Today, home-ownership has reached extremely high levels. Modern generations tend to believe there is something wrong with them if they rent.  However, is high home-ownership really as rosy as people imagine?  Staring at data first, we realize that the most successful, stable, attractive country in the Western world is Switzerland. It has tiny unemployment; wealth; high happiness and mental-health scores.  Does it have high home-ownership rates? Absolutely not. In Switzerland, about seven in ten of the population are renters. Yet, with Europe's lowest home-ownership rate, the nation thrives.  Now go to the other end of the misery distribution. Spain has approximately the highest home-ownership rate in Europe (at more than 80%). But one-quarter of its population are unemployed. A likely reason is that high levels of home-ownership mess up the labour market. In a sensibly functioning economy it is easy for people to move around to drop into the vibrant job slots thrown up by technological change. With a high degree of owner-occupation, everything slows. Folk get stuck. Renters can go to new jobs. In that way they do the economy a favour. As Friedman said, the rate of unemployment depends on the flexibility of the housing market. Next we come to economic breakdown. Most analysts accept that at heart it was the housing market--obsessive pursuit of homes, the engendered mortgage  lending and an unavoidable house-price crash--that sank the Western world. Germany, say, with its more efficient rental market, had a far smoother ride through trouble. As for the monetary system, in the past few decades, in the hope of getting untaxed capital gains way above their true labour earnings, many people threw their spare cash into buying larger houses or building extra bedrooms. TV programmes about how to make easy money, beautiful rising house prices, and most importantly, our falulty tax system encouraged that. When at some point market broke down, everyone suffered.  Our countries ought, instead, to design tax systems that encourage people to invest in productive real activities and in innovation. Renting leaves money free for better purposes. That also points to the role of sensible budgeting over a person's lifetime. Why should we think that when we die it is necessary to have paid off an entire house? Our children do not deserve it. Let them pay for themselves. We should rent--and enjoy our lives with the money saved. Finally, moderation usually pays off. Our scientific understanding of how economies function is horribly limited. This suggests that the golden rule should be to avoid extremes. A 50-50 mix of home-ownership and renting, not the 70-30 split that is now observed in so many Western nations, makes sense. The main reason to make people invest in housing market is   _  .
the problematic taxing approach favouring house buying people's desire to avoid their money from devaluing easy channels to obtain methods to make easy money people's wishes to live in larger and more comfortable houses