Because economic pressures are much stronger than humanitarian pressures, so standardized things are optimized to be as small and cheap as possible. Hence slums, standardized testing and junk food.

Small houses are good, as are standardized tests.

What’s actually happening in the US is houses are getting larger because city governments are run by old people who nitpick all apartment buildings (because they think they’re ugly) and approve unlimited expensive single-family houses, which have only gotten larger over time.

There's a lot of incentives in the US, but to simplify it: per-house-price and education funding are linked, via property taxes. Taxes paid by one home vs cost to educate average number of children per one home.

If we funded more local public education directly from non-property-tax sources (or made public education more efficient), a lot of the resistance to lower-cost housing would disappear.

The Eastern Bloc kind of tried, you can see how it went.

Saying it being a half-success would be a complement.

If a Union's citizen could've choose in between Union's kindergarten, and an American one, he wouldn't need to choose, though some people say daycare wasn't as bad in Western countries of the bloc.

I would still admit, Union's secondary education was a rare somewhat half-success story, and it only looks so good if you compares it to USA, but not so much other Western bloc countries.

China tried mass housing along Union's model, and it failed miserably (though this failure could've probably been called a success by standard of places like California.) It took it to adopt capitalist real estate model to get where it is now, and even today, Beijing has no viable recipe how to house 60% of population that got to stay behind in the industrialisation drive.

The bling-bling Chinese 1st tier cities most Westerners get to see only represent how 5% of China population live, and even they get to house most of its citizens in rather gloomy "bedroom district" type suburbs which most outsiders lauding "Chinese housing model" never see.

The quality of housing in China drops with inverse square root of a distance from nearest 1st tier city, and from downtown to suburb.

> Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and food to scale?

In other words, some most essential living needs are hardest one to scale, and mostly not for physical, but for social, and organisational reasons.

The outskirts of Beijing were still pretty grim, by US standards.

The issue with command economies has always been the producers have no incentive to succeed, hence productivity is atrocious.

But has anyone ever tried something like a fixed-price contract for standardized essentials, on a national scale?

Those types of schemes were very common in the post-war period. The UK government used to directly design and sell "utility furniture" for example

Also plenty of monopolies do exactly that at enormous scales, Bell System/Western Electric is a good example.