I want to share, because this is a great book, but I won't, because I want to punch the author of the review in the face.

In other words, in a sufficiently screwed-up system, doubling everyone’s productivity is a net loss. The gains get eaten up by proportional increases in the prices of positional goods, and you’re left with nothing except complete dependence on a shaky advantage that could disappear at any time.

I don’t know exactly how serious I was. But Elizabeth Warren makes almost the exact same argument in The Two-Income Trap, and I’m pretty sure she’s very serious.

NO SHE FUCKING DOES NOT. She makes the argument that tying school district funding to property taxes has artificially inflated housing values for some while denying funding for the districts that need it the most.

The productivity argument is made in Methland as the reason Americans love speed so much - it allows us to work harder faster more which suits our "protestant work ethic" but Elizabeth Warren says fuckall about productivity. She says everything about flexibility and choice and options which the author of the review just skates on by.

Around a vague period of time centering on the 1970s, a couple of things happened.

First, the cities became viewed, rightly or wrongly, as terribly unsafe ghettos full of drugs and gangs and violence.

This is the author adding random made-up shit that isn't in Warren's Book. The "vague period of time" covered by the reviewer is commonly known as white flight but that wasn't the problem. The problem, as laid out by Warren, is that homeownership became subsidized by the federal government which led to a spiral of expense and the need to earn two incomes to pay for better houses in better school districts which led to vulnerability to shocks which is what the book is about.

Warren is a Harvard professor. Think about that for a second.

No, you think about that for a second, particularly when you claim that her original research, well-cited in the book, answers all your mealy-mouthed suggestions of her failure of analysis when you link to two papers only tangentially related to the question at hand.

A lot of the causal claims here are very complicated and iffy at best, but here are two numbers that cuts through a lot of the debate: between 1984 and 2001, the median home value of the average childless couple increased 26%; the median home value of the average couple with children shot up 78%. So families are spending a lot more on houses nowadays and the disparity seems to be heavily concentrated in families with children.

Yeah, like that bit you quoted before this bit:

Likewise, studies that look for effects of school district on house price – usually by looking at otherwise identical houses on either side of a school district line – generally find modest effects

Bitch, the woman did a study in which she examined home prices in school districts before and after a charter school was announced - not built, announced. Original data. Original research. STFU.

Her proposed solutions are also all over the map.

No, they aren't. She advocates for the creation of a consumer credit protection bureau to protect consumers against fraudulent and predatory lending and credit practices and she advocates for the federal (rather than local) funding of schools.

That's it.

Two things.

But aside from doing some legal work to solve the bankruptcy crisis, we need some science work as well. The question is: are good school districts really that important?

I can’t find great research on this at the school district level.

BITCH YOU JUST READ A BOOK ABOUT IT

What I really want is Elizabeth Warren vs. Rand Paul 2016.

You really could have put that down as the first sentence and saved me the trouble.

Why are we all orgazmotron over slatestarcodex again? Because it mostly stinks of alt-right pseudointellectual posturing.