Joe Fish

Also from the handful of economists I’ve read on AI, it doesn’t seem like adoption is high enough to explain a sluggish hiring market

im trying to grok how a price decline happens w/out a building boom. Possibilities:

1) causal inference during COVID is hard (unobserved negative demand shock in MPLS)
2) much funnier one: ending parking minimums -> decreased parking availability -> negative amenity shock

@zyudhishthu.bsky.social

incredible review of levis 501® Original Fit Selvedge Men's Jeans

I think a lot of them aren’t Americans. There were a couple “this is White supremacy enabling” type takes.

Which is maybe a decent heuristic for a large swathes of White America, they uhhh might want to check who the “pray on it” coalition is in North Carolina dem politics

I wanna know which exec listened to which mba who listened to which intern who took which course on LinkedIn who decided Just in Time shipping logistics were exactly what Hollywood needed to cut costs

population didn't quadruple precisely because san francisco makes it very challenging to build new housing. if san francisco had better housing policy that allowed more homes to be built, it would have more people and lower prices.

It’s weird. There are two citations, one of which is a working paper that has largely been debunked, and the other doesn’t really say what the author says it does. And the author is apparently highly regarded?

People also really overrate how "unaffordable" new apartments are. In basically every metro, people who live in new apartments have incomes that are below the median for their metro.

I am mostly confident that the reason why price declines are highest in low amenity neighborhoods is that if low/high income residents agree on the ranking of neighborhoods, an increase in the supply of housing in high income areas has the largest effect on vacancies in the bottom of the market

These are the paper's plots for welfare by income (skill, in this model)

The intuition is that

1) rent decreases matter most for low income workers
2) rent declines are largest in low amenity areas where low income residents tend to live (despite most construction being in high price areas)

The welfare gains part of the paper is pretty striking, as well.

IIRC it argues the biggest beneficiaries of a market rate housing boom are low income tenants. (Also a very rough paper for inclusionary zoning)

Yeah equilibrium is one where
1) it’s generally not “true”
2) learning how to “close a model” is genuinely a very useful + largely Econ specific skill (at least in housing) for thinking through policy changes

The flip side of rent control in econ 101 not being super helpful is a generation of urban planners convinced more housing = higher prices.

For a city like San Francisco with such dysfunctional housing supply, Econ 101 intuition gets you pretty far, IMO.

i go back and forth on this, tbh. Econ 101 has a lot of good stuff, but it requires an intuition for how/when/where to apply basic models. E.g., I found Econ 101 a lot more useful after I started my PhD!

lukewarm take: econ 101 is correct about the kind of uber strict rent control that econ 101 describes.

Where there's nuance ™️, is that because Econ 101 is correct, nobody proposes uber strict rent control, and so the criticisms of uber strict rent control don't apply as much to proposed policies

she campaigned on prices (and house prices in particular) a lot. maybe she could have campaigned on it better -- i'm not sure

but the "take on price gouging" rhetoric was a major part of her stump speeches

bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-roo...

can we please educate journalists to stop writing the sentence "and <Thing X> is happening most in Florida, Texas, California, and <other state>".

This is just population! Please tell me about thing x *relative to population*

Seems like if you have rent stabilization with some serious teeth, like what NYC has, you also need a strong regulatory regime around condo conversions, AirBnBs, minimal maintenance, key money, & landlord outside options in general

Not per se insurmountable but it is a perpetual game of whac a mole

instagram live

yeah, it's an odd choice (CBPP does an income vs rents graph that adjusts things correctly).

the fixed income bins also break my head a bit (rising incomes causing fewer low income renters will make the graph look the low income renters who remain), but I digress

the joint center for housing studies does a similar graph that doesn't have the same insane drop from 2000-2005 (although they find a massive drop from 2019 to 2023, which i'm also suspicious of).

www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/defaul...

808s and heart break and viva la vida.

808s and music made by sad-boi men that are marginally employed and enjoying cheap rent. j cole mixtapes also very recession coded

The thesis of the article is that these programs, like diving, are disappearing because football and basketball players are getting paid millions

but the implication of this is that in the past the football and basketball players -- disproportionately poorer and Blacker -- were subsidizing them!

These twins were college divers. Then new NCAA rules changed everything. Nick and Noah Wanzer thrived as freshman athletes at Virginia and North Carolina State. Landmark changes to the college sports economy left their futures in jeopardy.

The kids here were done dirty. There should have been a just transition for incumbent student athletes, but the story kind of glosses over the racial + class dynamics of football and basketball subsidizing all the other sports. It's an important part!

www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/...

One may have a billion dollars or access to social media but never both

Can you run a quick VAR for me on this? I need the granger causality and some impulse responses. Maybe ask integralds?

Tai Lopez dragged around the corpse of Radio Shack so crypto scammers could run with Blockbuster

I think Econ 101 intuition is probably correct and you should see people move to CA/NYC/etc from whatever the closest substitute is, so yeah probably some combo of Florida/the mountain west

There’s just way more latitude for large landlords to exploit switching costs and mess with tenants’ outside options than there is to inflate asking rents. Even RealPage looks like it tops out at ~5%

Semi baked thought: people thinking about market power and rental housing should be thinking way more about lease renewals and switching costs and not asking rents.

The idea here is that market power will bite a lot more when prices are being bargained over than when units are on the open market