[sircastor]

Lots of things are causing this. It’s very expensive to live in the US. We have an aggressive market system and culture that tells us we should be earning as much as we can, and our social safety nets are sparse and thin. Paying for schooling, housing, medical care, child care, etc are all very expensive, which in turn requires us to be aggressive in our earnings. A lot of services have become commoditized and consumers are price sensitive, so tipping is a means to pay workers a wage.

And there’s a lot of runaway effect here. The snowball is so big that it’s insane to try to stop it. I think most countries under this load would see their economies collapse, but we have the accidental benefit of being the world’s reserve currency, and we’re still a very strong manufacturer of goods. So we just keep going, trying to make it work.