Do Me a Personal Favor: Please Pre-Order *Build, Baby, Build* Now
My new non-fiction graphic novel on housing regulation releases May 1, and the sooner you order, the more you help me.
I started writing Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, in the early weeks of Covid. Now, with the kind cooperation of the Cato Institute, my second non-fiction graphic novel releases on May 1, 2024. That’s less than six weeks away.
Please forgive my laughable arrogance, but I assure you that BBB is the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written. In fact, I assure you that there will never be a more fascinating book on housing regulation!
While objective self-interest impels you to buy the book as soon as it releases, it would be a huge favor to me if you would take the extra step of pre-ordering right away from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Apple Books, or anywhere else. Why? Because all pre-orders count as “first-week sales” for national best-seller lists — and I’m aiming high.
The paperback version is $25.95, though of course if the vendor cuts the price between now and May 1, you standardly get the lower price.
The e-book version of BBB, meanwhile, is a token $10.95 on Kindle, $10.99 on Barnes and Noble e-Book, and $12.99 on Apple.
If you feel grateful that all Bet On It writing is 100% free, pre-ordering BBB is the best way I know to show your gratitude. Worried that family members (kids included) will fight over access to the book? Afraid that your friends won’t buy the book on their own? Buying spare copies is the perfect fix for these otherwise agonizing woes.
“Why a graphic novel?” If you’re already a fan of the genre, you already know the answer: This is an awesome format. But if you’re not yet a fan, here are my top reasons:
Social scientists have amassed a pile of compelling evidence on the massive benefits of housing deregulation. Unfortunately, this compelling evidence bores almost everyone to tears. A graphic novel doesn’t just bring this evidence to life; it makes it larger than life. As a result, I win more readers, and more time per reader.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Not literally true, but you can normally communicate far more information per minute by combining words and pictures than you can with words alone. Since total learning equals…
# Readers * Minutes/Reader * Learning/Minute
…the graphic novel format is pedagogical gold.
Why a graphic novel on housing regulation specifically? Because most of the harm of housing regulation is invisible: structures that could have been built, but weren’t due to government restrictions. The visual format allows me to literally show readers the unseen. With the great Bastiat by my side. Furthermore, much of the case for regulation is aesthetic, so the graphic format allows me to counter aesthetics with aesthetics. Why assume the deregulated world will be ugly? Maybe it will be as beautiful as I imagine it to be.
Writing graphic novels is a delight, a true flow experience. If I’ve done my job on this project, the reader will share the flow — and the delight.
“Why a graphic novel on housing deregulation?” In any list of “necessities,” housing comes right after food. Yet regulators around the world really do treat developers like criminals, obsessed — nay, hyper-obsessed — with a small chance that “things could conceivably go wrong.” The end result is not merely drastically more expensive housing, but the loss of a long list of “things that reliably go right.”
Chapter 3, “The Panacea Policy,” tours the list. Deregulating housing raises productivity, increases social mobility, reduces inequality, slashes poverty, cleans the environment, raises fertility, and reduces crime. In a sensible world, housing deregulation would allow partisans of all leading persuasions to table their familiar arguments until skyscrapers cover San Francisco. (And no, I do not brush the recent Greaney/Hsieh-Moretti controversy under the rug; I re-designed page 86 at the last minute in response).
“If deregulation is such a good idea, why hasn’t it already happened?” Probably because most of the population is economically illiterate enough to deny that allowing more construction would reduce housing prices. And innumerate enough to think that dozens of minor complaints outweigh trillions of dollars of gains.
“Who did the art?” I fully storyboard my graphic novels, then micromanage the artists to bring my vision to life. This time around, my illustrator is Romanian artist Ady Branzei, who packs the new book with charming classic Disney homage. Ady is admittedly a lot less famous than Zach Weinersmith, my previous collaborator. But I sincerely hope that Ady, like Zach, will soon be so famous that he shoots out of my price range.
I wrote Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration because I think that deregulating international labor supply is the First World’s greatest missed policy opportunity. I wrote Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, because I think that deregulating housing supply is the First World’s second greatest missed policy opportunity. Though I know that radical policy changes rarely happen quickly, my dream is to inject YIMBY logic into the next generation ASAP at the highest survivable dose.
I’m delighted to start scheduling all forms of publicity immediately, though my plan is to delay the actual events until April 15. When I release a major new book, I devote virtually 100% of my non-teaching work effort to promotion. If it’s worth writing, it’s worth selling. I’m especially happy to talk to industry groups, who I view with great fondness. I only write about the evils of draconian housing regulation, but they have to actually deal with this nonsense in order to put roofs over all our heads.
P.S. All Bet On It readers (as well as the general public) are invited to the official launch party at the Cato Institute on April 30, with commentary from Megan McArdle of the Washington Post. Just click to register, and feel free to try to arrange carpools in the comments. I’m hoping for a packed house!
Greetings, Bryan Caplan!
I tweet under the handle @MoreBirths on Twitter/X. We are both pro-natalists and your book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (which I am holding in my hands as I write this) was the most important book of 2011 and in my estimation the most important thing you've ever written. I'll have to have you autograph my dog-eared copy at some point. I am friends with your colleague Robin Hanson, and I live locally in Rockville Maryland, so hopefully I really will have a chance to meet you and discuss our common pro-natalism.
Here's my thought which is vastly important and which I am not sure you have considered:
Seeing your cover art through the lens of the great low birth rate crisis that is devastating global economies, I don't see a cool futuristic Jetsons-style city. I think "OMG, that is Seoul or Shanghai or some other East Asian city with a TFR of 0.5 to 0.6 births per woman. If we build like that, population will crash even more, and civilization will be screwed."
Here are a few posts and threads I've written about urban high-rises and the ultra-low fertility that results. Please graciously look through threads (they aren't long) and consider amending your argument and cover art a bit.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1744831537936310394?s=20
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1697002137958404217?s=20
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1704991877970444557?s=20
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1761807352473272603?s=20
I fully agree that building is good and high housing prices crush fertility. But it matters dramatically what we build. If we build Atlanta-style (first post in the thread) fertility will be fine and we will be okay. If high-rises and ultra-dense housing configurations result, civilization will be crushed through Korean-style demographic collapse.
This is not some Korean quirk: the lower fertility associated with higher density is like an iron law of demography, true almost everywhere and at almost every time in history. And we can't just rely on markets to sort this out.
How does this square with economics? Don't we believe free markets will solve everything? Not in this case. First of all, the devastating signals of a collapse in fertility (and ensuing civilizational collapse) are hidden, removed from normal economic calculus and separated in time by a generation or more. But ultimately this devastation is real and dramatic.
Is the collapse in fertility that results from overly dense housing a tragedy of the commons? Maybe. Or maybe we need a new economic principle to describe the short-term/long-term mismatch (where we don't take into account long-term costs such as demographic collapse) that may result for the course we are taking.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html
Bryan, you are correct in a lot of ways. It is good to build more housing to alleviate crushes. If that ends up being more suburbs, and opening more farmland and exurbs for homes we will be okay demographically. But if we throw up high rises, Asian-style, we will be devastated demographically. That happened basically through free markets and it's an awful market failure from which the affected countries may not recover.
The problem with housing type is that housing can last for hundreds of years once it is built. Young people are eerily drawn to cities, where they will stay and have very low fertility. I was in Japan for 10 days (in an Airbnb house on the edge of Tokyo) with my family in September and I saw this. Tokyo has the lowest fertility in all of Japan, but they keep building more high-rises and young people are continually drawn to them. So, Tokyo isn't depopulating, the rest of Japan is. Young people leave the higher-fertility countryside for lower fertility Tokyo -- a depopulation conveyor belt that is crushing the economy and the nation. I wrote about how Japan's stagnancy is down to demographics in this viral thread (3.2 million views so far).
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1727059812746199301?s=20
Housing rules that favor limited density are critically important for fertility. If fertility crashes, at it is doing, it will take down everything else. Single family zoning seems like a violation of free markets, but it addresses the greatest market failure in world history, density-driven demographic collapse. And ultimately it forces people and companies and economies to spread out, resulting in a society that is demographically sustainable rather than collapsing.
Bryan, if you are still reading, I am so grateful! DM me at @MoreBirths and I'd love to discuss more or we can meet up. You are a hero for your pro-natalism, and I think this book can be dramatically improved by taking that into account!
What's the first world's third greatest missed policy area?