> despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive

Are they? GDP is a measure of national economic success not of personal economic success.

The latter is measured by metrics such as: value of a home relative to wages, value of rent relative to average wage, disposable income relative to the prices, food prices relative to wages.

These are the numbers you don't often hear about in the media, you only tend to hear about GDP and the time derivative of prices, neither of which have much relevance to ordinary people.

Most of those are measures of the housing market and not the economy though. We've chosen to make housing an artificially scarce good which is making fortunes for some people and making life hard for many more. But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH. They just want to be in the have group.

And we get into the root of the issue. I wouldn't be surprised if much of the Gen Z support for left wing positions doesn't just boil down to Gimmeism that they'd quickly abandon once they're part of the elite.

Another example is constant controversy over Elite College Admissions, ignoring the 99% of perfectly good but not as reputable State Colleges with high admissions rates.

"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor"

> But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH.

I have no clue why you would think this. Basically ever poor person I know (and I know a lot of poor people) has simply given up on ever experiencing home ownership. None of them can afford to live by themselves. High density or low density, zoning laws, etc, don't even enter the picture because not one of those will actually bring housing into any kind of affordable range. It's just that politicians refuse to campaign on anything but "what type of housing supply should we hope developers build—low or high density" that there's any confusion here.

Yep, positive vs normative might be the words you are looking for.

Normative approach versus a descriptive/empirical approach.

Thanks. In a first draft I used the words descriptive and prescriptive but then I decided to avoid possibly using the wrong terminology. Would "prescriptive" be a synonym for "normative" in this case or is there an important difference?