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Eh, people really need to be questioning econ 101 more often. It's built upon untrue assumptions - infinite buyers / sellers - perfect information - no swit

Eh, people really need to be questioning econ 101 more often. It's built upon untrue assumptions - infinite buyers / sellers - perfect information - no switching / transaction costs --- The article itself has 3 different year ranges provided so I'm not sure how you can use it as evidence. Plus overall the rent is still up by a lot since 93% - 4% is still at least 80%. - Rents increase by 93% from 2010 to 2019 - Housing increase from 2015 to 2024 (this overlaps with when rents increased ...) - Rents fell from 2021 to 2026 by 4%

pembrook 7mo ago
Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand. "Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!" No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true. We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world isn't a perfect vacuum either. They know this, don't be silly.
- lesuorac 7mo ago
  We do throw out everything from physics 101. The movement of satellites is not modeled using distance = speed * time. It would do well to consider if econ 101 is an accurate way to model the world since for other domains the 101 course is not.
  - pembrook 7mo ago
    Yet the overwhelming factor in modeling the movement of those satellites is still distance = speed * time. The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle. The equivalent to arguments made by 'economics deniers' in this thread would be if you argued: the satellite moving at 7.8 km/s actually causes the earth to spin 8 km/s faster, so trying to make the satellite move faster makes it go slower! Applying acceleration doesn't help! No. Making the satellite move faster generally makes it move faster. Building more housing generally makes it cheaper. Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.
    - lesuorac 7mo ago
      > The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle. Eh, ok throwing out all of physics 101 is a little strong. But you still don't use the original formulas you learned to do actual analysis. So using the basic models from econ 101 to do analysis can lead you to incorrect answers (but also correct ones; from a False premise you can imply both True and False; see "Material Implication" [1]). So sure on a forum like HN it can be appropriate to use basic econ 101 logic but when somebody is trying to be an expert or write an article for thousands+ people you should really question why they're only using 101 logic. > Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry. Lets actually do the not HN thing and read the article. There's too little rigor in the article to support the argument in the title. The articles _own numbers_ are that after building 120k housing units the rent went up 85% (4% decrease after 96% increase). Just looking causally at this the only data in the article supports more housing = more rent; the article is only casual observations so little reason to do anything else ... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra#Secondary_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra#Secondary_oper...
- datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
  I mean “Econ 101” is an equally dumb meme. The laws of supply and demand have their limits, otherwise there would be nothing to study after Econ 101.
Qwertious 7mo ago
Housing is also really weird: - the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input. - economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction) - more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.
energy123 7mo ago
First year economics doesn't ignore any of this. There's behavioral economics and microeconomics, for example.
- AdamN 7mo ago
  That may be true recently but there was alot of effort required to unseat Homo economicus as the sole building block of economic theory.

pembrook 7mo ago

Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand. "Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!" No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true. We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world isn't a perfect vacuum either. They know this, don't be silly.

lesuorac 7mo ago
We do throw out everything from physics 101. The movement of satellites is not modeled using distance = speed * time. It would do well to consider if econ 101 is an accurate way to model the world since for other domains the 101 course is not.
- pembrook 7mo ago
  Yet the overwhelming factor in modeling the movement of those satellites is still distance = speed * time. The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle. The equivalent to arguments made by 'economics deniers' in this thread would be if you argued: the satellite moving at 7.8 km/s actually causes the earth to spin 8 km/s faster, so trying to make the satellite move faster makes it go slower! Applying acceleration doesn't help! No. Making the satellite move faster generally makes it move faster. Building more housing generally makes it cheaper. Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry.
  - lesuorac 7mo ago
    > The existence of nuance and external factors don't negate the original principle. Eh, ok throwing out all of physics 101 is a little strong. But you still don't use the original formulas you learned to do actual analysis. So using the basic models from econ 101 to do analysis can lead you to incorrect answers (but also correct ones; from a False premise you can imply both True and False; see "Material Implication" [1]). So sure on a forum like HN it can be appropriate to use basic econ 101 logic but when somebody is trying to be an expert or write an article for thousands+ people you should really question why they're only using 101 logic. > Let's not do the HN thing and get lost in pedantry. Lets actually do the not HN thing and read the article. There's too little rigor in the article to support the argument in the title. The articles _own numbers_ are that after building 120k housing units the rent went up 85% (4% decrease after 96% increase). Just looking causally at this the only data in the article supports more housing = more rent; the article is only casual observations so little reason to do anything else ... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra#Secondary_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra#Secondary_oper...
datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
I mean “Econ 101” is an equally dumb meme. The laws of supply and demand have their limits, otherwise there would be nothing to study after Econ 101.

Qwertious 7mo ago

Housing is also really weird: - the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input. - economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction) - more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.

energy123 7mo ago

First year economics doesn't ignore any of this. There's behavioral economics and microeconomics, for example.

AdamN 7mo ago
That may be true recently but there was alot of effort required to unseat Homo economicus as the sole building block of economic theory.