I’m now about halfway done with the storyboards for my new non-fiction graphic novel, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing. This time around, I’ll be published by the Cato Institute, a think tank I’ve been working with since the summer of 1991. If all goes well, this will be the first volume in an entire Cato library of books modelled after my Open Borders – works that combine high scholarly standards with compelling sequential art to explore underrated policy ideas. While fan favorite Zach Weinersmith was not available to illustrate my new book, I have found another stellar artist for the job, Ady Branzei (aka “Sebastian Soric“). Ady and I are both fans of classic Disney, so expect a lot of Disney homage.
Will I be content merely popularizing other people’s research? My official position is my non-fiction graphic novels are serious scholarship. How so? Because thoughtfully synthesizing interdisciplinary research is original research! The papers aren’t going to synthesize themselves, after all. My project is not to summarize a list of articles, but to collect research worthy of broader attention, then fuse it together to create a novel policy perspective. Along the way, I offer many new arguments and insights. And while arguments and insights are usually too swiftly communicated to publish as research papers, that’s because academia sadly rests on the Labor Theory of Value.
I keep tweaking the Table of Contents for Build, Baby, Build, but here’s the current plan:
Chapter 1: The Home that Wasn’t There. Here I explain why the supply-and-demand story for rising housing prices, though true, is deeply misleading. Why? Because regulation is strangling housing supply, especially in desirable locations. In a free market, housing would be very affordable throughout the country because building up and in is easy. We have the technology; what we lack is permission to use it.
Chapter 2: The Manufacture of Scarcity. Now I go over the empirical work that measures the effect of housing regulation on housing prices. Standard estimates of the effect are massive. It is very plausible that U.S. housing would be 50% cheaper under laissez-faire.
Chapter 3: The Panacea Policy. This part starts by exploring estimates of the effects of housing deregulation on GDP. But then it explains how deregulation would help cure a long list of social ills. Housing deregulation will reduce inequality, increase social mobility, enrich and uplift working-class males, curtail “deaths of despair,” raise birth rates, fight crime, restore the American Dream, and give an ideologically divided nation something constructive to do together. Hence, the “panacea policy.”
Chapter 4: The Tower of Terror. Needless to say, housing deregulation is extremely unpopular. This is where I explore all the standard externalities arguments: congestion, pollution, noise, aesthetics, and so on, with four main rebuttals. First, these negative externalities are greatly overestimated. Second, since gratis is not great, the prudent remedy is not restricting construction, but using tolls, fees, and taxes to address specific drawbacks of development. Third, building has enormous and almost totally neglected positive externalities. That’s why people currently pay a fortune to live in New York: the net value of all the good and all the bad of living in this metropolis is very good indeed. Fourth, even when an isolated housing regulation is helpful, it puts us on a slippery slope to disaster. Which is no hyperbole, because the disaster is here already. A beautiful confirmation of Rizzo and Whitman’s work on slippery slopes, by the way.
Chapter 5: Dr. Yes. This is the housing analogue of the Open Borders chapter, “All Roads Lead to Open Borders.” Utilitarians, egalitarians, libertarians, Kantians, Christians, and virtually everyone else should, on their own terms, support housing deregulation. This shouldn’t be a liberal or conservative issue. It should be an issue where liberals and conservatives hold hands and say “kumbaya” together. I’ll also probably discuss keyhole solutions here.
Chapter 6: Getting to YIMBY. How do we get from the world of draconian regulation, high prices, and cramped quarters to the world of freedom, low prices, and spacious living? Tough, but every policy journey starts with a non-fiction graphic novel, right?
Time to get back to work. I leave you with one of my favorite draft pages.
READER COMMENTS
Art K
Apr 7 2021 at 3:03pm
Thank you for working on this. This needs to screamed from rooftops. We don’t have enough housing because there isn’t enough capitalism in housing due to regulation. Housing is the biggest item in most home budgets and it’s time to bring the housing expense back down to earth!
Steve X
Apr 7 2021 at 3:35pm
It’s great to see that it’s coming along.
There are surprisingly few books on the impact of Zoning on housing prices.
As Art K says housing being the biggest cost for so many people is important. The BLS data on household spending shows this pretty well. Interestingly as late as the 1950s food was the highest cost item for households. The decline in the cost of clothing compared to housing is dramatic.
At any rate, it’ll be really good to see the book when it comes along.
Michael Hamilton
Apr 7 2021 at 10:36pm
I think you should spend some time specifically debunking Randal O’Toole’s work. That Cato is publishing this book at all is a sign that he’s on the outs, at least on land use issues, but he’s spent 30ish years advocating central planning in cities. This is a good opportunity to respond to his bad work.
Christophe Biocca
Apr 8 2021 at 9:04am
So I just spent a solid hour scouring his work because what you’re saying seemed at odds with what I remembered from his work. I mostly find things like this and this.
Seems like his advocacy is very much against central planning, though he makes drastically different predictions about what will actually be built if housing rules are relaxed: He thinks most people will choose to live in single-family housing in newly-build suburban areas on the outskirts, whereas most other YIMBY commentators expect highly elastic demand for living in the city core will drive rapid density increases. But both sides seem to support getting rid of rules and letting the market build what’s actually desired.
Michael Hamilton
Apr 8 2021 at 6:53pm
I see how you might have that impression, because he’s a very unclear writer and Cato won’t publish his worst stuff. He bundles his advocacy with the terminology of free markets even though he is stridently opposed to giving markets a chance.
Specifically, Randal O’Toole opposes upzoning, i.e. letting individuals decide what to build and where by making it legal to build something other than a detached home, because he thinks single family zoning is an acceptable substitute for his imagined world of universal covenants.
To get the good (bad?) stuff you have to spend more time on his inaccurately-titled blog and listen to him talk in person. Here are a few examples:
https://ti.org/pdfs/APB24.pdf
https://www.newgeography.com/content/006541-make-america-affordable-again
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=16299&fbclid=IwAR1o5OhdsPM3CYdxRjLKN6z-F3kwfGbFswZNT0I5qKtXqw1Rb35kxK5k2Lw
FEECON debate, 2017. I don’t have a cite for this one, but I was there in person and wrote it down. Adam Hengels might have a video somewhere.
He also started writing vignettes about his history of NIMBY activism, if you’re interested: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=16676&fbclid=IwAR35jEAlYj5Z0fw1Qw17Qzv4A6fv1IZlPzvTXLaBJ2Hlya2f2tgoDhNd6w4#more-16676
There’s a lot more where that came from, too.
My point isn’t just that he’s hypocritical or a statist, but underlying his positions are a lot of weak ideas and bad math. He’s frequently written about how housing can’t get cheaper with density because multi-family construction is more expensive than building a detached home, for example.
That construction costs do not dictate prices, or that paying more for multi-family construction allows developers to economize on land have not occurred to him, even though these are some of the most basic insights economists and developers have known for centuries.
“Suburbs are good” doesn’t really need advocacy because they’ll still exist in a market environment. He cares so much because allowing housing markets to function in America’s growing cities would lead to rapid increases in density, and he think that outcome is bad. Nearly every land-use regulation on the books in the United States is a restriction on density, and he somehow misses that.
Tejas Subramaniam
Apr 8 2021 at 8:24am
Would love to see some discussion of housing deregulation in developing countries as well! Land-use regulations, clearance requirements and permit costs, and rent control keep housing supply in Indian cities artificially scarce, for example.
Anon
Apr 8 2021 at 9:36am
But wasn’t Caplan working on a book called: Poverty, Who’s to Blame?
Don’t tell me he’s abandoned that!
K Wheat
Apr 8 2021 at 10:39am
The fact that you are working for and supported by Cato should tell everyone what they need to know about you and your publication. One cannot get much further right wing than Cato. They have zero social concience and promote an unabashed position of “Corporatism”. As Mussolini once commented, Corporatism is the correct name for Fascism because that’s what it really is. He should know because he developed the concept in Italy during the 1930’s. Your publication will no doubt be heavily “guided” by Cato and should be dismissed off hand as right wing garbage.
Max Avar
Apr 8 2021 at 3:23pm
Professor Caplan, may I ask why you chose to write both books in the graphic novel format? (Apologies if you’ve explained this before, but if you have I didn’t find it after a cursory Google search.) It would seem to me that they suffer some disadvantages as a result, namely:
The density of information per page is considerably lower with such a format, as compared to pure text. For serious readers interested in the relevant arguments and evidence, it will seem that substantive content has been cut in order to make space for the images.
Graphic novels are, fairly or unfairly, generally associated with fantastical stories aimed at children. For critical readers (or, more likely, nonreaders), the fact that you’ve presented your arguments in such a format makes it easy to take cheap shots at them. (Especially given how relatively sharp-elbowed debates on immigration and housing on the Internet tend to be.)
My perception—and I admit that it may be a faulty one—is that there aren’t many casual readers of graphic novels these days. That is, on the one hand, the kind of people who would be interested in reading a nonfiction graphic novel by Bryan Caplan would likely be equally interested in reading a nonfiction text book by Bryan Caplan. On the other hand, people who wouldn’t be interested in reading such a book are likely to mostly consume media like video games, movies, and television as opposed to graphic novels. So I’m not sure that the sacrifice of information density for serious readers would be offset by increased appeal to casual readers, as e.g. that of a documentary or television series might. (Possibly the sales figures of Open Borders as opposed to your other books falsify this speculation.)
Will I be content merely popularizing other people’s research? My official position is my non-fiction graphic novels are serious scholarship. How so? Because thoughtfully synthesizing interdisciplinary research is original research!
I fully agree in general, but didn’t Matt Yglesias already do this for the particulars of housing policy with The Rent is Too Damn High? How does this book differ from his?
AlexR
Apr 8 2021 at 6:30pm
I hope you’ll also give some thought to practical solutions to NIMBY sentiment. In particular, new housing construction will tend to lower market prices of the existing housing stock, something current owners will strongly oppose. And given that current residents are the ones with voting rights, they have veto power. To get actionable reform, there has to be some mechanism to overcome this resistance. The glimmers of hope from the prospect of California’s statewide rules nullifying local resistance are one possibility, but I think this will only work to the extent that the ratio of renters to owners is much higher statewide than it is in the localities where NIMBY sentiments prevail. Another possibility is some kind of transfer payment from new residents to existing owners. One thought is that builders could bid for the right to build in a particular area, the proceeds from the auction then being used to defray the property taxes of existing housing. Something like this would very much be a second-best solution to the NIMBY problem, but second-best is better than the status quo.
Pete S.
Apr 8 2021 at 10:47pm
Can I just give you money now? Open Borders is one of my favorite books of the last year.
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