Recently Tyler Cowen has doubled and tripled down on the idea that congestion pricing in Manhattan would be inefficient. I respond to that in the section “A Strange Take on Congestion Pricing in New York City.” For it is, indeed, a very strange take, claiming that it is good for the surplus produced by Manhattan if everyone involved spends their time stuck in traffic, so as to not impose a minor tax that will in some portion fall on visitor cars.
Regarding having your own space, like a kitchen and living room, and a place to bring dates and put your own stuff:
I don't think I'm at the place where you'd convince me that, even at considerable savings, it's better to have an apartment version of "hot-desking" on any long-term basis....
The big pain point with many alternative housing solutions is bathrooms. People hate sharing them with strangers, everyone who works a normal day shift needs to use them for an extended period in the morning, and there isn't a way to make them portable without massively sacrificing quality. You can put a bed anywhere, connecting a toilet and shower to the public sewer system takes skilled labor and permits.
"There are a remarkably large number of (single) people who, if they had a place to sleep, even if it was at the office, would not otherwise need their own place."
But...where would those people spend their free time? Is Zvi imagining people who work such long hours that they don't do anything but work and sleep? Because if you work 40 hours and sleep 8 hours a day, you're left with 72 hours. Where in the world would you go for that long if you didn't have your own place?
Probably not just one place, but several, e.g. bars, restaurants, stores, parks, plazas, and even right out on the street. Zvi might be also imagining college students who generally have LOTS of places to be when they're not 'at work' or sleeping.
I agree – for myself. Are you so sure that _nobody_ should be allowed to make that choice? I'm not – it would be a welcome upgrade for a lot of people.
I guess they can make that choice but a world where this is done kind of as a norm, or a state of living that a large portion of people of modest means consider normal, would not be good for society.
I can understand why you wouldn't want to _stop_ at this, but I don't get how considering anything "normal" or not actually (effectively) helps anyone live a better life.
The world operates more smoothly for those who have to use fewer bits to describe their situation to others.
While I know that in reality things would never get to this extreme extent, if taken far enough a sufficiently powerful norm of coliving in a corporate environment would mean that fewer consumer-grade appliances are built, so those who want to live elsewise would have a harder time searching for (and affording) all the things they need to live a normal lifestyle.
Somewhat more down-to-reality, the demand for walkable urban infrastructure located near private living would go down significantly if private living was no longer the most common way for those who most prefer walkable urbanity to experience the world, which is exactly the audience I think would be most likely to go along with a modern-architecture shared living arrangement.
I think those many-order effects can be effectively ignored – there's much more significant issues to deal with first! But the big advantage of more 'anarchy'/freedom of living/sleeping arrangements is that people could self-organize to solve their own particular problems instead of waiting for the interminable 'one right way to do anything and everything debate' to finally finish.
The difference between a high-trust and low-trust society is norms: your neighbor could steal your stuff from your unlocked house but they don't; most people could defraud the social welfare system but they just don't..... And when the norm is broken, it can't be brought back easily.
Norms around having kids, around civility or minding your own business, norms against tattling or norms around privacy: when you treat them as given, and someone pushes them and they're gone, it's a new equilibrium but it might very well suck.
Economics example: i've noticed that most of the consumer goods I consume, with only a few exceptions, are manufactured with worse quality than the same things 20 years ago. Maybe it's actually better because it's relatively cheaper to buy that thing than it was to buy the same thing 40 years ago on 40 years ago salaries. But you'd have to demonstrate it was so; maybe I don't actually need a sturdy plastic toy when a flimsy plastic one does the same job.... But if I'd rather use the old one from my parents' attic than the new one, I'd say it's worse, but somehow that's where the equilibrium settled - the good stuff isn't economical to make anymore. I can't change this but it still sucks.
There are other examples, but not every equilibrium is necessarily better, even if unavoidable.
As-written, this is so abstract and vague that it sure seems like it justifies _any_ particular position, i.e. any particular set of norms.
I don't even agree with your economic example! Most of the consumer goods I buy and use are great. There are _some_ things where a deliberate tradeoff between price and, e.g. 'sturdiness', was made, but that mostly makes sense and there are still options on the 'other side' of that tradeoff available too.
Not every (new) equilibrium is better – not every change is worse either! We have to actually look and see and make up our minds each time (if we even care).
Ok fair. I didn't mean to go for "all norms are bad" or "all modern things we bad". More that a lot of equilibria that emerge, even if they emerge somehow organically, aren't necessarily better, and a norm can very much affect the well-being of a lot of people *because* it is the prevailing norm.
Thus, if somehow the existence of private spaces becomes scarce for e.g. young single people or couples, as people make those choices to save money, it seems like that would have negative knock-on effects when a lot of people are living like that.
I agree that I'd prefer a bedroom entirely my own - though sharing living and cooking areas is broadly fine - to time sharing a larger space; cost savings might be very large though, and the difference between having free time between work and chores and spending all those hours commuting
Coming at this from a UK standpoint, but I don’t get the ‘homeowners prefer lower house prices’ bit - is that not the core belief of NIMBYism, that new build housing (especially social housing) will devalue nearby homes?
I know it's weird, but no! NIMBY is mostly, as I understand it, about people not wanting their area to change, not about prices. Perhaps in the UK this is different because things are so far off the deep end already.
I think this is basically correct vis a vis NIMBY. The correct way to conceptualize it in my view is twofold: firstly, that people necessarily and rationally buy in reliance on neighborhood character in purchasing a house in a given neighborhood even if they don't formally have title to all the land in said neighborhood[1] -- they don't really have a choice to opt out of neighborhood externalities in any case, so they're buying into positive ones. (See also one Zvi Mowshowitz on this, esp. #4A and #4D. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/change-is-bad/).
However, housing, and especially primary home, is first and foremost a consumption rather than a capital good -- you sure as hell don't want to be underwater (as RM observes), but the reliance interests bought into are basically all about use-value rather than exchange-value. Even assuming that dezoning increases land values, it also (essentially by definition based on people having previously bought into what is personally their optimal neighborhood under their price constraints) involuntarily converts use-value into (unrealized until sold, and less the massive transaction costs of moving) exchange-value. With consumption goods in general, the involuntary interconversion of use-value into exchange-value[2] by third parties is forbidden--we still call it "theft" or "property damage" if you take it upon yourself to intentionally take or damage my lawnmower and leave some amount of cash behind, even if it exceeds the value of the damaged good. While there is quite a lot of legal theory that analyzes torts generally as a form of involuntary contract, "make whatever involuntary contracts you feel like as long as they'd be putatively market-clearing if voluntary" isn't the way things are actually run. [3].
The harms of dezoning therefore (to the NIMBY PoV), in my view are best conceptualized as (1) the violation of reliance interests (that, practically speaking, people don't have great ways to opt out of making even if zoning *weren't* a formal legal guarantee of such reliance interests being respected, which it basically is), and (2) the involuntary interconversion of use-value to exchange-value, in a way that's (i) generally disallowed under the Anglo-American legal system and (ii) doesn't respect subjective heterogeneity of preferences so as to guarantee that the putative increase in prices fully compensates incumbents for their loss of consumer surplus in the neighborhood as a consumption good.
[1] I think as a corollary this is going to lead to an equilibrium in which, partially in response to NIMBY victories private HoAs just serve as a somewhat shittier replacement for legal zoning restrictions as the preferred mechanism for creating the kind of low-entropy bubbles that people currently buy in based on zoning. Per Vox something like 75% (!!!!!) of new house starts are under an HoA (albeit presumably the numbers are presumably inflated to Include mutifamily starts that have always had them and that don’t restrict density.) Shittier because while it will presumably recapitulate the same density restrictions that zoning does, there will now be a lot of incidental regulation about parking in one's own driveway and how tall your begonias can get, coupled with the notoriously arbitrary tyranny that HoA management structures afford. I think the YIMBYs could still count this new equilibrium as a win to the extent it dezones inner ring suburbs that (in retrospect foolishly) tried to rely on public rather than private law to restrict density, particularly since that seems to be most of the YIMBY marbles.
[2] Obviously the use-value is in individual subjective-utiles and the exchange value is market dollars of the marginal buyer, and given that land/neighborhoods tends to have extremely high and heterogeneous subjective value we shouldn't expect the exchange-rate with respect to involuntary use-value / exchange-value interconversion to be generally efficient, at least not necessarily.
[3] Stocks are a notable exception this, as they can be involuntarily converted from shares to into their cash value if the Board approves a sale. But this is kind of the exception that proves the rule, because to first order stock shares (at least as owned by individuals) have *zero* use-value, only exchange value.
"Vermont bans all new housing on 50% of its land. In theory there could be a grand bargain, where the places worth preserving are preserved, and the places people want to live are built twice as high, and everyone wins. This does not seem to be that. This seems like banning humans from half the state."
I agree with you that this law is bad. But I disagree with you that this could even in theory be a good outcome. God forbid people want to buy a slice of land out in the boonies and build themselves a house on it. This is the goal I'm personally working towards. So much for all the talk about property rights? I'm not a city person, I don't care much either way what YIMBYs do in the cities. But come after the boonies on the grounds that all housing units are interchangeable and density is unquestionably good, you're gonna gain some new enemies you didn't have before.
The theoretically good outcome here is based on the prospect of monotonic population growth demanding preservation of lands before they become developed.
Stage 1: Inhabited places are too full of people, but at least there's green space around
Stage 2: People build out into the green space
Stage 3: More people get born or move into the area.
Stage 4: Inhabited places are too full of people, plus now the original green space is now gone.
Under conditions of perpetual population increase or spread (i.e., as long as Stage 3 is taken as an exogenous given), trying to solve this by expanding the buildable green space frontier just takes you right back through steps 1-4 in a perpetual loop until everything is built over and there are no boonies (or national / state parks or whatever) left.
Excellent piece. I have too many blogs to read, so thanks for tipping me over the edge and crossing Tyler Cowen from my list! His insistence on a point that one would expect him to take a completely different view on is perplexing.
I'd echo Ethan here. I get a ton of value out of Marginal Revolution and Tyler more generally, as frustrating as this has been. I link to his stuff often, and outside of AI x-risk it is usually very good - the number of people I'd have responded to in this level of depth (or with this kind of anger, frankly, as a resident of the city) is single digit for sure.
Sure, I agree completely with the point discussed in that Scott A piece, but this isn't the only example with Cowen. I have to prioritize somehow -- I follow around a hundred Substack blogs! I disagree with Zvi on AI risk but read him frequently because he's so damn good on everything else! (And, to be clear, argues very well on the AI issue in a way that Tyler is not doing on the congestion issue.)
Re LaGuardia airtrain, the planned route was pretty bad (would have looped way into Queens before turning around). The actually good option would be to just extend the N train (which would also have the benefits of improving subway access in Astoria and not having yet another disconnected system).
From someone just back from Bangkok and other major Asian megalopolises, I think cities are going to be cities, and you humanitarian planners are just fucked. It seems that things are not going according to desired plans. Towers surround Central Park and other notable city parks worldwide, but they remain vacant, resembling tombs and symbols of extreme wealth. Entire livable neighborhoods are being demolished by unsettling urban developers who construct towering glass and steel structures that seem straight out of a dystopian sci-fi series. While observing the skyline of Bangkok last week and witnessing the devastating displacement it has caused, I couldn't help but wonder: has artificial intelligence already taken control without our knowledge? Are we constructing these empty buildings with the intention of housing stacks of nVidia chips instead of people from the get-go? That's the impression I had. What do you think?
Canada may have transferable mortgages but we also have to renew about every 5 years. Lots of people got squeezed out of their houses last time interest rates went up in the 70’s and 80’s. A good possibility it will happen again since Vancouver and Toronto’s housing prices are so insanely high and people will have to renew this upcoming year with a 3 percent raise in interest rates.
Goes hand in hand I suppose - if you can transfer then the bank has a much bigger interest rate risk, if there is little interest rate risk then the transfer is easy. A 30 year fixed mortgage that was transferrable would presumably have a meaningfully higher rate.
Regarding having your own space, like a kitchen and living room, and a place to bring dates and put your own stuff:
I don't think I'm at the place where you'd convince me that, even at considerable savings, it's better to have an apartment version of "hot-desking" on any long-term basis....
The big pain point with many alternative housing solutions is bathrooms. People hate sharing them with strangers, everyone who works a normal day shift needs to use them for an extended period in the morning, and there isn't a way to make them portable without massively sacrificing quality. You can put a bed anywhere, connecting a toilet and shower to the public sewer system takes skilled labor and permits.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this:
"There are a remarkably large number of (single) people who, if they had a place to sleep, even if it was at the office, would not otherwise need their own place."
But...where would those people spend their free time? Is Zvi imagining people who work such long hours that they don't do anything but work and sleep? Because if you work 40 hours and sleep 8 hours a day, you're left with 72 hours. Where in the world would you go for that long if you didn't have your own place?
Probably not just one place, but several, e.g. bars, restaurants, stores, parks, plazas, and even right out on the street. Zvi might be also imagining college students who generally have LOTS of places to be when they're not 'at work' or sleeping.
I agree – for myself. Are you so sure that _nobody_ should be allowed to make that choice? I'm not – it would be a welcome upgrade for a lot of people.
I guess they can make that choice but a world where this is done kind of as a norm, or a state of living that a large portion of people of modest means consider normal, would not be good for society.
I can understand why you wouldn't want to _stop_ at this, but I don't get how considering anything "normal" or not actually (effectively) helps anyone live a better life.
The world operates more smoothly for those who have to use fewer bits to describe their situation to others.
While I know that in reality things would never get to this extreme extent, if taken far enough a sufficiently powerful norm of coliving in a corporate environment would mean that fewer consumer-grade appliances are built, so those who want to live elsewise would have a harder time searching for (and affording) all the things they need to live a normal lifestyle.
Somewhat more down-to-reality, the demand for walkable urban infrastructure located near private living would go down significantly if private living was no longer the most common way for those who most prefer walkable urbanity to experience the world, which is exactly the audience I think would be most likely to go along with a modern-architecture shared living arrangement.
I think those many-order effects can be effectively ignored – there's much more significant issues to deal with first! But the big advantage of more 'anarchy'/freedom of living/sleeping arrangements is that people could self-organize to solve their own particular problems instead of waiting for the interminable 'one right way to do anything and everything debate' to finally finish.
What is "normal" is pretty important, in general.
The difference between a high-trust and low-trust society is norms: your neighbor could steal your stuff from your unlocked house but they don't; most people could defraud the social welfare system but they just don't..... And when the norm is broken, it can't be brought back easily.
Norms around having kids, around civility or minding your own business, norms against tattling or norms around privacy: when you treat them as given, and someone pushes them and they're gone, it's a new equilibrium but it might very well suck.
Economics example: i've noticed that most of the consumer goods I consume, with only a few exceptions, are manufactured with worse quality than the same things 20 years ago. Maybe it's actually better because it's relatively cheaper to buy that thing than it was to buy the same thing 40 years ago on 40 years ago salaries. But you'd have to demonstrate it was so; maybe I don't actually need a sturdy plastic toy when a flimsy plastic one does the same job.... But if I'd rather use the old one from my parents' attic than the new one, I'd say it's worse, but somehow that's where the equilibrium settled - the good stuff isn't economical to make anymore. I can't change this but it still sucks.
There are other examples, but not every equilibrium is necessarily better, even if unavoidable.
As-written, this is so abstract and vague that it sure seems like it justifies _any_ particular position, i.e. any particular set of norms.
I don't even agree with your economic example! Most of the consumer goods I buy and use are great. There are _some_ things where a deliberate tradeoff between price and, e.g. 'sturdiness', was made, but that mostly makes sense and there are still options on the 'other side' of that tradeoff available too.
Not every (new) equilibrium is better – not every change is worse either! We have to actually look and see and make up our minds each time (if we even care).
Ok fair. I didn't mean to go for "all norms are bad" or "all modern things we bad". More that a lot of equilibria that emerge, even if they emerge somehow organically, aren't necessarily better, and a norm can very much affect the well-being of a lot of people *because* it is the prevailing norm.
Thus, if somehow the existence of private spaces becomes scarce for e.g. young single people or couples, as people make those choices to save money, it seems like that would have negative knock-on effects when a lot of people are living like that.
I agree that I'd prefer a bedroom entirely my own - though sharing living and cooking areas is broadly fine - to time sharing a larger space; cost savings might be very large though, and the difference between having free time between work and chores and spending all those hours commuting
Surely the sensible term is 'hot-bedding' (like hot-desking)? Has someone somewhere just misheard this?
Indeed hot bedding as a term predates hot desking! The idea is the bed is still hot because someone was sleeping in it, hot desking is by analogy.
Anything HOT is to be avoided at the neural level on up, by definition.
It's a Navy thing, right? lots of sailors, and space on ship is precious, so bunks are shared between different shifts.
Coming at this from a UK standpoint, but I don’t get the ‘homeowners prefer lower house prices’ bit - is that not the core belief of NIMBYism, that new build housing (especially social housing) will devalue nearby homes?
I know it's weird, but no! NIMBY is mostly, as I understand it, about people not wanting their area to change, not about prices. Perhaps in the UK this is different because things are so far off the deep end already.
My sense is that people remember being trapped in negative equity and will resort to anything to avoid this again!
I think this is basically correct vis a vis NIMBY. The correct way to conceptualize it in my view is twofold: firstly, that people necessarily and rationally buy in reliance on neighborhood character in purchasing a house in a given neighborhood even if they don't formally have title to all the land in said neighborhood[1] -- they don't really have a choice to opt out of neighborhood externalities in any case, so they're buying into positive ones. (See also one Zvi Mowshowitz on this, esp. #4A and #4D. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/change-is-bad/).
However, housing, and especially primary home, is first and foremost a consumption rather than a capital good -- you sure as hell don't want to be underwater (as RM observes), but the reliance interests bought into are basically all about use-value rather than exchange-value. Even assuming that dezoning increases land values, it also (essentially by definition based on people having previously bought into what is personally their optimal neighborhood under their price constraints) involuntarily converts use-value into (unrealized until sold, and less the massive transaction costs of moving) exchange-value. With consumption goods in general, the involuntary interconversion of use-value into exchange-value[2] by third parties is forbidden--we still call it "theft" or "property damage" if you take it upon yourself to intentionally take or damage my lawnmower and leave some amount of cash behind, even if it exceeds the value of the damaged good. While there is quite a lot of legal theory that analyzes torts generally as a form of involuntary contract, "make whatever involuntary contracts you feel like as long as they'd be putatively market-clearing if voluntary" isn't the way things are actually run. [3].
The harms of dezoning therefore (to the NIMBY PoV), in my view are best conceptualized as (1) the violation of reliance interests (that, practically speaking, people don't have great ways to opt out of making even if zoning *weren't* a formal legal guarantee of such reliance interests being respected, which it basically is), and (2) the involuntary interconversion of use-value to exchange-value, in a way that's (i) generally disallowed under the Anglo-American legal system and (ii) doesn't respect subjective heterogeneity of preferences so as to guarantee that the putative increase in prices fully compensates incumbents for their loss of consumer surplus in the neighborhood as a consumption good.
[1] I think as a corollary this is going to lead to an equilibrium in which, partially in response to NIMBY victories private HoAs just serve as a somewhat shittier replacement for legal zoning restrictions as the preferred mechanism for creating the kind of low-entropy bubbles that people currently buy in based on zoning. Per Vox something like 75% (!!!!!) of new house starts are under an HoA (albeit presumably the numbers are presumably inflated to Include mutifamily starts that have always had them and that don’t restrict density.) Shittier because while it will presumably recapitulate the same density restrictions that zoning does, there will now be a lot of incidental regulation about parking in one's own driveway and how tall your begonias can get, coupled with the notoriously arbitrary tyranny that HoA management structures afford. I think the YIMBYs could still count this new equilibrium as a win to the extent it dezones inner ring suburbs that (in retrospect foolishly) tried to rely on public rather than private law to restrict density, particularly since that seems to be most of the YIMBY marbles.
https://www.vox.com/money/23688366/hoa-condo-board-john-oliver-real-estate-coop . Probably inflated by apartment buildings having one by default, to be fair.
[2] Obviously the use-value is in individual subjective-utiles and the exchange value is market dollars of the marginal buyer, and given that land/neighborhoods tends to have extremely high and heterogeneous subjective value we shouldn't expect the exchange-rate with respect to involuntary use-value / exchange-value interconversion to be generally efficient, at least not necessarily.
[3] Stocks are a notable exception this, as they can be involuntarily converted from shares to into their cash value if the Board approves a sale. But this is kind of the exception that proves the rule, because to first order stock shares (at least as owned by individuals) have *zero* use-value, only exchange value.
"Vermont bans all new housing on 50% of its land. In theory there could be a grand bargain, where the places worth preserving are preserved, and the places people want to live are built twice as high, and everyone wins. This does not seem to be that. This seems like banning humans from half the state."
I agree with you that this law is bad. But I disagree with you that this could even in theory be a good outcome. God forbid people want to buy a slice of land out in the boonies and build themselves a house on it. This is the goal I'm personally working towards. So much for all the talk about property rights? I'm not a city person, I don't care much either way what YIMBYs do in the cities. But come after the boonies on the grounds that all housing units are interchangeable and density is unquestionably good, you're gonna gain some new enemies you didn't have before.
The theoretically good outcome here is based on the prospect of monotonic population growth demanding preservation of lands before they become developed.
Stage 1: Inhabited places are too full of people, but at least there's green space around
Stage 2: People build out into the green space
Stage 3: More people get born or move into the area.
Stage 4: Inhabited places are too full of people, plus now the original green space is now gone.
Under conditions of perpetual population increase or spread (i.e., as long as Stage 3 is taken as an exogenous given), trying to solve this by expanding the buildable green space frontier just takes you right back through steps 1-4 in a perpetual loop until everything is built over and there are no boonies (or national / state parks or whatever) left.
Excellent piece. I have too many blogs to read, so thanks for tipping me over the edge and crossing Tyler Cowen from my list! His insistence on a point that one would expect him to take a completely different view on is perplexing.
I too am baffled at Cowen's insistence on being so aggressively wrong about this issue, and in such a non-economist way. Truly bizarre.
But with that said https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
I'd echo Ethan here. I get a ton of value out of Marginal Revolution and Tyler more generally, as frustrating as this has been. I link to his stuff often, and outside of AI x-risk it is usually very good - the number of people I'd have responded to in this level of depth (or with this kind of anger, frankly, as a resident of the city) is single digit for sure.
Sure, I agree completely with the point discussed in that Scott A piece, but this isn't the only example with Cowen. I have to prioritize somehow -- I follow around a hundred Substack blogs! I disagree with Zvi on AI risk but read him frequently because he's so damn good on everything else! (And, to be clear, argues very well on the AI issue in a way that Tyler is not doing on the congestion issue.)
Re LaGuardia airtrain, the planned route was pretty bad (would have looped way into Queens before turning around). The actually good option would be to just extend the N train (which would also have the benefits of improving subway access in Astoria and not having yet another disconnected system).
See also https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/16/new-york-cant-build-laguardia-rail-edition/
Extending the N seems so obvious once you put it on the table. And yet.
Even DC had been extending its metro at a visible rate....
From someone just back from Bangkok and other major Asian megalopolises, I think cities are going to be cities, and you humanitarian planners are just fucked. It seems that things are not going according to desired plans. Towers surround Central Park and other notable city parks worldwide, but they remain vacant, resembling tombs and symbols of extreme wealth. Entire livable neighborhoods are being demolished by unsettling urban developers who construct towering glass and steel structures that seem straight out of a dystopian sci-fi series. While observing the skyline of Bangkok last week and witnessing the devastating displacement it has caused, I couldn't help but wonder: has artificial intelligence already taken control without our knowledge? Are we constructing these empty buildings with the intention of housing stacks of nVidia chips instead of people from the get-go? That's the impression I had. What do you think?
Canada may have transferable mortgages but we also have to renew about every 5 years. Lots of people got squeezed out of their houses last time interest rates went up in the 70’s and 80’s. A good possibility it will happen again since Vancouver and Toronto’s housing prices are so insanely high and people will have to renew this upcoming year with a 3 percent raise in interest rates.
Goes hand in hand I suppose - if you can transfer then the bank has a much bigger interest rate risk, if there is little interest rate risk then the transfer is easy. A 30 year fixed mortgage that was transferrable would presumably have a meaningfully higher rate.