[ethanbond]

Got it: higher taxes on the wealthy will tax some people out of their 2nd and 3rd homes, bringing those units onto the market, and this will be a more pronounced effect on demand than UBI'ing 40 million people below the poverty line into the next rung up in the rental market, or the 80 million American adults who live with non-family roommates who will likely be seeking their own housing.

"Statistical significance," like UBI, is a very specific idea. It's not shorthand for "does it convince me." It is literally not true the study had zero statistical significance.

[danenania]

> higher taxes on the wealthy will tax some people out of their 2nd and 3rd homes, bringing those units onto the market

To fund UBI would impact a lot more than just super rich people with multiple homes. You'd have to tax into the upper middle class most likely to pay for it.

Do you not see the logical inconsistency in your argument? That adding all this purchasing power at the bottom of the market would have a massive impact on prices, but removing the exact same amount from the top has a only a narrow, insignificant impact.

> "Statistical significance," like UBI, is a very specific idea. It's not shorthand for "does it convince me." It is literally not true the study had zero statistical significance.

It's just a cherry-picked correlation in a massively noisy dataset, and a very weak one at that. Calling that study "empirical evidence" is a joke. You might as well cite astrological charts.

[ethanbond]

But people who have one home still need one home, right? So you're describing taxing wealthy people into competition with lower income people (lower-income housing), not taxing them out of it.

And no, there's no logical inconsistency with predicting different effects from the same purchasing power removed from the top as added to the bottom: those people have different marginal propensity to consume. As an example I've already mentioned, 80 million American adults live with non-family roommates. Those 80 million people aren't evenly distributed across income brackets, are they? Lower class people spend 30%+ of their income on their housing, often by pooling multiple incomes into a single unit. As you go up the income spectrum, roommates disappear and then % of income dedicated to housing goes down.

> It's just a cherry-picked correlation in a massively noisy dataset, and a very weak one at that.

At this point it's clear you haven't even attempted to read the paper. The data is neither cherry-picked nor noisy. The (independent) data source has 39 states in it. All 39 states are used in the study. The effect size is small, as you'd expect from small increases in minimum wage, but the correlation is extremely strong and almost certainly not due to chance.

[danenania]

> But people who have one home still need one home, right? So you're describing taxing wealthy people into competition with lower income people (lower-income housing), not taxing them out of it.

By this logic, if you could snap your fingers and make half of all wealthy people's net worth disappear (by some definition of wealthy), it would cause rents to go... up? You only need basic economics to know it doesn't work that way.

> And no, there's no logical inconsistency with predicting different effects from the same purchasing power removed from the top as added to the bottom

The effects would certainly be different, but how they would ultimately resolve in aggregate isn't even theoretically computable. Yet you're claiming to know what the exact impact would be. All we can say for sure is that there would be two massive countervailing effects.

> At this point it's clear you haven't even attempted to read the paper.

No I haven't because it would be a waste of time. Reading the abstract is enough to know that the premise is flawed and it can't possibly provide empirical evidence to support your hypothesis because there is no control. The same exact changes in default rates and rents could have easily occurred without the minimum wage increase due to countless other factors. It's pseudoscience.

[ethanbond]

> No I haven't because it would be a waste of time.

got it

[danenania]

What’s the point in reading research that, as is made clear in the abstract, can’t possibly provide evidence of causation? You’re drawing conclusions from the results, but there’s no scientific basis for those conclusions; like I said, many things could have caused those results. It’s no different from physics research that doesn’t account for environmental factors.

[ethanbond]

It’s interesting how you’ve gone from stochastic parroting general caveats around statistics (cherry-picked data, noisy data, not statistically significant, no controls, weak correlation [none of which is true]) to “not worth reading, obviously!”

That’s just arguing in bad faith and dishonesty bud.

Have a good rest of your week!