Debating YIMBYism in Dissent

The empirical case for the supply-skeptic argument is thin and getting thinner every year; mostly, supply skeptics on the left are forced to rely on a small handful of already debunked studies with deeply flawed methodologies. But that’s OK, because the core of their argument is philosophical, not conceptual: deregulated markets exist to enrich capitalists, and so any policy that relies on market instruments will inevitably tend to benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else. As Dave Madden and Peter Marcuse wrote in In Defense of Housing, a foundational text for supply skeptics of the left, “Removing the regulations that rein in property owners shifts power towards capital and away from residents—while also, not coincidentally, making land more valuable and more amenable to speculation.”

Embedded in this argument is an odd sort of inverted market fundamentalism. Both bona fide market fundamentalists and supply skeptics tend to describe “the market” as a single coherent entity, locked in a zero-sum struggle with the forces of economic democracy. Because neoliberals believe that expanding the market is an end unto itself, leftists must adopt constraining the market as an end unto itself.

Instead of simply reversing the moral polarity on folk neoliberalism, the left should think its way out of neoliberal habits of mind entirely. Ironically, Marcuse and Madden hint at how to do this when, invoking Karl Polanyi, they note that markets are neither self-regulating nor independent of the state. “The state cannot ‘get out’ of housing markets because the state is one of the institutions that creates them,” they write. “Government sets the rules of the game.”

Though Marcuse and Madden fail to take their own insight seriously, there’s nothing to stop us from doing so. If government sets the rules of the market, then the market does not have to inherently be any one thing or satisfy any one set of goals; the state can establish and tinker with various markets in the interest of producing certain outcomes. Whether these are the right outcomes is a political question. Whether market mechanisms are the best instrument for producing them is both a political question and a technical one.