alt Hacker NewsMillennia 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.
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AlecSchueler • today at 6:41 PM
> made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.
But populations were relatively stable until capitalism drove us towards the growth mindset.
In general, in pre-industrial societies families built their own houses rather than "society" building them for them. Of course this was because 1) many tribal societies had no concept of land ownership so you could just build wherever someone else wasn't using, and often these were temporary for a season or two anyway 2) later feudal societies where there was land ownership had land mostly owned by a nobleman who allowed his serfs to build their cottages on his land.