A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...
American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.
Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?
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I feel like I've already expressed my answer to this question: Because of a combination of wanting to advantage their children (which in the modern world means substantial education among other things), preferring high consumption to themselves and a small number of children to having more children, and of the existence of many things which people want (or at least, are willing to buy/do) that didn't exist in 1800.
Well that's a fairly horrifying way of thinking
Cheap is relative. What did energy cost in 1800? What did it cost compared to the median salary? The median German is still going to consume vastly more energy in total this year than his great-great-great-grandfather did in his whole life. In any event, Germany right now is clearly an outlier both compared to other developed regions and compared to its own recent history.
Yes, I'm well aware, and this is my point. Total energy consumption has vastly increased. We could choose not to travel outside walking distance, but people like the ability to quickly and conveniently travel, provided by trains, planes, cars, etc. We could choose to sit in the dark after sunset, but people like having lights. We could choose to only buy goods from the immediate vicinity of where we live, but we like that we can buy a computer from Korea, get fresh fruit from South America in winter. And we like to provide all of these same things to our children.
So every home in the US today, except maybe the very poorest, has what only rich Romans did. Tools and knowledge makes this possible, but it doesn't make it free.
As I said, this is a guess. There's probably multiple reasons. Many houses pre-date the aforementioned process, and it is not cheaper to demolish and rebuild them. Maybe the production lines are not viable in areas that are too spread out, or have varying/hilly geography or other physical complications, and we've already exhausted locations that are amenable. Maybe they're in more use than I think they are (although I suspect that plenty of people are willing to overpay for their "dream home").
No, these are different. The latter increases costs as well, but Baumol's cost disease is simply the observation that if the productivity in some industries increases, then prices will increase in industries that don't see the productivity increase (or see less of one). The textbook example is a live band, which requires the exact same number of people for the same time to play one concert as in 1800, but the salary for musicians has to increase or no one will be a musician when being an unskilled laborer suddenly gets you 10x the income.
It sounds like we don't disagree that much here. I think there is a case to be made that there are financial and/or cultural, although the ways these manifest is often as supply regulations (e.g. local zoning gets imposed because existing homeowners want to make more of a return).
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