How Wrong I may have been

I read again a post on housing.  (I think I read it before.  I may have even posted it.  the main fact is that you can argue that we are facing a housing shortage.  I had though of the housing supply as excessive for a long-time due to the easy money of the early 2000’s. 

But Karl Smith offers an alternative view.  The boom in housing was not that much.  Check out this graph:

 

The point is that the growth in population her growth  in houses is at a rate of almost 5 people per house.  If that were to continue it would imply a doubling in household size, and that seems unlikely.

Another implication is that the idea of an excess construction of homes that collapsed as the cause of great recession doesn’t hold up well.  The idea that housing was hammered by tight money does hold up.  Check out this previous post.

Advertisement

EPA Will Destroy Jobs, Not Create Them

From:

 

http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2011/02/epa-will-destroy-jobs-not-create-them.html

I know my environmental writings upset some of you, but I must press on… In this post I take on a new study from the Political Economy Research Institute. An excerpt:

Glancing through Appendix B of the PERI report, in which they explain the method by which they come up with such counterintuitive conclusions, shows that it truly is based on the crude “insight” that forcing businesses to spend money complying with new regulations, will cause them to hire workers. There is nothing in the PERI study showing that what these workers are doing is beneficial to the economy; it is the mere fact of their hiring per se that is supposed to be the benefit.

To demonstrate the problem with this approach, we’ll do the folks at PERI one better. To repeat their argument: they are claiming that the EPA’s new pollution regulations will create 640,000 years of work directly flowing from the need to comply with the new rules. But if that’s supposed to be a good thing, then why not pass a further regulation specifying that anyone performing upgrades to power plants must work with one hand tied behind his back? We haven’t done a formal simulation as the PERI folks have done, but we bet our augmented regulations would easily require 2 million years of work directly in the generation sector. So the IER plan creates far more jobs than the modest EPA proposal, especially when you factor in the indirect benefits flowing to the massage therapists who have a surge in arm and hand cramps to deal with.
…
If proponents of the EPA’s new regulations want to admit that they will hurt the conventional economy, but will yield benefits in the form of reduced air pollution or global warming, then that is at least a coherent argument. To see if the plan made sense, we would then face the empirical question of seeing whether the alleged environmental benefits came at too high a cost in terms of lost jobs and lower economic output.

But that’s not what the folks at PERI are claiming. Instead, they are mixing up their costs with their benefits. They are saying that it is a good thing that it will take more workers to produce electricity, and hence drive up electricity prices.

EPA Will Destroy Jobs, Not Create Them
bobmurphy
Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:57:54 GMT