— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part Two — A Leninist critique of statistical categories · Chapter 8

8 A critique of contemporary theorists of rent: the apologia and its data

The two previous chapters have shown how the accounts hide rent: by dressing it up as a service (chapter 6), by dispersing it among the nomenclatures (chapter 7). But rent is not only concealed: it is defended. Beside those who make it invisible stand those who justify it, by making it the legitimate remuneration of a factor, of a risk or of a service. This chapter confronts them with Lenin’s method, which refuted its adversaries not by authority but by their own figures, and it begins, as they do, with the institutions, for it is from them that the loudest of the apologia issues today.

8.1 The apologia of rent: the landlord as benefactor

The dominant thesis is less scholarly than institutional, and it is everywhere. The private landlord, we are told, produces housing. The Fédération des promoteurs immobiliers, the developers’ federation, made a national campaign of it, to demand a “private landlord status”: to invest in rental property is to “turn your taxes into a new flat”, and it is “an investment that benefits you as much as it benefits others” — “no need to be rich to invest”.¹ The State says nothing different: the whole architecture of “rental investment” (from the Pinel scheme to its successors) rests on the idea that the individual investor is the producer of the rental supply, and must therefore be subsidised.²

Behind the institution stands guard the theory, and it is an old one. It is the neoclassical doctrine of distribution (that of John Bates Clark) which, by generalising Ricardo’s law of rent to all factors, makes land a factor like any other, paid at its marginal productivity: every income, rent included, thereby becomes “earned” by a contribution.³ From this flows the theorem that the profession recites with one voice: rent control “destroys supply”. Surveyed in 2012, the economists of a reference panel reject it almost unanimously; one of them sums up: “unless all the textbooks are wrong, it is a mistake”.⁴ One may add, for the record, the financial argument (rent as a “risk premium” and an “illiquidity premium” owed to the investor), which is not a signed thesis but a discourse of wealth management. These three justifications — the factor, the service, the risk — converge on one and the same conclusion; it remains to confront them with their own data.

8.2 The refutation by their own data

“The landlord produces housing.” What does the State’s own auditor say? The Cour des comptes examined the Pinel scheme in 2024: 7.3 billion euros of cumulative tax expenditure by 2023 (for an annual cost of 1.48 billion in 2023), a total cost that the administration itself is unable to put a figure on at the 2038 horizon — and a result nowhere to be found. The administration, the Court notes, could supply no consolidated count of the dwellings actually built; and the scheme “is not meant to constitute a lasting stock” of intermediate housing, since the investor exits the market at the end of his commitment.⁵

“No need to be rich; an investment that benefits everyone.” What do the figures on ownership say? That the landlord is not the diffuse crowd of small savers he is painted as, but a concentrated class. According to INSEE, 24 % of households — the multiple owners — hold 68 % of the stock owned by individuals; above all, 3.5 % of households by themselves hold half of the dwellings put up for rent, and in Paris the households owning five dwellings or more hold 58 % of them.⁶ The rent drawn from letting, far from spreading through the crowd of savers, is thus concentrated in a narrow minority, and the “benefit for all” that the advertisement proclaims is, for the most part, the benefit of a few.

“Rent control destroys supply.” What does experience show, where it has been carried out? The evaluation commissioned by the government and conducted by the Institut des politiques publiques finds moderate effects: the control weighed on rents (of the order of 2 to 4 % outside Paris, about 5 % in Paris relative to their expected course), without the collapse of supply that the theory announced.⁷ The catastrophe predicted by “all the textbooks” therefore did not occur, and for good reason: the theorem described the rigid freezes of the post-war years — the New York or the Berlin of old, where a rent locked far below the market ends up discouraging maintenance and supply. The French control, for its part, caps the rent around the market level, too mild to produce the announced catastrophe, too mild also to bite into the rent: the apologists’ scarecrow thus does not describe the scheme it claims to condemn.

8.3 INSEE’s honesty, and its burial

The concentration figures that ruin the image of the small saver are not this book’s: they are INSEE’s own. The study by André and Meslin is exactly the reclassification “by the real relation” that chapter 7 called for, conducted inside the institution, from tax and administrative data. The accounts disperse rent; the statisticians of INSEE, for their part, knew how to gather it together. The Leninist method is thus no trial of intent: the truth is in the official data, provided they are regrouped otherwise.

There remains the fate reserved for that truth. The study stayed a working paper, “binding only its authors”; it had some echoes in the press (the figure of the “3.5 % who hold 50 % of the rental stock” even reached political debate), then it fell back into the shadows; and no policy followed from it. The revision of cadastral rental values that it calls for, and of which a twin study showed that it would make the best-endowed pay proportionally less property tax, was voted three times — in 1990, in 2013, in 2020 — without ever coming into force.⁸ The institution produces the measure of concentration, and the State makes no use of it. To salute the honesty of the work, and to record its burial, is to say the same thing: the datum exists, but it weighs nothing so long as no will takes it up.

8.4 Lenin’s model, and its acknowledged limits

The method followed here is the one Lenin opposed to the “critics of Marx”. David, Bulgakov, Hertz, Chernov had made the “law of diminishing returns” the cornerstone of an apologia of small farming and a refutation of concentration. Lenin does not contradict them by authority: he turns their own statistics against them: the German censuses of 1882 to 1895, where, with the number of agricultural labourers constant, the number of machines doubles and imported fertiliser triples, confirming the march that the critics denied.⁹

It remains to mark two limits, for to ignore them would be to fall back into the very fault denounced. The first: not all economists defend rent, and some condemn it — Henry George made it the archetype of unearned income (George 1879); Milton Friedman held the tax on land value to be “the least bad tax”.¹⁰ The second: confronting a thesis with its data does not entitle one to proclaim the opposite thesis. That anti-control catastrophism is belied by the French measurement does not make rent control a solution; it establishes only that the argument from authority (“all the textbooks”) does not withstand the test.

The balance sheet

Rent is neither the price of a factor, nor that of a risk, nor that of a service. The “factor” is a condition that land does not produce (chapter 1); the “risk” is that of a portfolio, not the justification of the tribute that is levied; and the housing “service”, when the State is asked what it buys by subsidising it, turns out to be a stock that cannot be counted and does not last. What remains, once the apologia has been confronted with the data, is a tribute levied on a concentrated monopoly — and it is the State’s own institutions, its auditor and its statisticians, that say so, when they are not buried under a nomenclature or a working paper.

So ends Part II, in which we have seen the categories hide rent, the theories justify it, and both alike give way before the figures. Two tasks follow. The first is to measure what the apologia defends and the nomenclature disperses: how much, in euros, once real production has been deducted? That is the object of Part III. The second (for to measure a tribute is already to pose the question of its abolition) is to say how to allocate land otherwise; that is the object of Part IV. In both tasks, we shall keep to the rule of this chapter: however loudly the apologia makes itself heard, it is to the data that this book leaves the last word.