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
Measured in kilocalories per person per day. This indicatesthe calories that are available for consumption, but doesnot necessarily measure the number of calories actually consumed, since it doesn’t factor in consumer waste.
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.
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=~USA
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.