Head Empty. No Thoughts

100 - >150 -> 148

So much win

Another chart from the same article which he didn't show

https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/national-rent-data

Surely wages also increased by 30-40%, right?

Getting hit by a car, but it stopped accelerating at 60 kph

rent goes up $1000

rent goes down $500

omg rent is so cheap now!!!

It's not even that it went back down, it just stopped rising. Rent isn't any cheaper that it was last year
- Mine didn't stop rising
- i had some items in my amazon cart. they've just been sitting there for weeks now because i'm avoiding buying from amazon for awhile. $16 total.
  black friday came and the original $16 price tag is now a BLACK FRIDAY DEAL -24% at $16 ONLY FOR PRIME MEMBERS!
  i ignored it. on monday the original $16 then turned into a CYBER MONDAY DEAL -24% at $16.
  legit just checked. all the "deals" are now over. it's still $16...
- Lmao this guy
  fuck you i got mine
“Just get a raise to catch up, if you can’t then that’s your own problem.”
- But don't everyone do it at once, or we'll have inflation again and I'll have to raise your rent.
I would fight someone for 1000 dollar rent
- I think their example means the rent goes up by $1000.

This type of guy fascinates the hell out of me, getting owned so hard all the time by so many people, constantly being proven stupid and wrong, but he lacks the self-awareness to recognize how embarrassing it all is for him.

i kind of wish i had that capacity, it must be nice to live shamelessly
- Yeah, I'm sure he's happier than I am despite being wrong all the time
I think he is intentionally obtuse and is trying to push landlords talking points
- He's like the chief "owned" guy on social media lately, on more than just landlord issues though

The thing I find most fascinating about the liberal worship of the economy, is how they'll try to describe it like some vengeful, angry god we must appease by being "understanding" and saying the magic words "The economy is doing great."

Maybe rents have dropped slightly because landlords realised they got so greedy they couldn't actually find tenants anymore and had to dial it back so they could continue to exploit people?

They haven't though, what it measures is the rate of increase. It literally shows rents getting higher! Just not as fast as before.
- Doesn't the last little dip show a small decrease?
  So if in 2020 someone paid $1000 in rent, in 2021-22 it rose by 20% to $1200, then dropped maybe 2% in 2023 down to around $1176 or so.
  That's my understanding of it, please tell me if I'm not getting it, math was never something I was great at.
the economy as some vengeful, angry god we must appease
check these out
https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/
https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/#automatic-subject
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-04-27

This is so fucking idiotic.

I hate hearing about rent 'deflation' from these econ bros. I've never experienced my rent or know anyone whose rent was reduced, except by court order, but almost everyone's rent increases per year like clockwork. Maybe the only way to get a cheaper rent is to move at the right time but then you have to pay the cost of moving, which is expensive, not to mention time and energy consuming. But you can't afford to move if you're paying exorbitant rents every month either, and moving to a place that is $500 cheaper is eventually not going to last because of rent increases and depending on how far and how much you have to move then you may have just burned a lot of the long-term potential savings upfront. These hot takes over some dumb graph is useless or unrealistic to most people, since it probably includes the lowest rents in the most economically abandoned parts of a large country. Most people have to face an inordinate monthly rent bill even in moderate cities, not to mention the largest metropolises like New York and Los Angeles, no one gives a shit about the national statistic when their local and immediate condition is costing half or more of their monthly income and is only getting worse. It's like that guy claiming inflation was defeated if you don't consider all the necessary costs people have to pay, like housing or food, fuck you.

These apologists should be among the first in the gulags.

- I'm honestly happy for you, and I believe you, but you're an extremely rare anomaly which I've never heard of actually happening but I guess it does happen then. Kind of like ancaps with Milei.
  Out of curiosity, do you live in a major city or do you have rent control? I'm guessing from what you said about your management that they didn't give you an explanation as to why it was reduced, it could have likely been a glitch since some companies use algorithms to set their rents. I hope they don't raise your rent next year but I'd be very interested to hear a follow-up.
- this is the first time i've ever heard of anyone ever having their rent go down. the gods have smiled upon you.
  use the 50$ to burn your landlords house down.

Here's a graph for ya

turns graph upside down
see? idiot
- tis i who is the idiot
Chuds: YUP LOOKS ALL GOOD TO ME
- Chuds aren't the ones writing daily op eds explaining why you're an idiot if you don't think the economy is doing great.

If this was happening in China, Westoid China Watchers would be publishing doom and gloom articles about how the collapsing property sector is going to cause the Chinese economy to go into a death spiral.

I know this because that's exactly what's happening right now.

Even funnier when you consider that housing and rent is about 15-20% of US GDP, including "virtual rent", which is imaginary rent which is counted in GDP. Literally imaginary in that it measures home owners living in their own houses paying rent to themselves.

- USA has higher GDP than China... If we measure in nominal US dollars and pretend that every homeowner in the US pays themselves rent.
  I wonder how much China's GDP would increase if you counted all the homeowners (which is like 80% of the population) as paying fictional rent to themselves.
- It is capital that is being put to productive use, I think including it in gdp is fair
i am dying of laughter after finding out that this is actually true
Economics is not a science, it is your moral duty to be anti-intellectual towards economics.

"Well sure rent increased by 20% for a year there but now it's dropping by 2%! That balances it out!"

Also goddamn wish I got an 18% raise every year.

For a second, i thought the graph was

in the thumbnail.

Smartest "economics" liberals don't understand that rates turn into prices by accumulating them over time lol.

That "one-time" spike, cumulatively, looks like a big permanent rent increase.

The rate of increase is falling! Why aren't you people happy? That massive rent increase was just a one time thing (until your lease is up for renewal)

Meanwhile...

lol, I googled to see how bad it is in California - I pay 70%, and have for years - and I found a "study" by Forbes that claims California is the second-highest state at . . . 28.47%. How is that possible? Oh, here it is - they calculate it based on the average California annual income instead of the median renter income.
https://ktla.com/news/california/californians-spend-second-highest-percent-in-rent-study-says/
Here's a better one that shows that 28.8% of Californians are "severely cost-burdened" and pay more than 50% of their income on rent:
https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/throughout-the-state-californians-pay-more-than-they-can-afford-for-housing/
- you pay 70% of your income in rent? holy shit
Look it didn't go up as much this year. Bidenomics stays winning!
Why are you complaining?

the psychopathic tankies who feel the need to turn every debate over the economy into a blizzard of abuse think they're winning, because they're making more death threats, but what they're actually doing is demonstrating why views on the economy have become so distorted

logiclords always seem to think that you can't be correct unless you're nice.

No offense, but it’s been social media and peer information bubbles from the very start, some of us identified the problem immediately. “Mortgages and interest rates,” by contrast, are being adopted as an explanation because it’s the last alternative even remaining

Maybe you're just in a cope bubble of people who are well off and can abstract economic struggle into a 2016-esque theory of your social media grievances. You've been working at a university think-tank for 10 years. Get real.

When your data doesn't confirm the point you want to make, just add more derivatives

Smuggest liberal's understanding of the fundamental theorem of calculus

I am a little confused by what the graph actually represents in terms of net change. Is this the first derivative of the actual graph, so to speak?
- I'm not sure if the "Rent Index" is any legitimate metric or just some abstraction invented by ApartmentList, which is an online marketplace for housing (lol).
  It does look like first derivative of rent cost to me. Net change in rent would be the signed area under this curve.

Communists, cursed by the ability to do math.

the rapid spike in rents was a one-time thing

for all economists

This guy isn't an economist he's a Twitter dipshit

idiots 20% increase is countered by 5% decrease it’s simple math

That's cool. I'm not voting for Joe Biden but thank you for the graph.

I keep getting this guys posts on twitter and it's genuinely impressive to be so consistently wrong. Every time I hear about a new thing and see his position I just go for whatever is opposed to that, 100% track record so far

New Jim Cramer

"Citizen remain calm, rents are leveling off at astronomically out of reach."

"We have generously let six fig earning have-nots rent from us instead of our usual target demographic of trust fund babies of multimillionaires. Why are you taking my generosity for granted, peasant?"

So, this guy is saying my rent is lower now?

gonna tell my landlord they have to charge me less because just look at this graph
- That's what the economy says they have to do!

literally every word of this is false.

I don’t think people realize how incredibly lucky Biden has been.

The Biden administration’s initial strategy was to raise the interest rates to induce unemployment to curb inflation (based on neoclassical thinking, which everyone here already knows is wrong).

However, contrary to what they had anticipated, the interest rate hikes have caused the interest payment from US treasury to pump out a gigantic ~$1.2-1.5 trillion dollars this year! The money mostly went to the rich people, but the trickle down of the crumbs have been enough to keep the economy staying afloat. This meant unemployment were kept low and consumers continued to spend. The inflation was mostly caused by supply chain issues, so it was already transitory in nature regardless of whether there was Fed rate hikes or not.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a 12-month lag when it comes to housing price data, and new leases have their rents going down (as shown in the quoted tweet here), which means that high rent is still being counted in the CPI print and this will come down over the next few months.

But the inflation is practically over. Biden survived. The rich people have won. The poor people have lost the most. In fact, African Americans have seen unemployment increased, while white families (especially in the top 10%) saw their share of wealth increased. The economy didn’t crash, and all the right wing economists who predicted a recession have got it all wrong (which is what I have been saying throughout this year - no recession in the US!).

raise the interest rates to induce unemployment to curb inflation
I want to expand on this because I was taught this in third year economics in college. This is what the Philips Curve looks like in theory
This is what it looks like in practice
So lmao, nice one economists, this is just obviously false yet its treated like untouchable science