social media means people have realized how poor they are relatively. otherwise we are not in a substantially more capitalist world in the west and people are only more affluent than in the past.
obviously social media cannot explain everything about fertility, but i suspect it explains a significant portion of modern economic discontent among the professional/middle+ classes
I tend to disagree, I think a lot more in our society has changed due to the commodification of basically everything combined with the capitalist tendencies to pervert and corrupt anything, as there is no limit to greed. I think the housing market, food pricing and many more aspects of live have started to outpace the average workers wage to a point where it’s hard to be optimistic about a brighter future. The dream of ownership, a car, a family has gotten significantly more expensive in relation to incomes. At least from the POV of an European
it’s actually been shocking to me how elastic it is. it frankly pisses me off how much time i spend in traffic behind people who are apparently fully deterred by a mere $1-2 fee. we should absolutely have faster lanes for people who are driving for higher value reasons.
congestion pricing is good. we can raise taxes, but the existence of billionaires is not a good reason to refuse adoption of obviously net-good policy.
i think it is funny how this critique only comes out to play when people dislike a thing for other reasons but want to project a high-minded concern for the poor.
i think we have far more examples of things working fine than the reverse. there are plenty of government assisted things (water, electricity, transit, etc etc etc) that we pay for at point of use. you can’t just hand wave at “corruption” and claim that resolves everything.
I would actually argue that your examples prove my point.
The best transit systems are the ones that are almost fully subsidized with a token payment that doesn't price discriminate. We have strong examples of the problems with price discrimination in water (the entire American Southwest). Electricity "markets" gave us Enron and semi-privatized electric companies are currently giving us shutdowns because they are liable for causing fires--neither of these would be an issue if electricity is a flat market based on usage without price discrimination.
Everything you mentioned used to be what we called a "utility" and was the job of government to provide, oversee and generally subsidize. It was only since about 1980 that governments started trying to "privatize" these kinds of things with the magical thinking that somehow "profit incentive" would magically make them cheaper to run.
Yes, usage above and beyond basic levels was generally paid for at "point of use"--especially if the resource was limited (see: water). However, that payment needs to be somehow "metered" and with pricing that rises significantly as usage moves further from baseline in order to disincentivize over-consumption.
In the case of tolls (which started this discussion), that means the baseline price should be set to "damage incurred" which is "fourth power of weight" (if I remember correctly). Cars should be a low price; brodozers should pay significantly more than cars; loaded semis should pay a lot more. Adjust as necessary based upon time and load in order to manage traffic.
By linking to something directly meterable, you avoid the perverse incentives where the poor get disproportionately hit and the rich simply ignore everything (see: Nestle pumping water out of aquifers).
i don’t agree with the notion that everything provided by the government must be free at point of use, seems like a childish and foolish way of running a society with real resource constraints.
Childish and foolish? That's the way these roads have been utilized for decades before someone figured out a way to extract more tax dollars from the public.
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