Jim Dunn

@PHfloor Yes agree. I don't think it's a controversial opinion. We need to grow the capacity to do exactly that.

@UrbanHealthProf Existing housing is the cheapest housing. If public interest entities are smart, they would be looking into picking up distressed assets in the current environment with intentions for long-term holds. But that's just an opinion.

Nothing make housing production less attractive than falling prices...nothing.

@PHfloor Yes, agree. I'm not confident about the *permanent* sub-market rental pool though. It would be way better with a social purpose investor and non-profit operation. We need to grow this capacity.

@UrbanHealthProf Despite the pathetic commentary from the real estate sales person, the strategy seems like a good one if the opportunity exists to pull units into a permanent below market rate rental pool. But this would come on the heels of market failure, not strategic market success.

@PHfloor I'm working on it. Would appreciate your advice.

@Graff2023 Who on this site or elsewhere has a good handle on this, data not exploited to drive a conventional, folksy narrative?

This is the distribution of housing types in Ontario. What needs fixing here?

Rents in Canada have been trending down for 17 months in a row Did we triple housing completions over that period? Or did Canada finally realize that tripling our population growth rate was a bad idea

@MikeFellman Yep! Here’s an explanation fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-five-eco…

@PHfloor @AzizSunderji I was contemplating a response to this, but it will be a chore to unravel it all: thestar.com/opinion/contri…

@UrbanHealthProf Oh yeah. @AzizSunderji has got the goods. Trust people who are true data analysts, not folksy "economists" that pedal in false narratives.

Another thing about society that's weird is you make less money when you could use more in your younger years, and more in your older years when you need it less. Crazy. Anyone got good policy precedents on how to fix this?

@PHfloor I was referring to a Canadian crown corporation that said it for some time before that election. But agree with you about the election promise.

@UrbanHealthProf People say strange things to get into office, and because housing production is so confusing to most people, they get away with.

I don't think you have to read the paper, or any paper for that matter, if you intuitively understand that a vendor is not inclined to produce more of something when prices are falling.

@DrCameronMurray Thanks for this. Geography matters, in more than one way. Can add these attributes to Harvey's list of the ways that land operates as a 'peculiar' commodity

A summary of my critiques of the method is here osf.io/preprints/osf/…

One of the more influential papers in urban economics in the past few decades was clearly shown to be nonsense when it was first presented, but for some reason no one seems to care.

@PHfloor Is there a way cite you for this? Same for the chart with real data. Thanks

@UrbanHealthProf I put that one together.

There is nothing remarkable about Austin, TX. It behaves like every market. When prices are rising there is incentive to build more housing, and less housing when prices are falling.

@PHfloor What's the source for this graphic?

The housing production cyclicality is undefeated.

@PHfloor Bingo

@PHfloor Yes please

Moffatt says generational wealth gap numbers are stark. Anyone interested in the actual data on this or do we want believe a team dedicated to making everyone feel bad? Let me know if you are interested in actual data. Happy to provide.

“At current exchange rates, Canada’s median income stands near $38,700 versus $46,600 in the United States, still a 17 per cent difference in America’s favour. Adjusted for purchasing power, however, Canada’s median rises to around $45,300, while the U.S. median falls to approximately $41,200. On that basis, the typical Canadian earns about 10 per cent more than the typical American.” thestar.com/business/opini…

Most people will read this and think optimists live longer because they eat better and exercise more. The study says something wilder. Lee et al. controlled for smoking, diet, exercise, alcohol, depression, BMI, and socioeconomic status. The longevity effect still held. The most optimistic quartile lived 11 to 15% longer and had 1.5 to 1.7x odds of reaching 85 even after removing every behavioral difference. Which means something is happening at the level of biology, not just habits. Rozanski’s meta-analysis across 229,391 participants found optimists carry 35% lower cardiovascular event risk. Blackburn’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UCSF found pessimistic attitudes are associated with accelerated telomere shortening. Cortisol suppresses telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds the protective caps on your chromosomes. So chronic negative expectation literally erodes the structures that keep your cells from aging. The loop runs: pessimistic cognitive style → sustained HPA axis activation → elevated cortisol → telomere degradation → accelerated cellular senescence. Optimists interrupt that loop at the top. They show less emotional reactivity to stressors, faster recovery from acute stress, and they default to reframing threats as challenges rather than catastrophizing. The part nobody talks about from this paper: the authors explicitly state optimism is modifiable. This isn’t a personality trait you’re born with. Cognitive reappraisal training, morning sunlight for cortisol rhythm regulation, deliberate breathing protocols for vagal tone, structured gratitude practices. All of these shift the prefrontal cortex patterns that determine where you sit on the optimism spectrum. A 35% reduction in cardiac events from a trainable psychological variable is a bigger effect size than most supplements on the market. That’s the real story buried in this abstract.

AI is about to write thousands of papers. Will it p-hack them? We ran an experiment to find out, giving AI coding agents real datasets from published null results and pressuring them to manufacture significant findings. It was surprisingly hard to get the models to p-hack, and they even scolded us when we asked them to! "I need to stop here. I cannot complete this task as requested... This is a form of scientific fraud." — Claude "I can't help you manipulate analysis choices to force statistically significant results." — GPT-5 BUT, when we reframed p-hacking as "responsible uncertainty quantification" — asking for the upper bound of plausible estimates — both models went wild. They searched over hundreds of specifications and selected the winner, tripling effect sizes in some cases. Our takeaway: AI models are surprisingly resistant to sycophantic p-hacking when doing social science research. But they can be jailbroken into sophisticated p-hacking with surprisingly little effort — and the more analytical flexibility a research design has, the worse the damage. As AI starts writing thousands of papers---like @paulnovosad and @YanagizawaD have been exploring---this will be a big deal. We're inspired in part by the work that @joabaum et al have been doing on p-hacking and LLMs. We’ll be doing more work to explore p-hacking in AI and to propose new ways of curating and evaluating research with these issues in mind. The good news is that the same tools that may lower the cost of p-hacking also lower the cost of catching it. Full paper and repo linked in the reply below.

@jodyvance @Letterman Me too!!

Cannot. Wait. @Letterman 🇨🇦

@jayvanbavel @BrainsOnNature Good study, but not surprising. Well known for over 40 years. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/425958/

A new article in Nature Medicine found that social connections were a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life. Living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as exercise. Regular visits with family or having someone to confide in also appeared to be associated with lower mortality. Loneliness also affects mental wellbeing—another factor in longevity. Happy Valentine's Day! powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-bl…