Build, Baby, Build: My Favorite Chapter 5 Pages
Here’s a sneak peak at chapter 5 of Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. The most intense objections to housing deregulation are often aesthetic: Development will look terrible! Especially when the status quo is beautiful as is, such aesthetic objections are pretty convincing. How, after all, can mere imagination compete with observation?
The graphic novel format, however, literally lets me show readers what what could have been - or what the great Frédéric Bastiat famously called “the unseen.”
Bastiat (1801-1850) died over a century before I was born, but that doesn’t stop the two of us from having a thrilling illustrated conversation about how gorgeous a free market in housing would look. Since his Economic Sophisms and Selected Essays on Political Economy were foundational in my early economic education, the chance to chat with the Master - even in imagination - was a quite a treat.
If only France durably anointed Bastiat as its greatest intellectual, perhaps Paris could have lived up to its full potential!
"Here's a sneak peak ..." Here's a furtive orgasm? I hypothesize that "peek" is the word on the internet that is most often misspelled, but only when it follows "sneak."
Bryan, I was talking with my leftist friend the other day. And we don't agree on a lot but we both agree on open borders and urban densification, oddly enough.
We posited that support for denser housing and/or less zoning restrictions is, not so much, a left-right divide but a generational divide. i.e. Boomers vs Millenials. But, of course, we were basing this on our own personal anecdotal experience.
I was wondering: given that you're writing a book about zoning restrictions / urban densification, have you seen any research about generational attitudes about zoning/density?