How do you think about vacancy chains in terms of how the “effects of local supply” papers get identification?

Is it just that those local papers’ results are probably attenuated by spillovers?

the issue with Bruce's data, to close the circle, was that there are people, particularly those who are homeless, who are very challenging to survey and who likely have very low incomes.

Although the data we have on them tends to suggest that most homeless people make ~400 / month

My recollection of the debate was correct, and the debate largely revolved around how to account for and measure in-kind benefits, particularly in survey data.

If you use Bruce Meyer's data, you get an extreme poverty rate of 0.11%.

web.archive.org/web/20250409...

i would bet a non-insubstantial amount of money that the answer to "why is 1% of the US living under $3/day" is "the survey wasn't counting in-kind benefits correctly".

iirc there was a whole debate spurred by similar claims made by Kathy Edin and Angus Deaton

the guardian article is writing a takedown of the US vis a vi China, but the fact that they could have written the exact same article but with the UK, Austria, Sweden, Japan, or Italy should be a sign that the data are weird not that their argument is strong.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

of course, this doesn't really vindicate the doomers in the way they think because today is still better than any point in the past 45 years (2019 weirdness excluded). but the gains have certainly been more modest under these measures.

this is almost entirely driven by shelter inflation tracking mostly 1 for 1 with income gains

Housing theory of everything strikes again. I'd be hesitant to go fully to bat for this, but if you think the 1970s drop was partly urban growth controls, they matter a lot more than 2008!

what's funny is that i've found Econ 101 to be an immensely useful course, but only after about two years into my PhD lol

i guess the tricky part would be trying to answer "so why do recessions happen" after your facts about the business cycle

what else would you call this?

Here is a specific error he makes in discussing poverty lines. He says that because we now spend ~5% of our income on food instead of 33% we should inflate the 1963 poverty line by 16 instead of by 3.

We spend a lower % of our income on food *because* we are richer.

If he had written "hey it's really expensive to raise two kids in America" I would agree with that.

It's when he tries to say and imply that we're somehow poorer than in the 1950s or that all the social scientists who work on poverty don't know what they're doing that I get annoyed.

i've read the article and I think the article is bad. He is doing armchair social science, and it is clear he does not know how poverty lines work.

He's calling any improvement in the quality of life a hedonic treadmill and uses that to declare we are poorer than in the 1950s. That is asinine.

He "discusses" it, but he clearly does not understand how poverty lines are constructed or how hedonic adjustment works.

This opening paragraph is immediately discrediting. You also don't get to wave a wand and call all the benefits of airbags and cellphones "price of participation"

the numbers are what they are, but if you define his threshold as "poverty" you need to also do this going backwards in time.

if you do that, you end up saying like 90% of the US was poor in 1950. which is the exact opposite of what he is arguing.

You could probably get a rough check of this with corelogic data.

Something like comparing sale prices of single family homes based on new apartment being built/nearby on the same block vs one that’s not in their “aesthetic area”. Could be a cool paper for an undergrad / or a nice weekend project

I gotta find the person (apparently there are lots of them!) who would move to Baltimore but only if “money were no object”

but im in the camp of "ehhh the numbers are kind of weird but in-line with MIT's living wage calculator".

I just don't think the MIT living wage calc is a useful barometer of poverty! I make ~42K w/ great benefits. Living wage for me is ~50K. But I'm doing fine? im definitely not impoverished

my current take is that

1. people have zero conception about how poor the typical American was in 1950/1960
2. because of 1) + innumeracy, people have no ability to critically evaluate numbers in context of what the author says they mean, and so just go based on vibes

bsky.app/profile/sadb...

Here's how we know this: 130K would be about 12,000 in 1960s dollars.

There were ~45 million families in the US in 1960. Of those about 6.4 million had family incomes > $10,000. So an income of 12,000 in 1960 dollars puts you comfortably in the top ~10%.