off the top of my head for things that have gotten better: 1. crime 2. healthcare 3. air quality 4. cars 5. food 6. house quality (although not affordability) 7. consumer electronics 8. access to media (movies, music, etc.) 9. ability to make cool maps 10. international travel

Revan@revan.eurosky.social · 18h ago

So this is basically one of the entry points to becoming a reactionary

i feel the loss of econ twitter with stuff like the quality of consumer goods discourse the literature on reputation incenvtives is very rich; it covers a lot of interesting stuff (why do bad mechanics not get competed, why do firms harvest reputation). alas, nobody here does those kinds of threads

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 3d ago

I'm curious on what the econ lit is on this. intuitively, it seems like a few things could generate the "great price and good-enough quality" equilibrium 1. cost of quality is convex and willingness to pay for it is not 2. information frictions force competition to be mostly on prices, not quality

okay, one more galaxy brain take: Another reason to legalize single stair and promote dense urban living is that double loaded corridors + subsdized suburbia encourage *massive* closets, which encourages buying more stuff. Good menswear guy article on this: putthison.com/real-people-...

Real People: Dressing with a Parisian Closet

Parisian homes are notorious for having small closets. That’s partly because the homes themselves are already small, and partly because...

putthison.com

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

I'm curious on what the econ lit is on this. intuitively, it seems like a few things could generate the "great price and good-enough quality" equilibrium 1. cost of quality is convex and willingness to pay for it is not 2. information frictions force competition to be mostly on prices, not quality

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

Huh? Go back to the city run grocery stores that get fat operating subsidies, I liked that one better

More evidence that housing markets are connected: An AI boom in SF shows up first and most prominantly in the rich parts of SF, then the poorer parts, then the richer parts of the East Bay, then the poorer parts of the East Bay. This is why building lots of market rate housing is important

A good comparison to the Mamdani grocery stores are commissary stores, which sell at ~25% discounts compared to other grocers If you read their financials, commissaries provided 1.6 billion in savings, and got 1.57 billion in subsidies. So subsidies are basically 1:1 with savings.

I need someone (me??) to come out swinging against Mamdani's grocery store because it'll be *too effective* and cause massive gentrification and rent increases

the food dessert literature seems very weird. As far as I can tell, there are three sets of facts: 1. there are places with poor grocery store access and poor residents 2. these places have worse nutritional outcomes (conditional on demographics) 3. Adding grocery stores doesnt fix the bad outcomes

I’ll give Mamdani the benefit of the doubt on the numbers but best I can figure per census, if the city totally covered you could cut prices: 1. rent only ~2-4% 2. Rent, utilities, advertising, taxes, and depreciation ~6-10% 3. All of 2), no profit, and discounts only on some goods gets you to 20%

Headquarters@headquartersnews.bsky.social · last wk.

Mayor Mamdani: Since 2019, food prices have soared at grocery stores around the country by roughly 30%. Wages have not kept up. Today, I am proud to announce a collection of essential staples that will be predictably 30% cheaper at all five of our city-run grocery stores.

Much like with a work of literature, there comes a point with every chart where it ceases to be understood as the author intended and becomes a conduit of takes. be free, wage chart; i no longer can tell people in my mentions they are misreading you (you, reader, understood it. everyone else, idk)

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · last wk.

Here's another way to see that rent is probably the most important long-term affordability constraint: In a world where rent (shelter) prices increased only as fast as the rest of the economy, purchasing power today would be about 13% higher (measured by wages)

Here's another way to see that rent is probably the most important long-term affordability constraint: In a world where rent (shelter) prices increased only as fast as the rest of the economy, purchasing power today would be about 13% higher (measured by wages)

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · last wk.

Anyway, the chart you should be posting is how rent prices look like compared to wages. Note: This has been going on for a long time! The housing crisis is a long standing issue.

Obligatory FRED posting: Yes, food prices increased faster than wages from 2022-2023; however, food prices have generally grown much slower than wages (including recently!)

John Gramlich@johngramlich.bsky.social · last wk.

"Buying food to eat at home has gotten 33% more expensive in U.S. cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures. In the 7.5 years before that, prices rose 6.4%." (via @apnews.com) apnews.com/article/groc...

Mini-thread on the Vancouver vacancy tax (and resulting study). The tax is Vancouver's 2017 empty homes tax; the study from CD Howe looks at its impact. The study claims the tax had large impacts on vacancies and minimal impacts on prices. As I'll discuss, I think there are problems with the study.

is that figure consensus? this is non-housing labor share from a recent American Economic Review article and it's basically ~flat outside the US and canada. germangutierrezg.com/GutierrezPit...

Duncan Weldon@duncanweldon.bsky.social · last wk.

If you look closely, there’s some sort of pattern here. www.ft.com/content/9741...

im really curious what the units are gonna look like. The lot size is 2500 square feet. Obviously great if it gets built, but with staircase and elevator requirements, it's probably gonna be all studios and there will be a ton of dead space. (also lol at neighbors saying it's "out of character")

San Francisco Chronicle@sfchronicle.com · 2w ago

It’s the first housing project to get the green light after the Family Zoning Plan was approved last year.

i once tried to figure out what the optimal bidding strategy was for one of those airline auctions where they ask how much they could pay you to take the next flight. i tried to math it out, gave up, and bid half my valuation. i asked one of my game theory profs at happy hour and he gave up too

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 2w ago

auction theory stuff is also interesting because there's a big gap between auctions with uniformed particpants -- like ebay -- and oil/spectrum auctions. in the former, the behavioral stuff maters a ton, and the latter the market participants want theoretical guarantees about optimal behavior

to elaborate for a second: econ 101 will tell you san francisco is expensive because it's bad at building, and it's a very nice place to live. Houston is cheap because it's a less nice place to live, and it's good at building. There's more to housing, but this is actually a good first pass!

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 2w ago

honestly, i disagree. I have a lot more respect for econ 101 after 4 years in my PhD. i think econ 101 works pretty well for a lot of the stuff people say it doesn't work for -- e.g., housing prices. the hard part is that distinguishing where and when econ 101 logic doesnt work is very tricky.

more productively, here's a thread on a "modern" (2007!) econ paper The paper asks a simple question: when families can pick which neighborhoods to live in, how do we measure how much families value different characteristics of their neighborhood? (eg. school quality) www.nber.org/system/files...

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 2w ago

i think you can put 95% of bluesky econ meta commentary into three bins: 1. general innumeracy and anti-intellectualism 2. people processing their anxiety 3. a game of telephone that started with a professor's lecture in 1970, got relayed to a bookclub in 2006, and now enters Bsky today

i think you can put 95% of bluesky econ meta commentary into three bins: 1. general innumeracy and anti-intellectualism 2. people processing their anxiety 3. a game of telephone that started with a professor's lecture in 1970, got relayed to a bookclub in 2006, and now enters Bsky today

Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 2w ago

honestly, i dont think Bluesky's conception of econ is so much narrow as it is "divorced from reality" At its most intellectual, Bluesky criticism of econ amounts to hazily repeating what someone in a bookclub said, which was itself a hazy recollection of something a professor said circa 1980

we are so close to getting a carbon tax. need everyone to manifest a "tariff on emissions"

If 2016 San Francisco housing discourse could only see this paper. The paper's estimates imply that stringent IZ ordinances, like what San Francisco used to have, likely halved San Francisco's housing construction from 2017 onwards -- a loss of like 20K units.

Aaron 🏗️🚲🌲🏀@aceckhouse.bsky.social · 3w ago

here you go that's for the average (California) IZ policy, many existing policies have even steeper estimated effects on the scale of a 50% reduction bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.ed...

argentina's world cup performance is vindication for every academic who says they can make their slides the morning of their presentation

isn't the way more obvious explanation that the great recession killed housing supply? post-2008, seattle metro had about five years of rock bottom home production and now builds about as much as it did pre-recession despite why higher demand. the corporations are buying *because* of the shortage

Rep. Adam Smith@adamsmith.house.gov · 3w ago

My father, a baggage handler at SeaTac Airport, bought our family home in 1971 for $15,000. Today, that very same house would cost $526,000. Hedge funds and wealthy corporations continue to buy up single-family homes, kicking working-class Americans out of the housing market.

i'm working through Bruce Ackerman's stuff on regulating housing markets and ive never been more pro "no, you really need that mathematic formalism in your model" He's clearly very smart and knowledgeable and he manages to launder a million load-bearing assumptions into his model of housing markets

on one hand, taxing second homes didn't decrease prices. on the other "raising significant amounts of revenue" is nice. it's a bit hard to square "large increases with revenue" with the text's belief that the small effects on prices are bc of tax avoidance (lying about if a home is a second home)

#urbanecon@urban-econ-papers.bsky.social · 3w ago

New in JUE: Quantity, price, and compliance effects of a second-home taxation reform in France, by Antoine Belgodere, Georges Casamatta. #econsky #urbanecon

What's up with San Francisco Housing? A quick thread: First, after a post-COVID lull and compared to the rest of the Bay Area, the housing market is booming again. Second, rent prices have been going up much faster and for much longer than home prices.

Ah shit that’s dean Preston at Peet’s, New Zealand housing twitter celebrity

the rise, subsequent failure, and proposed fixes of implied warrants of habitability law -- and the "tenants rights revolution" more broadly -- is a good example of lawyers thinking the solution to every problem is more lawyers turns out, offloading the regulatory state to the judiciary doesnt work

i'm curious how this particular form of brainworms gets passed down across generations if memory serves me, this kind of logic was pioneered by Berkeley leftists in the 60/70s (maybe vienna earlier?). Basically, crush land values via regulation -> expropriate land at cheap prices -> social housing

Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸@jmisci.bsky.social · 4w ago

Not to rub salt on the wound but this is a tiktok post from one of the Metra board members that Brandon Johnson just re-nominated. Just pure left-NIMBYism So I am not expecting much upzoning or TOD effort from Metra anytime soon (unless it’s 100% affordable and therefore unsustainable)