[zackmorris]

It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem. We could have automated things like solar energy production in the early 80s but the powers that be said no. We could have done similar things with mass transit, or organic farming, or wireless telecommunications, but that top 10% with all the money kept saying no. So here we are decades later still paying for the long term costs of technical debt in our economy.

The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities. Planning and zoning put homes too far away from workplaces. Houses are still built of wood 2x4s instead of recycled materials. Heck, we still build homes mostly by hand. Not to mention that land prices are hyper inflated due to the age old power imbalance between land owners and plebeians.

We're basically living in the 1999 economy from the Matrix movies 20 years later. I think it's either going to take a mainstream movement towards some of the democratic socialism ideas from Europe or organizing on a mass scale to solve these problems. Unfortunately politicians and the elite will do everything in their power to stop real progress like that, until (like with solar) it becomes cheap enough that it can be rolled out without government incentives.

[scottlocklin]

I don't disagree with you there are political problems, but this is a measurement problem.

>The fallacy is looking at the sticker price of homes without considering the externalities.

If productivity had truly quadrupled since 1950, it doesn't matter what the externalities of homes are; not even the fact that they're still made by hand. If it takes X worth of labor and materials to build a house at t0 and t1 and societal productivity has gone from y to 4y between t0 and t1, there should be some large fraction of the population at t1 who can afford a house on 1/4 of t0 hours. There isn't. You can't even say that modern houses are better in any sense than 1950s houses; they mostly are not (energy efficiency maybe; even that is dubious).

I think the thing we have to come to accept as a society is that productivity and efficiency increases are a mirage.