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Comment by behringer | Hacker News Reader

Why? When my parents were working, a simple factory job by one person in the family unit was enough to get them a house. Nowadays, professionals don't have health insurance, they have a failing justice system, they have high crime and low paying jobs.

Today the American Dream is impossible to attain for, I'd say, the majority of people.

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> When my parents were working, a simple factory job by one person in the family unit was enough to get them a house.

It may be that it was just a complete anomaly - in human history, it was never possible to achieve this, barring a couple of decades in one country (USA). And after it, even in the US, things got back to normal. It may be that your parents' generation was the luckiest generation in history.

It's still totally possible to achieve this (at least in the US, and likely the world), but as a society we've decided it's more important that the top x% get a larger share of the pie than they did in those "couple of decades".

> as a society we've decided

Hardly. The people who are not yet on the wrong end of it play nice with it in order to not end up on the wrong end of it, those on the wrong end of it would actually prefer to suffer less, have a decent life and all that. It's just that we're standing on their throats and don't have very good ears, so it can be hard to hear.

We didn't decide anything. Globalization happened because the same technology the US deployed to raise their standard of living (from the industrial revolution on) eventually ended up distributed to the rest of the world. Now everyone competes with each other and the US has been normalized. Post WWII USA was definitely an anomaly that won't be happening again anytime soon. That's probably a good thing since it was built on the back of the destruction of most of the rest of the first world.

There's tons and tons of space that we could build affordable homes on. I don't mean token "affordable housing" that distracts so many people, I mean "10,000 people want to live here, so let the market build 10,000 apartments".

Instead, we let a housing cartel (boomers) forbid any new homes.

This thread is about being able to buy a single family home on a single income. There's a lot more to that than zoning issues.

Since antiquity, the spoils of war have always led to prosperous times for the victorious. I don't see why the aftermath of WWII should be any different.

There's a factory in town here that starts people with a high school education at better than the national median household income (COL is not high). They have their pick of that labor force though, and the employee count has come down over the decades.

So those jobs exist, just not enough of them.

I would say only for people who went to college without wealthy parents.

Being steadily employed directly out of high-school makes it much easier to obtain a mortgage and find a home in a low CoL area.

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