homes of one kind or another over ~2 years. That’s, umm, nothing? Like seriously - the current rate of housing completions is over 2 orders of magnitude above that (it’s hovering just over 1.4M/yr right now).
[0] https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/index.html
Classic government inefficiency, I believe state housing projects have similarly low figures.
I'm just confused as to why the US population needed to grow by almost 100 million since I was born without any sort of infrastructure undertaking to sustain that massive immigration. My local community is terrifically swollen with people and everything built for 1/3rd the population is now crumbling under that weight.
You believe the increase in population has been caused by “massive immigration”?
We’ve had roughly 4 million births and 2 million deaths per year since 1980. That is roughly a difference of 90 million. Additionally, when people cite immigration numbers, they frequently leave out negating numbers; the amount of people who were here temporarily, the amount of people who were deported or left voluntarily, and those who are “repeat offenders” in terms of migration that are frequently counted multiple times. So while yes, the number of immigrants as a percentage of population has increased in that time, the entire population increase is not a direct result of the roughly 10-15% they account for, which also aligns with the roughly 10-15% of the population they account for. Also, if you go back further than just when you were born, the US had roughly 14% immigrant population since 1900. Racism (in the form of nationalism/anti-immigration/etc) and nationalist changes to immigration laws reduced that number to 3% in the 20s, which has been slowly returning to the same 14% level since the 70s.
The US population growth has slowed overall since you were born, averaging a rate of 1% +/- 0.5% over that time and currently lower than when you were born. During that same time, our average infrastructure spending has grown from 300 to 600 billion a year; a 100% increase over that time compared to 1% growth in population per year.
So, given all these facts, how do you reconcile your statements that we have added 100 million due to massive immigration with no increases in infrastructure, when the facts seem to directly refute your assertions?
Most of suburban America wasn't built yet when you were born. I don't understand this point at all. You don't think sprawl counts as infrastructure? It may not be the housing you (or I) personally think should have been built, but it's absolutely housing. And it was built in great quantity at great cost, and even turned out to be great investments. And it came with schools and strip malls and freeway interchanges and substations to connect it all. Living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways.
It's also, it needs be said, wasn't built to support (sigh[1]) "massive immigration". You can find a few H1B holders peppered around, but the sprawl is for the middle class, 100%.
[1] Seriously, why must everything become a callout to right wing grievance politics these days?
I think you trying to transmute this to polemic weakens the points you've attempted to make.
Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".
This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.
Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.
Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.
Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.
I think the situation is likely significantly more nuanced than either of your points of view allows.
Suicide and basic needs being met is likely not highly correlated. On the other side suicide stats likely don’t include dependency related death, alcoholism can be a coping mechanism, if you didn’t commit suicide but instead murdered your liver and died early is that really a different statistic in your assessment?
The only way you can measure is access to basic needs, housing, shelter, medical care, nutrition. A century ago those things were significantly lower for the average person vs now. Could the world be in a better situation? Very likely yes, but is could also be much worse.
If you want to significantly change things then better, advocate for more social workers and to make sure the social welfare system works through them. They are in my experience very good at sussing out whether someone is a leech to society and is just looking for a handout of someone who is truly in need.
Advocate for adequate housing, more suburbs doesn’t help low-middle class people, you need more dense housing close to infrastructure or workplaces.
I respect your thoughts here because I think they come from a good place and that you want to help people.
I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.
We can easily construct a thought experiment world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.
I don’t disagree, the world is much much more nuanced than a black or white take can express.
I just think we don’t need to debate this, things are better than a century ago but they are still not great.
Quality of life isn’t solely based on basic needs alone, but for the vast majority of people those basic needs are now met when they weren’t before. That doesn’t mean we get to say, “That’s good enough let’s pack up” there’s still a lot of work to do.
I think I probably disagree.
Fundamentally the question to me becomes "what is the meaning of life" and I don't actually think the answer is even "to be extremely comfortable".
This is my core disagreement with tech enthusiasts (specifically AI) people. It's just a naive way of understanding the human organism.
(You know, it occurs to me that most Americans aren't even extremely comfortable because they live in comfort with a massive amount of real or perceived precarity.)
I do want to see your point of view but I’m not seeing it clearly right now.
I can tell you my point of view is that we aren’t even sure what we should do. I know reasonably well how to solve the basic needs, in my experience that doesn’t mean you are going to be happy, I was the unhappiest in my life when I had the most I’ve had. Well maybe the second unhappiest, there was a point in my life I will never want to go back to, but I don’t think I will.
When everything was going well, I needed nothing, I was achieving all my life goals, I fought through the worst depression, I had to seek medical help.
I looked for older suicide rate data and it doesn’t support what I think is your view above.
At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago.
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...
I'm not sure what point you think is being made but your own chart shows suicide exploding during the exact timeline we're discussing.
It's probably not causative, as that would be quite silly, but economic plenty for extremely wealthy people caused by a massive influx of cheap labor is clearly not a net boon on this metric.
The US made its bones well before this insane population explosion we only very recently had.
(Yes, we've had large amounts of immigration before. We also built infrastructure and were vastly less developed).
It shows it increasing after a notably low period. It’s increased back to a level similar to 1950, which are both dramatically lower than 1900-1940. What’s the “right” reference point? Was 2000 an anomaly while today’s rate is a mere reversion to the mean? Or a reversion to a measure which is still better than the 100-year mean?
Putting aside my concerns about the integrity of the data, the clearly "correct" reference point is the one it takes to falsify the parent comment's claim: that this extremely brief period of gizmos, gadgets, economic plenty and mass immigration is somehow an unparalleled land of milk and honey. You could directly correlate our literal exact debate as negative evidence of his assertion.
I assume then that you agree that the data I cited refutes your presumption here:
> A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.
No, not really.
1. The data going back 70 years, which is 50 years more than 20, show that suicide has sharply risen.
2. The integrity of data much older than that is substantially in question.
