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This is a summary of the main points in my new book, out today.
Kevin Erdmann
37.6K posts
Kevin Erdmann
@KAErdmann
I discovered a new framework for understanding the housing bubble, the financial crisis, and costly housing markets.
See my substack link for ongoing analysis.
- What are your best theories about why Newsmax is airing this?Abrego Garcia's wife: "I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive. Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn't forgotten about you. Our children are asking when you will come home ... they miss their dad so much."
00:00 - Sometimes, it seems like 80% of public debate is just some form of this:
- Manhattan condo. For sale for $595,000. Monthly HOA dues $6,975. New York is a different planet.
- Krogers profit margin over the last year was 0.75%, according to yahoo finance and hasn’t been more than 2.5% over the past 4 years.What happens when only a handful of giant grocery store chains like @kroger dominate an industry? They can force high food prices onto Americans while raking in record profits. We need to strengthen our antitrust laws to break up giant corporations and lower prices.
00:00 - Unaffordable housing is WEIRD. Housing was affordable basically everywhere until 1980. It was still affordable in 75% of cities as late as 2002. Making affordable cities doesn’t require some unprecedented complex set of new policies and programs.
- I think we’re getting the answer to “How could someone have bankrupted a casino?”Trump has a "make the economy worse" button and he is pressing it as hard as he can.
- Monthly employment data is probably the best real time clue on changes in population. There is no sign of 20,000 new residents, let alone Haitians. Home price appreciation has been normal. The cat thing was ridiculous. It distracted everyone from realizing it's all ridiculous.
- It doesn't matter much if the median new home can't be constructed at a price that is affordable for the median household. New homes are 1% of the market. The most important result of building a lot of $500,000 homes is that a bunch of $250,000 homes start selling for $200,000.
- Upzoning would be unfair to most current urban landowners in the same way that fracking was unfair to the Saudi royal family.
- Does everyone know that there’s a tax deduction self employed people can take on new cars, but the cars have to weigh at least 6,000 lbs? (Section 179)
- Tyler Cowen has an old talk where he warns that depending on explanatory stories with villains in them lowers your IQ by 15 points. Marxism is like an institutional commitment to that. It lowers your IQ by 50 points. 1/
- I was in a chat with some academics where I mentioned how crazy it is that we've gotten to a point that people will oppose local amenities to try to keep housing costs down. A Chicago trained economist who had written on housing said he'd never heard of such a thing. 1/
