* Bigger homes means you feel more comfortable being lazy and spending all your time indoors
* Bigger cars means you are incentivized to drive 20 miles to a restaurant in comfort instead of walking over to a closer one
* Bigger TVs means you spend all day "watching the game" instead of going out and playing a sport.
Once again, these are grossly oversimplified, but should drive home the central point that spending on some things can actually worsen outcomes of others.
For many (most?) people in the US, the idea of walking anywhere of consequence from their home is simply ludicrous. Restaurant, convenience store, grocery store, all are completely inaccessible except by car.
Suburb planning has explicitly disallowed that sort of living for most people. It has also made it nearly impossible to serve neighborhoods with any sort of reasonable public transit.
This particular aspect of USA struck me as quite bizarre whenever I visited on business trips. More so as I’m from India where it’s almost a given that things that you need on a day to day basis (grocery, bakery, pharmacy, convenience store etc.,) are available within walking distance. Apart from an opportunity to get some fresh air it’s also a good way to interact with my neighborhood community.
I assumed this is how it’d be in any developed country until I moved to Netherlands. It’s not too different from India at all in that respect here.
So now I wonder, what factors lead to that kind of city planning in US. It was a real ordeal for me to get a meal outside in US, had to either walk for an hour or order taxi service (those were pre-Uber days).
What other countries? The US is very much an outlier. The only one I can think of is maybe Australia?
A car requirement (and hence minimum fuel purchasing requirement) helps keep lower socioeconomic classes out of higher socioeconomic classes’ neighborhoods. This results in marked improvements in economic performance of children in school, as the public school students are determined by the area they are in, and spacing things out results in a populace with a minimum level of financial security who can afford to travel further.
The original impetus may not have been exactly that, as people generally like their space anyway, but it’s affects are well known. Historically, I’m sure there was also a racial component to it, with white people moving to more expensive areas that non white people couldn’t afford.
I call BS on that. Accordingly to this logic homeless must be the healthiest people. That aside, rich people (who also happen to have bigger houses) actually exercise more than the poor.
* Bigger cars means you are incentivized to drive 20 miles to a restaurant in comfort instead of walking over to a closer one
You telling that person with the smaller car would rather walk to the store (often VERY long walk in the US)? I call another BS here.
* Bigger TVs means you spend all day "watching the game" instead of going out and playing a sport.
Same argument as for size of the houses. I think you pulled these arguments right out of the place where the sun does not shine.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe "bigger $things" and "worse outcome" are on the same side of the graph.
Do you have a source for that?
In my experience living and working in a slew of countries around the world, the USA has the cheapest alcohol, cigarettes, cars, electricity, clothing, electronics, gas (and diesel), food at the supermarket, food at the restaurant and many other things of any developed country.
Because taxes are so low, stuff in America is extremely cheap compared to countries with tax-funded healthcare, higher education, etc.
But mostly they're buying the stuff I talked about above. Consumerism.