Stuff that sounds believable because it “sounded good” and was argued by charismatic people plagued medicine until shockingly recently.
It’s human nature to believe people and your snarky reply is evidence of that. Your gut reaction should be to agree with the comment or call out the author for fabricating stuff, not to dismiss intellectual rigor.
We are given no confidence interval, no error bars, not even a passing nod to the broader Veronese housing market. Two? Why not three? Why not seven?
Dignity, too, goes unmeasured. Are we talking patrician gravitas or the brittle self-importance of guys who name their swords? The line presumes a convenient symmetry where there is almost certainly chaos, over-leveraged family fortunes, and at least one uncle squatting in a basilica basement.
Frankly, I suspect "two households" is just the number Shakespeare could hold in his head without dropping his drink.
- percentages aren't in a published paper
- isn't in a prestigious enough journal to be taken seriously
- hasn't been reproduced to be reliable