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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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A study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti estimated that the housing restrictions brought on by NIMBY activists are costing US workers $1 trillion in reduced wages, (several thousand dollars for every worker), by making it unaffordable to relocate to higher-productivity cities.

Wouldn't all the workers moving to higher-productivity cities lower the salaries of workers living in those cities? The glut of workers vying for jobs would probably bring the price down more than several thousand dollars for every worker.

They'd be coming from other places reducing labor supply and raising wages there. Even if migration lowers the urban wage by introducing more people as long as it's a higher wage than where they were migrating from it's possible for the average to still increase. Also the mechanism by which you restrict or increase the urban labor supply is by raising or lowering housing supply which effects rents. So if there's a ton of new houses built and a whole bunch of people can move to the city and flip burgers even if that depresses the wages of existing burger flippers they benefit from lowered rent, or the absence of a rent increase, since new housing was built.

But the main argument is that agglomeration allows specialization which increases productivity, and wages are downstream of productivity. If a bunch more skilled people move to the city they can specialize in their most productive niche due to economies of scale. Because they're incredibly specialized and productive unskilled people can earn higher wages selling services to them. You could draw in so many unskilled people that there's no longer an urban rural unskilled wage difference once you adjust for rent, but it would still be a lower average wage then if the unskilled people were selling services to less specialized skilled people.

And that wouldn't matter because on aggregate products will be cheaper (And ultimately everyone is richer on balance). I think @Ecgtheow said it a lot better than I could in another comment in this post.

Now you may say, my backyard is special and I value it over economic efficiency because I discount the value of future/geographically distant people who may want to move there. But if everyone applies this logic to their backyard we make it impossible to increase housing density anywhere, we underproduce an important commodity, and we get a housing affordability crisis. That's great for you because it increases the value of an asset you own, but it's bad for society as a whole because it reduces economic dynamism which libertarian economists are keen to remind us has diffuse benefits

For example, the value produced by biotech firms gets siphoned off by Madison area homeowners who used control of local government to enact regulations that restrict housing supply, raising prices, so that biotech firms have to offer higher wages to induce skilled workers to move there. This slows the creation of an agglomeration effect in biotech and reduces the margins of biotech firms, slowing the rate of innovation which would be beneficial to society as a whole.

This is why unions are better. People teaming up to offer lump some deals drive up the overall price when individual workers would sell cheaper. Same thing housing. If a group hangs up to ban the entire construction of new housing it can drive up home prices. But our system is based on having defectors drive down the price in nearly every business and transactions going to marginal value. Many individuals homeowners would gladly sell off their yard for cash and allowing building in it etc.

They are defecting if you consider getting something and holding onto it and not allowing more of it to be made cooperating. There is another mode of doing things, which is doing things better and doing/building more things.

From a bird's eye view, you want the price of things to go down over time, you want more competition, more things, more goods, more services, and more houses. If your mode of operating is to not grow the pie but instead defend your share then sure, large swathes of humanity operates under those principles.

That’s my point individuals will defect. Sort of a prisoners dilemma where if everyone cooperates to restrict supply of land they can cause the valué to skyrocket in a booming jobs market. But individually a lot of people who paid $500k for their house now worth $1.5 would gladly sell off their backyard for cash.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I was an econ major.

It does matter. There are winners and losers. The people two states over who get to save two cents at a time are better off, and the people put out of work are tens of thousands of dollars worse off, but there are enough pennies to balance the tens of thousands of dollars, so it's all a wash!

The world doesn't work that way, and while it can be modeled in such a fashion, you should not confuse that model with reality.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I was an econ major.

This hyperbole doesn't add anything to your argument--it just undermines your credibility and makes you guilty of unnecessary antagonism. Don't do this.

Arguably that is exactly the economic decisions that have been taken over the last few decades. Outsourcing manufacturing makes everything cheaper for all consumers but hollowed out steel works and manufacturing in the rust belt.

Now you can certainly argue as to whether that was a good thing ( I would lean towards yes but some of the value should have been redistributed to the losers) But it is basically the essence of the neo-liberal economics of the past 50 years or so. So it is definitely reflective of reality as it stands.

I don't care about what you majored in.

Arguing for maximally free markets is hardly a novel economic stance to hold. And yes I do think 10 people imposing anti-free-market policies to shift 2 pennies from 1000 people so that they could be 2 dollars richer is morally wrong. This is the standard free-market maximalist stance. Also, half the pennies get lost in thin air (DWL) the moment they make their deal with the devil (market restrictions) so they are 1 dollar richer each. I want there to be the most dollars in the world, not some people having a lot of them at the cost of others having less, sue me.

That's definitely a position.

There's a problem with basically lying about how "rising tide rises all boats" instead of admitting that you have this position and honestly telling the people who are getting fucked that they are getting fucked at least, not to mention actual redistributive efforts in their favor.

There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers. Because when you don't ask them directly they are very good at making it seem that the fact that their models only look at the GDP and such is OK because everything else is unimportant.

There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers.

Was it this one? It's about immigration, not tariffs, but otherwise seems to match pretty closely.

It appears I might just be totally miscalibrated on this topic. I checked the IGM Economic Experts Panel. Although most of the expert economists surveyed believed immigration was a net good for America, they did say (50% agree to only 9% disagree) that “unless they were compensated by others, many low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year”. I’m having trouble seeing the difference between this statement (which economists seem very convinced is true) and “you should worry about immigrants stealing your job” (which everyone seems very convinced is false). It might be something like – immigration generally makes “the economy better”, but there’s no guarantee that these gains are evently distributed, and so it can be bad for low-skilled workers in particular? I don’t know, this would still represent a pretty big update, but given that I was told all top economists think one thing, and now I have a survey of all top economists saying the other, I guess big updates are unavoidable. Interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this.

OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!

How did you find it?

  • Googled site:slatestarcodex.com tariffs economists survey

  • Got the following articles and snippets

    1. Another Followup To "Economists On Education": If I remember my International Economics class, the theory actually suggests that tariffs can make a large, important country richer if it makes ...

    2. Please Take The 2018 SSC Reader Survey: Do you consider persistent depressive disorder to be depression for this survey, or only major depressive disorder? (For that matter, on surveys ...

    3. Book Review: Capital In The Twenty-First Century: Second, catch-up growth provides a powerful force for reducing inequality between nations.

    4. List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of Capital In The ...: I know that about 100% of economists who are not working for the Trump administration at this exact moment are against tariffs, but I don't ...

    5. Book Review: Ages Of Discord: Although most of the expert economists surveyed believed immigration was a net good for America, they did say (50% agree to only 9% ...

    6. Response To Comments: The Tax Bill Is Still Very Bad: First of all, the IGM Forum asked the nation's top economists whether the current tax bill would substantially raise GDP. 51% said it wouldn't, ...

    7. Predictions For 2020: Conditional on me asking about Reade on SSC survey, ... Economists surveyed during the beginnings of recessions don't generally realize ...

    8. Highlights From The Comments On PNSE: I analyze economist predictions, see that their track record of ... Remember, on the last SSC survey, 6% of respondents said they were ...

    9. A Thrive/Survive Theory Of The Political Spectrum: For a more comprehensive theory of economic self-interest and politics, ... from stereotypical leftist charges of “false consciousness”?

    10. The Tax Bill Compared To Other Very Expensive Things: I remember this Planet Money episode where a panel of economists ... the IGM, which is a nonpartisan survey of top economists surveyed them ...

  • Opened each of the links that looked promising (1, 4, 5, 6, 10) in a new tab

  • Searched for the term "econom" (which matches "economy", "economist", "economic").

  • Found the promising passage in the third article I looked at.

Had I failed to find the passage through those methods, I would have retried the same search with site:astralcodexten.substack.com and site:lesswrong.com.

While it is generally true that Google sucks at search these days, it is still useful if you know what site you're looking for something on.

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