It’s hard to tell whether the arguments are “actually analogous” because …
The spoof-argument about food, in the OP here, leaves lots of things implicit. (E.g., “With deregulation, farmers would massively shift to luxury crops, and we would have shortages of bread, milk, eggs, and other staples”; it doesn’t go into details about why this would allegedly happen.) So we don’t know what the parallel argument about housing actually says.
The parallel argument about housing leaves everything implicit, in that we don’t actually know what it is. Jeff hasn’t (so far as I know) pointed at a specific pro-housing-regulation article and copied its arguments, he’s provided a bunch of food-arguments that supposedly parallel common housing-arguments. So what’s “the argument” here?
I think it’s reasonable to suspect that they aren’t “actually analogous” in sufficient detail that if one is wrong then the other is too because …
They depend on all sorts of details about the world that there’s no particular reason to expect behave the same way in the food and housing cases. E.g., is a (fictional) several-year waiting list for SNAP equivalent to a several-year waiting list for, er, whatever housing thing this is meant to be parallel to? It might be, but maybe not; the timescales on which hunger and homelessness happen aren’t exactly the same, after all, nor are the timescales associated with normally-functional food-buying and house-buying, and if I try to imagine mechanisms leading to several-year waiting lists for food assistance and for housing assistance, it’s not clear to me that I should expect them to be similar. (Hence, the prospects for fixing them might differ.)
And I don’t understand why you are so sure that if the arguments are analogous then “this shows that one of them is wrong”. Normally, when that sort of thing is true it’s because the conclusions of the two arguments are incompatible, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Perhaps you mean “this shows that the one about housing is wrong” because you find it obvious that the one about food is wrong (though in this case I am not sure why you said “one of them”, which seems wrong on Gricean grounds), but I don’t find that convincing because
The argument about food is liable to seem obviously wrong simply because it’s based on a world that is clearly quite different from ours in implausible-seeming ways.
If I leave aside the fact that the things it says about food are in fact false in our world, it’s no more obviously wrong (to me) than the argument about housing that it’s meant to be undermining by its more-obvious wrongness. In some hypothetical world where food is highly regulated and unaffordably expensive, would it be the case that deregulating it would bring prices down to the levels we see in our world? Are you sure you aren’t just assuming that since Jeff has described a world that differs from ours in those two respects, the regulation must be the cause of the cost?
Maybe this argument is a straw man. That is, maybe it’s not accurately describing the arguments that people use. But that is a very different problem than saying this argument might be OK.
I agree. That’s why I listed those two issues (1. the spoof argument might not be a good analogy for real arguments about housing; 2. the spoof argument isn’t obviously wrong) separately.
is a (fictional) several-year waiting list for SNAP equivalent to a several-year waiting list for, er, whatever housing thing this is meant to be parallel to?
Thanks! Here are a couple of relevant extracts for anyone else who didn’t know the same things as I didn’t know. First, what it is:
Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937 [...] authorizes the payment of rental housing assistance to private landlords on behalf of low-income households in the United States. Of the 5.2 million American households that received rental assistance in 2018, approximately 1.2 million of those households received a Section 8 based voucher.
Second, those waiting lists:
In many localities, the PHA waiting lists for Section 8 vouchers may be thousands of families long, waits of three to six years to obtain vouchers is common, and many lists are closed to new applicants. Wait lists are often briefly opened (often for just five days), which may occur as little as once every seven years. Some PHAs use a “lottery” approach, where there can be as many as 100,000 applicants for 10,000 spots on the waitlist, with spots being awarded on the basis of weighted or non-weighted lotteries, with priority sometimes given to local residents, the disabled, veterans, and the elderly.
“Fully Fund Section 8” is part of Bernie Sanders’ housing proposal and is popular among people on the left. If we think low income people should get housing vouchers, why give out so few?
If I thought there was no way to bring down the cost of housing I would probably agree, but since supply is so restricted giving Section 8 to everyone who needs it would (a) raise rents even more, (b) be incredibly expensive, and (c) transfer a huge amount of money to landlords.
Building public housing (at higher densities than would normally be allowed) or just removing zoning restrictions would go much farther.
It’s hard to tell whether the arguments are “actually analogous” because …
The spoof-argument about food, in the OP here, leaves lots of things implicit. (E.g., “With deregulation, farmers would massively shift to luxury crops, and we would have shortages of bread, milk, eggs, and other staples”; it doesn’t go into details about why this would allegedly happen.) So we don’t know what the parallel argument about housing actually says.
The parallel argument about housing leaves everything implicit, in that we don’t actually know what it is. Jeff hasn’t (so far as I know) pointed at a specific pro-housing-regulation article and copied its arguments, he’s provided a bunch of food-arguments that supposedly parallel common housing-arguments. So what’s “the argument” here?
I think it’s reasonable to suspect that they aren’t “actually analogous” in sufficient detail that if one is wrong then the other is too because …
They depend on all sorts of details about the world that there’s no particular reason to expect behave the same way in the food and housing cases. E.g., is a (fictional) several-year waiting list for SNAP equivalent to a several-year waiting list for, er, whatever housing thing this is meant to be parallel to? It might be, but maybe not; the timescales on which hunger and homelessness happen aren’t exactly the same, after all, nor are the timescales associated with normally-functional food-buying and house-buying, and if I try to imagine mechanisms leading to several-year waiting lists for food assistance and for housing assistance, it’s not clear to me that I should expect them to be similar. (Hence, the prospects for fixing them might differ.)
And I don’t understand why you are so sure that if the arguments are analogous then “this shows that one of them is wrong”. Normally, when that sort of thing is true it’s because the conclusions of the two arguments are incompatible, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Perhaps you mean “this shows that the one about housing is wrong” because you find it obvious that the one about food is wrong (though in this case I am not sure why you said “one of them”, which seems wrong on Gricean grounds), but I don’t find that convincing because
The argument about food is liable to seem obviously wrong simply because it’s based on a world that is clearly quite different from ours in implausible-seeming ways.
If I leave aside the fact that the things it says about food are in fact false in our world, it’s no more obviously wrong (to me) than the argument about housing that it’s meant to be undermining by its more-obvious wrongness. In some hypothetical world where food is highly regulated and unaffordably expensive, would it be the case that deregulating it would bring prices down to the levels we see in our world? Are you sure you aren’t just assuming that since Jeff has described a world that differs from ours in those two respects, the regulation must be the cause of the cost?
Maybe this argument is a straw man. That is, maybe it’s not accurately describing the arguments that people use. But that is a very different problem than saying this argument might be OK.
I agree. That’s why I listed those two issues (1. the spoof argument might not be a good analogy for real arguments about housing; 2. the spoof argument isn’t obviously wrong) separately.
Section 8
Thanks! Here are a couple of relevant extracts for anyone else who didn’t know the same things as I didn’t know. First, what it is:
Second, those waiting lists:
“Fully Fund Section 8” is part of Bernie Sanders’ housing proposal and is popular among people on the left. If we think low income people should get housing vouchers, why give out so few?
If I thought there was no way to bring down the cost of housing I would probably agree, but since supply is so restricted giving Section 8 to everyone who needs it would (a) raise rents even more, (b) be incredibly expensive, and (c) transfer a huge amount of money to landlords.
Building public housing (at higher densities than would normally be allowed) or just removing zoning restrictions would go much farther.