If it was working, why did it collapse?
There are lots of alternatives to capitalism but most of them are measured in mountains of skulls. No one has any difficulty imagining more, most people just noticed.
Construction is pretty high where it's been allowed.
As for food, it has fallen - eggs were high earlier this year and now aren't. This is mostly driven by gas prices and the occasional animal pandemic.
https://twitter.com/stuartbdonovan/status/166414741287168409...
Your new land has to be insurable, not in a fire/flood zone, get roads and utilities built out to it, and has to not already have local land-use busybodies zoning it R-1 or inventing brand new weird design requirements.
At the same time, none of these things other than roads/utilities are a requirement in my country and housing is still rising in price much, much faster than anything else + wages.
(Some countries like the UK don't have this because it's even _worse_. There are no written requirements of what's legal to build, because nothing at all is legal to build without convincing a planner to allow it.)
because it was a cold war fairy tale.
State is needed to stop too much consolidation from occurring and prevent monopolies where alternatives are sensible.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Smart people can argue why elasticities are so low across the market, but IMO low elasticity is one of the major drivers behind equilibrium working a little bit differently than you would expect from high school level economics.
New market entrants will conveniently be denied permits, or made to abide by the letter of the law, where other blessed groups are granted the grace of government officials looking the other way.
How is a new market entrant fuel distributor supposed to come in, when a single refinery exists to supply fuel? Same question, where a government monopoly sells electricity, how are we going to get competition?
Where I live, housing costs are triple or more in the city core as in the suburbs. But, gas prices are identical at every station, with zero apparent geographical variation! Same thing for grocery store prices, where food prices are identical in areas with 3x industrial and commercial leasing costs. For the gas, apparently, a tax on the commuters is what's balancing things out, but it doesn't add up.
What's more likely is that prices are being carefully centrally controlled, and have been for quite some time. And, this seems to be doing a great job of keeping inflation in check.
The above is not a criticism, just a statement of observation. The above scheme is working quite well for many people. It seems unfair to some.
Is there a formal economic theory that bases the generation of value off of the creation of economic inefficiencies? I definitely think we're there, and that the theory is correct. Efficient markets are not highly productive. What's highly productive is wasting a lot of energy and resources in various areas of activity. Where productivity means that you produce a lot. Wars, the Great Pyramids, "green" technologies come to mind.
Viewed this way, wage growth will happen if and when consumer spending is again considered to be a driver of economic growth. If we think that businesses are going to deploy cash more profligately than consumers, then cash will be (and should be) funnelled into businesses, so that they can drive economic activity.
For awhile now, Western consumers have been doing an awesome job of driving economic activity in other countries (exporting manufacturing economies). Western policy makers are super sick of this and it shows.
If you were given $100,000, what would you spend it on? And how would that drive further economic activity?
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" talks about this, great book.
I really wish they would have met the banks collapse. That would have done wonders for fixing this inflation. Nope us wage slaves will continue to lose.