Month: September 2021

Say It Ain’t So, Fed, Say It Ain’t So

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The Federal Reserve broke my heart recently.

Now you might think that today’s post is about something to do with monetary policy, or the taper, or something high falutin’ like that.

Nope. It’s about a game. The Fed Chairman game, to be specific. And I’m heartbroken because the Federal Reserve took it down:

Thank you for your interest in the monetary policy game, Chair the Fed. The game has been a useful and fun tool to learn more about monetary policy. However, the Fed has updated its approach to monetary policy, and the changes are not readily accommodated within the existing structure of the game. As of June 1, 2021, the game is no longer available.
You can learn more about the Fed’s policy updates here. Be sure to also check out FOMC Rewind, a texting video series that summarizes the FOMC’s meeting statements.
In the meantime, we encourage you to connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

https://www.sffed-education.org/chairthefed/default

So what was the game all about? Well, you got the chance to “be” the Fed Chairperson for sixteen quarters, or four years. You had to “react” to events that took place in the economy by raising or lowering interest rates, in order to meet two objectives. First, you had to make sure that inflation was as close to possible to 2% over the duration of your term, and second, you had to make sure that unemployment was as close as possible to 5% over the duration of your term.

The game was designed with some sort of a payoff between inflation and unemployment, and the reason I use the phrase “some sort of” is because I do not know quite what the functional form was. If you played the game long enough, you figured out pretty quickly that there would be a “crisis” at the end of your fourth quarter in charge. And the remaining 12 quarters were essentially an exercise in firefighting.

Inflation in the game had a way of getting out of hand pretty quickly, and unless you were quick enough to react and adjust real interest rates quickly enough, each successive quarter would have the economy spiraling quickly out of control. Of course, if you knew your monetary theory well enough you could figure out how to “win”.

Here’s a screenshot of the game layout:

Source: The Hill

And here’s an example of how quickly things could get out of hand:

Sourcehttps://i.ytimg.com/vi/5PAJtUjikis/maxresdefault.jpg

The last sentence from the previous version bears repetition: Of course, if you knew your monetary theory well enough you could figure out how to “win”.

That’s the point!

And that’s why I wish the Fed would reinstate the game. Because playing the game was a great way to get students to learn what monetary policy looks like in action. Sure, you can have students read Mishkin, or any other monetary text. And sure you can have them go through as many PDF’s released by both the Federal Reserve and the RBI. But nothing beats having the class split up into two teams, and playing three rounds each of this game.

After that, explaining the monetary transmission mechanism, or the Philips curve, or inflation expectations, or what “dovish/hawkish” means was child’s play. Because you see, they’d seen the effects for themselves.

So, dear whoever-is-in-charge-of-this-at-the-Federal-Reserve, I completely agree with you when you say that “the Fed has updated its approach to monetary policy, and the changes are not readily accommodated within the existing structure of the game”. No game could (or should) have envisioned the last eighteen months, and its ramifications on monetary policy.

But the game still served as such a magnificent jumping-off point for discussions about what transpired in the last eighteen months. “So now you’ve understood how monetary policy works under usual circumstances and most crises”, you could say at the end of the session. “But what about what the world went through in the last eighteen months? Would these tools be enough? Why or why not? What other tools does the Fed have in its arsenal? Which are most appropriate to use under these circumstances? Why?”

My point is that it was, and it still remains, a great way to introduce the subject to anybody, and especially those of us who’re learning about monetary policy for the first time. And there’s, in my case, about twelve years of students who I subjected to this game – and I’m pretty sure they would all agree with the request I’m about to make.

Please, dear ol’ Federal Reserve. Pretty please, with a cherry on top. Please bring the game back. It’s a great teaching tool, and classrooms are more boring without it.

The Delhi Walla: The Library Category

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Via the excellent Divyanshu Dembi. He spent an hour on this category, as per his tweet, but I’m going to end up spending way more. What a lovely, lovely website for a relaxed Sunday morning!

https://www.thedelhiwalla.com/2020/02/22/city-library-shakespearean-jonathan-gil-harriss-books-hauz-khas/ Credit: Mayank Austen Soofi

Divyanshu tweeted about the category titled library on this magnificent website, but the other sections are worth a look too.

Soccernomics, Literally

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The book is a great read, but the title of today’s blogpost relates to, well, this:

The Vajpayee Moment in Telecom, IO and Porter’s Five Forces

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Vijay Kelkar and Niranjan Rajadhakshya had on op-ed out in Livemint recently on the mess in the telecom sector, and their suggestions for (at least partially) resolving it:

It has been about a year since the Supreme Court instructed telecom companies to share not just their core telecom revenues with the government, but also to take into account promotional offers to consumers, income from the sale of assets, bad debts that were written off, and dealer commissions. The apex court has allowed the affected telecom companies to make a small upfront payment and then pay their excess AGR dues to the government in ten annual instalments, from fiscal year 2021-22 to 2030-31, in an attempt to ease their immediate burden, which has raised concerns about the financial stability of Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Analysts estimate that the extra annual payments by all telecom firms could be around ₹22,000 crore a year.

https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-new-vajpayee-moment-for-the-troubled-indian-telecom-sector-11631123688457.html

Their suggestions for the resolution of this problem involve the issuance of zero-coupon bonds by the telecom companies, along with an option for the government to acquire a 10% equity stake. As always, please read the whole thing.

Now, this may work, this may not work. The more I try to read about this issue, the more pessimistic I get about a workable solution. But we’re not going to get into the issue of finding a “workable” solution today. We’re going to learn about how to think about this issue.

That is, what model/framework should we be using to assess a situation such as this? Kelkar and Rajadhakshya obviously have a model in mind, and they hint at it in this excerpt:

There are three broad policy concerns that need to be addressed in the context of the telecom sector: consumer welfare, competition and financial stability. Possible tariff hikes to generate extra revenues to meet AGR commitments will hurt consumer access. The inability to charge consumers more could mean that the three-player telecom market becomes a duopoly, through either a firm’s failure or acquisition. The banks that have lent to domestic telecom companies are also worried about their exposure in case AGR dues overwhelm the operating cash flows of these companies.

https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-new-vajpayee-moment-for-the-troubled-indian-telecom-sector-11631123688457.html

So a solution is necessary, they say, because we need to have a stable telecom market that doesn’t hurt

a) the consumers,

b) the current players in this sector and

c) the financial sector that has exposure in terms of loans to the telecom sector

To this list I would add the following:

d) make sure the government doesn’t get a raw deal (and raw is a tricky, contentious and vague word to use here, but we’ll go with it for now)

e) make sure new entrants aren’t deterred from entering this space (if and when that will happen)

f) suppliers to the telecom sector shouldn’t be negatively impacted

In other words, any solution to the problem must be as fair as possible to all involved parties, shouldn’t change the status quo far too much in any direction, shouldn’t hinder the entry of new competition, and should give as fair a deal as possible to consumers.

Take a look at this diagram:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis#/media/File:Elements_of_Industry_Structure.svg (Credit: Denis Fadeev)

Students who are familiar with marketing theory are going to roll their eyes at this, but for the blissfully uninitiated, this is the famous Five Forces Analysis.

Porter’s Five Forces Framework is a method for analysing competition of a business. It draws from industrial organization (IO) economics to derive five forces that determine the competitive intensity and, therefore, the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of an industry in terms of its profitability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis

Michael Porter’s Five Forces Framework can be traced back to the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, so in a sense, it really is an industrial organization framework:

In economics, industrial organization is a field that builds on the theory of the firm by examining the structure of (and, therefore, the boundaries between) firms and markets. Industrial organization adds real-world complications to the perfectly competitive model, complications such as transaction costs, limited information, and barriers to entry of new firms that may be associated with imperfect competition. It analyzes determinants of firm and market organization and behavior on a continuum between competition and monopoly, including from government actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_organization

The point is that if you are a student trying to think through this (or any other problem of a similar nature), you should have a model/framework in mind. “If I am going to recommend policy X”, you should be thinking to yourself, “how will that impact Jio? Airtel? Vi? How will that impact government revenues? What signals will I be sending to potential market entrants? Will consumers be better off, and if so, are we saying that they will be better off in the short run, or on a more sustainable basis?”

Now sure, the diagram doesn’t include government, but the Wikipedia article on the Five Forces does speak about it later, as does the excerpt above from the Wikipedia article on Industrial Organization. More importantly, this framework gives one the impression that we’re dealing with a static problem, with no considerations given for time.

I would urge you to think about time, always, as a student of economics. Whether it be the circular flow of income diagram, or the five forces diagram, remember that your actions will have repercussions on the industry in question not just today, but for some time to come.

So whether you’re the one coming up with a solution, or you’re the one evaluating somebody else’s solution, you should always be evaluating these solutions with some framework in your mind. And tweaking the Five Forces model to suit your requirements is a good place to start!

Industrial Policy, South Korea and Learning by Doing

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Amol Agarwal points us to an excellent paper, the title of which is “The Long Term Effects of Industrial Policy“. Here is the abstract:

This paper provides causal evidence of the impact of industrial policy on firms’ long-term performance and quantifies industrial policy’s long-term welfare effects. Using a natural experiment and unique historical data during the Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) Drive in South Korea, we find large and persistent effects of firm-level subsidies on firm size. Subsidized firms are larger than those never subsidized even 30 years after subsidies ended. Motivated by this empirical finding, we build a quantitative heterogeneous firm model that rationalizes these persistent effects through a combination of learning-by-doing (LBD) and financial frictions that hinder firms from internalizing LBD. The model is calibrated to firm-level micro data, and its key parameters are disciplined with the econometric estimates. Counterfactual analysis implies that the industrial policy generated larger benefits than costs. If the industrial policy had not been implemented, South Korea’s welfare would have been 22-31% lower, depending on how long lived are the productivity benefits of LBD. Between one-half and two-thirds of the total welfare difference comes from the long-term effects of the policy.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w29263

Why should you read this paper if you are a student of the Indian economy?

Because industrial policy has been, i,s and will be critical for long run growth in India, and South Korea is an excellent example of getting industrial policy “right”. The reason I put “right” in inverted quotes is because there is still debate about whether South Korea really got it right or not.

If you are interested in reading more about this, part of footnote 4 from the paper is worth reading in greater detail (And the papers that are cited there, naturally):

However, many economists have been skeptical of the effectiveness of industrial policy (e.g. Baldwin, 1969; Lederman and Maloney, 2012). Lee (1996) did not find a positive correlation between sectoral TFP growth and tariff rates in South Korea during the 1970s and interpreted the correlation as the ineffectiveness of industrial policy.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29263/w29263.pdf, footnote 4, page 5

Me, I’m very Studwellian in my outlook, and am therefore a sucker for papers such as these. And even if the paper were to show that industrial policy had not worked, that in itself is also a lesson worth learning, no? But if you ask me, something worked in South Korea at that point of time, and while causality is tricky, Industrial Policy (IP) certainly seems to have been at least partially at play:

Between 1973 and 1979, the average annual real GDP growth rate of South Korea was 10.3%, and the average export growth rate was around 28%. The HCI sectors increased their share of manufacturing output from 40% to 56% and their share of total exports from 12.9% to 37%.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29263/w29263.pdf pp 6

The paper does three things, in my opinion:

  1. Establishes that Industrial Policy did too have a role to play in South Korea’s development
  2. That role has had effects that have persisted well beyond the years in which that specific industrial policy was “in play”
  3. Makes the case for how South Korea’s welfare would have been lower had this policy not been implemented

Your mileage may vary with regards to point 3, no matter how careful the econometric modeling (and it’s pretty careful, if you ask me). But this paper is worth reading because it reinforces my opinion that industrial policy, when done well, can have meaningful impacts upon the development of a nation.

There is a citation in this paper that is worth reading in its entirety (if you go in for that sort of thing). The citation is that of a chapter in The Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. 5. The title of the chapter is “Trade, Foreign Investment, and Industrial Policy for Developing Countries“

I really do mean the “if you go in for that sort of thing”, because this is assuredly not light reading. Why, the section titled “Concluding Comments” takes up a solid four and a half pages! But I’ll speak here about three things that I found especially relevant from that section alone. Note that this is my paraphrasing, not a direct quote.

  1. The infant industry argument is, on the whole, overrated.
  2. In general industrial policy that promotes more exposure to international trade is likelier to be more successful
  3. The authors say that more work is urgently needed to understand, as they put it, “the human cost of adjustment to trade and FDI reforms”. Maskin and Kremer’s work is worth reading in this regard.

Finally, “Learning By Doing“. What does it mean, exactly? The classic paper to read is by Lucas, titled “On the Mechanics of Economic Development“, and the classic-er (est?) paper is, of course, “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing“. But simply put, it is this:

Learning-by-doing is a concept in economic theory by which productivity is achieved through practice, self-perfection and minor innovations. An example is a factory that increases output by learning how to use equipment better without adding workers or investing significant amounts of capital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning-by-doing_(economics)

It remains underrated at all levels of economic organization, if you ask me.

The State of America, Circa 2021

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Kevin Drum has an excellent article out on where the United States of America finds itself in the year 2021, in terms of both medium and long term trends along a variety of dimensions. Here are just the first three from “The Good” section:

  1. Income is up for everyone: men, women, Black, white, Hispanic, rich, poor, and middle class. Data from the CBO is here. UPDATE: Confused by this chart? Explanation here.
  2. Poverty is down by five percentage points since the ’70s.
  3. Federal income taxes are lower for practically everyone.

I found it instructive that he chose to go with 28 Things that he found to be Good, but only 5 that were Bad. That, in a meta-sense is worthy of being included as a 29th Good Thing!

Here are the five Bad Things:

  1. The worst trend of the past couple of decades has been a steady deterioration in average health outside of the upper middle class. Life expectancy has stopped increasing; obesity is up; opioid addiction is up; and deaths of despair are up.
  2. The labor force participation rate has been steadily dropping.
  3. The Black-white education gap has been stubbornly resistant to improvement.
  4. Climate change continues unabated.
  5. Political polarization has gotten worse, thanks mostly to Fox News and, more recently, the rise of Trumpism.

(I haven’t formatted both excerpts as quotes because the WordPress editor, best as I can tell, allows you to either format a piece of text as a numbered list, or as a quote, but not both at the same time. They call this the improved editor, and that makes me weep.)

What might India’s list look like? What do you choose to include and exclude in the good, the bad and the ugly, and what does that tell us about both the country we live in, and the biases that we reveal?

If any student reading this is looking to start a YouTube channel around a fun theme, I have, um, a suggestion for you 🙂

Ashwini Deshpande interviewed by Scroll.in

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We were lucky enough to get the chance to speak with Alex Thomas on Friday, and the video of the conversation should be up on YouTube soon enough. In a wonderful coincidence, Scroll.in published an interview with Ashwini Deshpande just a day later. It is a coincidence (to me) because Alex’s textbook is the first macro textbook that I read that speaks extensively about caste, gender and ecology.

Who is Ashwini Deshpande? An economist, currently with Ashoka University, Ashwini Deshpande has been working for a while on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action. The interview, conducted by Rohan Venkat, is a fun and instructive (and what a rare combination that is!) read on both the arc of Ashwini Deshpande’s career, and also on the work that she has done, and is currently doing.

Here’s an excerpt from a different source, before we get to the Scroll interview:

There’s a lovely new working paper by Ashwini Deshpande and Jitendra Singh on female labor force participation in India. We talked a little bit about this last time. Our last conversation was about the honor-income tradeoff, how there are all these things at home that are holding women back: public safety issues, child care issues.
They find something quite remarkable, which is that they don’t find much evidence of supply-side demographic characteristics, like household income, structure, motherhood or timing of childbirth, et cetera, to be very significant in the labor force participation. In fact, it has an effect on the level, but it’s not like the timing of the childbirth—you see this big drop-off and then they come back to the labor force and so on. They find that it’s mostly demand-driven, that actually female labor force participation is so low in India because the demand for women is very low.
There’s a second finding that they have. It’s bad news for India going into the immediate future, which is adverse economic shocks actually make this problem worse. Because a lot of the lack of demand or the fallen demand for female labor is because they’re getting displaced by the employment of male workers.
They find that when there’s an economic shock, like demonetization or current COVID constraints and things like that, you see women being driven out of the labor force.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/09/16/ideas-of-india-female-friendships-and-fraternal-capital/

Why this excerpt? Well, as a young student, you often get to hear that economists are working on topic “x”, or feature “y” – and when you start to read the work itself, one tends to miss out on asking the big picture questions. This exceprt, I think, helps you focus on just that: the big picture question.

What is the big picture question, you ask? Simple: is women’s participation in the labor workforce so low because the supply is low? Or because demand for labor supplied by women is low? Or both? And how does one go about answering this question? So yes, the age at which women get married, how much education they receive, and cultural impediments to they working are all factors to be considered – but hey, maybe there just is a preference to hire males instead of females as well?

It goes without saying: read the paper, but this should help you read it better 🙂

The first part of the interview is about how Ashwini Deshpande got into this field of research, and is useful reading to understand the role of “luck” in the development of your research interests, and also to understand the resistance to change in terms of new research areas for economics twenty to thirty years ago.

There are a lot of interesting points in the interview, such as, for example, problems with recording women’s work better than is done right now (and what happens if it is not recorded correctly). There’s stuff in there about the lack of meaningful linkages between women’s education levels and the jobs that ought to become available as a consequence – and this could be because of (a lack of) sanitation, and increased mechanization on farms, among other things.

The interview is also useful reading because it introduces you to the so-called “Indian enigma“. (Please read “Where India Goes” if you haven’t already, and here’s an old review of the book on EFE.)

Here’s a chart from her paper that posits a different explanation (I’ve copied it from the Scroll interview, but it is from the paper as cited below):

UC: Upper Caste, SC-ST: Scheduled Castes, Schedules Tribes, OBC: Other Backward Classes. Credit: Ramachandran, Deshpande, The Impact of Caste: A Missing Link in the Literature on Stunting in India

We found that regions where the self-reported practice of untouchability was higher, the child height for upper caste children was unaffected, which means that, for example, Brahmin children were not shorter, compared to regions where untouchability was lower. But the average height of Dalit children was shorter in areas with higher practice of untouchability, compared to heights in areas with lower prevalence of untouchability.
That gives us a mechanism about how stigmatisation and social ostracism might affect child height. The fact that you have to be at the end of the queue in terms of receiving social services, maybe you get excluded actively. There’s a whole set of social and economic processes which either completely exclude these children or put them at the end of the queue.
What this suggests is that the greater prevalence of societal discrimination is associated with a worsening of the stunting problem.

https://thepoliticalfix.substack.com/p/interview-ashwini-deshpande-on-the

Now, you may agree, or you may disagree with her assessment – and that, of course, is more than absolutely fine. The idea, especially if you are a young student starting out on a voyage of discovery in the field of economics, isn’t to either form or change your opinion. It’s awesome to have opinions, and it’s awesome-r to have it change because of something you read or learn. But for the moment, to be informed about this body of work, and to go through it, would be a very good place to start.

As Ashwini Deshpande herself says in the interview:

Sometimes no number of facts can make people change their minds. Some people already have their minds made up. But such people are at the extremes. I believe a very large number of people believe in something because they don’t know better. They’ve just never been exposed to another way of thinking, another way of looking.
The idea is to expand that community of people. Reach out to the people who believe in something, maybe very strongly, but that’s only because that’s all they’ve ever heard. What CEDA is trying to do is to create an evidence base which is accessible. You can always produce evidence that is so obscure and so difficult to understand that nobody would want to engage with it.
But what we are trying to do at CEDA is, through pictures, through little data narratives, through short pieces, to summarise issues in a way that a lay person will find accessible. It’s like a ball that you set into motion, and hopefully it will spread to more and more people.
The more the number of institutions or portals that allow people access to data and debates in a democratic manner, the better.

https://thepoliticalfix.substack.com/p/interview-ashwini-deshpande-on-the

There are some great recommendations at the end of the interview, both to read and to view, and if you haven’t consumed them already, you have your work cut out for you.

If you are interested in reading more about Ashwini Deshpande, here is her CV, here is her faculty page, and here is her Twitter profile. A word of advice: do not click open her Twitter profile if you are feeling hungry. You can thank me later. 🙂

Housing in Singapore

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“Solved” is, at the least, ambitious phrasing. But the video is well worth watching. Via Sahil Shaikh, a SYBSc student at GIPE

24 “Underrated” Websites

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Some are not underrated, some are downright weird, some (at least in my case) evoke nostalgia. Freerice, for example, helped me look busy for hours in my last corporate job. Your mileage will obviously wary, but I enjoyed going through this list.

And while on the topic of old websites, check this one out: Complete Review.

On Serendipity, Housing and a Request

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Just the other day (the 15th of September, if we want to be exact), a student from GIPE sent across a video that I found to be very interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I scheduled it for this coming Sunday’s post. It is about housing in Singapore, and I’ll leave it at that for the moment.

And then, just yesterday, I finally got around to reading some of Shruti Rajagopalan’s interviews of doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers for her excellent podcast: Ideas of India. The third interview in the series is of Tanu Kumar, a postdoctoral fellow at William & Mary’s Global Research Institute.

That’s where the serendipity bit in the title of today’s post comes in – the interview is in some ways closely related to the video. (Interesting aside about the etymology of the word serendipity. Got nothing to do with anything, but hey, it’s Friday)

Tanu Kumar’s paper is about housing subsidy programs, and how they might affect political behavior. The paper is about the effects of a housing subsidy program in Mumbai, and local political participation, it would seem, went up among the beneficiaries of the program.

Just a broad overview of this paper is that the Indian government—and actually, governments everywhere—they invest a lot in making housing affordable and accessible to lower-income residents. So, I wanted to understand how these programs actually affect beneficiaries and shape their behavior and their decision-making.
Because these programs are such a large scale—maybe even 5 percent or more of the Indian population benefits from them—any effects on political behavior would have implications for the broader political landscape. What I find is really in line with what you just said—benefiting from a subsidized housing program in Mumbai makes people more politically active at the local level. They’re more likely to complain about local services, attend meetings about local public issues, and they also know more about local politics.
What’s particularly interesting is that they actually care more about local-level community issues like water, electricity, and sanitation. This is different from what we’ve seen in the past, where we find the people who benefit from different programs might participate less in politics. And the difference here is the outcomes that I focus on. I’m focusing more on, really, everyday politics, everyday making of complaints and stuff in cities to make services better as opposed to voting and turnout.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2020/12/24/ideas-of-india-how-does-subsidizing-housing-prices-shape-political-behavior/

Read the whole thing, but the reason I found the discussion so interesting is because my intuitive guess would have been that political engagement will go down, not up after getting the benefits of a subsidy such as this. Tanu Kumar thinks that one reason political engagement at the local level is going up is because people have more capacity (time) to spend on these issues.

RAJAGOPALAN: What do you think is driving this? Is it because now people have succeeded once through winning the lottery for subsidized housing that it changes their perception of what is possible in terms of the interaction with the state? Is it that now the need for housing has been satisfied, they push their clientelist efforts towards getting other things?
Is it a locational thing? Now that the housing problem has been solved, they are geographically fixed, but they’re also fixed electorally. Now they know that they are constituents of a certain group of people, and maybe now they want to push more, given the geographical elements. Maybe some of these things wouldn’t transfer if it were a different kind of subsidy which wasn’t so geographically rooted. What do you think is driving this push for greater participation?

KUMAR: There could be many different things going on. It would probably vary across the whole population. But what I think is actually going on is two things. First of all, people have greater political capacity. They’re wealthier. They have more time.
I don’t really see more political participation across the board, but I actually see it targeted in a very specific way, like targeted around local, very community-level services. There is probably some element of having better expectations or changed expectations of what the government might provide, but it’s also action that’s very motivated by protecting the value of these homes, is what I argue.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2020/12/24/ideas-of-india-how-does-subsidizing-housing-prices-shape-political-behavior/

I have two questions. First, it is interesting that the beneficiaries choose to spend their greater capacity (time or money) on local political issues rather than elsewhere. Why might this be?

Tanu Kumar in a way answers this question, for she says that folks are motivated to protect the value of these homes. What I find fascinating is that if this is true, then the beneficiaries truly believe that the best way of protecting the value of these homes is through greater involvement in local politics – which is a Very Very Good Thing Indeed.

And my second question: if it really is skin in the game that is at play – and that is the simplest way to think about this, correct? – then how should we think about doing more about it at the local grassroots level? And not just for housing, but other goods?

Which brings me to the last part of the title of today’s post…

Do any of you know where I might get to read more about whether involvement in local politics goes up given public housing subsidies? Did this happen in Singapore? In Hong Kong? In other parts of the world?

If yes, it would make the argument for subsidies in public housing (among other things) even stronger, and that is a topic worth thinking about, no?