Carrington Clarke

It's controlled by the governments and there's a lot of talk in economics about the planning rules, but people also forget, including the advocates of changing the planning rules and making it easier to develop.

but it's also controlled by the private landholders who already exist.

So there's no point relaxing the development restrictions in, you know, say, inner West Sydney if the people who currently own large houses in inner West Sydney don't want to sell them.

And they're so expensive now, using that example, that

There are people who are like, well, actually, even though a developer would come and pay me four and a half million dollars for my block of land, someone else who wants to keep it as a single block of land would still pay $4 million for it.

So.

And it would significantly push up the price of the remaining standalone houses in those areas.

And, you know, until we start getting good at building three and four bedroom apartments that families can live in, there's going to be a substantial market for well-located family homes that currently is mainly being met by standalone dwellings.

Well, and I think it's because people have confusion about the debate.

I mean, there's two problems with GDP.

One is that it doesn't measure overall human well-being.

And there are already measures around overall human wellbeing that have existed for quite some time.

And what the UN seems to be trying to do is create yet another one of these measures, but even more comprehensive, right?

One of the other problems with GDP, which what the UN has done here doesn't seem to address, is that even from a purely economic and fiscal accounting point of view, GDP is not a complete measure because it doesn't factor in, for instance, externalities.

So if you grow your economic output by cutting down a forest, which no longer exists for

to cut down again the next five years and also leads to all these other negative things like erosion, loss of biodiversity, et cetera, loss of potential future tourists.

Removing carbon from the air, which is very relevant to the debate about climate change.

Exactly.

So none of these externalities are properly accounted for in GDP.

And the classic example is the Christchurch earthquake, which I wrote an analysis piece about when that happened.