Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?
A lot of this is related to inequality, value of labour detaching from wealth, and the increasing unaffordability of life.<p>The material conditions of regular people are continuously getting worse as more and more of their income is stripped away by rent seeking oligopolies, mainly increasing housing costs but depending on your jurisdiction all sorts of other costs (eg. cable and mobile phone costs an issue in some places, healthcare in other places).<p>In the worst extremes people are simply running out of money and the amount of people at risk of homelessness and in homelessness is spiking, and people in such dire conditions are dying at a remarkable rate given the toxic drug crisis.<p>For the political class, not a problem here, as they are part of the rent seeking class, and they can expect a nice directorship gig at some oligopoly corporation after their term.<p>The big fix for much of this is fundamentally to put more money in the wallets of regular people. This means increasing rental vacancy, limiting rent increases, and bringing rents down to 30% of people&#x27;s income (or less!). It means livable incomes and government stepping in to create a social safety net to ensure that those incomes aren&#x27;t flowing away immediately to pay for the basics of staying healthy.<p>It means breaking up corporations and reigning them in and stopping rent seeking.<p>All of this harms the very wealthy and even the upper middle class, who themselves are often small time landlords that benefit from low rents and renter misery, so these politically active groups block all change.