Why can’t you afford a home? UCL researcher Josh Ryan-Collins says it is due to inevitable landowner profits from land, to a majority of homeowners blocking fair taxation of those profits, and to excessive mortgage credit. His new book is not yet widely available, but he has written a long summary. Causation is complex. Lawyers […]
A disturbing new trend has emerged. Faced with strong evidence from the US of the terrible damage to welfare and GDP from our long-term failure to build enough homes with access to jobs and opportunities, the beginnings of a counter-revolution are stirring. The first signs that the counter-attack had spread to respectable academia emerged at […]
There are few words in the English language which better encompass everything conservatism is meant to be about than “home”. Home is not just the roof over your head. Home is where you are from, where you feel you belong, where you feel safe. We humans are not abstract beings; we exist in particular spaces […]
The Campaign to Protect Rural England has released another in a long line of reports claiming that the green belt is disappearing at an alarming rate. Newspapers lapped this up, as they always do. Readers were told the development is a tragedy for the environment and a national disgrace. The articles were furnished with misleading […]
For all that has changed in politics in recent years, some old truths remain. One of them is the central political importance of economic growth. As Danny Finkelstein reminded a standing-room-only CapX event at Conservative Party Conference this morning, it’s difficult for an incumbent party to win an election when economic conditions on the ground […]
According to conventional wisdom, Theresa May is on the back foot. But this needn’t be the case. The modern world gets more exciting by the day and a Prime Minister that grasps the opportunities afforded to her by these changes could usher in greater prosperity for Britain. Mrs May’s predecessors understood this. In the 1980s […]
Across the globe, free markets, capitalism and enterprise are on the back foot. The engines that have lifted 1.5 billion people out of poverty over the last 30 years are suddenly found rusty. Government action and market intervention are back in vogue, even amongst parties of the centre-right. So, let’s accept one thing upfront: capitalism, […]
Brits have long been a nation of homeowners and aspiring homeowners. Just why we have this culture of home ownership isn’t easy to answer. But, for politicians and policymakers, the reasons are less important than the consequences. Polling commissioned by the Centre for Policy Studies found that only three per cent of young voters never […]
We tend to conceptualise the housing crisis in terms of affordability – and justifiably so. Over the last two decades, the ratio of median house prices to earnings in England and Wales has more than doubled. Back in 1997, house prices represented, on average, around 3.6 times workers’ annual gross full-time earnings. By 2016, however, […]
Private property rights have been central to the success of the global economy. Enabling individuals and firms to enjoy the benefits of their hard work has incentivised innovation and increased productivity, delivering real income growth and increased well-being for billions. Since the late 19th century average life expectancy has almost doubled and the number of […]
It is a decade since the financial crisis, and no one is happy. Progressives like Elizabeth Warren and John McDonnell think the guilty bankers went unpunished. Free-marketeers despair over the absence of meaningful reforms to discourage risk-taking on the taxpayer’s dime. Ordinary people across much of the West have only seen tepid growth since 2008. […]
In a recent extract of her book Squeezed, Guardian columnist Alissa Quart documented in detail the insecurities faced by many ordinary American families. Student loan debt, housing costs, and healthcare bills can be crippling even for those on decent enough incomes. For the struggling poor with job insecurities, the situation can be worse still. Even with the […]
I’ve never really understood the point of a think tank launching a commission full of high profile entrepreneurs, politicians, and trade unionists. To start with they tend to be rather dull. High-profile and time-poor individuals don’t back new ideas. Worse, these commissions tend to get dominated by the most politically active members with hobby horses. […]
Good news: it looks as though the Government is set to scrap Help to Buy. The programme was introduced in 2013 to help to get more people to be able to buy their own home. No sensible economist thought it was a good idea when it was introduced, with the general consensus that it would […]
Living on our planet is more enjoyable than it used to be in almost all respects. We live longer, we are healthier, we learn more, and we enjoy greater comfort. The one exception is what we see. From the Stone Age to St Mark’s Square, human beings spent millennia learning to make more beautiful things. […]
Precariousness is the defining feature of low-income Britain. According to a recent Resolution Foundation report, two-fifths of in-work low- to middle-income households say they cannot afford to save at least £10 a month. Today, the publication of Child Poverty Action Group’s annual cost of a child calculations adds to this picture of hard-pressed Brits. According […]
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