tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36769332573715004112024-02-18T18:17:37.165-08:00Real Estate Articlemailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.comBlogger301125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-79005099067983976372013-10-24T07:21:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.085-07:00UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow has issues with sifting and winnowing.A geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Rachel Slocum, made the mildly controversial point in an email to her students that Republicans in the House of Representatives had brought about the partial closure of the US government, and had therefore brought about the closure of the US Census web site. This closure prevented her students from completing their mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-38465362067586442912013-10-10T00:10:00.001-07:002013-10-10T00:10:10.633-07:00welcomewelcome...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-59015697247559294102013-10-02T14:00:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.092-07:00The Windy City and The Foggy CityHannah Green writes:ERNEST HEMINGWAY famously wrote of Paris, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." For half a century, Hemingway’s nostalgic vision of the city of lights has made undiscovered literary geniuses wish that they could be unemployed in Paris in the 1920s mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-59326606959447991572013-10-01T20:02:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.098-07:00Dr Patricia Harris on Healthcare ExchangesIt is here:mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-59084971322887349172013-08-13T21:18:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.103-07:00Hannah Green interviews Josh Oppenheim Asia Times Online :: Skeletons in Indonesia's closetAsia Times Online :: Skeletons in Indonesia's closetINTERVIEWSkeletons in Indonesia's closetBy Hannah Green LOS ANGELES - Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing is a transformative film. It presents a glimpse into one of the 20th century's lesser-known political mass killings: the extermination of suspected communists in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Unlike many other documentariesmailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-85339279500188898402013-07-27T13:50:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.108-07:00How I wish I could get an unbundled subscription to the Wall Street JournalI cannot do my job without reading it, and its reporters are still excellent, even in the Murdoch era. And in general, I have learned to ignore the rantings of the editorial page, which basically say that if a policy is first-order good for poor people, it is bad for poor people, and if a policy is first-order bad for poor people, it is good for poor people.But there is one worthy in mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-19545837268629468082013-07-26T21:45:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.114-07:00Hannah Green writes on the problem of how victims of rape who are college students are treatedIn Open Magazine (an Indian newsweekly), she writes:Angie Epifano always wears the same necklace. It is simple—a round blue stone set in silver on a silver chain. When something reminds her of her rape, she holds the pendant in her palm and concentrates on how it feels. This brings her a sense of calm.“It’s called ‘grounding,’” she says, touching the pendant during a Skype interview. It’s a mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-39056201171559390562013-07-25T10:12:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.119-07:00Ten Favorite Metro Systems--A Personal View (reposted from Forbes blog).10) New York. Butt ugly, smells bad, too many rats, but gets you a whole lot of places at reasonable speeds.9) Washington, DC. Very pleasant, beautiful stations, and when working properly, fast. But its major design flaw (lack of double tracking) means that if one train goes down, the whole system gets gummed up. And it is not maintained well enough.8) London. mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-48216610011147709822013-07-25T10:11:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.124-07:00Who Moves? Not Old People? (reposted from my Forbes blog)A meme is out there that baby boomers, having raised their children, are ready to downsize. (See here). Some scholars, such as Arthur Nelson at Utah, say that as the population ages, there could be a mass sell-off of houses which will lead to a collapse in house prices.One of our Ph.D. students here at USC, Hyojung Lee, and I are redoing a paper I did with Patric mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-53506735523451021372013-07-18T08:58:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.135-07:00House Prices in Southern California need to Rest now (reposted from Forbes).From my Forbes blog:DataQuick today reported that house prices in Southern California have risen 28 percent from the last year. A year ago, people who were buying houses in this part of the world were getting a good deal. Now, the deal is so-so.Take a look at the table below (it is something I constructed for my class on mortgages and mortgage backed securities). The mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-62120592220743654712013-06-29T12:24:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.144-07:00The Internet is Truly Awesome (Leonard Bernstein Mahler edition).David Denby wrote a nice piece in the New Yorker a little over a year ago about this ten most "perfect" orchestra recordings of all time. Coming in at Number 5 was Leonard Bernstein's Mahler 7 (the second time through) with the New York Philharmonic. (FWIW, I know seven of his choices, and love them all).If one looks it up on the NY Phil's website, one finds a link to Lenny's marked upmailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-68343084880750627542013-06-25T21:50:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.151-07:00John Roberts is supposed to be a smart man.But he makes a specious argument. He says that because in the presence of Voting Rights Acts, there is no disparity in voter turn-out, there is no need for a Voting Rights Act. Huh?mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-53572596226024300472013-06-23T10:56:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.246-07:00Are models that assume linear utility useful?I just saw a paper on how the desire of households to match with particular houses could explain housing market dynamics--in particular why house prices are more volatile than incomes. Performing such an exercise is very difficult, and requires simplifying assumptions. One of the most important simplifying assumptions in the paper is that utility is linear--that people value their last unitmailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-67627286981190217792013-06-20T21:23:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.419-07:00If in 1987 you bought the average house in the average place...…you have about broken even relative to the consumer price index. The Case-Shiller National Index for March 1987 was 62.03; for March 2013, it was 136.70. The Consumer Price Index in March 1987 was 112.7; in March 2013 it was 232.77. So the Case-Shiller Index has risen by 120.4 percent in 26 years; the CPI has risen by 106.5 percent. So in inflation mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-65800346335413630552013-06-18T11:04:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.513-07:00Could someone explain the market failure that protecting car dealerships solves?The Wall Street Journal has a good story today about how car dealerships are (successfully) lobbying legislatures to ban Tesla Motors from marketing their cars directly to consumers. GOP legislators, who get the willies about regulation that actually solves real problems, are on board with supporting protectionist policies for auto dealerships.Does anyone really think that the industrial mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-17106391810739835672013-05-15T18:13:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.608-07:00A metaphor for why Goodness of Fit tests are, well, not very good.I am proud to say I learned my econometric from Art Goldberger, who had little use for R-squared.Anyway, a smart friend of mine (who works in industry and therefore might not want to be named) pointed out that he could probably fit the brushstrokes of a Jackson Pollack painting with a 17 degree polynomial and get an excellent R-squared. But he still couldn't predict what a next brush strokemailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-71963001298162561382013-05-05T23:44:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.703-07:00A painting by Morgan Greenmailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-3945786094423552522013-04-18T09:53:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.799-07:00Reposting from my Forbes blog: the debate on Debt and GDPMy two cents:Within the past day or so, economics conversations have been all about Rogoff and Reinhart and their critics, Herndon, Ash and Pollin. The Rogoff and Reinhart (RR) paper purported to show that countries with more debt grow more slowly than countries with less; Herndon, Ash and Pollen (HAP) show that Rogoff and Reinhart’s data contains mistakes, and there is not mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-16571493766284826922013-03-13T10:16:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:18.976-07:00Please follow me to ForbesI am at http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardgreen/2013/03/13/california-has-a-shortage-of-rental-housing/.mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-88107338725076494092013-03-10T20:49:00.000-07:002013-10-30T22:00:19.151-07:00Why not worry about the deficit right now?Because if I did my math right, Federal Government interest payments are at a long-term low relative to GDP. [Update, after looking more closely, I see that the source of the data--the US Treasury--includes state and local interest payments as well]. Consider the chart below:Federal Government Interest Expense on Debt Outstanding Relative to GDPThe numerator is annual Federal Government mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-60417865055388761352013-03-04T12:23:00.000-08:002013-10-30T22:00:19.245-07:00The American People agree with George OrwellThis video presents what the American people consider to be the ideal wealth distribution. At 2:47, the narrator notes that under this ideal distribution, "the wealthiest folks are about 10 to 20 times better off than the poorest Americans."George Orwell in Why I Write:2. Incomes. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-26807634443761142012013-02-26T15:04:00.000-08:002013-10-30T22:00:19.425-07:00Good for Greg Mankiw.....for supporting marriage equality.mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-61357379978300035512013-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:002013-10-30T22:00:19.520-07:00Why is the luxury housing market recovering so well?The fashionable thing to say is because of foreign money. I suspect the actual reason is that the one percent have gotten 122 percent of the recovery (h/t/ Tim Noah). The demand curve for housing among the rich has shifted out.mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-29871462217819865022013-02-23T16:38:00.000-08:002013-10-30T22:00:19.692-07:00The future of efficient transportationMight look like this:I heard a lecture from Alain Bertaud on how networked, scheduled transportation is not a good solution for many people--even in poor parts of the world. And I can testify that auto rickshaws are often the best way to get around cities in India--they are quick, cheap, and when fueled by natural gas, environmentally not too bad (those with two stroke engines are a whole mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3676933257371500411.post-33922899756166874472013-02-18T05:24:00.000-08:002013-10-30T22:00:19.786-07:00Where's the monopsony?President Obama, Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have all been pushing for an increase in the minimum wage. I want to agree with them, and Krugman is certainly correct that the preponderance of empirical evidence shows that the minimum wage's impact on total employment is negligible. But the question is, why? Krugman's statement that human beings are not Manhattan apartments is true, mailbin mailhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05890710807145613852noreply@blogger.com0