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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   34238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I don't have any data to argue against you with, though

Several studies that argue against your viewpoint are cited in "Folk Economics and the Persistence of Political Opposition to New Housing".

Activists and local officials who oppose new market-rate housing projects in expensive cities often insist that such projects benefit only the rich and “Wall Street”1, notwithstanding compelling empirical evidence that new construction in expensive places opens up housing and dampens prices in more affordable segments of the regional market2,3,4,5,6. The anti-development elites may have chosen their rhetoric to appeal to beliefs that were already widely held. Several previous studies document a tendency toward “folk economic” thinking in the mass public: markets and politics alike are seen as venues in which groups jostle for advantage and try to cheat one another rather than trade or collaborate for mutual advantage7,8,9. It is not yet known whether the mass public actually believes that a substantial increase in housing supply would fail to make housing more affordable. But, if such beliefs were prevalent, they might well undermine support for pro-housing policies.

1Been, Vicki, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan. 2019. “Supply Skepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability”. Housing Policy Debate 29(1):25–40.

2Rosenthal, Stuart S. 2014. “Are Private Markets and Filtering a Viable Source of Low-Income Housing? Estimates From a 'Repeat Income' Model”. American Economic Review 104(2):687–706. [paywalled; non-paywalled preliminary version]

3Glaeser, Edward, and Joseph Gyourko. 2018. “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply”. Journal of Economic Perspectives 32(1):3–30.

4Mast, Evan. 2021. “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market”. Journal of Urban Economics p. 103383.

5Bratu, Cristina, Oskari Harjunen, and Tuukka Saarimaa. 2021. “City-Wide Effects of New Housing Supply: Evidence from Moving Chains”. VATT Institute for Economic Research Working Papers.

6Hansena, James, and Alicia Rambaldib. 2022. “How Do Homes Transfer Across the Income Distribution? The Role of Supply Constraints”.

7Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. 1992. “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange”. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 163:163–228.

8Rubin, Paul H. 2003. “Folk Economics”. Southern Economic Journal 70(1):157–171.

9Boyer, Pascal, and Michael Bang Petersen. 2018. “Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.

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