A few more years of this.........................

 

.................and the supply/demand scales will level out.  Then, and only then, can we talk seriously about solving the affordability problem.   Historically, one million housing starts per year is the magic number. 

Lies, damn lies, and statistics...........

 

Data can be biased: There is a widely held belief that data is objective, at least if it takes numerical form. In the hands of analysts who are biased or have agendas, data can be molded to fit pre-conceptions. 

-Aswath Damodaran, as culled from here

Newsweek deliveres the opinion that..............

 

........America is getting the President we deserve.

You can read the essay yourself if you wish.  I will tell you that the following sentence made me stop and say, "What?":

When approximately half of adults in the U.S. lack literary proficiency, is it any surprise we elect leaders who speak in soundbites rather than solutions?

In 2025 almost half (actually, if you follow the link the number used is 54%) of the adults in the United States "lack literary proficiency"?   Can that possibly be true?

via

Having fun with statistics: but there is some question about causation vs. correlation....

  Post-legalization [of marijuana], incomes in legalizing states grew by about 3%, home prices went up by 6%, and populations rose by about 2%. 

-as culled from this Marginal Revolution post

A very good question.......................

 ............if the underlying assumptions are correct.  While truly not having a clue, I'm going to hypothesize that governmental re-regulation plays a considerable role. 

    via

Checking in................

.......................with Tim Harford.  Some snippets from The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics: 

Much of what we think of as cultural differences turn out to be differences in income.

It’s a rather beautiful discovery: in a world where so many people seem to hold extreme views with strident certainty, you can deflate somebody’s overconfidence and moderate their politics simply by asking them to explain the details. Next time you’re in a politically heated argument, try asking your interlocutor not to justify herself, but simply to explain the policy in question.

A hammer looks like a useful tool to a carpenter; the nail has a different impression altogether.

Ten rules of thumb are still a lot for anyone to remember, so perhaps I should try to make things simpler. I realize that these suggestions have a common thread—a golden rule, if you like. Be curious.

So the problem is not the algorithms, or the big datasets. The problem is a lack of scrutiny, transparency, and debate.

But we can and should remember to ask who or what might be missing from the data we’re being told about.

trust is easy to throw away and hard to regain.

Neuroscientific studies suggest that the brain responds in much the same anxious way to facts that threaten our preconceptions as it does to wild animals that threaten our lives.

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy, too.

The good stories are everywhere. They are not made memorable by their rarity; they are made forgettable by their ubiquity.

Don't remember reading this...............

 

On perspective..................................

      If we don't understand the statistics, we're likely to be badly mistaken about the way the world is.  It is all too easy to convince ourselves that whatever we've seen with our own eyes is the whole truth; it isn't. . . .

      And yet, if we understand only the statistics, we understand little.  We need to be curious about the world we see, hear, touch, and smell as well as the world we can examine through a spreadsheet.

      My second piece of advice, then, its to try to take both perspectives—the worm's eye view as well as the bird's eye view.  They will usually show you something different, and they will sometimes pose a puzzle:  how could both views be true?  That should be the beginning of an investigation.

-Tim Harford, How To Make The World Add Up:  Ten Rules For Thinking Differently About Numbers

The difficult part is finding the "good"...........

 Of course, we shouldn't be credulous, but the antidote to credulity isn't to believe nothing, but to have the confidence to assess information with curiosity and a healthy scepticism.

     Good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic.  Good statistics are not smoke and mirrors; in fact, they help us see more clearly.  Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist, or an X-ray for a radiologist.  If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves — both large and small — that we would not be able to see in any other way.

-Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up:  Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

It's likely fallen off the cliff here of late, but......

The Gross Domestic Product.  So, what is it really?  Well, that's easy you say:  the GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power.
     To which Bastiat would respond:  You've overlooked a huge part of the picture.  Community service, clean air, free refills on the house — not of these things make the GDP an iota bigger.  If a businesswoman marries her cleaner, the GDP dips when her hubby trades his job for unpaid housework.  Or take Wikipedia.  Supported by investments of time rather than money, it has left the old Encyclopedia Britannica in the dust — and taken the GDP down a few notches in the process.

-Rutger Bregman,  Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build The Idea World

Fun with science and statistics............

No one can ever be wrong using statistics. Pick a common food and studies can show it helps and harms you.

enlargeable graph and back story is here.

via

On capitalism.......................

"capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses … It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls."

-Joseph Schumpeter, as quoted in 1919, and as cut-and-pasted from this blog post on how much cheaper (in the relative terms of how much labor do you perform in exchange for what you want) a basket of food is today as compared with 1919.

via Newmark's Door

Fun with statistics..................

    via

And we're making more every day.....

"The commercial real estate market is roughly the same size as the U.S. stock market."

-taken from here

On standards of living..................

Economics today is beset with a number of problems, not least of which is a fundamentally flawed approach toward measuring one of the most important features of the economy: the standard of living. Economists generally track this key measure using benchmarks such as real income per household, real GDP per capita, or the real wage (with the prefix "real" indicating that figures are expressed in terms of purchasing power). But calculating living standards in this way assumes that everyone purchases roughly the same mix of goods and services. That was true when a large share of income went toward traditional necessities like food, as well as mass-market durable goods like refrigerators. This is no longer the case.

Economic historian Robert Fogel studied changes in overall consumer budgets, including changes in the income that is "spent" on leisure — that is, time that could otherwise have been taken up with paid work — and found that, between 1875 and 1995, leisure increased from 18% of the consumer budget to 68%. By contrast, consumer spending on food, clothing, and housing went from 74% to just 12%.

-as culled from this interesting article from Arnold Kling.  From the view in the cheap seats, I'm not sure I understand, or believe, the last sentence.

In case you were curious...................

.....................................................my favorite optimist doesn't have much good to say about wind power:

"As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips."

-full post is here

Don't drop the curtain...................

.........................................on bricks and mortar retail quite yet.   Balanced story here.  Excerpt here:

 "A report by retailer researcher bazaarvoice found that shoppers who interact with a retailer via multiple channels, such as through a mobile device and by visiting an actual store, spent 18-36% more than those who dealt with just one channel, no matter what that was—leading us to believe there is a place for both. And, judging by the coffee situation and other trends we are seeing in the marketplace, experience is becoming a more important part of the shopping situation."

via

Sometimes there is an overlapping.......

..............of correlation and causation.     Is this one of those times?

via xkcd

'Tis the season..................

.................................Five economic reasons to be thankful.

When they start trotting out............

..................the statistics, you know trouble is ahead.   This may, or may not, be an interesting breakdown.  Let me take a stab in the dark at it and suggest it is misleading.  The root article is behind the Washington Post paywall (and I won't be paying).  Just wondering how they define "economic activity"?  I'm guessing that Wall Street accounts for a significant percentage all by itself, but how truly productive is that activity?  Farming and the oil/gas industry may not add up to a lot of "economic activity,"  but I am fairly certain they are truly productive.  Just wondering.