I looked at the proposer who was a tall, handsome well healed looking chap. My friend would say: “he’s higher up the food chain than you and I”

…

I’m working class and I divide people into those who have second properties and those who don’t. Those who don’t have any property I don’t like to think aboutl

Matt is certainly a handsome chap, but none of the economists on this blog own any property! Maybe we’ve fallen through the cracks in your taxonomy 😉

@JH. I live in South Brighton. My back lot neighbour has a tenant living in their garage and has since we moved in. My neighbour to the North off and on has tenants in the shed. My neighbour to the South has her house for sale currently, but there is a secondary house on the back of her section that was built for her father, now deceased. I’m hardly writing from the poncy neighbourhoods.

If we eased up on land use restrictions, more people could have affordable housing – even if population were to increase substantially.

“We live in a world where economic growth and technological improvements are making our lives vastly better by the day. But these improvements don’t remove the fact that we have to accept trade-offs in our lives, as resources are ultimately scarce. Apart from providing for those that are genuinely struggling, it is not up to the government to increase our incomes and improve our lifestyles – it’s up to us. ”

Nevertheless we rarely read this contradictory  observation by Rod Oram:

“Fast population growth over
the past decade has strained infrastructure, boosted house prices and reduced the
quality of life in the Auckland region.”  

http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/0705/RMA__Oram_Paper_May_2007.pdf

Oh, not disagreeing at all about Director’s Law. 

But I can understand, and have some sympathy, for the general view that where voters wish to extend insurance against bad outcome via a welfare system, it’s cheating for the recipient not to make an honest effort to seek employment or, if disability or other factors prevent it, at least to do what one can to pay back the community. 

In terms of designing incentive mechanisms that has some merit – in terms of redistributional policy, our demand for “deserving” vs “undeserving” become something else entirely.

If we were to think of it in terms of incentives, rather than redistribution, I don’t think we can make any more sense of the current form of middle class capture.