Economic Facts and Fallacies
Rent control laws will attract more buyers because of the lower prices, but they will discourage improvements and new sellers (creators of housing), and usually lead to shortages.
Improving conditions for workers means worsening conditions for employers. This isn’t inherently wrong, but it can lead to a decline in productivity/profitability and fewer jobs.
Open-ended demands are a mandate for ever-expanding government bureaucracies with ever-expanding budgets and powers.
When large projects like home building are financed, delays due to regulation or adjudication can be extremely costly. Even if concerns are dismissed, the delay can incur significant interest expenses.
Even if employers are discriminating strictly over competence and qualifications, a society’s culture around educating men and women can lead to disparities in those qualities, and thus, in income.
Statistics demonstrating disparities in income between the sexes fail to illustrate the reasons for those disparities are largely driven by the personality traits or circumstances of each cohort, not discrimination.
The more competitive the market for labor and an employer’s product is, the higher the cost the employer pays for discriminating in hiring or sales.
The wealth gap between sexes is relatively non-existent at younger ages, but labor force participation drops off significantly for women as they get older and, thus, leads to an experience and income gap in later years.
Statistical disparities are not, by themself, sufficient for concluding discrimination.
College endowments provide a large portion of the funds used for research and faculty incomes, so they are often one of the biggest drivers in attracting the greatest talent.
Colleges tend to focus on research as the primary criterion for professor success and tenure, but focusing on research usually comes at the expense of quality education.
Costs refer to the expenses paid to produce goods and services, whereas prices refer to what the consumers of those goods and services are charged. Accordingly, price controls do not affect producer costs, they affect what consumers pay.
The prestige of Ivy League colleges that attracts students is usually based on the faculty engaging in research who never actually teach those students.
The government subsidizing college tuition is what provides the incentive for tuition to rise.
Increases in individual income can actually drive decreases in household income by supplying members of that household with the means to move into their own place.
Income inequality statistics generally leave out financial aid like welfare, thereby significantly misrepresenting the actual income of low-income individuals.
Statistics suggesting stagnating worker incomes usually fail to account for the growing number of part-time workers and worker benefits, which act as a significant drag on the overall income average. The average income (including benefits) of full-time workers would be more accurate.
The number of middle-class people declines when there is a fixed definition of middle class and incomes are rising over time.
Pay is not a retrospective reward for merit, it is an incentive for contributing to production.
Input and talent are not the measures of value, output and results are.
Racism became a way to justify slavery in places where it was otherwise irreconcilable with the culture.
There is a stark difference between bias/prejudice and actual discrimination.
Political decisions are seldom based on empirical evidence or logic.
Differences rooted in geography, demography, sex, race, or anything else are natural, so one shouldn’t assume those differences are inherently problematic or rooted in discrimination.