After WW2 we were in a high-trust, low-barrier society state across the Western world [1]. You could leave your door unlocked and no one would come and rob you, your children could roam free as they pleased, you could start what could become a multi-billion dollar enterprise in your garage and neither the IRS nor "HOA enforcers" would raise an eyebrow or keep annoying you with audits, you could afford a home with a garage in the first place even as a blue collar worker. And that worked out pretty well in retrospective - we had a literally booming economy from both large giants as well as small startups, people had lots of children as they actually had money, employees in companies had actual freedom to decide things even on lower levels where the actual work happened, employees entered their company at 16-18 and left at 65-ish, and the focus of upper management was to keep the company healthy.
Around / after the fall of the USSR, things took a serious nosedive all at once. A lot of solid blue-collar employment got moved off overseas, poverty shot through the roof (and with it, related crimes like burglaries and robberies), IRS shifted from enforcing the tax code fairly to focusing on small businesses and people (partially because the uber rich and international megacorps now employed sizable amounts of lawyers and tax specialists that created schemes that were way too complex for the IRS to dig through), companies more and more focused on quarterly results, short-term benefits and financial plays instead of sustainability (we're seeing right now with Boeing how a once proud company has fallen to the MBA beancounters), employers completely forgot about responsibility for their workers and hired-and-fired them in response to said quarterly results, the resulting loss of trust led to absurd micromanaging from above, and everyone in general went for "side hustles" and squeezing out some tiny amounts of money for themselves by tricking others because there was no other way.
And the combination of all of that is IMHO what created the low-trust society state we are in: we cannot trust our neighbour, our employer, a random hobo on the streets, the government, no one any more.
[1] Yes, I know, distrust against non-Whites, LGBT, ... was a (massive) thing but that's not my point here. And yes, I'm painting a rose-colored picture, and realities could vastly differ.
But I dont think thats enough to explain this. Something relevant, a lot of the houses that were allowed to be built in the 40s would be illegal now. I could probably build a decently sized small house with a garage with a cousin for 20-30k. But it would be illegal to live in. Even in the countryside... and eventually the taxman would find me, which forces us to not build something to use, but build something that functions as an investment.
Maybe other counties have the resources to create bureaucracies. But her in the Midwest there's not the budget for creating elaborate rules, much less paying inspectors.
Any of those and youve captured most of the working population of the US.
Sure, some folks have a hard time choosing where to live, I get it. If we're honest, most folks just live by default wherever. They don't want to change.
And you vastly overestimate the cost of living outside major cities. It's a tiny fraction of what you might imagine.
I think I agree, if we recast it as 'inertia', it captures most of the working population of the US.
Racism definitely plays a part in here ("white flight"), but it's by far not the dominant issue.
> Something relevant, a lot of the houses that were allowed to be built in the 40s would be illegal now.
Indeed, but their designs are illegal nowadays for good reasons, mostly related to fire code or structural integrity. Way too many people have literally died in their sleep in unsafe homes. Statista only goes back to 1977 for residential fire deaths, but even that shows a serious reduction of cases over the decades [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/376703/us-civilian-fire-...
You cant have safety and freedom.
I do think building codes are valid in cities. Outside of cities it should be a free for all, but its not.
However, building codes now are insanely overreaching. I have lived in japan for a few years and found many of the features in buildings here would never be allowed in the US. Minimum stairwell widths, door sizes, building sizes, parking lot requirements, etc. Modern Japanese buildings are probably 100 times safer but would fail american building code.
Point is if the argument is we need regulation for safety it needs to actually be for safety, and minimally.
That may be when the effect was felt, but the seeds were planted much earlier than this - at least 20 years.
Pretty sure we're already there.