That may sound like a recipe for a small state, but in practice "creating incentives" often involves building huge bureaucracies to "keep the incentives aligned" (that is, to prevent private firms from ripping off public agencies).

This is how we get "solutions" that fail catastrophically, like:

* #PublicServiceLoanForgiveness instead of debt cancellation and free college:

studentloansherpa.com/likely-i…

* The #GigEconomy instead of unions and minimum wages:

newswise.com/articles/research…

6/

Research reveals majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage

As the cost of living continues to spiral, a new report shows more than half of gig economy workers in the UK are paid below the minimum wage.

^{University of Bristol (Newswise)}

* Interest rate hikes instead of price caps and windfall taxes:

npr.org/2023/05/03/1173371788/…

* Tax breaks for billionaire philanthropists instead of taxing billionaires:

memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10…

* Subsidizing Uber instead of building mass transit:

prospect.org/infrastructure/ci…

* Fraud-riddled carbon trading instead of emissions limits:

pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/vol…

7/

When Cities Turn to Uber, Instead of Buses and Trains

Some money-losing transit districts shift to ridesharing—but the cost for that may prove even greater.

^{Alexander Sammon (The American Prospect)}

As infuriating as all of this "actually, your boss is right" nonsense is, the most immediate and continuously frustrating aspect of it is the housing crisis, which has engulfed cities all over the world, to the detriment of nearly everyone.

America led the way on screwing up housing. There were two major New Deal/post-war policies that created broad (but imperfect and racially biased) prosperity in America: housing subsidies and labor unions.

8/

Of the two, labor unions were the most broadly inclusive, most available across racial and gender lines, and most engaged with civil rights struggles and other progressive causes.

So America declared war on labor unions and told working people that their only path to intergenerational wealth was to buy a home, wait for it to "appreciate," and sell it on for a profit. This is a disaster.

9/

Without unions to provide countervailing force, every part of American life has worsened, with stagnating wages lagging behind skyrocketing expenses for education, health, retirement, and long-term care. For nearly every homeowner, this means that their "most valuable asset" - the roof over their head - must be liquidated to cover debts.

10/

Meanwhile, their kids, burdened with six-figure student debt - will have little or nothing left from the sale of the family home with which to cover a downpayment in a hyperinflated market:

gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-d…

Meanwhile, *rent* inflation is screaming ahead of other forms of inflation, burdening working people beyond any ability to pay.

11/

The Rent’s Too Damned High - GEN

A human right, commodified and rendered zero-sum.. “The Rent’s Too Damned High” is published by Cory Doctorow in GEN.

^{Cory Doctorow (GEN)}

Giant Wall Street firms have bought up huge swathes of the country's housing stock, transforming it into overpriced, undermaintained slums that you can be evicted from at the drop of a hat:

pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wal…

Transforming housing from a human right to an "asset" was always going to end in a failure to build new housing stock and regulate the rental market. It's reaching a breaking point.

12/

"#SuperstarCities" like New York and San Francisco have long been priced out of the reach of working people, but now they're becoming unattainable for double-income, childless, college-educated adults in their prime working years:

nytimes.com/interactive/2023/0…

A city that you can't live in is a failure. A system that can't provide decent housing is a failure. The "your boss is right, actually" crowd won: we don't build public housing, we don't regulate rents, and it suuuuuuuuucks.

13/

Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving, Too.

Educated workers are increasingly migrating away from the country’s most expensive major metros — and have been since before the pandemic.

^{Emily Badger (The New York Times)}

Maybe we could try *doing things* instead of "aligning incentives?"

Like, how about #RentControl.

God, you can already hear them squealing! "Price controls artificially distort well-functioning markets, resulting in a mismatch between supply and demand and the creation of the dreaded deadweight loss triangle!"

14/

Rent control "causes widespread shortages, leaving would-be renters high and dry while screwing landlords (the road to hell, so says the orthodox economist, is paved with good intentions)."

That's been the received wisdom for decades, fed to us by #ChicagoSchool economists who are so besotted with their own mathematical models that any mismatch between the models' predictions and the real world is chalked up to errors in the real world, not the models.

15/

It's pure #economism: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/eco…

But, as Mark Paul writes for *#TheAmericanProspect*, rent control *works*:

prospect.org/infrastructure/ho…

Rent control doesn't constrain housing supply:

dornsife.usc.edu/pere/rent-mat…

At least some of the time, rent control *expands* housing supply:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/fu…

16/

Economists Hate Rent Control. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.

Half of Americans, namely homeowners, already have rent control. It’s time to expand it to everyone.

^{Mark Paul (The American Prospect)}