lthornberry

Princeton prides themselves on being a top-tier research university where teaching is taken seriously. That's different from being a teaching university. They spend a ton of money on research, and faculty have much lighter teaching loads than almost anywhere else.

They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.

$10 billion per month is far, far less than either 1) the economic losses of the pandemic to society, or 2) the amount of money the pandemic is costing the government. I have no knowledge on whether it's feasible, but if it significantly reduced the impact of the pandemic, the economic decision is easy.

I can't comment on the others, but I'm a trained historian, and hating Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably the single thing that unites our field. It's vastly oversimplified, and gives anyone who reads it the idea that they understand the major forces shaping world history while ignoring most of the things that historians agree are more important than environmental determinism in that process.

I'd settle for suburban development not being required (through maximum density zoning laws) or subsidized (through disproportionate spending on suburban infrastructure).

Much of your value is in the underlying cost of land. More permissive development rules would increase the value of your land, because it would be possible for a developer to buy it and build more units of housing on it.

You are eliding two different kinds of goods here: units of housing, and land. The average price of the former would presumably decrease. The average price of the latter would presumably increase, since loosened restrictions on development would make it possible to build more units of housing on a given lot. For current owners of single family houses, it's likely that the land price effect would outweigh the unit effect, although there will be exceptions (the dynamics of exurbs will be different from those of central areas, for example).

See my comment above, but the economics of increasing supply are actually much more nuanced, and the majority of current owners would probably not see the value of their assets eroded.

Increased development wouldn't necessarily devalue you asset, particularly if it's a single family house or a condo in a relatively low-density development.

Right now, the high cost of housing in the Bay Area is largely due to a couple of factors: 1 - high cost of labor. Rezoning won't change that. 2 - restrictions on right to build. Rezoning will reduce this. 3 - high cost of land. Rezoning will increase this, by making it possible to build more units of housing on a given area of land.

For most current homeowners, it's likely that 3 will outweigh 2. Developers will buy up some portion of single family housing stock (and low-density multifamily stock) to rebuild the lots with denser housing. That process will both increase demand and reduce supply of those types of housing, resulting in price increases.

At the same time, the average unit of housing will cost less, because there will be many more condos/apartments available. Owners of high-density condos would be the most vulnerable to seeing their asset values decrease. However, building big condo buildings is still going to be a complicated endeavor, so price adjustments will happen slowly over time. No one's going to get hosed, although their asset prices might go up more slowly over time than otherwise, or even be eroded by inflation in the long term.

At the same time, many of those condo owners will still come out ahead. They may be able to upgrade to a nicer condo than they otherwise could have afforded. They may also benefit from the second-order effects of lower average housing prices, in the form of reduced costs for non-housing items. If they run a business, it will be easier for them to attract and retain workers. Schools and other public services will also be better able to attract and retain quality staff, at a lower wage bill. Etc.

The BA isn't "full" by any reasonable measure. See this list of US cities by population density for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d.... San Francisco is 21st on the list, at 17,246 people per sq mi; the next densest city in the Bay Area is Daly City, which is 49th at 13,703 people per sq mi.

By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has 18,297.

There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if denser housing is allowed.

I live in flyover country, and rented single family homes here with no problem until we finally bought a year ago. It's true that there's a smaller stock of rentals, but there are more than your example suggests. I'd bet that there are lots of rentals in Westerville, OH that aren't coming up in your search, because they are rented through other mechanisms (anything from Craigslist to a sign in front of the house to locally-specific websites). It's true that fewer people are looking to rent, because buying is more accessible to the median family here than on the coasts, but renting is absolutely a thing that people do.

Also, mortgage is REALLY not the only cost of home ownership. I own a house worth about $200,000. My mortgage payment is about 850/month, my taxes are about 550/month, insurance is 60, and I budget 300/month for maintenance. It would cost me 1600 to rent an equivalent house, so I'm paying more on a monthly basis to own than I would to rent. Some of that is equity, true, which is why we bought. On the other hand, when/if we sell, we'll be paying a realtor $12,000 for the privilege, so we'll have to live here awhile before the equity gains outweigh the transaction costs.

For anyone interested in this story, or in the politics of biometric identification more broadly, you should get your hands on a copy of Keith Breckenridge's new book, The Biometric State, which is a history of the South African government's efforts to create a biometric identification system to help enforce racial legislation. Breckenridge argues that these efforts mostly failed, but set the stage for the post-apartheid use of biometrics to facilitate South Africa's social grant payments system (many, many poor South Africans live on government cash payments, mostly old age pensions or child grants). He further argues that the technology developed in South Africa is now being exported elsewhere in the developing world, where similar grant systems are used to justify increasingly intensive population registration and surveillance programs.

You don't know if people will divorce or not until 1) they get a divorce or 2) one of them dies instead. As a result, we can only reliably calculate this percentage for the cohort of couples who married 50+ years ago. We have many reasons to assume that couples marrying now, or who married ten years ago, will not divorce at the same rate as those who married 50 years ago. As another poster says, we can estimate based on historical comparisons and other data. The NY Times article referenced in the link shows some of that: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-div.... But we can't measure it directly. And we may get surprised - the number of people currently divorcing in their 50s and older is at a historic high, which wouldn't have been predicted by comparisons to previous cohorts.

Science has shown it's not bad for children: http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx?item=11

People who continue to make this argument are ignoring a very well-established conclusion in the social science research.

I actually agree with your proposal to get the state out of recognizing marriage (from what I suspect is a diametrically opposed political position). But you need to acknowledge that this would mean massive changes in many, many aspects of government policy. In the United States, state recognition of marriage is built into our tax structure, immigration policy, all aspects of social security, the regulation of trusts and estates, health care...the list is pretty much endless. Unless and until we change all of those policies, the failure to recognize same-sex marriages is discriminatory.

Even if it's not bad planning, the business is the more appropriate party to bear the risk of unexpected slow times than the employee. The employee has already reserved the time in her schedule because she's been told that she will be working then. Even if it turns out her works is not needed, she should be paid for those hours.

This question might have been to me - I try only to buy reasonably ethically made clothing, and figure on paying up to a 50% or so premium for it. I buy a lot of Patagonia and Ibex, but dress shirts are a problem (suits would be too, but luckily I don't have to deal with that very often). I do think that new models of manufacturing have the potential to ameliorate some of the ethical problems as well, by shrinking the supply chain back down so that retailers actually have some idea of what's going on in their factories. Everlane is an example of what I'm thinking about, but I didn't love the shirt I ordered from there, and they only have S/M/L sizing.

This looks very cool - enough that I finally created an account to ask you a question. Can you tell me a bit about the production process for the shirts? Are they made in the US? If overseas, what kind of assurances do you have about working conditions, etc in the factory? If you can vouch for decent working conditions, it would be a big selling point for me (and, I think, for many others).