Ordinary people having “living space” is a capitalist invention. I remember staying one night in my dad’s village in Bangladesh—a country where socialism is one of the pillars of the constitution—in one of the tin-roof houses. Half a dozen people sleeping on the floor in maybe 300 square feet. Third world villages in rice-farming parts of the world are very socialist.[1] They share resources and nobody gets ahead of anyone else.

The cookie-cutter 1950s northern virginia house my brother and I grew up in was 1,100 square feet. We were upper middle class, with two college educated parents. Adjusted for CPI inflation, I paid less for our house in 2016 that’s three times the size.

People aren’t mad about “capitalism.” They’re mad about the knowledge work industries that pay a large fraction of the population so much better than everyone else that everyone is priced out of the communities where they grew up. After Google moved into Northern VA, prices skyrocketed and the same shitty 1,100 square foot house is $900,000. Shitty 1950s houses in what used to be drab faceless suburbs in the Bay Area are $2,000,000. In a way the knowledge work industry is capitalism’s fault too, but not in the way people think.

[1] https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol4/iss1/7/