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> The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing. I'd bet that turns out to be worse in p

• roenxi 7y ago
  I'll read up on it, but it wouldn't surprise me if Singapore had more land devoted to urban development than they do countryside. Their policies aren't going to be optimising for general welfare as much as they are working around the fact that they have no land to play with when compared to anyone else. Their system looks like it makes sense for those conditions, but it would be a massive burden elsewhere. Look at the complexity of their quota system, for example [0]. So people are not going to be living where they want and everyone is going to be in the same part of the city anyway because Singapore is small - I could walk the long edge of their land in a single day. So basically, point taken that it works for Singapore. But Singapore is facing unique geographical constraints and it probably causes a lot of pain in practice that we don't hear about [1]. under normal conditions it would be far cheaper and easier just to build some high density government housing rather than trying to decommoditise. I expect it will turn out that nobody with alternatives should try to copy that aspect of Singapore. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore#Resale_flats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore#Re... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index - See Singapore, entry 151 of 180