3 ms·

One of the supposed reasons for this is the relation between labour and product prices. Before WW2, labour was far cheaper then materials, especially in Europe

• wwarner 7y ago
  Thanks for making this point. Beat me to it.
• notahacker 7y ago
  Labour being cheap made elaborately designed wrought iron balconies possible for relatively modest housing. It didn't make them necessary (and relatively speaking, the iron itself was a lot more expensive then)
• perl4ever 7y ago
  I've often thought that a lot of the problems with modern society people complain about could be solved, and can only be solved, by making "stuff" much more expensive relative to labor. And the straightforward way to do that (not "simple") would be to put a huge universal tax on energy. A day's labor is about 600 watt hours, and let's say it is (or should be) 8 hours at $15/hr plus benefits, so a reasonable cost is $180. That means human power costs about $300/kwh. By comparison, electricity is maybe $0.12/kwh. My modest proposal is that we should tax energy (maybe exempting renewables) so that it's only, I dunno, 20 times cheaper than human power. This would make an enormous reduction in the amount of materials disposed, in the durability of machinery, and so on.