This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't think either of your examples work. The problem of sub-Dunbar thinking certainly exists, but when the stakes are as high as they are in housing or healthcare, actually-existing democracies make better decisions than pure monkey politics would suggest. In both cases, I am happy to defend the policies we are seeing as sane way of pursuing the goals of the median voter (which I do not share in the case of housing). This is an effortpost on the pathologies of UK housing policy that I am structuring as a fisking of your post in order to make it quicker to write rather than because I think your post is bad - I suspect we agree on all the substantive issues and the double crux is about the motivations of our political opponents.
UK housing policy is a simple problem (policy-induced scarcity) with a simple solution (build more houses) that is politically difficult to implement. The various deckchair-rearranging policies to "fix" the housing market while retaining an artificial scarcity of housing are mostly supported by people who know exactly what they are doing, and are likely to succeed at their stated goals within the limits of what is possible by rearranging deckchairs.
The problem is MUCH less bad in Berlin than in London - the whining is worse in Berlin because Berliners got used to low rents in prime central neighborhoods during the period when the city was recovering from the Cold-War era partition, but rents in Berlin are about half London and incomes at a comparable skill level are higher. There was a short period when the legal market didn't clear due to rent controls (a quick Google suggests that people willing to pay illegal key money had no trouble finding flats) but they were struck down by the German federal courts.
These rules were brought in by the Conservative government, and the stated purpose was to encourage homeownership at the margin by forcing amateur landlords to sell out to first-time buyers, not to make life easier for marginal tenants. You can say that encouraging homeownership at this margin is a bad idea because homeowners are more likely to under-occupy (FWIW, I disagree with you), but the consequences of this change were thoroughly intended, and popular (partly because the marginal tenants losing out are disproportionately likely to be non-voting immigrants).
The UK does not have rent control. If the market isn't clearing, then rents need to rise further until it does. The fact that oversubscribed tenancies are allocated by sealed bids (rather than paperwork races) suggests this is happening.
Then you would be wrong, as you yourself acknowledge in the next sentence.
CORRECT. I guessed you were basically sound. If we don't allow developers to build the homes that there is demand for (and that could be built profitably), then millions of prospective Londoners, who have a reasonable want to live in London, will have to go away. Once you let the NIMBYs win, that becomes a matter of arithmetic and not a policy choice. Neither the free market nor the welfare state can alleviate the pain, because at the relevant margin the pain needs to be bad enough to make people leave. Even Gavin Newsome has started to get this - the fact that the UK in general and Sadiq Khan in particular don't is scary for people who have to live here.
That passive investment in land is a form of social parasitism is Econ 101, going back to David Ricardo. We tolerate it because (1) it is too hard to distinguish passive investors in land from passive investors in the structures built on the land, who are socially valuable in the same way as other capitalists, and (2) a lot of them are homeowning boomers, who are ludicrously entitled and vote. In England this is explicit - page 1 of every English Land Law text says that English Land Law is based on the doctrine of tenure and the doctrine of estates. The doctrine of tenure is that William the Conqueror stole all the land in England in 1066, King Charles still owns it as William's heir, and whatever rights you may have in your "own" land are based on stolen property.
Apart from the Corbynite usual suspects, I am not seeing a powerful faction in the UK calling for Berlin-style rent controls, largely because there is no powerful faction in British politics who wants a world where people with a long-term stable address rent from private sector landlords. We don't want the landlords to suffer - we want them to stop landlording and invest in new assets rather than bidding up the price of existing ones. The anti-landlord faction of the Conservatives thinks that people with long-term stable addresses should be homeowners and wants to tax landlords until they are forced to sell out to first-time buyers. The dominant faction of the Labour party thinks that poor people with long-term stable addresses should live in social housing, but that allowing an overpriced spot market to exist for the niche of people who need it is, on balance, a good thing (Sadiq Khan did call for rent controls in a vague non-committal way, but he was slapped down by Keir Starmer. The underlying politics of this is that the post-WW2 housing policy was built around social housing for the working class and homeownership for the middle class, to the point where even after the Thatcher-era selloffs the UK has an unusually high percentage of social housing (see p2 of this OECD report), so the political machines running off long-term low-income tenant voters are focussed on social housing and not rent control.
Without the bold word, this is obviously correct. But the supply issue is the supply of housing, not rental housing. Given the way the UK housing market works (and in particular the lack of dedicated rental buildings where a single private landlord owns the whole multifamily building), there is a single market for housing services in which private renting and mortgaged ownership are effectively different financing options. Because of undersupply, the market for housing is a brutal zero-sum competition which someone has to lose. If policy favours mortgaged ownership as the way of financing the purchase of housing, then the competition is rigged in favour of people with stable jobs, good credit scores and parents able to put down deposits for them. If policy favours private renting, then the competition is rigged in favour of people able and willing to live with multiple employed adults per bedroom in order to cover the rent. Which of these groups of people you prefer is a far stronger motivator for which housing policy you support than whether you hate bankers or landlords more (FWIW, the sub-Dunbar idiotarian left seem to hate developers more than either).
More options
Context Copy link