My thoughts:

• We are much better at being talked into giving our money away when we didn't need to. Instead of forcing corporations to charge what something is actually worth by staying in budget, we pay the inflated prices for everything to corporate delight. (Don't think I'm just bashing other people -- I'm a bad offender with this, and that's how I know). A lot of this has to do with the psychology for word-of-mouth marketing and alternatives going away but people don't do anything about it.
• We are willing to pay 10x+ more for college, often with loans and government money to make it commonplace for everyone to do it even when they can't afford it. Hardly anybody realizes the value of college doesn't even come close to matching what we're paying for it when there is free education all around us, and so migration from institutionalized education to more sensible education is going slower as companies are still, for the most part, expecting an accredited degree.
• We no longer, for the most part, build houses anymore until we're loaded rich, and we don't know how to live humbly. We all just buy into the inflated housing prices for 6 bedroom houses we don't need and fork over all our money to the Boomers.
• Overpopulation. Face it, all these extra naive kids being brought into the markets are making things worse. Why is it everyone's dream to plop out an economic anchor or 5 when they're still young?
• We're more about complaining about our problems than doing anything about them.
• The govt., corporations, and entrepreneurs have brought all of the wealth into big cities and we just go along with it, especially with the internet now. Everywhere else suffers while these cities thrive (to an extent).
• We buy macbooks, ipods, surface tablets, xboxes, ps4s, Galaxy Ses, iPhones, cable internet, cell phone data plans, etc. and we pay the premium price for the whole package when we could be using our easy access to free technology education to take advantage of lower priced alternatives. (Probably not fair for me to include xbox/ps since the companies commonly lose money on the actual systems themselves)
• Most buy new cars instead of learning how to fix older ones
• We elect either government that raises our taxes for the wrong reasons, or government that wants to cut taxes so you can waste it on evil multi-billion dollar private entities.