Lots More People vs. Singular Things

Sometimes I think that the major factor lost in the discussions about scarcity overlook the fact that there are a LOT MORE PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY than when they were children.

Just to pick a couple of random years: 1985 & 2015. The former because it's close enough to be representative of my childhood and it's a multiple of 5; the latter because it's +30 and why not round numbers? Anyway, the US population in 1985 was about ~235M and in 2015 it was ~324.5M. That's a whopping 89.5 million extra people all trying to have many of the same singular experiences. Go to Yellowstone, get into an Ivy League college, live in a coastal city like Washington DC or Seattle, go see an NFL game, see Taylor Swift (or the popstar du jour), etc, etc. But while the population increased by about 38% between those years, they did not make more Seattles, more Yellowstones, more skiing mountains, or more Ivy League colleges. And while I suppose in theory it's possible to expand the Ivy League class sizes (though Harvard's stayed basically identical in the 30 year period I noted above), there will *NEVER* be another place like Yellowstone... or Yosemite or Paris or Aspen or think of something more provincial in your own area that used to be easy to do and now requires planning. (Unless you live in an area that has lost population.)

A lot of internet shouters like to blindly rage against rich people because they make easy targets in the pursuit of harvesting internet points. But the reality is that even in the absence of worsening income inequality, it would STILL be harder to do any of the things above simply because there are MORE people all trying to do those same things. (The old saying, "A small percentage of a massive number is still a really big number.)

In my HS youth I had a brief interest in Malthusian related thought that at some point I just sort of forgot about. And while it would appear that human ingenuity has avoided that particular crack-up, it has never figured out a way to replicate Notre Dame, the Pyramids, the Colosseum or any of the innumerable natural wonders already mentioned. Something to keep in mind when you hear whining about how everyone has a right to live in the some of the most attractive cities & places in the United States. Spoiler alert: they don't. The reality is, some of the singular experiences a lot of us took for granted when we were young are really, really hard to have in the modern era because there are SO. MANY. MORE. PEOPLE.