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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

This paper suffers greatly from US-centrism. There are too few examples of proper Austin-like YIMBY cities in the US for proper statistic analysis.

A more world-wide search would quickly find counter-examples of low-wage high-price cities like Vancouver, BC.

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This is a paper meant to explain what is happening in US cities and will obviously be US-centric.

That'd be nice if it was possible. However it runs into the standard social science problem -- you can't run experiments, so you have to rely on natural experiments. If the natural experiment doesn't exist, you don't have any data and you can't draw conclusions.

This is why research papers are not for the lay person, they are for the people who have the level of training to understand the nuances and make accommodations for it.

It’s a bit unfortunate that the democratization of knowledge, means that everyone is expected to read an NBER paper.

I think twice when I come across one, since it means a very large amount of time and calories are going to go into understanding it.

I think the point that the person you are responding to was trying to make is different - there is no way to actually test any of this, so it could just be all bullshit and no one could really tell.

To which my counterpoint was that it’s not fair to expect people without the training to look at it and realize it’s not bullshit, and to realize they tested and proved the point they made in the paper.

The conversation becomes something about what people can talk about, but not the math in the paper, or the supporting documentation or familiarity with the literature.

They can’t test or prove the point they made in the paper.

The entire field is nearly impossible to distinguish from bullshit - fundamentally.

"Austin-like YIMBY cities" is that a typo? Surely you meant NIMBY?

Nah they mean YIMBY :)

Austin did a great job with opening supply.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/comments/1cxbnq3/yimby_has_ba...

https://therealdeal.com/texas/austin/2024/05/20/austin-forge...

I went to school in Austin back in 2009 and surprisingly, rents for my same college apartment only grew a few % a year since then! Crazy

Or Hong Kong, Singapore, any major Indian metro, etc.

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