Thanks for this. One additional point on the case for restrictions of supply, rather than interest rates or speculative property developers, being the problem. The chart you show which show incomes rising above rents is average across the UK. But the affordability crisis is biggest in the most productive cities like London, Oxford and Cambridge. There, rents are rising faster than incomes (as I know from bitter personal experience)
Advocating for street votes seems like a good high income country donation opportunity, though probably still worse than GiveDirectly, which is what we concluded from the Founders Pledge report.
Great graph. I should probably have included some discussion of this being largely a regional problem.
Yes, to be clear Founders Pledge did tell me that this was probably worse than GD/other things all things considered, so I am going against their recommendation to do this.
One argument for this being better than GiveDirectly might be that there is large value of information from the policy. If street votes gets through and produces large economic benefits without annoying the nimbys, then other countries could copy the approach. Proving it works in a large economy could have huge demostration effects since pretty much all rich countries have big supply problems. This could be a very big deal—it’s arguably one of the top constraints on global growth along with immigration controls, limited R&D funding etc.
Thanks for this. One additional point on the case for restrictions of supply, rather than interest rates or speculative property developers, being the problem. The chart you show which show incomes rising above rents is average across the UK. But the affordability crisis is biggest in the most productive cities like London, Oxford and Cambridge. There, rents are rising faster than incomes (as I know from bitter personal experience)
(source)
Advocating for street votes seems like a good high income country donation opportunity, though probably still worse than GiveDirectly, which is what we concluded from the Founders Pledge report.
Great graph. I should probably have included some discussion of this being largely a regional problem.
Yes, to be clear Founders Pledge did tell me that this was probably worse than GD/other things all things considered, so I am going against their recommendation to do this.
One argument for this being better than GiveDirectly might be that there is large value of information from the policy. If street votes gets through and produces large economic benefits without annoying the nimbys, then other countries could copy the approach. Proving it works in a large economy could have huge demostration effects since pretty much all rich countries have big supply problems. This could be a very big deal—it’s arguably one of the top constraints on global growth along with immigration controls, limited R&D funding etc.