It really isn't. The raw materials in our lives are a tiny fraction of our living costs in the west. 200 tons of concrete, steel, and plastic etc. in appropriate proportions is enough for a very nice house, yet it would cost less than a tenth of the sale price of that house: what you need to turn it into a nice house is expensive human labour.
The raw materials are cheap because we have machines to help extract them; before we invented them, those materials were also expensive.
There is the point that how wealthy the competing humans are is also a major factor. But you're trying to bypass an argument about resource scarcity by pretending that resources aren't scarce. If you follow that path to its logical conclusion you're probably going to end up in a very confusing world because then it won't make sense why everyone doesn't just get a house (if someone can't afford a house, why not just upskill and learn how to build one? It isn't that hard and there are a lot of people who don't own a house but really want one and are more than happy to work for the privilege).
What attracts people to a place is often all the other people there. The actual land area is not close to being a limiting factor, we only build on about 1% of it.
> why everyone doesn't just get a house (if someone can't afford a house, why not just upskill and learn how to build one? It isn't that hard
You've not followed Colin Furze, I see. Even his basic concrete and steel tunnel and bunker isn't "just upskill" and done alone, he's got a team.
Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a house where you could save €50k by doing the plastering yourself, like I have turned down.
Some rough estimates for the time it takes to learn the necessay trades; if you think these are unreasonable, ask yourself how come e.g. plumbers cost so much on callout, or how long after graduating you were still a noob at whatever your day job is:
* Basic construction literacy (plans, codes, sequencing): ~1-2 years (or 3-6 months intensive self-study + mentoring)
* Site preparation & surveying basics: ~3-6 months
* Excavation & earthworks operation: ~6-12 months
* Concrete work (formwork, rebar, pouring, curing): ~1-2 years
* Masonry (brick/block work): ~1-2 years
* Carpentry (structural framing): ~2-4 years to solid competence
* Roofing (structure, waterproofing): ~1-2 years
* Plumbing (rough-in + fixtures): ~2-4 years
* Electrical (wiring, panels, code compliance): ~3-5 years
* HVAC installation: ~2-4 years
* Insulation & air sealing: ~3–6 months
* Drywall installation & finishing: ~6-12 months
* Interior carpentry (doors, trim, cabinetry basics): ~1-2 years
* Flooring (tile, wood, laminate): ~6-12 months
* Painting & finishing: ~3-6 months
* Window & door installation: ~6-12 months
* Exterior finishes (siding, stucco, cladding): ~1-2 years
* Project management (budgeting, scheduling, subcontractors): ~2-5 years practical experience
* Health & safety compliance: ~3-6 months initial + continuous practice
A single person can reach "good enough to build a simple house" faster (perhaps 5 years if you skip the optional bits and keep the process count as low as possible), but quality, speed, and compliance will be limiting factors. And you'd need some person or people with all that knowledge to tell you which processes you could get away with not using, otherwise you'd end up with the house equivalent of vibe coded software.
This is also why houses in need of significant maintenence go for so little, sometimes even less than the land they're on.
Heck, if even just *insulation* from that list was as easy as you seem to think an entire house is, the UK would halve its heating bills as fast as its factories could make (or ports could import) foam.
> Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a house where you could save €50k by doing the plastering yourself, like I have turned down.
So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?
Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?
Not particularly. We've ridden massive increases in both quality of life and population (at both the per-country and global scales) over the last two centuries.
The floor is 2-300 USD equivalent, because that's what subsistence farming is, and it took two centuries to go from $1500 to $18811: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...
> We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.
that's a massive shift of goalposts from "not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources".
I actually agree with this vision. But I wouldn't say every human not being a millionaire is "the #1 problem" today.
Don't leave us all in suspense.
>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.
It sounds like one of those not very nice ways you describe more so than an active societywide choice. People aren't exactly choosing in the wide sense of the word. Their states population keeps going up despite often many decades of below replacement birthrates (thus aleviating pressure in places that retain higher birthrates) whilst they feel like they struggle with housing, childcare, pressure on their wages trough migration (and other things) and leave the parental nest at historically late times.
What states, exactly? The EU as a whole has a population growth rate of 0.3% according to the world bank - that's as close to flat as makes no difference (and that's accounting for immigration!)
The only EU countries with a >1% growth rate are Ireland and Portugal.
The population has not shrunk a single year since the world wars but the natality has been below replacement since the start of the 70's if you take the colloquial replacement natality rate and since the world wars if you take the more realistic one.
I think just about every surrounding country is similar.
That growth is indeed slowing down but that has more to do with the natality continuing to drop.
There are indeed eastern european countries with far less migration which saw declines pulling the average down.
>The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.
Taking this as true (it very evidently isn't), then since Europe already has declining birth rates, the logic step would be to prevent migration no? An influx of people would hurt.
>There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.
You say this as if this "amazing outcome" came out of nowhere, magically. People are forced into this because finances make it hard. That is not very nice.
>If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children
Why would this happen? From your comment, it doesn't seem to be something to expect?
By the way
>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.
This sentence is so extremely out of touch as to be insulting.