Reddit mentions of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the TwentyFirst Century (Studies in Government and Public Policy)

> Standard of living can be defined as:

Lol, I was just going to start off by saying it depends on what you mean by better!

> I think most would agree that Sweden has a greater standard of living than Nigeria. Which is better at creating these types of standard of living increases?

> Is Capitalism or Socialism better at moving humans to a greater standard of living?

First of all, no socialist that I know of, or even suspect that exists in this community, would deny that capitalism is fantastic at things like wealth creation. Of course capitalism has brought many good things to us. And of course, the corollary of that is true as well.

Still, among many of the factors you site, however, I can tell you as an academic economist, many of these are hotly debated as to how and in what ways they can be said to reflect the health of society as a whole. GDP for example is a notoriously bad gauge to quantify societal well-being (if you want a sample of the basic controversy).

In the US, we have so much of an abundance of capital and wealth that if we desired, we could virtually if not entirely, eliminate many of the facets of poverty in our country. We could provide low-cost affordable housing to everybody (see some of the history of housing policy in the US), even despite our horrible attempts at pubic housing in the past. So why can't/hasn't capitalism accommodated a solution for this niche problem? Well, capitalism doesn't produce for the social need or utility, it produces for profit and individual consumption.

Capitalism doesn't allocate resources to areas it can't profit off of, unless someone can turn it to a profit.