Dotage smotage. I'm the same age you are. I ain't riding off into the sunset on a Barcalounger. Let's continue to kick ass and speak truth (as we know and understand it) until we can't kick or speak no more! We all appreciate you, Jared. Keep up the great work.
One of the factors you left out is the growing number of people living on a fixed income. For them (mostly elderly), the income/price mismatch will continue.z
There, my issue was that a weakness of the corporate pensions, that the Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Hacker ("The Great Risk Shift") were bemoaning the loss of, were often problematic, as they were not inflation-adjusted, and had other inflation-risk in how their formulas worked. (State and local government pensions are often only partially inflation adjusted, as well. I think, but am not sure, all federal pensions are fully inflation adjusted. Social Security I know to be fully inflation adjusted, and, as well, constructed so that there is no disadvantage in switching employers--thus fully transportable.)
Now, with 401Ks, that corporations are shifting to, I think it tends not to have an inflation problem, and maybe even, as people get older on retirement, they tend to be in better shape. (There is, of course, still massive risk of market decline. I think it was to about 1/7th value in the years following 1929.)
I'll toss on another one of my peeves. There is no reason at all to have 401ks be something that corporations have to set up. People at employers without 401ks, and that group especially is composed of less-well-off people, only have an option of an IRA, with much, much lower contribution caps. Obviously, instead of 401ks, there should just be 401k-sized IRAs, with a possibly option for any employer to throw in some sort of match.
(The explanation, I suspect, is that there is more money to be made by the finance industry by handling set up of lots of separate employer plans. However, incompetence of federal legislators, or some different special-interest factor, is another likely possibility in my mind.)
Two essential truths here: The roots of today’s affordability crisis actually lie not in recent price spikes, but in the long-term suppression of workers’ pay. And consumer sentiment is much more affected by the prices themselves, rather than the inflation level.
On your chart, you may have the green and red lines reversed. Your text says the basic model is green, legend has it as red. Really love your posts, always very insightful, keep it up!
I know Substack has been observed as a place where there are scams going on.
Note: My commenting having been blocked on Krugman's Substack, I can't notify Prof. Krugman. And I see no other way of communicating with his Substack. So, I'll just post the notice of potential scam here on Mr. Bernstein's site, for whatever good it does.
The gap between inflation and the actual cost of living is not a matter of perception but of measurement, power, and political legitimacy. It exposes a deeper epistemic failure in economics itself. What people experience is a sociological reality that economists cannot model: the structural erosion of everyday security caused by permanent shifts in the price level.
While not addressing your exact assertions, I will throw in that I myself am a big fan of terms like "epistemic". Terms with that same root.
"Epistemic virtue" I love. Also, "epistemological mistake", being most often thinking one knows something, when one either does not know but only guesses, or the thing one thinks they know is completely false.
And then, this academic area called "social epistemology". Focusing, instead of what one can know all by themselves ("I see a green field before me--am I hallucinating?, etc.") like old-fashioned regular epistemology, focuses on how people interact when knowledge is involved.
In particular, though rather obvious, the social-epistemological problem all of us have when relying for other people for information in areas where we can't figure it out ourselves has been stated by at least one social epistemologist that I read as:
a) Does the person know what they're talking about?
b) Is the person sincere (i.e. telling the truth)?
These both are not binary. They have degrees, and other complexities. (For example, for (a), a person may be good at some aspect of a problem, but not other aspects. For (b), any person with any political role or political effect may find themselves deciding it is best to leave out a few things.)
I insist that our problems in democracy are largely expressible in terms of this social epistemological problem.
(This can be manipulation of those with poor critical-thinking skills by many politicians and much of the media. It can also be for much-higher-functioning and fully-noble participants with very sound critical-thinking skills, doing their best to figure out "what is true?" on a citizen-in-a-democracy job that is, frankly, too much for any of us.)
I am a huge fan of the “epistemological” Hindu folk tale “The Blind Men and the Elephant”. It is a great metaphor for how we humans construct knowledge from our limited perspectives. If the blind men had pooled the information they gathered rather than argued about who was right, they would have come closer to understanding that elephant they were investigating.
As for critical thinking skills we should all be looking to how Finland’s life long media literacy program is implemented. I love that they use folk tales about tricksters to introduce the idea of false information to the youngest kids. The program clearly works — Fins regularly top the European survey of ability to spot fake news.
"Following fake news campaigns focussing on immigration, the European Union, and NATO membership, the Finnish Government recognised the need to increase the population’s resilience to digital misinformation."
Not all governments react the way the Finnish government did. Many elites want to maintain manipulatability, as it's much easier and cleaner than having to use violence.
(It is not a unique thought to me that evolution has kept the human race away from a situatation where a high proportion of the population is too smart to be manipulated. Because having genes accumulate so that a bunch of leaders can say "Those people in that other group: they are evil, kill them!" would be a big bonus, preonderance-in-the-genepool-wise.
This is not necessarily a mechanism that could happen only in a godless world. In a world with God, even a Creationist or teleological world, I suppose there could be a similar functioning that a deity is intending.)
Your price levels vs inflation argument is so enlightening—thank you for explaining it so well! Also, I agree with Paul, I think you’ve mixed up the green and red lines in the chart.
It doesn’t help people’s vibes when we keep hearing that millions of jobs are likely to be wiped out by AI and that there is likely a AI bubble on the verge of collapse.
In American Prospect, the Dec. 2025 issue, "The $79 Trillion Heist" is an article by Harold Meyerson. A very big number, $79 trillion. The federal outlays for 2024 were under $6 trillion. The total houshold net worth is $176 trillion, the national annual income is almost $25 trilllion. $79 trillion is more than monumental. How was it stolen? Through wage suppression. Each worker, presumably nonsupervisory, would receive $28,000 more income each year if incomes had matched national growth. That would be $28,000 added onto the median of $55,432, the median for the nonsupervisory workers, or $83,432; and for the median for all workers it would be $28,000 added to $63,128 or $91,128 annually.
Wages for the nonsupervisory worker, "average weekly earnings" were higher in 1973 than in 2025. The economy grew by 140%, inflation adjusted and per capita. See the BLS graph -- https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000031
National income grows by 140%, nonsupervisory workers who are 80% of all workers, see no wage increase ("average weekly earnings"). Disaster.
You could also hunt for the Median Household Income for 1973 and adjust for inflation, the 2025 income was 2% higher than 1973. Meyerson quotes a RAND Corp study done in 2025.
To quote Meyerson:
A RAND Corporation study from earlier this year found that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners received about 67 percent of all taxable income in 1975. In 2019, the last year for which this data was available, they received 46.8 percent. Had that bottom 90 percent continued during the past half-century to make the same share of the national income they’d had in 1975, RAND calculates that by 2023 they would have made an additional $79 trillion. Just in the year 2023, they would have made an additional $3.9 trillion. As the size of the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. workforce is roughly 140 million people, that means that the average earner would have made about $28,000 more in 2023 than they actually did."
The bottom 90% income growth 1946 to 1976 was equal growth as the national growth. "Real" incomes doubled.
That's my comment -- analyze Meyerson's article, he presents some important solutions at the end. My blog is http://benL88.blogspot.com, I have an essay with solutions, the Dec. 2024 essay: Solutions.
Very insightful post. I wonder if there is one additional independent variable that should be included (if only we had a good proxy for it): anxiety about the political and economic environment? That is, might a person who is responding to the survey ascribe their general anxiety about non-price elements of the environment to price elements and their general sentiments? That is, someone who is worried that the implications of the rise of authorianism or the prospect that AI will replace them in their job be influenced by those things when responding to the consumer sentiment survey?
I initially assumed the red and blue lines diverged at the election since Republicans have been documented as being much more optimistic with a Republican president. But if I’m reading it right, the attitudes started improving before the election. Obviously, not enough to help Harris. Was it because interest rates started going back down in 2023? Less credit card pressure? I think rent was still flying upward at that point, if I remember correctly.
Whatever the reason, this was a really interesting way to look at it. Thanks for pulling it together.
Prices shot up during the pandemic. Larry S blames demand-side issues (generous stimulus spending and a switch in purchases from experiences to goods); Paul K blames supply-side constrictions (higher shipping costs, constrained domestic output). They’re both right. But if demand for Pelotons has been sated, and if shipping costs came down (and social distancing at meat packing plants was eased), shouldn’t prices have fallen somewhat post pandemic?
They clearly haven’t. I doubt I’m the only one who suspects that producers, importers and retailers have been enjoying higher margins. True enough, bird flu and extreme weather events have constrained supply of various commodities. And not all tariffs have been fully passed on to consumers. But I still have this nagging feeling that we’re being had.
I just listened to the cited "NPR Show 1A" discussion, which I found highly worthwhile.
(For others who might be interested in listening, there are 3 other guests, all who seem knowledgeable. It focuses especially on housing and food, but hits the whole affordability, and other components a bit, as well.)
1) In the host's description of Mr. Bernstein, I noticed from the start the missing "for President Biden" with just "for Vice President Biden" (attached to "chief economic advisor"), so I was glad Mr. Bernstein managed to clarify that (some distance into the interview).
2) I had observed there was a place where the White House advisors stand in front of the cameras and talk to the press. I assumed it was somewhere on the White House Lawn, and was pleased to learn the little tidbit that it is the "White House North Lawn" (="WHNL" to insiders.)
I wonder what they do if the advisor has to talk to the press when there is a big thunderstorm going on. I guess they must move it somewhere. (Can't be they would let everyone risk being electrocuted?)
I wonder what will happen to all of the lawns, including the North one, with new, humongous ballroom, that I believe is continuously being enlarged by the president beyond all architectural taste. Will it eat up the North Lawn? The South Lawn? Which lawns will it eat up? Will there be any lawns left?
3) I have expressed in a prior substack comment somewhere on a Bernstein that, as regards housing affordability, I am on the same "we need more supply" side as Mr. Bernstein. (Indeed, all of the guests on the NPR discussion who spoke about housing were on that same side.)
4) For diversity of opinion, I will toss in other people.
Some years ago Paul Krugman opined with same opinion as Mr. Bernstein, tossing in that the problem is, to some extent, us liberals. (It took courage to say that. Who knows how many readers it cost him?)
“The bad news is that America’s housing affordability crisis has gotten even worse. Rents will probably come down over time in places where housing construction isn’t prevented by excessive regulation. (Sorry, this is one policy area where blue states generally get it wrong while many red states get it right.) But NIMBYism in places like California and, yes, New York will do even more damage in the remote-work era.
The housing story, then, is that the pandemic changed the way we live and work — or, more likely, brought forward changes that were going to happen eventually. This led people to want more space at home. And that’s OK. What we need now is to let markets give people what they want, at a price more people can afford.”
"So we know what to do about housing prices. It won’t be easy politically — and the opposition will come from the right as well as the left. Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 manifesto, is fiercely opposed to government regulations that, say, protect the environment — but rabidly in favor of protecting the right of local governments to block housing development:
'American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.' "
(I continue to read and quote Prof. Krugman, despite the tiny injustice that I feel he, his comment-moderator, or his comment-moderating AI program has done to me. Removing all of my comments from his substack, which I believe were of useful information and arguments, with a few satirical jokes, and further, of taking away my commenting privileges for 30 days! Me, a paid subscriber, without any explanation to me!
5) I might as well toss in an actually-differing opinion, from economist Dean Baker, who I guess, from co-authorings, may be an old pal of Mr. Bernstein.
Mr. Baker cites different factors on housing cost than Mr. Bernstein (and also Ezra Klein) here:
6) Taking on roughly the role of the aging people going into dotage discussed in Mr. Bernstein's last sentence, but applying it to giving the young people hopefully-wise advice from years of experience, I will toss on about Dean Baker.
Young people may stumble upon that Mr. Baker co-authored a New York Times article with Kevin current White House economics guy Hassett (then at the American Enterprise Institute) some years ago. (2012.)
In some nations the “outs” create a shadow government mirroring the party in power, our “shadow” government are the Substacker and you and Paul lead the pack. As you are well aware tying Econ data to politics is dicey, although when the NYT food critic writes a glowing four star ⭐️ review of a Japanese 10 seat restaurant at $700 a couple I know we’re heading in the wrong direction. How about an, “If I was in my old job …..”
Dotage smotage. I'm the same age you are. I ain't riding off into the sunset on a Barcalounger. Let's continue to kick ass and speak truth (as we know and understand it) until we can't kick or speak no more! We all appreciate you, Jared. Keep up the great work.
One of the factors you left out is the growing number of people living on a fixed income. For them (mostly elderly), the income/price mismatch will continue.z
This fixed or partly-fixed income in retirement thing I actually commented on yesterday in a slightly different context:
( https://econjared.substack.com/p/trump-accounts-and-the-great-risk/comment/184863454 )
There, my issue was that a weakness of the corporate pensions, that the Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Hacker ("The Great Risk Shift") were bemoaning the loss of, were often problematic, as they were not inflation-adjusted, and had other inflation-risk in how their formulas worked. (State and local government pensions are often only partially inflation adjusted, as well. I think, but am not sure, all federal pensions are fully inflation adjusted. Social Security I know to be fully inflation adjusted, and, as well, constructed so that there is no disadvantage in switching employers--thus fully transportable.)
Now, with 401Ks, that corporations are shifting to, I think it tends not to have an inflation problem, and maybe even, as people get older on retirement, they tend to be in better shape. (There is, of course, still massive risk of market decline. I think it was to about 1/7th value in the years following 1929.)
I'll toss on another one of my peeves. There is no reason at all to have 401ks be something that corporations have to set up. People at employers without 401ks, and that group especially is composed of less-well-off people, only have an option of an IRA, with much, much lower contribution caps. Obviously, instead of 401ks, there should just be 401k-sized IRAs, with a possibly option for any employer to throw in some sort of match.
(The explanation, I suspect, is that there is more money to be made by the finance industry by handling set up of lots of separate employer plans. However, incompetence of federal legislators, or some different special-interest factor, is another likely possibility in my mind.)
Two essential truths here: The roots of today’s affordability crisis actually lie not in recent price spikes, but in the long-term suppression of workers’ pay. And consumer sentiment is much more affected by the prices themselves, rather than the inflation level.
Productivity gains by labor have not resulted in commensurate wage / income gains to labor . Working harder for less but producing more
causes legitimate frustrations
( social media aside) . The platinum
life stiles of the top 1 percent show little concern for the struggle going on below decks- is it any surprise
then that indicators don’t always reflect attitudes?
On your chart, you may have the green and red lines reversed. Your text says the basic model is green, legend has it as red. Really love your posts, always very insightful, keep it up!
I'm very color blind to these colors and can't tell the difference! I think I fixed it but pls check and let me know.
Thnx
Yup, looks great...I do that quite a bit! Keep up the great work!
Off topic, possible scam alert or something:
I got an email saying:
"Paul Kruggman followed you on Substack" with a picture of Paul Krugman.
Now, the obvious thing is two g's there. Must be some kind of fraud. I cannot tell if the email truly emanates from Substack, or somewhere else.
Maybe a week ago, I got a similar email, this time saying the same thing, except with one g on Krugman.
Then I was able to observe all of my commenting was blocked on Krugman, and as well, all of my comments on Krugman went missing.
(I have jibed about this missing comments in various places, such as within:
https://econjared.substack.com/p/is-the-affordability-crisis-a-crisis/comment/185236687 )
I know Substack has been observed as a place where there are scams going on.
Note: My commenting having been blocked on Krugman's Substack, I can't notify Prof. Krugman. And I see no other way of communicating with his Substack. So, I'll just post the notice of potential scam here on Mr. Bernstein's site, for whatever good it does.
The gap between inflation and the actual cost of living is not a matter of perception but of measurement, power, and political legitimacy. It exposes a deeper epistemic failure in economics itself. What people experience is a sociological reality that economists cannot model: the structural erosion of everyday security caused by permanent shifts in the price level.
While not addressing your exact assertions, I will throw in that I myself am a big fan of terms like "epistemic". Terms with that same root.
"Epistemic virtue" I love. Also, "epistemological mistake", being most often thinking one knows something, when one either does not know but only guesses, or the thing one thinks they know is completely false.
And then, this academic area called "social epistemology". Focusing, instead of what one can know all by themselves ("I see a green field before me--am I hallucinating?, etc.") like old-fashioned regular epistemology, focuses on how people interact when knowledge is involved.
In particular, though rather obvious, the social-epistemological problem all of us have when relying for other people for information in areas where we can't figure it out ourselves has been stated by at least one social epistemologist that I read as:
a) Does the person know what they're talking about?
b) Is the person sincere (i.e. telling the truth)?
These both are not binary. They have degrees, and other complexities. (For example, for (a), a person may be good at some aspect of a problem, but not other aspects. For (b), any person with any political role or political effect may find themselves deciding it is best to leave out a few things.)
I insist that our problems in democracy are largely expressible in terms of this social epistemological problem.
(This can be manipulation of those with poor critical-thinking skills by many politicians and much of the media. It can also be for much-higher-functioning and fully-noble participants with very sound critical-thinking skills, doing their best to figure out "what is true?" on a citizen-in-a-democracy job that is, frankly, too much for any of us.)
I am a huge fan of the “epistemological” Hindu folk tale “The Blind Men and the Elephant”. It is a great metaphor for how we humans construct knowledge from our limited perspectives. If the blind men had pooled the information they gathered rather than argued about who was right, they would have come closer to understanding that elephant they were investigating.
As for critical thinking skills we should all be looking to how Finland’s life long media literacy program is implemented. I love that they use folk tales about tricksters to introduce the idea of false information to the youngest kids. The program clearly works — Fins regularly top the European survey of ability to spot fake news.
https://www.nordicpolicycentre.org.au/media_literacy_education_in_finland
Thanks so much for the helpful link.
I see, within it:
"Following fake news campaigns focussing on immigration, the European Union, and NATO membership, the Finnish Government recognised the need to increase the population’s resilience to digital misinformation."
Not all governments react the way the Finnish government did. Many elites want to maintain manipulatability, as it's much easier and cleaner than having to use violence.
(It is not a unique thought to me that evolution has kept the human race away from a situatation where a high proportion of the population is too smart to be manipulated. Because having genes accumulate so that a bunch of leaders can say "Those people in that other group: they are evil, kill them!" would be a big bonus, preonderance-in-the-genepool-wise.
This is not necessarily a mechanism that could happen only in a godless world. In a world with God, even a Creationist or teleological world, I suppose there could be a similar functioning that a deity is intending.)
Your price levels vs inflation argument is so enlightening—thank you for explaining it so well! Also, I agree with Paul, I think you’ve mixed up the green and red lines in the chart.
I'm very color blind to these colors and can't tell the difference! I think I fixed it but pls check and let me know.
Thnx
You’ve corrected it. 🙂 Thanks again for the terrific insight.
Possibly RFK, Jr. has this partial color-blindness linked to acetaminophen or vaccines. So, do please keep an eye on those destructive behaviors.
It doesn’t help people’s vibes when we keep hearing that millions of jobs are likely to be wiped out by AI and that there is likely a AI bubble on the verge of collapse.
In American Prospect, the Dec. 2025 issue, "The $79 Trillion Heist" is an article by Harold Meyerson. A very big number, $79 trillion. The federal outlays for 2024 were under $6 trillion. The total houshold net worth is $176 trillion, the national annual income is almost $25 trilllion. $79 trillion is more than monumental. How was it stolen? Through wage suppression. Each worker, presumably nonsupervisory, would receive $28,000 more income each year if incomes had matched national growth. That would be $28,000 added onto the median of $55,432, the median for the nonsupervisory workers, or $83,432; and for the median for all workers it would be $28,000 added to $63,128 or $91,128 annually.
Wages for the nonsupervisory worker, "average weekly earnings" were higher in 1973 than in 2025. The economy grew by 140%, inflation adjusted and per capita. See the BLS graph -- https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000031
National income grows by 140%, nonsupervisory workers who are 80% of all workers, see no wage increase ("average weekly earnings"). Disaster.
You could also hunt for the Median Household Income for 1973 and adjust for inflation, the 2025 income was 2% higher than 1973. Meyerson quotes a RAND Corp study done in 2025.
To quote Meyerson:
A RAND Corporation study from earlier this year found that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners received about 67 percent of all taxable income in 1975. In 2019, the last year for which this data was available, they received 46.8 percent. Had that bottom 90 percent continued during the past half-century to make the same share of the national income they’d had in 1975, RAND calculates that by 2023 they would have made an additional $79 trillion. Just in the year 2023, they would have made an additional $3.9 trillion. As the size of the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. workforce is roughly 140 million people, that means that the average earner would have made about $28,000 more in 2023 than they actually did."
The bottom 90% income growth 1946 to 1976 was equal growth as the national growth. "Real" incomes doubled.
That's my comment -- analyze Meyerson's article, he presents some important solutions at the end. My blog is http://benL88.blogspot.com, I have an essay with solutions, the Dec. 2024 essay: Solutions.
Very insightful post. I wonder if there is one additional independent variable that should be included (if only we had a good proxy for it): anxiety about the political and economic environment? That is, might a person who is responding to the survey ascribe their general anxiety about non-price elements of the environment to price elements and their general sentiments? That is, someone who is worried that the implications of the rise of authorianism or the prospect that AI will replace them in their job be influenced by those things when responding to the consumer sentiment survey?
Excellent breakdown, J.B.!
One addition to the Report:
Affordability depends on:
- prices
- wages
- Supply and Demand for components, raw materials--all the stuff that goes into item being afforded.
Best... /g
I initially assumed the red and blue lines diverged at the election since Republicans have been documented as being much more optimistic with a Republican president. But if I’m reading it right, the attitudes started improving before the election. Obviously, not enough to help Harris. Was it because interest rates started going back down in 2023? Less credit card pressure? I think rent was still flying upward at that point, if I remember correctly.
Whatever the reason, this was a really interesting way to look at it. Thanks for pulling it together.
Prices shot up during the pandemic. Larry S blames demand-side issues (generous stimulus spending and a switch in purchases from experiences to goods); Paul K blames supply-side constrictions (higher shipping costs, constrained domestic output). They’re both right. But if demand for Pelotons has been sated, and if shipping costs came down (and social distancing at meat packing plants was eased), shouldn’t prices have fallen somewhat post pandemic?
They clearly haven’t. I doubt I’m the only one who suspects that producers, importers and retailers have been enjoying higher margins. True enough, bird flu and extreme weather events have constrained supply of various commodities. And not all tariffs have been fully passed on to consumers. But I still have this nagging feeling that we’re being had.
I just listened to the cited "NPR Show 1A" discussion, which I found highly worthwhile.
(For others who might be interested in listening, there are 3 other guests, all who seem knowledgeable. It focuses especially on housing and food, but hits the whole affordability, and other components a bit, as well.)
1) In the host's description of Mr. Bernstein, I noticed from the start the missing "for President Biden" with just "for Vice President Biden" (attached to "chief economic advisor"), so I was glad Mr. Bernstein managed to clarify that (some distance into the interview).
2) I had observed there was a place where the White House advisors stand in front of the cameras and talk to the press. I assumed it was somewhere on the White House Lawn, and was pleased to learn the little tidbit that it is the "White House North Lawn" (="WHNL" to insiders.)
I wonder what they do if the advisor has to talk to the press when there is a big thunderstorm going on. I guess they must move it somewhere. (Can't be they would let everyone risk being electrocuted?)
I wonder what will happen to all of the lawns, including the North one, with new, humongous ballroom, that I believe is continuously being enlarged by the president beyond all architectural taste. Will it eat up the North Lawn? The South Lawn? Which lawns will it eat up? Will there be any lawns left?
3) I have expressed in a prior substack comment somewhere on a Bernstein that, as regards housing affordability, I am on the same "we need more supply" side as Mr. Bernstein. (Indeed, all of the guests on the NPR discussion who spoke about housing were on that same side.)
4) For diversity of opinion, I will toss in other people.
Some years ago Paul Krugman opined with same opinion as Mr. Bernstein, tossing in that the problem is, to some extent, us liberals. (It took courage to say that. Who knows how many readers it cost him?)
( https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/opinion/remote-work-housing-prices-covid.html )
“The bad news is that America’s housing affordability crisis has gotten even worse. Rents will probably come down over time in places where housing construction isn’t prevented by excessive regulation. (Sorry, this is one policy area where blue states generally get it wrong while many red states get it right.) But NIMBYism in places like California and, yes, New York will do even more damage in the remote-work era.
The housing story, then, is that the pandemic changed the way we live and work — or, more likely, brought forward changes that were going to happen eventually. This led people to want more space at home. And that’s OK. What we need now is to let markets give people what they want, at a price more people can afford.”
Today, https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/affordability-part-ii , Prof. Krugman added Project 2025 is a different shade of red. Quoting him:
"So we know what to do about housing prices. It won’t be easy politically — and the opposition will come from the right as well as the left. Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 manifesto, is fiercely opposed to government regulations that, say, protect the environment — but rabidly in favor of protecting the right of local governments to block housing development:
'American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.' "
(quoted Project 2025 document: https://whatisproject2025.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-15.pdf)
--
(I continue to read and quote Prof. Krugman, despite the tiny injustice that I feel he, his comment-moderator, or his comment-moderating AI program has done to me. Removing all of my comments from his substack, which I believe were of useful information and arguments, with a few satirical jokes, and further, of taking away my commenting privileges for 30 days! Me, a paid subscriber, without any explanation to me!
Look, see:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hard-landings/comment/179644750
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/doge-was-a-harbinger-of-trumps-assault/comment/181002566
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/vibecessions-part-ii/comment/180534602
Replies to my comments, and "likes", are still there. But the comments themselves have been deleted.
Like the empty frames around the stolen paintings at the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum ( https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/five-frames-left-behind ) !
5) I might as well toss in an actually-differing opinion, from economist Dean Baker, who I guess, from co-authorings, may be an old pal of Mr. Bernstein.
Mr. Baker cites different factors on housing cost than Mr. Bernstein (and also Ezra Klein) here:
https://deanbaker22.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-needs-to-look-more-closely
6) Taking on roughly the role of the aging people going into dotage discussed in Mr. Bernstein's last sentence, but applying it to giving the young people hopefully-wise advice from years of experience, I will toss on about Dean Baker.
Young people may stumble upon that Mr. Baker co-authored a New York Times article with Kevin current White House economics guy Hassett (then at the American Enterprise Institute) some years ago. (2012.)
( https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/the-human-disaster-of-unemployment.html )
Please, young people. Do not try to cancel, or censor. Mr. Baker!
Young people: No, no, no. We don’t censor! We don’t cancel! That’s wrong. That’s not the way to do democracy!
Why, we boomers, we had some disagreements in our day, but never did we censor. It was just the wrong thing.
And, as well, all of your censoring and cancelling has helped cause a reaction on the other side, and look where it got us.
And lookee here at the Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate.
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Look who signed it. Noam Chomsky, Paul Starr. Both liberals. See!
(If this does not stop the young people from trying to cancel or censor Mr. Baker, I will point out that Mr. Baker recently bashed Kevin Hassett, here: https://deanbaker22.substack.com/p/trumps-one-percent-interest-rate
But if I have to do that to stop the mob, then I judge we have a failing democracy!)
In some nations the “outs” create a shadow government mirroring the party in power, our “shadow” government are the Substacker and you and Paul lead the pack. As you are well aware tying Econ data to politics is dicey, although when the NYT food critic writes a glowing four star ⭐️ review of a Japanese 10 seat restaurant at $700 a couple I know we’re heading in the wrong direction. How about an, “If I was in my old job …..”