Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

The article identifies some problems but totally misses their actual source. The problem isn&#x27;t that we own less stuff, it&#x27;s that the ownership is replaced by a dependency on a handful of corporations which we have no ability to influence or appeal to.<p>The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. The problem with our recent trend is that we aren&#x27;t getting communal ownership in return; we&#x27;re getting nothing but convenience.<p>Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term &quot;sharing&quot;. You aren&#x27;t &quot;sharing&quot; when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren&#x27;t pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You&#x27;re renting. You&#x27;re renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren&#x27;t shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money.

I’m surprised at the criticism here and I think the critics are missing the author’s point. He’s not saying, “buy more stuff you don’t need” or even, “possess more stuff.” He’s saying, “you ought to <i>own</i> the stuff you possess.” Which I didn’t think was a controversial opinion but I guess I stand corrected.<p>I might be an outlier. I make a deliberate effort to own instead of rent. My commute is enormous because I moved to a place I can afford to own a house, rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own. I’ve never leased a car because I value the ability to repair and upgrade it myself. I don’t rely on streaming services for media, which could one day disappear without replacements. I do my own taxes. I don’t even eat at restaurants often. I feel that relying on services is risky coupling, unnecessarily involving another party in my success&#x2F;outcome&#x2F;enjoyment of the product. If I have the MP4 on my hard drive, Netflix can’t wake up one day and decide I can’t watch it anymore. I’ll only (grudgingly) subscribe to a service if there is no other realistic option, such as with Internet service.

Everything this guy illustrates in this article as frightening and subversive, I see as positive. Americans confuse control with love; that&#x27;s why we say things like &quot;you belong to me&quot; and &quot;I only hurt you because I love you&quot;. That&#x27;s why we substitute possessions for relationships. It&#x27;s a thoroughly poisonous attitude.<p>The most bizarre statement is when he says &quot;The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system.&quot; It&#x27;s pretty obvious to me that a deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system; to flip that relationship around and make it a <i>moral</i> statement is frankly a little scary. People really think like this?<p>Look, what Americans need is to spend more time with their friends, their children, their spouses, their families. Not to spend time collecting fancy cars or other hollow pursuits. This is a lunatic point of view.

This is beyond ridiculous. The crux of the article is:<p>&gt; <i>Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.</i><p>Whether you own music or rent it doesn&#x27;t give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.<p>What gives you a stake is your <i>net worth</i> -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.<p>And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you.<p>If we want to be nervous, let&#x27;s investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.

It may be better for the environment to not own stuff, but instead use services.<p>For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. &quot;planned obsolescence&quot;.<p>However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.<p>EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:<p>- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a service costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more transparent market leads to better competition.<p>- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including <i>recycling it</i>, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.

<i>Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text. Fifteen years ago, people typically owned the books and magazines they were reading. Much less so now.</i><p>The statements about books are not accurate. Ebook sales are still just a fraction of print sales in many genres - NPD data indicates ebooks are less than 20% of total unit sales for nonfiction, children, and young adult titles (self-published ebooks excluded). Total ebook unit sales were 162 million in 2017 from the 450 publishers tracked by NPD, down from 180 million units in 2016.<p>Source: Publishers Weekly, &quot;Ebook sales fell 10% in 2017&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publishersweekly.com&#x2F;pw&#x2F;by-topic&#x2F;digital&#x2F;content-and-e-books&#x2F;article&#x2F;76706-e-book-sales-fell-10-in-2017.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publishersweekly.com&#x2F;pw&#x2F;by-topic&#x2F;digital&#x2F;content...</a>

First point:<p>Excerpt: &quot;The great American teenage dream used to be to own your own car. That is dwindling in favor of urban living, greater reliance on mass transit, cycling, walking and, of course, ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft.&quot;<p>The teenage dream is not to own the car but to get to where they want to go, e.g., autonomy to see their friends, go to activities. When the consumer says they want a quarter of an inch drill bit, what they actually want is a quarter of an inch hole in a particular wall. The author doesn&#x27;t seem to appreciate the difference.<p>Second point:<p>The right to repair or alter devices you own, e.g., farmer hacking their own tractors -- that part I agree with.

&gt;We used to buy DVDs or video cassettes; now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix<p>This I don&#x27;t care about really.<p>Although I remember Richard Stallman wrote a satirical article about there being no libraries and having to pay to read anything (as in pay to read per page or something kind of ridiculous) now his article doesn&#x27;t feel so ridiculous anymore.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html</a><p>The SCARY thing, the thing that he doesn&#x27;t really predict is that nobody will own anything and nobody will be allowed to read anything but also nobody will care about it either. They&#x27;ll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever.

I have to laugh a little bit here. Cowen is implying by his tone and his use of &quot;Americans&quot; that people are making this choice willingly.<p>If you don&#x27;t have the capital to own, or it becomes too difficult to manage the things you own, it gets harder. I don&#x27;t think ownership is a problem for people with plenty of capital, it&#x27;s just a lot more scarce than it used to be for most of the population. Kindle books are cheaper and tinier, therefore I sacrifice a bit of rights for practicality - otherwise Amazon may not put out the books for fear of piracy, or the publisher wouldn&#x27;t grant the rights. (mix of convenience plus moving &#x2F; inventory costs &#x2F; cheaper purchase cost)<p>Additionally, companies that provide these services have no incentive to give consumers additional rights to these devices and happily remove these rights - sometimes without a reason at the time - and fight them in court.<p>I totally agree with him that a consumer rights movement needs to gain steam ASAP to counter potentially misinformed abdication of consumer rights, and to establish solid baselines that is better for consumers. This needs to happen at a grass roots level and then wallets need to fix the behavior.<p>As for the lack of capital &#x2F; buying things - much bigger question but I wish Mr. Cowen would at least acknowledge it.

Oh goody, another article telling me why everything I do as a Millennial is wrong.<p>Here&#x27;s what we were told as children: &quot;My gosh, you always want <i>more</i> toys, <i>more</i> comics, <i>more</i> videogames. Don&#x27;t you ever get enough? What&#x27;s wrong with you!&quot;<p>As teenagers&#x2F;young adults: &quot;Look at all this crap you&#x27;ve collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you&#x27;re barely an adult! You&#x27;ll never have space for all this when you move out into a tiny apartment. What&#x27;s wrong with you!&quot;<p>As adults: &quot;Why aren&#x27;t you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What&#x27;s wrong with you!&quot;

I&#x27;d agree young Americans are less interested in owning their media and there does seem to be a general trend away from materialism and towards spending any extra income on experiences over objects. However, I reject the notion that the younger generations are less interested in owning property. Young people do want to have a stake in the system, but most places young people are living (especially where they&#x27;re moving to) it&#x27;s nearly impossible for most of them to get into the property&#x2F;housing ownership game to begin with due to housing price inflation and stagnant wages.<p>If you took millenials and plopped them in the economic context that the young generations of the 50s (or even 70s&#x2F;80s) had I think this would be a very different story.

It&#x27;s simple. Less stuff equals more freedom.<p>Freedom to move. Freedom from debt. Freedom from &quot;keeping up with the Joneses&quot;. Freedom from soul-crushing jobs.

The issue is that ownership used to constitute a form of wealth, but now it constitutes a relentless financial drain.<p>When I got stationed in Northern Virginia, I thought about buying a condo. But almost everywhere I looked, there were absurd HOA fees, some as much as $400&#x2F;mo. Considering I could rent a room for $750&#x2F;mo, it didn&#x27;t make sense to buy. If RENT &lt; HOAFEES + MTGINTEREST, you&#x27;re better off investing the money instead of pouring it into equity.<p>As for physical possessions, they all cost money (in rent!). Sure, I <i>could</i> own my own kayak and ATV. But it&#x27;ll cost me $150&#x2F;mo for a storage unit to keep them in. So until such time as I spend $1800&#x2F;year on quad and kayak rentals (not even counting the amortized purchase prices), its more financially sound for me to rent them.<p>There are exceptions. I own my truck, which I bought used, and I know I&#x27;ll drive it for years and years until it&#x27;s beyond fixing. In the long run, it&#x27;s cheaper than renting.

There&#x27;s a strange conflation in the article between &quot;owning things&quot; and &quot;owning land.&quot; I think there is something fundamentally different about the two, in that having a patch of ground for which you are responsible for can help build a sense of self-reliance, investment in the future, skin in the game. Accumulating a wall-full of VHS tapes doesn&#x27;t do that.<p>I don&#x27;t much mourn the lack of ownership of a lot of worthless junk that doesn&#x27;t bring fulfillment or human flourishing. The late 20th century West let itself fill garages and storage units with consumerist nonsense.<p>But it&#x27;s important to recognize that the corporate consumerist system is all too willing to mutate, to adapt to people&#x27;s changing tastes and to offer them a product they feel is liberation. If you&#x27;ve heard &quot;Don&#x27;t buy things, buy experiences,&quot; then you&#x27;ve heard this new advertising. Companies are all too willing to make you think that an &quot;authentic&quot; vacation around the world will bring happiness and meaning in the form of selfies. Restaurants play up the &#x27;foodie&#x27; advertising to make consumption of their product seem like a life-altering experience. The companies realize they can sell the same thing again and again digitally to customers who binge-watch Netflix and pride themselves on cutting the cord and not vegging in front of the TV like their parents did. And at the end of the month you find yourself subscribed to so many services, so many pseudo-addictions, you wonder where your money is going.<p>Rather than buying things or buying experiences, consider what you can make yourself or find for free. There is already more than enough media content out there to last many lifetimes; why not look for old material that has stood the test of time? Why not build a skill and learn the value of becoming self-reliant in some small way?

This shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise. Ownership comes with maintenance costs, and maintenance requires time. Americans work more than most developed nations [1] and work more than they used to. American commutes have also increased [2] steadily over the last 30 years. Given that, is there any surprise that Americans are less willing to own, and maintain, their things than they used to be?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;americans-work-harder-than-any-other-countrys-citizens-study&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;americans-work-harder-than-any...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;the-american-commute-is-worse-today-than-its-ever-been&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;the-a...</a>

The classical notion that property is a kind of independence, which this article implicitly draws on, has always felt wrong to me. Rather, property feels to me like vulnerability. When you own things, they can be stolen, they can be destroyed by extreme weather (a real consideration living in the Midwest---for folks in CA, think of the fires), they can randomly stop working, they can be devalued by market crashes. If you rent, all those risks are someone else&#x27;s problem, and the price premium is really just a form of insurance against that.

I sometimes worry about how many Kindle books I own. eBooks are extremely convienent (except maybe the need to consume power to view them), but as this article points out, the ownership problem is concerning. All it takes is my Amazon account getting stolen, or Amazon exercising some right they&#x27;ve given themselves to take the book away.<p>What I&#x27;d really like to see is a push for &quot;drm-less&quot; books, so you wouldn&#x27;t be tied to Amazon&#x27;s systems in order to read something you&#x27;ve bought rights to access.

I share the observation that we are living in a &quot;rent economy&quot; of the things we pay for, especially intellectual property or creative works.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed it happening slowly over time, but there are dangers[0] even if you believe you &quot;own&quot; your media.<p>There are no good solutions, people are willing to trade ownership for convenience because &#x2F;mostly&#x2F; you&#x27;re getting the same value- why do you care if you can&#x27;t access that song you liked in 30 years?<p>Personally; I fight this notion as much as possible; if I buy digital media- it&#x27;s backed up. I do not give my custom to anyone who wishes to own my digital rights (thus, I avoid DRM) and, where possible, I buy physical copies of goods.<p>However, I work in an industry which is moving towards providing &quot;service&quot;, namely; I work in video games. And we have a new concept: &quot;Game as a service&quot;, the idea being that the game lives and grows and dies, rather than being a static art which is subject to the non-decay or altering hand of time immemorial. Thus, the games we played in 1995 can be played to day, but the games we played in 2010 are much less possible, and the games we play in 2018 will be impossible to play 10 years on.<p>I don&#x27;t have a particular point, I&#x27;m more frustrated with the state of affairs. Also: Apple Music can sincerely fuck off.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dijit.sh&#x2F;importance-of-self-hosted-backups" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dijit.sh&#x2F;importance-of-self-hosted-backups</a>

I think there is a difference between “owning stuff” and “owning assets” that this post is clouding. It is the owning of assets - that are worth more than what you paid for them - that seems to form the backbone of American entrepreneurship in the way that the author wants the owning of “stuff” to do in his setup.<p>There is of course value (to me) in owning a library of books - but for different reasons than, say, owning intellectual property or real estate.

As someone who has given away a couple thousand dollars worth of crappy music from the 80s and 90s, I can say for certain that I am glad I don&#x27;t own it anymore.<p>A Spotify subscription that allows me to listen to practically any song that was ever recorded is of far more utility than a pathetically limited personal music collection.

I don&#x27;t know about you, but one of the reasons I am accumulating less stuff is that I already have plenty of stuff, more than I can comfortably fit in my house. I need to get rid of stuff before I can get more stuff.

I own very few <i>things</i>. No house. No Car. But I own a lot of equities. As to why the author thinks I have no &quot;stake in the system&quot; because I don&#x27;t own shit is beyond me.

What this is about is the increasing financialisation of the world&#x27;s economy, in other worsds, consumers don&#x27;t buy a &quot;fridge&quot; and own a fridge and have dominion over it (classical unfinancialised markets), they instead subscribe to a service that cools their food. This on HN and in other wealthy techno-cratic circles is more-often known as &quot;$something-as-a-service&quot; (or just &quot;XaaS&quot;).<p>It&#x27;s a trend that is in my honest opinion one of the more increasingly troublesome and negative aspects of modern human civilisation. Xaas has a nasty side-effect of concentrating wealth and power to fewer and fewer individuals, it creates a much deeper power structure, since one finances another who finances another who...and so on, and the more you financialise the more you can financialise - an unstable equilibrium, or &quot;positive feedback loop&quot;. With classical unfinancialised markets, it is a more Slack(the app)-like <i>flat</i> structure, where products are <i>exchanged</i> and <i>ownership</i> is transfered. Everyone becomes an owner. Power, wealth, and resources diffuse similar to that of the heat equation.<p>We can see this nasty effect in the housing markets, for example. The current situation where the law and society in general allows a growing number of ownership-hoarders who buy up many houses in an area and lets them out to their fellow underlings is a rather dangerous and volatile setup, and historically does not end well for anyone, but especially those up top.

He makes a lot of generalizing, and his track record is pretty poor. He said many years ago America is in a stagnation. hardly. The stagnation is in countries such as Turkey. not America. The S&amp;P 500 is at record highs, Tesla and Facebook and AI technology..all sorts of cool stuff and innovation..quite the opposite of stagnation. Consumer spending at record highs too, so evidently people are still buying. Maybe instead of buying knick-knacks and do-dads they are buying services and subscriptions instead.

It seems to me the author does a lot of hand-wringing over the loss of ownership of things I didn&#x27;t particularly care if I own or not. I think back to Thoreau&#x27;s &quot;don&#x27;t own anything that eats or needs painting&quot;. I had DVDs because I might want to watch the movie again. But if I were to never see <i>Caddyshack</i> ever again, I could live with that, so now I might just buy it on iTunes. Apple has shown themselves worthy enough in my eyes to trust that I will always have access to <i>Caddyshack</i>. But here&#x27;s the kicker before some of you get your dander up: if Apple were to somehow screw me Microsoft-style and my movie just disappears, for the pittance I paid <i>I don&#x27;t care</i>. Because it beats boxes of DVDs taking up space in the attic.<p><i>We’ll have ovens and thermostats that you set with your voice, and a toilet and bathroom that periodically give you the equivalent of a medical check-up.</i><p>Until we are <i>required</i> to have such things, I do not care that I have the <i>option</i>. I have a Nest, I have Hue lights, I&#x27;ve gone to the trouble of hacking together a HomeKit server that can talk to the cameras. You know what? All of that shit could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn&#x27;t care much. Oh, I was all excited when I got the gear, it&#x27;s handy, and I would be inconvenienced by the disappearance. But the novelty of that stuff wore off <i>fast</i> for me, and I don&#x27;t consider it a requirement in my life.<p>And I think that&#x27;s key: as long as we can do without your subscription whatever, the author&#x27;s hand-wringing is a bit overdone.

&gt; The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system.<p>Why is the fact that people without property were not given the right to vote because they &quot;didn&#x27;t have a stake&quot; as our nation was founded being lifted up as a good thing? It&#x27;s such a bizarre thing to say that this ideology was a good one. The author can&#x27;t really believe that renters have less a stake in the system as property owners?

I&#x27;ll chime in with anecdata of 1: for our family it is purely about convenience and the lack of space (due to increasing real estate costs.)<p>Books for us are about space. Growing up, having a full-wall bookshelf was one of my favorite things. It had sentimental value, it was a family gathering place, each ripped page or blemished cover had a story. We now dont have space for a second full-wall bookshelf. We&#x27;ve completely stopped purchasing books and just use Kindle or the library. It works, it just doesnt have the love of a physical books. But we also dont have the space for physical books.<p>Living in Brooklyn, going from a 2BR to 3BR meant another $500,000 in cost. We now living outside DC, which is less expensive, but still not enough to have room.<p>So we rent.<p>Music and movies are for convenience. For me, most music and movie CDs&#x2F;DVDs never carried as much sentimental value. It is great not having to carry around disks and having temporary access to a much larger library. We subscribe to Apple Music and have never looked back.

While I get it that some people want to own and control things, I have made peace with the idea of not really ‘owning’ digital media. I protect against account loss and loosing everything my splitting ebook and audible book purchases across Amazon, Google Play, and Apple. This is a little inconvenient if I want to reference my notes in a book and have to remember which digital library to look in.<p>I also favor getting digital media from my library. It cost $200&#x2F;year to belong to our local library in Illinois but the number of ebooks and audio books available is fantastic.<p>I have also started buying my very favorite movies in Google Play. This probably does not make much sense, but I like to ‘own’ my very favorite movies.<p>The world of digital entertainment is fantastic and the cost is very low compared to other costs of living.

There&#x27;s no mention of FLOSS philosophy. Those are philosophies that emphasize control of the software and data on those devices by the users of the devices.<p>Even a cursory understanding of licensing of Wikipedia content is an anti-dote to the loss of ownership the author describes. If you download the current state of Wikipedia that data is yours under a very liberal license. No one can call foul and remove it from your machine.<p>By ignoring these important concepts the author&#x27;s piece makes it sound as if digitization itself is somehow making people forget the importance of ownership.<p>Anyone else find this odd and disappointing?

America is becoming poorer. It used to be that Beijing had bicycles and motorbikes clogging the streets, and few cars. Now it&#x27;s all late-model cars, while the US moves to bicycles, motorbikes, and mini-apartments.

1.) How does the market (in the most basic sense) make any meaningful distinction between &quot;owning&quot; a rack of DVDs and &quot;owning&quot; a Netflix subscription? Both are transactions where resources are being traded for &quot;goods&quot;.<p>2.)The idea of spending more resources on experiences rather than goods has become more pervasive over the years so the trend of people owning less stuff would make sense.<p>3.)This is a little more in the weeds but it&#x27;s funny to think about how a society&#x27;s definition of wealth changes over time and how that might affect consumer behavior.

It&#x27;s amusing and&#x2F;or alarming, depending on your mood, that someone like Cowen, a believer in the market&#x27;s solutions, can sound so similar to Stallman on this issue. Stallman pounds the same talking points over and over, but he founded a movement and released products that espoused the change he wanted to see in this world. Yet despite the tangibility of his works, the market and field is flooded with clickwraps, SaaS, and mandatory arbitration. And this extends beyond infotech, where as the article notes, rentier things are proliferating.<p>In many cases in the real world, the economics of the rent-based solutions are the only ones that make sense for the consumer, because alternatives require steep barriers to entry that are hard to surmount. This is the case when prices on land and houses require loans and money down, or when comparable services don&#x27;t exist due to requirements in capital, expertise, and IP. Sometimes this price is artificially low (Google, Facebook, Uber) or artificially high (mobile data), but it&#x27;s hard to compete with free, and hard to start a cellphone network. In one case, giant corporations are dumping at a fictitious price to encourage an ecosystem, while in the other, giant corporations are buying into a moat of intellectual property while paying large bills on the immense infrastructure that enables their service model.<p>When fewer people can afford to become meaningful shareholders, or band together to start alternatives, the more likely they are to be on the passive end of this transition. This is what we&#x27;re seeing now.

It&#x27;s only a single example but vinyl record ownership has continuously increased dramatically over the last few years and continues to do so. Maybe if you make an object worth possessing against the digital version, they&#x27;ll be an audience for it?<p>The important discussion should be not about American&#x27;s losing their idea of private ownership but about American&#x27;s learning the idea of owning their information and data about them. I don&#x27;t care that I stream media, use SaaS for email or don&#x27;t own a car but rather rely on ride share and public transit. But what I do care about is the companies that provide these services are brokerages for data about me.<p>I&#x27;m not aware of a single American politician who has as a prime issue the idea of private data ownership. That we can make laws that ensure that any data gathered about you belong to you and that companies are privileged to use it and do not get to dictate terms around it. That if you want to do business in a way that includes personal data of any kind then there are laws you have to follow that greatly restrict what you can do with that data. That upon request every single data point about a person can be disclosed to that person and how you&#x27;ve used that data and an audit trail with regards to that information.<p>Civil Rights for private data could be a thing.

<i>The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system.</i><p>The conclusion that you have a &quot;stake in the system&quot; if you are a property owner is 180 degrees backward and that is apparent in his own logic.<p>If you don&#x27;t physically own something you are using, like in his examples of music, or books, then you are relying on &quot;the system&quot; to ensure it will be there and are heavily bought in. Such a reliance is not necessary if you own it outright.<p>Consider that, if you want to ensure without question that you won&#x27;t lose access to something, then you buy it outright. How this contradiction isn&#x27;t clear is baffling.<p>Owning something removes you from the group&#x2F;system that could support it. For example, shared real estate vs owned real estate. If I own a piece of land that I live on, I can do whatever I want on it and there is nobody to tell me I can&#x27;t and I don&#x27;t have to consider anyone else. If I instead share ownership of the land I live on, then I have to take consideration for the others on the property.<p>I think if there is a complaint here, it should be that there is a power imbalance between leasees and owners in today&#x27;s world. As a user of spotify, uber etc... you&#x27;re beholden to the owners of the content and platform to allow your paid access to it, which they can revoke at any time for any reason, with little recourse from the user.<p>That is actually what America was built on and is simply an extension of hundreds of years of rent seeking. We should be moving to more intentional distributed ownership (I&#x27;m not invoking blockchain here) of capital and property. Not, simply becoming renters to the capital class.

This seems to be the antithesis of the lesson taught in Rich Dad Poor Dad. Stuff is a liability. Even in &quot;owning&quot; it you&#x27;re still beholden to it. You have to maintain it, store it, protect it, make sure nobody injures themselves with it and sues you. You don&#x27;t own it, it owns you. Rental, in many areas, is an improvement. Own the couple things that matter to you, rent the rest.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s not so much that Americans own less stuff, but rather the supply of stuff has grown so much that we became overwhelmed with too much ownership and have resorted to rents on more and more of those items by percentage.<p>Cellphones are an interesting side point, as they don&#x27;t fully fit into either classification (own or rent). They kind of take on the worst of both. In fact, perhaps there&#x27;s a market for a phone that&#x27;s more purely &quot;rent&quot;. Given the state of technology and the speed of change, I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s any real market for a purely &quot;own&quot; phone, unless it&#x27;s like an ultra-secure dumb phone, in which case yeah there&#x27;s probably a market for that too.

Well, it&#x27;s trivial to strip the DRM from Kindle books and and back them up.

This article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims and is very light on actual data. For example a blatant assertion like &quot;Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text.&quot; has no support in the article itself. For what it&#x27;s worth I know only a few people that use e-books; the majority purchases and reads plain old paper books. Likewise, &quot;...now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix...now Spotify and YouTube are more commonly used to hear our favorite tunes....&quot;. This is unsubstantiated. Nearly all of the video content I want to watch is not available on Netflix; and anything that is is liable to disappear at any time. Just last month I purchased VHS tapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays to get content I wanted, so if the writer isn&#x27;t going to go to the effort of researching and presenting information, then my anecdotal experience completely contradicts this thinkpiece.

&gt; The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.<p>Then rents went up, education became more expensive, wages went stagnant, the rich got richer, and suddenly owning property and buying &quot;stuff&quot; to fuel the insatiable furnace of capitalism doesn&#x27;t seem like such a great life goal. If that means we&#x27;re not participating in &quot;the system&quot;, well... maybe it&#x27;s time to change the system.<p>Also, I think it strange the author questions what the death of property ownership means for capitalism, and then cites various examples of capitalism in action that are working to corrode property ownership -- e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc. The rise of subscription services over shrink wrapped software or hardware to which you own the rights arose directly from capitalism.

This article confuses the issue of preferring walking, biking, and mass transit to owning a car with the issue of software freedom. The former is still based on ownership of sneakers and bikes. More importantly, it&#x27;s not the same issue as proprietary software licenses that prevent users from running software as they see fit. I think RMS would be happy to see such a piece about the importance of software freedom in such a mainstream publication. It&#x27;s too bad that they didn&#x27;t fully research it and tie these issues back to the disappearance of general computing from our lives, but it&#x27;s great to see this issue getting wider exposure in the mainstream media even if it is slightly dumbed down for the masses. RMS has been writing about this issue for decades (1) and it most certainly is one of the biggest issues of our time.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fsf.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fsf.org&#x2F;</a>

I see tge point here. When I was renting apartment, I was not really involved with what was happening in the area or local housing community but now that i own a house, I regularly take part in local development meetings. We all have say in what gets build and what does not. Same can be applied to car rental vs owning a car.

I wanted to watch Fellowship of the Ring recently. Would&#x27;ve been happy renting it, but the cheapest streaming option available to me was to &quot;buy&quot; it from Amazon for $10. This infuriated me so much that it almost drove me back to piracy, but I eventually caved and paid the $10. It&#x27;s LOTR, of course I&#x27;ll want to watch it again.<p>I immediately felt a deep shame, like I was the biggest sucker on the planet. But I thought to myself, what was the alternative? Buy the friggin BluRay? I don&#x27;t want a pile of plastic boxes like it&#x27;s the 00s and I don&#x27;t have a player anyway. I just want THE FILE . IN FULL HD. Not the right to stream the file from Amazon&#x27;s servers when I happen to have a good connection and a device with their App. Just the video file please. This article is spot on.

Keynesians want to encourage spending in order to keep wages high. That&#x27;s because an increase in spending causes an increase in aggregate output. However, it&#x27;s unlikely that the employee will benefit. In the first place, if the marginal propensity to consume is less than 50%, and therefore the Keynesian multiplier less than two, then an increase in consumer spending will not pay for itself in wage growth. Further, the gap between spending and wage growth is increased because wages form a small component of the unit cost of any good. If spending on a good increases by some amount, then the wages increase derived from that spending will be much less. As usual it might be concluded that people are better off saving their money than spending it on things they don&#x27;t need or want.

A lot of this &quot;stuff&quot; are one-time-use items for the majority of people. I very rarely read a book for a second time nor do I rewatch television shows. When I do, reread a book or rewatch a movie, I usually end up paying for it again because I lost the original or I saw the movie in a theater.<p>The good thing about the digitization of this content is the fact that it will be more likely to be preserved in the long term. There are tons of books that are out of print and movies that were produced before DVDs that will never be released. This is going to be much less of an issue going forward. So, while you may need to pay for access again if you haven&#x27;t watched a movie in 20 years, at least you&#x27;ll be able to obtain it like you would any other movie.

I&#x27;ve been nervous about &quot;owning&quot; cloud-based media since Amazon deleted Kindle-purchased copies of 1984 [0].<p>Even today, media you &quot;own&quot; on services like Amazon can disappear when the cloud provider&#x27;s license for this content expires. In my opinion, it is far better to purchase a Blu-Ray or CD copy of media titles you wish to retain, rip them to disk, and stream them to the device of your choice via Plex or Kodi.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;07&#x2F;18&#x2F;technology&#x2F;companies&#x2F;18amazon.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;07&#x2F;18&#x2F;technology&#x2F;companies&#x2F;18am...</a>

This is insightful. I want to also mention that it&#x27;s not just ownership of property that&#x27;s disappearing, though: the concept of owning <i>wealth</i> also seems to be disappearing. So much -- including the nation&#x27;s foundation now -- is based on loans, credit, and in general paying with money that you don&#x27;t actually have. It seems like an entirely different financial&#x2F;economic model from the one we mentally have in mind, and that seems like another reason to be nervous -- I don&#x27;t know enough to know if it can be sustainable.

Before Amazon Kindle, Netflix, Spotify, etc; I always was puzzled by people’s need to own things. Why? I used, and still do, this thing called... The Library! Why pile up stacks of books requiring many bookshelves when you can borrow anything your heart desires. Libraries are better than Amazon or Netflix actually. There have been several instances when I’ve borrowed European TV series which are not easily available on any streaming service. Seriously, how many of your DVDs have you watched more than twice? You can always borrow it again anyway.

Stuff is cheap. Attention is dear. This trend will continue for a long time.

Extreme consumerism trends downwards in a few obscure commodities and someone proclaims the end of private property.<p>Give me break, collections of books, DVDs and CDs have always been largely worthless. Cars was never an investment tool.<p>Real estate, stocks, bonds is property with at least some value. Put stats on that before arguing that private ownership is in decline. (I&#x27;m not saying it isn&#x27;t)<p>I&#x27;m merely saying consumerism was never about private ownership, or am I missing something?

This 30-something year old couldn&#x27;t be happier owning little. I sold my house and nearly everything I own with the exception of clothes, car and a few other miscellaneous items. That stuff is just weight. I rent furnished rooms now, pay less, and can move around easier. Sure I sacrificed some, but I&#x27;m debt free and can always buy again.<p>This author sounds reactionary. The sky isn&#x27;t failing, its just a different hue of blue today.

&gt; The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system.<p>That notion presumably had something to do with why, in a nation with a population of well over 5 million, fewer than 40,000 people participated in the first US Presidential election.<p><i>Everyone</i> who lives in the country has a stake in the system, by virtue of the fact that they are subject to its laws and their lives are impacted by its policies.

There is an overlap between ownership and access.<p>Reduced access is bad.<p>Reduced ownership is bad only if it leads to reduced access.<p>-<p>I have a lot of books here at home that I haven&#x27;t read in a long time. If I didn&#x27;t own them that would not affect me in any way, since their resell value is very low. My exclusive ownership of these books makes them highly inefficient.<p>Same goes for a lot of stuff that people own but hardly ever use. Owning fewer things is not necessarily bad.

&gt; Perhaps we are becoming more communal and caring in positive ways<p>I think I this is a big one. There&#x27;s a very degree of trust that public services and even private ones will be there whenever we need. Not just things like reliable hospitals and electrical grid, but also one-day shipping on whatever we need. There is no longer a need to keep things on hand.

Back in the 90s, I used to spend a sizable chunk of my high school and college income on physical media - music CDs in particular. And I couldn&#x27;t even return them if they sucked.<p>I&#x27;m now able to own more other, actually useful stuff because I pay just a couple dollars a month to stream literally everything ever recorded. This is so much better.

If true, this is great news, for americans and for the environment.<p>Life is easier when you don&#x27;t have too many things. Now people go to extremes, like they always will, but overall, this is very good trend. I think people will lead healthier lives when they are not oppresed with owning stuff and paying credit cards.

IMHO, the smart phone has a lot to do with this.<p>The phone acts as a communication device, a GPS, a flashlight, a camera, a music player, a library, etc. etc. It&#x27;s also the end-all entertainment device.<p>It&#x27;s natural to own less stuff. There&#x27;s too much interesting stuff right there in your palm.

Recently I gave away my linux compute machine and use AWS instead. I can dial up to 400GB of RAM&#x2F;100 cores when I need to run a major compute job, and dial down to a machine which is 10 cents an hour for 99.0% of my compute time. I get the benefit of owning a 10,000$ machine for a fraction of the cost, approx 80$ a month.<p>&quot;The erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property&quot;<p>If the lament here is for the mountain of garbage that each individual generates in the name of private property, color me not-amused. Think of those broken old DVDs that were used at most once or twice. Think of those cars that sit on parking lots and garages 99% of their lives. Wounding the earth to extract all that resource and burying our future in a carbon cloud. And for what! To hold on to some vague notion of private property like a comfort blanket.<p>The future is one we have not seen before, of all powerful trillion dollar companies. But the recent past is a hell scape which led to global warming and other atrocities. We should be willing to walk boldly into this unknown future if only for the promise of reducing waste and possibly a better climate future.

It&#x27;s because the value of intellectual property and financial assets has displaced direct physical ownership of assets like farmland and livestock. We own S&amp;P500 tracker ETFs instead and spend our dividends at Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh etc.

The &#x27;idea of private property&#x27; is about private ownership of means of production, which is what definition of capitalism is. Basically it is about idea of owning capital privately and start your own business employing that capital, with a goal to increase that capital. It is not about owning &#x27;stuff&#x27;. And in that sense, it is not going anywhere. So i think it is an empty reason to worry.

The value of intellectual property and financial assets has replaced more physical ownership of assets like farmland and livestock. We invest in the S&amp;P500 and spend our dividends at the supermarket instead.

Ironic that Tyler Cowan&#x27;s book The Great Stagnation was the first book I read on Kindle.

Nervous because we might wreck the planet with overconsumptiona little later than thought?

&quot;The main culprits for the change are software and the internet&quot;<p>Stopped reading after that. This guy has a very loose understanding of what real people&#x27;s lives are like. Throw Occam&#x27;s razor out the window - the reason people own less stuff is not because they might have less money - no its because &quot;society&quot; has changed its &quot;values&quot; or some other air-headed notion ppl who live in airconditioned offices dream up.<p>The reason Americans own less stuff is because for 80%+ of the population wages haven&#x27;t seen an increase in 3 decades and are up to their eyeballs in debt. &quot;But GDP is so high!&quot; - but nothing. What matters is the money that average people take home and for that they havent seen their income rise but they have seen the cost of education and healthcare go through the roof. If you&#x27;re the kind of person who thinks like this guy you&#x27;re probably in the camp who thinks Trump got elected because &quot;Far-Right Racists&#x2F;Russian Hacking &#x2F;The Patriarchy&quot;<p>Sorry for the rant. I get an Inspector Dreyfus twitch when I read this sort of stuff by supposed &#x27;smart&#x27; people

This piece failed to provide the conclusion that was promised in the title.

&gt;<i>Some social problems are blatantly obvious in daily life, while others are longer-term, more corrosive and perhaps mostly invisible. Lately I’ve been worrying about a problem of the latter kind: the erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property.</i><p>The &quot;traditional American concepts&quot; where the pioneering spirit and individualism (and of course various forms of protestantism and religious nuttery and so on).<p>Not consumer capitalism. It took a lot of advertising and nudging to turn the more independent 1920s and 30s American into a consumer, and even more to turn him into a consumer of today&#x27;s proportions.

&gt;the erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property.<p>I don&#x27;t understand the author&#x27;s premise. The author is largely lamenting that people are buying services over goods, but that doesn&#x27;t show a dwindling loyalty towards capitalism in the slightest. I might think it strengthens loyalty to capitalism, as many of these services require an ongoing relationship with the market.<p>I&#x27;m also unsure about how &quot;private property&quot; is a traditional American concept and the author does a poor job explaining why changing loyality to it is a reason to be nervous...

Here is a non-computational paywall (ie, you run untrusted code on your computer or you don&#x27;t get to see) mirror of the article text: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;via.hypothes.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-08-12&#x2F;american-ownership-society-is-changing-thanks-to-technology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;via.hypothes.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;artic...</a><p>And here&#x27;s a mirror of just the article raw text: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;bqBWgDPk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;bqBWgDPk</a>

I love how this blatant neoliberal propaganda piece attempts to brand the gig economy and perpetual licensing of streaming content in lieu of CDs and other physical media ownership as &quot;communal&quot; (certainly they didn&#x27;t mean anything by that wording?) when it&#x27;s clearly a natural progression of the rent-seeking motive that capitalism is literally based on. &quot;All the bad parts of %ideology% aren&#x27;t <i>real</i> %ideology%!&quot; Gee, where have we heard that before.<p>Also great to see them deliberately misuse &quot;private property&quot; when discussing ownership of personal property.

Serfing the internet.

Headlines now tell us how to feel, and that’s a bad thing.