alt Hacker News> Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure.
The reason we need non stop housing construction is because the underlying issue is capitalism's demand for infinite growth.
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It's not capitalism that requires infinite growth, it's our current monetary system.
New money is created by lending it into existence, with interest.
That last bit is key. In order to pay off the interest, you need money, which was also loaned into existence with interest.
The only way to maintain this is through constant economic growth. Without it there's a deflationary collapse.
Millennia before Adam Smith was born, pretty much every human societies which built "houses" (be they crude tents, igloos, lean-tos, thatched huts, or whatever) made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.
Capitalism has financialized housing, and that seems to be a major cause of the "can't actually build housing" problem.
That doesn't really make sense. The population in most of the west is vaguely around replacement. A given individual can only make use of so much housing at once. Sure if you're rolling in cash throw in a vacation home or two. There's a pretty quick falloff in terms of utility, status, desire, any metric that's coming to mind as I type this.
It seems to me that at least in the US the issue is location. There's cheap stock in places without jobs and ridiculously expensive stock where the good jobs are located. It doesn't have to be this way.