Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The newspapers are full of stories about politicians frantically searching for a way to prevent foreclosures and dramatic declines in the price of houses across the United States. The thinking seems to be that high house prices are good for the economy. Maybe they are good for the banks and Wall Street firms who lent money on the theory that a crummy 100-year-old wooden house was worth $1 million. It is tough to see how high house prices are good for the economy as a whole and for job growth.

Suppose that I want to employ a woman who supports a family of four in California, Boston, or New York City. I have to pay her enough that she can afford to buy or rent a three-bedroom place to live. If that three-bedroom place costs $1 or $2 million, I will have to pay her quite a lot of money simply so that she can survive. I might find that a worker in Guadalajara, Bangalore, or Shanghai could do the job for less than half the salary and yet live quite comfortably. The next time that I get a big tax break from the Federales, therefore, I invest it in a new office somewhere that has a reasonable cost of housing and therefore a reasonable cost of labor.

We spent most of our investment capital over the last ten years building huge and luxurious houses. Americans were by far the best-housed people in the world before, but now many of us are truly living like kings. Does this help our international competitiveness? Does an employer care that we can go home to a 6,000 square foot McMansion and watch a 60″ TV in our media room? I don’t see why the employer would care. In fact, an employer would probably prefer that his workers be housed in sufficiently squalid conditions that employees were encouraged to linger in the office. Certainly the employer doesn’t want to have to pay a worker extra just so that he or she can afford to pay rent or mortgage in an artificially inflated housing market.

Reporters and pundits are saying that government intervention in the housing market is inevitable. As we hand out tax dollars to ensure that $1 million houses are still priced at $1 million, let’s not forget to hand out some more tax dollars to employers as an incentive for them to keep hiring Americans who need to pay a $70,000 per year mortgage.

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Congress has decided to leave no house price speculator behind: “Homebuilders get breaks from Congress.”

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“Playing the Housing Blame Game” by David Leonhardt is an interesting New York Times story on what happens when you use tax policy to encourage people to spend a lot of money on houses instead of investing it in businesses. It turns out that you end up with a country with spectacularly expensive houses and feeble job growth.

Our government seems so plodding and ineffective most of the time that it is tough to remember how powerful it is.

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The Daily Mail shows some newly discovered photos of German officials enjoying life at the Auschwitz death camp in 1944 and 1945. The album belonged to a senior officer, Karl Hocker, who worked in a bank prior to World War II and returned to his career after the war.

The photos live in a Washington, D.C. museum, which has a crummy Web page devoted to them with some low-res photos.

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Here’s an important video for understanding how tomorrow’s job market is likely to work: small-size WMV format | even smaller YouTube version

If you’re interested in Alaska, brown bears, or hand-to-hand combat, this video should prove useful.

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Americans are often chided for a low savings rate. We would be better off if we saved, supposedly. Instead of taking a luxury vacation or buying a beach house, we loan money to bank or invest it in a business. They use that money productively and give us back a nice return on investment so that we can, at some point in the future, take two vacations or buy a much nicer beach house.

Consumers in the past decade or so have not behaved as though they believed this pitch. They borrowed the maximum that they could out of their home equity and went off to Europe. They spent every dime that they earned and every dime that banks would lend them. They behaved as though they believed that money invested in the stock market would be stolen by managers running the companies. They spent as though they believed beach houses and European vacations would rise in cost much faster than the stock market.

It now appears that Wall Street agrees with these folks. The yield on 5-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) has gone negative (story). If you give the government $1000 today, they will give you back $900 and change in 2013. Whatever they give you back will be adjusted for domestic inflation, at the officially published rate, so in theory your spending power in 2013 will only be slightly smaller than it is today. But for the average thing that you might want to buy, you are more likely to be able to buy it right now than if you bought TIPS and waited five years.

A friend who is a professional money manager says that you should expect the yield on every form of investment to converge to LIBOR. In other words, there is no reason to believe that other investments will return more than these negative-yield TIPS. They might appear to yield more right now, but that is only because we are underestimating inflation.

Due to the decreasing marginal utility of income, i.e., that $1 spent on top of $150,000 brings less enjoyment than the same dollar spent on top of $15,000, it makes sense to save a bit for retirement. Otherwise, perhaps anyone with a steady income should party on. What if disability or death interferes with that steady income? One can buy insurance against these unlikely events and that insurance might well be cheaper than the haircut you’re going to take as an investor in TIPS or any other publicly traded instrument.

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The Justice Department has approved the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio (story). That leaves the Federal Communications Commission as the last line of defense for consumers. The main argument that the Justice Department used to grant these folks a monopoly on satellite radio is that it isn’t a monopoly on music. A person could use an MP3 player, listen to standard AM and FM stations, or hire a violinist to sit in the back seat of his or her car.

What has been lost in the press coverage of this event is that XM and Sirius are the only companies equipped to offer nationwide data broadcast services. Each 64 kbps data stream could be used for a music channel or to broadcast aviation weather, traffic jam information, or any other data important enough for people to pay. These data channels are more lucrative than the music channels. Aviation weather costs $50 per month for one channel, none of which need be paid out as a royalty because the information is all provided free by the federal government. Traffic information is $10 per month for one channel. Music costs about $13 per month for 100 channels.

Will there be any hope of competition once the merger goes through? The mobile phone networks don’t provide adequate coverage for many uses, such as aviation. The cost of launching new satellites would be prohibitive and any new entrant to the market would have to content with the fact that XM/Sirius has exclusive agreements with popular sources such as Howard Stern, NPR, and various sports leagues. Our government, saddled with a $3 trillion bill for making Iraq safe for Iraqis, seems unlikely to attempt any kind of public wireless Internet.

I predict that the cost to consumers of this merger will be at least a doubling of the long-term rates paid for data provided via satellite. That will discourage a lot of people from signing up for traffic information, which will lead to less efficient use of our road network, thus increasing our consumption of oil from countries that hate us, thus increasing our military expenditures to keep those countries under our thumb. CO2 emissions and other forms of pollution will also be increased. Work time will be lost as Americans are stuck in traffic, thus reducing our GDP and our competitiveness with more efficient countries. In the air, the high price of weather already keeps a lot of pilots from subscribing; the $600/month is nothing for jet owners, but is about equal to the cost of insurance or maintenance on an old Cessna. There will be some additional deaths each year due to people flying into bad weather that they could have learned about.

[These are also sad times for audiophiles. With XM and Sirius competing, there was some hope that eventually one would offer improved audio quality on at least some stations. With the two combined, it will be “any quality you want, as long as it is the muddy sound from 64 kbps and the CODEC that we designed in the late 1990s” (compare this to the 128 kbps of a standard MP3 stream or 192 kbps for a somewhat better MP3).]

If we must give a company a monopoly on satellite audio, it is a shame that the Federales didn’t say “You can have your radio monopoly, but you have to carry at cost any data that touches on public safety or environmental quality.”

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The indirect route from Boston to Cincinnati goes right by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. We stopped for a visit today.

The house was commissioned in the mid-1930s by Edgar J. Kaufmann, owner of a big Pittsburgh department store and passionate about preserving and enjoying the mountains southeast of the big city. According to his biographers Wright hated Jews. Ironically, however, he did his most famous works for Kaufmann and Solomon Guggenheim (the museum in New York). Kaufmann approached Wright with a budget of $50,000; the house eventually cost over $150,000, making it roughly 15X more costly per square foot than conventional architecture of the day.

According to an exhibit in the cafe (excellent), Wright did not specify adequate structural strength for the famous cantilevers of Fallingwater, but fortunately Kaufmann independently engaged a structural engineer who slipped in a vastly increased quantity of steel reinforcement. If not for Kaufmann and the engineer, Fallingwater would have fallen into the water many decades ago. (When Wright found out about the extra steel, he was enraged, but eventually things were patched up.)

The house itself is fairly small by current standards, about 2500 square feet of interior space. The only room that seems spacious is the livingroom/diningroom. There are windows everywhere, but Wright forgot to put in screens, which must have made the place miserable during mosquito season. All of the other rooms and passageways are far too small for contemporary humans, whose tall stature would have them hitting the ceilings and whose obese bodies would barely fit through doors and halls.

According to the tour guide, Frank Lloyd Wright wanted the entire house covered in gold leaf. Kaufmann balked at the cost and, perhaps, the ostentation at a time when most of his countrymen were still suffering from the Great Depression. The house ended up being painted more or less the color that you see today. It was interesting that Wright, so far ahead of his time in many areas, was apparently able to predict the hip-hop aesthetic.

We also visited Kentuck Knob, a beautifully crafted 2200 square foot house on a nearby hilltop. This was built in the 1950s at a staggering-for-the-time cost. The house has a lot of interesting angles and great lighting.

Both houses are well worth visiting if only to see what it might look like if we put a lot of care into designing houses.

What struck me after touring these Wright monuments is the same thing that struck me after visiting the Gropius house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. How come none of these ideas are available in 99 percent of houses being built today? Wright did great things with corners and interesting polygonal shapes for rooms. Developers build houses where each room is a big rectangular box. Wright did interesting things with indirect lighting. Developers build houses where each room has a light in the center of the ceiling. If the ideas of the modern architects are so great, how come virtually no home builder has found it economic to implement any of them? It might add a few percent to the cost of construction to build things in a Wright-esque manner, but they could potentially sell at a 20 or 30 percent premium if buyers valued the design.

Is the conclusion that buyers don’t value this kind of design and that we all want to live in a standard colonial house?

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A friend said the other day that a lot of economists were worried that the U.S. was becoming like Japan in the 1990s, with burst stock market and real estate bubbles and slow growth despite near-zero interest rates. I replied “Yes, we could be just like Japan, but without the obsession with quality, reverence for craftmanship, strong work ethic, high achievement in math and science, and low crime rate.”

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Some interesting facts from this story about the new presidential helicopter:

• each of the 28 helicopters will cost $400 million, more than a Boeing 747 tricked out to serve as Air Force One
• the contract was awarded in 2005 and the first helicopter will be delivered in 2010, despite the fact that these are basically EH101s, a design first flown in 1987 (the Chinese could probably build 10 cities for 5 million people each in the same five year period)

What would be truly incredibly would be a president of the U.S. staying at his or her desk in the White House so that 28 helicopters were not needed…

[Note that this is the same contract that stirred up a lot of shock and horror at Sikorsky when it was awarded. Every preceding Marine One helicopter had been designed and built in the U.S. Note further that the actual mission of Marine One, transporting a few people from the White House to an airport, could be accomplished with a handful of Robinson R44s, the price of which was raised this year to $320,000 (most are sold overseas). The Robinson doesn’t have the same anti-missile defenses as the monstrous EH101, but on the other hand it presents a much smaller RADAR target and also a much smaller heat signature (one piston engine instead of three massive jet engines).]

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