About housing: I have a few ideas as to why, weirdly none of which overlap with yours.

1) I think part of it is due to our ability to fine-tune the limits. Before, if a company wanted to pass an inspection, they had to be really confident. There were going to be some expenses that in theory they could have avoided if they were better capable of measuring where the line between 'safe' and 'unsafe' was. The end result was buildings that were more safe than strictly required. But now we can get closer to the line, and so buildings are engineered at the edge of safety.

2) Of course, survival bias plays a role here. Who remembers all the crappy buildings that just vanished? It's the same reason we look at old toasters or mixers or what-have-you and say things were so much better-made in the past - all the crappy cheap toasters, mixers, and houses are gone now.

3) Also, as extreme weather has happened more frequently, areas all over are seeing weather different than what they were designed for. Given that the average temperature in Oregon in July (the hottest month of the year) was typically around 65 degrees Fahrenheit[1]. For the past few years it has generally hovered in the upper 60s. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Oregon before 2021 was 107 degrees Fahrenheit[2], and typically there were one or two days a year that crossed one hundred degrees -- occasionally five, more often none. In 2021, it hit 116 degrees. Since 2021, there has not yet been a year without 4 or more days over a hundred. And, of course, this pattern is repeated all over the world. Houses are being built for one set of extremes and averages and getting another.

[1] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla...

[2] https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/

1 is in large part a reflection of idiot proofing everything. Every party's judgement gets reduced down to some some quantitative stuff like wire gauges, stud spacing, etc, that even idiots with poor judgement can reliably assess. Instead of failures because people do shoddy work we instead get failures where people are dumbly building things they know won't last because it's easier to just let things be crappy than to try to get permission to deviate from the plan. Basically decision making authority is being abstracted away from the people who have actual context. This limits the screw-ups from people doing work below the minimum at the expense of preventing anyone from who would have done something better than the minimum from doing so.

Heh, I know somebody that was really annoyed their builder wouldn't install conduit since it wasn't in the code or something and their gripe was "but its better than code".

Maybe it doesn't in America. Nor here in Australia. Some European cities are showing that better is in fact possible by strongly supporting co-operative housing sectors which are better for residents. But that would break the American taboo against government intervening usefully in private markets for human rights (in this case, shelter).

More from a recent report by Australia's business council of coops and mutuals: https://bccm.coop/australia-urged-to-look-to-europe-for-solu...

Anyway, my advice to the author was that systems can enable care at scale. Not to say that our current systems do.

Edit: to be more explicit, I'm suggesting that some approaches to the housing sector in some parts of Europe amount to care that scales; society and governments have decided that housing is a right, and have enacted policies to approach that situation. Conversely, a "we don't care" approach also scales very well with the opposite outcome.

‘Society and governments’ can also ‘decide’ that the Sun is revolving around the Earth… so decisions and policies on paper cannot be fully credible by themselves…

What is the actual tangible evidence that the aforementioned issues are avoided?

Yes I did take a slightly different tangent than your build quality argument. I don't actually know whether there's been studies done about that. You've inspired me to go find out.