Something is wrong with the Anglosphere

And there are at least five if not six pink lines. One ends near "W Europe" and two appear to be "Canada."

This from the thn Australian Prime Minister in 1972. We did the exact opposite and now have a 2nd rate American system

It's the neoliberal fever dream that unregulated market mechanisms can build a better world. It's the socioeconomic theory that unfettered psychopathy is a guiding light, and the high priests of this religion pray the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train. (Or that they died wealthy of old age before things ever got too bad for them.)

No interest in letting in more tradespeople to buff up the construction industry?

They seriously curtailed immigration with the new government

Carney only became PM in March. Where are you seeing statistics of a large decrease in net migration since then?

Yes, that's definitely part of it. It's not perfect, but if you think the English speaking world is a disaster you should try living in a developing country.

Sure it does. Suburban planning has ALWAYS been a shitty type of plan, but it takes scale to make it obvious to even the dumbest of fools. After all, a tiny suburb near some local stores is just a walkable town with more asphalt/cement.

That and a frontier-era individualism, now pressed into the service of standing against socialism. If you live in a single-family home and only get around in your private car, other people don’t look like comrades or fellow citizens so much as traffic and competition. As cars cost money, they’re also a good emblem of material success.

And, of course, those uncomfortable with seeing those people as their fellow citizens no longer need to share subway carriages or tenement corridors with them.

It's worse than us simply becoming poorer. It's that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There's just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We've only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:

1. Letting older suburban infrastructure decay to well past its replacement state.
2. Relying on growth to prop things up. (Build new neighborhoods and require developers to repave streets and replace/upgrade utility infrastructure in an area.)
3. Relying on ever higher levels of debt.

It isn't financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.

I would say it predates the Cold War. The industrial revolution started in England, and then the US ran with it. The UK built the first ship with a steam engine, the US built the first ship to sail across the Atlantic under steam power, and that's basically been the pattern for the last 200 years. Humphrey Davy describes electromagnetism, Edison and Tesla build industrial scale power grids. England gave us Alan Turing, and in America you get IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Apple and Google.

While "the anglosphere" as this thread terms it has been inventing everything from antibiotics to thermonuclear weapons to the T-shirt, what have the rest of you been up to?

If it weren't for "The anglosphere" the rest of you would still be dying of smallpox by candle light.

You're obviously not in the loop, major housing crisis going on already. But because it across the board it doesn't necessarily translate to extreme housing prices (although they've been getting steeper for years now).

Also

Housing always has to go up, or the owner-voters revolt against whoever is in power. So all government policies favour housing appreciation, protect against depreciation, or simply avoid taking meaningful, proportionate and timely action that could cause prices to depreciate.

Even things like airbnb bans, getting rid of exclusionary zoning, etc. are too little, too late. Prices have already been inflated, and owner-occupiers are now holding things up because they can't simply cash out, write off a loss and move their equity elsewhere because they need somewhere to live. Governments support those owner-occupiers (and often corporate landlords, for as long as they stay in the game) to ensure votes and campaign contributions continue.

We are sitting on a massive, fragile bubble that is getting harder and harder to prop up every year. With insurance issues, climate change, an aging population hoping/needing to cash out equity to fund their retirement, wages way behind inflation for millenials and Gen z, massive amounts of differed municipal infrastructure due to artificially low property tax, unemployment creeping up, etc. there are growing threats to the continued "housing always goes up" economy.

Almost all of that applies to NZ.