Unrelated, a huge point I'd like to see addressed more is how housing costs have outgrown inflation over the course of decades. We used to build enough housing, but NIMBYism and restrictive zoning has taken over recently. Housing is much more expensive in big cities in real terms than it was then, even though fewer people live in them in many cases now (e.g. the population of Manhattan reached its peak in the 1910 census and is down 30% since then). Real wages haven't decreased since the middle-class heydays of the 60s, and a lot of consumers goods have gotten much, much cheaper since then in real terms. The real headwinds in the face of middle-class prosperity are housing costs, healthcare costs, and (to end the digression) university costs, all of which have grown well above inflation.

Hundreds of thousands would live on a street that now houses a thousand people.

I don’t think that density is coming back or desirable.

No one is saying the tenements were desirable, or wishes for them to come back. What we want is the construction of more dense residential housing that can meet or exceed that population density while providing good quality of life. Said construction is entirely possible, doable, and profitable, except that zoning prohibits it in most places.

to save anyone else a search.

> I don’t think that density is coming back or desirable.

I think there's plenty of examples of dense cities (certainly far denser than most US cities) that aren't full of death-trap tenements and it's borderline intellectually dishonest to equate density with that.

In fact, letting NIMBYs have free rein to obstruct/delay/interdict housing construction is far more likely to cause overcrowded/unsafe living situations (which include homelessness) than the other way around.

But on housing, there's a major issue you're not considering. This [1] is a list of US city populations in 1950. This [2] is the list for 1960. So we're looking at the sweet spot of the housing boom and a period where the population also dramatically grew increasing by about 30 million (~20%) in those 10 years. Now you might notice something funny. Nearly every major city shrank in size!

The housing boom did not involve building up (rather literally as is the desire of some people today) in desirable areas so everybody could affordably live there. Instead people sacrificed some comfort and moved outside of cities and started building houses in uninhabited areas outside of the cities. Houses were cheap because people were developing in areas where there was nothing and that nobody wanted before. In turn this movement away from city centers helped keep those prices within the city reasonable, as it had a depressing effect on demand.

The reason prices are so high today is because of simple market dynamics. People are less willing to live in less desirable areas. This is driving the prices in desirable areas into crazy land. There is still immense cheap housing available outside of these areas. Some cities are so hungry for new citizens that they're literally even giving away land on the condition that you put or build a house on it.

[1] - https://www.biggestuscities.com/1950

[2] - https://www.biggestuscities.com/1960

That upwards mobility depends on one thing: that old people drop out of the workforce either by death or by pension, so that young people can rise up the ranks.

Now, given that people in their 80s need to work (!) to survive, this "generational contract" is broken. People are stuck with shit jobs until well in their 30s, so how are they supposed to procreate or save for their own retirement?

We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.

Imagine an island society, with a bunch of 40 year old workers. You own the company that gets all the profit from their labour. So, you have a real resource, which you could trade with other places.

Now of course this island has no children. How do you feel about your investment once the workers reach age 80. It wouldn't produce very much. In fact you'd need to put resources in just to keep your island ex-employees alive.

But that's an extreme example. Let's suppose that 20% of the population is only 20 instead of 40. When the current 40 year olds hit 65 and retire, the younger generation will be 35 and can support them. What happens to your profits?

They will probably still either collapse or near collapse. You had 100% of people in the labour force, now you have 20%. This poor 20% not only has to support themselves, they must support the 80% idle old. And that's before any surplus is generated for your profit as owner.

So, your savings in the form of ownership of the island weren't very useful. It just dies out.

Could you saved otherwise? Not really. To a limited extent you could store the outputs of the island. We do this currently with grain reserves, oil stockpiles, etc.

But most of the stuff we consume are produced in the same year. You can't save real goods, only ownership of entities.

So if the entities all have a shrinking labour force, they aren't worth as much. The old people in the us won't have meaningful assets with which to pay for their care.

(The one exception is a small old country that owns rights to part of the output of other countries which are younger. There's also an exception for automation, if the companies owned by the old are massively more productive per worker by the time the demographic bulge retires)

You're making the mistake of those who think that money itself as wealth, as opposed to a medium to exchange for wealth. Money is mostly fungible, but in edge cases it just can't buy certain things.

Such a society would nonetheless face much difficult if the worker/retiree ratio changed from 100:0 to 20:80. That's true regardless of individual productivity level: case two is harder than case 1. Regardless of capital stock such as ports, rail lines, buildings, etc

And here is where it gets funny. I wonder how pension systems would look like if they were supported by the billions of dollars that especially FAANG but also other huge megacorps such as IKEA, McDonald's, Burger King "creatively avoid" in taxes. Or if minimum wages were set so high that a pension built on a life of minimum wage were enough to live on in old age (this is a problem that currently runs high in Germany, as many old people have not enough pension to get by and so require social welfare)?

And corporate taxes are just taxes on people, in the end (the owners of the shares). If there are fewer people working and more people to support, things just get harder, absent large productivity increases or immigration of young workers.

It's not like the people running these corporations are all evil and out to ruin people's lives. People behave based on the incentives laid out in front of them and the current combination of capitalism and laws incentivizes the behavior we are seeing.

True, but the same people also largely support programs and politicians that preserve or extend those incentives. They're not innocent bystanders.

Pension systems own the FAANG companies. For example, in the US, CalPERS manages a third of a trillion dollars. Two thirds of that is in equities such as Apple.