Social Interactions and Bubbles-Becker

Bubbles in prices of stocks, houses, or other assets are usually defined to mean sizable and somewhat prolonged deviations in these prices from the fundamental determinants of the prices. These price deviations are supposed to get larger and larger until the bubble bursts, and then price rather abruptly go back close to the levels expected from fundamentals. Do bubbles so defined exist? I believe they do, although I applaud economists who work hard to find explanations of such price movements in more subtle changes in fundamentals. But we do not have good explanations for when bubbles arise and when they end.

Bubbles depend on expectations that get out of whack and become self-fulfilling for a while. In recent years, one of the most glaring examples of what appears to be a bubble is the pricing of young Internet and biotech companies during the period 1995-2000. Many companies in these fields that had no earnings or even any sales, and objectively had little prospects of earning anything in the reasonable future, were deluged with money from venture capitalists and others. Their stocks if they went public had enormous market values relative to any likely discounted earnings. After a few years the market realized the folly of what had been happening, the bubble burst, values came back to earth, and most of these companies went out of business.

The boom in housing prices in the United States that started in the late 1990s, and peaked in 2006, is another example of what looks like a bubble. According to data that Karl Case and Robert Shiller compiled, real housing prices in the United States went up on average by about 10% a year for six or seven years, and then crashed after 2006 to erase much of the previous gain. Neither increases in construction costs nor in overall population levels, two major fundamental determinants of housing prices, appear capable of explaining these price movements. Some of the price rise is surely explained by low interest rates on mortgages and low down payment requirements, but part of the bubble mentality was the willingness of lenders to give ridiculously generous terms to many buyers who had little ability to withstand any even moderate shocks to their economic circumstances.

The most plausible view of asset price bubbles is that the price increases of an asset are supported by expectations of even further price increases that makes it worthwhile to buy and hold the asset at prices that far exceed the prices determined by the fundamentals. A sophisticated and attractive version of this argument is that social interactions produce large and cumulative changes in prices from modest initiating forces. It is well known in social interaction theory (see, for example, the book Social Economics by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy) that a “social multiplier” can magnify small initial changes in demand for a good or asset into large changes in prices or consumption.

According to this argument, suppose a “few” participants in say the housing market begin to expect significant price appreciation, perhaps due to low interest rates. Their expectations then influence the expectations of others through a “contagion” or social interaction, process. As more and more persons expect housing prices to rise, this leads to expectations of even greater housing price increases, and a bubble in housing prices starts. The bubble would end when expectations about price increases become even a little pessimistic since then price levels would seem much too high, and price decline expectations could spread through the populations. Prices may then fall abruptly to earth.

Although I find a social interaction approach to bubbles appealing, it does run into several difficulties. Why do not enough savvy investors see through what is going on, and build up large short positions. These short holdings would prevent a bubble from getting out of hand because they in effect increases the supply of the asset to help offset much of the unrealistic increase in demand? Some investors like John Paulson did take short positions in the residential housing market and made fortunes, as this theory would predict, although Paulson did it very indirectly through mortgage-backed securities and swaps. However, papers in finance point out that in many asset markets it is difficult to take large short positions on the future prices of these assets. Such difficulties would limit how much short arbitrage occurs (see the classic paper by Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny “the Limits of Arbitrage”, Journal of Finance, 1997).

However, if only small initial shocks are required because of the magnification produced by social interactions, why do not bubbles occur even more frequently in markets like housing? The national housing indexes that Case and Shiller compiled show only a few episodes over the past century when major deviations from fundamentals occurred at the national level-the Florida land boom of the 1920s was a local, or at most a regional, phenomena.

Moreover, if the social interactions explanation is right, bubbles should also happen in a downward direction, so that prices could continue to fall below levels justified by fundamentals. National housing prices have basically never been significantly below levels expected from construction costs and other fundamentals. Prices below fundamentals have persisted for years in declining cities, as Edward Glaeser of Harvard has shown, but these are not examples of bubbles. Rather, they reflect the slowness in the rate of depreciation in the excess housing found in declining cities. Perhaps downward bubbles are generally less common because it is easier to take long rather than short positions, so that arbitragers can more easily buy assets in sufficient quantities to keep prices from falling too much below the fundamental determinants.

If only small initiating and terminating forces are needed for bubbles to start and end, then it is easy to understand why bubbles occur, and why the start and end of bubbles are so difficult to predict, either by market participants or government officials. Some economists have suggested recently- discussed in the May 8 issue of The Economist- that governments try to take actions, such as countercyclical taxes on real estate, that prevent bubbles, in particular housing bubbles, from getting out of hand. The papers The Economist cited appear to misuse the “externality” argument for government actions in the housing market, but in addition I am highly skeptical that government officials can succeed where profit-seeking market participants fail. At least in the US, the vast majority of government officials involved encouraged rather than tried to moderate the housing bubble. I believe the best contribution public policy can make to the control of bubbles is to follow steady well-defined rules of behavior, such as Taylor-type rules, or capital requirement rules, that at least prevent political pressures from exacerbating any bubbles that do develop in housing and other markets.

Comments

[Michael F. Martin]

I believe the best contribution public policy can make to the control of bubbles is to follow steady well-defined rules of behavior, such as Taylor-type rules, or capital requirement rules, that at least prevent political pressures from exacerbating any bubbles that do develop in housing and other markets.

This must be correct so long as we don't understand how or why bubbles form and collapse.

[IntuitiveEconomics]

Perhaps I'm being naive here but...
Doesn't the very fact that bubbles occur and burst change people's behavior and thus mitigate future bubbles. In other words don't bubbles (especially many bubbles in a short period of time as we have experienced recently) make market actors pay more attention to fundamentals in the future? If housing, or other asset prices started rising rising again soon, beyond fundamentals, wouldn't a lot more people be skeptical about jumping in, not knowing when the bubble will burst? Since we now have fresh in memory that bubbles beyond fundamentals DO eventually burst. Same argument about negative bubbles (busts).

[Gordon Longhouse]

The house price bubble happened when lenders were effectively buying houses from one another instead of financing their purchase by homeowners.

Most homeowners finance their purchase from wages from which it follows that house prices rises cannot persistently exceed rises in wage levels. When they do it is likely that financiers are making up the difference through lax lending standards.

One striking feature of the housing bubble is the extent to which downward house price risk became concentrated in the finance sector rather then being disbursed amongst millions of homeowners. The use in the US of non-recourse lending (a borrower can effectively cancel a loan by giving the lender title to the security) may have played a role here.

In effect lenders are selling multiple year put options over the houses they use as security for the loans they make. Are they receiving fair value for this option? How can the risk they take on in such arrangements be hedged and managed?

Given that, from the lender's point of view, any mortgage is a sold call over the mortgage security it seems to be tempting fate to sell both long dated puts and calls over the same asset.

I agree with Becker that ordinary prudential regulation is called for and not some sort of "bubble authority". I think that the US would do itself a favour by having a single prudential regulator for deposit-taking institutions rather than the alphabet soup of agencies that currently carry out the job. It should have a focused mission and not be concerned with international competitive advantage (as the UK regulator was) nor with the encouragement of home-ownership.

The scary thing about bubbles these days is their frequency. Crash events that might happen once a century are now happening every 15 years or so. This is a reproach to our current political, economic and financial architecture.

[Jack]

"Although I find a social interaction approach to bubbles appealing, it does run into several difficulties. Why do not enough savvy investors see through what is going on, and build up large short positions."

I think we answered that at the financial biz level........"the band played on". At retail level, of course, the only way to "short" housing is that of taking one's winnings and moving to a rental at the frothy peak. The other, moderate short, is that of standing pat in a modest home even as personal finances might suggest the "dream home". There were some strong signals to do just that as in many cities the cost of ownership became multiples of what the very same digs cost as a rental. I've met some "savvy investors" who did just that.

To get closer to the many causes of the bubble we need to understand that the housing market is not a stock market and is both individual and different across the nation.

Individually, the strongest and most reliable demand is for "starter homes" as these days few want to raise even pre-school children in apartments or rental housing.

The next somewhat similar group are those whose jobs have forced a move so they too have a strong incentive to buy "at the market".

The last major group is the "move up" market. They can afford to shop and consider. But even here there is a built-in incentive to make a move in a rising market. Consider, their old $100k home may go up 10% for $10k while what they are eying is $250k and going up at $25k per year.

In the OK market that I know a bit about, the "bubble" didn't happen despite strong markets in all three categories. Why? Cheap farmland is still available so inflated lot prices weren't an option for developers. As Becker points out construction costs changed slowly and the parameters were fairly well known.

Once when Gspn was testifying about internet stocks he sagely remarked "some of these things are very difficult to value". Such seems the case for our mega cities. How does a consumer have a chance to accurately value the price of a property in So Cal or NYC? So Cal has had a number of "bubbles" but not long after the "bubble" prices looked quite modest.

Given the choices of long commutes for somewhat cheaper housing it's not too surprising that properties in good locations would go up much faster than say, inflation or housing in less desirable areas.

And Ha! dare we mention the Prop 13 tax situation which in effect levies a tremendous tax penalty on those moving from one part of CA to another. Ha! instead they stay put and continue to build "freeways" that are gridlocked at rush hour in BOTH directions! Brilliant!

Another aspect of the mystery is that population increase plus replacement points to about 700,000 new homes per year. At the peak we were building 2.5 million, more than three times what would seem the right number. A part of the explanation was that there WERE "investors" if that's what one calls those who show up with a small deposit, buy a house at sheetrock phase for the expectation of selling it upon completion for a good profit or putting it in rental for a brief time.

What this did was create a phantom inventory as the builder could take those "investor" contracts to our ever eager and "talented" "bankers" and build some multiple of the number "sold". Las Vegas was a hot spot for this as CA "investors" finding nothing affordable or that would carry a big negative if put into rental flocked to LV, AZ and other "hot markets".

Falling prices may have plateaued but there will be many more foreclosures, "workouts" and pain for all involved as overbuilding and "overexuberance" unwinds.

[Wendell Cox]

A GEOGRAPHICALLY CONCENTRATED HOUSING BUBBLE

There seems no doubt that the dimension of social interaction in the house price bubble was significant. This is the psychology of speculation.

The article, however, misses these radical differences in cost escalation that occurred between the metropolitan. These differences are a far more satisfactory explanation than any other.

There are reasons why house prices increased so rapidly relative to incomes in virtually all markets of California and Florida, for example, while they moved very little in relation to incomes in Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and elsewhere. No amount of social interaction could produce a bubble in the latter markets, where despite huge increases in demand for home ownership was readily diffused by expansion of the housing stock by at least a commensurate rate. The problem in virtually all of the bubble markets was very simple. Demand far overshot supply. The culprit was over-regulation in the bubble markets.

Paul Krugman noted well before the bust, that the housing bubble was limited to only part of the US market. The difference in this “two-speed” market was restrictions on land use. Dallas Federal Reserve Bank research showed that where there was liberal land use regulation, the supply of housing was permitted to increase sufficiently to provide a vent that prevented local bubbles from occurring. Where there were significant restrictions on land use (regulatory structures variously called “compact city,” “urban containment,” “smart growth,” “growth management” and others), prices increased inordinately. The research on the impacts of such
regulation is summarized at http://demographia.com/db-dhi-econ.pdf.

The metropolitan area markets of California, Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Washington, DC, with their strong restrictions on land use, accounted for more than 70% of the pre-Lehman Brothers house value collapse. Average house value losses were more than 10 times those in traditionally regulated markets such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Cincinnati (see: http://demographia.com/db-ushsg2009q1.pdf).

If the losses in the more regulated metropolitan areas had been on the order of those in the less regulated areas, either the bubble and its burst (and the subsequent international financial crisis) might have been avoided, or, at a minimum would have been far less severe. Without the more restrictive regulations, losses of this far lower magnitude would have been expected.

In combination, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the bubble that led to the international financial crisis were more liberal loan standards and the more restrictive regulatory regimes in some major metropolitan areas of the United States. The more restrictive regulatory structures produced mortgage losses that were far too intense for the financial industry to absorb.

It is worrisome that the lesson has not been learned. Legislation proposed in Congress (such as the Kerry-Lieberman cap and trade bills and the draft transportation reauthorization bill) would attempt to force virtually universal adoption of the very kinds of restrictive land use policies that were so destructive to households, housing affordability, the economy and our ability to address the financial challenges ahead (see: http://www.newgeography.com/content/001174-congress-and-administration-take-aim-local-democracy).

Wendell Cox
Demographia, St. Louis
Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris
Co-author, Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey
http://demographia.com/dhi.pdf

[Jack]

Wendell: With 10 million people squeezed between the coast, mountains and southern border of So Cal and half of that land paved over for their cars, land prices in that balmy climate are bound to have a strong upward bias w/o "restrictive" policies. Same for NYC and for that matter much of the entire eastern seaboard.

Like much of the plains states DFW is still surrounded by relatively cheap land, but! they too are beginning to have the "LA" problem of long commutes and gridlocked "freeways"

LA and others surely experienced bubble pricing (with MUCH of the cause being that of reckless "bankers" shoveling loans out the door with no underwriting stds, while as another poster pointed out on the Posner side, realtors and builders were cherry picking "good appraisers" and gleefully kiting "values". Blessedly, today, legislation has passed to prevent picking one's favorite appraiser. Gee! great idea, eh?

Cap and trade? I hope we'll discuss that one here sometime. I'm still trying to get my arms around the idea of GM "owning" forests in South America so we can continue to drive carbon spewing gas guzzlers, while that nation's "land use planning" is in the hands of GM or some such.

There is already a growing biz of forest piracy as a tree "worth" a couple bucks as a carbon repository may be worth a thousand as lumber. Perhaps? The LA's and others who some think might have restrictive building covenants should deal with their own carbon problems?

[IntuitiveEconomics]

Indeed, in Silicon valley where I live, next to my house there is a 1/8 acre housing lot inside the "Urban Boundary" area which sells for $270,000. Just 2 miles away, outside the "Urban Boundary" area land is selling at $20,000 per acre! Clearly restrictive zoning policies have something to do with housing prices.

Average freeway coverage is approximately the same per square mile, regardless of whether you're in California or Texas.

[Ponyo]

I don't know. I've always been a believer in utilizing fixed-capital structures to ensure that when bubbles inevitably burst, the public won't be holding the ball because the companies going under will be able to stop themselves from doing so by being liquid enough. We've been able to structure international contract law to make problems easier to resolve: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2010/05/10/international-contract-drafting-a-complex-headache/ Why can't we do that with our local economy?

[Jack]

Ponyo: Well, because they broke the entire system; a bigger version of what happened in the, small by contrast, $100 billion S&L mess of the mid-80's. Had there been responsible lending/underwriting standards the bubble would have been much smaller, with all from the home owner to the lenders having a bit of skin in the game to lose on the way down, thus cushioning the blow over many hands.

Have a look at this pricing graph and particularly at its divergence from the long time trend of median home prices tracking closely with median income trends. The least "talented" banker should have be able to spot something being awry even without listening to radio ads for "no down, no doc, no asset, no credit "loans". These guys KNEW they were surfing a tidal wave, but hey! if bonuses are on volume of dreck pawned, and risk is somewhere downstream, why not keep surfing?

Intuitive: I was just pointing out that LA, like my much smaller town of Anchorage, will experience true supply/demand price increases due to being geographically compressed. I point out devoting half of their R/E to the auto as part of that compression; as every 1/8th acre lot not currently served requires a similar area to be paved. Ha! kinda funny, inching along on freeways difficult to enlarge and headed to a destination 20 miles from the home one does not want to sell due to Prop 13 penalties on trading homes, that half of the trip is that of passing space devoted to the auto! Ahh, yes, as the well to wheel efficiency of oil sinks below 15%.

Were SoCal like it was in the 60's everyone would want a home in that nearly ideal climate not far from the beach, mountains and skiing, and it's still the case today thus truly demand driven increases in R/E prices......... amplified of course by the same bubble fundamentals of the rest.

Ha! funny thing in Alaska that we're by far the largest state with the lowest pop/square mile, but Anchorage is on a sort of peninsula rimmed by rugged mountains with limited building land.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeqrguz/housingbubble/

"Restrictive land zoning" has more to do with creating enduring value than with creating bubbles. Zoning is subjective, so apparently your nearby neighbors have favored increased urban density over suburban sprawl. The $20K an acre may not be as cheap as it sounds, with choices perhaps ranging from buying 5 acres so as to have a well and septic, or subdividing with small lots poking a fair sized hole in $100k......... plus, more "freeway" to handle the increased traffic.

[Jacob Hedegaard]

Becker wrote:
"Moreover, if the social interactions explanation is right, bubbles should also happen in a downward direction, so that prices could continue to fall below levels justified by fundamentals. National housing prices have basically never been significantly below levels expected from construction costs and other fundamentals."

Is there not something about imputation of prices being overlooked here? If prices of factors derive from expectation of prices from finished goods, then prices would only fall below if producers vastly overrate the value of the finished good. This, I would think, it not necessarily so, even though prices are bit up in a speculative bubble.
A better 'fundamental' might be cost of renting, which for a lot of construction companies might be the determinant in bidding up prices of factors.

I do not know if this is so, it's merely a suggestion.

[IntuitiveEconomics]

Jack: The costs of bringing water, sewer, roads and electricity to a subdivision that does not already have it is in the 10-30K range. It is by no means enough to justify the difference in lot price from $20K per acre (i.e. 3K per house lot) to $270K. So even after these infrastructure costs are factored in the difference is still 33k (at most) for the lot outside the "urban boundary" vs $270k for the lot inside the urban boundary. The cost differential is still due to the restrictive zoning, which, in turn, is nothing but the legal manifestation of the prevailing public attitude of: "Now that we've found our SoCal (or whatever) paradise let's close the door to outsiders! (By preventing our local farmers and others from developing their land, many of whom already owned it before we even moved in)".

[Jack]

Jacob: I'm not sure what your first point is but a long time ago, and perhaps for few today, the cost of ownership of a home was compared to rental costs. But after the tremendous inflation of the 70's and probably boomer pressure on housing demand, for the most part buyers have done far better than renters.

In my view, and perhaps another factor in the bubble, young folk are perhaps too hasty to "quit buying a stack of rental receipts" in favor of home ownership as their jobs (and even young marriages) are often unstable. I believe there is a study showing that those able and willing to change location quickly do far better in their careers.

In rental housing it's typically exactly as you suggest; when rents are low even those who'd like to build more rental housing on speculation are prevented from doing so by the project not "penciling" for their banker. Thus rents on existing apts rises close to or even above what new apts would command and then there is a wave of building.

Intuitive: You're right that restrictive land use planning "dooms" farmland to its value as farmland. If the planning was retro-active I suppose it could constitute a "taking" and be especially onerous if the farming became no longer viable.

Zoning and land use planning are one of our toughest issues and one that points up the inherent tension between "pure capitalism", democracy and general welfare. On the one hand "the market" is going to develop land for its "highest and best use" for that moment in time........ reflecting the ever-elusive equilibrium. Joni Mitchell summed up the other side well in singing ".......... you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot."

Some other things will happen on the way out to the cheap, nearby land. Outside of OK's two largest cities is lots of farmland and land use planning being abhorrent to the politic of the region nearly all is available to developers. It sells for perhaps $30k/acre and turns into lots of $35k to $70k depending on size and amenities. In addition to the hard costs, because developing is a risky biz (ha! ask a few of em this year!) they target 25-40% margins. Then builders come in for a lot draw, relieving the developer of further risk and interest costs and tack a 10% or more mark-up on the lot to cover their own risk and holding costs.

Where you are if they lifted the restrictions, that land would soar in price reflecting the $100 - 150k or more lot prices that your market would likely support.

Perhaps there is something else to be considered in the long view: Most of America does not lend itself to mass transit as the residential density is too low. So our whole land usage is based upon a theory of relatively cheap and available fossil fuels both to get to our energy consuming homes of twice the size of those in the EU, while the produce no longer available locally is hauled from places as far away as NZ. Now we're drilling in 5,000 feet of water or in the risky offshore Arctic Chukchi Sea as well-to-wheel efficiency of fossil energy drops to 15%.

While I don't personally like high density living (a former So Cal-er) it does seem we've gone about 40 years too far out on the plank of wasteful energy consumption and assuming that being 70% reliant on increasingly costly imports is not a national security threat and very thin ice for the profitability of our also heavily dependent producers. (We were but 30% imported when OPEC gave us the oil shock of the 70's)

[IntuitiveEconomics]

"You're right that restrictive land use planning "dooms" farmland to its value as farmland."

It also dooms consumers to spending $270,000 for a buildable lot. That is 5-10 extra years of work for the average US income earner when one considers taxes and mortgage interest. People could retire 5-10 years earlier without loss of standard of living if the lots were 30-50K as they would be under less restrictive zoning.

The bottom line is that zoning induced house price inflation was/still is an important part of the housing bubble, as it provided one of the main reasons why housing prices were expected to keep rising, and they did - however they rose past the fundamentals justified by the restrictive zoning. In Texas, with less restrictive zoning, the bubble never even got started.

[Bob]

"At least in the US, the vast majority of government officials involved encouraged rather than tried to moderate the housing bubble."

I really like the 'at least in the US' part. In my opinion, the present campaign finance rules in the US are in part responsible for markets going out of bounds. This is because politicians know they will only be reelected if some economic criteria are met. E.g. "As long as the Dow is above 10.000 we're fine." This (and belief in efficient markets) makes them unwilling to break up a good party. By the time a bubble bursts it's no longer their problem. And because of the millions of dollars needed to get elected, they're too heavily invested to act as spoilers.
I don't see the difficulty in recognizing a bubble. If median home price went up from 3.1 times median family income to 4 times median family income in a matter of years, and price increases can't be accounted for in population growth, wealth increase or increase in construction costs, this should signal something. The loss of purchasing power and it's influence on the economy overall should be enough of a motivation to seriously search for ways to slow down bubble growth. Anyway, might be a fetish of mine, but without campaign finance reform no US politician will ever bother. I do believe however, some countercyclical lending standards might be helpful.

[Siep]

Becker: i will need to read your book to be sure but your "social interaction" theory sounds a lot like the Keynesian multiplier. if i believe a specific asset to be over priced and thus i sell and in doing so convince many others to sell demand for the asset goes down. the asset demand reduction translates into a supply reduction which translates into laying off the labor responsible for the production of that asset.

now one of two things happen: the demand reduction for the asset i believe to be overpriced is met by an equal demand increase in best alternative consumption bundles and thus the labor are re-hired to produce the alternative consumption bundles; that is there are no bubbles. OR there are bubbles in which case the labor is not re-hired because consumption is not solely a function of income but also some mystical social force "social interaction, Keynesian multiplier"; in such case the unemployed labor then consume less translating into an ever deepening unemployment equilibrium.

now i don't know which one of these is true myself but it seems to me the two theories, bubbles or no bubbles are mutually exclusive. as such it seems odd to me that after a year of arguing that the government should stop trying to spend its way out of an unemployment equilibrium, that is stop trying to burst the downward bubble of credit pricing because bubbles don't exist, that all the sudden you believe in bubbles.

jack: there is a book "defining the national interest" in which another Hoover fellow argues that national security is the one aspect of u.s. policy that when push comes to shove businessmen will not prevail over security minded statesman due to the independence of the executive branch vis-a-vi congress.

everyone: food for thought: if we have domestic legislation that limits the risk our financial institutions can take wont we just encourage lending from foreign lending institutions that now have a comparative advantage at making short term high risk plays in our financial markets?

[Jack]

Intuitive: I agreed with you that "less restrictive land use" policies would add to supply and thus tend to lower prices, but you could also end up with a Houston or SoCal..... ie fairly ruined places that will suffer tremendously if oil become 200/bbl. As land use planning is a subjective decision I don't know whether it would be wise for the San Jose area to change its planning.

For the reasons posted the new lots would not be $50k but more like three times that amount.

Here are a few more reasons. A $270k lot points to a new home in the million buck range, which points to a family income north of $300k. Your area has many of those, otherwise $270k lots would be a VERY small percentage of the offerings.

The "good news" is that every town in America has the welcome mat out for clean, high tech, companies, and Ha! some well paid employees to help pay the local bills not possible to pay with the "new improved" Walmart pay scales. BTW where do you guys put your service people? teachers and others who can't possibly consider homes on those pricey lots?

[Jack]

Siep: Thanks, good comments. On your last, I don't think we'll come close to outlawing risk taking, or even go far enough to make sure those "taking risks" have signed up for both the upside and the DOWNside.

If other countries were to continue to subsidize "risk taking" I'd think any comparative advantage would turn out to be Fool's Gold as we are quickly learning.

I think you're talking about the exact reasoning justifying Keynesian spurring and if need be, using government at something of an employer of last resort as the military certainly is providing today. In the 90's the military would have had a very tough time getting people to enlist for 15 month back to back tours in the M/E for Spec 4 or Sgt pay.

Looking back at the 20's and 30's isn't that exactly what happened. A time of business prosperity turned into a stock market bubble, then when the stock bubble burst the downward spiral took out business sectors that should have had the fundamentals to keep doing most of what they had been doing.

With a couple trillion of delayed infrastructure maintenance and needed upgrades on the books, with this mess seeming to be of considerable duration and with the few choices available, I'd favor borrowing yet more from the future to put folks to work on these projects. Perhaps that weakens the dollar but if we "believe in" globalism our next round is that of exporting more and importing less, thus eventually creating more "real" jobs here.

[IntuitiveEconomics]

Jack: Increasing prices by legislating scarcity (restrictive zoning) is hardly a way to create wealth. Even a purely Intuitive Economist can figure that out. In other words, if you need to produce 300k/year in goods and services to live in a mediocre house (because that mediocre house costs $600k in a smart growth – read restricted growth – environment) the what’s the point?

[Jack]

Intuitive: As land use planning and zoning are subjective decisions only your neighbors can tell you why they made that trade off. I suppose there's a variety of reasons ranging from those with a genuine concern for the environment and having some balance to those more self-interested folk who're already invested in spendy real estate and don't want to see urban prices fall.

Surely you don't favor tossing all land use or zoning regs aside? If not, then all we're discussing is where you and others draw the line.

Also, since nearly every company in Silicon Valley could do the same thing elsewhere, if or when it takes too much production to afford to live there, perhaps they move to a new area. Would you pick a spot like So Cal or SF that for the most part grew up with little land use planning?

[Lorenzo (from downunder)]

If you want to see the effects of restrictive zoning, compare the UK with Germany. Under the German federal constitution, there is a "right to build". It is almost impossible for officials to interfere with property owners building on their property. So housing supply responds to housing demand and German house prices move at about the rate of inflation.

In the UK, just about everywhere land use is subject to official discretionary control over market entry. The result is ridiculous housing (land) prices and a boom-and-bust cycle.

The suggestion that Germany (593 people per square mile) has some profound geographical and population density advantage over the UK (660 people per square mile) is not exactly plausible.

Another comparison is Texas (80 people per square mile) and Australia (7 people per square mile). Texas has a higher population, higher population growth, higher average income and crams more of its population in its five largest cities than Australia does. Yet Texan houses are a half or a third of the price of Australian metropolitan housing. That median houses in Sydney and Melbourne are 9 or 8 times median household income, more expensive than houses in London or New York (both median houses 7 times median household income) while in Dallas and Houston they are less than 3 times median household income is pure regulatory madness.

The national average ration of median (metropolitan) houses to median household income is 2.9 in the US and 6.8 in Australia. We have 22 million people in the area of the continental US. We do not lack space: what we lack is Texan/German land management. Instead, with have adopted California/British-style land management, with California/British-style problems.

Giving officials discretionary control over market entry encourages inflated asset prices due to impeding the ability of supply to respond to demand so as to reward incumbent asset holders with inflated asset values. If you doubt that, just look at the price of taxi plates in any jurisdiction where numbers are controlled. (In Melbourne, taxi plates are currently about the same as the median house price.)

The geographical concentration of housing bubbles in the US is not a result of geography (except in the sense that geography creates positional goods--hill view, ocean view, beach fronts, etc--which encourage the adoption of restrictive zoning), it is the result of restrictive zoning.

[sesli chat]

The bottom line is that zoning induced house price inflation was/still is an important part of the housing bubble, as it provided one of the main reasons why housing prices were expected to keep rising, and they did - however they rose past the fundamentals justified by the restrictive zoning. In Texas, with less restrictive zoning, the bubble never even got started.

[nfl jerseys]

They will gladly vote for a far left liberal if the Republican Party does not stroke their egos and nominate a so-called moderate like themselves. They love people like John McCain and assorted other RINOs and have enough power http://www.epayebuy.com/nfl-brady-quinn-orange-jerseys-cleveland-browns-10-p-229.html
within the party to make sure that the party gets a Reagan to lead it about as often as a hippie changes his underwear. And in case you have not been around a hippie, then the answer to that riddle is not very often. Remember, McCain was dead in the water until he went into New Hampshire where these so-called Republicans resuscitated his chances

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