Of course housing is subject to the iron law of supply and demand. It's remarkable that so many people find seemingly-reasonable justifications for denying it.

Of course housing is subject to the iron law of supply and demand. It's remarkable that so many people find seemingly-reasonable justifications for denying it. There must be a name for this pattern, which occurs in areas of life as varied as technical debates, climate science, and health. The common thread is that there's some strong effect that smart people would prefer not to be true and that these smart people spend an inordinate amount of time and social capital finding seemingly-rational justifications for denying this strong effect. The result of this high-IQ motivated reasoning is an impenetrable mess of dueling blog posts, cherry-picked studies, and sophisticated personal sniping that leads regular people to throw their hands up in confusion and do nothing. An example of this effect: the "zombie claim" (an idea that keeps circulating after being debunked, mostly because it's rhetorically useful) that building housing doesn't decrease prices because developers build only high-end housing. Granted, this effect might be true for very limited times under very limited circumstances in some special region of the supply curve, but it's clearly not a general principle. But there are just enough studies purporting to show this effect that people who want to block housing in general can point to some official-looking LaTeX-typeset thing and say "Look! Economics proves that construction doesn't lower prices!". By the time someone gets around to reading that article and commenting, "if you read beyond the abstract, the article it doesn't say that...", someone's already made some other blog post with the same discredited idea. It goes on and on and on and on and on. I've become increasingly convinced that the whole scientific and rational enterprise only works in collaborative mode, when there's some shared desire to find the truth. You can never convince someone of something by using reason and evidence, and your counterparty will suspect (rightfully so!) that your "evidence" is just the sort of rhetoric-disguised-as-dialectic that I'm talking about. It's a dismal conclusion.