What? Why? Economically possible would mean that our society is not productive enough, that it doesn't have the capacity, to produce small little houses for everyone who wishes one. I doubt that is true in any modern economical system.

It isn't about the demand not being there, nor the supply lacking. The issue is the distribution of wealth and how much the poorest workers in America get paid and the insane cost of living associated with the "American Dream"

Living a dream can be very expensive.

America is a big place. There are a lot of places suitable for living out different dreams. Some (many?) dreams are just not conducive to some (many?) situations/locations, others are.

Buying into dreams promoted by the wealthy are expensive. A lot of what we consider normal, even vital, is the result of accepting advertising's message; wasn't long ago such was considered luxurious, even impossible.

Living [sub]urban lifestyles requires reliance upon others for pretty much everything, with many layers of middlemen taking a cut for profit & raising prices; that's not a condemnation, just observation of reality. Shorten the distance & layers between source & use.

Owning a small house in a marginal neighborhood is not an impossible dream.

It is not true, of course.

Just once I would like the authors of these "it's just not economically possible for X to have Y" to be referring to themselves in group X.

Economics is subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Okay, call me dumb, but I don't get it. I looked up wikipedia, and I still don't get it. What, in economics, is analogous to fermions and quantum state?

Assertion: In any modern economical system, capacity exists to produce small houses for "everyone who wishes one".

Disproof: For certain possible values of "everyone", the Pauli Exclusion Principle prevents the simultaneous existence of a sufficient number of distinct small houses.

This is only true because classical economics are predicated on scarcity, much of which is artificial and shared inequally and inequitably.

Clint Eastwood's Pauli Exclusion Principle:

This energy state ain't big enough for the both of us.

Tell me, what in economics plays the role of identical particles?

Relative economic position of actors? Not sure if that's what ubernostrum was referring to.

Read grimtrigger's story in the HN comments. You'll get the idea rather quickly.

1950s America, with its living wages, disagrees.

"Living wages" supported by the only major industrialized economy not to be smashed by the two World Wars. And a labor market that actively limited its participants for many of its most rewarding roles to almost exclusively white men.

I don't get this nostalgia for the 1950's. Things have gotten radically better in essentially all aspects of life since then.

Certainly things were far from ideal in the 1950s, but pay equity was still a thing then. The CEO of the biggest corporation weren't be making thousands of times more than the people in the factories assembling the products.

Until around 1980 when things started to get a little crazy, or 1990 when they started to get intensely crazy, CEO pay was around 20-40 times that of the average worker. Now, given that a lot of manufacturing is out-sourced to countries where dollars per day is the norm and a CEO's salary of $50M a year is not abnormal, it may be that the disparity is as high as 50,000x.

It's not that the money isn't out there, it's just being concentrated to a dangerous degree.

Remember that it's not a good idea to equate "didn't have thousands of times the taxable income [in the 1950s]" with "didn't make thousands of times more" except for the purpose of misleading people. Comparing taxable income then to taxable income now is a mistake, because it was a time of 90% tax rates and not coincidentally a time of people moving heaven and earth to get their compensation in any form other than taxable income.

You'd still be hard pressed to find a CEO that was earning hundreds of millions a year, even adjusted for inflation.

Billionaires like Howard Huges made their fortunes through owning stock, but these shares were not part of their pay package.

And even if they weren't radically better there is very little that is easy to do other than destroying other countries investments that would allow a return to such a state.

Of course it's possible, wealth just needs to be redistributed fairly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

What nonsense. On any given night in the US, there are more unoccupied residential spaces (homes, apartments, etc) than there are homeless people. The problem is entirely political and structural.