Today’s public policies exacerbate our differences-The evidence that land-use regulations harm potential migrants keeps piling up

By Adam Millsap of Mercatus.

"The evidence that land-use regulations harm potential migrants keeps piling up. A recent paper in the Journal of Urban Economics finds that young workers (age 22 – 26) of average ability who enter the labor force in a large city (metropolitan areas with a population > 1.5 million) earn a wage premium equal 22.9% after 5 years.

The author also finds that high-ability workers experience additional wage growth in large cities but not in small cities or rural areas. This leads to high-ability workers sorting themselves into large cities and contributes an additional 3.2% to the urban wage-growth premium.

These findings are consistent with several other papers that have analyzed the urban wage premium. Potential causes of the wage premium are faster human capital accumulation in denser, more populated places due to knowledge spillovers and more efficient labor markets that better match employers and employees.

The high cost of housing in San Francisco, D.C., New York and dozens of other cities is preventing many young people from earning more money and improving their lives. City officials and residents need to strike a better balance between maintaining the “charm” of their neighborhoods and affordability. This means less regulation and more building.

City vs. rural is only one of the many dichotomies pundits have been discussing since the 2016 election. Some of the other versions of “two Americas” are educated vs. non-educated, white collar vs. blue collar, and rich vs. poor. We can debate how much these differences matter, but to the extent that they are an issue for the country our public policies have reinforced the barriers that allow them to persist.

Occupational licensing makes it more difficult for blue-collar manufacturing workers to transition to middle-class service sector jobs. Federal loan subsidies have made four-year colleges artificially cheap to the detriment of people with only a high school education. Restrictive zoning has made it too expensive for many people to move to places with the best labor markets. And once you’re in a city, unless you’re in one of the best neighborhoods your fellow citizens often keep employers and providers of much needed consumer staples like Wal-Mart out, while using eminent domain to build their next playground.

Over time people have sorted themselves into different groups and then erected barriers to keep others out. Communities do it with land-use regulations, occupations do it with licensing and established firms do it with regulatory capture. If we want a more prosperous America that de-emphasizes our differences and provides people of all backgrounds with opportunity we need more “live and let live” and less “my way or the highway”."