Heatmap Daily emails us “With more snow on the way this week for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, extreme heat is probably far from most Americans’ minds.” But to an alarmist with a hammer, everything looks like a red-hot nail, so they go on to deplore the government not bossing people around. “Most people who die in heatwaves die inside. Manufactured homes, also called mobile homes, are particularly lethal in extreme heat. During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, 20% of the 96 people who died in Oregon lived in such housing, according to an analysis by The Oregonian.” So, they argue, Leviathan should ride to the rescue by restricting choice and driving up costs. Why do the people who keep getting everything about climate change wrong think they are smart enough to tell everyone how to live their lives?
That publication insists you shouldn’t want a mobile home and indeed are such a fool that left to your own devices you’d roast yourself to death in one instead of purchasing an air-conditioned, double-glazed, ecofriendly luxury home. And they lambaste politicians who just passed up a chance to run your life:
“And yet last week, the House of Representatives approved a bill that could prevent the adoption of regulations that would help prevent future heat-related deaths in manufactured homes. The vote was the culmination of a nearly decade-long fight over who should regulate the construction of manufactured homes, which are crucial to solving the housing crisis and the primary route to low-income homeownership. It also lies at the crux of the debate over building out quick, cheap homes – the industry’s preference – versus investing in resilient construction practices with an eye on a hotter future.”
They want the government to tell people they don’t even know, and whose circumstances they don’t know, what kind of house they should be allowed to agree to buy from other people. But as students of economics as well as climate, including how it relates to government, we think Heatmap is far too credulous if they think politicians design measures that do exactly what they are intended to do. And while this warning applies vastly beyond mobile homes, its application there is illustrative.
Of course this “hotter future” is uncertain too. But suppose that the buyers of mobile homes believe it’s coming. They are already free to buy the more expensive home with built-in whatever that makes heat waves amusing not alarming. Or they can buy a cheaper one and a fan because they can’t afford the luxury model and find that being homeless is worse than being in a trailer that gets hot on hot days.
Indeed, just possibly they’re in the market for a mobile home partly because their resources are limited, and Heatmap’s preference for where they should want to live, or at least should have to live whether they want to or not, would stretch their budget to the point that any tiny reduction in heat-related risk is more than offset by the other important things they would have to do without. Possibly including a home at all.
What’s missing in Heatmap’s analysis is any appreciation of trade-offs at all, and much appreciation of other people and their ability to judge the trade-offs they face sensibly. After all, the vote didn’t ban the construction or purchase of these fabled resilient-construction-practice trailers. It just left it to customers and manufacturers to decide what sort of trade-offs to make between quality and price. Exactly what markets have done superbly since the invention of the haggle, and governments have done terribly since the invention of the edict.
