Seán Keyes

A lot of intellectual puzzles disappear if you model all 'endowments' – reliable incomes or wealth or property that people receive – as being possessions or rights in the eyes of the public. There is a tendency to see only classic common law property rights as actual, genuine property. In a sense, this is true. But I think to reify this distinction too much, we are applying our own moral distinctions to the situation artificially, in a way that doesn't predict people's behaviour. I think it's easier to understand people's behaviour if we see quite a few more things as morally like 'property' in the eyes of those affected: government payments – disability benefits, pensions, housing benefits, in-kind benefits like social housing, and valuable states of affairs that people have a stake in and care a lot about and have historically managed to keep fairly stable, like the character of their neighbourhood. All that's really going on here is the endowment effect. In general, people prefer to hold onto something versus getting a new thing of an equal value. My contention is that extent of the experienced endowment effect is largely driven by different dimensions of social trust. For example, developing countries find it very difficult to expropriate property in service of public goods, and they do it very seldom. The most developed countries can take property easily. (Compare building a metro in Delhi versus building it in France: in France the promoters will demolish freely; in Delhi they will build it over roads and rights of way they already own.) Drawing this out, an implication of my contention is that the paradigm feature of state & social development is being able to change endowments. The more people a government can, with public consent, make worse off, in service of a social end, the more developed it is. This is why I say that the recent inability of the Labour government to justify either raising taxes (making taxpayers worse off) or cutting benefits (making recipients worse off) in service of the nation's wellbeing (producing public goods), is an indicator of Britain's falling development level. Same for the US. nitter.cf/bswud/status/204113912…

One thing I believe firmly is that the YIMBY/NIMBY problems we have today are directly equivalent to the land fragmentation problems – and related political economy issues – that essentially all societies faced in their agrarian past. To begin with, homeownership is literally landownership in nearly all cases other than a few mass leaseholder locations like Singapore, Hong Kong, Britain before 1960, and Canberra, Australia. Second, it is 'splintered' or 'fragmented' into many different plots. In an important sense, the crazy cadastral maps of, say, Galicia in Northwestern Spain, look like the standard property lot maps in most countries today. Third, there are an enormous number of customary rules and rights governing how the land can be used. Farm life has always been partly communal, varying by crop, location, population density, and so on. To insure against bad years wiping them out, farmers owned (or had lease/copyholds on) strips across many fields. Strips were cultivated individually but rotations were coordinated collectively. Ox teams were shared. This is inevitable. So too today do we have land use rules that are designed to express the interest of the broader community, ranging from rules preventing me from extracting oil, tanning leather, or blasting music at all hours, to rules preventing me from knocking my property down to replace it with a giant block, shading all my neighbours, from housing dozens of extra people on my property, or even in some places just against making my house ugly enough to bother people. As @mattyglesias, @ProfSchleich, @nicholas_bagley, Bill Fischel, @CSElmendorf, @LawHeller, @RickHills2 & others have written, we need simpler, arguably more American property rights, the kinds of property rights that most European countries attained only after centuries of difficult reform. And I think we should look to those centuries of reform as a guide to what might be possible.