【正文】 at houses were primarily investments. As a result, people seem to have started to buy and sell homes more frequently. Between the mid1990s and mid2021s, the number of new houses sold almost doubled in America, from just over 600,000 to over in 2021. Perhaps that made labour markets more mobile, but it was certainly not what policymakers were aiming for when they set out to increase home ownership. Their efforts in the past few years seem to have weakened, though not destroyed, the best arguments for treating home ownership as something to be encouraged: that it increases people’s savings and creates better neighbourhoods for everyone. But perhaps you should not be surprised by that. As Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” two centuries ago, “a dwellinghouse, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitants.” 自有住房 是避難營還是重?fù)?dān)？ 自有住房帶來的社會利益中看不中用，而且經(jīng)濟(jì)成本高昂 。 reading levels were 7% higher. This had nothing to do with ine: the research controlled for that. In another study homeowners’ children were 25% more likely to graduate from high school and more than twice as likely to go to university. Their teenage daughters were also less likely to bee pregnant. These studies, though, are not the last word. They find a link between children’s education and homeowning. But is this because, as some suggest, home ownership requires parents to possess managerial or financial skills that they pass on to their children? Or is it because the people with those skills help their children at school and also buy houses? No one knows. Nor is it certain that owners always take better care of their neighbourhoods than renters do. Some studies claim that the effect in fact depends on a few publicspirited people willing to set an example. Renters can be publicspirited too. In America areas with lots of renters tend to be transient because the typical rental period is short. In Germany, though, people rent for years. Stable neighbourhoods and widespread home ownership can go together but do not need to. As Bill Rohe of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill puts it, “evidence regarding the societal benefits of home ownership is highly conjectural.” Still, on balance, home ownership gives people a stake in the state of their surroundings. Thriving streets increase the value of properties, giving owners incentives to improve them further. Renters get no such benefit。 and it benefits future generations because, it turns out, the children of homeowners do better at school and have fewer behavioural problems than children of renters. On the face of it, the evidence for these claims is strong. In America homeowners are less likely to move than renters, so areas with a lot of homeowners are more stable. According to the 2021 American Housing Survey, homeowners stay where they are for about nine years whereas renters move every two. More stable neighbourhoods are more lawabiding. According to a study of New York City, the homeownership rate was second only to ine as an explanation for different crime rates. The link between ownership and political participation is stronger still. In America in the early 1990s, 69% of homeowners voted, pared with only 44% of renters. Homeowners are more likely to know who their representatives are。 if house prices fall by 10%, you may lose your entire savings. The value of American homeowners’ equity in their own houses has slumped from a peak of $ trillion in 2021 to just $ trillion at the end of 2021. This undermines one claim that homeowning is economically beneficial. The other piece of evidence for home ownership’s benefits is that the houseprice fall has so far spared most existing homeowners from absolute losses. In America, for example, house prices have fallen back only to where they were in 2021. There were roughly 29m house sales in the United States between 2021 and 2021, pared with 115m households, and anyone who bought before then is probably sitting on a nominal profit. However, as Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein points out, if house prices rise, people feel richer and borrow and spend more. If they feel poorer, they may cut back even if the price of their house has not fallen below what they paid for it. Subsidies to home ownership have thus increased economic volatility. They boosted consumption, as homeowners used their houses as collateral to finance consumption or investment. In America mortgageequity withdrawals reached $9 trillion between 1997 and 2021—equal to more than 90% of disposable ine in 2021. This gave homeowners