{"id":195253,"date":"2008-07-20T17:11:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-20T22:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/07\/20\/rge-american-un-beauty-the-crisis-of-the-suburbian-mcmansions-and-gas-guzzling-suvs-way-of-life\/"},"modified":"2008-07-20T17:11:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-20T22:11:00","slug":"rge-american-un-beauty-the-crisis-of-the-suburbian-mcmansions-and-gas-guzzling-suvs-way-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/07\/20\/rge-american-un-beauty-the-crisis-of-the-suburbian-mcmansions-and-gas-guzzling-suvs-way-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"RGE &#8211; American Un-Beauty: The Crisis of the Suburbian (McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs) Way of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nouriel Roubini makes a very very good point in his essay <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rgemonitor.com\/roubini-monitor\/253033\/american_un-beauty_the_crisis_of_the_suburbian_mcmansions_and_gas-guzzling_suvs_way_of_life\">American Un-Beauty: The Crisis of the Suburbian (McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs) Way of Life<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">The result was that the U.S. invested too much \u2013 especially in the last eight years \u2013 in building its stock of <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital<\/span><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"> and of larger and larger private motor vehicles (whose <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">effect on the productivity of labor is zero<\/span><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">) and has not invested enough in the accumulation of productive physical capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">that leads to an increase in the productivity of labor<\/span><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"> and increases long run economic growth. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Basically, the as a society no longer invests in productivity, it invests in consumption (and I would add arbitrage to the mix), which means that in a world where increasing productivity is the path to greater standards of living, the United States is not even in the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nouriel Roubini makes a very very good point in his essay American Un-Beauty: The Crisis of the Suburbian (McMansions and Gas-Guzzling SUVs) Way of Life: The result was that the U.S. invested too much \u2013 especially in the last eight years \u2013 in building its stock of wasteful larger and larger homes and housing capital &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,1002,1003],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-good-writing","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}