[smallmancontrov]

This is a wildly incorrect take that I thought was now exclusive to Boomers who last balanced a budget 30 years ago and now spend all day listening to Fox News while repeatedly refreshing their house price estimate on Zillow. Evidently not. Let's review.

Things are cheap. Health care, housing, and education are expensive. The median financed iPhone is $30/mo, health care is $500/mo, college is $800/mo, median rent is $1500/mo. You can get three 75" TVs for the cost of one month of median US rent. The average Millenial does not eat three $15 avocado toasts every day, but the average house actually does appreciate by 10*$15 every day (smoothed). This works in reverse, too: you must forego two 75" TV purchases and an iPhone purchase every month to pay rent. Obviously, unless you have a TV factory in your apartment, this is an extremely stupid plan that outs the person floating it as having been disconnected from reality on the ground for decades.

The modern economy solved material problems but it did not solve gatekeeping and rent-seeking problems and oh boy it has a lot of them. These problems are already gigantic compared to all of the material problems put together, so no amount of material deprivation will solve them.

[georgeecollins]

I think by making a comparison between today 1900 I wasn't expecting to get on the slot car track of all the bad economic policy of the last couple generations. I agree with you completely about the rent seeking, the protection of the wealth of old people at the expense of future generations, the gatekeeping of expensive accreditation. Amen to all that.

[smallmancontrov]

Maybe I was wrong to jump you for it, then. As long as your issue list prominently features those issues as well, we have no quarrel.

9 times out of 10, the way someone lands on materialism as an issue is by going down the issue list, crossing out anything that they might share culpability for (which is easy -- having a degree, a brokerage account, a 401k, a house) and then overstating the case for what remains. Materialism, culture, immigration, laziness, promiscuity of the youth (or lack thereof lol), and so on. I don't look forward to unwinding the things that elevate my place in society any more than the next guy, but some of them have gotten pretty torqued and I'd rather let off the tension than see if the next generation is the one that finally turns guillotine memes into reality.