alt Hacker News> But the flip side isn't anti-modernism, it's mass-market kitsch, which is at least as ugly.
It's far more common than it should be.
> The worst is block sprawl and suburban slop - endless subdued and constrained repetitions of the same thing, with very minor variations.
The economic of bathtub curves incentivises designs nobody hates, even if at the cost of nobody loving them.
The bathtub curve is not the most optimal however.
I mean look at the ecology of our world. What do you see out there when you look outside? Solely some lumbering generalist beast doing not good and not too bad taking up all the energy that comes off our sun?
Absolutely not. The opposite happens. The generalist tends to die out, outcompeted by the litany of specialists who better occupy the specific niches the generalist attempts to fill.
Left to its own devices, the market ought to look like this: hyperspecialized at all scales and levels such that every demand is maximally occupied by the most efficient manner to serve that demand. One might ask instead what artificial constraints are allowing a generalist to emerge and not be swallowed up by the sum weight of the countless specialists who are more optimal at every possible thing?