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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 11h

this is the UI on the case management software Massachusetts prosecutors use nasser.blog/dial-up-just...

Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The nexus study stuff is funny because they mechanically conclude that almost all local economic development is bad and needs to be taxed, which is the opposite of what every “local economic multiplier” (itself dubious) study will mechanically conclude

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Feels very similar to the building codes takes you sometimes see where reform is described as neoliberals selling out safety. But the codes are all done by a private monopoly! Kinda insane setup and antithetical to what I imagine critics imagine the status quo to be

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Even the industry publications don’t really go to bat for them: “They graduate at higher rates and with less debt” (note nothing about earnings) And “there are some schools that need reform” And “our students make more than the min wage and general labors”

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Are people really going to bat for cosmetology programs? Aren’t those mostly like: 80% Private companies of dubious value 20% Community and technical colleges and some state schools

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

i feel like this is a very weird conclusion by the authors. just eyeballing the standard errors, their estimate and the original papers overlap by quite a bit. i guess -0.46 is outside the 95% confidence interval of the original estimate, but it's not the same data and the -0.46 has uncertainty

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

something something humans retain a comparative advantage in research that is interesting but flawed -- which are most breakthroughs in social science! but maybe that's researcher cope

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

it also loves chasing really bespoke identification when there's not an obvious regression to run. either in the "this is well identified but narrow to the point of meaningless" or "here's this six step heterogeneity that nobody would believe".

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

yeah, and for bottom 10%, most all of their income is non-market

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

the series is wage and salary income , is my understanding, but a lot of people in that bottom income decile mostly aren't in the labor force or are marginally attached and so have zero or very little wage or salary income. i'd revise my statement from "bad", but i think it's harder to think about

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

just heads up, this series is bad for your excercise. the bottom 10% are generally not in the labor force so income from wages and salaries isn't a super helpful measure. you'd want like total income bottom 10%. doesnt change the story too much though

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

i dont view the infographic as anything much to do with econ 101 intuition tbh. i view it primarily as a review of case studies. the question of case studies is, to my belief, a question of how to map the particulars of one place onto another, which you need a theory to do.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

i think policy makers -- we as a society -- are always within their (our) right to make welfare weights but the issue is that people frequently believe things that are incorrect. walk west of the fillmore and get a generation of haight residents who froze the buildings and displaced the people

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

whereas, one, i think people would benefit a lot from some basic dating advice! but also, it's an easier thing for the person to evaluate themselves. so, sure, cities can consider the particular, but my belief is that the default is that they way overweight how special they are and refuse to learn

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

i dont think the dating analogy works tbh. the trouble with rental regulation is that it's a legitimately hard counterfactual to estimate since the downsides -- particularly for less stringent variations. that's not something a city official can evaluate easily. and yet you still need to decide

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

to be specific, i think you could get idk 70-80% of the rent regulation intuition with a 2x2 table of high / low expected demand and high / low stringency. and then do an add on that walks people through what would move regulation into a high / low stringency category and where the uncertainty is

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

oh i wholeheartedly disagree! i think there are specific weaknesses in the literature -- in particular, who benefits and how much is a weak point -- but i think city officials are waaayyyy too likely to think their specific situation is more bespoke than it is

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

not to both-sides it here, but there's a sort of "one sided demand for nuance" issue where proponents and critics of rental regulation often do a sort of a la carte thing with the assorted costs and benefits. or have reasons why the general contours of the literature dont apply in <my special city>

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

it's a reasonably consistent finding that rent stabilization increases the time a resident stays at their place some evidence that, conditional on moving, it's harder to stay in the area, although this bundles supply and demand shocks. but you can get stable tenancies & unstable neighborhoods

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

the analogy to minimum wages always felt strained 1. there's no real equivalent to a minimum wage (maximum rent?) 2. most rent control are caps on % increases not caps on prices (review includes both) i will say tho, many of the papers in the review are not particularly up to modern standards

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

i think (my family included) get really messed up on "i have to pay a plumber a lot to fix my plumbing" with "plumbers make a lot of money". there's often quite a bit of money in owning a plumbing business! less so in being a plumber. same with roofing, some electrical work, etc

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

the shade thing is especially bizarre because down thread the reader learns of a seperate regulation requiring developers to also plant a bunch of trees. bsky.app/profile/kers...

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

im a coauthor on a paper that posits a "people are well behaved utility-maximizing bayesians" model for crimes and home prices adjustments. it does great; you can throw a bunch of behavioral stuff at it and you can't reject "ehhh people seem to be updating about what you'd expect"

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

the article does both public and private comparisons.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

www.nber.org/papers/w34072 assuming youve seen this one? quasi-experimental. as an aside, i've kind of thought LLMs would be great for low income countries where a barrier is training on like "how should i do inventory" and bookkeeping best practices

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

i'm glad we agree on the need for more housing on the west side! i'll stop here since i'm sure you're arguing with a lot of people right now and I doubt anything i could say would be super persuasive. (okay, cant resist, but i wish mission bay new houses were way taller)

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

san francisco tries to stop the construction of everything, be that homes for the rich, homes for the middle class, or homes for the poor i'm 29 and i can count on one hand the number of new buildings within two miles of where i grew up. that lack of ~anything~ is a large part of why im priced out

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

like on some level, if the san francisco housing market can support the construction of two million dollar condos in perpetuity -- as much as can be built -- to say nothing of 11 million dollar pent houses, that's a win for the city since it means we have an infinite money glitch

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

imo even this is conceding too much. the typical SF condo looks much more like ~800K than it does an 11 million. even 280 spear st, which is as luxury as it's gonna get, is cheaper than a SFH on average. and for the 11 million dollar penthouse, if someone wants to pay taxes on that be my guest.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

san francisco, if you go like west of divisadero, looks basically the exact same as it did in the 1970s. as the <lack of building has happened> I watched homes that started as upper middle class *when built* end up as only accessible to the very rich.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

a new-ish rental (built like last 5-10 years) is gonna rent to someone in about the 60th percentile of the area's income distribution. new condos will be higher, but still lower than a single family home. lotta money to be made housing the middle/upper middle class!

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

*technically if you're a rich renter you're still taxed, but "rich renters" are not really a meaningful group of people outside of like san francisco and manhattan. it goes back to the whole luxury condos thing. "luxury condos" are not really a thing. even more so, "luxury apartments" arent

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

it's a tax on builders and middle class renters to fund subsidized units for lower income renters. if you're a rich household you do not bare any of the costs od IZ. even if you like inclusionary zoning, it's regressive compared to say, taxing property/income directly to fund housing subsidies.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"the worst thing about covid was the sloppy causal inference" -- guy talking to norm macdonald, probably. but adjudicating claims was really a series of: 1. this is not causal 2. this is causal but goofy 3. this is causal, not goofy, but probably Small 4. this is causal, not goofy and Big tests

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

there's a chris conlon paper that lays out much of my thought process but i dont remember off hand if it responds to weber in particular vs greedflation in general www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Did she ever put out a paper where she took a stand on percent of Inflation that was due to shenanigans? It always seemed like you could have collusion / conduct change be a component but they were, at least temporary, necessarily after a demand / supply shock.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i found some of the greedflation discourse to be a bit internally inconsistent. it's hard to get supply shocks to juice aggregate corporate profits (individual industries, sure). big demand shocks can explain the profit behavior very well, but are inconsistent with "the economy has lots of slack"

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Oh yeah I meant that, to the extent they’re in the registry (idk the requirements), Berkeley having a registry makes running the comparison of how they’re being impacted easier because you can more easily adjust for say the general increase in multi fam delinquency

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Berkeley’s probably the easier one since their rent registry is more public and comprehensive. What would you be looking for? Price changes? Exit? Signs of financial distress?

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

the other thing is that "starts nose-diving in 2023" is hard to evaluate without seeing what was happening pre-2023. could chatgpt hurt newspapers? absolutely, but there were also some pre trends going on in that industry.

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

yeah, it's a good question cause i'd expect lifecycle wage trends to mostly dominate labor market factors, at least for younger workers but maybe not older ones. in that respect, unemployment rate might be better for how workers perceive full employment?

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

(some of this is composition but for all the hay about declining wages in 2022 ish, the trends are pretty striking. there's been like two periods of sustained wage growth in the past fourty years, and we're living in one of them)

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

on the flip side, if you graduated college after 2015 -- so if youre like 33 or younger or so -- you've never been in a labor market where "wages basically go up" wasn't the norm

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"everyone should strive to be economists" is what im hearing (or at least the economist keynes would have wanted). and by "the economist keynes would i wanted" I, of course, mean a dentist

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

strong agree, ideally followed up by my more advanced preferred class: "Is this a number a big number? " Which is a 201 level course offering (also mandatory)

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

In any case, my kingdom for a mandatory college semester on “can you read and correctly interpret this graph?”

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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It’s always struck me as very odd that something like James Joyce is treated as much more foundational (more important for being a well rounded citizen?) than “what’s an eigenvalue” or “how does accounting work”

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