There is a real problem, but this article does it a disservice. The problem is that we've got arms races everywhere and they're making it impossible to live up

There is a real problem, but this article does it a disservice. The problem is that we've got arms races everywhere and they're making it impossible to live up to the standard of living we could have if we didn't have them. Architecture can be beautiful, but it isn't in designing parking garages. Take property prices, for example. There's only so much land in Toronto. There's only so much lakefront property two hours north of there. Even leaving aside mortgages (which only exacerbate the issue) the intellectual 1% is going to fight it out to get a piece of that no matter what. This is the double edged sword that is capitalism. It does good when it pushes out the candlemakers for the lightbulb manufacturers, but the very same mechanism has a cost and it's levied at the very shareholders and workers it enriches. Advertising, education, housing, and (in the US) healthcare are all where we're dumping our money and if we were smarter about it we could tax or regulate sensible limits to them. Or at least come to figure out a better arrangement like we did with our world's security to blunt actual arms races via liberalism.