> undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive

Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating.

My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fact that a significant portion of population is pissed off and see no realistic chance of the 'settle down and thrive' life, not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever (although labeling them as such only makes things more extreme)

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions.

Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.

It's not a coincidence that the three sectors you mention are the three most heavily regulated and subject to political intervention in the US, all with schizophrenic policy frameworks that simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.

Industrialized agriculture drove the cost of food from 50% of a normal person's income hundreds of years ago to like 5% now.

The problem is that after a few centuries of relatively good times, structures have been built up so that the owners of assets can claw back all that income again. They are using housing as the sink for all that wealth, because land can't be industrialized.

They want us to be peasants again.

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.

luxeries also haven't gotten cheap, really - their manufacturing has been outsourced into places which often don't pay decent wages - so it's just out of sight/out of mind.

We're currently living in a time where some of the issues are being hidden by the nature of a global market - it's friggin impossible to make any good analysis with a global market, it has just too many influences and ways to hide criteria...

> I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that

“You have lies, damned lies, and then you have statistics”

> Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives

In every developed country two of those are basic human rights, and you get them free even if you’ve never worked simply because you don’t want to.

Every developed country except one, that is.

> Health care, housing, and education

In Europe its only housing, and still proportionally cheaper than what US has, often in higher quality for older homes (bricks / concrete vs cheap creaky wooden houses).

The idea of saving massive amounts for my kids potential university studies is ridiculous to me. Same for any health issue. I mean any health issue as long as I can work, and then social state takes over (that is not ideal but at point nothing is).

This is also how happiness can be defined - lack of (much shorter list of) constant worries and pressures to deliver, sustain etc.

>this is all downstream of structural incentives

You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)

Or we just wait for automation and robotics to make building housing much cheaper and the free market system to fix things - which 5 years ago I assumed was too far out, but with all the advances in the sector, seems like we might get significantly cheaper building costs within the next 10 years or so.