> It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Wealthy Western nations have been wealthy for so long that people know how to cut up the pie in different sizes more so than they know how to bake more.
The negative moralizing of other people existing is genuinely out of control in California. From housing, to transportation, to climate change, to conservation, the major cities just causally like to pretend that if we can may other people go away, it'll solve our problems. It's thrown around causally like it's the state of nature, or an actual workable solution to anything.
I think the basis for this feeling is that people keep moving here. We feel it when traffic gets worse, etc... Not really sure IF there's a real solution. The more people there are, the worse things get in small spaces. We have an entire country that is mostly empty.
> I think the basis for this feeling is that people keep moving here. We feel it when traffic gets worse
A city in Japan would build new dense neighborhoods and a new commuter rail line to serve them. A city in California would refuse to build new homes nearby, so people are forced to live in a far-away suburb and commute 2 hours by car. Then Californians complain about increasing traffic congestion.
Construction zones in Japan have barriers erected around them with digital noise meters (in decibels). Painted next to the meters are the legal limits, and a phone number to call the authorities if they're exceeded. Try that in the U.S.!
Japan actually has about 3.25× California’s population. OTOH, California has a lot more land area that is, say, desert than Japan does, so there’s that (it also has a lot more that is controlled by a separate sovereign; 47.7% of California is federal land.)
The federally-owned land in California is mostly deserts and mountains.
Besides, even if we're generous and say that half of California is too mountainous to live in and another quarter is too desert-y to live in, leaving only a quarter of the state's area suitable for habitation, that leaves roughly 40 million people living in roughly 40,000 square miles, or about a thousand heads per square mile. That's comparable to Israel or Belgium in terms of population density, and certainly not as though people are packing into Kowloon.
Yeah, but you can't move to the empty space either. People will complain that's a desert and nobody should be allowed to live there cuz water. Or that its uninhabitable because the current population is distasteful to coastal sensibilities. Or it's too hot and humid or too cold and windy. Or whatever.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Wealthy Western nations have been wealthy for so long that people know how to cut up the pie in different sizes more so than they know how to bake more.