Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
1–10 of 497 posts
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#2Any way for me to access the article from EU without subscription or account?
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#3Any way for me to access the article from EU without subscription or account?
[deleted]
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#4What's this obsession with increasing housing density? Population in the developing world is leveling off. Most of the developed world is already at "peak child".[1] Housing shortages come from migration to cities, not more people.
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#5The title is clickbait, I presume. I can't read the full article either, but in the introduction it already says that the problem is that not enough houses have been built. And in my opinion, that plus regulation failure are at the root of the problem. Who actually owns the houses is of lesser importance.
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#6Any way for me to access the article from EU without subscription or account?
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#7I agreee that speculation on property solely as an asset is an issue, but don't really agree with the premise early in the article around the growth of cities. The argument strikes me as something like this:
* An increase in the size of urban areas would increase GDP by 4% * Anything which blocks this growth is bad * Home ownership blocks this increase * Therefore, home ownership is bad
The implicit premise is that anything which increases GDP is good. Is it? An obvious counterexample is around environmental regulation. We could almost certainly bump GDP in the short-term by deregulating, but would suffer the consequences a few decades down the line.
I really like the economist and they make their bias clear, but I am a little frustrated with the rhetoric that ever growing GDP is an ethical imperative.
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#8> From Sydney to Sydenham, fiddly regulations protect an elite of existing homeowners and prevent developers from building the skyscrapers and flats that the modern economy demands. The resulting high rents and house prices make it hard for workers to move to where the most productive jobs are, and have slowed growth.
Following this logic from the ancient Greek times, by now we would have thousand stories skyscrapers in Athens - because that's where all the jobs were - and an empty Europe around it.
Re: Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake
#9Any way for me to access the article from EU without subscription or account?
Why are paywall articles even allowed on HN? All they do is encourage people to comment without reading the article and talk based on headlines alone.