Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?

Absolutely correct. In fact to expand on this slightly... I've had a lot of clients wanting to find land to build...what they don't understand is how few lenders are willing to lend on just land / single home building projects (at least in my market). Then you add in the well and septic where so many just waive their hands "no big deal right?" Um - it sure is a big deal if you are the "lucky" party who doesn't hit water for > 1000 feet. I've got a lot of prospective buyer / builders who show up with tech money and end up very surprised at how quickly you can eat through a million dollars cash when you start from bare land.

Probably depends on your local jurisdiction... I am not a lawyer but my own experiences tell me that any kind of civil case below about $50K, the courts would really you rather not bother them with this, and you are going to spend at least 20% of that and several years before you may or may not see a dime.

I have friends who are economists, and I get in this argument with them all the time over beers.

There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal.

Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often indicated, and disruption often destroys lives. This is why income inequality is getting really worrisome, and there's the huge debate over college education costs, and you see so many people now living in their cars because they're chronically under-employed. This is why Trump was pandering to Pennsylvania coal miners and the like. There are millions and millions of people kind of stuck and not sure how to move forward. Everybody in this country can't just be a fullstack web guy, and the alternatives are increasingly working for minimum wage at two jobs, each of which keeps you under 20 hours so they don't have to pay benefits.

That being said, you can't just put the brakes on progress so that people doing things that we don't need anymore are kept happy.

Ideally, we'd have mechanisms in place to help people transition, but we really don't. The best we have is things like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, various infrastructure programs (just big employment schemes), and affordable Community College vocational programs. The worst we have are predatory vocational programs that re-train people with useless skills, which are essentially scams to cash in on predatory student loans and GI Bill money.

This is the crux of the 2016 election, and although the virus has hijacked 2020 it probably would have been the crux of that one as well. You have Yang and Sanders proposing massive reforms, AOC with the Green New Deal, contrasted with Trump pushing a regressive approach, and everybody's polarized and yada yada.

Nobody has a good answer yet, or 300 million people wouldn't currently be arguing about it. Ideally we'd have a temporary system of 'engineered inefficiency' in the economy that would help people with legacy skills transition into new fields when employment dried up. But, nobody knows how to politically design, implement, or fund anything like that. So, what we have is this and it sucks.

I hope people smarter than me are working on this problem. I feel horrible about all the folks who have just gotten screwed, and have lost their homes, and are trapped in cycles of poverty. But, I mean, we are debating with strangers on the internet, so you know, no ill will towards anyone even if they disagree.

I think the sentiment you are responding to is the erosion of good jobs. There are tons of new jobs, but for those impacted by this stuff very few of them are good jobs that pay a middle-class income (I know, I don't have a cite, but I'm explaining a sentiment, not a fact - so iono I don't got it).

A contractor in a town where the jobs dried up might work at Lowe's now for example, where they would be kept under 20 hours a week so Lowe's doesn't have to pay benefits, and they could look forward to living in a van off of social security when they retire (source - this is my brother in law at 55 y/o - he has no idea how computers work, and desperately just wants to go back to laying tile like he did for most of his life - lost work - got a job at Lowes a few years back - just laid off actually, due to the virus - he's 100% screwed). There are a lot of these folks floating around, and what has happened to them is absolutely tragic.

Ideally he should re-train in something, but what often winds up happening is that they get sucked into for-profit colleges that encourage them to take out predatory high-interest loans for training that lead to job markets that are either oversaturated, or misrepresented. Then come the payday loans, then come the repossessions.

Ideally those people would just buy a bunch of NoStarch books and become fullstack developers or something, but that's not how people work, unfortunately and we just haven't figured out a good mechanism to help keep those folks on their feet.

The person you're responding to is waaaaaay too angry, and I don't believe you deserve to be on the receiving-end of that, but they may be going through some really rough stuff right now. There's a lot of people who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and homeless and they may very well be in that situation.