Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

SFH's are probably not optimal. But IMO you're constructing strawmen.

Gardens are a particularly weird topic. Longtime residents will object to new development that ruins the viability of their longtime garden. YIMBY's will scoff in indignation. But I swear some of these YIMBY's are the same ones boosting the organic & eat local movements.

Speaking of gardens, people scoff that you have no right to sunlight for your garden, and no expectation it won't be blocked. Yet out of the other side of our mouths we issued the Solar Rights Act, to protect your right to sunlight for your solar panels.

I'm not sure that's really true - or at least, it's an incomplete model.

Rather, what's happening with education, health care, & housing is that you have three sectors with flat productivity growth and large barriers to entry, which implies that the number of people they can serve remains constant. The population is growing. When you can provide a service to X people but there are Y > X people who need that service, Y - X people will necessarily end up going without. The financial insecurity is because of the mad scramble to avoid being part of the Y - X who get left out in this game of musical chairs.

The reason the middle class (using danan's definition of "employees with a comfortable and secure lifestyle") expanded so much after WW2 was because we had a number of technological breakthroughs that dramatically increased the productivity of these sectors. Antibiotics and vaccines meant that illnesses which previously would kill or require long medical care could be prevented by a simple shot. The green revolution increased the yields on crops by 10x. The interstate highway system and automobile opened up vast suburban areas for development, and developers (like our current president's father) became wealthy applying mass-production techniques to building housing. The number of skilled scientists in the U.S. increased dramatically during WW2 as they left turmoil in the rest of the world, which could support larger college populations.

We still see those technological breakthroughs in other areas like computers & media, but they don't happen anymore in fundamental areas of life like health care & education. Some of this is probably inherent in the problem domain (with all the easy diseases cured, we now die of heart disease, cancer, suicide, overdoses, etc, most of which have proven stubbornly resistant to cures) while some is because of artificial restrictions (like housing zoning laws).

I studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Historical Linguistics, neither of which is part of anyone's plan for getting rich. But I studied those things because I was interested in them, purely for the sake of learning without any hope of financial reward.

Also, I made the best friends of my life in college, many of whom, 20 years later, are still my best friends.

Overall, I feel like I matured a lot in college.

As for my own kids, I'm encouraging them to do what I think will be best for them and their future based on their skills and temperment. My two oldest I encouraged to go to college. But my third I am strongly encouraging to go to trade school. I encouraged the two oldest to study whatever made them happy in college and to not worry about studying to make money. One is studying non-profit management and the other is studying animal behavioral psychology (she loves working with dogs). Neither of those are good career paths, but they are things they enjoy learning.

You don't need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for college. My wife and I graduated without any student debt. My two oldest are about halfway through and so far they have no debt either (through a combination of working their way through college and academic scholarships).

So unless you're giving that out...you will be living in abject poverty with a ubi.

I really think people who advocate for this have never been poor in their lives or spent time around poor people and have no concept of what it's really like to live with very little money.

Especially on hacker news. Though i'm guessing it's hard to see from the ivory out in silicon valley.

Then there's the fact that the way our economic system works, the value of currency and inflation is based on the amount of money in circulation. A ubi just makes all the money worth less.