People are purportedly losing faith in the value proposition of a college degree, however, it is simultaneously true that: 1. the price of tuition has been falling rapidly relative to CPI 2. the college wage premium has been pretty flat so it might be a particularly *good* time to go to college?

aside from being a chart crime, I'm think the answer to "why are fewer people living in extreme poverty in china than the US" is "the data aren't comparable". China is reporting 0% extreme poverty in a consumption based survey; the US reports ~1% in an income based one. *Sweeden* reports a 0.75%.

the long view of shelter inflation also makes a much stronger case for the primacy of supply constraints in determining housing affordability if you think the stagnation + drop beginning in the late 1960s reflects adoption of growth controls, that's kind of the whole story! @aarmlovi.bsky.social

People seldomly make this point correctly, but you can make a mostly-coherent argument that if you look at income gains in terms of the prices of "essentials", they're somewhere between modest and stagnant, depending on which year you pick for your base.

The commitment to white supremacy is crazy

crazy you basically can't get a mortgage with a <760 credit score anymore

the substack guy is basically cribbing his numbers from MIT's living wage calculator (although he's disingenuously not adjusting his income numbers inline with his expenses). it's fine to use a higher threshold for poverty. but do this consistently! it'd imply like 90+% poverty rates in the 1950s

130K for a household of 4 is about what you get using MIT's living wage calculator (e.g., Hennepin County, MN). The issue is that this is *definitely* not a poverty wage; per MIT poverty is ~32,000 in MPLS. people have lost sight of how poor the US was when the poverty line was first introduced.

here's a fun game to play in light of that (bad) substack on "poverty" going around. The game is called "the median household of four is rich beyond your wildest dreams". America is really rich! median household of 4 in seattle is at like 160K.

I’m at the Southern Economic Association conference in Tampa - come see me present on a large rural school expansion program in India! #SEA2025

I think this is mostly San Francisco finally shrugging off the pandemic, but it is *really* funny that rent prices in San Francisco shot up *immediately* after the city banned RealPage and other algorithmic price setting software. My pre trends are incredible!

niche tweet alert: NYCs "supermarket needs index" seems kind of bad. TLDR; people are calling it a "food dessert map", but the methodology makes it clear it's mostly a map of poverty. More grocery stores is good, but I think it's being kind of oversold as an affordability or an anti-poverty tool

Rent prices remain super elevated in areas hit by the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires, mostly driven by increases in zip codes affected by the Palisades fires.

Some takes on housing discourse: 1. measures of cost burdens at local levels are close to useless. for instance, of counties with > 100,000 renter households, the *least* rent burdened is San Francisco 2. homeownership doesn't measure what you think it does 3. housing shortage estimates are weird

per SF Fire Data, since 2003 in pre-1976 high rises (not just condos), there's been - 0 deaths - 20 injuries - ~15 million in property damage (not adjusted for inflation) This ordinance would hit 9800 units and cost 2.7 billion. @stephenjacobsmith.com www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Updated plot but same conclusion: 1. Metros where more apartments use rental pricing software are more sensitive to changes in demand, but this is true for both increases *and* decreases 2. Long term prices are mostly going to be determined by at what rent the marginal unit pencils at

Anyway, I think the correct read on ticket pricing is that, pre-COVID, sports tickets track GDP and concert prices track GDP / capita. Big picture, the rise in ticket prices seems like a combination of income inequality and supply constraints more than it does anything else (eg ticketmaster).

Re the "regulate the price of beer" debate, the two competing worldviews seem to be: 1. you can regulate margins/conduct and companies will, to a large degree, just take it on the chin 2. companies will adjust to your regulation and, to a large degree, offset what you're doing

if people have strong thoughts on how to do these threads, let me know. im weighing having the threads be 60 posts w/ a lot of per study detail vs the quick overview I did here. Maybe type up a longer form overview and host it somewhere?

I'm going to try to put together a mini lit review on some of the recent institutional landlords papers. there are lots of papers, so I will be necessarily omitting many. Mostly focused on impacts on prices, and whether institutional landlords are killing homeownership and driving up rents.

new-ish working paper on Los Angeles' mansion tax argues that the revenue estimates are severely overstated. the paper argues that somewhere between 2/3 and *all* the direct revenue generated by the tax is offset by tax decreasing transaction volume. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

median house price to full time wage ratios continue to fall. obviously interest rates are higher than pre-COVID. big difference is interest rates are way higher now, but affordability does seem to be improving

you can see this today. right now, you can get good deals on very labor-intensive (often hand welted) shoes from Indonesian bootmakers The reason they can make those shoes is that their wages are low. When Indonesia gets rich, these deals will stop. And that will be good.

nerdy, but i figured out what i dont like about JCHS' residual income chart. this chart is just saying that rent has increased faster than overall inflation the issue is that by fixing the income bins, you've removed any impact of income growth since the % of people in each bin changes over time

as a matter of pedagogy, i think teaching perfect competition first is giving people a false sense of how neoclassical econ thinks of pricing the benefits (you can aggregate things nicely) dont matter because undergrads dont care about nice aggregation! just teach monopolistic competition first IMO

I am *really* struggling to see how this isn't bog-standard neoclassical pricing. even in perfect competition, the firm sets prices as a markup over marginal cost. the difference is just that the markup gets driven to zero by competition.

a thread of me reading and musing on Introduction to Post-Keynesian Economics. mostly for my bookkeeping purposes, but if anyone wants to comment, please jump in. 1/However many I do.

libbing out rn

it sounds like the moody's analytics "top 10% of income Americans do 50% of consumption" statistic is fakeish. both the level & the time trend incidentally, tbe BLS' version shows a much lower level and no time trend. consistent w/ top 10% income share being ~flat - www.bls.gov/cex/pce-ce-d...

some of the austin rent decline is probably a decrease in demand, but it's still insane to look at how well they've done compared to other cities. Since 2022, they're the only major city with *decreasing* rents, and they've had the third-lowest growth since 2019 (and SF + DC have neg pop growth)

Before castigating a book for not using a term, you should check to see if the book uses a term.

pretty sure that headline Iowa GDP number the NYT is citing is just wrong. Per the BEA: (Also a 6% drop in GDP is insane... that's like twice the grea recession)

post-COVID, (and post Philly overhauling their eviction system), the largest drops in Philadelphia violent crime happened in the same areas where the largest drops in evictions were. Possible evidence some of the anti-eviction policies also help reduce crime

isn't video game pricing a super classic durable goods problem? there's a huge + mostly non-depleting backlog of old games which new games have to compete with, which pushes down the price new games can charge. this doesnt seem easily fixable. maybe subscription models?

Woke: Atlanta has seen a luxury housing boom! Bespoke: Atlanta has seen a fully affordable housing boom! (correct: affordability is mostly a function of total housing production + demand)

niche subtweet: aside from people confusing short / long run cost curves, isn't an easy way to get upward sloping cost curves to just add "acquisition cost" to the firm's cost function?

The "I'm a small bean" energy by San Francisco is incredibly insulting. Of major cities, San Francisco has the second-highest percentage of rich nhoods and the fourth-lowest percentage of low/middle income nhoods. How can we talk about gentrification when there's like two places left to gentrify?

my contribution to @besttrousers.bsky.social discourse: 1) census contract rents in Brooklyn make sense given observed incomes 2) zillow asking rents give implausible implied levels of rent burdens 3) zillow does way worse at explaining rent:income in high immigrant counties; census does not

be cool if pe stakeholder published their data so i could check this, but isnt this just a map of which places have built a bunch of new apartments? (relative to the size of their existing housing stock)

Per usual, people are bad at reading these articles 1) investors are defined as bought via an LLC, LP, etc. Per the article, institutional investors are net sellers 2) there's no obvious spatial correlation between % investor-owned and prices or price increases

Some papers have looked explicitly at the "break up big landlords" angle. Breaking up big landlords can lead to pretty large price declines! Like ~10%! *But only in a very small number of markets* (about 5% or so) It's not a general affordability tool www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jny7m...

apropos of nothing, it's kind of annoying how the flavor-of-the-month criticism of economic methodology is so incurious about why mainstream economists do things the way they do armchair sociology and aversion to qual research apparently affects economists of all methodological persuasions

shot in the dark: does anyone know of models that get market power where the market power doesn't come from 1) quantity restrictions 2) bargaining Motivated by Ticketmaster, which seems to have market power and doesn't seem to obviously restrict quantities or bargain

The best predictor of homelessness are high rents. What's interesting is that this correlation is driven by differences in *levels* of rents *Changes* in rents do a very poor job of predicting changes in homelessness, either short term (last year) or medium term (last 8 years)

not sure if this is pro/anti stancil-thought

SB 79 HAS PASSED!

news outlets are already reporting that income growth was stagnant, but this seems mostly like a household composition issue. if you look at median *personal* income, there was decent growth. which makes sense as wage growth has been pretty robust

performative male is just rebranded soft boy; everything that ever is, was, or ever will be, comes from 2016 discourse at a cafeteria in a midwestern liberal arts college

Apropos of nothing, it's interesting that a lot of recent urban econ work on zoning/housing supply reform has been very heavy on case studies (job market papers excepted). Lots of institutional details and descriptives + reduced form results. Nothing general equilibrium; no policy counterfactuals

A couple papers now (of varying quality) have found that tenant protections increase rents (in the 3-5% range, so pretty big changes). These papers have tried to argue that the effect comes from landlords reducing supply. This seems maybe true, but not the whole story