Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

Freeways are government projects, commissioned federally, given to private contractors, which setup cities, which enact a policy of sprawl reified by a small committee, of which only one member was elected, and for which in order for people to live in the city, they must purchase cars for themselves, appearing to the free market responding to the problem of getting around.

So at all levels, there is a mix of group-agency vs individual-agency: different concentrations of power.

Ultimately the chain of causality to create freeways and thus create demand for cars is started by a few people at the top.

But from the consumer's perspective, buying a car is a need combined with other luxury requirements to differentiate the car-driving experience to their tastes, and the market provides it. They don't always ask if there are alternative urban models that policy-makers could have tried.

See also lobbyists, that distort this process near the top as a bid to artificially create demand, or to stay solvent as economic actors without revenue from the free market. This also creates the illusion that the market is merely responding to consumer needs, when in fact it is constrained in ways that encourage specific consumer responses.

The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be in demand. But by and large, fashion is not predicting what will be cool, but specifing what will be produced.

When they say "blue will be in fashion next year", then it means you'll be able to buy a lot of blue clothes (and some people will be able to deduce that you have not recently bought clothes, which is a bonus to encourage more buying).

I only realized this a I got older, when certain items were missing in every shop, that were there the previous and following years. Be it a certain cut of jeans or a certain colored shirt. (And it's not just clothes, I noticed it in interior design, PC cases, salad sauces, and just about any product category.)

If interest rates were up at 8%, there would be a lot fewer bets of the type of "litter the sidewalk with scooters and hope some money falls into them". The entirety of Surveillance Valley is basically a play to parlay overabundant monetary capital of the present into surveillance capital of the future.

The "continual growth" mindset was only worthwhile when it produced productive investment. The mass malinvestment we see today indicates that it has gone way too far. If you care about sustainability and global warming, you should be concerned with monetary policy - it's the main lever controlling the amount of production/consumption.

Furthermore, higher interest rates would allow technological deflation to actually occur, making it so the surpluses of technology get widely distributed in the form of lower prices. As it stands right now, the feedback cycle from the mandate of "full employment" guarantees that everyone on average will need to keep working the same amount, making technological gains accrue centrally to where new money is created.

It's kind of trippy to imagine what the large-scale effects would be. If everyone cut their consumption by 1/3, our economy would contract a lot, but long-term it'd be healthier, right? Less waste, more efficiency, less environmental degradation overall, though I'll admit we need new technology to replace old dirty technology in energy. Overall, it's a very interesting subset of Westerners, the FIRE group.