During my debate with Cameron Murray, when I made my standard remarks about the 2000s housing bust being the result of policy errors rather than the inevitable reversal of a bubble, I was surprised to hear Dr.
I'm glad that you're looking more closely at different global housing markets, because there is some weird stuff going on in many different places. Back in the days when I too believed in the housing "bubble" I regarded the sustained high prices in Canada and Australia as something akin to Wile E. Coyote standing in mid-air past the edge of a cliff. When prices in those places never collapsed I started to believe the narratives you and Scott Sumner were offering about irrational responses by financial regulators that suppressed markets.
In the realm of zoning regulations, I made the assumption that the United States was an outlier of bad policy. In the past few decades I've discovered that England has worse policies than us, and Ireland has worse policies than England. In a stroke of good timing, the day you dropped this post, Marginal Revolution provided a link to a substack by "Alethios" about Taiwan. The expression "hold my beer...." seems appropriate because the author outlines a hellscape of bad policy that makes San Francisco seem rational when it comes to urban planning and housing production.
Examples of true real estate bubbles seem to be quite rare, and generally constrained to specific regions. Some urban outskirts in China and other Asian countries managed to build a true oversupply of units financed by speculative zeal. In some respects, certain types of commercial real estate here in the U.S. is being subjected to significant re-pricing.
Over and over again, we see housing shortages caused by de facto or explicit government policies, and then flaccid or even counter-productive (to put it mildly) government responses.
The orthodox macroeconomics profession is also largely absent in this discussion, or worse, subscribes to "housing bubble" narratives.
The modern macroeconomist would rather re-re-re-re-hash the Great Depression or produce a detailed study of obscuranta (usually conforming to political biases) than to head-on wrestle with America's housing crisis, which is also present through much of the developed world.
Can we ask voters to support free enterprise and private markets if lower living standards (due to soaring housing costs) are manifested year after year?
I'm glad that you're looking more closely at different global housing markets, because there is some weird stuff going on in many different places. Back in the days when I too believed in the housing "bubble" I regarded the sustained high prices in Canada and Australia as something akin to Wile E. Coyote standing in mid-air past the edge of a cliff. When prices in those places never collapsed I started to believe the narratives you and Scott Sumner were offering about irrational responses by financial regulators that suppressed markets.
In the realm of zoning regulations, I made the assumption that the United States was an outlier of bad policy. In the past few decades I've discovered that England has worse policies than us, and Ireland has worse policies than England. In a stroke of good timing, the day you dropped this post, Marginal Revolution provided a link to a substack by "Alethios" about Taiwan. The expression "hold my beer...." seems appropriate because the author outlines a hellscape of bad policy that makes San Francisco seem rational when it comes to urban planning and housing production.
Examples of true real estate bubbles seem to be quite rare, and generally constrained to specific regions. Some urban outskirts in China and other Asian countries managed to build a true oversupply of units financed by speculative zeal. In some respects, certain types of commercial real estate here in the U.S. is being subjected to significant re-pricing.
https://alethios.substack.com/p/taiwans-housing-crisis?s=08
Over and over again, we see housing shortages caused by de facto or explicit government policies, and then flaccid or even counter-productive (to put it mildly) government responses.
The orthodox macroeconomics profession is also largely absent in this discussion, or worse, subscribes to "housing bubble" narratives.
The modern macroeconomist would rather re-re-re-re-hash the Great Depression or produce a detailed study of obscuranta (usually conforming to political biases) than to head-on wrestle with America's housing crisis, which is also present through much of the developed world.
Can we ask voters to support free enterprise and private markets if lower living standards (due to soaring housing costs) are manifested year after year?