And the skies are not cloudy all day
Markus criticizes my criticism of Matthew Yglesias’s positive criticism of Richard Florida’s housing policy critique. Zounds! Let’s raise it to the fifth power, now:
The organizing goal for public policy, contends Markus, should be to ensure the economic health of families. As such, supporting the lifestyles of transient workers is good policy because it allows people to move to where jobs are rather than condemning them to circling the economic drain while mortgage debts pile up. De-incentivizing homeownership, then, frees people up to move to where their economic needs can be satisfied.
It’s essentially a philosophical critique of priorities, and he helpfully boldfaces the gut of the argument:
[…] shouldn’t that concrete economic need supersede Garrett’s more abstract social needs?
In a word, no. I absolutely agree that the satisfaction of economic needs is a crucial and inseparable element of social progress. Certainly there are a large number of people in this country for whom abstract concepts like ‘fulfillment’ are foolish to talk about since they can’t figure out how to obtain basic material necessities. But I hold that economic satisfaction is important only insofar as it collaborates to provide social and personal satisfaction. As a consequence, economic improvement for the sake of economic improvement is worthless. The same argument that Markus makes could be used to justify a lot of things which neither of us would probably like to justify: the construction of chemical factories in poor neighborhoods, for example, or even the decision to invade a country to prop up domestic production.
Moreover, on a non-philosophical level, I don’t buy the argument that homeownership by necessity shunts people into immiseration. The housing market in its current form does, but this is a consequence of specific elements of it, not of the underlying principle of homeownership. As I noted in the first place, there are major overhauls required of the public incentive system in order to produce more intelligent and fair residential distribution. But these reforms should do so while preserving the principle of homeownhership rather than dismissing it out of hand.
One response so far
I agree with your second point that homeownership isn’t necessarily an economic impediment; absent firm evidence, I’m cerainly not ready to say (contra Yglesias/Florida) that most people need to move around in order to succeed even in a modern economy. (At very least, that need seems limited to white-collar information workers, who are hardly a majority.) Our quarrel is purely theoretical.
To that argument, then: we’re not talking about “economic improvement” so much as economic survival, which in the ruthless capitalist environment is a constant struggle for working people. Social and personal satisfaction naturally require this economic comfort as a precondition, and when that comfort is attained the greater fulfillments can then be acquired fairly naturally and independently. That’s the American Dream in a nutshell. So why focus on the outcome rather than the factors enabling it?
Of course this is as much a practical matter of governance as anything else. Public policy, as we have seen, can (given the chance) do a fairly good job of mitigating economic hardship and producing a decent safety net (see EVERY FIRST WORLD COUNTRY EXCEPT AMERICA). On the other hand, social and personal satisfaction is rarely enacted well by the state; there’s a reason we don’t have Utopia. In the American context especially, with our enormous philosophical diversity, forcibly universalizing fulfillment seems laughably implausible. So we should focus on the one pressure point where the state can make a substantial improvement.