rchive

Another explanation is that American cuisine got wrecked by the Great Depression. Everything that had flavor was expensive. People's inability to purchase and make certain foods stopped generational transfer of knowledge on how to make certain things. Thankfully, after several generations it's finally recovering.

"Ethnic" food (non European) wasn't as affected as much.

I heard an interview about a book on it a few years ago but now I can't find it.

Just canceling and not watching things is also an option. There's so much stuff out there to do, you'll probably never get bored.

Not even close.

It's also not enough to just have enough units in total (which we don't have), you also have to have them in places people are actually willing to live. People are on average wanting more and more to live in cities each year. Cities are exactly where it's hardest to build and where we're most short on housing relative to demand.

Of course you can. Lol. Stay-at-home moms and dads are doing this exact thing. Older parents who live with their kids are, too. They're probably doing something like labor in addition to just being in some kind of human relationship, but they are effectively getting paid for friendship. It would be hard to put an exact dollar amount to this, and most people including myself wouldn't really want to write an invoice for every hug they give or minute of conversation they're partner to, but since all human interaction is effectively a transaction that is informally what's happening.

Saying landlords are renting and then subletting makes it sound like they're double dipping, just a passive middle man contributing nothing. They're not renting from the state, they're the owners who take on all the risk and other costs associating with full ownership. They pay for maintenance, they're subject to value changes in real estate markets. They bear the cost if someone builds a dump next door and tanks their value. Their asset is very un-liquid. The tenant can walk away from the property somewhat easily, but the landlord has to find a buyer.

Of course, some landlords actually do nothing. As long as we have a healthy competitive market where people can relatively easily build new housing, this competition would punish landlords who don't provide a good product. Unfortunately in a lot of the US building new housing is very difficult due to NIMBYism, zoning restrictions, and sometimes too harsh environmental or historical review.

Healthcare can stay private as far as I'm concerned, but it certainly shouldn't be provided by the employer. Just give me more cash and let me buy my own.

This extra passenger density would make it cheaper per person, right? More fuel efficient, too.

One separate reason housing is expensive in the US, at least, is that most jurisdictions make it very hard to build new housing. Law of supply, if supply goes down, price goes up, if supply goes up, price goes down. Supply hasn't been allowed to increase much for the last few decades, therefore price goes up. If we could double the amount of housing over night, it wouldn't matter how much landlords wanted to buy everything up, they wouldn't be able to keep up.

You can easily have medieval levels of quality of life working like 1 hour a week today. No one, not even kings a few hundred years ago had modern quality of life even with vast amounts of wealth extracted from whole continents of peasants. Modern money and economic systems allow for global trade and innovation that makes things Napolean couldn't dream of into boring every day stuff for you and me.

Landlords aren't renting land from the state, they own the land, the state is just collecting a protection fee from them since landlords generally don't have an army to defend them and their property from attackers.