Harvard economists have proven one of the major theses of American Nightmare, which is that land‐use regulation is a major cause of growing income inequality in the United States. By restricting labor mobility, the economists say, such regulation has played a “central role” in income disparities.
When measured on a state‐by‐state basis, American income inequality declined at a steady rate of 1.8 percent per year from 1880 to 1980. The slowing and reversal of this long‐term trend after 1980 is startling. Not by coincidence, the states with the strongest land‐use regulations–those on the Pacific Coast and in New England–began such regulation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Forty to 75 percent of the decline in inequality before 1880, the Harvard economists say, was due to migration of workers from low‐income states to high‐income states. The freedom to easily move faded after 1980 as many of the highest‐income states used land‐use regulation to make housing unaffordable to low‐income workers. Average incomes in those states grew, leading them to congratulate themselves for attracting high‐paid workers when what they were really doing is driving out low‐ and (in California, at least) middle‐income workers.
As Virginia Postrel puts it, “the best‐educated, most‐affluent, most politically influential Americans like th[e] result” of economic segregation, because it “keeps out fat people with bad taste.” Postrel refers to these well‐educated people as “elites,” but I simply call them “middle class.”
Middle class doesn’t mean middle income; it means people with managerial, creative, or other jobs that require thinking, not repetitive or physical labor. As a proxy, I use college education: less than 30 percent of working‐age Americans have a bachelor’s degree or better. Though some people with college degrees flip burgers just as some without such degrees gained enough knowledge on the job to be promoted into management, it seems likely that about 30 percent of the population are middle‐ or upper‐class while 70 percent are working‐ or lower‐class.
Census data show that, in the late 1970s, the average worker with a high school diploma but no college education earned more than 64 percent as much as the average worker with a bachelor’s degree. By 2010, it was less than 53 percent.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the barrier between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is far more porous than the one between middle class and working class. The rising cost of higher education and the high cost of moving into regions with land‐use regulation prevent less‐educated people from bettering themselves. Increased regulation of commercial operations limit people’s ability to start small businesses. Increased traffic congestion (favored by “progressive” anti‐auto cities) also hits working‐class people harder than middle‐class workers as the former are less likely to be able to take advantage of flex‐time, telecommuting, and other ways of avoiding congestion.
Britain, which has regulated land use since 1947, is suffering many of the same problems. As the Telegraph reports, this regulation has divided “the nation between old and young, haves and have‐nots.”
Of course, many urban planners still refuse to believe that land‐use regulation makes housing expensive. Never mind the fact that economists at Harvard, Whartons, and a wide range of other universities agree that it does. Let’s just ignore the fact that such regulation is destroying our economy and oppressing low‐income families. All that is important is that the middle‐class elites who benefit are happy.
