Month: April 2022

This is the interior of a subway car on the LA Metro. If I were, say, Cindy Sherman, the MOMA label next to this photo would explain how COVID masks were used to immediately mark the era as late capitalism; the Foot Locker bags connect the metro to modern consumerism; and the height of the camera angle makes the human subjects subservient to the technology that transports them.

Since I'm not Cindy Sherman, I will just get a bunch of guff about whether I got signed release forms from everyone in the metro car¹ and whether I was afraid that some of them looked like they were about to smack me.²

¹No.

²No. The lead era is over.

Why don't Americans trust experts anymore? Sean Illing interviewed Michael Lewis about this recently, but they somehow managed to miss the obvious. Here are three charts from the GSS survey:

There are blip and bloops, but around 1990 Republican trust in experts started a steady downward trend compared to Democrats. Republican distrust of the press is a long-told story. Distrust in medicine, which far predates COVID-19, likely has something to do with abortion, treatment of addiction as a disease, and perhaps increasing physician support of national health care. And distrust of the scientific community is pretty obviously because the scientific community keeps producing inconvenient conclusions.

I'm not claiming this is the whole story. But overall, distrust of experts is a Republican-driven phenomenon. You're missing a lot if you don't acknowledge that.

Let's review what's going on in Florida. Walt Disney Corp., under pressure from its employees, publicly opposed Ron DeSantis's "Don't Say Gay" bill, but they were the only theme park that did so. There wasn't a peep from SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, Legoland, or Universal Studios (though their parent signed a petition opposing the bill).

SeaWorld and Busch are both owned by a New York hedge fund. Legoland is owned by three different investment firms based in Denmark, Canada, and New York. Universal, of course, is owned by Comcast, headquartered in Philadelphia. Only Disney is headquartered in California.

So that may explain why Disney was the only theme park to speak up about the legislation. However, they weren't the only high-profile company to do so. Among others, there are Sony Interactive, Deutsche Bank USA, Airbnb, Hyatt Hotels, Wells Fargo, Yahoo!, Citigroup, Dell, Shutterstock, Target, Intel, Kellogg's, Mattel, Lululemon, IBM, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Pinterest, Google, Apple, Warner Music, Kraft, Amazon, Mars, Nike, Microsoft, Hilton, American Airlines, United Airlines, Oracle, and Pepsi, which all represent tens of thousands of employees in Florida. The full list (currently about 250 companies) is here.

So why was Disney specifically called out for revenge? Partly because their special district privileges were easy to target, I imagine. They're also really big, and their opposition garnered a lot more attention than the others. If you want to send a message, targeting a company like Disney is a good way to do it.

I'm trying to think of what Elon Musk might do with Twitter and why I should care. I'm coming up pretty dry, but let's go through the list.

Conservatives periodically go up in arms over the belief that Twitter has "shadow banned" them. That is to say, Twitter's algorithm has quietly reduced their influence without telling them. Musk will presumably "fix" this and then make the algorithm public, but since the whole shadow banning thing is just a conspiracy theory in the first place, this won't make any difference.

Speaking of the all-powerful algorithm, Musk has promised to make it transparent. Will he? If he does, I don't think it will matter. But I suspect he'll come up with some reason not to.

Musk will let Donald Trump and other banned public figures back on Twitter. Big deal.

Musk has made noises about making Twitter genuinely free of moderation. Anyone will be allowed to say anything they want! But he's going to find out this is harder than it sounds. A true free-for-all will (a) lose users, who just don't want the hassle of being trolled constantly, and (b) lose advertisers, who don't want to be associated with a toxic cesspool. One way or another, Musk, like every other social media owner, is going to have to figure out some compromise between free speech and profitability.

Maybe Musk will create a new paid tier. I have my doubts about this, but Musk is a helluva marketing genius. Maybe he can figure out a way to make it work.

Maybe Musk will add an edit button! Hooray for Elon! That will earn him about five minutes of goodwill before everyone figures out there are downsides to this and starts yelling at Elon to fix the edit button.

Musk also wants to eliminate spam bots, and this is a worthy endeavor that would substantially improve Twitter. The question is, can he do it without mistakenly banning lots of real people too? Nobody else has ever been able to thread this needle.

Maybe Musk will try to compete with TikTok, just like everyone else. This would require him to invest in really great video creation tools to go along with really great monetization tools for creators. Who knows? It could work. But every other social media platform is trying to crack this code too.

Get rid of the blue check? Expand the blue check? There's an astonishing amount of conspiracy theorizing that swirls around the whole blue check phenomenon.

Go back to 140 characters? Expand to 480 characters? Allow blog-length tweets?

Create a client interface that allows you to search for both users and tweets? And also isn't completely lame?

So far, none of these are things I care all that much about, nor are they things that are likely to change Twitter much. However, there's also a wild card. Elon really is a genius, even if he does throw off harebrained idiocies periodically, and he might come up with something completely unforeseen. That is, something that's seemingly unrelated to Twitter as it exists and transforms it into something totally new. Who knows?

The best analysis I've read of Emmanuel Macron's victory in the French presidential election yesterday comes from Helen Lewis in the New Statesman. The satire is subtle, however, unless you're well versed in the mainstream media's habit of parachuting into small town diners looking for "real Americans." But give it a look regardless.

UPDATE: This is from five years ago. Sorry. But the 2022 election was pretty much identical to 2017, so it holds up.

Our highways are littered with electronic signs that provide us with information. Sometimes they're amber alerts. Sometimes they tell us about traffic conditions. Sometimes they urge us to get vaccinated.

Most often, though, they tell us to drive carefully. But what messages work best? In Texas the signs tell you how many people have died in traffic accidents so far this year. However, this message is displayed only one week per month, which provided a couple of clever researchers with a way of figuring out how effective they were. Here's the answer:

A DMS is a Dynamic Message Sign, and you will notice in this case that the effect of the DMS being studied is positive (blue dots). That is, within one kilometer of a "traffic deaths" DMS the number of crashes goes up nearly 3%. For longer distances crashes are up 2%. (The red dots show the effect when there are no other DMS signs farther down the road. In that case the effect diminishes more quickly.)

Here's the interesting thing. I'm not surprised these signs don't work. Weird results like this happen all the time. But why has this never been tested before? Signs like this are ideally suited for A/B testing, and you'd think traffic agencies would be constantly working with PhD students eager for research projects. Why aren't they?

Moonrise over Silverado Canyon.

I am not always a big fan of Ian Millhiser, who writes about legal issues for Vox. He tends to sound the alarm over practically every Supreme Court decision, declaring it not just obviously wrong but perhaps the most dangerous ruling this century. After a while you tend to shut out this kind of thing.

But God knows he's right about the way Florida has treated Disney over Disney's opposition to its "Don't Say Gay" law. By explicitly punishing Disney for its public opinion, it is using official state power to crush free speech:

This isn’t a close case.

At the urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature voted this week to punish one of the world’s biggest producers of entertainment and pop culture, because DeSantis and his fellow Florida Republicans disagreed with that producer’s First Amendment-protected speech. DeSantis signed the bill into law on Friday.

Florida’s decision to strip a government benefit from Disney because, in DeSantis’s words, Disney expressed “woke” opinions and “tried to attack me to advance their woke agenda,” is unconstitutional. And it’s not a close case.

As the Supreme Court said in Hartman v. Moore (2006), “official reprisal for protected speech ‘offends the Constitution [because] it threatens to inhibit exercise of the protected right.’” Nor does it matter how the government retaliates against a person or business who expresses an opinion that the government does not like — any official retaliation against someone because they engaged in First Amendment-protected speech is unconstitutional.

Oddly enough, this is a case where I think Millhiser is being too cool headed. This is an exceptionally dangerous action by DeSantis and the Florida legislature and I hope Disney fights it in court. It should certainly be an easy victory. Even a stone conservative Trump appointed judge should rule Florida's action illegal with barely a second thought.

The response of the conservative community, as usual, has been disappointing. There have been a few conservatives who oppose DeSantis's action, but their opposition has mostly been pretty tepid. Meanwhile, most conservatives have stayed quiet in hopes of avoiding having to take any stand at all.

This is mind boggling no matter what you think of the Florida law and no matter what you think of Disney's public response. A state has used its official power to take revenge against a company that expressed an opinion it disliked. It's flabbergasting. It's the behavior of an autocrat. It's blatantly illegal. Ron DeSantis ought to be in prison for abuse of power over his role in all this.

The fact that this is getting so little attention baffles me. Am I one of the few who understands just how bad this is? Or am I wrong and this isn't really a big deal? Someone please help me out.

On Wednesday I wrote a post saying we didn't have a housing shortage. I got a lot of pushback on that, so I figured I'd take a deeper look.

The result is a big pile of charts. Basically, it's everything I could think of related to housing with no cherry picking and no game playing. I just picked out everything I could think of that's an indicator of housing supply. Many of the data series go back only to to the year 2000, so I started them all off at 2000 to make sure of comparing the same time period for everything.

Some of you will undoubtedly have some issues with all this, but wait until the end before you go ballistic. After the charts are done I'll have a bit of discussion. Then you can go ballistic, OK?

First up is growth of housing units vs. growth of adult population:

"Housing units" mostly includes single apartments and single-family homes, but it also includes everything else people live in: mobile homes, houseboats, or any single room intended for occupancy as separate living quarters.

I charted this over a long period in order to provide some context. After World War II there was a huge shortage of housing as soldiers returned home and got married. It was a major political issue that produced housing developments like Levittown; the growth of suburbs and interstate highways; and a huge increase in housing projects for low-income families.

The result was strong growth in housing units, followed by another strong growth in the '70s and '80s as the baby boomer generation grew up and moved out. More recently, growth slowed down: In 2021 the number of adults barely budged, ending at 252.6 million. The number of housing units ended up at 142 million, for a ratio of 56.2% (compared to 56.6% in 2000).

You can draw your own conclusions from this. On the one hand, housing growth has slowed down considerably. On the other hand, this was largely because population growth also slowed down considerably. On a countrywide basis, we have the same number of housing units available per adult as we did 20 years ago.

The next chart shows housing vacancies:

Ever since the housing bust in 2010, the number of housing vacancies has gone down. This is to be expected given the substantial overbuilding during the housing boom of the early aughts. Overall, the current decline suggests a tightening of the housing market, but only to the level of about 2005 or so.

Here is household size:

If there were a shortage of housing you'd expect to see more crowding. However, since 2000 the number of persons per household—i.e., the number of persons per housing unit—has gone down. There's less crowding now than there was 20 years ago.

Now let's take a look at housing costs. Here is housing inflation vs. overall inflation:

Rent has grown 11% more than overall CPI since 2000 (184 ÷ 166 = +11%). This suggests a tightening of the housing market—the rental market in particular—but note that it's a measure of inflation, not prices directly. The next two charts do that. First up is the average monthly payment for a single-family home compared to average earnings:

The price of homes has risen considerably since 2000, but mortgage interest rates have fallen considerably. On average, a family's monthly mortgage payment today is a smaller percentage of their income than it was in 2000.

The story is slightly different for rental housing:

In an effort to be fair, this chart compares median rent to the median income of the 40th percentile. This is probably more representative of the income of renters than overall median income. As you can see, rent has stayed pretty steady at around 24% of income, with only small changes from year to year. Overall, there's little indication that rents have skyrocketed over the past couple of decades.

Here's the monthly supply of houses available for sale:

There's nothing much to see here. Housing supply has been pretty flat since 2013, and it's been flat at a slighly higher level than it was in the early aughts.

Here is the number of multi-unit apartments being built as a percentage of all housing units:

In the early aughts, multi-unit apartments accounted for only about 20% of all housing units. Today we're building denser: multi-unit apartments account for about 30% of all housing units.

Finally, this chart shows the willingness of people to move away from their current county:

I drew this one on a longer timescale in order to show the inflection point right around the year 2000. For decades, about 6% of Americans moved from one county to another each year. Then, starting in 2000, that plummeted. Today, only about 3% of American families move each year.

For some reason, Americans are much more settled these days and far less willing to move for any reason, including things like better jobs or cheaper housing. This is new and it's something I don't really understand, but I have a feeling that among young people this might have more to do with dissatisfaction over housing than the state of housing itself. Feel free to speculate.

---

I promised you some discussion at the end, and here it is. First off, it's clear that nearly every metric suggests there's not a housing shortage in the US. The only two exceptions are very tiny ones: housing inflation, which is slightly higher than overall inflation, and housing vacancies, which have declined from their bubble peak—though only to about the level of 2005. Overall, it appears that we have plenty of housing.

But shortages are local! The national average may be fine but that doesn't mean there aren't shortages in individual places.

Absolutely right. California is the Great Exception and the Bay Area, in particular, is just flat-out insane. In fact, California alone might account for virtually the entire nation's housing shortage.

But beyond that there are always individual places that are popular and expensive, and there are individual neighborhoods within those places that are even more expensive. These areas change from decade to decade as different cities get hot, and there's really no way around this. This doesn't indicate a housing shortage any more than high prices for Gucci bags indicate a shortage of purses.

Why are you willing to force people to move away from the places they were raised just so you don't have to look at an apartment building near your home?

I'm not. As far as I'm concerned, you may build as many apartment buildings as you want near me. I'm not trying to prevent higher density, I'm just gathering data about the amount of housing in the United States.

But you're still a horrible boomer who managed to buy cheap and now wants to pull up the ladder behind you.

Ahem. Let me regale you with my personal housing history. Out of college, I rented a room from some friends in Tustin for a few years. They had a kid and I moved out to an apartment in Midway City with a roommate. A few years later I moved into an apartment by myself in Santa Ana. A few years after that I bought a small condo in Irvine. Finally, in the early '90s, I got married and Marian and I bought a 2,000 square foot house in Irvine, where we've lived for the past 30 years.

This is very typical. Most people can't afford either the house or the place of their dreams in their 20s, and I was very much one of those. I didn't "get in cheap"; I waited more than a decade until I had the income to buy a place in a fairly expensive area. This has nothing to do with being a boomer or a Millennial or any other generation. My parents went through the same thing, and quite probably yours did too.

But I don't want to live in Peoria or Barstow or Ft. Wayne. I want to live in a big city.

Nobody says you have to live in any of those places. However, you might have to live in Jersey or Riverside or South Elgin for a while until you can afford New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.

But I don't want to do that.

Probably not, but this isn't a case of the world being unfair or anything like that. It's always been the case that young people have to live with roommates or live in small apartments or live in cheap areas for a while until their salaries catch up with their dreams.

This is all well and good for now, but what about 2022? Rents and house prices are going up a lot now, aren't they?

Maybe. Given the widespread use of rent moratoriums during the pandemic, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw a short-term spike in rents over this year and the next. However, we'll have to wait and see.

What about all those investors snapping up houses so the rest of us can't buy them? Isn't that killing off the housing supply?

No. Housing supply is the same regardless of who owns the homes. Besides, corporate and real estate investors buy a small fraction of all the houses sold in America. There are a few specific areas where they're very active, but that's it.

The real lesson from this trend is not that housing supply is tight, but that in certain areas starter homes are selling too cheaply and apartment rents are too high. That's why it's profitable to buy low-end homes and turn them into rentals. This suggests that in certain places there's an imbalance of what's being built and what people want, but that's likely to balance out before long.

UPDATE: Two of the charts in this post (houses per adult and inflation) have been revised based on criticism received after this was posted.

We had a bit of rain last night, so this morning Hilbert got to jump on the fence¹ and pose for a beauty shot with a lovely background of puffy white clouds. Here's hoping the rest of the day is clear and brilliant too.

¹OK, fine, he didn't jump. I picked him up and put him there.