No Stupid Questions

Fundamentally it all comes down to unemployment. There is a certain point in a thermodynamic way that even the most brainwashed slaves stop becoming productive. If you don't have a safe and private place to sleep, it's enormously taxing on your motivation, if you can't afford nutrients, you will be physically tired and your body will scream at you to avoid any type of damage to itself, greatly lowerering your productivity that even a mostly post scarcity and automated economy can't even support you, even if you work 60 hours a week for meager wages.

For bubbles, they exist mostly to make rich people richer, but come at the cost of workers getting more inflation and weaker purchasing power for their wages. Every so often bubbles have to pop, so the rich can buy up all the property they sold back, at a discount and start the process over. One of the many scams of international capitalism.

So the bubble really pops when people are unable to work for the dropping wages. It's really just a physics question in a way. Not really a choice they make, because people who work often tie their entire identity into working and being a "good working citizen" as the media conditions them to think. It's just physics. The bubble popping is the reality of things like markets correcting themselves.

What comes after is often a die off of workers causing their value to go up, since human sacrifice is the only way they can collectively bargain anymore. Then an eventual resettling with lower wages after prices are forced to not track inflation. This is why a house is 30% cheaper then it was in the 70s in gold price, but people need on average 10+ years wages to buy one. The prices of houses gradually came down over time as the workers made less money in real value(gold, silver, minerals, commodities), year after year for decades. The market is forced to lower the prices of houses just enough to get some suckers to buy them. Again, workers can't just make money magically appear like the rich can, so there is a physical limit to how much a worker can pay before they quite literally starve, or develop severe health issues from eating potatoes for decades.

So the two poles of American style economics is physical constraints of reality, like the workers bodies ability to survive on potatoes and bread and sugar, and not having a mental breakdown because they live on a couch, and the greed of the rich who are completely self centered and want boats and mansions and most importantly, to be seen as valuable via their status and access to wealth and resources. These two poles form the tension in which the economy operates. The really sad part is, that this is probably an improvement over most of human history. Technology has made the lives of the average worker much better, despite capitalism taking every opportunity it can to try to squeeze more out of them, or keep them too miserable to resist.