The Glade 4.0

Highlights:

* 67% of self-described Progressives believe that restrictions on housing development (i.e., regulations that reduce the supply of housing) do not make housing less affordable.
* 51% believe that mandatory licensing of professionals (i.e., reducing the supply of professionals) doesn’t increase the cost of professional services.
* Perhaps most amazing, 79% of self-described Progressive believe that rent control (i.e., price controls) does not lead to housing shortages.


http://econjwatch.org/articles/economic ... -americans

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

just wow...

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

They don't buy into your supply and demand propaganda, that's all. Once we remove that poisoned well you call a "law" (they never voted for it, anyways, and neither did any of their friends; it's a stupid bill, anyways, because it didn't have any "tax the rich" riders), all of those things you claim they answered wrong are really right.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Thoughts give rise to reality?

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Rent control doesn't automatically result in a shortage, sure it means less houses get built than if there was no control, but I don't think cutting down on property building in, say, 2004 would have caused a shortage, do you?

It may not cause an overall shortage in the economy as a whole, but that's because there isn't rent control on all residential properties. Looking at all property building isn't what's relevant, it;s the availability of housing in rent-controlled areas.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Any time you artificially hold down prices, you affect supply and demand. In a place like NYC, where there is limited room for new construction, rent control increases the demand for appartments by people who couldn't otherwise afford them. This creates shortages.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

If prices are artificially high, then artificially lowering them doesn't result in a shortage.

What causes you to conclude they artificially high to begin with?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

because obviously it's the rich being greedy causing the rent to go up!
oh that and peer pressure

Exactly Kaffis. What does "artifically high" mean Xeq? For instance, you realize apartments in Manhattan are so expensive because a lot of people want to live in Manhattan. When you created rent control, even more people wanted to live there, thus creating greater demand. It actually exacerbated the problem. If rents are high, either someone is paying that price or the owner will have to soon lower their price because no one's taking it.

edit: Sorry Rynar. I didn't read your post first. But it is the perfect example.

Platitudes don't make your case. The prices weren't artificially high in the first place.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Dude, seriously. Let me mail you my first semester Economics book that talks about this very thing.

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The Dude abides.

I think this survey is of very limited usefulness. It reveals specific shortcomings in many liberals' economic knowledge, but its scope is far too narrow to support the conclusion that liberals are worse overall than conservatives. It only asks eight questions, and all of them are designed to probe common liberal errors. If the questions had instead focused on things like market failures/distortions, tragedy of the commons, the effect of tax rates on revenues, etc., I'm sure the "conclusion" would have been that conservatives were more ignorant. In short, I think liberals and conservatives each have blind spots that correspond to their policy preferences, and this survey ignores the conservative blind spots completely.

I believe that most fiscal conservatives could give accurate response to those 3 specific points RD.

I'm not convinced those that responded as they did in the original survey would get those right either.

Chance are high that if they can't make the links between supply and demand, they aren't going to understand taxes and revenue or market distortions either.

I don't know, Ladas. This is just anecdotal, but in my experience, conservatives frequently respond to market failure and ToC scenarios with a simplistic, hand-wavy assumption that the market will always work itself out. And the "tax cuts pay for themselves by boosting the economy" mantra is pretty standard rhetoric on the right. Conversely, I rarely if ever hear liberals making those errors.

It's not that liberals have some greater understanding in those cases, but rather that their policy biases lead to an instinctive assumption that markets are prone to failures, regulations are good, and lower taxes are bad. And similarly, conservatives aren't actually more knowledgeable about economics in general, it's just that their biases lead them to instinctively conclude that price controls, minimum wages, and other regulations are bad, so they got the particular questions in this survey right.

I rest my case. Thank you.

Espousing failed economic theory as wisdom kind of lends itself toward being told you don't have a very good understanding of economics... no?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Aside from the fact that these are not errors (as a rule of thumb; the market cannot always work itself out but exceptions are, in fact, exceptions, not the rule) the reason you don't see liberals doing this is that they are liberals. They make their own, far worse, errors.



The problem with this is that we can evaluate all of these statements in terms of their actual effects, and we can see that markets are not prone to failure; they suffer occasional failures, that regulations are not inherently good; they must be carefully thought out and implemented, so regulation for the sake of regulation is, indeed, bad, and that lower taxes do, indeed, spur economic growth.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I still have not seen any compelling evidence of this assertion. Don't misunderstand me, I am all for lower-taxes but only with corresponding budgetary cuts which translate to less services for the public (which again I am for).

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I was referring to the massive housing bubble we just went through. It's pretty much the definition of artificially high prices for real estate.

And what is it that caused those high prices? And how would rent control have applied in this situation, in the first place?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Just to echo Kaffis here but what caused those prices to inflate? The government perhaps by buying up and encouraging lending to people who traditionally wouldn't qualify for those mortgages. If the government hadn't been in the business of trying to spur lending to people who are irresponsible, we wouldn't have to worry about artificially high prices in the first place. The hubris Keynesians show thinking they can control prices more effectively than a marketplace that is many times larger. This is what happens when people think they can triffle with something as complicated as an economic system and perfect pricing and such.

That's necessarily a part of the assertion that tax cuts will spur economic growth - that spending will also be cut. Unfortunately we rarely if ever get anything like this.

We can, however, look at Ireland, for example, to see this in action. Low corporate tax rates promoted its first boom, from 1995-2000. However, from 2000 to 2003, public spending went up by 48% (with no tax increase to offset) and sure enough, the boom contracted considerably. In 2003 it returned, only to go right back down the crapper in 2008 with the rest of the world's problems.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The problem here is that bubbles are not artificial. They're temporary and unsustainable, but they are not artificial. They're part of normal market cycles.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."