public options – J. W. Mason

At Barron’s: Rate Hikes Are the Wrong Cure for Rising Housing Costs

(I write a monthly opinion piece for Barron’s. This is my contribution for November 2022.)

How much of our inflation problem is really a housing-cost problem?

During the first half of 2021, vehicle prices accounted for almost the whole rise in inflation. For much of this year, it was mostly energy prices.

But today, the prices of automobiles and other manufactured goods have stabilized, while energy prices are falling. It is rents that are rising rapidly. Over the past three months, housing costs accounted for a full two-thirds of the inflation in excess of the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

Since most Americans don’t rent their homes, the main way that rents enter the inflation statistics is through owners’ equivalent rent—the government’s estimate of how much owner-occupied homes would rent for. The big cost that homeowners actually pay is debt service on their mortgage, which the Fed is currently pushing up. There is something perverse about responding to an increase in a hypothetical price of housing by making actual housing more expensive.

Still, the housing cost problem is real. Market rents are up by over 10% in the past year, according to Zillow. While homeownership rates have recovered somewhat, they are still well below where they were in the mid-2000s. And with vacancy rates for both rental and owner-occupied homes at their lowest levels in 40 years, the housing shortage is likely to get worse.

Housing is unlike most other goods in the economy because it is tied to a specific long-lived asset. The supply of haircuts or child care depends on how much of society’s resources we can devote to producing them today. The supply of housing depends on how much of it we built in the past.

This means that conventional monetary policy is ill-suited to tackle rising housing prices. Because the housing stock adjusts slowly, housing costs may rise even when there is substantial slack in the economy. And because production of housing is dependent on credit, that’s where higher interest rates have their biggest effects. Housing starts are already down 20% since the start of this year. This will have only a modest effect on current demand, but a big effect on the supply of housing in future years. Economics 101 should tell you that if efforts to reduce demand are also reducing supply, prices won’t come down much. They might even rise.

What should we be doing instead?

First, we need to address the constraints on new housing construction. In a number of metropolitan areas, home values may be double the cost of construction. When something is worth more than it costs to produce, normally we make more of it. So, if the value of a property comes mostly from the land under it, that’s a sign that construction is falling far short of demand. The problem we need to solve isn’t that people will pay so much to live in New York or Los Angeles or Boston or Boulder, Colo. It’s that it is so difficult to add housing there.

Land-use rules are set by thousands of jurisdictions. Changing them will not happen overnight. But there are steps that can be taken now. For example, the federal government could tie transportation funding to allowing higher-density development near transit.

Second, we need more public investment. Government support—whether through direct ownership or subsidies—is critical for affordable housing, which markets won’t deliver even with relaxed land-use rules. But government’s role needn’t be limited to the low-income segment. The public sector, with its long time horizons, low borrowing costs, and ability to internalize externalities, has major advantages in building and financing middle-class housing as well.

If we look around the world, it isn’t hard to find examples of governments successfully taking a central role in housing development. In Singapore, which is hardly hostile to private business, the majority of new housing is built by the public Housing Development Board. The apartment buildings built by Vienna’s government between the world wars still provide a large share of the city’s housing. Before the privatizations under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, some 30% of English families lived in publicly owned housing.

In the U.S., public housing has fallen out of favor. But governments at all levels continue to support the construction of affordable housing through subsidies and incentives. Some public developers, like the Housing Production Fund of Montgomery County, Md., are finding that with cheap financing and no need to deliver returns to investors, they can compete with private developers for mixed-income housing as well. The important thing is to channel new public money to development, rather than vouchers for tenants. The latter may just bid up the price of existing housing.

Third, we should revisit rent regulation. The argument against rent control is supposed to be that it discourages new construction. But empirical studies have repeatedly failed to find any such effect. This shouldn’t be surprising. The high-rent areas where controls get adopted are precisely those where new housing construction is already tightly constrained. If not much is getting built in any case, rent regulation merely prevents the owners of existing housing from claiming windfall gains from surging demand.

No, rent control won’t boost the supply of housing. But it can limit the rise in prices until new supply comes on-line. And it’s a much bettertargeted response to rising housing costs than the policy-induced recession we are currently headed for.

What Should be Universal and Free?

In the US, as in many countries, local governments often provide fire protection. In general — there are exceptions, but they’re still rare enough to make news — this is a free service, available to everyone who lives in whatever jurisdiction provides it. No one has to sign up or pay for coverage. To most people, I suppose, this is a normal and reasonable thing to do.

One effect of fire protection is to stop peoples’ homes from burning down. As it happens, rich people are more likely to own homes than poor people. And when people with lower incomes do own houses, they are generally less expensive. So the distributional effect of preventing houses from burning is clearly regressive.

Why should everyone have to pay to keep millionaires’ mansions from burning? Modern apartment buildings probably aren’t even at that great risk of fire, what with sprinkler systems and so on. It’s the big houses up in the hills that are in the greatest danger.

So now comes a new mayor — let’s call him Mayor Pete — who proposes to abolish the municipal fire department and replace it with private fire services that people can contract with. Maybe he’ll take a page from ACA and have gold, silver and bronze levels of fire protection, sold on exchanges. It’s smart to build on what works, after all.

Naturally there will be means-tested vouchers for poor people to pay for fire protection. Or we can, say, cap the cost of fire protection at some percent of household income, with the difference made up by a subsidy. Just be sure you can fully document your income and assets each year, and don’t forget to fill out the forms. Of course not everyone needs fire protection — the homeless are free to opt out, and renters can decide for themselves if they prefer a building with fire coverage or cheaper rent.

Obviously, I am making an analogy with free college. And obviously, people who don’t support free college (and probably many who do) are going to reject this analogy. Here are some possible counterarguments:

– Everyone wants to not die in a fire. Not everyone wants to go to college.

– If someone falls through the cracks and doesn’t get fire coverage, the effects can be catastrophic — loss of home and possessions, serious injury, death. If some people end up unable to attend college, that is certainly unfortunate but not a disaster in the same way.

– It’s much more efficient to have a single fire service serving a whole area than to have lots of different contractors providing different levels of coverage in overlapping areas. There would be wasteful duplication of facilities, equipment, and personnel, and in an emergency confusion about who was responsible for what.

– If one house is allowed to burn that creates major risks for the houses nearby. Because fire spreads, fire protection isn’t something you can really opt into or out of on an individual level.

These are not unreasonable objections. On the other hand, we can debate how different fire service and college education really are on these dimensions.

Mike Konczal or I might say that they are not really so different – that many of the same practical considerations that favor a singe free, universal system of fire protection also apply to college. We might say that higher education is not a luxury in the contemporary US, and that if measures to keep the rich from getting a free education at a public college end up also excluding some non-rich people — as they inevitably well — that is a major cost. We might say that the machinery of assessing eligibility for various subsidies, vouchers, etc., collecting fees, and excluding or penalizing those who haven’t paid, is immensely wasteful. We might say that the benefits of higher education are social and public, and that these broader benefits are undermined when education is treated as a private good.

Noah Smith or the real Mayor Pete might say on the contrary that there are big differences – lots of people don’t go to college and that’s fine; means-testing is accurate and reasonably efficient, at least compared with running duplicate fire departments; and that claims about the importance of higher education to a fulfilling life or a robust democracy are mostly just the self-flattering fantasies of college professors.

Well, we disagree. But however you apply them in this particular case, these all seem like relevant arguments in thinking about how desirable it is to make a public service free and universal.

What they are not, is arguments about distributional impact. There’s no controversy over the distribution of student debt or tuition spending – they rise with income, but fall as a proportion of income. We can debate over whether that makes forgiving student debt progressive or regressive, but I don’t think that’s what’s motivating either side here. Disputes over whether something should be free and universal hinge rather on whether we see it as a fundamental right or a luxury; whether we see the risks of under- and overprovision as symmetrical; whether technical considerations favor provision through a single uniform system; and whether the service is a public good in the traditional sense, and whether it has significant externalities. If we were actually debating the elimination of universal fire protection, these would be the kinds of arguments people would make. Not ones about the direct distributional impact.

The distribution of college spending is quite a bit flatter than the distribution of home equity. So if you don’t oppose free universal fire protection on the grounds that it favors the rich, then I’m pretty sure you don’t actually oppose free public college on those grounds either. Mayor Pete certainly does not have any general objection to public spending from which the rich derive more direct benefit than the poor. Indeed, since public goods are mostly complementary to private goods — roads and cars; airports and airlines; meat inspectors and meat; police and private property — this is probably true of the great majority of public spending, at least if you look at it in the same narrow financial terms that people are looking at college debt forgiveness.

So I don’t think distributional concerns are the real reason that people oppose free universal public college. Presumably the real reasons are some mix of “I think it is very important that everyone is protected from fires, but I don’t think it’s that important that everyone can go to college,” and “Charging people individually for fire protection is impractical, but charging people to go to college seems to work ok.” Which might be reasonable positions! But let’s debate those.

I’d love to have that debate. But I must add that the fact that people who oppose free college keep bringing up the distributional impact, suggests that they may not be confident of winning on other grounds. It suggests that they, at least, don’t believe that most Americans see college education as simply a private good.

ETA: This postwould have been better if I knew anything about the concrete historical development of public fire proteection. Unfortunately, I don’t. Also, on twitter, Matt Bruenig argues that the distributional question isn’t as straightforward as I claim because of insurance. So just to clarify: The point here is that if you’re wodering why we have free, universal public services — and we have a lot of them — imagining them as cash transfers isn’t helpful. The reason the public takes over some service is precisely because it doesn’t fit the model of giving people cash – because the nature of the service makes it unsuitable to treat as a commodity. So the relevant question, if we are asking whether something should be a universal public service, is how well it fits the model of a private good. Not to start by assuming it is a private good and then asking how it is distributed.

Links for May 25, 2016

Deliberately. The IMF has released its new Debt Sustainability Analysis for Greece. Frances Coppola has the details, and they are something. Per the IMF,

Demographic projections suggest that working age population will decline by about 10 percentage points by 2060. At the same time, Greece will continue to struggle with high unemployment rates for decades to come. Its current unemployment rate is around 25 percent, the highest in the OECD, and after seven years of recession, its structural component is estimated at around 20 percent. Consequently, it will take significant time for unemployment to come down. Staff expects it to reach 18 percent by 2022, 12 percent by 2040, and 6 percent only by 2060.

Frances adds:

For Greece’s young people currently out of work, that is all of their working life. A whole generation will have been consigned to the scrapheap. …

The truth is that seven years of recession has wrecked the Greek economy. It is no longer capable of generating enough jobs to employ its population. The IMF estimates that even in good times, 20 percent of adults would remain unemployed. To generate the jobs that are needed there will have to be large numbers of new businesses, perhaps even whole new industries. Developing such extensive new productive capacity takes time and requires substantial investment – and Greece is not the most attractive of investment prospects. Absent something akin to a Marshall Plan, it will take many, many years to repair the damage deliberately inflicted on Greece by European authorities and the IMF in order to bail out the European banking system.

For some reason, that reminds me of this. Good times.

Also, here’s the Economist, back in 2006:

The core countries of Europe are not ready to make the economic reforms they so desperately need—and that will change, alas, only after a diabolic economic crisis. … The sad truth is that voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change. Reform is always painful. And there are too many cosseted insiders—those with secure jobs, those in the public sector—who see little to gain and much to lose. … One reason for believing that reform can happen … is that other European countries have shown the way. Britain faced economic and social meltdown in 1979; there followed a decade of Thatcherite reform. … The real problem, not just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life has continued to be too good for too many people.

I bet they’re pretty pleased right now.

Polanyism. At Dissent, Mike Konczal and Patrick Iber have a very nice introduction to Karl Polanyi. One thing I like about this piece is that they present Polanyi as a sort of theoretical back-formation for the Sanders campaign.

The vast majority of Sanders’s supporters … are, probably without knowing it, secret followers of Karl Polanyi. …

One of the divides within the Democratic primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton has been between a social-democratic and a “progressive” but market-friendly vision of addressing social problems. Take, for example, health care. Sanders proposes a single-payer system in which the government pays and health care directly, and he frames it explicitly in the language of rights: “healthcare is a human right and should be guaranteed to all Americans regardless of wealth or income.” … Sanders offers a straightforward defense of decommodification—the idea that some things do not belong in the marketplace—that is at odds with the kind of politics that the leadership of the Democratic Party has offered … Polanyi’s particular definition of socialism sounds like one Sanders would share.

Obamacare and the insurers. On the subject of health care and decommodification, I liked James Kwak’s piece on Obamacare.

The dirty not-so-secret of Obamacare … is that sometimes the things we don’t like about market outcomes aren’t market failures—they are exactly what markets are supposed to do. … at the end of the day, Obamacare is based on the idea that competition is good, but tries to prevent insurers from competing on all significant dimensions except the one that the government is better at anyway. We shouldn’t be surprised when insurance policies get worse and health care costs continue to rise.

It’s too bad so many intra-Democratic policy debates are conducted in terms of the radical-incremental binary, it’s not really meaningful. You can do more or less of anything. Would be better to focus on this non-market vs market question.

In this context, I wish there’d been some discussion in the campaign of New York’s new universal pre-kindergarten, which is a great example incremental decommodification in practice. Admittedly I’m a bit biased — I live in New York, and my son will be starting pre-K next year. Still: Here’s an example of a social need being addressed not through vouchers, or tax credits, or with means tests, but through a universal public services, provided — not entirely, but mainly and increasingly — by public employees. Why isn’t this a model?

The prehistory of the economics profession. I really liked this long piece by Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Weisberger on the early history of the American Economics Association. The takeaway is that the AEA’s early history was surprisingly radical, both intellectually and in its self-conception as part of larger political project. (Another good discussion of this is in Michael Perelman’s Railroading Economics.) This is history more people should know, and Steinbaum and Weisberger tell it well. I also agree with their conclusion:

That [the economics profession] abandoned “advocacy” under the banner of “objectivity” only raises the question of what that distinction really means in practice. Perhaps actual objectivity does not require that the scholar noisily disclaim advocacy. It may, in fact, require the opposite.

The more I struggle with this stuff, the more I think this is right. A field or discipline needs its internal standards to distinguish valid or well-supported claims from invalid or poorly supported ones. But evaluation of relevance, importance, correspondence to the relevant features of reality can never be made on the basis of internal criteria. They require the standpoint of some outside commitment, some engagement with the concrete reality you are studying distinct from your formal representations of it. Of course that engagement doesn’t have to be political. Hyman Minsky’s work for the Mark Twain Bank in Missouri, for example, played an equivalent role; and as Perry Mehrling observes in his wonderful essay on Minsky, “It is significant that the fullest statement of his business cycle theory was published by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.” But it has to be something. In economics, I think, even more than in other fields, the best scholarship is not going to come from people who are only scholars.

Negative rates, so what. Here’s a sensible look at the modest real-world impact of negative rates from Brian Romanchuk. It’s always interesting to see how these things look from the point of view of market participants. The importance of a negative policy rate has nothing to do with the terms on which present consumption trades off against future consumption, it’s about one component of the return on some assets relative to others.

I’m number 55. Someone made a list of the top 100 economics blogs, and put me on it. That was nice.

On Other Blogs, Other Wonders

Links for Friday, September 11:

From my Roosevelt Institute colleagues Mike Konczal and Nell Abernathy, here’s a primer on “financialization“. This term is used widely but not always precisely; most definitions are some tautological variant of “more finance.” Mike and Nell wisely don’t try to provide a single analytical definition, but treat it as shorthand for a number of linked but distinct developments. Especially useful if, like me, you’re always looking for good material on finance and macroeconomics to use with undergraduates.

Also from Mike Konczal: NY Fed Study Should Redefine How We Think About Student Loans and College Costs. There are two interesting points here, from my point of view. First, the fact that loans have a much stronger effect on college costs than Pell grants do, is yet another piece of evidence for the importance of liquidity; in a world without credit constraints, only the subsidy associated with federal student loan programs would affect anyone’s behavior. Second, it develops an argument I’ve been making for years — an important advantage of direct provision of public goods over vouchers and subsidies is that price movement will amplify effect of the former and reduce the effect of the latter.I should add that at CUNY, where I teach, the great majority of the students take on no debt at all, since Pell grants and New York’s Tuition Assistance Program both cover the full cost of tuition and fees.

Over at Jacobin, my John Jay colleague Ian Seda-Irizarry has a useful overview of the Puerto Rican debt crisis.

Related to the disgorge the cash and capital-reallocation topics we’ve been discussing here, Evan Soltas has an interesting post on What Ails the American Startup? He looks at census data that includes all firms, not just the publicly-traded corporations I’ve focused on, and finds the same long-term decline in the share of the economy accounted for by newer firms.

My friend Will Boisvert, whose two posts on nuclear power remain the most widely-read things to ever appear on this blog, is now writing for the Breakthrough Institute. I’m not entirely down with the “ecomodernism” project, but Will is a very smart and careful writer and his stuff there is very worth reading.

Here is my brother on CNBC, talking about the Kim Davis case.

Why Not Just Mail Out Checks?

A friend writes:

Let’s suppose that the United States could get a Universal Basic Income, but it had to trade a bunch of stuff for it. What would be important to keep after a UBI?

Obviously, various income support could right out the door (food stamps, unemployment insurance). But would we be willing to trade labor regulations (minimum wage, union laws)? Public schools? Medicare? Curious as to your thoughts.

This sort of choice comes up all the time these days. Of course in practice it’s a false choice: They take our parks and public insurance, and never send out those UBI checks. Or occasionally, as in New York, they give us our universal pre-K and parks and bike lanes, and we don’t have to give up our meager income-support checks to get them.

Still, it’s an interesting question. How should we answer it?

1. At least for an important current on the left, the goal isn’t to distribute commodities more equally, but to liberate human life from the logic of the market. Or, a society that maximizes positive freedom and the development of people’s capacities, as opposed to one that maximizes consumption of goods. From that point of view, diminishing the scope of the market — incremental decommodification, as Naomi Klein used to say — is the important thing, so we’d always reject this kind of trade. (Assuming it’s on more or less “even” terms.)

2. Setting that aside. Shouldn’t we have a presumption that the goods that are currently publicly supplied are subject to some kind of market failure? Presumably there’s some reason why many governments provide insurance against old age and health costs, housing, education, police and fire services, and very few governments provide clothing or restaurant meals. Of course one wouldn’t want to say the current mix of public-private provision is ideal. But one wouldn’t want to say it carries no information, either.

3. There’s a genuine value in institutions that pursue a public purpose, rather than profit. We can debate whether hospitals should be public, nonprofit or even private at the level of management, but presumably in the operating room we want our doctor thinking about what’s most likely to make this surgery successful and not what’s most likely to make him money. (And we don’t think reputation costs are enough to guarantee those motives coincide — so back to market failures as above.) In the same category, and close to many of our hearts, are professors and other teachers, who teach better when they’re focused on just that, and not worrying about their paycheck.

4. Related to (3), how do we manage a system in which the public sector is disappearing? Seems to me the logical outcome of the UBI-and-let-markets-do-the-rest approach is stuff like this. Either you agree that intrinsic motivation is important, in which case you have to honestly ask in each particular case whether self-interest adds more than it detracts. Or you deny it, but then you’re left with the problem of how to you assure the honesty of the people sending out the checks. (Not to mention all the zillion commercial transactions that happen every day.) DeLong somewhere calls neoliberalism a counsel of despair, which makes sense only once you’ve given up on the capacity of the state. But without minimal state capacity even neoliberalism doesn’t work. If the nightwatchman won’t do what’s right because it is right, you can’t have markets either. Better pledge yourself to a feudal lord. And if the nightwatchman will, then why not the doctor, teacher, etc.?

5. How confident are we that unfettered markets plus UBI is politically sustainable? Being a worker expecting a certain wage gives you some social power. Being a participant in a public institution gives you, arguably, some social power, an identity, it helps solve the collective action problem of the poor. (Which is the big problem in all of this.) But receiving your UBI check doesn’t give you any power, any capacity to disrupt, it doesn’t give you a sense of collective identity, it doesn’t form a basis of collective action. My hypothesis is that the parents at the local public school are more able to act together — they have the PTA, to begin with — than the same number of voucher recipients are.