Category: Main

chris dillow is worried about high house prices.

In my day job, I point out that a single person must be in the top 3% of earners if s/he is to afford the average house. My gut instinct is that this is not a desirable state of affairs.

I certainly would go along with chris’s instincts. In general it is good if stuff is cheaper and we can have more of it, and housing is not any different. Better housing improves quality of life, and improves efficiency as people are able to store stuff, stay with friends, and so on. Not least, it is good for future generations – an apartment is OK for a single or a childless couple, but if you want to reproduce you need more space.

chris says “A few months ago, I’d have said: ‘nothing, prices will fall and the market will solve the problem.'” – a rare misjudgement. The market may be able to supply, for instance, heroin, at a reasonable price to all who want it, but as I observed previously, the government’s war on housing is vastly more effective than its war on drugs.

chris asks, “what should be done?” – well, what should be done is to end the war on housing. The war on housing is driven, as I see it, by two factors:

The first is the political influence of house-owners. Allowing house prices to fall to a reasonable level would hit very badly those who currently own houses. (It might also hurt those who lent them the money – although a large number of new cheap houses coming on the market and being bought by first-time buyers would compensate the lenders somewhat for the bad debt on the currently high-priced houses.) As I observed previously, that is only part of the impact; increasing the supply of houses will reduce the price of houses in the normal way, but it will also redistribute value away from houses that are ideally situated given the current setup:

The best places to live are on the edge between the city, with its civilised amenities, and the countryside, with its space and pretty landscapes and fresh air. It is expensive to live in such places, so the people living there are the rich and the powerful. If you build on the countryside next to them, you’re having negligible effect on the balance of the country as a whole, but you have a severe effect on those rich and powerful people who no longer have the best of both worlds, but are now part of the urban sprawl.

The second factor is the illusion that Britain is overcrowded. I have heard it suggested that this is only ever a smokescreen covering the sectional interest of property-owners, but I am sure many intelligent people believe it, even when it would be in their interest to increase the housing supply.

Again, what should be done? In theory, the interests in continuing artificial scarcity of housing should be at least balanced by the interests of those who would benefit by ending it. If the property-owners are able to maintain their advantage, it might be because, unsurprisingly, they are group – one could perhaps even say a class – with disproportionate political influence.

But to a large extent I think the scales are being tipped by the ignorant – those who would dearly love an affordable house, but not at the price of Britain being “tarmaced over”. We need to scream from the rooftops the vast amount of land in this country being used for nothing more useful than unnecessary subsidised industrial farming. The media always measure drugs seizures in terms of the retail “street price” – we should always refer to farmland in terms of the value it would have if built on – say 500 million pounds per square mile.

The other avenue to ending the war is to avoid the secondary effect on existing property-owners by building “new towns”. This could be done either privately or by the government (obviously, I would prefer to see it done privately), by allowing building over large areas which are currently undeveloped. The current owners of the land would obviously benefit, but even rural dwellers outside the designated area would be winners rather than losers, as their property would be in key high-end commuter territory for the new town.

I emphasise this is inferior to permitting building generally – I put it forward as potentially more acceptable politically.

The problem with the plan is transport – the lavish provision of the London and “Network South-East” rail and road networks is sufficient to strongly discourage anyone from going elsewhere. It might be possible to have the developer of the new town responsible for providing transport links, but that has a danger of turning into a vast “public-private partnership” corruption-fest. In any case, public projects such as the 2012 Olympics development (spit) will be tying up resources to the extent that it will be difficult to provide effective transport at any price.

I just want to finish by saying that I consider this issue the single biggest problem facing Britain, ahead of war, terrorism, global warming, crime, obesity, measles and Gordon Brown.

This is getting silly – most of my posts these days start out “A year ago, I said…”

Anyway, getting on for a year ago, I said:

The police have moved quite quickly – it emerged in September 2001 that some of the US hijackers were already under investigation, but nothing concrete had come up, so they were being left alone. As soon as they struck, the authorities were able to quickly track down their backgrounds. The same may well be the true here, and no blame would neccessarily attach to the police or security services – it could be very difficult to make the jump from vague suspicion to grounds for arrest.

On one hand, it seems that rather more information was available to the FBI in 2001 than we knew of.

On the other, my speculations about the July bombers have turned out to be accurate.

I find the news encouraging; it is somewhat reassuring to think that successful attackers slipped through our defenses rather than that we are wide open.

How do we prevent others slipping through? That’s not obvious, but one thing we can say with confidence is that wider information-gathering is not what we need. Terrorist plots are not being carried out without the security services getting any sniff of them. What they need might be better management, it might be more resources, or it might be easier access to specific kinds of information on suspected individuals – what might be termed “deeper” intelligence-gathering. (Or, of course, some combination).

Even illiberal measures such as ID cards have to be considered in this context. If it were easier or cheaper to “drill down” from having suspicions of one individual to getting enough information to act, then that might have happened in July 2005.

However, it’s hard to see what could have triggered action. What arouses suspicion seems to be contacts with known terrorist sympathisers. What would trigger action? Probably only getting hold of actual plans or materials for an attack – and those are hard to get. You can’t follow every suspect around with armed police, (which is a good thing) – if the amount of preparation for the attack is kept to the minimum, it’s very difficult to prevent it.

That’s not a reason for despair. The sort of attacks that can be carried out with little preparation of the sort that risks exposure are the ones we’ve already seen – kitchen-made explosives or poisons, small arms, sabotage. These are not a threat to our society, and not a significant threat to us as individuals when compared to the non-terrorist risks we run every day.

The IRA was able to to mount much more serious operations – mortar attacks on Downing Street, truck-size bombs, sustained campaigns. I feel in less danger from terrorism now than at any time since I moved to London in 1989.

If counterterrorism is basically working well, what are the lessons? More of the same, I think. Gradual increases in resources for intelligence and policing, and for analysis of intelligence – nothing that will disrupt an organisational structure that is functioning adequately; nothing that will carry too much cost or cause too much disturbance. No overreaction to the fact that small-scale attacks will continue to slip through the net.

I’ve just seen a link to The Futurist, a US blog looking mainly at global economic, technological and political trends.

A couple of minutes skimming is enough to recommend it. See this piece, identifying, in my view correctly, anti-Americanism as the “second superpower”. Also a series on sustained global growth. Also the latest, comparing the recent protests in France and in Los Angeles

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek asks:

I don’t understand this at all. Why would anyone care who has [Bjorn Borg’s] trophies? Its not like anyone is going to think that the highest bidder actually won them rather than bought them.

Isn’t it? Perhaps not in this specific case, but people in resenting the idea that the trophies might come to be owned by a private buyer are applying a general wish that badges of achievement be held by those that have earned them.

I think that’s a reasonable preference. There are lots of ways of displaying wealth, but fewer ways of displaying past exellence at tennis. Turning badges of achievement into symbols of wealth destroys information.

A better example of the same phenomenon is here. I might already know who won the Wimbeldon Mens’ Singles in 1980, but anyone on seeing a Blue Peter Badge on someone’s lapel might easily assume they’d earned it. If they can be had for a fiver on eBay, that information is lost to us.

There is a complicating factor when such badges become historical artifacts – at that point it is useful for them to end up in the hands of a collector or a museum, where they are linked to their historical context, rather than a descendant of the original winner of the honour. But while the winner is alive, people prefer that the badges stay in their possesion.

To summarise, there is money, and there is honour of achievement. Money can be, to some extent, a sign of honour of achievement, but in general they are different things. People like to be able to honour achievers, and so prefer that those symbols of achievement be usable to determine who is to be honoured.

(Of course, one can still ask why it is that people want to honour achievers, but that’s a much wider question).

What to do about this? We can attempt to restrict – by law or contract – the resale of badges of honour by those that earn them, but the enforcement costs are large, as the BBC is no doubt finding.

What does work is to keep the enforcement within the “system of honour” itself, which indeed is what people do. To buy a badge of honour is itself seen as shameful and dishonourable, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, to sell one likewise.

(The same principles underlie in part the loans-for-peerages controversy, but that sort of thing is historically so common that it’s difficult to be sincerely upset).

When I went to an ATM this morning it informed me that my bank’s entire ATM network will be down for four hours on Sunday because of the time change.
I don’t know why they need this outage – possibly for testing – but I can’t blame them.
Why do I get so worked up about this when there are so many bigger issues? It’s just such a clear-cut question. BST isn’t about when we go to work, or when we go to school, or when we go out; those are separate questions that we are capable of working out for ourselves. BST is about how we measure time – and it’s an extraordinarily bad way of measuring time. If I were to list requirements for a time measurement system, the very first one would be that any valid time would occur only once, and the second would be monotonicity – and what we have fails to satisfy even those most obvious conditions.
Traditionally it has been believed that any kind of weird shit can go on, but it doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of the night. That doesn’t work any more – business doesn’t sleep, and for that matter neither does leisure: night clubs and TV schedules all experience the confusion of time going haywire twice a year.