morto-tats-blog

[morto-tats-blog]

Happy Anniversary Intoxicating Liquor Act 2008

Alcohol has long been one of those areas where policy makers value being seen to do anything, rather than doing something that works. In policy terms it joins drugs and prostitution as an area plagued by gestures aimed at placating the hand wringing masses, with few honest attempts made to actually reduce the harm it causes. Being kind, alcohol policy in Ireland is an ongoing drunken fumble in the dark to try and get the key into the lock. Really it is a flagrant disregard for evidence that suggests the traditional approach of ‘ban it’ does not work.

Take the Intoxicating Liquor Act 2008 (ILA). That’s the old chestnut that prevents you from buying a beer in a shop after 10pm. You would hope that if government were going to introduce something that is so infantilisingly irritating, that they would be doing so on the basis of strong evidence - in this case evidence that not selling alcohol after 10pm reduces alcohol consumption. If not you would think that after a decade of the ILA having (spoiler alert) the opposite effect, government would be willing to hold its hands up and say, ok we were wrong let’s try something else. Let’s see.

Take per capita alcohol consumption - it’s fairly rough around the edges as a measure but it at least gives us a general sense as to whether things are getting drastically better or worse. When the ILA was introduced as law in 2009 we saw a relative spike in the amount of alcohol being consumed per capita. Usually after a ‘just ban it mate’ policy like this is introduced you expect to see an immediate, even if small positive impact. Not a great start.

After a trough in 2013 (roundly put down to an increase in excise duty - a policy action that may actually work as a deterrent) alcohol consumption has since been on an upward trend. So after a decade of the ILA we’re back where we were in terms of consumption overall, although we would arguably be worse off were it not for the dampening effect of the increase in excise duty in 2013. 

In the absence of any accompanying evidential justification for the ILA (trust me - I’ve looked), we can speculate that the policy was devised on a model of people whereby if a person misses the 10pm deadline they abandon their evening’s drinking plans, and on that basis the policy is predicted to reduce alcohol consumption. I’ve never met someone who calls off their planned evening’s craic because they arrived at the off licence after 10, and frankly I don’t want to.

This is the crux and why I reckon the ILA resulted in a spike in alcohol consumption when it was initially introduced. Anecdotally, one of the many reasons the ILA has been so ineffective, is that in this brave new era people tend to stock up on alcohol before 10pm for fear of missing their window, often in the absence of a concrete plan for the evening. Better to be looking at it than looking for it, as they say. I don’t need to tell you what happens to stockpiles of booze in Ireland, and this is borne out by the consumption trends above. Or as Bukowski put it

That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen

So the ILA’s model of drinkers’ behaviour is deeply flawed. Take London as a counter example. In London, where already declining levels of binge drinking and alcohol consumption continued to decline even after the introduction of 24 hour licensing in 2005, many corner shops sell alcohol for 24 hours. In my experience this leads to decision making around alcohol purchase that is driven by how much you actually want to consume at a given moment rather than on the fear that it will soon be unavailable. This is anecdotal but it serves to illustrate the lack of interest at a policy making level in prodding at the very simple: ‘if you can’t buy it you won’t drink it’ model of behaviour. Closer to home we’ve all proved this one wrong in queues outside Indian restaurants for 40 quid bottles of vinegar when there’s literally no other option.

No one cares, really.

One of the many annoying things about the ILA  is that it is never going to be a big issue to rally around. The ILA is no 8th amendment; it's not going to get people on the streets. Nevertheless it subtly feeds into the ‘Ireland’s just a bit shit’ narrative, and needlessly continues the catholic hangover with this hand wringing, evidence-light style of policy making. While on it’s own the ILA may not be a game changer, this ‘Ireland’s a bit shit’ narrative is killing us and anything that fortifies it it should be stopped.

One thing that wonks can applaud the ILA for is its being a neat exemplar of what’s wrong with policy making in Ireland: it’s typically not evidence based and it defers to the view of whichever interest group traditionally has the state by the balls in a given area. See below for more details.

Let’s celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the ILA by inverting the sour parent V teenager atmosphere the it propagates and do something unheard of in policy terms: try something that works, or at least doesn't make things worse. 

[morto-tats-blog]

The Psychogeography of D’Olier Street

Anyone familiar with psychogeography and Dublin city centre will know that D’Olier street stands out as an exemplar of the urban nightmare. It is a vile piece of urban design with scant regard for the pedestrians forced to partake in its loathsome contribution to city centre life. Its only redeeming feature being that it is born of such a collection of street level abominations as to make it worthy of consideration as a case study of what not to do by budding planners.

I walk north along D’Olier street most days on my way to work and this affords me an insight into where those feelings of unease we all feel when we walk down it come from. It would be remiss of me to put such valuable experience to waste, particularly at a time when urban design is on the lips of so many Dubliners what with #CollegeGreenGate in full swing.

The high level stuff you don’t need me to tell you: D’Olier street is an horrendous wind tunnel. Things have moved on since arteries for polluted gusts like D’Olier street were created, and these days architects and planners have to take the creation of ground winds into consideration before granting planning permission, particularly for tall buildings. But back in 1965 when D’Olier street’s towering O’Connell Bridge House was defecated onto Dublin’s streetscape, such impacts were not taken into account with the result that walking up D’Olier Street feels like the wind equivalent of storming the beaches at Normandy. To make matters worse, the wind is given a rancid quality by the fact that the shops on D’Olier street store their bins on the pavement, more on this later.

The pavement itself is quagmire of uneven slabs and potholes, which means you have to constantly beware of where you step and, along with the blasting wind, means that you instinctively look down to protect your eyes. Alas you are forced into a kind of Sophie’s choice between your feet and your eyes, and your head because there is an obstacle course of people created both by the fact that pedestrians walking the opposite direction have to make the same choice, and the fact that D’Olier Street is a hub of bus stops, where passengers queue for buses perpendicular to the direction of pedestrians, which creates a blockade of slack jawed gawkers gazing up at bus numbers rather than paying heed to the pedestrians whose thoroughfare they are blocking.

To make matters worse there is a high chance of a high speed head on collision with passengers disembarking buses, because they step off with a momentum  entirely inappropriate for negotiating the chaos under discussion into pedestrians who are not looking up because they want to guard themselves from the wind tunnel and negotiate the uneven pavement.

In case the confusion unfolding on the footpath isn't offensive enough for you, D’Olier street is also a four lane motorway in the middle of the city. This is incredible both in that it is allowed to exist, but also because of the cacophony it creates. Buses hurtle on to the street like Sean O’Brien taking a crash ball off a line out, with a surge of momentum created by their acceleration beginning at the bottom of O’Connell street 70 metres away, and are manned by Dublin bus drivers, who always seem to live in hope that no one will actually be at the next bus stop so they can speed past it and hopefully finish their shift early, thus creating the need to swerve at a great speed to arrive at the D’Olier street bus stops at which there are always people waiting because it’s the middle of the city. All of which creates the effect for a pedestrian who dares to actually look up that a bus is driving at speed directly at them.

Meanwhile back on the footpath, the fact that foul-smelling bins; (unlicensed, illegal) sandwich boards left on the path by shops (all of which are interestingly horrific and warrant a blog post of their own to explain why,[1] except for Books Upstairs: a hopeless romantic guerilla movement for pleasantness in a world of industrial levels of urban decay); passengers waiting for buses; and bus stops themselves, narrow the thoroughfare of D'Olier street for pedestrians to a degree whereby the amount of journeys that involve that awkward prisoner's dilemma style dodge ‘em and/or a full head on collision is, conservatively, over 50% during rush hour.

The catwalk effect created by the combination of this narrowing and the audience of waiting passengers, who are miserable because they are on D’Olier street, makes it feel like just by walking down the street you have done something wrong. I have fortunately never had to walk into a courtroom to stand trial for committing a heinous crime, but I imagine the stares are not unlike those searing eyeballs I get on D’Olier street, which seem to scream ‘this is all your fault.’

Whose fault is it? In some ways D’Olier street is the result of its not being anyone’s fault. D’Olier street is a microcosm of the neo-liberal incoherence that can ensue when we leave things entirely up to the market. It has things that people want: a convenience store; public transport; accommodation, even a pub, but they don’t speak to each other. There is no sense of an overall plan. They all exist in their own universe and have an almost hostile relationship to each other. To paraphrase that aul whore in number 10, there’s no such thing as D’Olier street.

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[1]The Spar on D’Olier street for example has the worst queuing arrangement I have ever seen in a shop. In brief, whenever there are more than 3 people in the queue it cuts off the shop from right in front of the door, so that if you want to get into the shop you have to explain to people standing in the queue that you are not skipping, you just want to get inside, but because you are confronted with the queue immediately upon entering the shop a lot of newbies/hungover tourists (of which there are many as there is a grotty hostel on D’Olier street) think that the shop employs a queue only system whereby in order to buy anything you queue up first and tell the cashier what you want when you reach the top of the queue, a misunderstanding which ultimately results in more (angry) people clogging up the shop because when these misinformed people reach the top of the queue the cashier reveals that no you are mistaken, this is indeed a shop in which you bring your items to the till to pay, so even though you have spent several minutes in the queue (the cashiers are needless to say lacking in joie de travail thus lengthening the average queing time) you will need to go back and find your items and queue up again (most likely in a queue with people who are under the false impression that you once were), a process that continues ad infinitum (until closing) and, coupled with the people who have had to justify their walking into the shop to people in the queue, results in a terrible atmosphere in a shop that is poorly stocked and overpriced (e.g. E5.95 for a pre packed sandwich) anyway.

[morto-tats-blog]

“Here’s your problem, someone took away this thing’s moral code”

A bonanza of scandal and the ensuing mess of judgement and process of ostracising that most groups of friends at some point experience is an opportunity to reflect on first principles, to wit why do people make self destructive, morally bad decisions that don’t seem to chime with their worldview? And on what grounds does our otherwise fairly free and easy milieu still adhere to the kind of black and white moralising that this behaviour consistently provokes?

Many continentals saw the perpetual struggle between reason and desire as constitutive of what is is to be human. Lacan framed desire not as something that pops into our attention every now and then, but as the very context within which all human experience happens. You could take the less impulsive, morally worthy path for years, but desire is a constant and probabilistically speaking  at some  point it will wear you down and cause you to screw up royal. For all you philistines lacking the joie de vivre to let the left bankers away with some pseudo-science, there is actually evidence that willpower is depleted by repeated demands on it. Self control is like a muscle that tires with repeated use.

If it is tiring to it is fend off desire, wouldn’t it be easier if we just had a once-and-for-all, knock down response to any disagreeable claim desire makes on our attention, rather than having to come up with a fresh argument as to why it is right to act in a certain way in a given situation every time we are tempted to err? To brain-dump this entire area of thinking? Well - for the lapsed Catholics among us - we used to have just that, but we gave it up, leaving ourselves with a glut of executive thinking to do, in a case of the baby going out with the bathwater.

Back in the days of religious fervour you could tell yourself not to pay attention to desire because you would go to hell. You didn’t have to spend time agonising over it, you literally had a rule book of what you could and couldn’t do. With the onslaught of a more human centred view of the world we have decided we don’t believe in all that anymore, and we are very much at the centre of our own universe, playing off the cuff.

Like most people who were raised catholic, at some point in adolescence I rejected mass as an activity. You know the drill: my dislike of mass developed into an overall aversion to and ultimate rejection of Catholicism and religion in general. Therein lies the rub.

As we know but understandably tend to forget, beneath all of the ceremony, parochialism, and paedophilia, Catholicism has embedded in it a moral framework that provides a roadmap for how to live. Most of it is garbage, but crucially it takes some view on what the good life is that, since the decommissioning of catholicism, we no longer collectively reflect on in the everyday.

In a nutshell, we renounced Catholicism; inadvertently ditched its moral framework and accompanying vocabulary; didn’t replace it with anything; and stopped reflecting on the right way to live.

The fact that a lot of the moral conventions we now follow originate in a catholic doctrine which we no longer believe in leaves us in a situation where our morality is more or less groundless, thus making it increasingly difficult to justify not doing whatever you desire. Lacking a well-resourced moral vocabulary to compete with desire and impulse, it is inevitable that self-interest will start to take some big scalps.

So, over the course of a few generations we ditched Catholicism, which is fine, nay essential to do, but didn’t replace its view of the right way to live. This is problematic  when combined with the fact that now the primary duty is no longer to the common good, but rather to yourself, or more specifically to enjoy yourself. Coupled with the lack of a competing narrative, this duty to enjoy makes the call of desire all the more convincing. The goal of living a good life has been replaced with the duty to live an enjoyable life, and our lack of an everyday conversation on ethics has left us badly resourced to step outside this narrative.

This is not to say that we have lost an awareness of right and wrong. Most of us clearly still have a moral compass, but without an accompanying vocabulary which explains why something is right or wrong, it is more difficult to make the case against self-interest, and so awareness of right and wrong doesn’t always convert into action.

The other problem with jettisoning a moral framework is that it  also makes it problematic for people to legitimately judge those who act in a way that they view as wrong.  Pressing people to explain on what basis they criticise someone who has disobeyed some of the ten commandments is often greeted with hostility. This is because the question of right and wrong is viewed as so self-evident that prodding at it is seen as an attempt to be provocative,or worse an attempt to justify the behaviour in question. But often times the notion of right and wrong in these situations is a hangover from a catholic worldview which we have long since rejected. The hostility arises because the idea of having to explain first principles is frustrating in light of the inability to appeal to an agreed moral doctrine.

I cast thee out, but giz a shot of your multiculturalism.

Ireland in particular is in an awkward position here because we consider ourselves to be emergent liberal, but when it comes to questions of theft, infidelity, and gluttony I would argue that we are still mired in a staunchly catholic moral view of the world whereby these things are just wrong because the bible says so  or - in today’s terms - because that’s all there is to it. And, in addition, someone who transgresses should not only be looked upon as having done something bad, but also as a bad person with whom the community should have no dealings.

It all leaves you with the sense that while we’re happy to have a few pints at a world music festival, scoff down a bit of international street food, or join a bongo circle, when it comes to actually embracing things that structurally differentiate cultures, say completely different moral standards, we’re actually grand thanks.

[morto-tats-blog]

Give up yer auld life story

I was wondering recently why those Patek Philippe ads for the act of fathers passing on their watches to their sons make me feel that particular type of guttural illness reserved for the most vile, syrupy rot that offends the very core of my being.

Leaving aside any psychoanalytic deep dive you reckon my reaction justifies, I find the ads in question vom-inducing not just for their commodification of the father-son relationship, but also for the existential feeling of illness (akin to that described in Sartre’s La Nausée) they provoke. The kind of feeling brought on when confronted with something that is metaphysically foreign to you and challenges your very being in the world.

Consistently aghast everytime I open Monocle, the Economist or a similarly complacent zine of the centre right, I have never been able to completely put my finger on why this Swiss intergenerational exchange of wealth inspires ontological dread alongside the weltschmerz that is par for the course when confronted with the financialisation of human relationships.

The ontological aspect to my reaction has recently been explained by my realisation that I don’t possess the central characteristic of the human condition that the ad appeals to:  narrativity - having a life story, a narrative; the idea that each of us constructs and lives a narrative and this narrative, or life story is us, it is who we are. It is that conception of a person being shoved in my face that makes me feel nauseous, because it is completely foreign to me and, according to Galen Strawson, I’m not alone.

‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how’

A celebrated agitator of the traditional view of self, Strawson distinguishes between two kinds of people: Narratives and Episodics. Narratives want to make something of their lives. Episodics do not. For Narratives, giving their life a pattern that reflects what they care about, their values, is making something of their life. For Narratives a coherent narrative that adds up to who they are is the thread holding their life together. It is their life.

But not everyone gives their life a pattern. For episodics there is not this kind overarching coherence to things. Experiences come and go, events happen, but they are not replenishing a well of ‘me’ and telling an overall story of a life. There is a certain blindness to the past, or what life experiences have meant to them as a person.

As an episodic I am completely uninterested in the answer to the question of what I have made of my life. I am just alive and this whole accompanying idea of creating a narrative, and a way of describing it to myself and others, has no part of it. What I care about, in so far as I care about this ‘my life’ construct, is how I am now.

Enjoyment culture

Despite Strawson’s useful distinction, the Narrative approach - the idea that there is a story to your life that you are adding to everyday - does seem to be the default view. The advertising industry, and social media in particular (‘enjoyment culture’), has fully grasped this in recent years, and has exploited it with incredible success.

Enjoyment culture has set up a kind of ubermensch within the Narrative framework: a person who enjoys themselves all the time. The corollary being that if your narrative does not resemble this you are failing in life.

To be clear,narrativity in itself is not bad. Indeed Narratives are in good company: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Plato, Keroauc all saw the process of Narrative creation as the fundamental human project. But this coherence, pattern seeking tendency has been made problematic by the  annexation of narrativity by modern enjoyment culture as espoused by advertising and social media. Specifically, this move has made disentangling your personal narrative vocabulary from that provided by enjoyment culture, to engage in a true process of self-creation, problematic

Social media and advertisement hark back to the Freudian therapist who operates from a position of knowledge or authority to the patient: it sees us only in relation to a single theory of the human condition, and doesn't ask questions in a genuinely curious, meaningful way, instead only eliciting in what relation our lives stand to a wider theory.

Enjoyment culture makes us into a character in its own version of events, and does not allow us to have different values apart from enjoyment. Its interventions are designed to help us understand ourselves just as the Freudian: as agents that stand in some relation to a preconceived body of theory, or in this case the master signifier of our time: Enjoyment.

For Narratives the antidote to the aggressive seizure of narrativity by enjoyment culture may involve a Socratic approach, similar to what has occurred in the evolution of psychotherapy: an approach which asks questions in order to facilitate a self-generated idiosyncratic narrative, rather than assuming we all want to be enjoying ourselves all the time. I don’t know what this looks like in terms of social media and advertising, but there is a view that these media can deliver us from political psychosis, so why not Narrative psychosis?

[morto-tats-blog]

Mindfulness: the silent buzz killer

Socrates, as anyone who has a passing familiarity with bar stool philosophy can attest, considered the unexamined life ‘not worth living’. Hannah Arendt viewed us as carving out our being and humanity through thinking, and considered those who carried out the holocaust as ‘non-thinking’. Martin Heidegger viewed our thinking about being-towards-death as constitutive of what it is to be human in the world. But can you hang on a sec and put the intellectual girth of humanity on ice? Some languorous bald lad is telling us to stop thinking. WTAF?

Is mindfulness whiting out an activity that makes us who we are?

Maybe it’s an unsympathetic view to take given how useful mindfulness can be, but I have a suspicion that it inoculates you against critical thinking, and, depending how far down the existentialist path you want to go, strips you of your humanity and derails self-creation.

Oh God no

On a macro level, mindfulness is a self-preservation mechanism of capitalism. It is a way of dealing with the alienation we all feel in the face of the pressure to enjoy ourselves that the latest edition of capitalism constantly places us under, while leaving the system responsible for this alienation unscathed. The western annexation of certain facets of buddhism in mindfulness is capitalism making a very effective attempt to preserve itself by preventing us from reflecting on how bad it makes us feel in the everyday.

But the app told me 

Anyone who has tried it out will know that the practice of  mindfulness discourages you from following streams of consciousness: don’t fight against them, but just watch them come and go, because, you see, it is following streams of thought that leads to all sorts of damaging, obsessive neuroses. Fair enough. You probably don’t want to be worrying about whether or not your colleague looked at you in a weird way two weeks ago when you’re trying to sleep. But what about all the ‘good’ streams of thought that we have, which lead to things like creative output, decision making, and generally having an opinion about world events and indeed about things that are happening in your life to, like, you? What about all that Nietzschean self creation malarky?

Care for an organic frontal lobotomy?

Proponents of mindfulness would say that this need not be a case of baby out with the bathwater, and that you can follow ‘good’ streams of consciousness to your hearts content. But can we really regulate our thinking in this way? Once the complacent, corpulent, holistic blob that is mindfulness poisons your view of thinking with its new age ‘it’ll be grand’ view of everything, is it possible to return to a state in which you don’t feel the need to accompany every thought with an attempt to categorise it? To let it go or stay with it? Surely the very act of making the decision of whether to follow a thought disrupts the stream of consciousness and therefore impacts where it will go, or indeed whether it will really get started in the first place.

Also, once you start associating thinking as something that is by and large unwelcome, presumably it is difficult to make reasonable decisions about which thoughts are good and which are bad. Who knows where a thought may end up if it’s unfettered by an immediate will to categorise it, or be aware of it? A thought about laying waste to Radio 5 Live with semtex may end up in an essay about the impact of being double landlocked on the County Laois world view. We just don’t know.  Such a valuable piece of work would be lost were mindfulness to have its buzz killing way. Or, more simply put, Ulysses. Clearly the festishisation of the present comes at a cost to the individual and to humanity.

The opium of the ‘right on’ people

Mindfulness is handy. If you want to switch off the old noodle and get some shut eye or not worry about whether or not you really are happy it’s great. It works quite well in tandem with the narcissistic times we live in. Life is stressful, don’t try and change the world, just opt out of it. Like an unbelievably lame update of Trainspotting: choose life – I choose not to choose life, I choose mindfulness.

It’s an even more effective opioid than religion; you can actually offend a religious person, and move them to action, whereas the mindfulness massive are basically immune to taking a view on anything, and will probably just breath more deeply as you burn a copy of The Power of Now in front of them.

Make it stop

Moving from a religious society based on sacrifice for the greater good, to a secular society structured around the duty to enjoy oneself has left us vulnerable to the moral torpor of mindfulness. As the duty to enjoy placed on all of us becomes evermore exhausting, mindfulness shifts the goalposts rather than changing the game. It commodifies the ability to deal with the self-alienation of modern life, and sells being non-engaged (engagée) and all that flows from that, as the mark of a well adjusted human. Eckhart Tolle unashamedly dismisses all ‘isms’ as being based on the idea that the present isn't good enough, in a way denigrating the very idea that things can get better. That is terrifying stuff, and no amount of calmly delivered breathing instructions should let us forget it.

[morto-tats-blog]

Houston, Texas: how deregulation can turn cities into monsters

The scene of the crime. Images: Google Maps and Map Frappe

Phwoar! What's that?

This is the outline of the urban area covered by Houston, Texas, placed over London, England.  The American dream involves doing things bigger: portions, cars, and, evidently, cities. It is your right, nay duty as an American to express yourself in the amount of space that you occupy;  Houston is flexing its spatial footprint and living the dream.

However, by one very important measure London is actually twice the size of Houston. The urban area of the British capital contains nearly 10 million people; that of Houston just 5 million.

So why is the latter’s footprint so much bigger? In order to best serve the American dream of owning a huge house with a rolling meadow for a garden, and a spaceship sized car in the driveway, Houston has very few planning restrictions. Development can happen anywhere within the city’s vicinity – a situation that’s resulted in low density sprinklings of large houses with estate-sized gardens, and, as recent tragic events show, very little permeable surface area, leaving it vulnerable to flooding.

Although many Houstonians reside in mansions about 10 times the size of a London flat, the urban sprawl which has resulted from the city’s 'entrepreneurial’ approach to land use planning, brings its own problems: poor health outcomes (Houston is America’s fattest city), long commuting distances, congestion, poor public transport, and a city centre that is basically abandoned by humans.  A colleague of mine recently spent three hours wandering around the city centre trying to find something other than a drive through monstromart where he could buy a packet of fags. A friend of mine on a family holiday decided to take a stroll around Houston only to have his walk interrupted every 5 minutes by a motorists pulling up in their gas guzzlers asking "Everything ok buddy? You need help?", aghast at the idea of someone not in a car. A testament to the friendliness of Texans, and a poor reflection  of Houston's street life.  

London’s growth, by contrast, is heavily regulated by planning laws, particularly the greenbelt. This has forced it's hand on higher (but by no means high in general terms - Paris and New York are among the cities setting the bar in that respect) density development, urban design, and public transport, in order to ensure that a city with a population more than twice the size of Houston uses up significantly less land.

While London’s transport system continues to evolve to meet the needs of its growing population, Houston has largely resisted having a mass transit system in favour of expanding roadways, highways and interstates to accommodate more cars. This means a lot of its residents spend a significant proportion of their lives in their cars, rather than lounging in their mansions, and suffer poor mental and physical health outcomes as a result. 

It’s not just comparatively regulated cities like London that Houston blots out. Even when placed over others cities which are listed among the world’s worst offenders for urban sprawl, Houston still dwarfs their comparatively feeble efforts at environmental degradation. Look:

Houston has fewer people than every one of those cities.

There is one beast that even Houston cannot tame, though, and that is the insatiable urban sprawl of Los Angeles, which has 6 out of the 10 most congested roads and the longest average commuting time of any city in the US.

This article originally appeared in CityMetric

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But Housing's still all cracked and broken. Sorry Mom, supply has spoken!

Anyone familiar with the Simpsons' golden age will agree that the Lyle Lanley led, Springfield town rendition of 'Monorail' is amongst the series’ most valuable contributions to humanity.

I've been thinking about this tune a lot recently, partly because it's so damn catchy, but mostly because it captures perfectly the current debate on housing in Ireland.  

There are of course some minor differences: for one the chorus of the song is 'monorail' rather than 'housing supply', but apart from that we basically find ourselves in the same situation as those newly flush springfielders.

A town with money is a little like the mule with the spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it

Our economy is buoyant again, but we still don't know how to manipulate this growth to solve the most pressing social problems, particularly housing. Most debates on the housing crisis at some point refer to the need to increase supply; build more houses; increase the numbers of new houses on the market, and so on. This supply narrative is shaping up to be Ireland’s Monorail moment: the moment when we give loads of money to the Lyle Lanleys of this world to build something we don't need.

The issue of the purchase price of houses in particular is an area where the current debate is selling us a monorail. The 'supply position’ is that simply building a lot more market homes could bring down house prices and rents. This is wrong.

I’d argue that the proposition being made by the supply freaks is something like:

Prices in the housing market – rents and house prices – are too high and rising partly because the housing market produces far too few homes.

If housing developers were freed up to match their supply to housing demand, for example by scraping planning restrictions, this would cause prices and rents to fall.

Over the long term, this is the only way to make housing more affordable.

While an examination of the Simpson's script reveals even fewer premises in the Monorail argument, the mania around needing to build the Monorail chimes with the fervour we have worked ourselves into about increasing housing supply based on the above premises.

Lisa Simpson: I’d like you to explain why we should build a mass-transit system in a small town with a centralised population

So why do I think this position is wrong? I think you’ve got to start with the fundamentals of the housing market. The key point is that prices and rents in the housing market are not set by newly built homes, unlike in lots of other markets, where the supply and demand for new products sets the price. Prices are set by trading within the secondary market. Basically, the price of a new house is determined by how much people are paying for old (secondary) houses in that local area. New build homes do not set prices. They absorb them.

At present there are roughly 40,000 residential property transactions in Ireland per year, of which roughly 2,500 are for new build market sale. At under 10% of the market, the new builds will not set the price but will be marketed at values which reflect their local second hand market.

So, when it comes to lowering house prices and rents, increasing the supply of new market housing is about as useful to Ireland as a monorail is to Springfield. The Simpsons et al do need to sort out their transport infrastructure, as we need to sort out our housing, but the  respective products on offer are not what either of us need. Springfield needs to fix main street, not build a monorail; Ireland needs more 'outside market' housing, not more market housing. For new build homes to start impacting, let alone setting, prices in the wider housing market there would need to an enormous rise in the scale of market building. This is not the kind of rise even those who bang the supply drum could conceive of. We are talking Stalinist, 5 year plans scale ambition here.

Borrowing from Kate Barker’s review of housing supply in the UK in the mid-2000s, even if private housebuilding doubled, house prices would still continue to rise on a trend well above inflation. To stop house prices rising at all would imply a level of market house building that would be “undesirable and unachievable”. Watch Behemoth and you will get the picture. Alternatively check out Ireland about ten years ago, or visit one of those ghost estates just a 'stone's throw' from Dublin.

Blood from a stone

So it is basically unachievable to get the market building enough homes to start flatlining or reducing house prices overall. The reason is simple: the private housebuilding market can only build when prices are rising. Private house building operates on a speculative business model. Firms buy land years in advance and they pay a price based on how much they think homes will sell for in the future. If house prices fall, they stop building – as they would not make a return. The unfolding mess in Cherrywood epitomises the Government's misunderstanding of how private developers operate.

Instead of trying to strike an ineffective deal with developers to build affordable housing, the Government should accept the fact that developers’ responsibility is to their shareholders, so they are not going to build something that doesn't maximise profits. And why should they? It is not their job to house the people, that is the role of the Government, and the Government needs to accept that the best way to do that is not by using public money to try and convince developers to shove social concerns into their business model.

The whole conversation on solving the housing crisis needs to stop being in throe to private developers’ business model, as the only way to build houses. It is one way to build houses,  but clearly it is not the way that reduces house prices, rents, homelessness, or any of the quagmire of issues that constitute the current  crisis.

Based on the fact that government keeps banging it's head against the market-led-supply-wall, it's safe to assume that there is institutional capture by the house-building industry going on at government level; let's not allow the wider debate to be subject to institutional capture in the same way, by letting people away with constantly saying this is a simple supply side issue.

So what?

What we need is to build (and retain) ‘outside-market’ homes which are outside of the land price, house price trap. Over time this will moderate price rises in the market sector too, by giving people who can't afford the market a viable alternative choice.

Horses for courses

At the moment everyone is scrambling for market homes, regardless of whether they are the most suitable product for their economic circumstances. This results in house prices and rents going up. The way to deal with this, as above, is not to build yet more market homes, but to build "non-market" homes.  The problem is that market housing is still the only game in town for people on average incomes.

We have been here before, and we have got it dreadfully wrong. Rather than loosening credit restrictions to allow people to buy housing products which are not suitable to their situation, we should be creating more products that are suitable to the situation of the growing cohort of people who have an average income, can't afford a deposit, and can't afford high rents. There’s an obvious second benefit to building outside-market homes too. It is that outside of the market you have scope to set rents and prices that people can genuinely afford. In the short term, this is what is needed most – homes that people on normal and low incomes can actually afford. Many of these non-market homes will be part-funded through schemes delivered by the private market which also provide full market homes – I’m not saying we should stop building market schemes! But the critical point is that without building thousands more homes outside of the speculative, high-price market we simply won’t make a dent in the housing crisis.