housing crisis

222 results back to index

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

‘Housing in London 2017’, London Datastore, GLA 10. Edwards, Michael, ‘The housing crisis and London’, City, Vol. 20 (2), pp. 222–37, 2016 11. ‘What are renters thinking?’, Briefing by Sian Berry, Green Party Member of the London Assembly, 2016 12. Skapinker, Michael, ‘London house prices push out the people the city needs the most’, Financial Times, 9 September 2015 13. Fifty Thousand Homes, ‘London’s housing crisis and what it means for business’, http://www.fiftythousandhomes.london/facts/ 14. Chakrabortty, Aditya, Keynote speech at ‘London’s Housing Crisis and its Activisms’ one-day conference, hosted by the University of East London and Birkbeck College at University Square, Stratford, 26 April 2016 15.

…

But as she returned to her seat, she tripped up on a misplaced lead and fell, breaking her arm. It was an upsetting incident and felt to me like a disturbing metaphor for London’s housing crisis. I went home feeling that it was necessary to combine my work so far with a specific investigation of the housing crisis. At the same time, Bob Catterall, the editor of the brilliant multi-disciplinary journal City, had commissioned a Special Feature on the housing crisis, which I was co-editing with Paul Watt, Reader in Urban Studies at Birkbeck. I owe Paul a huge debt of gratitude for the work we did together on that Special Feature and the accompanying housing conference we hosted at the University of East London in spring 2016.

…

Outside some of these buildings ‘anti-homeless spikes’ prohibit homeless people from sitting or sleeping on the pavement. Since 2008 much has been written about the housing crisis. Exploring the fallout from that year’s financial crash, which combined large increases in wealth in property assets for the richest with widespread austerity, Big Capital makes explicit the links between the sheer wealth at the top and the housing crisis, which does not affect just those at the bottom but the majority of Londoners who struggle to buy properties and pay extortionate rents. From the removal from their homes of people on low incomes to the use of property purely as profit and no longer as a social good, the active flouting of democracy by business and local councils alike, the scandal in housing benefit and the pressure on individuals and families at all income levels, this is a new politics of space.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Available at www.gov.uk/government/speeches/home-secretary-speech-on-an-immigration-system-that-works-in-the-national-interest ‘Immigration “causing housing crisis”’ (2003): Daily Mail, 20 July 2003, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-189224/Immigration-causing-housing-crisis.html ‘Revealed: How HALF of all social housing in England goes to people born abroad’ (2012): Gerri Peev, Daily Mail, 15 April 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130095/Calls-British-people-given-priority-social-housing-queue-revealed-foreigners-HALF-properties.html ‘We don’t have a housing crisis – we have a population crisis’ (2017): Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 17 November 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-5091383/We-don-t-housing-crisis-population-crisis.html ‘Immigration has pushed house prices up by 20 per cent over a 25-year period, says Tory minister’ (2018): John Stevens, Daily Mail, 8 April 2018, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5592189/Immigration-pushed-UK-house-prices-20-cent.html no evidence that social housing allocation favours migrants: ‘Migrants and Housing’, Postnote 560 (August 2017), Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

…

The State of Housing Having spent the past decade working as a journalist specialising in housing inequality, I have watched and listened as the term ‘housing crisis’ has been repeatedly used. I have used it myself hundreds of times; it is a convenient shorthand for an inchoate feeling of unfairness, a series of specific social and economic problems and myriad political failings. The very term housing crisis is problematic, though. It implies a sudden catastrophe. By their nature, catastrophes tend to blindside us, cannot be easily prevented and are usually temporary: a tsunami or an earthquake. That is not what this is. This was as predictable as it was avoidable. The housing crisis is made up of a series of distinct but related emergencies: the instability of the private rented sector; rising street and hidden homelessness; unaffordable housing enabled by our country’s economic reliance on the housing market; the hoarding of property wealth; and a lack of social housing.

…

Available at assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/858908/Social_Mobility_Barometer_2019-2020.pdf ‘accumulative dispossession’: See Loretta Lees and Hannah White, ‘The Social Cleansing of London Council Estates’. nowhere affordable for key workers: ‘Camborne NHS nurse “may have to leave job” over housing crisis’, BBC News, 25 November 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-59409301 companies are seeing staff members leave: Ben Chu, ‘London housing crisis forcing workers to quit their jobs, says CBI survey’, Independent, 26 April 2018, www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/london-housing-crisis-cbi-survey-workers-quit-capital-house-prices-rent-a8321551.html figures provided by housing officers in September 2020: Amanda Cameron, ‘New figures reveal exactly how many affordable homes have been built in Bristol’, Bristol Post, 18 September 2020, www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/new-figures-reveal-exactly-how-4530278 This was, in part, because of arbitrary caps: Darren Baxter and Luke Murphy, Priced Out?

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

See Feargus O’Sullivan, “Lisbon Has a Plan to Reclaim Housing from Airbnb,” Bloomberg CityLab, July 8, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/lisbon-s-plan-to-reclaim-vacation-rentals-for-housing. 32.  Matthew Desmond, “The Tenants Who Evicted Their Landlord,” New York Times, October 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/rental-housing-crisis-minneapolis.html. 33.  Peter Calthorpe and Joe DiStefano, “Revolutionizing Transit and Solving the Silicon Valley Housing Crisis,” Urban Footprint, August 17, 2018, https://urbanfootprint.com/revolutionizing-transit-while-solving-the-housing-crisis/. 34.  Harry Truman, “Special Message to the Congress upon Signing the Housing and Rent Act,” June 30, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/131/special-message-congress-upon-signing-housing-and-rent-act. 35.  

…

Leilani Farha and Surya Deva, “Letter to Stephen Schwarzman” (March 22, 2019), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/Financialization/OL_OTH_17_2019; and Patrick Butler and Dominic Rushe, “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis,” The Guardian, March 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un. The same year, Raquel Rolnick, who succeeded Kothari in the UN position, published a book that drew on her experience reporting on the violent entry of globalized finance into housing in Europe and the Americas: Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance (New York: Verso Books, 2019).

…

Institute for Tourism Studies, “Disclosing the Economic Impact of the Vacation Home Industry on Osceola County,” prepared for Experience Kissimmee (Orlando: University of Central Florida, 2016), https://www.experiencekissimmee.com/sites/default/files/Vacation_Home_Impact_Study.pdf. 10.  Thorben Wieditz, “Addressing Toronto’s Housing Crisis?,” Fairbnb, January 9, 2019, https://fairbnb.ca/2019/01/09/addressing-torontos-housing-crisis/. 11.  According to a 2017 study, the increase in Airbnb listings nationally accounted for about one-fifth of rent growth and about one-seventh of housing price growth. Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Proserpio, “The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb,” Social Science Research Network, July 25, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’ Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years.

…

In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking. The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it? It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land.

…

And we need greater transparency around the planning system, with better online maps matching up land ownership, options and planning permissions, so the public can see who benefits from the planning process, and better engage with it themselves. 2. Fix the housing crisis: stop landowners hoarding land and leaving homes empty At its heart, the housing crisis is a land crisis. The real cost of a house isn’t the bricks and mortar, but the land underlying it – and land prices have spiralled upwards 400 per cent since 1995. Politicians can talk all they like about building more homes, or slashing planning regulations to free up developers.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

The housing market is as tight as it has ever been.”44 One should not have excessive faith that the business turndown of 2000–2001 will spell much relief for San Francisco’s overburdened housing consumers. But these same forces creating a housing crisis in San Francisco have also produced probably the strongest local housing movement in the nation. San Francisco’s Housing Movement TOOR’s fight against displacement from the South of Market area and related struggles in the Western Addition were the 1960s forerunners of San Francisco’s housing movement. Starting in the early 1970s, the Tenants Ac- Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 337 tion Group and later the San Francisco Tenants Union45 organized individual buildings around maintenance and repair issues and provided tenants’ rights counseling, mainly in the Haight-Ashbury and Fillmore neighborhoods, via a “hotline” and publication of tenants’ rights handbooks.

…

In the early eighties, it was reported that “Mayor Feinstein wants to avoid turning the city into what she termed ‘a magnet for the homeless of the entire Bay Area, the state and the U.S.’ ”172 But it is highly unlikely that homeless folks just hanker to live on San Francisco’s streets as opposed to Chicago’s or Atlanta’s. The problem for the most part afflicts local residents who, due to poverty, the city’s housing crisis, and, for some, personal issues, are frozen out of the housing market. Sentiments such as those expressed by Feinstein are heard by city officials all over America and mask an unwillingness to provide the needed services. Paul Boden, director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness, accurately notes: “I don’t know of one city in the country that doesn’t say it’s a magnet and that homeless peo- Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 381 ple come from somewhere else. Fargo, North Dakota, was calling itself a magnet.

…

City for Sale OTHER BOOKS BY CHESTER HARTMAN Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning Housing: Foundation of a New Social Agenda (with Rachel Bratt and Michael Stone) Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America Paradigms Lost: The Post Cold War Era (with Pedro Vilanova) Housing Issues of the 1990s (with Sara Rosenberry) Winning America: Ideals and Leadership for the 1990s (with Marcus Raskin) Critical Perspectives on Housing (with Rachel Bratt and Ann Meyerson) The Transformation of San Francisco America’s Housing Crisis: What Is to Be Done? Displacement: How to Fight It (with Dennis Keating and Richard LeGates) Housing and Social Policy Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco The World of the Urban Working Class (Marc Fried, with Chester Hartman) Housing Urban America (with Jon Pynoos and Robert Schafer) City for Sale The Transformation of San Francisco R E V I S E D A N D U P D AT E D E D I T I O N CHESTER HARTMAN with Sarah Carnochan University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

Words and music © Leon Rosselson, 1975 The lyrics are derived from a seventeenth-century pamphlet attributed to the English Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley. ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOME ‘In this hard-hitting and timely book Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live?’ Paul Mason, journalist and author of PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future ‘A wide ranging and thorough analysis of where we have gone wrong in housing in Ireland, followed by innovative ideas for putting things right.’

…

Michelle Norris, Head of School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College, Dublin ‘Ó Broin argues that the Irish housing system is dysfunctional because of successive governments’ over reliance on the private market to meet housing demand. He argues for a new form of State involvement in housing – public housing – as the only way of ensuring that everyone will have an opportunity to live in a good quality affordable home. This book is accessible to anyone who is interested in solutions to the current housing crisis.’ – Simon Brooke, adjunct assistant professor at Trinity College, Dublin Democratic Programme Adopted by Dáil Éireann 21.1.1919 We declare in the words of the Irish Republican Proclamation the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be indefeasible, and in the language of our first President, Pádraig Mac Phiarais, we declare that the Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation, and with him we reaffirm that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.

…

From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns. The lesson I take from it is: it can all be redrawn again, this time with the people in control. In this hard-hitting and timely book, Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists, and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live? Paul Mason is a British journalist and author of the book Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future Overture Inadequate Language Every day our attention is drawn to housing.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

(“The Death of the Fringe Suburb,” read one recent headline; “Struggling in the Suburbs,” said another; a third declared, “The Housing Crisis Could End Suburbia as We Know It.”) Meanwhile, a cache of articles, papers, and popular books has heralded the resurgence of cities. But what the headlines miss is that while much of the hurt can be blamed on the recent recession and its immediate effects, there are larger trends at work. Many of the suburbs affected by the housing crisis are not experiencing a temporary setback but a permanent one, the result of a powerful tectonic shift whose forces have been grinding away for quite some time

…

As of this writing, we have a 4.4-month supply of existing homes, the lowest housing supply since early 2006. But the migration of wealth from suburb to city started well before Wall Street concocted the no-income, “no-doc” loans that led to the housing crisis. Cities’ renaissance started as early as the mid-1990s, urban housing prices have been rising since 1980, and crime rates have been falling for almost as long. Toll Brothers started moving into the New York City market in 2003. The trend might have been accelerated by the housing crisis, but it was happening already. Home valuations are now reflective of the shift inward. Christopher Leinberger, analyzing data from the online real estate database Zillow, found this to be the case by comparing real estate prices in center cities and inner suburbs with their far-out suburban counterparts in the late 1990s and today.

…

One of the hottest areas is in multifamily construction—the market for apartment and condo buildings and other structures containing four or more housing units, whether in cities or in suburbs. Construction of this kind of housing has more than doubled since the housing crisis set in. Part of this growth is due to a boom in the market for rental housing. The number of renters surged by more than five million in the 2000s, the largest ten-year increase since World War II. Vacancy rates are down and rents are soaring across the country, even in markets with lots of foreclosures. The vast majority of multifamily housing starts these days are rentals, whereas in the height of the housing crisis they were predominantly condos for sale. Meanwhile, the urbanization of the suburbs has only just begun.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

In March 2014, the following headline appeared in London’s Evening Standard: ‘Sell Public Land to Solve Housing Crisis, Boris Johnson Is Told.’1 And in this case it was not Whitehall doing the telling. Johnson, then London mayor, was being instructed to privatize public land in the capital by London First, a business lobby group. He would hear the same message from the Berkeley Group, one of Britain’s leading property developers. In 2012, Johnson had commissioned the development analysts Molior to research barriers to housing delivery in London, which prompted Berkeley in 2015 to proffer its own diagnosis and advice regarding the same issue: ‘Despite the housing crisis and need for the public sector to raise funds, public sector land is not being released quickly enough for development’.

…

Wallwork, ‘UK Government Pledges £5 Billion Towards Housebuilding’, Property Forum, 3 October 2016, at propertyforum.com. 2 Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Accelerating the Release of Surplus Public Sector Land: Progress Report One Year On (London: DCLG, 2012), p. 5. 3 Cabinet Office, Government’s Estate Strategy, p. 4. 4 Local Government Association and Cabinet Office, ‘One Public Estate: Transforming property and services’, August 2014, p. 4, at local.gov.uk. 1 HL Deb 15 July 2014, c230GC. 2 DCLG, Accelerating the Release of Surplus Public Sector Land, p. 5. 3 See, for example, H. Osborne, ‘UK House-Building Crisis – and How to Solve It’, Guardian, 19 May 2014. 4 G. Trefgarne, ‘Planning Log-Jam “Has Created Housing Crisis”’, Telegraph, 15 January 2003. 5 K. Niemietz, Abundance of Land, Shortage of Housing, IEA Discussion Paper No. 38, April 2012 – pdf available at iea.org.uk. 1 D. Bowie, ‘Responses to the Housing Crisis in the UK’, paper presented at the RC21 ‘The Ideal City’ conference, Urbino, Italy, 27–29 August 2015. 2 Bowie identifies two in particular – Paul Cheshire and Alun Evans – and cites two studies: P.

…

Geoghegan, ‘Budget 2017: HCA to get new planning powers in expanded role’, 22 November 2017, at planningresource.co.uk. 4 Part of the reason compulsory purchase powers are considered inadequate as currently constituted (including subsequent to the modest measures announced in the November 2017 budget) is that, since the beginning of the 1960s, councils have been required to pay inflated prices (instead of existing value) for compulsorily purchased land, because the price must take into account potential planning permissions and infrastructure developments (see Chapter 2). Hence growing calls for local authorities to be able to acquire land at existing-use value, as they were in the 1950s – see, for example, J. Evans, ‘Major Land Reform Urged to Fix UK Housing Crisis’, Financial Times, 23 August 2017; D. Bentley, The Land Question: Fixing the Dysfunction at the Root of the Housing Crisis (London: Civitas, 2017). In early 2018, the Labour party explicitly nailed its colours to this particular policy mast, with the shadow home secretary, John Healey, drawing up proposals for a new Sovereign Land Trust empowered to compulsorily buy sites with the ‘hope value’ removed and thus at prices closer to those without planning permission – a move, he said, that would cut the cost of building council houses by nearly 40 per cent.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

These studies all: Richard Florida, “How Housing Supply Became the Most Controversial Issue in Urbanism,” City Lab, May 23, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/residential-zoning-code-density-storper-rodriguez-pose-data/590050/; “Blanket Upzoning—A Blunt Instrument—Won’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis,” The Planning Report, March 15, 2019, https://www.planningreport.com/2019/03/15/blanket-upzoning-blunt-instrument-wont-solve-affordable-housing-crisis. “We can work together”: “Remarks by the President at U.S. Conference of Mayors,” Obama White House, January 21, 2016, http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/21/remarks-president-us-conference-mayors.

…

It’s the concentration of opportunity and the rising cost of being near it. It says much about today’s winner-take-all economy that many of the cities with the most glaring epidemics of homelessness are growing technology and finance centers where good-paying jobs are plentiful and industries of the future are on the rise. California, home of the nation’s worst housing crisis, has the dubious distinction of having somehow managed to produce some of the highest wages in America as well as the highest state poverty rate once the cost of housing is figured in. This didn’t happen all at once. It has become a popular narrative, at least in a certain kind of high-cost city, to say that the reason housing has become so expensive is that working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified, foreign investors are parking money in U.S. condominiums, houses and apartments are being commodified by hedge funds, and companies like Airbnb are turning rental buildings into hotels.

…

When the country’s highest-growth regions become so expensive that it is considered an extravagant luxury for people to live near jobs and industries that everyone in America has played at least some role in building, that qualifies as a major national issue. Golden Gates is the story of how we got here and some of the early efforts to solve what is fast becoming a national housing crisis. It’s a story about one group of people searching for new homes while another group of people clings to the ones they have. The struggle at the center is the struggle to make space and coexist. This is fundamentally a struggle of politics, but those politics do not conform to a red/blue map. Cities are ultimately about people, so this book is too.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

Chapter 17, Superficial Data Analysis: Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes, by Brendan O’Connor and Lukas Biewald, shows the correlations and patterns that emerge when people are asked to anonymously rate one another’s pictures. Chapter 18, Bay Area Blues: The Effect of the Housing Crisis, by Hadley Wickham, Deborah F. Swayne, and David Poole, guides the reader through a detailed examination of the recent housing crisis in the Bay Area using open source software and publicly available data. Chapter 19, Beautiful Political Data, by Andrew Gelman, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Yair Ghitza, shows how the tools of statistics and data visualization can help us gain insight into the political process used to organize society.

…

It could probably be argued that housing prices had a significant effect on the CPI throughout the period under study. With this basic overview in hand, we now drill down into the details. In the following sections we break the house sales into smaller groups, first by price and then by location. We are interested in finding out whether the housing crisis has affected some groups of homeowners more than others. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer Has the housing crisis equally affected the rich and the poor? Has the effect of the crisis been to improve or worsen the relative equality of these two groups? In this section, we will explore how the crisis has affected the distribution of housing prices.

…

The correlation between price drop and commute time is weak, but note that all of the cities with the longest commute times (more than 35 minutes) have particularly large drops in price. It appears that the housing crisis has been relatively more damaging in poorer areas. The county-level census data contains more variables than the data for cities, so we analyzed the county data for further explanation of the housing crisis. The plot at the top of Figure 18-12 shows, for each county in which we had sales data, the percentage change in the number of housing units (from 2000 to 2006) plotted against the median sale price in 2008.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Although the dominant global pattern is the eviction of the poor from the center, some Third World cities reproduce US-style urban segregation, with the postcolonial middle classes fleeing from the core to gated suburbs and so-called "edge cities." This has long been the case in Kingston, where one quarter of a million poor people inhabit the crime-ridden but culturally dynamic Downtown, wThile the middle 40 David Glasser, "The Growing Housing Crisis in Ecuador" in Carl Patton (ed.), Spontaneous Shelter: International Perspectives and Prospects, Philadelphia 1988, p. 150. 41 Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanche%: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, New York 1961. 42 Kalinga Tudor Silva and Karunarissia Athukorala, The Watta-Dwellers: A Sociological Study of Selected Urban Tow-Income Communities in Sri Tanka, Lanham (Md.) 1991, p. 20. 43 Feng-hsuan Hsueh, Beijing: The Nature and the Planning of the Chinese Capital City, Chichester 1995, pp. 182-84.

…

As architect Djaffar Lesbet observes, however, this theoretically elegant balance between state aid and local initiative did not democratize access to housing: "The building plots have allowed those whom the system privileged to hold onto their lead, to achieve their own housing. They have also helped to reduce the dramatic and political tone of the housing crisis, by transforming this national issue into an individual problem."44 As a result, civil servants and others have acquired subsidized detached homes and villas, while the truly poor have ended up in illegal shacks in bidonvilles. Although lacking the revolutionary elan of Algeria, Tunisia also developed substantial state-subsidized housing, but 75 percent of it was unaffordable by the poor, who instead crowded into Tunis's sprawling slums such as Ettadhamen, Mellassine, and Djebel Lahmar.45 India illustrates the same trend in several different guises.

…

Most of the site-and-service lots ended up in the hands of state employees and the middle class.12 Planning expert Charles Choguill says this is unsurprising because the minimum savings required by the World Bank to qualify for a construction loan was so high that it automatically excluded most of the squatters.13 Likewise, in another site-and-service scheme in Lusaka, only one fifth went to the target group, and roughly the same dismal result obtained in Dakar.14 Writing in 1993, the ILO's A. Oberai concluded that World Bank slum-upgrading and sites-and-services projects had largely failed to have visible impact on the housing crisis in the Third World: "Despite efforts to make projects replicable, the project approach ties up excessive resources and institutional effort in a few locations and has not been able to achieve the desired level of housing stock. The project approach is therefore unlikely to have a significant impact on solving the problem of shelter in most developing countries."15 Other critics pointed to the programmatic disassociation of housing provision from employment creation, and the inevitable tendency for sites-and-services schemes to be located in peripheries poorly served, if at all, by public transport.16 11 Greg O'Hare, Dina Abbott, and Michael Barke, "A Review of Slum Housing Policies in Mumbai," Gties 15:4 (1998), p. 279. 12 A.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

On one hand, the cottage suburbs presented a more idealistic and generous response to working-class housing needs, but pressures of space and affordability seemed to compel the tenement as a feasible solution. This contest between multi-storey living – densification in current jargon – and low-rise persisted, fought out in the competing visions of architects and planners and the conflicting priorities of politicians. After 1914, the political class would find that the Great War created a housing crisis among a working class that it both needed and feared more strongly than ever before. This compelled a new, larger and far more generous state operation to manage housing. And so, in 1919, the first great age of council house building began. 2 ‘The World of the Future’: The Interwar Period The ‘Homes and Property’ section of the Evening Standard describes the Dover House Estate as ‘a charming enclave on the western edge of Putney’.1 In 1919, the local middle classes looked far less favourably on this new LCC estate.

…

The kitchen had an Electrolux refrigerator, a New World gas stove, plenty of cupboards. There was a nice garden. It was like coming into a fortune. My wife said, ‘Start measuring for the lino’.4 Another expedient, begun under wartime emergency powers granted in 1939 but maintained through the post-war housing crisis, was requisitioning of empty properties to house those in need. A total of 71,493 properties were requisitioned during the war, and another 51,695 up to 1951.5 Some authorities, particularly Labour ones, used the powers enthusiastically. For example, in Hackney by 1950, 3,800 homes had been taken over to house those on the waiting list.

…

But, Carlisle City Council, having overseen the demolition of good council housing, soon came to identify a net annual shortfall of 708 affordable homes over the next five years.50 I doubt that Carlisle – far away from the overheated housing markets and relative affluence of the South-East – has suffered an excess of gentrification, but the Alice in Wonderland logic of tackling a housing crisis by destroying solid, genuinely affordable and much-needed council homes seems plain. Despite that criticism, it’s nevertheless important to make one simple observation. I’ve probably seen more council estates (many of them no longer ‘council’, of course) than most people in recent years and the vast majority of them look good: well-maintained, attractively landscaped, overwhelmingly – unless my experience is very unrepresentative or Panglossian – quiet and respectable.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

BARBOUR, Elisa. (2006, February). “Time to Work: Commuting Times and Modes of Transportation of California Workers,” Public Policy Institute of California, http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=660. BARKHAM, Patrick. (2014, October 1). “Britain’s housing crisis: are garden cities the answer?,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/01/britains-housing-crisis-are-gaden-cities-the-answer-ebbsfleet-kent-green-belt. BARRAGAN, Bianca. (2014, April 2). “Los Angeles is the Biggest Anti-Sprawl Success Story in the US,” Curbed Los Angeles, http://la.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/los_angeles_is_the_biggest_antisprawl_success_story_in_the_us.php.

…

CHRISTOPHER, A.J. and TARVER, James D. (June 1994). “Urbanization during Colonial Days in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Urbanization in Africa: A Handbook, Westport: Greenwood Press, 46–7. CHU, Ben. (2014, February 9). “Britain is suffering from a housing crisis—who is to blame and how can we fix it?,” Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/property/house-and-home/property/britain-is-suffering-from-a-housing-crisis—who-is-to-blame-and-how-can-we-fix-it-9113329.html. CINCO RANCH LIFE. “Cinco Ranch History,” http://www.cincoranchlife.org/page/20251~312161/Cinco-Ranch-History. CITY LIFE. (2014, April 25). “Micro Units—The Newest Trend in Real Estate,” CitiesJournal, http://www.citiesjournal.com/micro-units-newest-trend-real-estate/.

…

“Perth—Australia’s most diverse capital,” Committee for Perth, http://www.committeeforperth.com.au/pdf/Advocacy/ReleaseCulturalDiversityJan2013.pdf. MONTEFIORE, Simon Sebag. (2011). Jerusalem: The Biography, New York: Knopf. MOORE, Rowan. (2015, March 14). “Britain’s Housing crisis is a human disaster. Here are 10 ways to solve it,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/14/britain-housing-crisis-10-ways-solve-rowan-moore-general-election. MORGAN, Edward. (2012, August 14). “Sex (Or Not) and the Japanese Single,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003019-sex-or-not-and-japanese-single. MOROZOV, Evgeny. (2011, January 8).

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Boomers confronting a bad job market have often faced an agonizing choice between struggling to find work in the area where they’ve lived for years, or having to sell houses that might now be worth less than they paid for them just to have a chance at moving somewhere else where jobs are more readily available. Unquestionably the Boomers were hammered by a housing crisis. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Millennials have been, too. Or more precisely, Millennials have been hammered by all the steps the Boomers took to try to rescue themselves from their own housing crisis. Meet Generation Rent We all know the stereotypes about Millennial living arrangements—the basement-dwelling, couch-surfing, with-parents-living stuff of Boomer parents’ nightmares.

…

The Boomers wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for homeownership, and that’s true even after the financial crisis erased trillions of dollars of housing equity and pushed millions of mortgages into foreclosure. That’s why it’s a pretty big problem that Millennials can’t buy houses. And yes, there really is a Millennial housing crisis. This is the one area of any survey of Millennial misfortune where Boomers are likely to have the least sympathy. Millennials, who were too young to have bought houses in large numbers during the boom, didn’t see large amounts of home equity wiped out in the 2007 housing meltdown. Boomers and Gen Xers did.

…

Now millions of people could enjoy the stability of a salaried job, while also having the means to accumulate wealth every month with their mortgage payments. The housing market had helped create a new middle class—and with it, a new American economy. The problem is that in the 1990s, as they came into their own politically, the Boomers got greedy. It all started with what at the time seemed like a housing crisis afflicting the Boomers. The homeownership rate started a gentle decline from above 65 percent in the late 1970s to less than 64 percent in the mid-1980s.29 Far more worrying, homeownership among younger buyers ages twenty-five to forty-four fell during the 1980s from just above 60 percent in 1980 to just below 56 percent in 1990, a level lower than it had been in 1960.

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

* * * According to the system’s designers and funders, coordinated entry upends the status quo in homeless services that privileged stronger clients. It builds new, deeper bonds between service providers throughout Los Angeles, leading to increased communication and resource sharing. It provides sophisticated, timely data about the nature of the housing crisis that can be used to shape more responsive policy-making. But most crucially, by matching homeless people to appropriate housing, it has the potential to save the lives of thousands of people. One of those people is Monique Talley. I met Monique, a round-faced, freckled African American woman, at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), a nearly 40-year-old organization dedicated to addressing the needs of poor and unhoused women.

…

South LA is very family oriented. My grandmother saw five generations here.” Surrounded by flatlands and low warehouses full of stitching garment workers, the shelter has a dramatic view of downtown, floating like a jeweled island three miles north. Pathways to Home is trying to bridge the gap between South LA’s housing crisis and its thoroughly inadequate resources, offering beds to approximately 315 men and 115 women nightly. It is a low, large, beige building packed wall-to-wall with bunk beds with about two hand-spans of space between them. Despite the staff’s attempts to make everyone feel welcome and to preserve clients’ dignity, it feels like what it is: a warehouse for people.

…

There was a period of time, a lull of people being unresponsive to us. People were upset because—you come out here, you’ve been collecting information, what is the outcome?” Their cynicism is not unwarranted. It is not the first time the homeless have been offered a magic-bullet solution to the seemingly intractable housing crisis in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of services out there where they will meet with you, ask you all of these questions, promise you something, and never come back,” says Richard Renteria. “So, they got all this information to create this database, talk about how many thousands of people are homeless, [but] never come back to serve them

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

In Britain rough sleeping barely existed before the late 1980s. But by 1989, all along the Strand, in the heart of London’s theatreland, homeless people were bedded down in one doorway after another. This sudden flood of people on to the streets was a result of the crash which followed the ‘Big Bang’ and the consequent housing crisis, when thousands of homes were repossessed. Benefit cuts and policies on mental health also played a role, with the 1980s witnessing the closure of the old mental asylums, replaced by what became known as ‘care in the community’. Pressures on the NHS, which hit mental health particularly hard, meant that rather than being cared for in the community, many with mental health problems slipped through the net – and on to the streets.

…

The process of introducing market forces into the part of the public sector which was once housing policy began with Mrs Thatcher and was stepped up by Labour. While the debate over health and education is fairly robust, there has been no debate over the future of housing. The result is effectively the end of social housing in Britain, a national housing crisis and the creation of new slums. HOW PUBLIC HOUSING WAS KILLED OFF In 1978, the last year before Mrs Thatcher came to power, the government built more than 100,000 council homes and the private sector built 150,000. 17 Since then the figures for private-sector house building have remained roughly stable – although that fell with the downturn – but the government builds hardly any, which is the simple reason why there is such a shortage of housing, not merely for people on low incomes but for many professionals.

…

It went on to say, ‘Shelter, the organization for homeless people, has said the move will increase the number of homeless people and decrease the number of homes available to accommodate them.’19 More than 1.5 million people did buy their homes and the policy, which was very popular with those who could afford to buy, became one of the emblems of the Thatcher government, continuing once Labour came to power. So did the housing shortages predicted by Shelter, which have affected millions more than those officially defined as homeless, fuelling the housing crisis in the process. There are currently more than 1.67 million households on the waiting list for social housing in England, a staggering figure which reflects a 64 per cent increase since 1997. More than 600,000 of these households are homeless, living in overcrowded, temporary or other unsuitable accommodation.20 ‘Right to buy’ was a justifiably popular policy.

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But even architects should remain skeptical of the power of well-tested traditional models in the face of extreme social isolation. Diggstown, in Norfolk, Virginia: a neighborhood-style retrofit of a previously distressed inner-city project that epitomizes HUD’s new standards THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS Virtually all the thought brought to bear on the housing crisis has been directed toward the urban poor, and rightly so, for they inhabit an environment that most would find unbearable. But the housing crisis is a middle-class issue, too. It has become increasingly difficult for the middle class to own satisfactory housing. In 1970, about 50 percent of all families could afford a median-priced home; by 1990, this number had dropped below 25 percent.4 There are many reasons behind this phenomenon, but the most significant factor is evident in the image on the left.

…

TWO WAYS TO GROW THE FIVE COMPONENTS OF SPRAWL A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPRAWL WHY VIRGINIA BEACH IS NOT ALEXANDRIA NEIGHBORHOOD PLANS VERSUS SPRAWL PLANS 2 - THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS WHY TRAFFIC IS CONGESTED WHEN NEARBY IS STILL FAR AWAY THE CONVENIENCE STORE VERSUS THE CORNER STORE THE SHOPPING CENTER VERSUS MAIN STREET THE OFFICE PARK VERSUS MAIN STREET USELESS AND USEFUL OPEN SPACE WHY CURVING ROADS AND CUL-DE-SACS DO NOT MAKE MEMORABLE PLACES 3 - THE HOUSE THAT SPRAWL BUILT THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING PRIVATE REALM VERSUS PUBLIC REALM THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME TWO ILLEGAL TYPES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS 4 - THE PHYSICAL CREATION OF SOCIETY ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES OF A SOCIAL DECLINE DRIVERS VERSUS PEDESTRIANS PREREQUISITES FOR STREET LIFE 5 - THE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION MESS THE HIGHWAYLESS TOWN AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY WHY ADDING LANES MAKES TRAFFIC WORSE THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY 6 - SPRAWL AND THE DEVELOPER THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DEVELOPER THE INSIDIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE MARKET EXPERTS QUESTIONABLE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM STRUGGLES WITH THE HOMEBUILDERS A VISIT TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOME BUILDERS’ ANNUAL CONVENTION 7 - THE VICTIMS OF SPRAWL CUL-DE-SAC KIDS SOCCER MOMS BORED TEENAGERS STRANDED ELDERLY WEARY COMMUTERS BANKRUPT MUNICIPALITIES THE IMMOBILE POOR 8 - THE CITY AND THE REGION THE POSSIBILITY OF GOOD SUBURBS SUBURBS THAT HELP THE CITY THE EIGHT STEPS OF REGIONAL PLANNING THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AS A MODEL 9 - THE INNER CITY THINKING OF THE CITY IN TERMS OF ITS SUBURBAN COMPETITION THE AMENITY PACKAGE CIVIC DECORUM PHYSICAL HEALTH RETAIL MANAGEMENT MARKETING INVESTMENT SECURITY THE PERMITTING PROCESS 10 - HOW TO MAKE A TOWN REASONS NOT TO, AND REASONS TO DO SO ANYWAY REGIONAL CONSIDERATIONS MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT CONNECTIVITY MAKING THE MOST OF A SITE THE DISCIPLINE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD MAKING TRANSIT WORK THE STREETS THE BUILDINGS PARKING THE INEVITABLE QUESTION OF STYLE A NOTE FOR ARCHITECTS 11 - WHAT IS TO BE DONE THE VICTORY MYTH THE ROLE OF POLICY MUNICIPAL AND COUNTY GOVERNMENT REGIONAL GOVERNMENT STATE GOVERNMENT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ARCHITECTS CITIZENS SUBURBAN NATION Acclaim for SUBURBAN NATION APPENDIX A - THE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT CHECKLIST APPENDIX B - THE CONGRESS FOR THE NEW URBANISM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS INDEX Notes Copyright Page PREFACE TO THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION THE STORY OF SUBURBAN NATION Now that Suburban Nation has managed to stay in print for a decade and sell close to 100,000 copies, it seems excusable to tell the story of how it came to be.

…

This would be an important first step toward creating public spaces worthy of habitation. 3 THE HOUSE THAT SPRAWL BUILT THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING; PRIVATE REALM VERSUS PUBLIC REALM; THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME; TWO ILLEGAL TYPES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING; TWO FORGOTTEN RULES OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING; THE MIDDLE-CLASS HOUSING CRISIS Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements? —JANE JACOBS, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES (1961) THE ODDITY OF AMERICAN HOUSING Sprawl is made up mostly of housing.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

The Wisconsin activists, who believe housing is a human right, seize and occupy abandoned homes for homeless families without consent. For years, consumer advocates, human-rights and political activists, and others have called on the Obama administration to aggressively investigate and prosecute bankers and lenders whose actions led to the worst housing crisis in decades. We now know that the housing and subprime mortgage bonanza was rife with fraud and deception. This complicated enterprise included bankers, appraisers, notaries, investors, and disreputable middlemen who fabricated, altered, and cobbled suspect documentation together to sell properties quickly—whether people could afford them or not.

…

Unoccupied, blighted, and foreclosed properties are “health hazards” to the community, Fleming said. Since no one’s forcing the banks to come to the table and discuss rates that poor and struggling people can afford, “the people of the community are house sitting or community sitting.” It’s called the “community economic development plan,” Fleming added. The housing crisis has endangered the American Dream—where every family can own a home or simply have a decent place to live and raise their families. Say what you will about the home occupiers’ tactics, they have the courage to speak truth to power—and they refuse to be powerless. They have the audacity and courage to take on a multibillion-dollar institution.

…

Smith Goes to Washington” passion and purity. But too often, once lobbyists begin to exert their extraordinary influence, previously principled men and women sometimes become pawns in a game that only the spineless survive. This is why there has been such an absence of serious investigation into the housing crisis and no indictments against the multibillionaire bankers who profited from the subprime lending boom. In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama said that he plans to create a federal mortgage crisis unit charged with investigating the alleged wrongdoings of bankers related to real estate lending.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Travers T (2012b). Devo Max for London? Urban Government and Fiscal Autonomy. Presentation. Available at www2.lse.ac.uk/government/research/ resgroups/BGatLSE/Documents/Devo-max-for-London.pdf. Accessed 2013 Mar 14. Travers T (2013a). London’s housing crisis triggers a culture war. Evening Standard. Jan 29. Available at www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/tony-travers-lon dons-housing-crisis-triggers-a-culture-war-8471038.html. Accessed 2013 March 1. Bibliography 217 Travers T (2013b). Tony Travers on how Ed Koch’s style paved the way for Britain’s mayors. The Guardian. Feb 1. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/ 01/ed-koch1?

…

It is particularly gratifying that Greg sees London: World City with a legacy that persists, leading to a fresh agenda for 2021: updated challenges to be addressed if London, a quarter of a century on, is to retain and enhance its global xii Foreword leader status in the face of today’s competitor cities – the same intention and some familiar themes, although some of the challenges are new. Chapter 13 sets out eight ‘imperatives’ – critical policy priorities. They include a worsening housing crisis, seen as ‘perhaps the single major concern’: a worsening imbalance between need and supply, with issues of affordability, tenure and quality, in danger of becoming a serious drag on London’s future success. Related to this is the lack of any mechanism for relating London within its administrative boundary to its wider functional (in housing, labour market and transport terms) region in south-east England, requiring the creation of a fit-for-purpose governance structure: a challenge for the next Government.

…

Paul Cheshire, Professor of Economic Geography at LSE, has warned that the shortage of good-quality, affordable long-tenure accommodation may create 106 The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015 knock-on effects on salary demands and in effect render the city less competitive. There are also risks of serious price volatility brought about by the combination of inelastic supply and tied-up wealth (personal communication, 9 December 2013). There is no consensus on the appropriate spatial solutions to the housing crisis. On the one hand, the National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and suburban lobby groups have found allies in pro-city supporters of densification. Conversely, economists and opponents of the planning system support the social and commercial rationale behind housing development on underdeveloped land, including the possible creation of ‘garden cities’ in the south east (Travers, 2013b).

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants by Bethany McLean

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, crony capitalism, housing crisis, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, negative equity, obamacare, Pershing Square Capital Management, race to the bottom, Savings and loan crisis

The analysis was very similar to that in a paper called “Fannie Mae Insolvency and Its Consequences” that was circulating among senior officials at the National Economic Council and the Treasury. Even the language was similar. “A government seizure is inevitable,” it began. It noted the same accounting concerns, and even ended with a version of the same conclusion: “A fully government owned guarantor of mortgage debt might be exactly what is called for given the current housing crisis . . . without the need to satisfy a fiduciary duty to shareholders, Fannie might finally be able to perform its affordable housing mission in a helpful and proactive manner.” The Monday after the Barron’s story ran, Fannie’s stock fell 13 percent. Then, in mid-July, stories appeared in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

…

Later, in a 1936 speech to the National Association of Real Estate Boards—which would become the politically powerful National Association of Realtors—Roosevelt said, “We have not yet found a satisfactory solution to one of the most fundamental of our economic problems—the provision for all American citizens of the kind of homes in which they have a right to live. I know you, with me, will not be content until a sound housing program is established for the whole nation.” The attempts to fix the housing crisis brought about by the Depression, which became the roots of the housing finance system we have today, actually began with President Herbert Hoover. In the summer of 1932, Congress passed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act; the idea was that federally backed regional banks would make cash advances to their local member banks, thereby encouraging those banks to lend.

…

Less than ten minutes later, Geithner fired back a letter saying that the GSEs’ own analysis showed that principal reduction could help up to half a million borrowers and save several billion dollars. The core difference was in their views of the risk of strategic defaults, which Treasury argued was minimal. “You have the power to help more struggling homeowners and heal the remaining damage from the housing crisis,” Geithner wrote to DeMarco. But DeMarco would not budge. Treasury officials, and at least some of the National Economic Council economists, thought DeMarco’s view was ridiculously narrow. Taxpayers, after all, would benefit from what benefited the broader economy. “The White House couldn’t believe it,” says a former official.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Concrete tubes just over eight feet wide, with a bench that turns into a bed, could be your solution,” Daily Mail, January 15, 2018, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5271411/8ft-concrete-tubes-solution-housing-crisis.html; James Heartfield, “Britain’s Housing Crisis: The Places People Live,” New Geography, January 28, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003432-britains-housing-crisis-the-places-people-live. 50 Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male (New York: Harper, 2017), 11. 51 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 52 Office of the New York Comptroller Scott M.

…

CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

…

genericContentID=249797&channelID=311; Joel Kotkin, “The Progressives’ War on Suburbia,” New Geography, November 16, 2014, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004773-the-progressives-war-suburbia. 5 Patrick Condon, “Government should supply housing for up to 40 percent of Vancouver wage earners,” Think Pol, December 3, 2017, https://thinkpol.ca/2017/12/03/condon-govt-should-supply-housing-for-up-to-40-percent-of-vancouver-wage-earners/; Edward Ring, “The Density Delusion,” California Policy Center, August 20, 2019, https://californiapolicycenter.org/the-density-delusion/. 6 “A home truth for the Tories: fix the housing crisis or lose power for ever,” Spectator, April 21, 2018, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/04/a-home-truth-for-the-tories-fix-the-housing-crisis-or-lose-power-for-ever. 7 Joseph Chamie, “The Rise of One-Person Households,” Inter Press Service News Agency, February 22, 2017, http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/02/the-rise-of-one-person-households/; Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin, 2013), 38–39; Council on Contemporary Families, “Reminder: Marriage Is No Longer the Mode,” September 12, 2017, https://contemporaryfamilies.org/singles2017factsheet/. 8 Jan Woronoff, Japan: The Coming Social Crisis (Tokyo: Lotus Press, 1984), 349–50. 9 Choe Sang-Hun, “A Writer Evokes Loss on South Korea’s Path to Success,” New York Times, September 8, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/world/asia/shin-kyung-sook-mines-south-koreas-sense-of-loss.html. 10 “All the Single Ladies: China Leads World in Unmarried People—Report,” Sputnik International, December 21, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/art_living/201612211048842308-china-unmarried-people/; Chamie, “The Rise of One-Person Households.” 11 Joel Kotkin, “The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity’s Future,” Chapman University and Civil Service College of Singapore, 2012, https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/_files/the-rise-of-post-familialism.pdf. 12 Mary Eberstadt, “‘The Great Scattering’: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied by Family Life,” Quillette, August 27, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-great-scattering-how-identity-panic-took-root-in-the-void-once-occupied-by-family-life/. 13 Klinenberg, Going Solo; Liz Greene, “Why Millennials Are Choosing to Be Child-Free,” Role Reboot, February 6, 2019, http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2019-02-why-millennials-are-choosing-to-be-child-free/; Claire Cain Miller, “Americans Are Having Fewer Babies.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

I grew up in communist Poland, a once-proud nation razed to the ground in the final days of World War II, then subjugated by Stalin and unceremoniously subsumed into the Soviet Bloc. I remember childhood tales of distant relatives vanishing without a trace, and I recall long lines and ration cards for basic necessities like sugar and soap. Later, when I came to the United States, I lived through the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, and then through the housing crisis of 2007 to 2009. I watched friends go from earning cozy six-figure salaries to having their cars and homes repossessed. I kept telling myself this would never happen to me—all the way until, through a stroke of bad luck, I almost ended up on the street. In the end, my fascination with emergency preparedness isn’t rooted in a mean militaristic streak or a bleak outlook on life; it stems from a simple realization that disasters aren’t rare today, just as they weren’t rare in days gone by.

…

In a highly cited 2015 survey published by Bankrate.com, about two-thirds of Americans indicated they didn’t have enough savings to cope with an unexpected expense of $1,000.3 Although the findings of that study are also sometimes overstated by commentators, the underlying problem is real. During the 2007–2009 housing crisis (a comparatively mild recession next to some of the earlier crashes of the 20th century), the number of foreclosures in the United States exceeded 1.6 million,4 with a peak at more than five times the normal annual rate. Part of this involved investors or house flippers purposefully walking away from underwater nonrecourse mortgages, but part involved genuine tears and pain.

…

Filburn, a landmark Supreme Court case that greatly expanded the reach of the federal government. But both sides spend little time discussing the dynamics of the money supply in that era, or the contents of the balance sheets of multiple large banks that went bankrupt in the run-up to the crash. The housing crisis of 2007–2009 is another well-remembered instance, and so is its European counterpart—a sovereign debt crisis accompanied by bank closures and limited-scale deposit confiscations in the Eurozone (euphemistically dubbed bail-ins).11 But the analysis of its causes is entirely subservient to the political narrative too.

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Those concerned about the affordable housing crisis often focus a spotlight on rising rents. Clearly, a few million additional government rental subsidy vouchers would help. In addition, there is a place for investment in the building or rehabbing of more affordable housing. There’s actually already an underutilized mechanism in place at the federal level that could help with this—the National Housing Trust Fund. The NHTF is supposed to act as a pot of money that could be tapped by states to help support the building of affordable housing developments. Yet the recent housing crisis derailed efforts to fully fund the NHTF, and the federal government has yet to build the program up.

…

At some point, if the authorities were to find out that Kaitlin and Cole were sharing a room, Jennifer would be at risk of losing custody due to “neglect.” By today’s standards of child well-being, Jennifer can’t move into a studio apartment to help balance her family’s budget. The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1990 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters.

…

And yet they are America, as much as any other place in the country. Though these forgotten places are indeed a world apart, much of what the extreme poor in other regions experience is reflected in the experiences of these families, too. In the central Delta, welfare is just as dead as it is in the rest of the country, if not more so. The affordable housing crisis and the perils of doubling up are also richly evident in the Delta. So is the stubborn spirit of those with nothing to survive by any means necessary. But a key difference between other places and the economically distressed small towns and rural regions concentrated in the Deep South and Appalachia is the combination of a virtually nonexistent cash safety net and the virtual lack of any formal-sector jobs.

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

From 2007 to 2009, one out every six Tennessee workers producing these goods lost their job. The sharp drop in household spending in California, Florida, Nevada, and New York directly affected Tennessee workers. We cannot be certain of the number of jobs in Tennessee that would have been saved by policy efforts to mitigate the housing crisis elsewhere. But the view that helping troubled home owners in California and Florida was “terrible public policy” from the perspective of Tennesseans is suspect. When it comes to problems associated with levered losses, it does not matter where you live. As we’ve said, the ripple effects on the labor market mean that we are all in this together.

…

However, DeMarco’s position as head of the GSEs was different. The GSEs by this time were a public entity and effectively belonged to taxpayers. It was DeMarco’s responsibility to act in the wider interest of the American public and pursue principal write-downs. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the failure to respond adequately to the housing crisis was likely the biggest policy mistake of the Great Recession. Some have argued that debt restructuring would have had little benefit because spending out of housing wealth, even for indebted households, is too small to have made a significant contribution to GDP.21 This is a narrow view. As we explained in the first part of the book, the collapse in spending by indebted households infected the entire economy through foreclosures and employment.

…

Further, such an intervention would have cost very little taxpayer money—only the trustees would have needed to be compensated. The proposal would have allowed for more efficient renegotiation of mortgages that would have reduced debt and left both home owners and MBS investors better off—at little taxpayer cost. Another proposal put forth at the beginning of the housing crisis was the allowance of mortgage cram-downs by judges in Chapter 13 bankruptcy. In a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, an individual with too much debt submits a debt payback plan to a bankruptcy trustee in order to reduce his overall debt burden.36 Chapter 13 bankruptcy allows people to reduce debt that is not explicitly secured by some collateral.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

And that realization, that nobody has designed this experience for you—it’s terrifying. LESLIE DREYER We meet near City Hall and I make a joke about the number of times she’s probably protested outside this building. Part artist, part activist, she came to San Francisco to build a life with her partner. Then, the financial crisis hit in 2008, and the San Francisco housing crisis followed. Many of my friends were being evicted. Rents were skyrocketing. Starting in 2010, 2011, it was just a huge upward curve. And at the same time, the Google buses were all over the streets, the program had really amplified in those two years. So that was on the tips of people’s tongues.

…

Recently, the Board of Supervisors reclassified “affordable housing” to be for people earning 100 percent to 120 percent of the median income. That is no longer affordable; that’s just a developer giveaway. But developers fund their campaigns. It’s just this constant squeeze. It’s a global crisis. In Austin and Seattle—tech companies are growing there and a housing crisis along with it. Berlin and Barcelona and London and all these places are trying to deal with deregulated housing markets because of “home sharing” companies like Airbnb. The Bay Area’s history of resistance is helpful, but it seems the minute the movement gets in the way of capital, then it gets blocked or coopted.

…

The whole idea of taxing a business located in your jurisdiction is to offset the impact of the workers on housing availability, transit, parks, other city services. Today, cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are collecting business taxes from tech companies headquartered there, but they aren’t dealing with the impacts of the workers on housing. The link is ironic: the money to offset the housing crisis just isn’t available. The old rules are meaningless against the new technology—it allows these companies to pretend they are ungovernable. That’s why everybody is confused. There are virtually no protests at City Hall because nothing is being voted on. The crisis isn’t driven by decisions at City Hall or the planning commission.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

Many of these young adults will appreciate that they can live in a well-maintained, family-sized suburban home and send their children to good public schools without committing to decades of mortgage payments, tying up their savings in down payments, or risking entrapment in another market collapse. By renting, though, they forsake the method through which most Americans build wealth. Last decade’s housing crisis threatens a more lasting and far-reaching impact on American society than other historic market meltdowns because the previous crashes have generally been in the stock market and share prices mostly affect the rich. The behavior of voters and consumers might be swayed by the direction of stock prices, but most people don’t own much in the way of equities.

…

Even if Phillips was winning in court, the reception from buyers for the finished product at San Carlos was not a good sign for other towers topping out along the beach. It was clear the air was whooshing out of the condo bubble, but I still hadn’t made the connection between surgeons trying to wriggle out of a regrettable investment over some mildew and my own fortunes. 12 OVER THE HEDGE A timeline of the housing crisis prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis points to February 27, 2007, as an early sign of the brewing calamity when Freddie Mac announced that it would no longer buy the riskiest types of subprime mortgages. For me, the first hint of trouble was the smell of hot garbage wafting over the hedge.

…

NOTES Much of the reporting for this book was undertaken by the author for newspaper articles published by the Mobile Register, which was renamed the Press-Register in late 2005, and The Wall Street Journal. Included in each chapter’s notes are the relevant articles in the order in which the reporting first appears in the narrative, along with more specific citations for work that was not produced by the author. 1. THIS IS THE ONE Ryan Dezember, “My 10-Year Odyssey Through America’s Housing Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2018. The collapse of the U.S. housing market wiped out Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” New York: PublicAffairs, 2011, xv. At its depths, more than twelve million Americans CoreLogic, “New CoreLogic Data Shows Second Consecutive Quarterly Decline in Negative Equity,” news release, August 26, 2010.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

When the status quo of climate change became untenable, it was these places that were sacrificed, these places that were the first victims of the logic of retreat. The rivers that run through the two towns may start far apart from each other, but they empty into the same ocean. CHAPTER THREE Burnout WILDFIRES, INSURANCE, AND THE HOUSING CRISIS Santa Rosa, California I. The Fire on Tubbs Lane Even five years later, the precise facts of the Tubbs Fire incident remain unknown. Here is what we can say for sure. Early on the evening of October 8, 2017, the wind started to blow in Northern California. This wind had begun as a high-pressure system rotating clockwise over the deserts of Nevada and Utah, but the descending jet stream had given it an extra push, boosting it over the Sierra Nevada and into California.

…

Almost every major city in the United States faces a housing shortage of some kind or another, but California’s combination of restrictive laws and rapid growth has made homeownership burdensome for middle-class families and all but impossible for low-income households. According to one estimate, the shortage exceeds four million units, which means ten million people need a home but do not have one. Although the housing crisis originated in the meteoric growth of the Bay Area and Los Angeles metroplexes, its tentacles have spread to every corner of the state, raising costs in the agricultural towns of the Central Valley and in remote mountain towns like Greenville. Santa Rosa is more than an hour away from San Francisco by car, but the region is still well within the reach of the Bay Area’s economy, and over the past thirty years it, too, has felt the pain of the region’s housing shortage.

…

Even so, the primary factors in the decision were economic. The Trans might have considered moving to a similar neighborhood with lower fire risk, and their insurance company would have been more than happy to see them use their claim payout to go somewhere safer, but there was no such neighborhood in Santa Rosa or indeed in all of Wine Country. The housing crisis had squeezed the area’s middle class almost to the point of nonexistence, and for the Trans, moving elsewhere would have meant upgrading to a much more expensive property. Their insurance policy gave them only enough money to build a Coffey Park–caliber house, and there was only one Coffey Park.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Despite the warning, the day felt like a victory. For now, they’re safe, and each has placed a red sign in the window that in big block letters reads “No Buyouts.” New York City is in the midst of a housing crisis. New York is also, because of its liberal politics, its wealth, and its semi-strong welfare state, in possibly the best position, at least compared with other US cities, to handle a housing crisis. And unlike in other cities, where the electorate is still split on how to solve the gentrification problem (San Francisco mayor Ed Lee ran unopposed except by a few protest candidates who garnered low percentages of the vote and who were not backed by party money; mayors of other cities will not even mention the G-word), New Yorkers appear nearly united in their desire for a progressive solution.

…

Around the same time, Baruch College and New York 1 (a local news station) conducted a survey that found 65 percent of all New Yorkers feared being priced out of their homes in the next few years. The findings cut across economic and racial lines: low-income residents, Latinos, and black New Yorkers were more likely to be worried about rising rents, but everyone, including a majority of people making over $100,000 a year, feared they were next in line. This is what a housing crisis looks like. If the middle class and even some upper-income people can barely afford New York, what does it mean for the working class and the poor? My brother and sister-in-law are lucky they’re able to afford more, even if it does strain their budget to remain in this city. I am flexible. I’m young, I have money, and I have no immediate family.

…

Even the city’s private developers have been pleasantly surprised by how pro-development the de Blasio administration is. His deputy mayor for housing and economic development, Alicia Glen, came not from a lefty think tank or nonprofit but from Goldman Sachs, where she oversaw $3 billion in investment in cities. In 2015, I got a chance to sit down with Glen and ask her about the city’s housing crisis. Our interview made it clear that she saw the need for action, but that her solution would not fundamentally challenge gentrification. De Blasio and Glen are progressives, but without challenging the fundamentals of real estate capitalism, their vision is severely limited. I asked her if she understood people’s concerns about being priced out of neighborhoods that were rezoned by the administration she works for.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

This has, as was intended, led to a dramatic increase in debt ratios, both in the public and private sectors. The main exception in recent years has been the reduction in the leverage ratios of banks, whose dangerous level in 2007/2008 was a major factor in causing the GFC, and household leverage in countries where this sector has gone through a housing crisis. Although debt ratios have risen dramatically, there is not enough concern about leverage. That’s because debt service ratios have not risen along with debt ratios, thanks to an almost exact inverse correlation between rising debt ratios and declining interest rates. This is set out in Chapter 11.

…

The speed at which the labour market adjusted is also striking. GDP growth fell from 6% in 1989 to −2% in 1994. The unemployment rate rose from around 2% in 1990 to 3% by 1995. It is only by 2003 that the unemployment rate peaked at just 5.4%. By contrast, the unemployment rate infamously rose to 10% in the USA during its own housing crisis. The unambiguous message from the labour market is that if there is one part of Japan’s economy that does not participate in economic adjustment, it is employment, i.e. the Phillips curve has always been flat in Japan, more so than in other advanced countries. The origins of Japan’s labour customs: World War II changed Japan’s labour market.

…

As a result, in countries like Canada, Australia and Sweden, households across North Asia, Poland and Chile have seen double-digit increases in household debt. Household debt in China, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand has risen around 20–25%. Household debt to GDP ratios in Malaysia and Thailand now are closer to levels seen in advanced economies, while the household leverage in Korea is not far from that in the USA on the eve of the housing crisis. With the personal sector in sizeable surplus, and asset markets very strong, the wealth of the household sector increased in the post-GFC decade far faster than its liabilities (n.b. the same was true in the previous decade 1997–2007). The problem, both then and now, is not with the general level of household indebtedness, but with that group, mostly young families, where debt is high, albeit temporarily because of age profile or unemployment, relative to income.

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

I arrived at work bursting to discuss alarming economic data erupting on all fronts. Stock market volatility, the collapsing subprime mortgage industry, and the mountain of household debt was unnerving. And not a sounding board for miles. My new colleagues shrugged, uninterested. They believed any housing crisis would be regional. After all, their boss Bernanke had said just that. Their indifference—and subtle hostility—was maddening. As far as I could tell, none of them watched CNBC in the morning. Of course they read the financial newspapers, if they bothered to check their mailboxes. I was often unnerved to find days of the Financial Times stacked up in someone’s box.

…

However, once inside, I confronted an uncomfortable question: Why were so many of its highly-educated and well-paid economists oblivious as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was about to break over their heads? Why had Greenspan been so resolutely blind to the housing bubble his low-interest-rate policies had created? Why didn’t Bernanke sound an alarm instead of repeatedly opining that the housing crisis was “likely to be contained”? Why was Janet Yellen, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, astonishingly clueless as the housing market in her region imploded? And later, why couldn’t Yellen—an economist known for her brilliant forecasting skills—foresee the consequences of the Fed’s disastrous zero-interest-rate policies after she succeeded Bernanke as Fed chairman?

…

In 2002, Bernanke, while on the Board of Governors, had paid tribute to Milton Friedman at a conference at the University of Chicago. Acknowledging Friedman’s work on the Depression and his criticism that the Fed’s tight monetary policy had deepened its deprivations for millions of Americans, Bernanke told Friedman, “We did it. We’re very sorry. But we promise not to do it again.” After years of downplaying the housing crisis, Bernanke had finally awakened to the imminent danger. The markets were in turmoil, with the S&P 500 Index down over 16 percent by the third week of January. On Monday, January 21, Martin Luther King Day, Bernanke went into his office believing dramatic action by the Fed was needed before the next FOMC meeting, scheduled for January 30.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

But it would greatly benefit America’s children and make it much easier for middle-class people to have the number of kids they say they want. As a policy reporter, I’m much more a generalist than a specialist. And I like doing stories about solutions. Like many people, when I look at something long enough I start to see patterns in it. The solution to America’s new urban housing crisis is to build more houses so more people can move to in-demand cities. The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow. Both America’s vast rural hinterland and many of its aging northeastern and midwestern cities need an influx of people to prevent their current priceless assets from wasting away.

…

The return of land scarcity It’s no mystery why a house might cost more to buy than to build—it’s because houses usually come with land attached and land can be expensive. Given the right setting, even a broken-down shack can sell for huge sums of money. A few years back, an eighty-year-old, nine-hundred-square-foot house in Palo Alto sold for more than $2.5 million and became the poster child for how land scarcity drives the housing crisis.* At the dawn of the economics profession, land scarcity loomed extremely large as a consideration. To the nineteenth-century British economist David Ricardo, diminishing returns were the central fact of economics. He felt that as a country’s population grows, people would increasingly need to move not to places where incomes were highest but to places where land was cheapest.

…

In other words, you can make a town allow duplexes but if the town says a duplex is going to need ten off-street parking spaces then nobody is going to build any. These concerns are not merely hypothetical. Way back in 2002, the California State Legislature attempted to address the state’s housing crisis by allowing single-family homeowners to build “accessory dwelling units” (aka granny flats or mother-in-law apartments). But as Margaret Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett showed, local governments simply responded by “imposing burdensome procedural requirements that are contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the state-law requirement that ADUs be permitted ‘as of right,’ requiring multiple off-street parking spaces, and imposing substantive and procedural design requirements.”* It was only about fourteen years later that a new, stronger pro-housing coalition emerged in the state legislature, passed a series of new rules designed to allow ADUs, and an ADU boom began.* Then in 2019, the legislature responded by passing a package of five new ADU laws—four aimed at further knocking down local barriers, and one allowing homeowners to build two ADUs rather than just one—fueling a further boom.* ADUs alone aren’t going to solve the California housing crunch.

Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

Below is the rest of the shark: a 13 who have art, activis just the new American economy HOLLOW 14 in which most of us thing will be ble. faster, will CITY be poorer, a few will be more homogenous and more far richer, and every- controlled or controlla- The technology boom and the accompanying housing crisis have fast- forwarded San Francisco into the newest version of the American future, a version that also is being realized in Boston, Seattle, and other cities from New York and Atlanta to Denver and Portland. A decade ago Los Angeles looked like the future —urban warfare, segregation, despair, injustice and decay, open the new corruption— ^but future looks like San Francisco: a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of numbness of incessant work hours and homes and neighborhoods. this country is in the a ripple effect Napa and Sonoma sive the anxiety of destabilized jobs, Bay Area, along with 30 percent of the multimedia/ boom that started in Silicon Valley has pro- throughout the region from south of San Jose to in the north. ^ San Francisco has had the most expen- housing of any major American city in the nation for but in the past few years housing prices —^both skyrocketing, along with commercial rents. at a hectic pace, and they in turn generate sales two decades, and rents —have been New businesses are coming in new boutiques, restaurants and bars that displace earlier businesses, particularly nonprofits, and the industry's workers have been outbidding out from under tenants at a for rentals breakneck pace.

…

All over the city, and replaced with bigger ones, long-vacant built and into dot-com sold, old industrial buildings offices Program puts and upscale down buildings are being torn lots are being filled in, and former nonprofit condos offices turned As San Francisco's Urban Habitat lofts. "The growing gap between low wage and high wage it, workers and the scarcity of housing, especially affordable housing for low income households, is resulting in the displacement of by middle and high income households ties of color."^ San Francisco and ing this housing crisis new jobs without many in historically traffic by encouraging the influx of new technology was the sprawling suburban enterprises and live capital and an aggravation in the nation. of the first become both a bedroom community for the Val- highly paid workers and the capital of the next technological wave the Internet, aka multimedia, with biotechnology about to huge presence in Mission Bay.

…

yuppies, and there is definitely tension Some on both filled the people have focused on sides of that divide —those who know they are considered yuppies, and those who hate whoever qualifies as a yuppie in their eyes. Some people have said that it's not the fault of those who came here looking for a job that there's a housing crisis, and it's the local politicos, real estate speculators, greedy landlords and developers who should be targeted. Some human need —housing— exists largely as a need takes back seat to profit. My own a fault a system in which a basic free-market commodity, so that writing has been about culture and politics in other senses.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

affirmative action, Cass Sunstein, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, dumpster diving, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, housing justice, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jobless men, Kickstarter, late fees, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, payday loans, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, statistical model, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, working poor, young professional

The remaining 67 percent—2 of every 3 poor renting families—received no federal assistance.32 This drastic shortfall in government support, coupled with rising rent and utility costs alongside stagnant incomes, is the reason why most poor renting families today spend most of their income on housing.33 Imagine if we didn’t provide unemployment insurance or Social Security to most families who needed these benefits. Imagine if the vast majority of families who applied for food stamps were turned away hungry. And yet this is exactly how we treat most poor families seeking shelter. — A problem as big as the affordable-housing crisis calls for a big solution. It should be at the top of America’s domestic-policy agenda—because it is driving poor families to financial ruin and even starting to engulf families with moderate incomes. Today, over 1 in 5 of all renting families in the country spends half of its income on housing.34 America can and should work to make its cities livable again.

…

In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that expanding housing vouchers to all renting families below the 30th percentile in median income for their area would require an additional $22.5 billion, increasing total spending on housing assistance to around $60 billion. The figure is likely much less, as the estimate does not account for potential savings the expanded program would bring in the form of preventing homelessness, reducing health-care costs, and curbing other costly consequences of the affordable-housing crisis.56 It is not a small figure, but it is well within our capacity. We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners.57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance.

…

On foreclosures of rental property, see Gabe Treves, California Renters in the Foreclosure Crisis, Third Annual Report (San Francisco: Tenants Together, 2011); Vicki Been and Allegra Glashausser, “Tenants: Innocent Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis,” Albany Government Law Review 2 (2009); Matthew Desmond, “Housing Crisis in the Inner City,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2010; and Craig Karmin, Robbie Whelan, and Jeannette Neumann, “Rental Market’s Big Buyers,” Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2012. Real estate investment manuals promoted investing in foreclosed and damaged properties long before the crash. “Distressed properties can literally make you rich,” one advised in 1998.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity.”69 It’s a laudable goal. However, tackling it will first require not only compassion from world leaders, but real change in Wall Street’s business model. In the midst of the housing crisis and Great Recession a few years back, I spent a lot of time traveling through the Inland Empire, a large metropolitan area in the middle of Southern California. It stretches an hour or two east of Los Angeles and Orange County, but is about as far away from the tony “OC” lifestyle as you can imagine.

…

In the early 2000s, predatory lenders flocked to the area, offering dicey deals to the largely minority and lower-middle-class white populations who, unable to afford housing on the coast, still craved the American Dream of homeownership. It ended, as it did in so many neighborhoods and cities across America, in tears and massive foreclosures, turning entire cities into ghost towns of derelict properties. As recently as 2012, when I visited the Del Rosa neighborhood of San Bernardino, one of the hardest-hit cities in the housing crisis, remaining homeowners’ efforts to keep their properties up were being thwarted left and right. Groups of young men and school-age kids with pit bulls in tow hung out in front of corner bodegas at midday. For every well-kept bungalow with freshly cut grass and potted plants on the porch, there was an abandoned building spray-painted with gang graffiti or strewn with dirty mattresses and empty liquor bottles.

…

Home values began rebounding from their post-financial-crisis trough in the beginning of 2012, and by July 2015, home sales had increased to their highest pace in eight and a half years.6 But the percentage of Americans who can call themselves homeowners is still declining from its peak in 2004, and many experts expect it to fall further as credit continues to be tight, young people struggle with higher-than-average levels of unemployment, and baby boomers begin moving into retirement housing.7 Fixing this housing crisis, as Warren Buffett once told me, is a fundamental prerequisite for fixing our economy. And yet, nearly eight years after the crisis of 2008, we aren’t there yet. The national housing market is in recovery, but like the larger economic recovery, it is incredibly bifurcated. Sections of Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are booming, while Detroit, Atlanta, and California’s Inland Empire are still coping with foreclosures and mortgages that are underwater.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Regional inequality was making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another—one world wracked with painkillers, the other tainted by elite-college admission schemes. It was making it difficult to settle on nationwide programs that could apply across such wildly disparate contexts—in one set of places, the housing crisis was about blight and abandonment, while in the other, it was all about affordability and gentrification. Inequality between regions was also worsening inequality within regions. The more prosperity concentrated in certain cities, the more it concentrated within certain segments of those cities, exacerbating long-standing imbalances or driving those of lesser means out altogether.

…

In his acceptance speech, Rubenstein said that as he was contemplating what to say, Andrew Carnegie had written him a letter from the beyond. “‘Good philanthropists invariably live very long lives,’” the “letter” read, “‘and when their time is up they are warmly welcomed into a special place in Heaven.’” * * * Seattle’s housing crisis had been building for half a decade—ever since Amazon had started building that enormous headquarters in South Lake Union—but the Seattle Times headline on April 6, 2017, still had the power to shock: SEATTLE’S MEDIAN HOME PRICE HITS RECORD: $700,000, DOUBLE 5 YEARS AGO In fact, the Seattle region had the fastest-rising home prices of any metro area in the country for the prior five months.

…

Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities. The cranes kept going up—there were fifty-nine in the air in April 2019, still the most in the nation. Work resumed on the tower that Amazon had threatened to cancel. Meanwhile, the company announced that it was taking steps to address the housing crisis it had helped create—philanthropically, that is. It would donate $5 million to an affordable housing developer and set aside eight floors in one of its new buildings for a 200-bed homeless shelter for families, complete with its own health clinic. It was far less than the $500 million that Microsoft had previously announced it was investing in local housing, but it was something.

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

The return had not proved any easier since many of the apartments in Jaffa had been destroyed in their absence or requisitioned by new Arab tenants. Secondly, floods of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe after World War I (an immigration wave known as the ‘Third Aliya’) had only increased what was fast becoming a serious housing crisis.114 In the short period between September 1920 and May 1921 alone, 10,000 Jewish immigrants entered through the ‘Gates of Zion’ (or infested the ‘Bride of the Sea’, depending on one’s ethno-religious allegiance).115 Lastly, and most importantly however, was the ideological make-up of this latest batch; having survived their infancy in among the pales and pogroms of Tsarist Russia and their adolescence absorbing the revolutionary fervour of 1917, these immigrants were considerably more radical than previous influxes.

…

It was no longer possible to try to keep a mixed, double or in-between identity, like that of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche. Jews had nothing to look for in Jaffa, and the city had been transformed from a cosmopolitan city into an Arab one. Jewish enclaves within Jaffa, such as the Feingold Houses in Manshieh, had gradually deteriorated, atrophied and been abandoned. The housing crisis in the region initially caused by the waves of immigrants from Europe had worsened due to the massive departure of the Jewish population from Jaffa, and soon, the whole region of Tel Aviv and Jaffa was swamped in tent encampments.129 As a result, Tel Aviv’s population in the 1920s multiplied twenty-fold, from 2,084 inhabitants at the beginning of the decade, to 42,000 at its end.130 Mass overcrowding encouraged more land acquisitions and the majority of deals for plots in what is today considered part of Tel Aviv were conducted during this period.

…

Some were new immigrants, some were internal refugees having fled Arab neighbourhoods in the wake of the May Day riots, and nearly all were homeless, living in tents. In light of the increasingly untenable situation in Jaffa, which had been twitching with rancour ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and the severe housing crisis developing in Tel Aviv, this displaced collective understood the necessity of starting over. The members of the association decided to unite as a collaborative corporation, to purchase a tract of land, and to build a new neighbourhood south of Tel Aviv. Neve Sha’anan in the 1930s, as seen from south to north-east.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

World War II improved the situation greatly, as 16 million young service men and women shipped out to the European and Pacifi theaters. But this improvement was only temporary. After demobilization, the situation worsened again. In Chicago in 1946, for example, the housing crisis was so bad that over 100,000 veterans—mostly unemployed young men—were homeless.24 In their book Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen eloquently illustrate just how acute the housing crisis had become:“In Atlanta,2,000 people answered an advertisement for one vacancy. A classifie ad in Omaha newspaper read, ‘Big Ice Box 7 by 17 feet. Could be fi ed up to live in.’”25 In 1933, under FDR, the federal government responded to the crisis with a series of experimental moves that would ultimately render old techniques and styles of housing construction obsolete.

…

They were one example of what the sociologist Sharon Zukin calls liminal spaces—public areas for meeting, mixing, and transit.33 For low-income inner-city tenants, these liminal spaces, including front stoops, hallways, parks, sidewalks, squares, bus stops, and train terminals, can be sites of uncomfortable interactions—elevator silences, excessive noise, physical aggression. Especially during a depression or other housing crisis, liminal spaces are always overcrowded. Unemployed adults spend long hours there, as do children, poor relatives, and newlyweds forced to bunk-in with family members because they cannot afford their own apartment. The appeal of the porchless suburban house was the escape it offered from intense, overcrowded interaction with one’s neighbors.34 Contrary to popular myth, the urban working class was not driven to Levittown by crime; it was lured there by the promise of space and privacy offered by a detached home.

…

There was no communal path, no common service area.”35 Alfred, who was the exact opposite of his gregarious brother, was obsessed with privacy in housing design and expressed his belief that it could be made compatible with the mass production of homes. “Without even a trial balloon you guess in advance just how far you could push and persuade [people] to take either open planning or living in a fis bowl until the landscaping grows to give them privacy.”36 After 1948,when the housing crisis eased somewhat,the Levitts committed themselves to constructing detached housing for veterans. They could hardly lose. The government guaranteed veterans’ mortgages and made them available without any down payment at all. So, just as competition was entering the Levitts’ new downscale market, Alfred redesigned the Cape Cod to make it attractive to a middle-class clientele.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

The problems of the 'white working class' were ascribed to their whiteness, rather than their class. argued against this false portrait. Indeed, working-class communities and workplaces are more likely to be ethnically diverse than their middle-class counterparts. Problems faced by working-class people who are white-s-like the housing crisis, the lack of good jobs, poor rights at work, declining living standards, safe communities--are to do with class, not race. These are problems shared by working-class people of all ethnic backgrounds. Where race does come into it is the fact that working-class people from ethnic minority backgrounds suffer from other forms of oppression and exploitation.

…

Aside from the millions who are spending years of their lives on waiting lists, the number of people in temporary accommodation soared by a stunning 135 per cent between 2001 and 2008. And the government might not be spending much on social housing, but instead it spends £21 billion a year on housing benefit, much of which ends up subsidizing private landlords. With the housing crisis worsening year by year, and with accommn, dation so central to people's lives, why did a Labour government leave the whole policy to go to rot? I asked Hazel Blears, whose fonner department when in the Cabinet included responsibility for housing. She accepted that New Labour had failed to build sufficient capaciry.L but with caveats.

…

Things like crime and drug addiction are more common in working- class areas than in the average middle-class suburb. A working-class teenager is considerably more likely to give birth than her middle-class peer. But the reality is rather different from the vicious generalizations and victim-blaming that accompanies chav-hare. Poverty, unemploy- ment and a housing crisis provide fertile ground for a range of social problems. These are working-class communities that took the brunt of a class war first unleashed by Thatcher three decades ago. Indeed, it would be far more startling if life had gone on, much like before, even as the pillars of the community collapsed one by one

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality,” unpublished working paper, April 2012, https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeim JobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf. 4.See Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (January 1, 2011), http://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/01/01/the-inequality-that-matters/. 5.http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/must-read-steve-teles-the-scourge-of-upward-redistribution-2/. 6.William Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014), https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity. 7.See Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 3–28. 8.Justin Lahart, “Number of the Week: Finance’s Share of Economy Continues to Grow,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-week-finances-share-of-economy-continues-to-grow/. 9.General Accounting Office, “Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation’s 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements,” July 1996, http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/ai96123.pdf. 10.See David Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis,” The Atlantic, December 16, 201l, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/for-the-last-time-fannie-and-freddie-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/250121/. 11.Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 207. 12.Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design, p. 253. 13.See Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis.” 14.See Neil Bhutta, “GSE Activity and Mortgage Supply in Lower-Income and Minority Neighborhoods: The Effect of the Affordable Housing Goals,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 45, no. 1 (2012): 238–61. 15.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

New York City, for example, built fewer new units in the recovery boom of the 2010s than it did in the Great Depression of the 1930s.8 In the smaller suburbs that dot regions like the great bays of California and Massachusetts, zoning has emerged as an effective tool for blocking any and all development, locking many communities in amber. As a result, many coastal housing markets now operate in a context of permanent housing crisis. Relatively little housing is built, and where it is built at all, the housing is kept prohibitively expensive by unnecessary mandates and a costly permitting process.9 With restrictive zoning already on the books in those cities that remain somewhat affordable—usually thanks to an increasingly scarce supply of undeveloped land—the housing affordability crisis is unlikely to remain an exclusively coastal phenomenon for long.

…

Molly Boesel, “Home Prices Reached Highest Annual Growth Since 1979,” CoreLogic, August 3, 2021, https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/home-prices-reached-highest-annual-growth-since-1979/. 2. Erick Trickey, “How Minneapolis Freed Itself from the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes,” Politico, July 11, 2019, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/11/housing-crisis-single-family-homes-policy-227265/; Todd Gill, “Fayetteville Eliminates Minimum Parking Requirements,” Fayetteville (AR) Flyer, October 7, 2015, https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2015/10/07/fayetteville-eliminates-minimum-parking-requirements/; Angie Schmitt, “Hartford Eliminates Parking Minimums Citywide,” Streetsblog, December 13, 2017, https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/13/hartford-eliminates-parking-minimums-citywide/. 3.

…

On top of the tens of thousands of dollars the applicant had to spend on a team of environmental consultants, any local opponent of the project with a couple hundred dollars to spare will also have standing to further delay the project with a frivolous lawsuit challenging the environmental review in court. 26. Combined with the risk of creditors or partners dropping out of the project, these delays can and often do kill projects. 27. As Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) find, those who speak at public hearings in opposition to housing are often highly unrepresentative of their communities, both demographically and in their opposition to new housing. The authors find that speakers at public hearings are systematically more likely to be elderly male homeowners and to be far more opposed to housing than the average local resident. 28.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

It sounds unthinkable, but the few who are beginning to do this will be better off than those who reach out for the government lifeline, prolonging high payments for 30 years. The outcome would be a shorter recession, for the housing market would quickly readjust rather than suffer from the agonizing slow-motion erosion in prices and perpetually high inventories that are occurring today. Socialism’s solution to the housing crisis is reminiscent of the Japanese perpetual recession, where a bear market in equities has run 19 years and counting. The moral hazard that has been built into the nation’s mortgage market is a function of the structure of the system, something that the liberal Keynesian economist Paul Krugman drives home in his nostalgic plea to return to a simpler, 1950s-style banking system.

…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), 229–252. A sprightly discussion of this is in The Black Swan’s Chapter 15: “The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud.” Notes 383 14. Zillow, The Majority of U.S. Homeowners Thinks Their Home is Insulated From the Housing Crisis (August 6, 2008), http://zillow.mediaroom.com/index. php?s=159&item=64. Chapter 3: The Rise and Fall of Hard Money 1. Laurence H. Meyer, Remarks by Governor Laurence H. Meyer, December 5, 2001, www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2001/20011205/default. htm. 2. Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994), 42. 3.

…

., 248 Conspiracy of Fools (Eichenwald), 223 Council on Foundations, 176 Counterfeiting, 38, 53 Countrywide Financial, 212, 214 Cramer, Jim, 141–142, 143, 145–146, 289, 303 Crawford, Michael, 246 Credit Crisis of 2008–2009: forced lending, 128–133 Index overview, 116–121 “too big to fail” policy, 121–128 See also Housing Crisis Crispus, Gaius Sallustius, 248 Culture of irresponsibility: chilling of inquiry, 293–296 moral vacuum, 296–299 morality, 290–292 overview, 277–281 rationality, 285–290 secular society, 281–285 See also Moral hazard; Self-indulgence Cuneo, Jonathan W., 326–327 “Curveball,” 363 Damn Yankees, 303 Dawes Plan, 62 The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions (Fisher), 131 Deflation: Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here (Bernanke), 117 Democracy Alliance, 185 Derivatives, 22.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Six regions, all in the Sunbelt, posted ratios of 15 or greater. Another twelve metropolitan areas, again all in the Sunbelt, had ratios above 10. Las Vegas’ ratio was 9, Miami’s 8.4, and Phoenix’s 7.2, all sky-high by any standard.9 With their debt-fueled economies driven by housing, it’s no surprise that the housing crisis has brought severe economic pain to many Sunbelt cities. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, of the twenty worst-performing regions in the country, fourteen were in the Sunbelt, including Las Vegas and Miami.10 Both Las Vegas and Phoenix saw their economic Stress Index value—a composite measure of economic hardship developed by the Associated Press—more or less double between December 2007 and March 2009.11 At the peak of the crisis the Sunbelt states and cities witnessed something that had once been unthinkable: after a century of unchecked growth, many locations had their first taste of mass outmigration and population decline.

…

We’ve seen the ways in which the importance of home ownership became overblown and began to undermine the economy; how it consumed an ever-larger share of income for far too many, constraining their lifestyle and sometimes even bankrupting them; and how it encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real estate economy dominant. We could well look back on this moment in history as a time when people lived like indentured servants, with their own homes as lord and master. For too many, the dream of home ownership turned into an economic trap, one of our own making. The most staggering damage caused by the housing crisis may not be the impact on the financial markets; it may be the long-run competitive disadvantage caused by the inability to relocate the labor force to where the jobs of the future lie. It’s not that home ownership per se is bad, it’s that home ownership on the scale it has grown to is plainly ill suited to today’s postindustrial economy.

…

Even though prices have declined somewhat, it’s still very expensive to buy a home in many of these places. More people have no choice but to rent in those cities. Renting is much more prevalent in metro areas such as New York, where 66 percent of residents are renters, as well as D.C. and Chicago, where more than half (56 and 51 percent, respectively) rent their homes.11 The housing crisis creates additional opportunities for rental housing. Across the country, there is an accumulation of foreclosed homes and failing condo projects that could be turned into rentals. With prices down 30 or 40 percent or more in some places, this kind of conversion increasingly makes economic sense.

Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street by Kate Kelly

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, fixed income, housing crisis, index arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, moral hazard, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, technology bubble, too big to fail, traveling salesman

This was the issue most bothering Geithner and Paulson that night. Bear wouldn’t fail in a vacuum, they knew. The crisis of confidence among lenders and clients would likely spread to the next most vulnerable firm—be it Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch. Both firms were thought to be overexposed to the housing crisis, Lehman had its large commercial real-estate portfolio as well as its sprawling mortgage-origination and packaging activities, and Merrill was invested heavily in enormous underwater investments in CDOs. If skeptical investors and frightened customers and lenders were able to sink Bear, a series of dominoes could fall after it—potentially taking down most or all of Wall Street.

…

“Well, our financial institutions, our banks and investment banks, are very strong,” Paulson said. “And I’m convinced that they’re going to come out of this situation very strong. Our markets are resilient. They’re flexible. I’m quite confident we’re going to work our way through this situation.” Apparently having exhausted his Bear questions, Stephanopoulos moved on to the housing crisis. It was a grueling television circuit. Paulson’s other two interviewers, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, grilled him about both the Fed loan and the state of the banking business in general. An overwhelming number of economists polled by the Wall Street Journal thought the economy was in a recession, they pointed out, and with Bear’s teetering status, the entire Wall Street business model seemed potentially at risk.

…

Paulson at Goldstein, Michael Grasso, Dick Great Depression Greenberg, Alan (“Ace”) Buffett’s friendship with Cayne’s relationship with as chairman Glickman’s relationship with market-risk gatherings of ousted as CEO partner memos issued by post-CEO role of spending curbs of Greenberger, Mala Greene, Maryann Greene, Tim Greenspan, Alan Greenwich Capital group Griffin, Ken Harrington, Donald Harrison, William Harriton, Richard Harvard University hedge funds Bear balance reduced by failure of see also specific funds Hernandez, Carlos High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund Hill, Jeremy Hogan, John Hom, Dennis housing boom housing crisis HSBC Iger, Bob IndyMac Federal Bank ING insurance, against debt default International Swaps and Derivatives Association investment banks: demise of discount window and see also specific investment banks IPOs (initial public offerings) Japan Jardine Strategic Holdings Limited J.C.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

Conversely, the reporters found it was much more likely to predict that White criminals would not offend again, despite the data showing that this was not at all accurate. Sitting next to me was Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and the author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction, who has an insider’s view of the way that math and big data are directly implicated in the financial and housing crisis of 2008 (which, incidentally, destroyed more African American wealth than any other event in the United States, save for not compensating African Americans for three hundred years of forced enslavement). Her view from Wall Street was telling: The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings.

…

See also Google PageRank; Kandis Ali, Kabir, 80 Alphabet, 34–35; cultural imperialism, 86; expansion into surveillance technologies, 28 Anderson, Benedict, 136 Angwin, Julia, 27 Anonymous (hacker group), 112, 194n4 Anti-Defamation League, 42, 44, 157, 160 “antidiversity” manifesto, 2 Apple: labor condition in China, 164, 199n43; profiling in store, 163 Arreola, Veronica, 155 artificial intelligence, 1–2, 148; financial and housing crisis of 2008 role, 27; future criminality predictions, 27 ArtStor, bias in metadata management, 145–47 Ascher, Diana, 29 Associated Press v. United States, 190n57 Baartman, Sara, 94–96, 100 Bagdikian, Ben, 41 Bar-Ilan, Judit, 47 Barlow, John Perry, 61 Baron, Jill, 134 Battelle, John, 148 Berger, John, 58 Berman, Sanford, 139, 143–44 bias.

…

., 89 purchasing products online, 175 racial and gender profiling, 28 racial categories: PubMed/MEDLINE, 95; South Africa, 95 The Racial Contract (Mills), 60 racial formation theory, 84 Racialicious (blog), 4 racism and sexism, 9, 186; application program interface (API), 187n5; Black people as a problem, 142–43; “colorblindness” and multiculturalism, 167–68; contributions of African Americans erased, 108; fantasy of postracialism, 108, 168; financial and housing crisis of 2008, 27; first search results, 5; future criminality of White and Black defendants, 27; #Gamergate comments, 63, 191n96; Google’s default settings, 88–89; history of enslavement and exploitation, 92, 96–98; impact of stereotypes, 105, 155; internet as a tool, 89; internet marginalization of Blacks and women, 58, 108, 165; Jezebel image, 70, 96, 98; male impact online, 58; Mammy or Sapphire image, 70, 98; n*gger application program interface (API), 4–5; race hierarchy theory, 79–80; recognition of, 25; search engine bias, 29, 31–32; traditional media images replicated, 55–56, 59.

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

See Treasury bonds Deflation bailout, effects on economic impact of myths about “pushing on a string” argument De Gaulle, Charles Deng Xiaoping Digital gold currencies GoldMoney Dollar as currency reserves deterioration, and oil-pricing alternatives devaluation and Fed overseas holdings Dollar standard benefits to U.S. global dumping of Economic collapse, signs of Economic crisis (2008- ) bailouts command economy threat credit crisis and dollar standard federal debt government actions. See Federal Reserve housing crisis impact of and interest rate cuts Iraq war, cost of and job losses See also specific topics e-gold Elements ETNs Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), operation of Energy independence, myth of Energy trusts, recommendations Enerplus Resources Fund Trust (ERF) Engelhard England coinage debasement, impact of goldsmith as banker inflation and paper money See also Great Britain Erhard, Ludwig Ethanol Euros euro ETF (FXE) replace dollar Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) bond cautions about commodities-based foreign currency-based gold-based nationalization risk oil-based silver-based trading/operation of Exchange-traded notes (ETNs) commodities-based Elements ETNs Fannie Mae China/Japan holdings Federal debt amount of (2009) debt ceiling, increase foreign holders of hidden debt infinite horizon discounted value concept inflation as remedy interest expense on Medicare Part D, unfunded liability example monetizing debt percentage of GDP in trillions Federal deposit insurance Federal Reserve auditing of bailout funds cooling economy, actions for criticisms of system and debt monetization and devaluation of dollar federal funds rate fractional reserve banks inflation, creating by interest rate cuts and monetary policy and mortgage meltdown open market operations and Plunge Protection Team and politicized money public/private nature of secrecy related to stimulating economy, actions for as unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act (1913) Federal Reserve Notes Fiscal policy, defined Fisher, Richard Florin Food production demand, future view See also Commodities as investment Ford, Gerald Foreign currency, hard currencies Foreign currency as investment digital gold currencies exchange-traded funds (ETFs) speculative nature of Foster, Richard S.

…

., historical view Goldman Sachs GoldMoney Gold Reserve Act (1934) Goldsmiths, as bankers Gold standard abandoned, United States Bretton Woods agreement Grant, James Great Britain gold standard nationalization oil reserves of Great Depression Greenbacks Greenspan, Alan on dollars held abroad on housing bubble interest rate cuts on WIN program Gresham’s law Gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt in Gulf War Hard Assets Producer (HAP) fund Hard currencies Hayek, F.A. He Fan Hickey, Fred Hitler, Adolf Housing crisis and Fed and interest rate cuts jingle mail Hunt, Bunker Hunt, Herbert al-Husseini, Sadad Hyperinflation and “crack-up boom,” features of Israel past periods of political implication of Index-type fund, gold-based India, poverty, decline of Indian rupee ETF (ICN) Infinite horizon discounted value Inflation as alternative to taxation and coinage debasement core inflation rate and distortion of market double-digit.

…

See Hyperinflation Federal Reserve, creation of historical view inflationary recession and malinvestment as monetary phenomenon official explanations of persistence of and price ceilings and price increases as remedy to debt as remedy to inflation and stagflation as theft Interest rate cuts economic impact of and housing crisis to stimulate economy Interest rates and bond prices raising, to cool economy and stagflation Investment recommendations bonds commodities foreign currencies gold gold/silver ratio information/resources for investors oil silver Iran, oil, pricing in euros Iraq war cost of and global rejection of America nonsupporting countries IRS bank transactions, reporting to financial behavior, reporting to See also Taxation Isaac, William iShares COMEX Gold Trust (IAU) iShares Silver Trust (SLV) Israel, hyperinflation James II, King of England Japan Fannie and Freddie holdings yen payable Treasuries, call for Japanese yen ETF (FXY) Johnson, Chalmers Johnson, Lyndon B.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

The largest deal was the $8.5 billion purchase of HD Supply, the contractor-oriented arm of Home Depot, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Perhaps to underscore Conway’s own point, that deal turned into one of the more troubled of the boom era, struggling mightily in the teeth of the U.S. housing crisis. Conway is, at his core, a deal guy, and widely regarded as one of the smartest investors in private equity. He is affable and physically imposing, and while charming and self-effacing, he is arguably the most feared person inside the firm. A practicing Catholic who attends Mass most days, he grew up in New Hampshire and earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth.

…

In 2009, at the depths of the credit crisis, private equity deals were less than 7 percent. By 2011, they’d regained their place, accounting for just less than 17 percent. Any explanation of the leveraged buyout boom of 2005 to 2007 inevitably includes the phrases “cheap debt” or “easy credit.” The parallels to what led to the housing crisis are hard to ignore. Just as financing was available for homebuyers to buy houses beyond what they thought they could afford, so too was debt available for private-equity firms to eye targets, bid up prices and buy companies that had previously been far beyond their reach. Part of it was the size of the equity funds they’d collected from pensions and endowments eager, and in some cases desperate, for the returns buyout firms had historically delivered.

…

CD&R paid $1.5 billion for the business and eventually took it public in 1995. CD&R has largely stuck with the business of carve-outs, buying Hertz with Carlyle from Ford and US Foods from Royal Ahold in well-timed deals, and the contractor supply business from Home Depot (called HD Supply), in a very poorly timed deal at the onset of the financial and housing crisis. In its modern iteration, CD&R has become a full- or part-time home for some of the highest-profile former chief executives of global companies, including Jack Welch, arguably the most famous CEO of all time. After Welch joined as a senior advisor in 2001, CD&R added A.G. Lafley, who ran Procter & Gamble, and former Tesco CEO Terence Leahy.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

But it is the poor, and African-Americans, who are most likely to spend their late teens and early twenties in prison, rather than at school.1 The article takes up the issue in the context of America’s housing crisis, and one aspect of it in particular: the “robo-signing crisis.” In their rush to issue bad mortgages, banks didn’t pay attention to record keeping. When the inevitable housing crisis arrived, and it came time to throw people out of the homes for which banks had gladly lent them money only a few years earlier, the banks’ records of who had repaid what were a mess. Many states have a system in which banks can simply sign an affidavit that they have examined the records and that the individual who is being declared in foreclosure does in fact owe the money alleged.

…

We could have prevented the mortgage crisis, if we had only more effectively enforced laws already on the books, regarding predatory and discriminatory lending—and if the Fed had lived up to its responsibilities in enforcing standards of lending in the mortgage market. “The One Housing Solution Left,” written with Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s, argues that there were alternative ways of handling the housing crisis, after it emerged—borrowing an idea that had worked in the Great Depression and that would have cost the government nothing. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon introduced a bill, Rebuilding American Homeownership, which would have accomplished this. And there was even a strategy for doing this within the political constraints of the time.

…

Then comes bewilderment: How could we let this happen again? Officials promise to fix things. Something is done about the most egregious abuses. People move on, reassured that the crisis has abated, but suspecting that it will recur soon. The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down—some to a point even lower than where they began. This new crisis is emerging even before the last one has been resolved, and the two are becoming intertwined.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

There were African American-run savings and loan associations that financed black homebuyers, but because they were undercapitalized, they made little impact. Blacks looking for their own homes were left to turn to loan sharks or to buy homes using land contracts at high interest rates.43 Urban Redevelopment Postwar highway and urban redevelopment projects further exacerbated Detroit’s housing crisis, especially for blacks. Detroit’s city planners promised that the proposed system of cross-city expressways would dramatically improve the city’s residential areas, as well as bolster the city’s economy. For the thousands of blacks who lived in the path of Detroit’s first expressways, both promises were false.

…

The debates over housing in the 1940s were to have profound ramifications for the fate of federal policy in the city for the next twenty years and would set the terms for debate on—and limit—the next generation of social policy, the Great Society.5 A New Deal in Housing From the 1930s through the early 1950s, the federal government, city officials, and housing reformers looked to an alternative to Detroit’s private market to solve the city’s housing crisis. In place of inferior accommodation for the poor, government-subsidized developments would be built throughout the city. The construction of public housing, argued its advocates, would eliminate the city’s overcrowded, dangerous slums. Not only would public housing offer workers and the poor clean, new, affordable shelter, it would serve as a tool of social engineering.

…

Official approval of segregation, he argued, “has a detrimental effect,” fostering “distrust and disbelief in government on the part of minority and liberal” groups, and giving “official sanction to the prejudices of others.”106 During the Cobo administration, DHC policy remained unrelentingly segregationist, as officials defended “the right of the landlord to operate his property as he wishes or take the tenants he wants to take in.”107 In response to pressure from civil rights orgnaizations, city officials began the token integration of public housing projects in 1953 and 1954, but not until 1956, after the Detroit Branch of the NAACP won a lawsuit that challenged the city’s racial policy, did the city open all public housing to blacks, and even then desegregation was haltingly slow. As late as the early 1960s, four public housing projects were virtually all-white, with token black residents, and two projects were all-black.108 The dilemma of the housing crisis for Detroit’s poor was still unresolved in the late 1950s. The city directed blacks needing homes to its already crowded center-city projects, and defended the concentration of blacks as the necessary consequence of slum removal. James Inglis, director of the City Housing Commission in 1949, stated that black housing projects were by necessity high-density because of the high land prices in the center-city areas where slum housing had been cleared.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

After he led groundbreaking urban renewal efforts in the deteriorating cities of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s, and Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, Logue was hailed as the savior of New York State’s troubled cities—until the UDC’s sudden downfall. In his defense, Logue stressed the UDC’s undeniable accomplishments. Faced with an acute housing crisis and New York voters’ repeated rejection of referenda to remedy it, the UDC had innovated a new public-private funding approach. In place of old-style urban renewal, which depended on federal funds in ever shorter supply with the rising costs of the Vietnam War, Logue and Rockefeller had developed a new paradigm for urban revitalization.

…

As I watched events unfold in New Orleans, the debates that animated Logue’s story—who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill—took on real-life resonance before my eyes. Similarly, the Great Recession of a few years later, with its massive wave of foreclosures and talk of shrinking cities, gave me another ringside seat from which to watch urban decline and strategies of revival. As my writing of this book neared its end, the urban housing crisis of our own time became more pressing. And the United States elected a real estate developer for its forty-fifth president, with yet unknown long-term consequences for urban policy. This history of making and keeping American cities viable remains relevant in the twenty-first century because many cities are still challenged by formidable problems.

…

Margaret’s keenness for modern design was interspersed in her letters with political commentary condemning racial segregation and endorsing liberal candidates in Smith’s mock Democratic Party convention, indicating that all were a part of a consistent worldview. A year later, as Margaret contemplated their next move to Hartford, she wrote, “I’d love a Lustron home,” referring to the innovative, prefabricated, porcelain-enameled steel houses developed to meet the housing crisis after World War II.120 Soon after the Logues returned to New Haven in 1953, they decided to build a new house in the modern style. They hired Chester Bowles’s son Ches, who had recently graduated from the Yale School of Architecture, to design it. “We live in the only modern house in our part of town,” Logue proudly reported to his Yale class secretary.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Such properties, the Observer’s Alex Preston argues, ‘have become lavishly upholstered safety deposit boxes’66 – buildings that consume iconic views for largely absentee owners while appreciating vast speculative profits. As in Vancouver and New York, many will remain unoccupied, their darkened façades and empty rooms looming arrogantly and absurdly over a population experiencing its worst housing crisis in living memory. London also provides a classic example of the ways in which simplistic critiques and representations of the supposed failures of vertically built mass social housing have paved the way for the proliferation of towers for the super-rich. Speaking of one of the forty-three-floor elite housing towers in Stratford, one legacy of London’s Olympics-based ‘regeneration’ in 2012, architecture critic Juston McGuirk ponders that the building is the ‘sort of high-rise that was supposed to be unpopular in this country [the UK], discredited architecturally and politically, at least when it was called council [social] housing.’67 In 2013, 85 per cent of all housing purchases in inner London – largely those in the higher and ‘super-high’ price brackets – were being snapped up by non-UK nationals (mainly nationals from China, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia and Hong Kong, places where London real estate agents hold lavish prebuild sales events).68 Such frenzied speculation, often as a means of anonymously recycling money derived from corruption in a city now widely regarded as the world capital of money laundering,69 is pushing already-astronomical prices further ‘into the stratosphere’.70 Startlingly, as in New York, the numbers of residential super-high towers in London are rapidly overtaking the more traditional towers of corporate and banking headquarters.

…

Meanwhile, the totally inadequate production of affordable or social housing means that London’s poorer and middle-class populations are either displaced altogether or squeezed into ever more overcrowded and overpriced accommodation within the rest of London’s housing stock. Between 2012 and 2015, over 50,000 low-income families were physically displaced from inner London because of the housing crisis combined unprecedented cuts in welfare funding.75 Many low-wage workers who remain are pivotal to the functioning of the city, but are crammed into tiny, illegally rented and often dangerous spaces in attics, basements, sheds and garages. Often highly overcrowded, with no provision for decent sanitation or fire escapes, and with no official record on maps and statistical registers, such improvised dwellings become extremely vulnerable to fires.

…

, Too Much, 14 March 2014. 74Knight Frank, ‘Tall Towers’, London, 2012. See knightfrank.co.uk/research/tall-towers-2012-1101.aspx. 75Daniel Douglas, ‘Over 50,000 Families Shipped Out of London Boroughs in the Past Three Years due to Welfare Cuts and Soaring Rents’, Independent, 29 April 2015. 76Antonio Olivo, ‘Housing Crisis Drives Families into Overcrowded Living Conditions’, Chicago Tribune, 28 March 2010. 77Rowan Moore, ‘London Is Being Transformed with 230 Towers: Why the Lack of Consultation?’ Observer, 29 March 2014. 78Mira Bar-Hillel, ‘What Does the Skyrocketing Price of Property in the Capital Mean for Society?’

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

Oscar is living with friends, so the idea of escaping a full house and staying with the Ogawa community for the night was appealing. Though he didn’t think that there were very many people there in the same position as he, he did feel very welcome and at home. Oscar had been out of work since the housing crisis began three years ago. Though he considered Occupy Oakland a good start, he was skeptical about whether the system could be changed at all. He wasn’t sure if he would stay another night, though I did see him there later after sunset setting up a tent. The space had attracted some homeless people as well who seemed to have a mixture of practical and political reasons for being there.

…

One of the speakers representing Move On, Charles Davidson, was someone I had interviewed in April at the US Uncut tax day demonstration.2 I remembered that at that time he expressed frustration at the national Move On organization, and was dissatisfied with some of their capitulations and their retreat on US wars and occupations. I asked him via email if he had a statement about the issue. Davidson wrote that the march was focused on budget cuts on healthcare, social programs and infrastructure, and on pressuring Congress to create jobs and address the housing crisis. Davidson also stressed that he did not trust the Democratic Party, and that he didn’t support Move On’s alliances with the party in general, but that he did support certain progressive Democrats such as Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich. He also stressed that there were many Move On members who’d been involved in political activism for years, and that the Occupy movement should try to embrace, rather than alienate, them and the union members that would be involved in the event.

…

People are living too long There have also been a rash of stories recently in the UK, scapegoating old people for just about every economic woe we have. First, there are too many pensioners and we can’t afford them – so they need to pay more, work for longer and get less.6 Then, a report by the Intergenerational Foundation told us that the housing crisis was down to these pesky old-timers living in houses that were ‘too big’ and were therefore off limits to young families.7 That’s right, it’s not a property bubble. It’s not that all the council houses were sold off to bribe some working-class people into thinking they were Tories. It’s nothing to do with extortionate house prices and unachievable deposits.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In North and South America, Europe, and Asia, Blackstone has acquired buildings and converted them into rental units, which tenants have demonstrated are often uninhabitable. As the company increases rent prices, it ruthlessly evicts those who cannot pay, and in the United States, Blackstone has also been fighting against rent control. The United Nations’ housing advisor has flagged Blackstone as a major contributor to a global housing crisis in which tenants increasingly find themselves at the mercy of “faceless corporations.”46 Blackstone has also extended its reach into the Amazon rainforest. Blackstone-owned firms develop ports and roads, thereby fueling the hostile takeover of lands by agribusiness that damages indigenous land and sovereignty.47 Blackstone’s practices fit within a long history of dispossession sanctioned by state violence and international government alliances.

…

New York University, “New Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Launches: First of Its Kind Dedicated to the Study of Social Implications of AI,” press release, November 20, 2017, https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-artificial-intelligence-research-institute-launches.   46.   Patrick Butler, “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis,” Guardian, March 26, 2019.   47.   Ryan Grim, “A Top Financier of Trump and McConnell Is a Driving Force Behind Amazon Deforestation,” Intercept, August 27, 2019.   48.   Jon Lee Anderson, “Jair Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy,” New Yorker, April 1, 2019.   49.   See Group of MIT students, faculty, staff and alumni, “Celebrating War Criminals at MIT’s ‘Ethical’ College of Computing,” Tech, February 14, 2019; Danny McDonald, “MIT Group Calls for University to Cancel Celebration of New College, Apologize for Henry Kissinger Invite,” Boston Globe, February 18, 2019; Zoe Sheill and Whitney Zhang, “Protesters Gather Against College of Computing Celebration,” Tech, March 7, 2019.

…

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” In Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency 81 (2018): 1–15. Butler, Patrick. “UN Accuses Blackstone Group of Contributing to Global Housing Crisis.” Guardian, March 26, 2019. Campolo, Alex, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford. AI Now 2017 Report. AI Now Institute, January 2017. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/ai-now-2017-report/. Caplan, Robyn, Alex Rosenblat, and danah boyd. “Open Data the Criminal Justice System and the Police Data Initiative.”

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

As we shall see, these three problems—plus a myriad of details—made mortgage modifications look economically difficult, legally problematic, and politically toxic. HAVEN’T WE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE? Once before in history, America experienced the frightening double whammy of a megarecession coupled with sharp declines in home prices. That was during the Great Depression. Back then, President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress reacted to the housing crisis with a burst of policy activism that put the governments of 2007–2010 to shame. The New Deal housing programs included establishing the FHA to insure home mortgages, Fannie Mae (then the FNMA, a government agency) to create a secondary market in mortgages, the Federal Home Loan Banks to provide funds to mortgage lenders, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation to insure deposits at thrift institutions.

…

And I sketched a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that the new HOLC, like the original, could turn a modest profit in the end. I was not alone in doing so. Economists Paul Davidson and Alex Pollock had the idea of reviving the HOLC before I did, and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) advocated something similar. By coincidence, a few days later I attended a meeting of House Democratic leaders where the then-budding housing crisis was on the agenda. My HOLC idea came up in passing—but, believe me, only in passing. It was rejected instantly as being wildly too expensive. At that stage, the TARP was still eight months away, and neither politicians nor their constituents were thinking about committing hundreds of billions of dollars of public money.

…

The banking plan that Treasury Secretary Geithner sketched in his first major speech on February 10, 2009, had four main components. One of them was the bank stress tests. Two others were new programs meant to accomplish the original stated purposes of the TARP: buying troubled assets. The fourth was, in Geithner’s words, “a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis.” Unfortunately, he also added, “We will announce the details of this plan in the next few weeks,” which led all hell to break loose in the jittery financial markets. After all, the new administration had been in office for three weeks already, and their plan was not complete! It took Geithner only eight more days to finish the job.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

According to Wolff, both the increasing gap in wealth inequality and the financially fragile state of the middle class stems from their overinvestment in their homes. The overconcentration in housing and the high levels of debt the middle class carry in their homes hurt them badly in the Great Recession and housing crisis of 2008. Wolff looked particularly at the years 2007 to 2013 to assess the impact of these two events and found that they hurt the broad middle class the most: “The sharp fall in median net worth and the rise in overall wealth inequality over these years are traceable primarily to the high leverage of middle-class families and the high share of homes in their portfolio.”

…

Housing has delivered persistently low rates of return relative to other asset classes like stocks and mutual funds.5 The middle class has overinvested in an asset that underperforms. The long-term rate of return (from 1983–2013) for financial assets like stocks has been about 9 percent, compared to the 3.5 percent return on residential real estate over that same time period. During the Great Recession and housing crisis (2007–2010), residential real estate returns fell by about 7 percent, twice as much as financial assets returns, which declined by only 3.7 percent. And real estate has been slow to recover. After the recession, from 2010–2013, residential real estate returned nearly 5 percent, but financial assets have delivered more than double the returns—over 12 percent.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Whereas the Baby Boomers and Gen X “divorced” their professional lives from personal and civic arenas, Millennials have blurred the line between professional development and personal self-expression (for example, using social media to deliberately leverage their individuality) and eagerly seek out to reconcile their personal values and desire to serve others in a professional setting. Millennials were raised to believe that “they can be whatever they want to be” and don’t want to settle for a less-than-meaningful life. In a major study of Millennials, the Pew Research Center recently concluded: “Whatever toll a recession, a housing crisis, a financial meltdown and a pair of wars may have taken on the national psyche in the past few years, it appears to have hit the old harder than the young.…Millennials [are] confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”4 Millennials were not only born into a world of much more perceived affluence than prior generations, but also into one in which these values and aspirations were gaining traction.

…

The threat is no longer distant; we no longer look outside our immediate communities to see people suffering devastating consequences from our warming climate, the scarcity of freshwater, or the infiltration of our reservoirs by toxic wastes. The threats are omnipresent. The economic disaster and housing crisis of 2008—the “Great Recession”—has also forced many people and companies to change their behavior as consumers and employers. The impact of this recession still isn’t entirely clear, but Millennials, who came of age in this reality, developed a different set of priorities in response to this new context.

Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS The Global Financial Crisis Other Books of Related Interest: At Issue Series The American Housing Crisis Introducing Issues with Opposing Viewpoints Series Globalization Opposing Viewpoints Series Consumerism Debt The Global Financial Crisis Noah Berlatsky, Book Editor Christine Nasso, Publisher Elizabeth Des Chenes, Managing Editor © 2010 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning Gale and Greenhaven Press are registered trademarks used herein under license. For more information, contact: Greenhaven Press 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or you can visit our Internet site at gale.cengage.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

…

The Weakness of Banking Regulations Caused the Crisis Vince Cable Some British banks have grown too big to fail, and perhaps too big for regulators to handle. Yet they want freedom from regulation and freedom to persue high risk investments. But the British taxpayer should not be responsible for financial risks taken outside the nation’s borders. 42 5. Low Interest Rates Caused the Crisis Tito Boeri and Luigi Guiso 53 The housing crisis was fueled by the actions of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who kept interest rates low. These circumstances encouraged people to borrow too much to pay for homes they could not afford. 6. Abandoning the Gold Standard Caused the Crisis Dominic Lawson 59 If currency is not backed by gold, politicians and bankers will simply print money, resulting in inflation and a cycle of boom and bust.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Indeed, the proportion of tenants who receive Housing Benefit is typically higher in ex-council properties that are now privately rented than it is across the private rented sector as a whole; in 2015, in Renfrewshire in Scotland, some 43 per cent of Housing Benefit claimants in the private rented sector were found to be living in properties purchased under Right to Buy.56 Another state-facilitated mechanism of gain realization for rentiers has involved public bodies buying back, at inflated prices, the very land that they had previously privatized at a discount. This has happened with housing land: in the face of a mounting housing crisis, numerous local authorities have reacquired homes sold under Right to Buy – Ealing council in London, for instance, spending over £100 million buying back 516 properties originally sold for less than £20 million.57 And this has happened with other types of land as well. A striking example is railway freight sidings and yards.

…

And yet the very same credit-fuelled boom in residential land prices that made many people feel like neoliberalism’s winners – and helped them to ride out its vicissitudes – has ultimately pushed homeownership beyond reach for younger generations, dragging owner-occupancy rates back down to around 60 per cent and crystallizing the grievances of millions of renters who not only feel but know themselves to be neoliberalism’s losers.113 The Resolution Foundation estimated in 2016 that the UK’s millennial generation born between 1981 and 2000 will on average have spent £44,000 more on housing rent by the time they reach 30 than the baby-boomer generation born between 1946 and 1965 did.114 ‘The current housing crisis’, Will Self is therefore right to conclude, is not so much emblematic of a transmogrification from a social market economy to a neoliberal one. It is constitutive of that process: the asset transfer from the state to the rich; the pump-priming of the value of those assets; the forcing of the poor into more expensive private rental accommodation – all of which measures are underpinned by a financial system heavily dependent on mortgage lending.115 In a sense, Right to Buy, in aiming to reduce levels of rentierism (albeit public-sector rentierism), was always a contradictory, doomed project.

…

See, for example, M. Watson, ‘House Price Keynesianism and the Contradictions of the Modern Investor Subject’, Housing Studies 25 (2010), pp. 413–26. 24. M. Stephens, ‘Mortgage Market Deregulation and Its Consequences’, Housing Studies 22 (2007), pp. 201–20, at p. 211. 25. M. Robertson, ‘The Great British Housing Crisis’, Capital & Class 41 (2017), pp. 195–215, at p. 199. 26. Oren and Blyth, ‘From Big Bang to Big Crash’, pp. 610–11. 27. Bush et al., ‘Why Is the UK Banking System So Big’, p. 386. 28. M. Singh and J. Aitken, ‘The (sizable) role of rehypothecation in the shadow banking system’, IMF Working Paper WP/10/172, July 2010, p. 4 – pdf available at imf. org. 29.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

.: UC San Diego, Department of Economics, 2009. Hammes, David, and Douglas Wills. Black Gold: The End of Bretton Woods and the Oil Price Shocks of the 1970s. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=388283. Harrington, Mark. “Oil Credit Crunch Could Be Worse than the Housing Crisis.” CNBC Commentary. January 14, 2016. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/14/oil-credit-crunch-could-be-worse-than-the-housing-crisis-commentary.html. Harvey, Fiona. “World’s Climate Pledges Not Yet Enough to Avoid Dangerous Warming–UN.” Guardian, October 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/30/worlds-climate-pledges-likely-to-lead-to-less-than-3c-of-warming-un.

…

The Bank for International Settlements noted an “intense debate” about how falling oil prices would impact economies, flagging in particular the high debt burden of the oil and gas sector, which had grown by 250 percent from 2006 to 2015 and stood at roughly $2.5 trillion.99 Some worried that crashing oil prices could trigger a banking crisis and downturn as the Lehman crisis had spectacularly done six years earlier. “Oil credit crunch could be worse than the housing crisis,” blared one commentary headline on CNBC.100 Others noted that while the oil crisis was leading to losses at Wall Street banks that had lent producers sizable sums, comparisons with the mortgage crisis were overblown as the scale, complexity, and direct economic impacts were less severe in the case of shale oil debt.101 Whatever the true extent of the risk, crashing oil prices in January and early February 2016 exhibited a reminder that there is a downside to price busts, even for economies that ought to benefit from cheaper oil prices.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

A month after Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli took to the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and denounced the president’s efforts to help homeowners endangered by the housing crisis. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Santelli asked the assembled traders. He asserted that Obama should “reward people that could carry the water” as opposed to those who “drink the water,” and denounced those in danger of foreclosure as “losers.” Race was implicit in Santelli’s harangue—the housing crisis and predatory lending had devastated black communities and expanded the wealth gap—and it culminated with a call for a “Tea Party” to resist the Obama presidency.

…

And since the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson and other sociologists following in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in “hardworking” manufacturing jobs has had on African American communities. And if anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans—the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past twenty years of the wealth gap between black families and their country. But the cultural condescension and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery. Moreover, a narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and rightfully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump.

The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

The Broadgate development in the City was no sooner declared open by the Queen than its developer, Rosehaugh, went into receivership with debts of £350 million. An extraordinary one-third of office accommodation in the City and Docklands was reported vacant. The residential market peaked and home ownership experienced ‘negative equity’. Housing ‘crisis’ had once meant soaring prices, but now meant plummeting ones. They did not recover until 1994. None the less, London’s economy was firmly set on a new course, with financial services in the driving seat. The City Corporation was able to claim that the number of foreign banks in London, seventy-six in 1959, had reached 580.

…

All was forgiven when the games were declared a success, with the prime minister, David Cameron, promising they had been worth £13 billion in exports, an absurd figure. But there was no question a pride surged over London that summer, as Nero’s bargain held, of ‘bread and circuses’ for public contentment. London 2012 saw a curious inversion of London’s traditional modesty. Housing crisis – or not A sense of suspended hysteria followed the 2012 Olympics, including much controversy over their ‘legacy’. Tourism did not rise, sports activity fell and a huge site at Stratford stood aching for reuse. On one thing all agreed, the legacy must have to do with housing, for housing was ‘in crisis’.

…

Such investment could only divert resources from those in real housing distress. They were not those eager for a cheaper ‘more affordable’ home, as the jargon put it, but those in genuine need of adequate housing. As in the nineteenth century, policy seemed to concentrate on the ‘deserving’ poor. London’s housing ‘crisis’ lay in distorted housing policy not a lack of house-building. The inevitable consequence for councils wishing to continue building for social rent was to cross-finance ‘affordable units’ by selling parts of their old council estates to the private sector. This was the case with the large Pepys estate in Lewisham, and Heygate in Southwark.

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Figure 4.7 reproduces the same data. The authors of the original graphic noted that the bottom 60 per cent of Americans had 65 per cent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 per cent, in contrast, had just 10 per cent of their wealth locked up in the bricks and mortar of their property. Consequently: ‘The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the super-rich.’99 Taxing the rich through their property holdings alone may not be enough. Figure 4.7 Wealth in the USA: it’s the Inequality, Stupid By 2012 it had become apparent that these graphics, publicised widely in the US during 2011, were badly out of date.

…

Allen, ‘Home Buyers Left Behind in Britain’s Two-Speed Housing Market’, Financial Times, 18 January 2014. 44. M. Griffith, ‘Foreign Demand Comes with Risks’ (letter), Financial Times, 5 March 2014. 45. B. Goldacre, ‘Generation Game’ (letter), The Times, 29 November 2013. 46. M. Duell, ‘All Aboard My New Home! The Shipping Containers Being Rented Out for £75 a Week to Try to Solve London’s Chronic Housing Crisis’, Daily Mail, 9 October 2013. 47. N. Shaxson, J. Christensen and N. Mathiason, ‘Inequality: You Don’t Know the Half of It’, Tax Justice Network, 19 July 2012, at taxjustice.net. 48. L. Slater, ‘Keeping Up with the Zahoors: Inside the Super-Rich World of Londongrad’, Times Magazine, 23 November 2013, p. 41. 49.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

I agreed with the city’s engineer’s recommendation to, essentially, go big or go home: make the larger strategic investments now and the city was going to have financial rewards in the future. It was option (c), with my hunch that the bypass would prove to be the most profitable. I was at a total loss when the results were presented. This was before the 2008 housing crisis, thus optimism was built into these calculations. Even so, for every dollar potentially to be invested by Pequot Lakes, here is the projected return on investment in each scenario: Through Town Alternative Required Improvements: –$7.34 Required and Maintenance Improvements: –$34.32 Required, Maintenance, and Growth Improvements: –$46.63 Bypass Alternative Required Improvements: +$1.43 Required and Maintenance Improvements: –$3.11 Required, Maintenance, and Growth Improvements: –$12.62 The city of Pequot Lakes was expected to lose money on all but one scenario.

…

With the enthusiastic support of contractors, developers, trade unions, and others involved in the business of construction, the ASCE regularly calls for large increases in all levels of infrastructure spending. They boldly cite the obvious benefits of more infrastructure, claims that are parroted nearly unquestioned by politicians and media outlets. For example, in 2011, as governments everywhere were having their budgets hammered by the lingering effects of the housing crisis that began three years earlier, the ASCE published a report called Failure to Act,8 an analysis of the economic impacts of infrastructure investment trends. In this report, the ASCE detailed the hundreds of billions our failing infrastructure is costing American families and businesses. At that point, ASCE estimated that families and businesses had lost $130 billion due just from deficiencies in transportation systems.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Sophisticated investors could vet their purchases.20 Computer models could identify and mitigate risk. But the replacement of regulation by automation turned out to be as fanciful as flying cars or space colonization. 106 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY Machine Dreams Consider the role of computer models in a critical part of the housing crisis: mortgage-backed securities. While investors may not be interested in any one particular mortgagor’s stream of payments, an aggregation of such payments can be marketed as a far more stable income source (or security) than, say, any one loan. Think, for instance, of the stream of payments coming out of a small city.

…

Journalists and legal scholars help the persistent to peer into fi nance’s black box. They need a stronger voice in a regulatory process too often dominated by the few who profit from opacity. To be sure, there are many conscientious souls working on Wall Street. But their voices and values matter little if they can be summarily overruled by their bosses. The aftermath of the housing crisis has exposed a critical mass of unethical and hugely costly deals. It has created a presumption of suspicion for large firms—particularly those that now enjoy “too big to fail” status. Black box finance ranges from the crude to the cunning, the criminal to the merely complex. Countless narratives and analyses of the crisis have tried to pin down whether bankers, mortgage brokers, regulators, and insurers knew or should have known that the mortgage industrial complex was building a house of cards.

…

Although 50 separate states run Medicaid programs, antifraud programs appear to be unifying these once-disparate sources of data. The data miners can also compare findings of noteworthy activity in the Medicare program across states.159 Functionality of this kind, spotting repeated patterns of mortgage fraud around the country, would have been very helpful in the run-up to the housing crisis. Just as a network of fusion centers can readily transmit suspicious patterns of criminal intelligence horizontally (to other state- or local-level agencies) or vertically (to national agencies), state Medicaid Integrity Programs both empower and are empowered by rapid data flows.160 The Medicare-Medicaid Data Match Program breaks down the barriers between the surveillance and analysis done by each program.161 Its successes should be a model for the entities now comprising the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which may be able to find efficiencies (and new insights) by sharing data.

World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

É urgente renegociar a dívida de São Paulo. Escola de Governo: Artigos. Available at http://www.escoladegoverno.org.br/artigos/1984‐qe‐urgente‐renegociar‐a‐divida‐ de‐sao‐pauloq. Accessed 2016 Feb 12. Holmes, C. (2016). São Paulo Is Betting Better Urban Planning Can Solve a Housing Crisis. Next City. Available at https://nextcity.org/features/view/sao‐paulo‐housing‐crisis‐master‐ plan‐zeis‐haddad‐habitat‐iii. Accessed 2016 Feb 12. IBGE (2016). Population projection for Brazil and federal units. Available at http://www.ibge. gov.br/apps/populacao/projecao/index.html. Accessed 2016 Jan 20. Jovem Pam (2014). Dilma elogia resultado de privatização do aeroporto de Guarulhos, SP.

…

There has been no broad framework resembling a ‘national urban policy’ in the US for over 30 years, with national urban programmes instead focusing upon small‐area‐based initiatives for community‐led housing and eco­ nomic development. The federal government did previously play a substantial role in investing in affordable housing programmes and many of these were uti­ lised in New York City. The gradual loss of this investment stream into New York over the past 20 years has contributed to New York’s affordable housing crisis. The federal tier has also withdrawn from many financing responsibilities and focused primarily on security, immigration and healthcare challenges. Instead, it is the federal support that New York City tends to receive in response to major crises that emerges as a recurrent theme of this chapter.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

., manufacturing of aerospace equipment, recruitment agencies, luxury goods, or technology and telecom providers), it came from the use of financial products and services to leverage underlying economic activity. Formally, in national accounts, financial products are treated as activity, though in reality they simply involve the purchase and reallocation of risk, and by 2007, this risk was not well allocated. The housing crisis was a great case in point. Cheap money boosted house prices, high house prices boosted transaction leverages, and exotic and ultimately dangerous derivative instruments magnified the impact of the housing sector on the economy. All the while, banks made money at each of these turns, and by 2006 nearly 40 percent of all the earnings of corporate America came from finance (as an aside, technology now occupies this role, and potentially, from a regulatory point of view, technology may be the new banking sector).

…

., that education and health are public goods), and needs to better oversee the state’s role as an economic actor and procurer of services. The second issue is that Ireland still regularly suffers from imbalances in its economy, the most obvious one today being that house prices and rental charges are higher than during its bubble period, and that there is a resulting housing crisis. Ireland’s overheated property market is one area where it can learn from other small countries. In the past it has found it too easy to copy the policy model of the United Kingdom and has ignored the lessons of other small open countries (notably, the Scandinavian banking crisis of the 1990s came to the notice of Irish policy makers only after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger).

…

For example, if eurozone interest rates were very low by the standards of the Irish economy and produced a housing bubble, the Irish central bank then could increase the deposit-to-loan ratio on mortgages or the finance ministry could increase the tax on property transactions so as to dampen the risk of a housing bubble. In a sign that Ireland has not fully learned the lessons of its housing crisis, it is now enduring its second housing bubble in ten years, with housing affordability very stretched and homelessness a very public social problem. Allowing, encouraging, and helping individual states to use policy tools like this would allow them to exist in the eurozone in a more stable way.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

But I wasn’t ready to provide much detail yet. We hadn’t figured out how the stress test would work. And the rest of my speech was just as vague. I would announce a new program to buy some of the distressed assets that were weighing down banks, while acknowledging that it wasn’t ready. I would promise “a comprehensive plan to address the housing crisis,” with little further explanation. And I would signal that we would not allow any more Lehman-style failures, a crucial commitment designed to prevent an even more chaotic run, but that line was hedged and buried in my twenty-sixth paragraph. As the President had promised, this would be my moment in the sun.

…

We needed to design a strategy to fix the broken financial system and a large fiscal stimulus package to arrest the economic free fall. We had to figure out a way to save the dying U.S. auto industry in order to prevent a regional depression in the industrial Midwest. We had to devise a plan to deal with the escalating housing crisis in order to protect millions of families at risk of foreclosure. At a time when the federal deficit was soaring past $1 trillion for the first time, we would also have to send Congress a budget laying out our tax and spending priorities, and demonstrating how we intended to limit the red ink once the economy recovered.

…

At my farewell dinner at the Fed, Jeff Lacker had quipped that my colleagues had considered giving me one of our Maiden Lane vehicles as a going-away present, since they probably wouldn’t exceed the Fed’s $25 gift limit. At the time, those assets were distressed enough to make the joke funny. The markets had welcomed TARP, but they no longer believed that TARP was big enough to fill the system’s capital hole. The President had pledged to use at least $50 billion to address the housing crisis, so we now had about $300 billion left to repair the financial system. Fortunately, we wouldn’t need TARP money to recapitalize Fannie and Freddie, because the separate authority Hank had gotten to put capital into them was essentially unlimited; otherwise, they were hemorrhaging so badly they could have drained most of the cash we had left.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

From London to Sydney, residential property prices in the leading cities danced to the same monetary jig.3 As an executive at Savills, a property consultant, commented: ‘What happened was that, for the first time, the cost of money in most of the cities was similar – you might say quantitative easing [has] levelled the global playing field.’4 Real estate brokers referred to the favoured destinations of the world’s super-rich as ‘golden concrete’.5 In the United Kingdom, the country’s ‘housing crisis’ was generally ascribed to a lack of housebuilding. But the Bank of England’s decision to maintain interest rates at their lowest level in its three-hundred-year history had a more significant impact on affordability. While UK house prices were extremely expensive relative to household incomes, relative to mortgage costs they had never been cheaper.

…

Homeownership was fast becoming a preserve of the professional classes.100 The British government offered a subsidy to first-time buyers in 2013, but this subsidy pushed up house prices even further.101 Politicians promised to build more homes, but the number of new houses needed to make housing affordable again was inconceivably large. Economists at the University of Reading came up with an alternative, summarized in a Bloomberg headline: ‘The Only Solution to Britain’s Housing Crisis May be a Crash’.102 Britain’s housing affordability crisis had damaging economic consequences. A dynamic economy requires that workers move freely between jobs. But as house prices climbed, there was a steep drop in the number of Britons moving home to start a new job.103 Young homeowners who took out large mortgages to buy a house had less money to spend on other things.

…

The average first-time buyer in 2015 showed an income of £50,000 or more, putting him or her in the top 30 per cent of households, according to Savills. 101. Kate Allen and Jim Pickard, ‘Help to Buy Has Pushed Up House Prices, Says Study’, Financial Times, 20 September 2015. Also, Kate Allen, ‘QE Feeding Europe House Price Bubble, Says Study’, Financial Times, 20 July 2015. 102. Jill Ward, ‘The Only Solution to Britain’s Housing Crisis May be a Crash’, Bloomberg, 10 April 2017. 103. John Ashmore, ‘How Britain’s Housing Market Has Created a Mobility Crisis’, CapX, 6 June 2019. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people aged 25 to 34 moving home to start a new job fell by 40 per cent. This decline roughly coincides with the low interest-rate regime.

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

Thatcher and her successors have done all they can to sell off the nation’s bricks and mortar, only to be forced to rent it back, at inflated prices, from the people they sold it to. Before Right to Buy, the government spent a pound on building homes for every pound it spent on rent subsidies. Now, for every pound it spends on housing benefit, it puts five pence towards building. The response of the current government to the housing crisis is to try to make it worse. It is taking steps to increase house prices, without taking steps to increase supply. The coalition’s two most explicit interventions in the housing market have been to restrict supply and raise prices: the first when it cut, by two-thirds, the grant given to housing associations to build new homes, and the second with its mocking parody of Right to Buy, ‘Help to Buy’, offering already well-off people cheap loans to overbid for overpriced houses they couldn’t otherwise afford.

…

There is a substantive obstacle in the way of that descent back into squalor: there is no neat way to separate the shortage of social housing from the shortage of housing in general. The government is pulling back in the face of a market that is failing across the board. Matt Griffith, author of an incisive paper for the think tank IPPR about the housing crisis, We Must Fix It, points out that the interconnecting problems afflicting the private housebuilding industry do not reflect a deeper economic malaise; they are the deeper economic malaise. Britain’s established housebuilders, Griffith reckons, no longer have housebuilding as their primary function.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, analysts like Henry Blodget at Merrill Lynch were wildly bullish about Internet stocks, dressing up pigs with lipstick. Years later, the same thing happened at credit-rating agencies where analysts issued blindly positive ratings for the CMOs and CDOs that would ultimately lead to the housing crisis. As for me, my 18 gut-wrenching months at D. H. Blair had destroyed my clean copybook and brought my career to an absolute low. The résumé and reputation I had built for myself at Oxford and Harvard had been reduced to dust. And reputation in business—especially the investing world—is everything.

…

., 149, 157–60 Fabozzi, Frank, 18–19 Fairfax Financial Holdings, 35, 140 Fannie Mac, 53–5 Farmer Mac, 53–7 fee structures, hedge fund, 46–7, 67, 73–4, 79–80 Feldman, Andrew, 23 financial crisis of 2008–2009, 21, 57, 101 and addiction to Bloomberg, 118 and Aquamarine Fund, 86–99, 192 and behavioral finance, 107–9 and finding balance, 121–2 and inner scorecard, 80 and redemption policies, 47 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb), 136 Ford, Henry, 45 Fortescue Metals Group, 97 Fosha, Diana, 17 Freddie Mac, 53–5, 90 Gabelli, Mario, 73 Gage, Phineas, 102 Gates, Bill, 61, 78–9, 83, 124, 176 Gawande, Atul, 151–4 GEICO, 38, 164 Girard, Joe, 61 GLIDE Foundation, 69–70, 75–6, 175 Goldman Sachs, 7–8, 30–1 Gotham Partners, 54 Graham, Benjamin, 1, 18–19, 30, 36–7, 50, 79, 106, 146 greed, 3, 8, 16, 50, 112, 189, 193 Green, William, 85, 195 Greenblatt, Joel, 53, 106 Greene, Robert, 171 Guerin, Rick, 82, 93 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 5 Harvard Business School (HBS), 5–7, 9, 21–2, 28–9, 42, 49, 128, 130, 184 Hawkins, David, 66 Hemingway, Ernest, 17 heroes, modeling habits of, 39–40, 46, 67, 71, 96, 113, 115–16, 176–7 Hill, Napoleon, 35 Hindi, Orly, 180 Hohn, Chris, 49–50, 51, 144 Hölldobler, Bert, 104 housing crisis, 17, 90. See also financial crisis of 2008–2009 How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling (Bettger), 6 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 35 Hughes, Stephen, 167–9 Influence: Science and Practice (Cialdini), 148 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini), 60 inner growth and meaning, 187–94 Intelligent Investor, The (Graham), 1, 19, 30, 79 investing checklist for, 151–70 as a game, 123–32 guideline for checking stock prices, 135–7 guideline for researching, 140 guideline for responding to sales pitches, 137–9 guideline for talking to management, 139–40 guidelines for buying and selling, 145–8 guidelines for discussing, 144–5, 148–50 rules and tools for, 133–50 use of the phrase “value investing,” 187 See also value investing IPOs (initial public offerings), 9–10, 129, 138–9 J.

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

In the same year, Fannie set itself the goal of doubling its profits in five years, and its employees were rewarded with stock options when that goal was achieved. In 1999, Steven Holmes noted in the New York Times that, by pushing through such projects, the administration could cause a repeat of the housing crisis of the 1980s: In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.24 But there was nothing tentative about the actions of Fannie Mae.

…

See also discrimination against minorities multiple purchases, 7, 9 second mortgages, 6-7 See also housing policy Hoover, Herbert, 101-5, 109 New Deal policies and policies of, 106 Hortlund, Per, 143 Housing and Urban Development (HUD), lending expansion under Cisneros, 29-36 housing bubble, 5-10, 17-18, 113 riding the bubble, 55-58, 134-35 warning signs of impending trouble, 40-43, 70-75 housing crisis of 1980s, 33 housing policy Cisneros and, 23-25 Community Reinvestment Act and, 26-28 expanded homeownership, 23-28 exposure to risk, 24-25, 29-30, 40-43 geographic variations, 7-9 government homeownership projects, 25-28 lending community and, 25-28 monitoring of loans made, 34 ownership society and, 24, 36-40 stretching HUD rules and requirements, 29-36 subprime mortgages and, 24, 29-36 warning signs of impending trouble, 40-43 housing prices, 8, 9-10 HUD.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

I decide there must be something I am doing wrong, some cue I am missing. Budgie's owners had been confident that Apartment Search would find me a place. When I call another friend of a friend, a professor at a college in St. Paul who has briefed me on the Twin Cities' industrial history, he concedes to being aware of an affordable-housing “crisis” but has no idea what I should do. Those rental agents who are kind enough to talk to me all recommend the same thing: find a motel that rents by the week and stay there until something opens up.[24] So, through multiple calls, I arrive at a list of eleven motels in the Twin Cities area, all of them of the non-brand-name variety, offering weekly rates.

…

But rents were also skyrocketing in the touristically challenged city of Minneapolis, where the last bits of near-affordable housing lie deep in the city, while job growth has occurred on the city's periphery, next to distinctly unaffordable suburbs. Insofar as the poor have to work near the dwellings of the rich—as in the case of so many service and retail jobs—they are stuck with lengthy commutes or dauntingly expensive housing. If there seems to be general complacency about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13 percent or so. The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and “poverty,” as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three.

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Of rules and their exceptions Thus, the student of market psychology finds himself at an awkward crossroads. He understands that market timing is typically ineffectual, but is also aware of times in history when broad market levels have become obviously and grossly disconnected from any measure of fundamental value. From the Roaring 20s and the Nifty Fifty to the Tech Bubble and the Housing Crisis, periods of mania have been relatively frequent, easy to spot with typical valuation metrics and have had dramatic wealth-destroying effects. If the rule is “don’t time the market,” is it possible that there are ever exceptions to the rule? I believe that there are and that consistent with our behavioral emphasis on contrarianism, they are infrequent, painful to implement and will run directly contrary to what feels right.

…

The 1973 oil crisis resulted in rumors that toilet paper would be in short supply. These rumors led to subsequent runs on the grocery story where fearful citizens stocked up. This led to, you guessed it, an actual shortage of toilet paper that was wholly a consequence of perception. More consequentially, this was evident in the housing crisis of the late 2000s. As housing prices began their precipitous decline, more and more homeowners found themselves underwater, meaning that the market value of the home was less than the mortgage. This provides ample reason for the homeowner to walk away from the home, declare bankruptcy and be free of the whole affair.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

A joint effort coordinated by the local Labour council and property developer Lendlease, its intention was to respond to the twin problems of the housing crisis and central government reducing local budgets as the result of austerity. In this respect it mirrors outsourcing. There the solution to unemployment is jobs whose wages increase poverty, while the HDV wanted to build homes that ordinary people could not afford. In a London borough where the average home was already fifteen times the median wage, the HDV wasn’t a solution to the housing crisis – it entrenched it. This feedback loop is no accident. Neoliberalism reduces the capacity of public bodies to spend money while simultaneously intensifying social problems like homelessness and poverty.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

And it was pretty clear to almost anyone who thought about it- including, it turns o ut, Robert Sh iller- that something was going badly wrong in US housing m arkets after 200 1 or so. But he saw it as exceptional rather than system ic.6 Shiller could well claim, of course, that all of the above other exam ­ ples were merely regional events. B u t then so, from t h e standpoint of the people of Brazil or China, was the housing crisis of 2007-09. The epi­ center was the US southwest and Florida ( with some spillover in G eorgia), along with a few other hot-spots (the grumbling foreclosure crises that began in the late 1 9 90s in poor areas in older cities like Balt imore and C leveland were too local and "unimportant" be cause those affected were African-A mericans and m inorities).

…

See also Eastern Europe, 140 Santiago China, xiv, 1 1 - 1 5 passim, 1 9 , 44, 46, 57-65, 1 24, 1 33; bill i onaires, 1 5 ; Ecologistes, Lx Egypt, 1 64. See also Cairo 7he Eigh teenth Bruma ire of Louis consumerism, 3 9 , 6 1 ; exception Napoleon (Marx) , 37 to global ant iwar protests, 1 1 6; El Alto, Bolivia, 79, 1 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 3 1 , urbanization, xv, 1 1 - 1 2, 1 9; US housing crisis and, 3 1 ; World El Alto, Rebel City ( Lazar) , 144 -50 Bank and, 29. See also Beijing; Chongqing; Guangdong; Shanghai; Shenzen Chongqing, 64, 1 36 Christiania, Copenhagen, 78 City of God, 1 00 Class Struggles in France ( Marx) , 37 1 4 1 - 5 1 passim passim Elyachar, Jul ia, 20- 2 1 Engels, Friedrich, 4, 1 6- 1 8 passim, 5 3 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 1 60 Escobar, Arturo, 142 European Central Bank, 24 Cleveland, 1 3, 3 1 , 56, 83 European Union, 29 Clinton, Bill, 45, 53, 54, 56 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna ( ETA) , 1 00 Cochabamba, Bolivia, 82-83, 1 1 6, 142, Excluded Workers Congress, 1 3 1 -32, 143, 149 1 37, 1 5 1 Cold War, 9, 1 24 Columbia University, 23-24 Commonwealth ( Hardt and Negri), 1 52 The Comm unis t Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 53 Copenhagen, 78 Fallujah, Iraq, 1 1 7 Fannie Mae, 39, 4 1 , 45, 47, 49, 5 1 Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA), 1 60 Federal Home Mortgage Corporation.

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

Chapman has never been shy about criticizing the managers of businesses he invests in, but he was particularly pointed with the brass at BMHC. He took to publicly calling out Rob as “San Francisco’s own $6 Million Man” and urged the company to reduce “its bloated cost structure.”* Even as the housing crisis became a clear supercycle event, BMHC—again, a low-margin commodity and service provider with its roots in Boise, Idaho—kept its tony corporate headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront. That fact alone, even more than the firm’s increasingly gruesome finances, convinced me to short its stock.

…

There was no reason Rob and his fellow executives couldn’t conduct their business in a low-cost industrial park or even some modest mobile offices tucked into the corner of one of the dozens of lumber supply yards the company owned. That would have not only saved crucial overhead expenses during the housing crisis, it would have shown the world—and their own employees—that they were going to do everything it took to weather the downturn, even if it meant living and working (gasp!) outside of San Francisco. Eventually, in early 2009, BMHC did move its headquarters back to its original hometown of Boise, Idaho.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

., 2022, ‘Canary Wharf proposes £500mn lab project to reinvent financial hub’, Financial Times. 38 Cintu, A., 2021, ‘Record apartment conversions make 2021 most successful year in adaptive reuse’, RentCafe (rentcafe.com). 39 Feldman, E., 2022, ‘Converting office buildings to apartments could help city housing crisis’, Spectrum News. 40 Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion. 41 Reagor, C., 2017, ‘Downtown Phoenix’s rebirth has been decades in the making. Here’s how they did it’, The Arizona Republic (azcentral.com). 42 Kelly, H., Kramer, A. and Warren, A., 2020, Emerging Trends in Real Estate: United States and Canada 2020, PWC and Urban Land Institute. 43 Harmon, J. and Zim, E., 2021, ‘The rise and fall of the American mall’, Business Insider. 44 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data. 45 Paulas, R., 2017, ‘The death of the suburban office park and the rise of the suburban poor’, Pacific Standard Magazine. 46 DeVoe, J., 2021, ‘Leaders say Arlington has the ecosystem to be the next Austin or Miami’, ARL Now. 47 Authors’ calculations based on Zillow data.

…

., 2020, ‘Cautious hopes for slum dwellers relocated in Egypt housing project’, Reuters. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2021, ‘The labor market for recent college graduates’ (newyorkfed.org). Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 2019, ‘The US auto labor market since NAFTA’ (stlouisfed.org). Feldman, E., 2022 ‘Converting office buildings to apartments could help city housing crisis’, Spectrum News. Ferenczi, A., 2021, ‘A city without cars is already here, and it’s idyllic’, Vice (vice.com). Ferguson, N., 2017, The Square and the Tower (Penguin). Fessenden, M., 2015, ‘Making a sandwich from scratch took this man six months’, Smithsonian Magazine. Fischer, C., 1982, To Dwell Among Friends (University of Chicago Press). —, 2007, ‘Technology and society: historical complexities’, Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 67, No. 1.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

That’s nearly twice the rate among white borrowers. Among low-income black borrowers, 62 percent of refinance loans were subprime, more than twice the rate among low-income whites. “It actually started in communities like Atlanta,” says Nikitra Bailey, a Center for Responsible Lending researcher who has studied the Southeastern U.S. housing crisis. “A lot of our older African-Americans were house rich but cash poor. So lenders came up with these scams to siphon the wealth away.” It’s a loss black America can scarcely afford, because black wealth has long been enormously dependent on home equity. In 1967, the year before the Mitchells bought their house, homes accounted for 67 percent of black wealth, compared with 40 percent of white wealth.

…

They will reach fruition when politicians and other leaders swallow their bruised egos and rethink their supine posture, arm in arm with Wall Street. That looks improbable at the moment. But voters can help them change their minds. The Suicide Solution B A R B A R A E H R E N R E I C H July 28, 2008 Afew days beforeCongress passed its housing bill,Car-lene Balderrama of Taunton, Massachusetts, found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Corporation—may its name live in infamy—was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband’s rifle. This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay titled “Why No Outrage?”

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Michael Boyajian, “The Death of the American Sunbelt,” Room Eight, July 19, 2010, http://www.r8ny.com/blog/judgeboyajian/the_death_of_the_american_sunbelt.html; Matthew O’Brien, “Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?” Atlantic, January 26, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-is-the-american-dream-dead-in-the-south/283313. 67. Jed Kolko, “Metros Clobbered by the Housing Crisis Are Growing Again,” CityLab, March 14, 2013, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/03/metros-clobbered-housing-crisis-are-growing-again/4991; Joel Kotkin, “Forget What the Pundits Tell You, Coastal Cities Are Old News—It’s the Sunbelt That’s Booming,” Daily Beast, March 1, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/01/forget-what-the-pundits-tell-you-coastal-cities-are-old-news-it-s-the-sunbelt-that-s-booming.html. 68.

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

The super-rich do exacerbate and help sustain the severe housing crisis; they treat housing like financial assets and help incentivise companies to build luxury, cash-cow apartments which only the very few can afford to live in. But focusing on specific nationalities like this ‘others’ inequality; rich Britons who play this same property investment game disappear, making it seem like it’s primarily outside influence that is the cause of unaffordable house prices. But these people buying and selling homes like they’re a commodity aren’t the only reason for the housing crisis. Factors such as land values and how planning permission is designed – determined largely by policy decisions – have played a huge part in the lack of affordable homes in the UK.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

In the context of stagnating wages, the gap between income and expenditure would be covered by personal borrowing. 1988 was the first year ever that consumers’ expenditure exceeded their incomes.30 The Lawson boom — the economic boom named after the Chancellor who presided over it — saw tax cuts, a reduction in interest rates (once the union movement had been dealt with, of course), and an across-the-board increase in household borrowing and spending. Growth increased in the short-term, before collapsing in an equally large bust when interest rates had to be hiked again to keep the UK in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In a mini precursor to 2008, a housing crisis ensued. But it wasn’t long before stability was restored, and debt began to climb once again — and it didn’t stop climbing for nearly two decades. The genius of basing demand on private debt was that it allowed people to buy more, propelling economic growth, whilst also directing a greater portion of peoples’ income towards interest payments and fees that went to financiers.31 Under this system, individuals would use the tools provided to them by financial markets to weather the storms created by changes in the business cycle, making a tidy profit for the finance sector in the process.32 In this way, “privatised Keynesianism” replaced the Keynesian model of demand management that governed the post-war consensus.33 Had this model relied only on unsecured lending, like credit cards or student loans, it wouldn’t have lasted very long.

…

But at the beginning of 2007, refinancing became more difficult, and many consumers found themselves stuck with high interest payments that they couldn’t afford. House prices levelled off in 2006 and then began to fall. Defaults escalated, and banks began to worry. Had the trouble ended at US mortgages, we may have been left with a US, and perhaps a UK, housing crisis. But by 2007, mortgages were no longer just mortgages. The debt that had been created by the banks in the boom between the 1980s and 2007 had been transformed into the plumbing of the entire global financial system. Every day, millions of dollars’ worth of mortgages were packaged up into securities, traded on financial markets, insured, bet against, and repackaged into a seemingly endless train of financial intermediation.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

This move back into city centers also coincided with the Great Recession. Those big houses and multiple cars, it turns out, were beyond many of our means. And it’s no coincidence, Turner says, that Airbnb — a company founded around shared housing — was born in 2008, just as the United States was entering a recession built on a housing crisis. For many Airbnb hosts, the spare rooms they rented through the service helped them keep their homes. City living, for all its allure, is expensive, but the sharing economy makes it possible for more people, whether they’re sharing a car because they can’t afford to own one, or a bike because they’ve got nowhere to store it.

The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg, Demos (organization : London, England)

banking crisis, credit crunch, failed state, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Right to Buy, smart grid, too big to fail, Winter of Discontent

House building levels at one point fell to the lowest level since the Second World War. There are almost one million fewer social homes than in 1991 and the waiting list has rocketed to 1.8m families. Labour has let down low income families – the very people who hoped Labour would protect them. Both the housing bubble and the social housing crisis developed because of Labour’s reluctance to disperse economic and political power. Social housing is disappearing because of the nationally-imposed Right to Buy and Whitehall restrictions on councils’ ability to invest in building new homes to replace those sold off. Both were introduced by the Conservatives but Labour did almost nothing to reverse the trends, even imposing extra constraints on councils in relation to the Decent Homes investment.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

And many Americans through the mid-1990s through 2007 saw the value of their homes rise dramatically, in some cases more than 100 percent over that period, leading to many people thinking of homes as speculative investment vehicles instead of a place to live. But the most striking fact coming out of the housing crisis for this author is that despite the 25 to 35 percent drop in value for many homes in major metropolitan areas, the cost of replacing many existing homes is above the current market value—grim testament to the reality of the underlying rate of inflation in the United States. The Greenspan Legacy Contemporary observers writing accounts of the collapse of the subprime debt bubble blame Greenspan and the members of the Federal Open Market Committee for the crisis.

…

But as the growth potential of the U.S. economy wanes and the baby boomers reach retirement age, all the while refusing to rein in their insatiable desire for consumption, the ability of the American economy to fulfill the dreams of workers around the world is in doubt. How we deal with the uniquely American problem of a global fiat currency will define the destiny of America and the world in the next century and beyond. One of the issues raised by the subprime housing crisis of 2007–2009 that is not often discussed in the media or economic circles is how the increasingly hollow U.S. economy will look without the positive effect of a constantly buoyant housing market. Josh Rosner believes that the positive influence of the baby boom in the decades following WWII is now becoming a serious drag on future U.S. economic growth.

…

Stevenson, Adlai Stewart, John Fat Years and the Lean Stewart, William Silver Knight (pamphlet) Stillman, James Stock investment New Era theory perspective, change Stock markets human nature, impact purchases (financing), short-term loans (usage) Stocks, decline Strong, Benjamin Bankers Trust Company exit Delano/House meeting Morgan control replacement Strong, William Subprime debt bubble, blame Subprime Debt Crisis (2008) Subprime debt crisis, Fed/Treasury assistance Subprime financial crisis, perspective (Raynes) Subprime housing crisis (2007-2009), issues Suez Canal, closing (1956) Sugar Equalization Board Summers, Larry Swanberg, W.A. Sylla, Richard Systemic risk, moral dilemma Szymczak, M.S. Taft, William Howard government debt Taleb, Nassim Tammany Hall Roosevelt, impact Tansil, Charles Callan America Goes to War Tariffs competitiveness, FDR promise FDR maintenance imposition increase protection, increase reduction FDR endorsement Hoover opposition Republican party position Tariffs for revenue only Taxes FDR increase reduction, passage Tennessee Iron & Coal Company U.S.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

Condo associations and residents in many cities, meanwhile, have protested the parade of transient visitors Airbnb has suddenly created in their buildings and the changes they have brought to their neighborhoods. Among other things, these opponents say that Airbnb is teeming with professional real estate operators who have hoarded housing units to turn them into full-time use on Airbnb. They claim this has kept housing off the market and worsened an affordable-housing crisis in many markets. In a handful of cities, including New York and San Francisco, they are legislating to curb the company’s growth. And the bigger Airbnb gets, the louder and tougher the fight. Over the years, Airbnb has also dealt with all the unintended consequences of putting strangers together, including ransackings, attacks, and lapses in responsibility on the part of its hosts that have led to tragic accidents of the worst possible kind.

…

It creates safety issues both by providing access to residential buildings to strangers and by failing to comply with traditional hotel-safety regulations. Perhaps most critically, they said the proliferation of units dedicated solely to renting out on Airbnb—so-called illegal hotels—removes housing from a market that is already in a serious affordable-housing crisis, driving prices up further for everyone. A much bigger blow came in the fall of 2013, when New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman served Airbnb with a subpoena, saying he was going after illegal hotels and seeking records of transactions for some fifteen thousand Airbnb hosts in New York City.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

There was widespread denunciation of the unemployment of millions of young people who had no prospects of finding a decent job. On April 7, 2011, thousands of youth had demonstrated in Madrid following the call of “Youth Without a Future,” an Internet-based campaign to defend their rights to education, work and housing. There had also been a protest against the housing crisis in general and against the shortage of affordable housing for young people in particular. One important contingent of the 15-M movement came from the youth involved in the “V as Vivienda (Housing)” campaign in the months preceding the movement. There were particularly virulent protests against mortgage foreclosures and evictions of elderly and families in need, who had been trapped by the banks in subprime loans that they would have to continue to pay for the rest of their lives, even after having lost their homes.

…

There were multiple proposals of various natures, voted on in the General Assemblies, but little effort to translate them into a policy campaign going beyond combating the effects of mortgage foreclosures or financial abuses on borrowers and consumers. The list of most frequently mentioned demands debated in various occupations hints at the extraordinary diversity of the movement’s targets: controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for co-optation in the political system (as happened with the Tea Party).

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Leicester’s stock of 38,000 council dwellings had fallen to 21,000 through the enforced sales; now there were 6,000 people on the city’s waiting list for a council tenancy. The only homes the council could afford to build were for private sale. Sir Peter Soulsby, the city’s Labour leader, said, ‘At the very least right to buy ought to be suspended in cities like Leicester until we have dealt with the housing crisis.’ Councils showed enterprise by creating arm’s-length companies that were able to borrow outside the usual restrictions. Eventually, the meagre numbers – only 1,900 new council dwellings completed in 2015–16 – proved unacceptable even to ministers. Their next move wasn’t so much a U-turn as a grudging acceptance that councils were irreplaceable as builders; sotto voce, ministers told councils they could borrow more, and the pace of construction quickened.

…

One example: it acquired 250 acres of a 605-acre site at Fairham in Nottinghamshire to develop as new homes and employment space, in collaboration with Rushcliffe council and private companies. The council’s target of 13,000 new dwellings by 2028 will contribute towards the 300,000 a year target as England’s minimum. A coalition of housing groups put a figure on what it would take to end the housing crisis: £14.6 billion a year for ten years to build 1.45 million dwellings for social rent or shared ownership. That is well within reach, since governments can borrow capital cheaply against property assets that stay on its books. Glories of the Garden Some signals are green/amber. ‘Declinism’ is a British tradition, and Ipsos’s Bobby Duffy and other surveyors of opinion deplore a tendency to overdo the gloom.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

The Verge, February 8, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16990730/tesla-earnings-2017-elon-musk 184straining the local road infrastructure and labor and housing markets: Benjamin Spillman. “Musk plunges Tesla into Nevada’s housing crisis.” Reno Gazette Journal, October 12, 2018. https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2018/10/12/elon-musk-tesla-gigafactory-nevada-housing-crisis/1619609002/ 184were already pointing the way to the trouble ahead: Jeff Cobb. “Model 3 ‘Bottleneck’ Blamed on Chaos and Incompetence at Tesla Gigafactory.” HybridCars.com, October 31, 2017. https://www.hybridcars.com/model-3-bottleneck-blamed-on-chaos-and-incompetence-at-tesla-gigafactory/ 186one of its trademark extravaganza events at the Fremont factory: Model 3 Owners Club.

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

More credit, and not higher wages, would be enough to solve the problems of America’s cities. Toward that end, federal policy fashioned the financial innovation that made possible America’s debt explosion—the asset-backed security—that expanded well beyond its original purpose. Solving the urban crisis would require solving the housing crisis. But to fix the housing crisis, radical financial innovation would have to occur to maintain the capital flows into mortgages. As the urban riots became the urban crisis, however, mortgage markets had a crisis of their own. American mortgage markets had abruptly frozen—the so-called Credit Crunch of 1966—as investors rapidly withdrew their deposits from banks and put their money in the securities markets.

…

By 1970, withdrawals at savings and loan institutions exceeded deposits nearly every month.43 The president of the Mortgage Bankers of America, Robert Pease, declared at their annual convention that, “except for FNMA, there is almost no money available for residential housing. We are in a real honest-to-goodness housing crisis!”44 On average in 1971, $50 million worth of mortgages flowed from the capital markets through mortgage-backed securities into American housing each month. SECURING DEBT 233 In both the cities and suburbs, mortgage-backed securities provided new sources of mortgage funds. While direct mortgage assignment collapsed, mortgage-backed securities provided the financing to dramatically increase the new housing programs in America’s cities.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

—ELISEO GUARDADO, subprime borrower The banks are playing to brokers who specialize in driving people into loans that people don’t understand…. They take a product that was exotic and move it to the category of a weapon—seriously. These loans go from being an exotic product to a hand grenade…. —KATHRYN KELLER, mortgage broker WHEN YOU THINK OF THE HOUSING CRISIS and millions of Americans being foreclosed out of their homes, you don’t imagine a bright, successful thirty-year-old like Bre Heller. When I met her, Heller was still reeling from the forced sale of her home in Orlando, Florida, stuck with a mountain of debt and furious at her bank. She didn’t seem like a typical victim.

…

The terms of JPMorgan Chase’s buyout barred lawsuits against either WaMu or JPMorgan Chase. The same happened to several pension funds for police and teachers in Detroit, Ontario, and Pompano Beach, Florida, which had invested in WaMu and were stuck with millions of shares of worthless WaMu common stock and bonds. Fraud but Almost No Prosecution What is striking about the housing crisis is that unlike the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, where hundreds of bank officials and board members went to jail on felony charges, only relatively low-level officers have been criminally prosecuted in the housing bust. Only belatedly have a few high-level government officials even acknowledged massive deception.

…

Clinton spelled out the benefits nationwide for average Americans if $1 trillion spent on Iraq went instead to domestic programs. “That is enough,” Clinton declared, “to provide health care for all 47 million uninsured Americans and quality pre-kindergarten for every American child, solve the housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable for every American student, and provide tax relief to tens of millions of middle-class families.” Increasingly, members of Congress have been pressing Obama to apply this economic logic to Afghanistan. Tea Party Republicans in the House have joined liberal Democrats in calling for defense cuts and faster withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As other buyers are pushed down the housing chain, inflation at the top of the market ripples down. This has contributed to the escalation of house prices and rents, making housing unaffordable for most wage-earners. Between 2010 and 2015, London house prices leapt by about 50 per cent. And while the housing crisis in London is most acute, prices have also risen steeply in the rest of the country. The previous trend towards more people owning their homes has gone into steep reverse. More are living in overcrowded or inadequate accommodation; more young adults are living with parents, unable to set up a household of their own; and homelessness is increasing, including among families with children.

…

In Britain and elsewhere, low interest rates and tax breaks have propelled property prices to levels that have put home ownership out of reach for many and, coupled with the abolition or erosion of rent controls, generated an increasingly expensive private rental market. Landlordism has become a feature of global rentier capitalism. It has not been resurrected by chance or by free markets. The UK’s present housing crisis has its origins in Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to give council tenants the ‘right to buy’ their homes at a substantial discount, a subsidy scheme that decimated the stock of social housing. Nearly 2 million tenants have since taken advantage of the scheme. Financial liberalisation also meant mortgages became easier to obtain.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Manuel Castells, a sympathetic observer, perused the online records of the Occupy sites’ general assemblies, and compiled a roster of changes the participants expected to work on the world. It made exhausting reading. …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for cooptation in the political system…[72] The action words used for these improvements of the status quo connoted negation and elimination: “reform,” “control,” “reverse,” “limit,” “combat,” “fine,” “critique.”

…

Ormerod’s endless list of parliamentary claims of competence can find a mirror image in the equally endless expectations of government culled by Manuel Castells from Occupier statements: …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet…[185] The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Indeed there are signs that progress is already being made in tackling some of the most thorny problems America faces—without explosive, fundamental change. Take housing. Falling house prices, excess supply, and the mortgage mess have been a millstone around the economy’s neck since 2007. The crisis has destroyed household wealth, ravaged banks’ balance sheets, and sapped consumers of their desire and ability to consume, borrow, and invest. The housing crisis turned out to be like Hanukkah: we were told it was going to last for a year, but it will probably last a good eight years. Residential investment morphed from a force that supercharged growth between 2001 and 2006 to one that sandbagged it. In its reports the Commerce Department points out how much each sector contributed to or detracted from growth.

…

., 14, 19, 23–24, 125, 146 deficits and, 221–22 economic decline and, 3, 10 health care reform and, 5–6 U.S. credit rating and, 1–2 Congressional Budget Office, 31 Connecticut, 50, 86, 105, 140, 146, 151, 161–62, 212 efficient consumers and, 187–88 Conservation and Recreation Department, Mass., 66 construction, 174 efficient consumers and, 190–91 housing crisis and, 219–20 infrastructure and, 205–6, 209, 211, 213 North Dakota and, 152–53, 155–56 Consumer Price Index, 187 consumers, consumerism, consumption, 2, 25, 28, 81, 101, 111, 216, 219 coal and, 102–3 economic pessimism and, 22–23 efficiency economy and, 64–65, 68, 73–75, 78, 223–24 exports and, 98–99, 104–5, 107, 110, 119, 128, 130–31, 147, 154, 164 FDI and, 83, 89–90, 92–93 indebtedness and, 9–10, 53–57 inports and, 131–32, 136–37, 141, 143, 147, 227 North Dakota and, 151, 153–54 and reshoring and insourcing, 169, 172, 175, 177 restructuring and, 44–45, 53–59 supersizing and, 202, 204, 209 see also efficient consumers Cooper, Bill, 105 Cooper, Stephen, 44 CoreLogic, 190 corporations, 1, 9–10, 60, 139–43, 163–67, 169–85, 192–206, 225 comparisons between consumers and, 181, 185, 189, 195 and costs of labor, 164–67 economic optimism and, 23–24 economic pessimism and, 22–23 efficiency economy and, 63–68, 71, 75–76, 80–81, 158, 172, 223 efficient consumers and, 181–85, 192–96 exports and, 98, 103, 108–10, 112–14, 116–17, 131, 177 FDI and, 82–96 global, 22, 24, 71, 95 inports and, 132, 135–37, 139–42, 144, 146–47, 202–3, 227 job growth and, 218–19 North Dakota and, 152–53, 155, 157–60 recoveries and, 17–18, 21, 215 and reshoring and insourcing, 167, 169–79 restructuring and, 44–45, 47–49, 52–53, 57–58, 81, 166 supersizing and, 199–206, 209–10 taxes on, 146–47, 163 timely policy decisions and, 28, 30, 34 U.S. economic importance and, 227–28 Costner, Kevin, 129–30 Coty, 71 Coulomb Technologies, 211 Council of Economic Advisers, 31 Cowan, Lynn, 203 Creation Technologies, 67 credit, 32–36, 94, 194 booms in, 21, 29, 56, 62 crisis in, 2, 4, 23, 26, 48, 53 exports and, 112–13 restructuring and, 49, 51, 53–56, 58 timely policy decisions and, 29, 32–33, 35–36, 42–43 credit cards, 34, 183–85 restructuring and, 54–56 credit ratings, 1–2, 11, 52 Credit Suisse, 137, 223 Davis, Fred, 90–91 debt, 1, 19–20, 23–24, 60, 185 CIT Group and, 48–49 consumers and, 9–10, 53–57 crises and, 6, 29, 216 efficiency economy and, 62–63, 72, 78 efficient consumers and, 181, 189, 193, 196 Erie Canal and, 205–6 FDI and, 82, 94 national, 2, 5, 11, 217 North Dakota and, 155–56 restructuring and, 45–59, 78 strengthening recovery and, 215–16 timely policy decisions and, 32–34, 36, 39, 42 see also loans, lending, lenders debt ceiling extensions, 2, 217 Dedrick, Jason, 140 Defense Department, U.S., 109 deficits: budget, 2, 6, 10, 64–65, 217, 221–22 efficiency economy and, 64–65 trade, 102, 107, 168, 221–22 Delphi, 46 demand, 18, 31, 45, 57, 101, 132, 178, 221 efficiency economy and, 60, 62, 72–74, 223 exports and, 99, 104, 107–10, 116, 119 North Dakota and, 153–54, 159 supersizing and, 206, 208 Deming, W.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

After all, Dimon was a hands-on manager with strong knowledge of the market, who had no qualms about disturbing his employees’ holidays if he considered a matter urgent. And by the autumn of 2006, Dimon thought the housing sector was becoming just that. In the spring of 2006, national house prices had started to slide. “A housing crisis approaches,” a column in Barron’s magazine boldly declared by August, pointing out that the median price of new homes had dropped almost 3 percent in the previous eight months, while sales of new homes had fallen 10 percent, leaving new home inventories at record levels. “The national median price of housing will probably fall by close to 30 percent in the next three years [based on] simple reversion to the mean,” it added, meaning that the fast-rising home prices of the past few years were the result of a bubble.

…

“In the world I operate in”: Interview with Blythe Masters, February 2007, on womenworking2000.com. No author cited. http://www.womenworking2000.com/feature/index.php?id=94. Ten: Tremors In October 2006, Bill King, the man: Tully, Shawn, “Jamie Dimon’s Swat Team,” Fortune (September 15, 2008). Supplemented with author interviews. “A housing crisis approaches”: Witter Lon, “The No-Money-Down Disaster,” Barron’s (August 21, 2006). “Builders that built speculative homes”: Editorial comment, “Pop! Goes the U.S. Real Estate Bubble,” Toronto Star (September 6, 2006). “When even Toll Brothers, the high-end builder”: Shilling, A. Gary, “Implosion: When Even Toll Brothers, the High-end Builder, Suffers Cancelations, You Know the Real Estate Boom Is Over,” Forbes (June 19, 2006).

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

Unless the council’s environmental health department decided that the flat was uninhabitable, she wasn’t even near the start of getting a transfer to a bigger property. To qualify for a priority move, she would have to be severely disabled, with a mobility problem. The young woman obviously felt relieved that Buck had listened and promised to do what she could. But she still left looking utterly hopeless. For another couple with a housing crisis, something needed to be done immediately. The woman was due to give birth the following day and they had been evicted without warning by their private landlord. Buck was again very firm, explaining that as the pair had moved to Westminster North from another part of the country, the local council had no duty to house them.

…

But the fight was so bruising for those in government, especially Eric Pickles, who was then Communities Secretary, and Theresa May, who observed it from a distance in the Home Office before entering Number 10 herself in 2016, that they privately vowed never again to have a serious stand-off with an organisation that represented so many people likely to vote Conservative. Consequently, ministers have dodged seriously considering reforms that could help build more homes and solve Britain’s housing crisis, such as reviewing the protections for the Green Belt. Another green and pleasant policy scuppered by a different sort of lobbying group was a 2011 plan to part-privatise the Forestry Commission, which manages more than 150,000 hectares of Britain’s forests. Ministers insisted that protection for the forests would remain in place, but the plans to raise around £250 million from the sale caused a row that spread quicker than a forest fire.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He was occasionally accompanied by colleagues, but the entire arrangement was kept secret from the rest of the CA teams—and perhaps Palantir itself. I can’t speculate about why, but the Palantir staff received Cambridge Analytica database logins and emails with fairly obvious pseudonyms like “Dr. Freddie Mac” (after the mortgage company that was bailed out by the federal government in the 2008 housing crisis). I do know that after Palantir data scientists started building their own Facebook harvesting apps and scrapers, Nix asked them to stay after hours to keep working on applications that could replicate the Facebook data Kogan was getting—without the need for Kogan. It was no longer simply Facebook apps that were being used.

…

Like many of their fellow Canadians, they took pleasure in smugly shaking their heads at their backward neighbors. Canadians have a hard time understanding populism because, unlike America or Britain, it has never had any Rupert Murdoch–owned media. There is no Fox News or The Sun in Canada. Because of its more risk-conscious banking system, the country did not experience a housing crisis or financial crash. And unlike the rest of the OECD, Canada is the outlier where patriotism and support for immigration actually correlate positively with each other. So I would find myself repeating the same conversation over and over to baffled Canadians who simply could not understand how Brexit or Trump were even possible.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”

…

., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

I feel as if I’ve been cut free from a sunken wreck and am starting the long swim back to the surface. 9 Courtrooms and Cheeseburgers In which Gary and I both get stuck in Wandsworth. We refuse to ride the bang-up, and wage admin warfare with the authorities. Things I learn: 1) The Offender Management Unit can’t count 2) How to conceive in prison 3) A novel way to solve the housing crisis We score a partial victory for Gary, but my prospects take a turn for the worse. 11 January I’m shortly due back in court for my confiscation hearing. I am desperate to know what’s going on, but can’t raise my lawyer on the phone. Danielle lets me nip out of the inductions to call, and I eventually speak to my lawyer’s assistant, who clearly learnt her bedside manner from Dr Harold Shipman.

…

I’d change the locks quick-smart and then put the address on Gumtree.’ He would only accept offers from foreigners, and insist they pay the first three months’ rent upfront in cash. He would hand over the keys, ditch his phone and then leave them to it. It’s a very twenty-first-century crime, and Carney is adamant that he was simply helping to solve London’s housing crisis. 20 January It’s finally time for my confiscation hearing at Southwark. I’m woken at 6 a.m. by an officer tapping on the door. I assume that it’s a Listener call-out, and stumble out of bed asking who the contact is. The screw tells me that I’m due in court, and I get ready in the dark to avoid waking Gary.

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

* * * I had not started out writing with this story in mind. I had begun with a completely different question: who owns London today? Researching the housing crisis, I soon came to recognise how often the question of land is overlooked. When we think about the modern city we look at the buildings and the infrastructural flows of the urban environment: stones, bricks, stairs, windows and kerbs. It is often assumed that when we consider the current housing crisis the debate is concerned only with the supply and distribution of houses. We should build more; open more space; construct taller; increase density.

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

That is how we achieve smaller, smarter government. Restore fiscal sanity. We cannot continue to borrow massively from the rest of the world. Our mounting debt is unfair to future generations, leaves the nation dangerously beholden to foreign creditors, and puts the financial system at risk. As we should have learned from our own housing crisis and the Greek debt crisis, when markets lose confidence, the plunge is fast and devastating. When will investors lose confidence in American debt? I have no idea—but we will be caught by surprise when it happens. There is never a memo announcing that a financial crisis will begin in six weeks.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

DECENT HOUSING The post-crisis recession had huge consequences on housing for many Europeans. High unemployment and cuts in salaries and state support meant many could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage. Between 2008 and 2013, more than four million Europeans were estimated to have faced evictions.13 The recession brought to a head a housing crisis that had been festering for years. Europe has become increasingly urbanized, and the availability and affordability of housing, especially for those with limited income, have become major problems in most large cities. In many urban areas, the price of residential housing has risen sharply since the 1980s.

…

See also public sector doctrines relating to (see economic doctrines) employment programs, 229, 274–80 globalization role of, 305 lending, 183–84 public banks, 116–18, 184–86; 183–184 role in research and development, 23, 100, 312 societal role of, 8 government bonds, 171–72, 182 Greece Austerity Doctrine and, 17 bond interest rates, 80 as crisis country, 35, 36 debt restructuring and, 57–58 depressed investment and, 108 ECB pressure on, 77 economic adjustment and, 55–56 Gini coefficient for, 47 health care in, 242 investment ratio of, 104 privatization in, 21–22 Troika policies and, 37 Troika structural reforms and, 70 unemployment levels of, 31 wage reduction in, 39–40 Growth Pact, Stability and. See Stability and Growth Pact Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), 64 headline inflation, 82 health care, 241–43 home mortgages affordability of, 231, 233–35 public option for, 183–84, 233–34 rising costs of, 230 housing crisis. See also home mortgages affordable housing, 235–37 land use and property taxes, 231–33 overview of, 229–31 Human Development Index, 126 Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner for, 247 Human Rights, Universal Declaration of (1948), 237 HypoVereinsbank, 164 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 36 incentives CEO and executive, 137–38 corporate governance and, 127 for excessive patenting, 146 proposals for reforming, 140 providing, for innovations, 147 worker-owned businesses and, 142 income, raising minimum wages, 265–68 restoring workers’ bargaining power, 262–65 universal basic income, 251–54 India, 131, 252, 253, 275 industrial policies, 273–74 inequality austerity related to, 49–50 corporation power leading to, 128 data supporting patterns of, 6, 7 globalization mismanagement and, 303–4 large corporations and, 19–20 macroeconomic framework creating, 46–47 market power contributing to, 129 as socioeconomic characteristic, 2 unemployment and, 31, 49–50, 275 inequality, growing (post-mid 1970s) contributing factors, 219–21 data supporting patterns of, 6, 7 decline in labor shares, 216, 217 economic background, 215–16 equitable society, achieving, 223–24 globalization, 219, 220–21, 221–23 income inequalities, 217–18, 218 rising poverty, 218–19, 219 welfare state and, 216–17 inflation Austerity Doctrine related to, 17 fears about, 44, 51–52, 58 -fighting mandate of ECB, 72–73, 75–76 low, or deflation proposals, 82–84 Price Stability Doctrine and, 18–19 informal workers, 247–48 information technology sector, 129 inheritance taxes, 188, 190–91 Initiative for Policy Dialogue, xv innovation -based economy, 128, 149 intellectual property rights and, 143–45, 147 in market economies, 135–36 insurance.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

At the time, we wondered what he had to look so pleased about. Now we know. Relieved (albeit briefly) of the burden of office and with time on his soft hands, he could now really make a killing as the most gallingly ubiquitous man on British television. But when I saw a trailer for Channel 5’s Our Housing Crisis – Who’s to Blame? presented by one Michael Portillo, my mixed feelings became a heady cocktail of annoyance and awe with perhaps a dash of admiration at his chutzpah. Of the many reasons, some sartorial, that I am loath to warm to Mr Portillo in the way softer hearts have, foremost is that I remember him for what he once was, one of the most viciously relishing of the young Thatcherites, the man who opined in 1993 that we should forensically examine health, education and social security (in other words, the heart of the welfare state) ‘from which the public sector could withdraw altogether’.

…

As this is a Christian notion, it is possibly enormously and embarrassingly unfashionable. But make no mistake, we need to get back to it. Not just in the sphere of housing, but across the span of our national life. To stay with social housing for now, the conclusions Danny Dorling put in his lecture to the LSE seem cogent and powerful to me. The answer to our housing crisis is in a massive programme of social housing building, the removal of all the financial incentives of Right to Buy, the removal of attractive financial incentives to become a private landlord, proper rent regulation, short-hold tenancies to be made illegal, and furthermore the compulsory purchase of buildings left unoccupied for more than a reasonable time.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game