Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous (opens in new tab)

The "thing that is happening" is a sort of etherealization of property. One underlying cause is that the bits of "property" themselves are digital/ethereal. Books, songs, films... They are no longer physical, and the economic norms around them are changing to reflect that. In conjunction, I think the cultural impact of consuming more digital goods (and probably a million other things) is that people are used to this type of economy. They want the same for their car, bike, etc.

I would call uber a step passed renting, or an extreme form renting. Leasing has already been the norm for a while, along with financing that is indistinguishable from leasing.

The "handful of corporations" part is... more of a consequence, I think. Etherealization/digitization is proving to be very centralization (or winner-take-most) friendly. There are a bunch of drivers to this though. One big reason is centralization of wealth. Big piles of money need big investments to go into. Uber could raise money on better terms than an "uber-for-aukland," adjusting for scale. $1 of profit/revenue/DAU is simply worth less than 1/100th of $100 in profit, on the "speculative investment" market.

I agree on your main points. There is a danger of becoming more of a "rentier" economy. If this trend continues (projecting trends is always speculative) we could end up with more property/wealth in corporate hands, and private individuals will only have liabilities and consumption.

The big elephant in this room is the same elephant that stomped through pyramid rooms 5,000 years ago: real estate, or "land" as it was once known. This is the big ticket item, and represents most of the wealth ordinary people own if they own anything. Cars, CDs and such just don't add up to much value, not anymore.

Up until this point in history having cash was all you needed to complete a transaction. Now you have to maintain your status as a “good” consumer, under the threat that you will be defacto excluded from a part of society by an algorithm. At which time you lose access to the platform as well as all your previous purchases.

There are also companies who are commoditising digital reputation. So a single, private, company will be able to effectively turn you into a pariah.

Amen. What grind my gears even more is when governments adopt that novspeak and promote the uberization of entire sectors under the guise of "sharing resources".

It's not necessarily bad, but it is a major change to share something among thousands of people or millions of people vs. just among family and friends.

Saying that the people sharing are a "community" makes it sound wonderful, but it's actually a large group of people that may have interests very different from yours. Decisions need to be made and it's hard to get consensus among a lot of people, so you are basically talking about a government of some kind, along with all the conflicts that creates.

Private ownership is not particularly convenient, but it has a very interesting relationship with freedom that we should not cast away lightly.

Renting is an accurate descriptor of Netflix or Kindle (and Google Play movies actually does have "rent" on the label of the button when you want to rent a movie). And I can see what you mean from the perspective of the guest or rider, but not from the perspective of the host or driver.

IMO it's still terrible if there is effectively only one product option. A democratic decision is just as bad as a shareholder one if it's choosing to favor a majority group over the minority (2 wolves and 1 sheep voting for dinner choices).

>outsources the generation of actual value to others

If you don't think there is value in the network, feedback mechanisms, and simplicity of using Lyft/Uber/whatever, you have completely missed why they are popular. Cabs would still dominate and would have been as popular as Lyft and Uber are now if all of the value was generated by drivers with cars. I think you probably meant to say 'outsourcing the labor' to others, which is completely different and companies have been doing that for centuries.

Labor != Value. I can go dig ditches in a yard for 10 years and not create any value.

Add: I also feel this is why new home sales is such an important metric to judge the momentum of the US economy, lots of new home sales means lots of new home-wares. You buy or build a house you also buy a refrigerator, microwave, carpet, furniture etc. Mostly on credit. If we truly become a communal society the cycle is broken, the same people who said "no new house and no new car, I'll just save my cash" now earn less 5 years later because there are many fewer things sold and the interconnected supply chain stalls.

Besides, a for profit service can create a community just as well as a communal repartition of it. It adds another risk to the community, of the service provider going bad, but it's not some overwhelming factor that makes all other irrelevant. Like it or not, you are sharing stuff when you rent them, the resource pooling is present (more or less present, depending on the renting modality), people are coming together (or not, depending on how it's shared), and there is social development just like with a communal resource.

The problem of Uber|etc and Netflix|etc is much more on how they do the renting than on they actually renting things.

There is some related problem you didn't point, in that once people start pooling some resource they didn't use fully, they should become more wealthy. We are not seeing this, so is it that the pooling isn't efficient or is it because people are being forced into pooling them by poverty? Either way, it's a problem.

If ever these corporations cause trouble, our government (well, maybe not the US government, but most sensible governments) will step in to remedy the situation. We've done so with privacy laws, we've done it with non-compete laws, we're going to do it with other companies as well.

I've owned VHS's, they're worthless I've owned houses - that I had to short sell I've owned DVD's - they're worthless I've owned Books - they're worthless

What is the value of owning over just paying to enjoy access?

I like spotify because i can sync music to my phone to play offline - but "owning" all this music is worthless... I had a HUGE cd collection growing up but they were all stolen one day. Owning was worthless..

It seems we're substituting "ownership" with control. There are landlords that let you "control" your house - paint it, update it, customize to your liking - without having to own it yourself. This is a win-win since you get the benefit of fix annual costs whereas owning the place you could be liable for so much more.

heck, Everything i "own" actually owns "me" and burdens me with costs... but i can cancel spotify/netflix/hulu and re-sub later. I like the flexibility of our new model. I get the 4k version without having to "Re-own", i get higher bitrate songs without having to re-encode or re-buy, i get more quality content because i'm paying the producer - not a middleman distribution.

That is the base that Richard Stallman created for the open source movement. You should own your own hardware, and the only way of fulfilling that is to own the software that makes it run. And I also thought that this is common sense at least for the past generation of developers. I am not so sure how much the message has been lost, but it is not so strong as it used to be.

I think you and the author conflated ownership of "stuff" with ownership of--or a stake in--society. All of the things you listed as owning versus the not-owning (whether it's called renting or leasing or subscribing) are trade-offs you made because you value the concept of ownership of stuff over the opposite.

My view is different: I want ownership of society; I want to be a full participant in society, regardless of the actual state of being of the physical and electronic objects around me. This is why, for example, I give money to local journalists on Patreon, and why I deliberately live in a smaller place in a large city where I can pay taxes to a well-funded library system. This is the type of "ownership" I value.

Other things I do, like ride mass transit, subscribe to Spotify, and pay my city electric bill (I wasn't aware that buying electricity from my municipality impacted my "ownership" of anything, as the author claims), are all things I do because I find them to be more efficient or more useful to me. There are things I unequivocally own, like records or my treasured collection of baseball cards, that have value to me beyond my simple possession of them. There are some things I own, like my residence, where ownership has been more of a burden to me than a non-ownership method would have. It's all about balance.

(One last question: Could you clarify "I do my own taxes?" What is it that doing taxes yourself, presumably by pen and calculator, gains over downloading a product like TaxAct and saving the PDF of the result?)

In GENERAL, it seems like it takes a lot more money and resources nowadays to do this, relative to other benefits you can have. In Media, having a wall of $19.99 blue-rays and an apple music full of albums is going to cost you a lot more given how must people consume media (a lot, and constantly). The cost to get that permanence is like an order of magnitude over more or less the same content with subscription services + rentals.

I tend to think of it like this - if netflix takes a show off that I watch constantly, I might buy the series online. If Netflix as a whole goes down along with all the other streaming services, then the whole internet and society is probably down, and I suddenly don't care about all the media I'd be consuming, because there's bigger stuff happening in the world.

Of course, "disconnecting" is probably undervalued - I'm just old enough to remember the time when offline was the default for media. Not having to deal with the engagement machine and autoplay was a bit of a blessing.

And:

> rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own

It sounds like you're now beholden to a situation that's misaligned with your interests. You've traded one kind of serfdom for another.

You're not an outlier if you live in the USA. You might be part of the problem. "Drive till you qualify" is peak consumerism.

I succumbed and buy music and movies online because that battle is already lost; I'm not going to commit to maintaining VHS, DVD etc players forever and obsolescence is built into the format. Hell there are probably people with laserdiscs that they can’t play anymore.

But I still buy physical books because they are a real thing.

That's not true. The reason why property ownership was required to vote is because in a democracy, the founders knew that if the majority of voters didn't have property then they would eventually just vote to take away the property of others. But they also knew that if the majority of people didn't own property then the government would also fail. So their solution was to only allow property owners to vote, but to make it easy and basically free for all citizens to become a property owners, and to heavily incentivize them to do so.

Early American democracy only worked because there was basically an unlimited amount of free land to give way. And to the extent that it still works, it's because technology and intellectual property have replaced land as the primary sources of capital.

American democracy is designed around broad-based capital ownership, not broad-based ownership of stupid shit you don't need. This is why this article doesn't make sense, because it would be far better for democracy if e.g. the average American owned $20,000 worth of Uber stock rather than $20,000 worth of car. Stock is capital, whereas a personal car isn't.

It's technically true. It's clear that the original law of the land assumed that only landowners had a stake in running things.

I didn't get the impression that the author claimed this was a moral truth. Rather, I thought he was saying that the resulting culture made the country prosperous and productive. As more and more groups started owning things, they became enfranchised into the system.

To understand the point of the author you need to look back, deeply back, at the history of human society. For most of human history, most people did not own any property. In a feudal society, for example, a few lords owned everything, and everyone else worked for them and owned nothing.

The "American experiment" was radical in that it placed the individual at the center of governance. The U.S. system of government is "built up" from citizen consent, not "pushed down" from a divinely-granted right of hereditary rule.

In order for this system to work, citizens must own property. Otherwise, they don't have the resources to collectively enact change. The Bill of Rights presumes citizens who have the resources to speak, associate, petition, etc. That's why it is worded to constrain the government's power, not worded to grants things to citizens.

The fundamental idea behind American democracy is that Americans have the means to pursue their goals and to influence each other.

This is why it was so much easier for early U.S. citizens to found churches and corporations than it was in Europe. European churches and corporations were top-down, and therefore few and conservative. U.S. organizations were bottom-up, and therefore many, diverse, and innovative.

So... that's why property ownership is at the heart of American democracy.

But what about:

> deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system

There's actually a lot of evidence against this, for example the entire labor and environmental movements. Collective citizen action has worked a lot of change to the U.S. over the years, and I predict it will continue to do so.

All that said, I think it's a pretty far reach to claim that the American experiment is at risk because a few people don't want to buy CD's or cars anymore. People still like money and things! The real estate market is not drying up. There's plenty of property being owned and desired by Americans.

I think that lack of money is a bigger issue. Over 40 million people in the U.S. live below the poverty line! I think that's a much bigger problem for American "stake in the game" than whether someone who has disposable income decides to spend it on a Kindle instead of books.

Ownership culture has always exhibited this sort of pathological tendency. People who live next to a park with a basketball court insist on an inferior hoop in their driveway. The suburbs are littered with garden sheds full of identical, mostly-idle tools. We insist on a car for every member of the household.

Similar examples are readily conjured.

To the extent that any of these involve practical advantages, they're far outweighed, it seems to me, by the bizarre psychological impulses that are really driving all this compulsive behavior.

Well, it hasn't been a deliberate and intentional effort to exclude those without property or net worth from the decision making process - People like that, who reside at the bottom of the hierarchies they inhabit, have never in history been looked to for guidance or input on any decision. I'm making an evolutionary biology claim: Folks with no clout can only have a say if it is deliberately & intentionally given to them. It's the opposite of your speculation that it's been taken from them.

And frankly why _should_ someone who cannot gather value for themselves have a say in economic decisions that will affect others? The reason we have these big evil hierarchies, where the poor are dispossessed and a small group of tycoons at the top make the decisions, is because they have a track record of good decisions. If you suddenly took some progressive initiative to invite some idlers to give input on tax law, they might make a decision that inadvertently lowers your country's GDP by half a percent for five years.

You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.

The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.

As an example I enjoy games and my Steam account likely now is 'worth' some thousands of dollars that I should be able to sell at some depreciated rate. Except it's not, and I cannot. As I'm effectively renting access to these products instead of actually 'buying' them, my account is worth exactly $0. I could try to sell it nonetheless, but it would be unlawful. If I was instead able to actually own these games, my little hobby would still have cost me money, but I'd be able to recoup a substantial portion of it at a later date -- or perhaps even work to monetize "my" games in some way, again within the confines of the law.

This is sort of a microcosm of what causes wealth inequality. A more typical example would be a poor individual spending decades paying rent each month that is simply subtracted from his net worth. A wealthier individual might be paying off a mortgage on a property that eventually begin to earn money for him, or at the minimum provide him a residence with no rent due other than that which the government demands. It's interesting to consider this aspect of the migration to cities. People move into these extremely dense areas where they're obligated to rent homes which, due to high demand, consume a very large chunk of their earnings - and then at the end of the days, weeks, years, decades, they have absolutely 0 to show for what will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for most people.

I don't think a bank account applies here. If I have a large bank account but no other ties to the community, I have no real skin in the game as it applies to community proceedings. I'll vote however and if I make mistakes I will leave with no losses.

'Property and stakes' in the context of American history and feudalism means land, not doodads. It's so many banal platitudes. Tyler is a smart guy but some of the stuff he writes and says is just...bad.

And we should find ourselves completely at ease at the end of our investigation, for in every species success is distributed inequitably. Inequality of net worth is a natural law, and human society is no exception. And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products.

Samsung made the largest fridge available. I got the $2500 model: stainless steel, no IoT but digital, double doors over drawer freezer. It looked really solid and durable. It failed in so many distinct and interesting ways!

The door shelves constantly shattered, at $50 each. The structure had been compromised by artistic design, with two kinds of plastic joined together. The ice maker died. The main shelves broke a couple times. The temperature display (blue 7-segment numbers) became nonsense. The drawer handle had a hinge made from plastic which broke and non-stainless steel which rusted out. The compressor went out, as we determined by diagnostic codes. The tech sent to fix that ignored us, never checked diagnostic codes, didn't look at the compressor, insisted that our problem was the ice maker (which was indeed broken but not our complaint), charged us $75 for nothing, and fought us when we did a credit card charge-back.

I cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying.

The replacement is a pair of smaller fridges that were about $400 each. One of them even has old-style wire shelves that seem unlikely to shatter. We've only had two broken shelves so far, in the other one.

Famously, there was a "lemons and cherries" paper on the economics of used cars. I think it also somewhat applies to new goods. There is information asymmetry here. I can't know that the hinges are fragile plastic and non-stainless steel. The fridge looks nice, and it says "stainless steel". I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.

Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that will work".

Sometimes that's because the person paying to build the building is going to sell it once it's rented out, so they won't have to deal with the long term consequences. Sometimes it's just budget restrictions that won't permit the funds to buy the high-quality option. Sometimes it's just short-sightedness. It's rare to meet an owner who truly wants to invest in high quality, long-term solutions.

A fridge service provider might run the hardware longer, but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features - if old phone monopolies, cable boxes and current isp's are any indicator.

And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...

Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.

What we are missing today is meaningful competition. You can’t buy an appliance that isn’t a piece of garbage because we have a financial environment that encourages consolidation above all else. There’s only a few companies making anything, so there is no incentive to use quality as a differentiator.

I first started become aware of this when I started having trouble finding shoes. In many categories, all shoes are made by one manufacturer, often in one factory in Guangdong.

You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience. The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down.

You just described a grocery store...

They keep food and beverages at certain temperatures. When you are ready to consume that food or beverage, you can pick it up (or have it delivered). And best of all, you pay no subscription fee :) But in reality, that's not practical. Most families eat 3 meals a day, and consume multiple glasses of some drink a day. To make a trip to the grocery store (or fridge depot subscription place) every time you want to eat or have a cold drink is not practical (and increases environmental pollutants). So maybe you want to go once a day, you'll still need some device at home to keep your groceries and drinks cold until you want to consume, some device like a fridge :p

If you found a solution, that'd be great. But you'd probably just be a food delivery startup with some fancy marketing lingo. And we have plenty of those already.

Fridge?

And I have three actually. One runs on propane, one standard power and one is a deep freeze, like what one would put in a garage.

All were cheap, all work well, all take modest to very liw resources to run.

The gas powered one works no matter what. That has saved me a time or two when there was no power. I may well get another. It is insane cheap to use.

Anyone selling me something that is planned to break gets the following:

Added to avoid list.

The product gets hacked wher it is posdible to untether it and or remedy the failure.

I tell others.

Now I realize all of that is contrary and toxic to many business models today. I rarely buy new.

I grew up poor, and had time which I invested in skills. Those have paid me off many, many times over.

I also think maximizing what has been produced makes good jobs, is better, with some qualifiers, for the environment, increases personal agency, lowers personal risk and cost.

Among many other good things.

Service models can make sense. For many basics, they just do not make sense.

I would much prefer we distribute repair, support modifications, upgrades and such across many enterprises as we used to do.

TV's were a good example. I grew up learning to repair them. Used to do it for date money. Offered in home service too.

Cars remain a good example. John Deere is the other extreme.

A blanket, "this way is good" makes little sense to me.

Would much rather have many local relationships than the same with big enterprises. More options, and if I do work, I get the immediate returns of lowered cost and risk.

There are things that I would like to buy for life. Kitchenwares, Desk, etc. There are things that are consumable and may be being a services would be better.

The world already has made a Subscription model for an Expensive and long last fridge and that is called installment plan.

Now, the one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.

They will happily externalize as many costs as possible as well. Your electric bill is high? Oops, guess you should have negotiated that in the contract. Five hundred dollars of fresh groceries went bad because we gave you a shoddy refurb? We'll have a new unit out to you tomorrow, good luck with the rest.

You can't buy a residential clothes washer designed to last longer than five years; laundromats won't tolerate that; solution, pretend Home Depot doesn't exist and buy a Speed Queen that your kids can probably inherit.

An interesting side effect is residential / contractors special type stuff has a very low initial cost of purchase but overall lifetime cost is always lower for commercial grade stuff; this makes sense, if it was cheaper to buy residential garbage the beancounters would force it to officially be commercial...

They also have an incentive to make it last a long time so you're a loyal customer. Loyalty is extremely important if you only purchase a half dozen of something your entire life. Guess which incentive is stronger?

As a corollary, there is a big difference between being incentivized to do something and simply not being incentivized to do the opposite. The average full-size refrigerator lifespan is 17 years. The fact that Maytag doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a fridge that can last 30 years doesn't mean they're incentivized to make a shitty fridge, it just means people don't care enough about years 18-30 that they're willing to pay what it would cost to get that fridge.

Only if they don't have competitor for your business with a reputation for longer-lasting fridges that are otherwise of similar utility.

A responsible tax system could accomplish the same without causing people to pay 100x the value of a good product over their lifetime.

So I disagree with your premise based on the example you gave. I would say it would be fine with items you only keep a few years and not long term appliances. I really do not think it encourages them to create units that fail because many companies still want their reputation to be built upon longevity. Simply put, the sales volumes are already great enough to not require shenanigans like what you suggest

People need to own, people need to be reaponsible with their decisions, and to think a business or corporation can do it better is dangerous.

For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".

However, if I subscribe to a communistic society to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then this society has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.

EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:

- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a 4 years planned product costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more planned society leads to better resource distribution.

- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of one society.

For me, it’s less strain on my eyes, it always works even without electricity, I can lend it out to friends easily, and I like to expand the aesthetic of my bookshelf. I’m also more likely to reread all or part of a physical book. Ebooks are simply inferior.

I can buy a used (and sometimes new) paper copy cheaper than an Ebook and when I'm done I can decided if I want to keep it sell it or give it away.

So far, the data is showing that most people still prefer reading on paper versus on screen, by a decent margin (only 14% prefer screen). However, people still read more ebooks than paper books, likely due to the convenience factor. This can be squared with the NPD data because library ebooks are included in our poll, not just purchased ebooks.

I've been surprised at what small percentage of people use a monochrome Kindle (less than 25%), and the lack of a dominant platform (Amazon — 35%, OverDrive — 19%, Apple — 11%, Nook — 8%, Other — 27%). I guess it's good for consumers that there isn't one big leader here.

Is that really it, though? I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans." That doesn't seem all that plausible.

Personally, I am happy streaming things I don't care to own. At this point, most of the things I watch, I want to watch once. The world is so abundantly overflowing with good video content that I have little reason to return back to something. Those few things, I frequently will buy. Some of my "season DVDs" I'm quite glad I hung on to... some of them were on Netflix for a while, but are no longer, and are still fairly expensive to buy.

If the stream services went away, ultimately I'd be slightly inconvenienced.

Music, by contrast, I tend to listen to a given track/album that I like quite a bit, and I take possession of. YMMV. I'm very music oriented compared to most people.

And Stallman's arguments about software are yet again something different; there are reasons for having the source and using open source that have no media equivalent, because software isn't just media, it's a machine.

Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.

1. "Experiences over objects" is driven by the need to share it on social media. Photos at the Eiffel Tower garner more likes than a new BMW car.

2. Peer pressure: Experiences of others being shared on social media and garnering likes causes the follower to do the same.

3. Being raised by relatively wealthy parents with all the stuff, and being disillusioned by hoarding and ownership of stuff.

4. Cheaper and more accessible transportation coupled with a general increase in per capita income.

5. Real estate is expensive now, and being forced to live in small rental units, you've learnt to spend time outdoors.

In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available.

I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though).

The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.

Renting absolutely means more freedom to move. It also means less freedom to, say, tear down a wall in the house. I think home ownership is over-rated, but I wouldn't draw such a clear line on "freedom."

Still not as easy as a truck. I drive mine into the ground too. Not just to figure out if selling a used one or getting the trade-in is the most effective use. Buying new car way less effective than buying a good in shape 16 year old accurately for $1700 currently. I value more varied vehicles over one nice one. it's also nice to say well this one didn't start today oh well how bout this one.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho...

[2] - https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-befor... (media article, but based on study which is cited with relevant numbers and figures shown)

I think a lot of older generation Americans grew up obsessed with ownership, particular of cars and houses, as crucial symbols of status and success. In my conversations with them I often hear them portray these as indicators rather than just symbols. So it’s not just that owning a home impresses your parents, it’s that you’re not an adult until you own your own home.

At the end of the day I think it’s hard for each generation to understand how much the world has changed and how much the culture of next generation has changed as a result. And they’re uncomfortable with this change, maybe understandably.

Therefore it’s understandable, though IMO misguided, for them to point at changing preferences and behaviors and mistake these as causes of the negative societal shifts they see, rather than understand them as being effects of the societal changes that have happened already.

Easiest case in point, the first generation of car-using adults suddenly experienced a massive glut of “useful” land and housing, and then a subsequent era of high inflation, thus it was very easy for them to buy a home and those who did prosepered at the expense of the banks as their mortgages hedged a bunch of value against inflation.

The second generation (the boomers) didn’t get quite as good of a deal, but it was still pretty easy for them to own a comfortable home with a reasonable commute, and they experienced long runs of appreciation, so their belief that this was the “best way to live” was validated.

But for the kids of the boomers (millennial), urban sprawl had already consumed most of the best near-city land, while the rural economy has been stagnant. Thus the trade-off to follow the old recipe is a brutal commute or else house prices that are out of reach for most of us. Many also came of age in the recession.

Therefore it should not be surprising that the Millenials did not find it viable to be obsessed with ownership, and that they would have backlashed against it in some ways including this preference for finding ways to enjoy things without incurring capital costs, as the so-called “sharing economy” has emerged to offer.

It may be that the Millenial generation is much less wealthy in the end. But that seems to me mostly the fault of the Builders and the Boomers and the result of the choices they made, and that the “renter” mindset is more a result of their lower wealth and harder economic prospects rather than the cause.

I've found that every physical thing I own has an ongoing cost. Firs there is the obvious cost of physically storing the thing. Then there is the labor cost of cleaning it and keeping it nice. Then there is the mental cost of remembering where it is. And finally there is a cost of worrying about it. What if the house burns down? You spend a lot of time and money and effort preventing and planning for such an event that may never occur at all. And for those of us who have lost everything that way, coming to the realization that it's all just stuff feels like anti-gravity. It's like living on Jupiter your entire life and then moving to the Moon.

The only reason I could think of was a potential implied subtitle: "the reason to be nervous is that if we stop buying things then those equity values go down" (which is honestly what I first thought when reading the headline)

When you own property, you care more about the place where that property exists because what affects the surroundings directly affects the value of your possession. That incentivizes you to care about and invest in your neighborhood, community, state, and country.

If you aren't tied to the place, it's easier to just jump ship and say "not my problem" when something goes awry. You have fewer incentives to put effort into long-term projects that improve the community since you're less likely to be there to reap the benefits.

In other words, renters are less likely to plant trees, but a neighborhood with trees is better for us all over the long term.

  Both are transactions where resources
  are being traded for "goods".

When people own a netflix subscription the industry is in a fixed-sum competition. The industry makes $X per subscriber per month, whether the average movie is Citizen Kane or The Emoji Movie.