Comparing monthly costs is a bit misleading. There are a whole bunch of less-direct costs and benefits to ownership. A bunch of these depend on your estimation of future economic conditions and of your future desires.

1) If you own a house, you're incurring the risk that you have to move for personal or professional reasons, and then can't easily sell. Landlords typically don't have to sell on short notice -- it's perfectly possible to be an absentee landlord. Not an absentee resident.

2) As a landlord, you can potentially hold the house as one asset in a portfolio. As a homeowner, you've locked up a lot of your potential capital in that high-risk illiquid asset; you're much more exposed if property values go down.

On the flip side:

1) Residents with a mortgage get a tax break that landlords don't.

2) Being an owner means you don't have the risk of future rent increases, and can profit if property values go up.

3) Being an owner entitles you to make structural or other changes -- repainting, say -- that a tenant can't easily.

Being an owner means you don't have the risk of future rent increases...

That is true, but as far as I can tell, rent increases don't follow soaring house prices during real estate booms. Rather, the price to rent ratio tends to go out of whack. (Check out these graphs -- I can't vouch for the accuracy of their numbers, but they are consistent with what I observe on the ground. Since I've been renting my current house, my rent hasn't gone up by a single cent, not even to compensate for inflation, while the house prices where I live have gone up by someth... (read more)

1TheOtherDave8yRegarding 1... can't a resident of a home, should the need arise to move on short notice, become an absentee landlord on the same property? If the monthly costs of renting equal or exceed the monthly costs of owning, presumably the rental income covers the cost of owning the property, and the former resident can go rent property wherever they happen to need to be. I would add to your second list: 4) Owning the property means I get more upside if property values go up. 5) Renting the property means I am subject to the owner's whims in addition to my own.

Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

by jsalvatier 3 min read29th May 2012260 comments








  • No effect on intelligence.


  • Possibly a small effect on sexual orientation.

So how do adoption studies lead to these conclusions?




If parenting doesn’t matter, what does?




Don’t be a tiger parent




Have more kids


Other Topics


Here are some other topics Caplan discusses in his book:


What parts should I read?


Criticisms of Selfish Reason To Have More Kids

