Why Everything
Costs So Much

You're not imagining it. A full-time job used to be enough to rent an apartment, save a little, and not think about it constantly. Now a significant chunk of the country spends more than a third of their income on rent alone — and that's considered normal. Healthcare costs have tripled as a share of household spending since 1960. The average American worker is roughly twice as productive as in 1979, but median wages — adjusted for inflation — have barely budged.

These aren't separate problems with separate causes. They're the same thing happening in different sectors. Understanding what connects them is the first step toward doing something about it.

What changed — and when

There was a period, roughly from the 1940s through the 1970s, when wages and productivity actually tracked each other, when housing costs were manageable relative to income, and when a significant portion of public services were funded and run collectively. It wasn't paradise — who got access to those goods was deeply unequal. But the basic material floor was higher, and it was being built on purpose.

Then, starting around 1980, a series of deliberate policy choices began shifting how the economy worked. Things that had been shared got privatized. Things that had been regulated got deregulated. Things that had been public goods got turned into markets. The results show up in the numbers:

It's not a bug

The tempting explanation is that this happened because of mistakes — bad politicians, greedy executives, unfortunate circumstances. And yes, all of those contributed. But the pattern is too consistent and too global to be mainly about individual decisions. The economy extracts because it's structured to extract.

Here's the short version: when something people need — housing, healthcare, water, education — gets turned into a market, a few things reliably follow. Whoever owns the supply has enormous power over whoever needs it. Prices rise to whatever people can be pushed to pay, not whatever it costs to provide. The gap between cost and price — economists call this "rent", though it shows up in a lot more than apartments — flows upward to owners, not to the workers who produce the actual thing. And the people at the bottom, who have the least negotiating power, pay the highest prices relative to their income.

This is not a conspiracy. It doesn't require anyone to be unusually evil. It's just what markets in necessities produce when there's no countervailing structure — no public provision, no community ownership, no commons — to check the extraction.

What "the commons" actually means

Before housing was a market, many communities governed land collectively. Before healthcare was an industry, care was organized through mutual aid networks, community hospitals, and public provision. Before water was a utility bill, most places had some form of shared governance over water. These weren't perfect systems. But they had a different internal logic: resources managed for the people who depend on them, rather than for the people who own them.

The commons just means: things held and governed in common, rather than by private owners or by distant states. It's an old idea with a very modern set of applications — and it's being rebuilt right now, everywhere, in response to exactly the problem we're describing.

• Housing Community land trusts remove land permanently from the speculative market, making housing permanently affordable without ongoing subsidy. There are over 250 in the US right now. They work.
• Healthcare Federally Qualified Health Centers — community-governed clinics that operate as nonprofits — serve 30 million Americans regardless of ability to pay. Mutual aid health networks fill the gaps where even those don't reach.
• Energy Community energy cooperatives produce power at cost for their members rather than at profit for shareholders. Rural electric cooperatives — a New Deal-era commons — still power 56% of US land area today.
• Banking Credit unions are member-owned financial cooperatives. They charge lower fees, pay higher savings rates, and make lending decisions based on community needs rather than shareholder returns. 130 million Americans belong to one.
• Food Food co-ops, community gardens, seed libraries, and community-supported agriculture all route food through relationships rather than supply chains — keeping more value local and more control with the people eating.
• Care The care work that makes everything else possible — childcare, eldercare, emotional labor — is increasingly being organized through worker cooperatives and community care networks that value it rather than extract it.

This isn't about left or right

Credit unions aren't a radical idea — 130 million people use them. Rural electric cooperatives were championed by Franklin Roosevelt and beloved by conservative farming communities for decades. Community land trusts have been started by everyone from affordable housing advocates to libertarian-leaning intentional communities. The question of who fixes the pothole doesn't have an obvious partisan answer — it has a practical one: who actually knows where the potholes are and has a stake in getting them fixed?

If you're coming from a libertarian or anti-government direction: there's a piece written specifically for you. The argument there is that the state and the market are the same problem — and the alternative to both is something with a long history. If you care more about the ecological dimension: the environmental and social crises are the same crisis, and the evidence for that is detailed and specific.

What all of these have in common isn't an ideology. It's a structure: the people who depend on a resource have meaningful say in how it's governed. That's less abstract than it sounds. It's the difference between your landlord raising rent because the market allows it, and a land trust where your housing costs are governed by a board that includes you.