this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Housing: square foot per person doubled 1970-today. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/housing1.png
Food: Eating food not made at home increased 66% from the 70s to today. (restaurant labor = resources, you are paying for someone's livlyhood) https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/28125/106446-chart-image-file.png Caloric intake from 1950 to today has increased by 25%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=%7EUSA
Cars are incredibly resource intensive and long commutes didn't exist or were very uncommon before cars. We have become accustomed to these resources intensive habits and built our infrastructure around them. This moved the bar of normal resource utilization.
I think this illustrates the trend I'm talking about. People today use more resources than they used to in lots of ways, we've become accustomed to this way of life because previous generations have normalized it.
I appreciate you pulling up sources, especially if these are things you went out of the way to collect fresh.
It'd require more research on my end but I do have questions.
I question how many people were actually actually getting new single-family homes built for those time periods. Are the rates of new home construction similar between the 70s and 2016-18 for this data? Are more people moving out to further places with cheaper land to buy new houses? Or are a smaller number of richer people buying bigger houses?
And, regarding food, the graph does say
Which brings up the question of whether the increase in calories can be mapped to the increase in fast food, which are insanely calorie dense for the amount of nutrition they contain. Just the amount of processing in many foods cranks up caloric count.
Fast food is something I will agree is an example of normalized behavior, where the 90s cemented "fast food" as a cheap dining option when that has not been really true in years.
Look, I'm not making any claims on nutrition vs caloric intake. I'm using calories available per person as an analog for the amount of resources an individual consumes today vs in the past. A calorie is literally a unit of energy, so we literally have more food energy available to us today than previous generations. That's the argument.
As a society have normalized increased resource utilization. This has happened largely with a decrease in the cost of these resources until recently. There is no reason to believe the trend of increasing resource utilization and decreasing resource cost would hold over time. Our generation got unlucky that finite resources finally started to show up in resource costs. It was like a game of musical chairs and the music stopped around the mid 2000s and generations that had not established wealth at that point were left without a chair.