Should the Netherlands cut regulations to build housing faster?
Built from documented writings, speeches, decisions and historical records. Council members argue from those positions, applied to today's question.
- 1Dutch PM-designate Rob Jetten is cited as embracing the "Abundance" message
- 2New York mayor Zoran Mamdani is also cited as responding positively to the "Abundance" message
The council treats these as reported facts, not settled truth. The members supply the reasoning; the asker supplied the sources.
The Netherlands should cut permitting rules, but test them in pilot cities before scaling nationwide.
Jetten should write a rule into the cuts: lower rents and open access count as success, luxury towers do not.
Hayek and Hirschman back the article's claim directly: Dutch zoning boards cannot match the knowledge builders and buyers hold, and scarcity itself can force faster building. Deng's 1979 Shenzhen model gives the mechanism for testing that claim safely: open a few municipalities, measure results, expand only what works. Ostrom complicates it: Dutch land and water rules are a commons problem, so blanket national cuts risk handing control to developers instead of residents. Rawls sets the test for the whole policy: deregulation is only justified if it lowers rent for the currently priced-out, not if it mainly enriches landowners.
The split is over speed, not direction. Hayek would cut now and trust the market to sort it out, while Deng and Ostrom insist on staged, locally measured reform before any national rollout.
- 1Pilot permitting cuts in a handful of municipalities before scaling nationwide, following Deng's staged Shenzhen approach.
- 2Define success in the pilot rules as lower rents and wider access, not luxury towers, per Rawls's difference principle.
- 3Require municipalities and residents, not just developers, to help redesign permitting rules, as Ostrom demands for commons governance.
Jetten is right: planners cannot know where housing should rise.
Thompson and Klein diagnose correctly: the Netherlands has buried its own builders under rules no single official can master. In 1945 I argued that the economic problem is never a technical calculation but the use of dispersed knowledge no planner possesses. Dutch zoning boards cannot know which parcel, which density, which street should hold the next thousand homes. That knowledge sits with builders, buyers, and local markets. Cutting discretionary permitting is not deregulation for its own sake. It is returning decisions to those who actually hold the information.
Scarcity can force building, but only if bottlenecks are real.
Hayek trusts dispersed knowledge; I trust productive imbalance, and the two are not far apart here. In 1958 I argued against balanced growth: deliberate tensions force creative responses that comprehensive planning never would. The Dutch housing shortfall is exactly such a tension, and Jetten's abundance politics tries to convert scarcity into momentum rather than paralysis. But I later admitted the hiding hand can excuse negligence, not just enable action. Reformers must distinguish a bottleneck that provokes building from one that simply breaks promises to tenants and neighbourhoods.
Abundance fails if Dutch rules are stripped, not redesigned.
Hirschman is right that imbalance can provoke action, but the Thompson and Klein argument skips a step: whose rules get cut, and who decided them. I spent forty years documenting that neither privatisation nor centralised control reliably governs shared resources, and Dutch land and water management is a commons problem before it is a housing problem. Mamdani and Jetten both sell deregulation as the fix. The real question is whether residents, municipalities, and builders redesign permitting together, or whether Brussels-style blanket cuts just transfer control to developers.
Cut rules only if the housing-poor, not landowners, benefit.
Ostrom asks who decides; I ask who gains. Thompson and Klein assume faster building helps everyone, but that assumption needs testing, not acceptance. In 1971 I argued that inequalities are only justified if they improve the position of the least advantaged. A deregulation that speeds luxury towers while clearing environmental review for incumbent developers fails that test completely. If cutting Dutch rules measurably lowers rent and opens housing to those currently priced out, the difference principle endorses it. If it mainly enriches landowners, abundance is just a new name for the old arrangement.
Test deregulation in zones before trusting it nationwide.
Rawls wants proof of benefit before trusting the policy; I built my whole reform on demanding exactly that proof, sequentially. In 1979 I did not dismantle central planning everywhere at once. I opened Shenzhen, watched what worked, then scaled it. The Dutch abundance argument is correct that excessive rules choke construction, but Jetten should not gamble an entire housing system on ideology from a book. Pick several municipalities, strip permitting there, measure the results against Ostrom's local control and Rawls's distributive test, then expand only what actually builds homes for the people who need them.
The convergence note
Where the council converges: Hayek, Hirschman, and Deng agree current Dutch rules block housing that could otherwise get built. All five accept that cutting rules changes who holds power over land, not just how fast it moves.
Where it divides: Hayek trusts markets to allocate rules away immediately; Deng and Ostrom insist on staged, locally tested reform first. Rawls and Ostrom doubt deregulation helps renters unless benefit is proven, while Hirschman sees scarcity itself as potentially productive.
For a policymaker to decide on: Jetten must choose between broad national deregulation now or sequenced pilot zones with measured outcomes before scaling. Any cut to permitting should specify who captures the gains: renters priced out today, or landowners and developers already positioned to build.