> And there are certainly significant inefficiencies created due to government regulation, though probably not enough to double our productivity even if you did have the knowledge and political capitol fix all those issues perfectly.
Keep in mind that a lot of these rules are multiplicative. Zoning rules limit the amount of new housing construction and increase construction costs because now you have to e.g. replace a 10 story building with a 20 story building, bulldozing the 10 story building, instead of replacing a single family home with a 10 story building to add the same number of units. Professional licensing apprenticeship requirements limit the supply of licensed tradesmen, increasing construction costs. These multiply together: You have to do more construction and the construction has a higher labor cost.
Then housing costs more, so you have to pay higher salaries for the same cost of living -- including to tradesmen, which makes construction cost even more, multiplying the effect again. But not just tradesmen, also the salaries of compliance bureaucrats needed by any other form of regulation, and the cost of commercial real estate for their offices.
Double is, if anything, an underestimate. These costs are quadratic.
> Building codes undoubtedly make housing significantly more expensive, but I'd still rather live in a society with expensive housing where I don't have to worry about the floor collapsing on me than a society with cheap housing where I do.
The building codes from decades ago were sufficient to prevent buildings from collapsing. Since then they've been accumulating cruft. Many of these individual requirements each add hundreds to thousands of dollars to the cost of a new house in exchange for a marginal safety improvement with a negative expected value.
And then you don't even get the safety improvement, because making new construction prohibitively expensive causes people to continue to live in old houses that weren't subject to the new requirements anyway. All you do is make housing more scarce.
> There's a balance there obviously, but my point is sometimes the extra expense can be worth it even if its not "net positive" in a purely economical sense.
"Net positive" is the measure of if it's worth it. You have a measure that can prevent a 1 in 1000 chance of $50,000 in damage but it costs $1000. You're spending an average of $1,000,000 to prevent $50,000 in damage. It's not worth it.
> There are so many things we consider necessities now that would be considered luxuries 100 years ago. I see no reason why things won't continue to move mostly in that direction as technology improves.
Most of these things are things that didn't previously exist, like cellphones or computers. Now you need one because it has replaced certain ways of interacting with people and institutions and the old ways are no longer available.
But let's suppose the definition of necessities expands over time. It used to be food and shelter, then we added medicine and transportation, then we added internet. Maybe tomorrow we add a personal robot or something else. But what if all of those things together cost $10,000/year? Would everyone choose to work full time if the surplus was solely to purchase luxury goods?
> I know a lot of people who earn enough that they could match my standard of living working only 10 hours a week. They mostly don't, and instead spend the extra wealth on things like larger houses, fancier cars, exotic vacations, etc.
There are also people who sell their startup and then choose to retire in their 20s or 30s. Different people make different choices.