What additionally complicates things is that habitable land is close to a zero-sum resource for all practical purposes, since to be useful, it must be near other people. Thus, however wealthy a society gets, for a typical person it always requires a whole lot of work to be able to afford decent lodging
Housing need not be as scarce as land, if regulatory permission for tall buildings and good transport networks exist. There is a lot of variation on this dimension already today. Automated mining, construction and cheap energy could make sizable individual apartments in tall buildings cheap, not to mention transport improvements like robocars.
I agree that the situation can be improved that way, though it’s arguable how much it runs against the problem that packing people tightly together has the effect of increasing discomfort and severely lowering status. But even with optimistic assumptions, I think it’s still the case that housing can never become non-scarce the way food and clothing could (and to a large degree already have). There is in principle no limit to how cheaply mass-produced stuff can be cranked out, Moore’s law-style, but this clearly can’t work anywhere as effectively for housing, even with very optimistic assumptions.
Another possibility that would reduce the effective cost of housing would be small scale distributed manufacturing (I’m thinking Drexler/Merkle nanotech here). That would mean that most goods would not need to travel, they would be “printed” locally. There are exceptions for goods which require uncommon atoms, which would still need transport. (To be a bit more explicit: I’m trying to weaken the “near other people” restriction. As is, a lot of what we exchange with other people is information, and we ship that around globally today. Goods are another major category, which I commented on above. Physical contact is a third category, but a lot of that is limited to family members in the same household anyway.)
One factor which hasn’t been directly discussed, is that housing, while partially designed to protect us from weather, is also partially to protect us from other people. The former function can be reduced in cost by better or cheaper materials. The latter is to some extent a zero-sum game. (There is a whole range of interacting social issues involved. Some of the protection is from thieves, some from obnoxious neighbors, some from intruding authorities—and these groups differ greatly in their ability to bring greater resources to bear, and also differ in their interest in doing so.)
Housing need not be as scarce as land, if regulatory permission for tall buildings and good transport networks exist. There is a lot of variation on this dimension already today. Automated mining, construction and cheap energy could make sizable individual apartments in tall buildings cheap, not to mention transport improvements like robocars.
I agree that the situation can be improved that way, though it’s arguable how much it runs against the problem that packing people tightly together has the effect of increasing discomfort and severely lowering status. But even with optimistic assumptions, I think it’s still the case that housing can never become non-scarce the way food and clothing could (and to a large degree already have). There is in principle no limit to how cheaply mass-produced stuff can be cranked out, Moore’s law-style, but this clearly can’t work anywhere as effectively for housing, even with very optimistic assumptions.
I basically agree, and don’t mean to nitpick, but there’s also in the long run virtual environments/augmented reality.
Another possibility that would reduce the effective cost of housing would be small scale distributed manufacturing (I’m thinking Drexler/Merkle nanotech here). That would mean that most goods would not need to travel, they would be “printed” locally. There are exceptions for goods which require uncommon atoms, which would still need transport. (To be a bit more explicit: I’m trying to weaken the “near other people” restriction. As is, a lot of what we exchange with other people is information, and we ship that around globally today. Goods are another major category, which I commented on above. Physical contact is a third category, but a lot of that is limited to family members in the same household anyway.)
One factor which hasn’t been directly discussed, is that housing, while partially designed to protect us from weather, is also partially to protect us from other people. The former function can be reduced in cost by better or cheaper materials. The latter is to some extent a zero-sum game. (There is a whole range of interacting social issues involved. Some of the protection is from thieves, some from obnoxious neighbors, some from intruding authorities—and these groups differ greatly in their ability to bring greater resources to bear, and also differ in their interest in doing so.)