Everything net
Everything relevant to the thought... A lot of people think that the size of the American housing "bubble" in 2005 made a housing crash inevitable. But if you compare the US to peer nations this isn't so obvious. https://t.co/hGWTzTUZyN https://t.co/HsqHfSaqxU Canada, the UK, and France all had bigger housing booms than the US. ...
... When I share this image people sometimes suggest I'm cherry picking, since other major economies don't look like the ones for the UK, Canada and France here. ...
... I also think this chart is consistent with the explanation I prefer—that causation mostly runs from bad macroeconomic policy to a housing crash, rather than the other way around. ...
... And that's what I think you see in this chart. Tight money put downward pressure on home prices throughout the Eurozone, but the effect was biggest for countries like Spain and Italy whose economies were otherwise most negatively affected by ECB policies. ...
... So return to to the US: most people think the size of the housing bust meant the Fed was powerless to prevent the Great Recession. I think this is backwards. If the Fed had cut rates more aggressively in 2007 and early 2008, we would have had a much smaller housing downturn. ...
... At a minimum, there's no reason the US housing downturn needed to be as extreme as it was. Looser money could have produced a 10 or 20 percent price drop in housing rather than 30 percent. That would have meant a milder recession and perhaps no financial crisis in 2008. ...
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... I think most Americans underestimate how much more dysfunctional our constitutional/political system could become. I think people mostly still think about the changes of the last 30 years in terms of the tone of political arguments getting nastier: annoying but ultimately not that important. ...
... But I think the governments ability to deal proactively with emerging problems has been degraded significantly. Many aspects of government are coasting along, overseen by agencies created between 1932 and 1972 but whose enabling legislation is increasingly out of date. ...
... Meanwhile I think we are going to continue to have more government shutdowns, 1/6 style chaos, etc. at some point this will coincide with an emergency and it will cause big problems. ...
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... This @JosephPolitano writeup is invaluable for understanding how this works. https://t.co/mmlaHCOVYW https://t.co/xtCyVhGzZl The use of OER to measure housing costs strikes a lot of people as goofy when they first hear about it. ...
... But if you think through the alternatives it does seem like the least-bad option. Just throwing home prices into the basket is weird because most homeowners don't buy a home every year. It also doesn't account for the fact that mortgage rates change over time. ...
... You could survey homeowners on their mortgage payments, but then would you price it based on the mortgages people actually pay (which would include people who bought homes 20 years ago and therefore have tiny payments) or what they would pay if they bought their house now? ...
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... I'm reading @mattyglesias and thinking that bubble-phobia was a major factor behind the bad economic performance of the Bush and Obama years. https://t.co/p8zhQAIA2D https://t.co/xBi4kjjAXK In the early 2000s, people exaggerated the frothiness of the tech bubble and the harms from its crash. ...
... When a sluggish recovery finally started to gain steam in 2004-5, triggering a housing boom, people once again over-estimated its frothiness. This bubble frame caused the Fed to react too slowly to the onset of the Great Recession from December 2007 to September 2008. ...
... Then the idea that 1999 and 2006 were driven by unsustainable bubbles, as opposed to just being healthy economic booms, prevented people from recognizing how far the US economy was below potential from 2010 to 2015. ...
... People in the early 2010s assumed we had to live with a permanently shitty economy to avoid having more bubbles. But now we know that was wrong. The economy was still way below potential in 2015, and it's possible to recover rapidly from a recession with appropriate macro policy. ...
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... Society needs to produce fewer factories and machine tools and more beer and pairs of pants (or whatever). ...
... Ok so let’s think about 2006 to 2009. The period through the end of 2007 arguably fits the austrian model. There was arguably over investment in residential home construction. In 2006 and 2007 the home building industry was contracting while other industries were still growing. ...
... As far as I can tell, Austrian thinkers mostly defend this with backwards reasoning: the depth of the Great Recession proves there must have been a lot of malinvestment earlier in the decade. But that does not make sense to me. ...
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... From 1987 to 2011 (and also long before then I think), manufacturing workers got faster more quickly than other workers. But in the last decade US manufacturing productivity hasn't improved at all. Why? ...
... What was exceptional was the deep post-2007 housing bust—driven I think by the mistaken belief there had been a big housing bubble. https://t.co/MEOt8eRT7J This chart helps to illustrate why home prices have risen so much in the last few years: the sticker price is at a record high, low interest rates ...
... So people keep upping their bids. https://t.co/TfGPftqOoj I'm grateful to @PEWilliams_ for giving me the data to make this chart. ...
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... As @DavidBeckworth has argued, there's no reason to think anything has fundamentally changed about the deflationary nature of durable goods industries. Once they've adjusted to this demand shock, we should start to see demand trending back down. ...
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... But I think that actually supports the view that the declines mostly reflected tight monetary policy rather than inherently unsustainable prices. ...
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... The human species nowadays has so many tools to help with all sorts of tasks but not a de-factor or even a popular tool to help day-to-day thinking? Why? Is that because our ways of thinking are so different from each other? ...
... Or is it because for most of us, our thinking naturally lacks structure or even cohesiveness? One of the main missions of the mind net is to solve that tooling problem. ...
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... There is a unique culture there with a hyperfocus on improving the thinking of each and every employee. ...
... On average, each employee spends at least 1-2 hours a day engaging in meta-thinking: reflecting on their own thinking as well as providing "radically transparent feedbacks" to other people's thinking (including external people visiting the company). ...
... The company provides a suite of software developed by a dedicated team (lead the formal lead of Waston from IBM) and an iPad to everyone just for the purpose of providing feedbacks on each other's thinking. ...
... Feedbacks are recorded real-time during meetings, so all participant can immediately review the feedbacks from their coworkers on how their thinking was during the meeting. ...
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... There are some insights from this [article](https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/dreaming-of-democracy-in-china/) by an anonymous writer - particularly the categorization of China as an egoist society. Although this is probably not due to the "Class struggle" as suggested by the article. ...
... Rather, the historical lack of rule of law explains better the dominance of the patrimonial mode of inter-person relationships in Chinese society. This theory is inspired by Fukuyama's theory that patrimonial political order is the default that humans fall back to. ...
... Personally, I think the key still lies in the power balance between society and state. It remains to be seen how the advance in information technology affects that balance but signs show that it tips the scale more towards the side of the state. ...
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... Hegel declared this as the end of the history and went on to claim that liberal societies were free from contradiction and would therefore bring historical dialectic to a close. ...
... As for "liberal societies free from contradiction", is the universal equality and the need for struggling in social group competition a contradiction? ...
... A liberal society can't just focus on its own principles of equal rights, it still has to serve another survival function: to compete with other social groups, liberal or not. Isn't that a contradiction? ...
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