321–330 of 352 posts
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I work remote for a startup out of San Jose ;) SV job, BFI house.
Very nice. What about the dating pool? Small? What education/degrees were required for your remote job?
I have a MS in CS, but I am sure a BS would suffice.
Strange concluding sentence about the prospect of an influx of Chinese investors to rekindle rising rents. Is there evidence that such a trend is likely in the near future? I have seen reports that a lot of money is expatriated from China into real estate because it's easy to launder that way. In general is it expected to increase so much that it would have a noticeable impact on rents in the major markets?
Even with the rents decreasing, they are still way to high for most people and adjusted for inflation, far higher than they were 30 years ago. The reason for the high rents are structural -- the use of politics to create artificial shortages in housing by use of zoning density restrictions. This is the deliberate creation of market failures due to "rent seeking" -- use of politics to create artificial scarcity to ben…
Can you explain how illegal immigrants are able to rent in the New York market? Surely the landlords will demand identification and references and would refuse someone who is illegal?
Overall, NYC (and others) do not check papers for public school, health care, ... at least as far as I know. In fact, there was a NYTimes op-ed within the past month where 200 students at Berkeley are illegal immigrants.
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I've been to the Adventurer Hotel which is the first on that list a long, long time ago. I would not recommend it. I had a layover at LAX, their bus pulled up right in front of me, and some kids said get on. The staff, all the girls were from Russia or Poland and the guys were from New Zealand, Australia, and one bloke from England, on the bus made a pit stop at the liqueur store. They bought at least 12 liters of bo…
Man, life was a lot more colorful before we started spending all our time behind a screen.
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Yes, rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Supply and demand also works for buying. Because central banks have ran with ultra-loose monetary policy since forever credit supply is huge and prices detach from wages. What a total mess these guys have created. Easy on the way down, chaos on the way back up.
> rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Are you implying that there's some sort of grand-scale collusion on rent prices? If most rent takers think "hey, the median salary is X so I'll just charge X * 0.33" then what's stopping another rent taker from drastically undercutting that price?
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> rents are set by wages as you have to pay them out of your wages. Are you implying that there's some sort of grand-scale collusion on rent prices? If most rent takers think "hey, the median salary is X so I'll just charge X * 0.33" then what's stopping another rent taker from drastically undercutting that price?
You could argue that home prices are tied to wages and rent is tied to home prices.
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Rents are going down. I am moving this weekend, and in the 2 months I've been looking a bit, it's very, very obvious. At first, it was just that you no longer had to essentially arrive with 3 months of rent in hand and sign on the spot. Next, there was emphasis on how "this is the only property at X price" (which was false on it's face). When we finally signed, the leasing agent told us "if the price is too high, mak…
sf? Which neighborhood?
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Price controls in competitive markets are usually a bad, bad idea. Rent controls, for instance, are famous among economists for managing to both disrupt rent markets while failing to achieve their desired outcome, which is helping poor tenants. The effect of a price ceiling is often just to shrink the supply of any units whose price would be above the price ceiling, while consumer queue themselves. It would be the sa…
> And since the opportunity cost of time of richer folks is lower, not to mention that they're more likely to be socially connected, they end up displacing poorer consumers Your conclusion is correct, but this should say "since the opportunity cost of time for richer folks is higher ". People who earn more have a higher opportunity cost of time, which means (all things equal) that they will have fewer children and ch…
It seems somewhat counter-intuitive, because the high income worker might be much more highly paid than a low income worker, and thus gives up much more in monetary terms than the low income worker. But the value of an additional dollar isn't the same for these two workers, since it's also a function of their present income. An hour work missed could mean a low income worker this week's lunch or his kid's medicine, whereas for a high income worker it often means just a little less money in his savings account.
I won't touch the issue of having children, because I don't think anyone has quite yet successfully tackled human reproduction. But when it comes to commuting, all workers in an would be interested in reducing their commutes. Richer workers can afford higher rents because their wages are higher. But that still doesn't mean that their marginal utility of income is higher than thay of lower paid workers.
It's somewhat unintuitive, because often people go through Econ 101 without trying to understand what a decreasing marginal utility of income means. But in Urban Economics, the falling opportunity cost of time is the mechanism which allows cities to form, first from cottage industries, as the agricultural productivity grows. So it's a standard argument.
The whole overall effect is that queues benefit the richer among the eligible for whatever they're queueing for.
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> And since the opportunity cost of time of richer folks is lower, not to mention that they're more likely to be socially connected, they end up displacing poorer consumers Your conclusion is correct, but this should say "since the opportunity cost of time for richer folks is higher ". People who earn more have a higher opportunity cost of time, which means (all things equal) that they will have fewer children and ch…
I'm sorry to say it, but you're mistaken. The opportunity cost of time is decreasing over income, since the marginal utility of income is also decreasing, and these things should be equal in equilibrium. It seems somewhat counter-intuitive, because the high income worker might be much more highly paid than a low income worker, and thus gives up much more in monetary terms than the low income worker. But the value of…
In a two-good, work-leisure market, the opportunity cost of non-work time is the foregone income. It's not (just) equal at equilibrium; it's equal by definition. The two things that are equal at equilibrium (and only at equilibrium) are the marginal utility of the income and the opportunity cost of working (that is, the marginal value of an extra unit of non-work time). That's not the opportunity cost of the non-work time, which is what we're talking about when we refer to the opportunity cost of time.
> But the value of an additional dollar isn't the same for these two workers, since it's also a function of their present income.
You're confusing the marginal utility with the opportunity cost. There's a function that relates these two concepts, yes, but they're not the same thing, as you can see here:
> Richer workers can afford higher rents because their wages are higher. But that still doesn't mean that their marginal utility of income is higher than thay of lower paid workers.
Nobody said that the marginal utility of income for the higher-paid workers is greater than the marginal utility of income for lower-paid workers. In fact, that's a comparison that can't really be made - utility is explicitly not comparable between two individuals (that's a fairly fundamental axiom of microeconomics). We can say that, as an individual's income increases, the marginal impact of further increases in income decreases, but the comparison you're trying to imply here is a value judgment between two individuals.
However, we can say that the opportunity cost is higher for the higher-paid workers, because that is something that is comparable across individuals - it's dollar-denominated. The opportunity cost of non-work time for both sets of workers is the foregone income, and that will be higher for higher-paid workers (by definition). That does not diminish the importance of what either set of worker might choose to do with an additional $50 (or any fixed lump sum of money), but that's a value judgment and is not the same as the opportunity cost of the work-leisure trade-off (which is an objective measure).
> I won't touch the issue of having children, because I don't think anyone has quite yet successfully tackled human reproduction.
It's pretty well-established that children are inferior goods (in the economic sense - the income-elasticity of demand is less than zero).
> It's somewhat unintuitive, because often people go through Econ 101 without trying to understand what a decreasing marginal utility of income means
I have a degree in economics. I know how diminishing marginal utility works.