Friday, July 17, 2009

Incentives Matter

Excellent post from Environmental and Urban Economics.

Everyone thought that housing prices would only go up - this is not a new insight. However, I never thought of the problem by comparing the housing market to the stock market (as they do). People who believed housing prices would go down had no way to short the market and express that fear - the housing market was in fact a very one-sided thing! Not sure how I missed this insight but thanks to those guys for pointing it out to me.

Guess this is why I am still - and truthfully, always will be - a student.

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Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty