Letting the government provide housing while focusing on that being cost effective would likely strange innovation in housing to an even lower point then where it currently is. Different people have different preferences when it comes to houses and market prices are an efficient way that people with different preference each get what they want.
It makes various alternative ways of living like group housing harder when the government standardizes housing.
In economics the idea that free markets are better at creating efficiency and low prices then government planning is well accepted.
A related question that comes to mind is why there aren’t already highly paternalistic services that help the poor get a good foundation and get out of poverty.
There are plenty of those services for the unemployed. Maybe you are too much focused on one jurisdiction if you think those don’t exist? It just that they don’t work that well.
You might want to look at the EA analysis of GiveDirectly. There’s a lot of thinking into why giving money is better then providing services.
Different people have different preferences when it comes to houses and market prices are an efficient way that people with different preference each get what they want.
Many people want but cannot get houses of their own in places like the US.
Letting the government provide housing while focusing on that being cost effective would likely strange innovation in housing to an even lower point then where it currently is
Government-provided social housing is widely implemented , not an innovation.
Or...strange s/b strangle? But, again, the overwhelming need is affordable housing for young workers , not new kinds of housing.
The goal is to standardize a floor, not to chop up the ceiling. People would be free to buy whatever they want if they opt out. Those that opt-in benefit from central coordination with others to solve the adverse selection problem with housing that incentivizes each local area to regulate things bigger and bigger than people need to keep away poor people, making housing more expensive everywhere than it needs to be and curtailing any innovation in the direction of making housing smaller. It probably isn’t a coincidence that Japan has capsule hotels, better zoning, low housing costs, more spread out high speed transit and a lot of wacky houses given its barriers to immigration. Don’t forget that most large group houses that people live in are illegal (though enforcement is lax unless something else goes wrong) and that cities all over the place have all sorts of NIMBY policy and rent controls that distort the market. That is the counterfactual you are replacing, there isn’t a pure market counterfactual in any big city I can think of, but would be interested to hear. The current equilibrium in most places creates an extremely strong incentive to create barriers to housing innovation, and accordingly they do. Singapore is hyper market oriented and rich as a country, but nevertheless did central coordination on housing to drive down costs and erode the support base for communism (not saying one should copy all their policies of course).
On the lack of paternalist services, I am getting at why the market doesn’t do them by default. If there are so many can you give one example? If you are just talking about gov ones, then we are talking about different things.
On GiveDirectly, I am incredibly skeptical of unconditional cash transfer vs. other targeted interventions in terms of direct effectiveness and vs. or institutional interventions for the long-term: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/givedirectly_not_so_fast
In abstract, interventions like this have always been possible since there have been political entities that use money, and yet you don’t see any country anywhere getting rich via this mechanism. Governments through history instead coordinate and provide services that would otherwise be difficult to provide. When there are systematic transfers, they are usually conditional in order to sustain good incentives over the long-term.
More concretely, the costs the GiveDirectly RCT gives for roofing costs seem a bit strange once you start reasoning about local prices. If people are so poor they are earning like a dollar or two per day, it isn’t going to cost $55 to thatch a tiny roof unless it someone actually has to spend about a month doing it… if metal roofing is less than $1 per square foot in materials I have no idea how you get to a $400 roof when labor wages are so low.
Letting the government provide housing while focusing on that being cost effective would likely strange innovation in housing to an even lower point then where it currently is. Different people have different preferences when it comes to houses and market prices are an efficient way that people with different preference each get what they want.
It makes various alternative ways of living like group housing harder when the government standardizes housing.
In economics the idea that free markets are better at creating efficiency and low prices then government planning is well accepted.
There are plenty of those services for the unemployed. Maybe you are too much focused on one jurisdiction if you think those don’t exist? It just that they don’t work that well.
You might want to look at the EA analysis of GiveDirectly. There’s a lot of thinking into why giving money is better then providing services.
Many people want but cannot get houses of their own in places like the US.
Government-provided social housing is widely implemented , not an innovation.
Or...strange s/b strangle? But, again, the overwhelming need is affordable housing for young workers , not new kinds of housing.
The goal is to standardize a floor, not to chop up the ceiling. People would be free to buy whatever they want if they opt out. Those that opt-in benefit from central coordination with others to solve the adverse selection problem with housing that incentivizes each local area to regulate things bigger and bigger than people need to keep away poor people, making housing more expensive everywhere than it needs to be and curtailing any innovation in the direction of making housing smaller. It probably isn’t a coincidence that Japan has capsule hotels, better zoning, low housing costs, more spread out high speed transit and a lot of wacky houses given its barriers to immigration. Don’t forget that most large group houses that people live in are illegal (though enforcement is lax unless something else goes wrong) and that cities all over the place have all sorts of NIMBY policy and rent controls that distort the market. That is the counterfactual you are replacing, there isn’t a pure market counterfactual in any big city I can think of, but would be interested to hear. The current equilibrium in most places creates an extremely strong incentive to create barriers to housing innovation, and accordingly they do. Singapore is hyper market oriented and rich as a country, but nevertheless did central coordination on housing to drive down costs and erode the support base for communism (not saying one should copy all their policies of course).
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/singapore-affordable-housing-freedom/#:~:text=In%20Singapore%2C%20housing%20is%20affordable%2C%20diverse%20and%20impeccably%20maintained.&text=80%20percent%20of%20Singaporeans%20live,Singaporean%20context%20in%20a%20moment.)
On the lack of paternalist services, I am getting at why the market doesn’t do them by default. If there are so many can you give one example? If you are just talking about gov ones, then we are talking about different things.
On GiveDirectly, I am incredibly skeptical of unconditional cash transfer vs. other targeted interventions in terms of direct effectiveness and vs. or institutional interventions for the long-term: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/givedirectly_not_so_fast
In abstract, interventions like this have always been possible since there have been political entities that use money, and yet you don’t see any country anywhere getting rich via this mechanism. Governments through history instead coordinate and provide services that would otherwise be difficult to provide. When there are systematic transfers, they are usually conditional in order to sustain good incentives over the long-term.
More concretely, the costs the GiveDirectly RCT gives for roofing costs seem a bit strange once you start reasoning about local prices. If people are so poor they are earning like a dollar or two per day, it isn’t going to cost $55 to thatch a tiny roof unless it someone actually has to spend about a month doing it… if metal roofing is less than $1 per square foot in materials I have no idea how you get to a $400 roof when labor wages are so low.