If We All Had Lodgers There Would Be No Housing Problem
This degrades my own degree from the Alma Mater
My old school, the LSE, publishes something that makes me am ashamed. Not that I’ve ever actually used my degree in anything but it also devalues whatever value the 40 year old piece of paper has. For it’s drivel - this new paper, not my degree (well….).
The problem is as so often happens at the LSE. Varied parts of the school try to do economics and they just don’t bother to amble down the corridor to the economists and ask “Well, whachu think?” Jason Hickel was guilty of that when he published a paper with an impossible conclusion - he insisted 19th cent. Britain has below susbsistence wages but that’s something just incompatible with the population going up by 4x. Couldn’t possibly be true. As anyone who knew the meaning of “subsistence” would have been able to tell him let alone an economist who’d read Ricardo. David Graeber was guilty of more than a little bit of that too - which is what led to his interesting sockpuppet turning up on some of my pieces pointing that out.
This claim here makes that same mistake. The claim is that, essentially, if we all took in lodgers then there would be no housing crisis in Britain. Which is to simply misunderstand, fail to grasp, the basics of what is being discussed.
Here’s how it’s described at UCL (why, yes, that is Mazzo’s foolishness):
Meeting housing needs within planetary boundaries requires opening the black box of housing “demand”
The giveaway is the “ “ around demand. A definite sign of the ignorant.
For the rest of the paper is about what people need. Which isn’t what demand means at all. Demand is what people would like. Further, the aim of having an economy - heck, a civilization - is not that folk get what they need but that they get what they desire. Lots of it too.
So, to save you the pain of having to read the thing. They look at the standard rules about who should have their own bedroom - kids can share up to 10 or so or whatever it is, couples who are having sex with each other can share and so on. Then they count the number of bedrooms in the country, the number of people, and claim that this is fine, we’ve enough!
OK, they go a little further, agreeing that a spare bedroom for a guest is allowable and so on. But that is still the basis of their calculation. There are enough bedrooms so there are enough houses and we don’t need to do anything.
Yes, I know.
I've done similar analysis showing the same thing for shoes. At any time in the UK, about 80% of shoes ARE NOT BEING WORN!!! I have written to the department of shoe allocation, but they keep ignoring me.
But there’s more here. The first is that not bothering to go ask the economists when you’re in the London School of Economics. Which seems more than a bit of a shame really, possibly even just plain damn lazy.
Because demand is not what you think people should be allowed. It’s a fundamental building block of economics that demand is what people want.
Further, the people who get to define what they want are the people doing the wanting. We don’t get to tell people they don’t want another slice of toast. They decide that, those currently toastless by their desires.
So the fools here are trying to define “demand” for housing by what they regard as being sufficient housing. Not by what the people who have to live in the housing thinks is sufficient housing. It’s not just wrong it’s a category error.
So, Fie with them and burn the non-economics parts of the LSE to the ground, obviously.
But it’s worse than that too. For their estimation of housing demand - their own definition of that - looks only at bedrooms. And as any adult can tell them that’s not, in fact, how people even think of the size of housing. Sure, it’s a part of it. But so is number of bathrooms. Size of garden, all sorts of other things. And the most important of those after bathrooms is number of reception rooms. Having a kitchen is great, obviously, having a kitchen table - even a kitchen large enough to have a table in. But so is having a lounge (or, given the English class thing, a sitting room). And a dining room. Or a games/TV room. Or and a study. A sewing room.
When you actually do look at how grander houses used to be built this is where much of the extra effort went. Not into people having more bedrooms than people to sleep in them but in more rooms to be awake in.
That is, even given that they’re measuring demand wrongly in theory their own measure is also wrong practically.
Perhaps we need to plough the land with salt as well after the burning?
It's clear that I need a room for my model railway, and another room to mash my fists on a computer, and another room to eat in, and another room to shout at the television in.
I think we know why they didn’t ask their colleagues in the Economics Faculty.