Tenants

An overview of the history of improvements to working people's living conditions is given, by way of the various acts passed by parliament in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, while somewhat uplifting, does coincide with that period where European states increasingly needed to mobilise their entire populations to be competitive as industrial states. Education was not made compulsory and squalor reduced out of Christian good will, it was done because a state whose people can't read and keep dying of tuberculosis would be less economically productive and make less able soldiers. As work becomes increasingly automated, it's not clear what incentive the state has to reverse the trend the book outlines - economic growth has become decoupled from the physical state of the people.

The deeper issue is the question of the extent to which the state should be able to place limits on what an individual can do with their property, or on how much property they can acquire, or even in the extreme case on the extent to which the state should be able to confiscate property - to improve the living conditions of renters. The implications of interfering with property rights in this way do not particularly interest the author - it is almost implied that to own a property that you don't use to house yourself is in some sense illegitimate.

The author seems somewhat disinterested in examining the root cause of why the prices of properties and rents keep going up.