According to Sonia Hirt, the UK has no building by-right, so anti-development has a structural advantage even compared to regulations on local development in the US. The longer these rules stay in place, the more culture entrenches the legal structure.
What's attractive about a CLT strategy is constraints on land speculation, since, I think you would agree, that land speculation is a problem, even in unzoned Houston. Land speculators are the adversaries of developers and consumers, and clearly they have the upper hand.
I do agree that land speculation is a problem, but I think a much simpler and better solution to defeat it is land value tax, which has the tremendous added benefit of raising money from the speculators which we can use to pay for public services.
I agree with most of the piece very strongly but I think you’re I goring that some kinds of progress/riches do not improve people’s lives. No one sane is against eliminating literally back breaking labor and I agree we too often forget this progress. But you’re ignoring the other kind - a child’s plastic toy used to cost $15 and now costs $1 - and this makes everyone worse off, including the child. Children with 100 plastic toys can’t keep track of them or treat them with respect (against human nature) and it’s harder to decide what to play with, parents deal with cluttered homes and guilt, the environment is getting polluted with the externalities that the companies selling these do not pay for and someone somewhere is getting exploited to make them. This is a real problem that there are no organizations lobbying against so… this results in sympathy for degrowth because no one else is taking this seriously.
I agree -- that's an abundance problem. We have the same thing with media, there's too much media of too low quality today, it leads to polarization and a lot of negative mental health effects. We also have this issue with food -- there's too much low quality food and it's not surprising we have obesity as a result.
I'm really interested in "abundance problems," but I do think that as a matter of first principles that scarcity problems are worse than abundance problems. We need to eliminate our remaining scarcity problems (ie housing), and learn to deal with abundance problems (ie. obesity).
And clothing! I think we should work on both sets of problems at the same time. Other than housing and health care (and this one is complicated because in some ways we have abundance and even the scarcity is better than ever in human history) there are practically no other scarcity problems left in the U.S.
According to Sonia Hirt, the UK has no building by-right, so anti-development has a structural advantage even compared to regulations on local development in the US. The longer these rules stay in place, the more culture entrenches the legal structure.
What's attractive about a CLT strategy is constraints on land speculation, since, I think you would agree, that land speculation is a problem, even in unzoned Houston. Land speculators are the adversaries of developers and consumers, and clearly they have the upper hand.
I do agree that land speculation is a problem, but I think a much simpler and better solution to defeat it is land value tax, which has the tremendous added benefit of raising money from the speculators which we can use to pay for public services.
Houston briefly had a partial LVT before the TX Supreme Court shut it down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Jay_Pastoriza#Houston_government
Increasing the holding cost of undeveloped land should dampen land speculation. I am unclear about the legalities of LVT's, though.
Great read
I agree with most of the piece very strongly but I think you’re I goring that some kinds of progress/riches do not improve people’s lives. No one sane is against eliminating literally back breaking labor and I agree we too often forget this progress. But you’re ignoring the other kind - a child’s plastic toy used to cost $15 and now costs $1 - and this makes everyone worse off, including the child. Children with 100 plastic toys can’t keep track of them or treat them with respect (against human nature) and it’s harder to decide what to play with, parents deal with cluttered homes and guilt, the environment is getting polluted with the externalities that the companies selling these do not pay for and someone somewhere is getting exploited to make them. This is a real problem that there are no organizations lobbying against so… this results in sympathy for degrowth because no one else is taking this seriously.
I agree -- that's an abundance problem. We have the same thing with media, there's too much media of too low quality today, it leads to polarization and a lot of negative mental health effects. We also have this issue with food -- there's too much low quality food and it's not surprising we have obesity as a result.
I'm really interested in "abundance problems," but I do think that as a matter of first principles that scarcity problems are worse than abundance problems. We need to eliminate our remaining scarcity problems (ie housing), and learn to deal with abundance problems (ie. obesity).
And clothing! I think we should work on both sets of problems at the same time. Other than housing and health care (and this one is complicated because in some ways we have abundance and even the scarcity is better than ever in human history) there are practically no other scarcity problems left in the U.S.
Love this. I share your views on CLTs. In addition to the reasons stated, they also make it really hard for residents to build wealth.
This is excellent Andrew!
On the topic of stasis, I wonder if the history of the term in greek poleis is illuminating. See this piece by Bret Devereaux https://acoup.blog/2020/10/30/fireside-friday-october-30-2020/