What's the point of being able to spend less on cheap junk if the surplus is eaten up and outspent by important things that inflated during that timespan?
And you don't even have a choice. If junk was expensive and houses were cheap, you could scale your junk consumption. You can't scale your house consumption.
You can to a degree. You can buy/rent a way too small house/apartment for your large family (what many immigrants do). You can also get roommates. If worse comes to worst, you can move another hour or two away from the big city.
> If worse comes to worst, you can move another hour or two away from the big city.
It is rarely the case that someone who can't afford housing in their current location can afford to move away from their support networks to a place with no jobs. Places with significantly cheaper rent almost invariably give you significantly less income, if you can even get a job without connections (which are important in general, but especially important in rural areas where everyone knows each other). That can work out for you if you have substantial savings or a comfy remote tech job, but if you have those you probably don't need to move in the first place.
Your other points are valid ways to technically scale housing down but, I think, bring with them a significant decrease in quality of life that far outweighs what is gained by being able to afford 500 big macs and 10 pairs of shoes.
You misunderstand. Keep your job. Move away. Drive to work 3 hours one way everyday. Have no life except work, commute, sleep and family.
And yes, it will drive your QoL to the ground, I'm fully aware of that. I'm just saying it's neither impossible nor infeasible nor unheard of. It's "merely" undesirable. Extremely undesirable. But possible.
I feel like these are much worse than the alternate reality where I simply have to spend more on or lose access to consumables, if I had to choose one or the other. For people that use the same smartphone for 10 years, never shop for clothes, never go out to eat, etc., it seems unfair that we'd construct a dichotomy (assuming it's even a valid one) and choose the one that worsens the resources that everyone needs rather than the more fungible one.
Which is an extremely important point to make when the claim is "you don't even have a choice" and "you can't scale".
There is a choice. We would just prefer nobody had to make that choice. We consider it a failure of the modern society that this choice is on the table. But housing consumption can be scaled, and that it can has important economic implications (such as, social housing can be made cheaper by making units smaller. It literally wouldn't be possible to pull it off if housing consumption was perfectly inelastic.)
That's why I said "worse come to worst". Where I'm from, it's not that uncommon to drive 3 hours to work, and as a result have no social life outside closest family. People do it because the alternative is homelessness.
I would argue that a reply to "you can't scale your house consumption" doesn't need to say how much the situation sux or what amount of gadgets will or will not unsux it.