Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Choice Comment on the "Housing Eating the World" Essay

On the WaPo version:

DavidRich
9:29 AM MST
Let me get this right, unemployed men with no college education are so scarce that the housing industry can't grow to meet the needs of the millennials living in their parents basements. Who writes this stuff? Probably the same people who believe the unemployment rate is 4.7%. These writers and academics should try living in the real world where tens of millions of working age Americans are so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work.

2 comments:

Taylor Conant said...

What Conor Sen did essentially was describe the current state of reality in such a way that it appeared like a prediction or forecast of the future. The familiar and undeniable fact of present reality seduced people into thinking this pseudo-prediction is implicitly accurate and inevitable.

In reality, reversion to the mean suggests a better bet is that something which is wildly expensive in relation to incomes and expectations actually gets cheaper over time, not more wildly expensive. You're going further and further out into outlier land, especially with regards to the time of origination of the trend versus the additional timeline granted in the forecast. If the "prediction" turns out to be true, its success can be explained as LUCK, not PRESCIENCE.

Andrea Graves said...
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