Help the Working Class by Deregulating Housing Construction

Both leftists and “national conservative” right-wingers have lamented declining job opportunities for the working class—particularly males, and proposed to revive their fortunes through a variety of subsidies and protectionist measures.  But my George Mason University colleague, economist Bryan Caplan points out a much better way to create millions of attractive new working class jobs:

My dear friend and colleague Don Boudreaux keeps arguing with national conservatives like Oren Cass who want to use industrial policy to revive American manufacturing…. The more I read these debates, the more convinced I am that both sides are overlooking common ground that reaches all the way to the horizon.

What common ground could that possibly be, you ask?

National conservatives yearn to help non-college domestic workers, especially men who feel out-of-place in the modern service economy. Like my dissertation advisor Anne Case and her Nobel laureate husband Angus Deaton, they plausibly attribute much of the opioid epidemic to the lack of meaningful work for non-college males.

Meanwhile, free-market economists have spent years talking about a big policy reform that would create millions of well-paid, meaningful jobs for non-college males: housing deregulation. While few give this reform the top priority that I do, almost every economist I know now recognizes that housing regulation has been strangling housing supply for decades, especially in the richest areas of the country….

What makes me so sure that housing deregulation would be great for non-college males? Because non-college males build almost all our housing! Over 80% of all construction jobs are non-college already—and almost 90% are male…

[N]otice that there are already over ten million construction workers in America. That’s only modestly below the nation’s total manufacturing employment!

Upshot: We can credibly do everything national conservatives hope to do for America’s non-college males via deregulation. Even modest relaxation of existing regs could swiftly create one or two million more well-paid working-class jobs. The radical housing deregulation I champion could easily double the size of the construction industry for decades.

Just imagine all the honest toil required to demolish those silly two-story homes in San Francisco and replace them with skyscrapers.

Unrealistic? Well, adding millions of con