Buckminster Fuller was a pioneer of affordable and efficient housing engineering who began his career shortly after the Great Depression. In his 1980 book Grunch of Giants, he makes the prescient observations of the cyclical failure and subsequent bailouts of the US real estate and automotive industries and the high barriers to entry for innovators in this area:
>The first Beech-produced Fuller House was widely publicized. Soon 36,000 unsolicited orders, many with
checks attached, were received for the Fuller House. At this point it was discovered that no distributing industry
existed. The general building contractors had none of the complex tools for several-in-one-day deliveries of the
dwelling machines. None of the building codes would permit their erection. The severest blow of all was that
both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the
prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the
otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively
the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws. No banks were willing to provide mortgages
to cover the sale of the Fuller Houses.
>Fortune made the mistake of assuming that "the industry industry missed" had at last come of age. But
evolution's inauguration of the "livingry" industry had to wait until capitalism had graduated, from its forcenturies-held assumption that physical land property constituted capitalism itself, to the startling realization
that the strictly metaphysical, technological "know-how" had become the most profitable property as the key to
exploitation of the invisible industries of chemistry, metallurgy, electromagnetics, and atomics.
>Reorganizing all its strategies, capitalism has now unloaded its real estate property onto the people by refusing to rent and forcing people to buy their condo or coop homes. Evolution had to wait upon the government guaranteed, forty-year mortgage-financing of housing's costs to exceed humans' financial capability to acquire. Evolution had to wait until the U.S. mass-production of automobiles exclusively as a money-making business had been made obsolete by the technological felicity of manufacturing by other countries' producers, thus leaving U.S. productivity to reorient itself to the necessity of rehousing all humanity in mass-produced, aerospace-level-of-technology livingry.
>Evolution was clearly intent on postponing the inception of the livingry service industry until humanity had graduated from its pre-twentieth century condition as a planet of remote nations to an integrated global society, all of which waited upon completion of a world-around network of highways, airlines, and telephones, and automobiles and jumbo jet airplanes. All these evolutionary events (requisite to the livingry industry) have now taken place or are about to take place in the very near future. If the political systems do not eliminate humanity with their weapons, the half-century-gestating, world-around livingry service-industry will soon be born.
