The central idea for this book of a feedback cycle between finance and house prices was first published in the form of a blog – ‘Fixing the Doom Loop’ – I wrote in 2016 as part of a series of seminars on ‘Rethinking Public Assets’, co-organized by Oxford University Department of Politics and International Relations, the New Economics Foundation and Positive Money. The concept was further developed in the UK context in Chapter 5 of the book Rethinking the Economics of Land published by Zed books and co-authored with Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane.
I owe an intellectual debt to a number of experts – on banking, housing, economic rent and land and the links between them – with whom I have engaged over the past seven years. These include Richard Werner, Dirk Bezemer, Michael Hudson, John Muellbauer, Claudio Borio, Tony Greenham, Michael Kumhof, Adair Turner, Alice Martin, Duncan McCann, Beth Stratford, Andrew Purves, Mariana Mazzucato and Steve Keen. George Owers at Polity Press and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable comments on early drafts of the book.
I would also like to thank Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, Alan M. Taylor, Katharina Knoll and Thomas Steger whose path-breaking – and publicly available – long-run macroeconomic history dataset has been a key resource in tracing the historical relationship between house prices and bank credit and which I used for a number of the graphics in the book. The dataset is available online at: http://www.macrohistory.net/data/.
The arguments in Why Can’t You Afford a Home? have benefitted from being presented at a number of seminars and lectures at the New Economics Foundation and the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, based in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London.
And a final but large thank you to my partner Salome and our daughter Elsa, for their support and patience during the writing period.