... it’s staggeringly hard to grow an economy when you lose a fifth of your working-age population in a single generation. ... Demographics will slow America’s economy, but they’re a five-alarm fire for other countries. So even assuming equal levels of productivity growth, the U.S. is head and shoulders better off than other developed nations, just given its demographics alone.
Supporters say the measure will help ensure residents released from prison are able to reintegrate back into society, hold down a job and provide for their families, instead of adding to Oakland’s homeless population. But some landlord groups worry the measure will sacrifice residents’ safety.
...Booker, Castro, Klobuchar, and Warren propose a combination of financial carrots and sticks that the federal government could use to induce local governments to reform their zoning. Indeed, a larger federal role in reducing local barriers to development appears to be one area with potential for bipartisan cooperation: President Donald Trump recently created a task force to address this issue.
Developers bet huge on foreign plutocrats—Russian oligarchs, Chinese moguls, Saudi royalty—looking to buy second (or seventh) homes. ... But the Chinese economy slowed, while declining oil prices dampened the demand for pieds-à-terre among Russian and Middle Eastern zillionaires. It didn’t help that the Treasury Department cracked down on attempts to launder money through fancy real estate.
First, the typical new American single-family home has become surprisingly luxurious, if not quite so swank as Manhattan’s glassy spires. Newly built houses in the U.S. are among the largest in the world, and their size-per-resident has nearly doubled in the past 50 years. And the bathrooms have multiplied. In the early ’70s, 40 percent of new single-family houses had 1.5 bathrooms or fewer; today, just 4 percent do. The mansions of the ’70s would be the typical new homes of the 2020s.
Third, and most important, the most expensive housing markets, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, haven’t built nearly enough homes for the middle class. As urban living has become too expensive for workers, many of them have either stayed away from the richest, densest cities or moved to the south and west, where land is cheaper. This is a huge loss, not only for individual workers, but also for these metros, because denser cities offer better matches between companies and workers, and thus are richer and more productive overall. Instead of growing as they grow richer, New York City, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area are all shrinking.
Young adults today are one-third less likely to own a home at this point in their lives than previous generations. Among young black Americans, homeownership has fallen to its lowest rate in more than 60 years.
...developers have been reluctant to slash prices too suddenly or dramatically, lest the market suddenly clear and they leave millions on the table.
When it comes to looming societal challenges, 92% of people said it was imperative for their employers’ CEOs to speak out on issues from the ethical use of technology to climate change, and three-fourths said they believed chief executives should be the drivers of change, rather than waiting for government intervention.
Some CEOs have picked up on this already. Lawrence Fink, chief executive of BlackRock Inc. has been outspoken on topics like slow wage growth and jobs lost to automation. His widely read annual letter to investors, released earlier this month, said that BlackRock would take a tougher stance against corporations that aren’t providing a full accounting of their environmental risks, part of a slew of moves by the investment giant to show it is doing more to address investment challenges posed by climate change. Days later Microsoft Corp. said it would take more carbon out of the air than its operations and those of its supply chain produce by 2030.
Consider the housing market. “In the 1960s and earlier,” Mr. Glaeser says, “America basically had a property-rights regime that meant that anyone who had a plot of land could pretty much put up anything reasonable on that plot of land.” Since then, cities and towns have circumscribed the areas where homes can be built, capped numbers of units, and imposed strict requirements on developers—all of which raise prices. “So there’s this intergenerational redistribution that’s occurred by restricting housing supply.
People who bought homes while the rules were lenient, or who are wealthy enough to have bought lately, have seen their values soar. Meanwhile, “younger people just don’t have housing wealth.” By 2013, a 35- to 44-year-old person at the 75th percentile had less than half as much home equity (adjusted for inflation) as his counterpart did 30 years earlier.
Yet Mr. Glaeser cites polling that suggests most young people’s vision of socialism might be better described as “hyperredistribution.” They don’t seek state control of the means of production, but punishing taxes on the rich to fund programs like free college for all. “They say, ‘Well, there are a whole bunch of projects—a whole bunch of government spending that helps old people. I want mine. If we’re going to spend a huge amount on Medicare, why aren’t we spending a whole lot on education for me?’ ”
We wrote a managerial economics textbook (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Cengage) to teach students how to solve business problems (7 min. video). We started this blog to support those who use the book, and to keep up with developments in the field.
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