People had thousands of books and hundreds of music records back in Soviet times too.

What's funny is that nobody steals any more. My apartment got burgled in the 90s and they stole a DVD player, some CDs, and a pile of change. Nowadays you have to pay someone to take your junk away.

Crime rates have gone down, but I think it's because there is nothing worth stealing anymore. I even looked at Craig's List and found a bunch of legit used older laptops for $100.

What has happened is that the only thing worth anything anymore is property... and the prices of that have gone through the roof!

The decline of consumer goods theft is actually a strong signal that the project of consumerism has run its course - part of "making it" in the late 20th century was having the toys, but the toys are now prolific, and that's happened in the most literal sense too, when you look at the pricing of children's toys and how many families now feel inundated with them. "Unboxing" is just an influencer ritual now.

The recurring themes now are all nuts-and-bolts concerns: housing, transport, employment, the environment, public spaces. These are things that aren't solved well with our existing coordination structures, since they tend to result in win/lose or lose/lose game-theoretic outcomes.

Iceland seems to have done well with creating community centers to reduce drug use among youth. Isn't that a win-win situation?

Western consumerism was actually one of the main reasons why Eastern Europeans stopped believing in communism. Seeing people in the West spoilt of choice for basic goods and affording them made communism a dead ideology.

Many quickly got disillusioned when they immigrated though. The more things change, the more they stay the same.