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Re-thinking the so-called Housing Bubble with Kevin Erdmann
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NEW Y
new-york-urbanism-with-stephen-smith
This podcast episode was originally posted on October 7th, 2016.
Today’s guest is Stephen Smith, he is an analyst for a New York real estate firm.
Stephen did some research showing that at least 40 percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built under today’s zoning regulations. In fact, the number is probably significantly higher. Classic landmarks like the Empire State Building, with its floor-area ratio of 30, wouldn’t fly today.
Watch this time-lapse of the New York City skyline, and pay close attention to the kind of changes that happen in the earlier part of the video compared to the later part:
https://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000003637210
Before the twentieth century, the pace of change is very gradual. Two storey buildings are replaced with three storey buildings. Waves of development sweep through the city, replacing wood buildings with brick and stone and concrete.
In the twentieth century, we see a different kind of development. Pay attention to any particular small building and you’ll notice one of two things happening: Either the building stays exactly as it is, or it is replaced by a massive skyscraper. There’s no more gradual change.
This is caused by the city’s adoption of land-use regulations. The first zoning code was adopted in 1916, but the really strict zoning came in 1961. Once this happened, tearing down and replacing a building meant pulling political strings to get it rezoned. Because of the significant fixed cost of getting a lot rezoned, developers opted to build a few extremely tall buildings rather than many moderately tall ones. Heavy restrictions in most of Manhattan led developers to concentrate development in the few places that would allow it. That’s why Midtown built up while other neighbourhoods didn’t.
New York’s mayors tend to be pro-development, but its city councillors block development at every turn. The city council’s behaviour is consistent with William Fischel’s home voter hypothesis. The city council tends to defer to individual councillors on their own local issues, giving each councillor de facto control over development in his neighbourhood. When authority is devolved to the hyper-local level, there’s a strong incentive to block development to raise real estate prices.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwv3nIhLVLQ
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VIDEO
LEGAL
legal-systems-very-different-from-ours
Originally released on December 1st, 2017.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lSdVeDM7EM
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VIDEO
CLASS
classical-economics-and-the-new-poor-law
Originally released on January 18, 2019.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q5stkRdgEw
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VIDEO
ECONO
economic-calculation-and-education
This podcast episode was originally released on August 29, 2014.
A key difference between Austrian economics and the neoclassical-mathematical economics developed in the mid-twentieth century by Paul Samuelson and others is the assumption by the latter that people are essentially omniscient. What neoclassical economists call “rationality” effectively means omniscience. When the agents in neoclassical models face any uncertainty, the uncertainty is always fully understood in advance; for instance, a stock’s value tomorrow might be drawn from a normal distribution with a known mean and variance. Without the assumption of omniscience, the Austrian school faces the important question of how people can make economic decisions in a complex, uncertain world.
Ludwig von Mises’ answer (see his 1920 essay, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth) was that capitalist entrepreneurs calculate in monetary terms. That is, they use the prices of the immediate past as their starting data, and attempt to direct factors of production in such a way as to maximize the spread between costs and revenues. If their predictions of price changes are good, they earn profits. If their predictions are bad, they earn losses. Thus, their direction of scarce resources is subject to immediate and consequential feedback allowing a selective process for only the best entrepreneurial forecasting methods. Without monetary exchange and prices, the problem of directing factors of production to their highest uses becomes intractable.
An interesting thing about Mises’ calculation argument is that it does not only relate to socialism, but to free, capitalist societies also. Mises states that, “Economic goods only have part in this system [of monetary calculation] in proportion to the extent to which they may be exchanged for money.” Thus, when a good cannot be exchanged for money, for any reason, it is subject to a Misesian calculation problem.
One type of capital good that I have identified as facing a calculation problem is education. The present value of an education is nowhere represented as a market price. The rental rate of the education is represented in the price spread between educated and uneducated labour, but the present value of the education is not a price because the education itself cannot be exchanged.
The present value of the education would correspond to the expected discounted stream of income generated by the education, but this income is not represented in prices until years after the education is complete. Thus, students cannot use monetary calculation to allocate their time, funds, and efforts to being educated. They cannot refer to the present value price of the education in their initial estimation of the education’s value, nor can the
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmUbkxglQsU
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VIDEO
THE B
the-basic-income-guarantee-freedom-and
This podcast episode was originally released on December 9th, 2016.
Petersen: You’re listening to Economics Detective Radio. My guest today is Otto Lehto of King’s College London. He is formerly the chair of Finland’s Basic Income Network. Otto, welcome to Economics Detective Radio.
Lehto: Oh it’s my pleasure to be here.
Petersen: So our topic for today is the basic income guarantee. Otto, you approach this idea from the perspective of political philosophy, so let’s start by discussing that. How about we start by talking about two of the major figures in political philosophy: John Rawls and Robert Nozick. What do each of them have to say about the welfare state and where do your views diverge from theirs?
Lehto: That is a good point to start indeed, although it is I think a bit lamentable that we have to start from those two figures because they have dominated the discussion so much during the last 50 years. In fact, it’s very hard to have a conversation outside the boundaries set by those two figures, but they’re both geniuses. They set the stage for the discussion, certainly in philosophy but also in public policy in many respects.
So, let’s start with John Rawls. John Rawls really was a towering figure in Harvard, really starting from the 60’s and throughout the 70’s. He wrote this book, A Theory of Justice, which is considered one of the really truly great books in political philosophy that revolutionized the way we think about these subjects. But the short version of his theory, which is very influential even up to this day, is that people in societies should look at the framework of living with each other as a cooperative game where we all try to sort of not only maximize our own position but also to make the whole game fair for everybody. And so he called his theory Justice as Fairness, where people are entitled to a certain respect and autonomy, certain liberties as members of the democratic community where they can pursue their own ends. But they’re also entitled to a redistributive scheme if they happen to be among the worst-off people in the society. They are entitled to redistributive transfers.
This framework sounds very familiar and indeed it should because it reflects the social democratic reality in which most Western societies operate. And even in later years he said that actually his philosophy, even though it starts from first principles and proceeds from there, is actually meant to be a philosophical justification of the intuitions that people in Western democracies—liberal democracies—have.
So, you combine liberal ideas of individual freedom with these notions of the welfare state and so on. So that was the foundation of Rawls’ system.
So that’s Rawls’ system but Nozick came along and he
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbFA6HASmts
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VIDEO
LIES
lies-and-bigotry-in-the-war-on-drugs
Mark Thornton discusses the political circumstances around the prohibition of marijuana in the United States.
Marijuana prohibition went national with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It too quickly changed from a measure to tax and regulate into an outright prohibition. Even hemp, the non-intoxicating form of cannabis was banned! When propaganda claiming that marijuana was deadly and caused insanity, violence, and criminal behavior was debunked (aka Reefer Madness), the “gateway theory” was born to fill the void. The gateway theory posits that while marijuana might not be addictive or dangerous, it would lead the user to try the hard drugs, such as heroin. This theory became the prevailing view in the second half of the twentieth century.
Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger made up this gateway theory on the spot when arguing for the prohibition of marijuana. Unfortunately, the argument stuck.
Recently, a quote by John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor (and Watergate co-conspirator) has resurfaced on the internet:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This quote shows how drug prohibition has long be complicit with the politics of bigotry.
Learn More: http://economicsdetective.com/2016/04/drugs-prohibition-suburban-overdose-crisis-mark-thornton/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aPx7RCott0
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RADIO
radio-spectrum-and-property-rights-with
Originally released on September 7, 2019.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y0FrntSCtQ
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VIDEO
FINAN
finance-and-the-austrian-school-with
This podcast episode was originally posted on December 27, 2014.
This episode of Economics Detective Radio features George Bragues, professor of business at the University of Guelph-Humber, discussing his work developing a distinctly Austrian theory of finance. While there have been forays into finance by Austrians such as Mark Skousen and Peter Boettke, Austrians have not yet fully developed a complete and distinctly Austrian theory of finance.
George names five pillars of modern finance theory: (1) The capital asset pricing model (CAPM), (2) the Black-Scholes option pricing model, (3) the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), (4) behavioural finance, and (5) the Modigliani-Miller theorem.
CAPM is a model that derives the value of assets based on the risk-free rate and market risk, that is, risk that cannot be diversified away. The Austrian response to this model is that there is no such thing as a risk-free asset, as risk is inherent to human action. An Austrian alternative to CAPM would incorporate the Austrian theory of a natural interest rate derived from time preference.
Black-Scholes, a model for pricing options—opportunities to buy or sell at a given price at some point in the future—assumes that price movements are normally distributed. Nassim Taleb has been forceful in his critique of this assumption; in his book, The Black Swan, he argues that returns are subject to so-called Black Swan events. Statistically, this implies a fat lower tail in the distribution of returns. George holds that, given Austrians’ skepticism about mathematics, there is little hope for an Austrian option pricing model. However, pricing assets was never the role of theorists, but of entrepreneurs.
The efficient markets hypothesis, developed by Eugene Fama, holds that the market price reflects all available information. This view holds economic equilibrium to be a normal state of affairs. The Austrian view is that equilibrium is an abnormal state of affairs; the market is always tending towards equilibrium, but it rarely reaches equilibrium. Austrian theory holds that identifying misequilibriums and arbitraging them away is the role of entrepreneurs. Identifying such opportunities isn’t easy; it requires prudence, or what Mises called “understanding.” If you believe the EMH, then Warren Buffet is not an example of someone with great insight and prudence; rather, he is someone who has repeatedly won a stock-market lottery.
Behavioural finance, developed by Robert Schiller, is a theory that argues that, contra the EMH, market prices reflect psychological factors rather than the real underlying values of the assets being traded. Behavioural finance has identified so many biases that it is essentially irrefutable. For instance, the gambler’s fallacy and t
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu11U_D2Eq4
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VIDEO
ALGOR
algorithms-algorithmic-discrimination
Originally released on February 10, 2018.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsWDXXc6LSo
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