【正文】 more to spend in the good times but less in bad ones. In Britain homeequity withdrawals added the equivalent of 3% of posttax ine to households in the fourth quarter of 2021 but subtracted 3% a year later. So changes to house prices aggravate the economic cycle. Recent research by the IMF finds that a quarter of the 100odd recessions since 1960 have been associated with houseprice busts and that these contractions “are deeper and last longer than other recessions do”. Subsidies to home ownership have also weakened financial services. They encouraged more people to buy houses (which was the point), but, logically enough, also encouraged lenders to take greater risks with housing. This was fine while house prices were rising, but the fall exposed how vulnerable banks’ balance sheets had bee. Moreover, if public policy aims to create wealth, there are other ways of doing it. People could invest their savings in the stockmarket and rent their homes, for example. Had they done so in the past two years, they would have done worse than homeowners. But for three decades before that, equity prices easily outstripped property prices (see chart 2), so in the long run equities have been a better bet than houses. (Admittedly, this strips out the effects of share dividends and imputed rents, which favour property.) Housing suffers from two further weaknesses as an investment. It sucks up disproportionately large amounts of money, falling foul of the idea that investors should diversify: in America the equity tied up in houses accounts for 45% of the worth of the average householder. And it is illiquid. If you need to raise money, you cannot sell a room or two, whereas you can always sell a few shares. It is hard to argue houses are the best asset for building wealth. “Perhaps the most pelling argument for housing as a means of wealth accumulation”, argues Richard Green of the University of Southern California, “is that it gives households a default mechanism for savings.” Because people have to pay off a mortgage, they increase their home equity and save more than they otherwise would. This is indeed a strong argument: socialscience research finds that people save more if they do so automatically rather than having to choose to set something aside every month. Yet there are other ways to create “default savings”, such as panies offering automatic deductions to retirement plans. In any case, some of the financial snake oil peddled at the height of the housing bubble was bad for saving. Subprime, interestonly and other kinds of mortgage instruments allowed people to buy their homes without a downpayment and without building up equity. “Negative amortisation” (negam) mortgages even let people pay only part of their interest each month and to add the rest to the principal, increasing their debt, not their savings. Homeequity loans had the same effect. Where the heart is The main arguments for home ownership, though, are not primarily economic, but social. Home ownership, argue those who want to expand it, benefits society because it encourages stable, more lawabiding munities。 From The Economist Home ownership Shelter, or burden? The social benefits of home ownership look more modest than they did and the economic costs much higher In a scene from the film “It’s a Wonderful Life”, a happy couple is about to enter their new home. Jimmy Stewart, whose firm has sold them the mortgage, reflects that there is “a fundamental urge…for a man to have his own roof, walls and fireplace.” He offers them bread, salt and wine so “joy and prosperity may reign for ever”. That embodies the AngloSaxon world’s attitude to home ownership. Owning your own roof, walls and fireplace, it is thought, is good for householders because it helps them accumulate wealth. It is good for the economy because it encourages people to save. And it is good for society because homeowners invest more in their neighbourhoods, engage more in civic activities and encourage their children to do better at school than do renters. Home ownership, in short, benefits everyone—not just the homeowner—and the more there is of it, the better. Which is why it is usually encouraged by the government. In America, Ireland and Spain, homeowners can deduct mortgageinterest payments from taxable ine. Yet the worldwide crash was bound up in this supposed miracle of social policy. The disaster began with defaults on American subprime mortgages, a financial instrument designed to spread home ownership among the poor. It gathered pace after the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two gover