Quote:
Originally Posted by John Mercier
#2 and #4 are BS. Real life experience tells us that.
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Here's my real-life experience about #2, regarding the possibility of home ownership. In 1957 my father earned about $6000 a year as an electrician and he bought a house costing $11,000, meaning less than twice his yearly salary. I bought my current house in 1994. Today I would never be able to afford to buy my current house (a very modest house built in the 1920s), because it would cost at least 6 times my annual salary---an example of loss of prosperity between generations over the last 60 years. My father retired with an adequate pension. Today 60% of Americans have NO pension.
You put your finger on the problem: there are no "small, well built, and cared for homes" on the market due to the greed of home builders, especially here in the Lake's Region, and society's failure to understand that adequate housing is a public need, not a privilege of the wealthy.
Investopedia: "The middle class is shrinking due to an
increase in population at the extreme bottom and top of the economic spectrum." This is a well-studied fact.
Regarding #4, training children and adolescents to live in a society with others, I didn't mean that we should bring religion back into schools or that religion could solve our social problems. I meant that schools are overly focused on knowledge and not focused at all on social skills. Knowledge doesn't help when you're turning out angry, selfish kids with no self-control who feel no obligation to anyone but themselves. At bottom, refusing to get vaccinated, wear a mask, and practice social distancing are antisocial actions symptomatic of a society that cares little about its own members.