City Council candidate (for what used to be my district before reallocated to Mike Ross) Gibran Rivera looks at a West Roxbury development proposal and asks, “How do condos set to sell at almost half a million dollars helping us solve the lack in affordable housing?”
Regular readers - or those who want to click on the Housing category on the left - will already know my answer to the question. But bracketing for the moment whether Rivera’s model (in which increasing supply has no bearing on decreasing price) or mine (in which supply geared toward any demographic eases prices for all) is the correct one, I’m wondering if this speaks to a larger problem in progressive politics. After all, socialist-minded folks of all stripes look at the operations of the market and to try to formulate a political response that mitigates its negative side effects, including most of all social and economic inequality. But it’s another thing to have a completely different diagnosis of how markets work to begin with.
Along these lines (sort of), Brad Delong points to a useful Martin Wolf taxonomy of European welfare capitalism.
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