Tag: Politics

Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy

I recently finished Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2013). It was a great read!  Maybe that’s just me in recoil from all the consciousness stuff I’ve been reading—glad to be back in more familiar territory: political philosophy.  Not just that, however.  It is just enthralling to read a closely reasoned, carefully constructed, argument.  There just are too few well-written and well-thought (if I can coin that adjective) books. 

Interestingly, when I think through what Lefebvre has to say in order to offer up the gist in this post, it’s not all that startling.  It is the care with which he makes his case that is exhilarating, not the substance (although it is hardly shabby. Just not all that startling either.)

So here’s the summary.

Bergson is a follower of Darwin. His reliance on evolutionary explanations for human phenomenon (like religion and morality) is quirky because he is a vitalist.  He believes in a fundamental “life force” that drives evolution, so is prone to 1) ascribe intention to evolution and 2) to think evolution has a single, dominating force (instead of resulting from a multitude of random—and unrelated—genetic mutations.)

In addition, Bergson is a dualist.  He believes that there exist spiritual entities that are distinct from material ones—and that the failure to give the spiritual its due is disastrous for human beings.  Bergson quite cheerfully declares himself a “mystic” and asserts that the spiritual is ineffable even as humans have various intimations of its existence (and importance!).

How do these basic commitments on Bergson’s part play into an account of human rights?  It all stems from the paradoxes built into morality.  For Bergson, human morality is a product of evolution.  “The evolutionary function of moral obligation is to hold society together. Its function is to ‘ensure the cohesion of the group.’” (page 25; quoted passage is from Bergson).  Unlike other theorists of morals, Bergson is adamant that morality is “natural,” is produced by evolution, as opposed to something that humans add on top of evolution.  Morality is not a human contrivance that tries to counteract natural impulses; instead, morality itself is a natural impulse.  Humans are social animals, utterly dependent on social relations to stay alive and to reproduce (the Darwinian imperatives).  Morality, insofar as it make sociality possible, is thus produced by evolution as are other human capacities essential to survival and reproduction.

The paradox comes from the fact that morality is exclusive.  Societies are “closed,” non-infinite, groupings.  One of the things essential to a society’s and its members’ survival and flourishing is protection from external threats.  Morality performs its service to life in part by distinguishing between friend (insider, fellow member) and enemy (outside, threat, non-member). 

“Closure is essential to moral obligation because its evolutionary purpose is to ensure the cohesion of the group in the face of an adversary.  It is this feature of exclusivity that Bergson brings to the fore with the concept of the closed society.  The purpose of this concept is not to claim that this or that society is closed.  Instead, it designates a tendency toward closure on the part of all societies” (25).

For this reason, war seems inevitable—and certainly human history appears to demonstrate that war is ineradicable.  Morality is good for the survival of particular societies—but is not conducive to the survival of human beings as a whole (especially once technology has given humans the means to mass annihilation) or to the survival of individuals (even the “winning side” in a war has many of its members killed in the contest).  To put it most bluntly: human morality generates not only cooperation and fellow-feeling with insiders, but also aggression toward outsiders.  For all the sophistication of his argument, Lefebvre ends up in a very familiar place: the claim that exclusion justifies doing harm to those designated as “other,” as beyond the pale.

Human rights, then, are an attempt to counteract the tendency of morality to sanction violence.  “Human rights are . . . an effort . . . that seeks to counteract our evolved moral nature. . . . Bergson [offers] a vision not just of what human rights must protect us from (i.e., morality) but also why (i.e., because of its [morality’s] biological origins” (54, 57). 

The standard way to address this paradox—that we need morality and that we also need something to counteract morality—depends on two planks.  The first recognizes that morality (the closed society) at least in the so-called Western world post 1700 functions most powerfully in the form of the nation-state.  Wars take place between nation-states—and the brutalities inflicted upon “enemies” have only increased since that time.  (The bombing of cities, the murder of refugees.)  Even in times of peace between nation-states, a particular state can identify certain people who live within its boundaries as “enemies within” and treat them differently and harshly in distinction from fully admitted members (citizens).

In response, there have been repeated efforts to create supra-national institutions that could rein in the aggressions of nation-states.  Such institutions have proved mostly ineffective.  When it comes to actually wielding power—and in securing the affective consent of people—the nation-state stands supreme, only minimally beholden to efforts to establish (and enforce) international law.  The institutionalization of human rights has mostly been a failure. Human rights are most fully protected when and where the state’s power has been used to uphold them.  But that’s useless in cases where it is the state itself that is abusing the human rights of some peoples living in its territory, not to mention its abuse of human rights on enemies during wartime.

The second plank is to widen morality in such a way that it is no longer exclusive.  The relevant “in group” would be all human beings—or, as proponents of animal rights desire—all animals.  Lefebvre demonstrates convincingly that the idea of “widening the circle” to be more inclusive is a prevalent call in much of contemporary political and moral philosophy.  Human rights are meant to apply “universally” and thus stand in direct opposition to any and all distinctions that would justify treating some people (or some groups) differently from others. 

Philosophers calling for expanding the circle offer different accounts of how that might be achieved.  Basically, the Humeans call for extending sympathy outwards.  Fellow feeling for those who can suffer—humans and animals—will underwrite our extending our consideration to them.  Kantians rely on reason to bring us to the recognition that only universalism keeps us from self-contradiction.  Utilitarians ask us to admit that suffering is a wrong—and then to avoid all actions that would increase the amount of suffering in the world. 

Levebvre’s most original contribution to such debates is to deny (forcefully) that expanding the circle is possible or adequate.  Morality, he insists, must be exclusive.  That is its whole modus operandi.  It only performs its natural function by being exclusive.  So it’s simply wrong to think it can be transformed into something non-exclusive. 

Human rights, therefore, must be something utterly different from morality, not an extension of it.  Lefebvre expresses this point by contrasting a distinction in quantity from one in quality.  We run into Bergson’s dualism here (although I doubt whether we have to embrace that dualism in order to adopt the distinction between a difference in quantity from a difference in quality.)  In any case, Bergson thinks “intelligence” deals in quantities and that we need another faculty (intuition or insight) to handle qualities.  Here’s Lefebvre’s account of Bergson’s view:

“[I]ntelligence does some things very well but not others.  It has a natural affinity with space and quantity and a natural aversion to time and quality.  More to the point, given its aptitude for quantity and number, intelligence views all forms of change in terms of (quantitative) differences of degree rather than (qualitative) differences in kind.  This includes moral change, of course.  It is no accident or simple error, therefore, which leads us to consider the evolution of morality in terms of expansion, growth, and continuous progress. . . . Intelligence is by its nature driven to picture the evolution of morality as the extension of a selfsame core (i.e., moral obligation) to more and more people” (49-50).

Bergson, then, wants to introduce an entirely different principle, one not based on moral obligation, as the underpinning of a human rights regime. Bergson wants to provide the basis for an “open society” that contrasts with closed societies that standard morality creates.  He strives to point his readers toward “a qualitatively different kind of morality, irreducible to obligation.  It [intelligence] struggles to conceive of a moral tendency that is not object attached.  And it struggles, as Bergson will come to say, to imagine a way to love that does not grow out of exclusive attachments” (50).

Before getting to a description of this “different kind of morality,” a morality of love, one other preliminary point must be made.  Bergson doubts the motivational power of reason.  He does not think that practical reason of the Kantian sort can move people to action.  Instead, he thinks morality must be a matter of habitus, of practice. 

“It is helpful to observe what Bergson has in common with an important strand of practical philosophy—call it antirationalism.  As Carl Power puts it, ‘Bergson might be said to join a counter-tradition that begins with Aristotle and includes more recent names such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Taylor.  What these disparate figures share is a propensity to see the human agent . . . as a being who is immediately engaged in the world and whose understanding of self and other is first and foremost expressed in practice.’ Broadly speaking, for these thinkers moral life is not primarily a matter of concepts and principles but of concrete durable practices that integrate moral obligations into the texture of everyday life. On that view, morality is not primarily a matter of weighing the purity of one’s intentions or assessing the partiality of one’s judgments.  Certainly these can be part of moral life; but they are not its backbone.  Instead, most of the time the performance of our moral obligations is prereflexive and embedded in the habits and activities of day-today life” (57-8).

It is precisely this emphasis on “practice” that explains Lefebvre’s title: human rights as a way of life.  Only through practice, through the embedding of human rights into the fabric of daily existence, can they take up a place in our world.  The “love” that Bergson advocates must be habitual for humans, must, in a concrete way, become routine.  It’s worth quoting Lefebvre a bit more on what a reliance of “habit” means.

“With his focus on habit, Bergson . . . wants to shift the attention of moral philosophy away from its preoccupation with the rational self-present agent.  Only on rare occasions does the performance of duty involve a conscious or deliberative process.  By and large, it is automatic, second nature, and unconscious. As he says, we ordinarily ‘conform to our obligations rather than think of them.’ Hence the importance of habits, which for Bergson are the true fabric of moral life.  In fact, moral or social life . . . is nothing other than an interlocking web of habits that connect the individual to a variety of groups.  But they don’t merely join the individual to different groups, as if he or she were pre-formed.  Rather, habits constitute the very stuff of our personalities.  They are what make us into parents, professionals, citizens, and the like” (58-9).

We are in recognizably Aristotelean territory here.  Character (personality, selfhood) is created through what we do—and our doings quickly become habits.  Humans are creatures, mostly, of regularity.  Which is not entirely a good thing.  “Habit seems to favor not only passivity and acquiescence but also conformity and laziness” (59).

The would-be moral reformer, the preacher, must lead the audience to become aware of their habits and to consider whether they are desirable or not.  Bergson “repeatedly characterizes love and openness as an ‘effort.’ Love [of the kind he advocated] does not extend moral obligation and it does not follow the habits of everyday life.  It defies them” (60).

So, Bergson wants to enlist the power of habit by making this open love habitual, but he must first break through the habits that make standard closed morality the default mode for most people.

OK!  Finally, what is this open love?  How to describe it, how to experience it, how to incorporate into one’s way of being in the world, how to make it “a way of life”?

Lefebvre cannot—and does not aim to—offer definitive answers to these questions.  The very idea (better: the very experience) of open love grows out of Bergson’s self-proclaimed “mysticism.”  Intelligence has nothing of use to say on this topic.  What Lefebvre wants to show is that “Human rights are works of love that initiate us into love” (89).  We can only proceed by way of examples—and of practices.  Examples “disclose love; they bring it into the world” (88).

As mostly practiced in contemporary society (the human rights practices and discourse most familiar to us), human rights attempts to regulate our world of closed societies, aiming to prevent or (at least mitigate) the abuses to which closed societies are prone.  Normal human rights strive to protect us from hate.

Open human rights aim not to protect, but to convert.  “Human rights are the best-placed institution for the open tendency to gain traction in the world” (89).  They offer a pathway toward a conversion to love, to taking up love as our way of life.

Lefebvre offers four examples of this way of life.  I don’t think they are meant to convince as much as meant to appeal. The first example is the person who says “yes” to the world and to existence, someone who radically affirms that this life is good and a source of joy. “In this sense, love is a disposition or a mood.  It is a way of being in the world, rather than a direct attachment to any particular thing in it” (93).

The second example is a radical indifference (i.e. making no distinctions, and hence an “open” justice), “according no preference to any of the beings in our path, in giving everyone our entire presence, and responding with precise faithfulness to the call they utter to us. . . . Yet this glance is the opposite of an insensitive glance; it is a loving glance which distinguishes, within each individual being, precisely what he or she needs: the words that touch him, and the treatment he deserves” (94 in Lefebvre; he is quoting Louis Lavelle). 

The third example comes from Deleuze’s description of the moment in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when the on-looking crowd is deeply invested in Rogue Riderhood’s recovery from an apparent drowning.  That crowd is rooting for the life in Riderhood, not attuned to his specific person, personality, or history.  They extend those good wishes to everything that has life, but attuned to life’s manifestation in this singular instance which provides the specific occasion for this affirmation of life.

Finally, Lefebvre considers Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of that name.  Elizabeth refuses the “insensibility to the pain of outsiders”(97) that, for her, must accompany the complicity with the slaughter of animals that all eating of meat entails.  She opens herself up to that pain—and in the process offends any number of human beings, to the extent that she doesn’t quite feel herself part of the human race any longer. 

In summary, Lefebvre tells us that “all four portraits are preoccupied with the care of others.  Or more precisely, each presents a mode of care made possible only once love ceases to be dedicated to a specific object. [With the first example] it is radiant joy and welcome; with Lavelle it is the responsiveness of indifference; with Deleuze it is attentiveness to singularity; and with Coetzee is it empathy not bound with the group” (100).

Obviously, just how moving these examples will prove to different readers will vary.  Lefebvre is offering, in a different key admittedly, his version of the argument between where to place one’s political efforts: in reforming laws and institutions or in reforming hearts and minds.  To his credit, he refuses to make this an either/or.  We need to do both; he resists the temptation (familiar in various leftist critiques) to see the discourse and institutions of human rights as corrupt and/or positively harmful. 

But, clearly, his focus is on conversion, on change at the individual level.  He struggles (in my view) to connect his perspective to Foucault’s (and the ancients) idea of “care for the self.”  I find this the least convincing move in his book—and I don’t think he really nails the connection he is trying to establish.  For me, even if I buy the idea of human rights as a “way of life,” that way of life had much more to do with my relation to others than it does to my relation to my self.  The “care” that Lefebvre focuses on in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph is not “care for the self” but “care of others.”  Both morality and love are about relations to what is beyond the self.  So I think it a mistake to try to bring them into the purview of the self.

I have undertaken to write a review of Lefebvre’s follow-up book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024).  I haven’t started reading it yet, but am eager to get into it since I enjoyed reading this human rights book so much.  More on Lefebvre once I do finish the new book.

Power, Self-Respect, and Remorse

I have been finding it very hard lately to read any novels from start to finish.  I begin five novels for every one that I actually complete.  Most things I pick up to read strike me as thin in any number of ways: in character development, in linguistic texture, or just jejune in their portrayal of human motives and emotions.  I can recommend The Known World by Edward Jones, a book I think is an absolute masterpiece. Jones imagines a whole world out of whole cloth, and presents it in an intricate tapestry of fragmented events spread over five or six years time.  The writing is spare, but that heightens its impact.  He has a terrible story to tell, but the artistic mastery is exhilarating.  Especially when there are so many bad novels out there.

I just finished reading The Noise of Time, a 2016 novel by Julian Barnes.  It is a fictional retelling of the life and career of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.  I have, in the past, found Barnes’ work fey at times, but I do get to the end of his novels (of which I have read maybe three or four.)  I picked up this one at the public library out of despair, needing to find something, anything, that I would actually read to the end.

What a pleasant surprise then to find it one of the best things I have read in ages.  The basic conceit of the novel centers around the compromises Shostakovich has to make to stay alive in the murderous world of Stalin and then Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.  The novel is a meditation on Power (always capitalized in the novel) and the demands it makes upon those over whom it holds dominion.  In some sense, it is pure Hegelian master/slave.  Power can—and will—kill you.  So what will you do to stay alive?  And if you do manage to do what’s necessary to stay alive, Power will have shredded any and all threads of self-respect.  You will have groveled, lied, betrayed others as well as yourself, and have proved to yourself and all observers your abject cowardice.  Even all that self-abasement may not be enough.  Power is fickle and may choose to execute you anyway at any moment when it no longer deems you useful to its ends—or when its paranoia sends it on one of its periodic killing sprees.

The idea that Power craves dominion, that it feasts upon demonstrating to its underlings their submission, comes through loud and clear in the novel.  And can only make one think of Trump and his need to publicly humiliate his underlings.  The latest example is making RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s burgers. 

One source of Power’s power (so to speak) is its total lack of conscience, its complete inability (refusal?) to feel remorse, its disconnect between self-respect and any assessment of its own deeds.  Maybe this is wrong; maybe Power walks in deluded self-righteousness, truly believing in the evil of its enemies and the beneficence of its own actions.  Power, of course, feeds on the production of enemy lists just as much as it feeds on the abjection of its underlings.  In any case, Barnes’ Shostakovich thinks that conscience and remorse did once hold some sway in human affairs.  Think of Henry IV in the Shakespeare plays, haunted by his crime against his lawful sovereign Richard, whom Henry drove from the throne and then killed.  But, Shostakovich thinks, such is no longer the case.

“He had judged [Shakespeare] sentimental because his tyrants suffered guilt, bad dreams, remorse.  Now that he had seen more of life, and been defeated by the noise of time, he thought it likely that Shakespeare had been right, had been truthful: but only for his own times.  In the world’s younger days, when magic and religion held sway, it was plausible that monsters might have consciences.  Not anymore.  The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of old superstitions.  And tyrants had moved on as well.  Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out.  Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found” (178-79).

I don’t credit the analysis; there is no evidence at all that a religious world is more moral than an irreligious one.  The barbarities of past history should put that notion to rest.  But that leaves us with the mystery.  The victim of crime is more haunted, more susceptible to self-questioning and self-collapse, than the perpetrator.  The raped is undone; not so much the rapist.  The total lack of conscience, of any portion of self-respect being tied to acting in good faith or with generosity or with kindness, comes to seem a source of power’s power, not a defect from which it will suffer.  As Edmund in King Lear puts it, the very credulousness of the good, along with their desire to actually be good, makes them easier targets for the fully and cheerfully unscrupulous.  There are no limits tyranny will not transgress.

That still leaves us the question of why others go along.  Fear of death, certainly, in the most extreme instance.  And once tyranny is established, fear of other less dire consequences for resisting: prison, loss of livelihood, loss of wealth.  Ducking one’s head and trying to live out of power’s notice will be the strategy adopted by many.  But why enable power to gain its seat in the first place?  Why the cult of the strong, even abusive, leader? 

When I was still teaching, I would ask my students how many of them had experienced a sports coach yelling at them.  Now that girls are almost as likely to have participated in sports as boys, it was usually 75% of my students who had had that experience.  And, almost to a person, they would defend the coach’s yelling, even his (or her; although it was much less frequently a her) humiliating a particular person in front of the whole group.  The coach’s actions showed he cared, they’d say—and then claim the yelling did produce better play from the team.  So, I would then ask, you want me to yell at you, to show I care, and as a good way to get better results from you?  No, they didn’t want teachers who yelled or humiliated students as part of their pedagogy.  But they were hard put to explain why such behavior was OK for the sports coach, but not for the teacher.  Or why they hated the few teachers who had deployed such tactics while admiring the coaches who did similar things.

Barnes considers the admiration for tyrants by having Shostakovich think not of sports coaches, but of orchestra conductors, especially the notorious, but much lauded, Toscanini.

“Such conductors screamed and cursed at orchestras, made scenes, threatened to sack the principal clarinet for coming in late.  And the orchestra, compelled to put up with it, responded by telling stories behind the conductor’s back—stories that made him out to be a ‘real character.’  Then they came to believe what this emperor of the baton himself believed: that they were only playing well because they were being whipped.  They huddled together in a masochistic herd, occasionally dropping an ironic remark to one another, but essentially admiring their leader for his nobility and idealism, his sense of purpose, his ability to see more widely than those who just scraped and blew behind their desks. The maestro, harsh though he might of necessity be from time to time, was a great leader who must be followed. Now, who would still deny that an orchestra was a microcosm of society?” (87).

Irony, the novel makes abundantly clear, is pitifully inadequate response to tyranny.  Yes, while trying to keep your head low, you will try to salvage some self-respect by only offering your assent ironically.  You always reserve to yourself the knowledge that you see through them, and don’t assent in the deepest recesses of your soul.  But not only is irony totally ineffective, accomplishing nothing, but you can only trick yourself for so long if you are one of the unfortunates who truly values self-respect.  It won’t take much to recognize how cheap irony is, how pathetic a dodge. 

“And irony has its limits.  For instance, you could not be an ironic torturer; or an ironic victim of torture.  Equally, you could not join the Party ironically.  You could join the Party honestly, or you could join it cynically; those were the only two possibilities.  And to an outsider, it might not matter which was the case, because both might seem contemptible.  . . . If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm.  And what good was it then?  Sarcasm was irony that had lost its soul” (190-91).

John Quiggan, the Australian economist and blogger, tells us Trump will be a dictator. (Find his short post here: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/11/19/trumps-dictatorship-is-a-fait-accompli/#comments)

Right now, in the brief interlude before Trump takes office, the Americans I talk to are fearful, but don’t really believe that full-blown tyranny is our future.  We might very well be sleep walking; Quiggan may be right.  And then we will have to learn the awful expedients to which one resorts to in order to live under tyranny—and learn just how much self-respect each of us is willing to sacrifice to insure survival.

Capitalism, Climate Change, and Affordable Housing

William Davies has a thought-provoking review of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet by Brett Christophers (Verso, 2024) in the latest London Review of Books (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/william-davies/antimarket).

The basic point of the review (and, presumably, of Christophers’ book) is that the imperatives of capitalist profit are a major impediment to making any progress in moving away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy.  The specifics of the argument are simple and compelling, but have far-ranging implications.  Basically, fossil fuel extraction generates a profit rate of approximately 15% a year for the oil companies.  Yes, there are the original investment costs of exploration and setting up the drilling sites, plus refining processes, but the resultant gasoline can then be sold at a premium price.  Renewables also require a large initial investment—but they don’t yield a product that can be brought to market except within the confines of heavily regulated utility markets.  On average, solar and wind generate a profit rate of 8%.  Davies quotes Wael Sawan, the CEO of Shell: “Our shareholders deserve to see us going after strong returns. If we cannot achieve the double-digit returns in a business, we need to question very hard whether we should continue in that business. Absolutely we want to go for lower and lower and lower carbon, but is has to be profitable.” The bottom line uber alles; investors will not move their money from oil to solar because the rate of return is not sufficient enough.

This economic logic means that capitalists basically insist that they will act only if subsidized (bribed) by the state.  There are really only three alternatives here—and states have been very reluctant to use two of the three.  1) States could introduce strong tax or other policies that would drive down the profit rates enjoyed by oil companies.  States have basically refused to take this approach because of the fear that heavily taxed (or otherwise thwarted) companies will just move their operations to friendlier venues.  Capital is mobile, states are not. 

2) De-risking.  States can assume the risk of capital investment, while leaving the profits in private hands.  This kind of backstopping of financial risk is, of course, rife in the financial markets.  The response to 2008 was a classic case of the state assuming the burden of the losses generated by financial overreach, even as bankers and brokers happily pocketed their somewhat smaller bonuses.  For all its cowboy talk of risk, capitalists love nothing more than a sure thing—and will blackmail the state into providing that surety any chance they get.  But de-risking is not relevant to the switch from oil to renewables.  It’s not the risk that is preventing that switch; it is the smaller profit rate.

So that leaves #3) state subsidies.  We see that with Biden’s so-called industrial policy.  The state will make the up-front investments needed—and then private enterprises will get to pocket the profits. (Something similar happens with government funding of the R&D needed to develop new drugs.) If the state builds the infrastructure for renewables, then the profits for the companies that then come in to manage them will go up.

The whole thing is supposed to work via carrot not stick.  Make investing in solar profitable enough and capital will move in that direction.  Rely on the magic of market incentives.  Except that there is more than enough capital sloshing around out there in search of safe returns that even as solar and wind get developed, fossil fuel extraction is not being slowed down.  Money is not moving out of oil toward renewables, especially when it is the state, not capital markets, that are supplying the funds to build the renewables.  Without a strong intervention into the way capitalist markets and incentives work, the production and use of fossil fuels will continue apace. As long that is, if there is money to be made in fossil fuels, capitalists will do the work to make it.

What does this have to do with affordable housing?  I read Matthew Yglesias and Noah Smith pretty faithfully—and anyone familiar with them and their ilk know that creating “abundant” housing (as well as abundant energy) is one of their major passions.  The basic argument is that market-based solutions are the only way to reach the goal of enough—and affordable—housing.  Here’s a link to a recent Noah Smith blog post that will give you the flavor of the kinds of arguments he and Yglesias regularly make. (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGxSbrtnkhNWfpnKDTnSWnzFsvh  The relevant section is number three in this list of five “interesting things.”)  Developers won’t build housing at all if they don’t stand to make a “reasonable” profit.  So, this particular piece argues, if you make them build “affordable units,” they just won’t build at all (unless, of course, there is a public subsidy that acts to push their profit margin back up.) 

In short, you have to bribe developers to build affordable housing—and, even then, the percentage of affordable units in any new development will be fairly small.  My hometown of Chapel Hill offers a case in point.  The town passed a ten million dollar bond to increase affordable housing.  Some of that money went to rent subsidies, but a large amount of it went to developers—and new apartment buildings and complexes are going up all over town.  At most, these new developments include 15% affordable units; in most cases, the percentage of affordable units is well below that.  The average for all the projects appears to hover around 12%.

In other words, to get access to the lucrative Chapel Hill market, developers must agree to provide some affordable units—and they get a monetary bribe to do so on top of permission to build.  Even worse, the town reports that only 10% of these new units are “permanently affordable.”  That is, after the originally tenants move out, rents can revert to “market rates.” (Source: Town of Chapel Hill web site and its various reports on development approvals and affordable housing.)

It is for exactly this reason that Noah Smith’s blog post argues that mandating the inclusion of affordable units is a losing strategy.  But because he will not countenance any interference in market processes, Smith has only two other strategies to offer. 1) Rent subsidies.  Just having the government help tenants pay their rent.  (Smith, like all economists, insists that rent control does not work.)  2) Let developers build non-affordable (i.e. market rate) housing.  If we build enough, the law of supply and demand will kick in and rents will fall.  It’s simply a question of getting enough supply.  Yes, the new units will go for a premium, but older housing will become cheaper as it becomes less competitive, less desirable.  This insistence that building new housing, no matter how expensive, will eventually drive down costs is an article of absolute faith for Yglesias, Smith, and all the other soi disant YIMBYs.

The problem is: how much is enough?  In Chapel Hill, it’s a Red Queen race. Why?  Because more and more college students have abandoned dorms for off-campus living.  Because die-hard TarHeel fans buy condos to stay in when coming to football and basketball games.  Because the town is very, very desirable for retirees and for those with school-age children (best school district in the state) and for its general laid-back, liberal, college town vibe.  It will always be a game of catch-up in Chapel Hill.  The demand will always outstrip the supply.  And it’s an upscale market, so the cost is always going to reflect that the town is an enclave for the comfortably off. 

The market signals and the market processes are very clear in the Chapel Hill case: build it and they will come—and they will pay a premium price to be here.  Waiting for the market to drive prices down means waiting a very, very long time indeed.  And renders the subsidies the town is paying to developers a token gesture that, effectively, is providing developers with access to this market while doing very little to move the needle on housing affordability.

Where does that leave us?  Rolling up the ladder and just preventing any growth, any new housing development?  That seems unconscionable.  But it does seem like we should recognize that the market rules of the game are rigged.  The developers hold all the good cards.  They can always go elsewhere—to places where the bribes will be bigger, or where there is no demand to include affordable units. (That’s why Smith thinks jurisdictions should just abandon making that demand.) And the town has no capacity to build anything itself. They have no recourse but to placate developers if they want any new housing built at all.

Public housing has not been a success in this country.  Perhaps it has been elsewhere (I don’t know enough on that score.)  But giving up on state-built and state-managed housing doesn’t necessarily mean we have to fall back on the market as currently configured, that we just have to resign ourselves to giving into all the developers’ demands .  Public utility companies work pretty well, as do public hospitals.  We have instituted profit limits for medical insurance and regulate other forms of insurance as well.  The YIMBYs say housing—and especially zoning—regulations stand in the way of our achieving housing abundance.  But do we really want to leave provision of a basic need to the market?  We, as a society, intervene in all kinds of ways in the production and pricing and quality of food. Our food policies are, admittedly, a mess. But would we really want unregulated food production and distribution, to return to the adulterated products of nineteenth-century laissez-faire?

It is no surprise that developers in Chapel Hill are currently playing the cards that are dealt them.  They are gaming the system that currently exists.  No doubt they would work to game any other system of regulations that were put in place.  But that’s no reason for the community and its local government to fold, to just throw up its hands and say “let the market have its way; it’s too strong for us.” 

Smith blog post concludes: there are only two effective strategies.  Let builders build and provide rent subsidies.  Trying to build affordable housing just doesn’t work, in his view.  What he does not consider (if we accept that publicly built and administered housing is off the table) is developing a housing policy that regulates the market in ways designed to get the results everyone claims to want: enough and affordable housing for everyone. 

In Chapel Hill’s case, such a policy would, for starters, have to be state-wide.  As a single jurisdiction, and in competition with other jurisdictions, Chapel Hill doesn’t stand a chance.  It is forced into making terrible deals with developers because of the threat that they won’t build here at all.  And then (very annoying) we have to hear about everything they are doing to address our affordable housing crisis—when in fact they are collecting a bucketful of water in a deluge.  That the hands of local government are tied is a terrible thing—and is leading to terrible outcomes that do next to nothing to solve our problems.  Accusing their opponents of racism hardly covers their own futility. 

We are back where we started.  It is pretty much universally accepted by liberal economists that health care cannot be left to an unregulated market.  But those same liberals seem to have come to the opposite conclusion when it comes to housing.  The prevailing orthodoxy among self-labeled “progressives” is that we need to deregulate, to take away impediments to development, so that abundance may be achieved.  But that position overlooks the relentless—and amoral—search for profits that the market unleashes and rewards.  To expect developers to solve our housing problems is as unrealistic as it is to expect Mobil to solve our climate crisis.