The black pill about that story isn't that a (crappy) preprint exists, it's that it got coverage in the press and was viral on social sites.

Just look through the comments on any post about housing or immigration and you will see hordes of them.

Every leftist European nimby party comes to mind.

There was an article on HN front page a few months ago which stated(paraphrased) "building more housing to reduce prices is a right wing ideology that doesn't match reality" or some such. I'll reply here if I find it.

First year economics models all these things, through behavioral economics, microeconomics and utility theory. It's the basics.

Housing is also really weird:

- the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input.

- economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction)

- more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.

Ah yes, that 150 year old meme reflexively copy-pasta'd by internet commenters since the days of usenet to refute basic concepts like supply and demand.

"Lol economists are dumb they think humans are robots!"

No they don't. Sorry, we won't be throwing away an entire field of human endeavor based on a straw man caricature that isn't true.

We don't call physicists dumb and throw out their ideas because the real world isn't a perfect vacuum either. They know this, don't be silly.

Prices in massively inefficient markets do not follow the supply + demand equilibrium. Beer is not an inefficient market. You're doing the absurd comparison.

Yes, you learn why supply + demand curves do not actually describe many markets

it says "it's complicated".

This reminds of a fun fact I remember learning in university.

Elasticity is the relationship between demand and supply, and there are actually very rare instances where it can be negative (where demand increases with price).

These are called Giffen goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

Explanation (that I remember)

Inelastic demand is when a good is demanded so much, that an increase in price has little affect on the total quantity (people still demand it, think like addictive substances)

So a perfectly inelastic product would be a straight line where any amount is demanded at any price.

So having the curve keep going it would get a positive slope, where higher price makes demand go up.

If I remember the example I was given was food during a famine. Supply is already low, but an additional pressure on price is the known shortage. The idea being that as the price goes up people see it as harder to get.

It’s been so long since I studied the subject so I might have gotten some things wrong here.

> A lot of people are venally or ideologically motivated against accepting this.

That’s the story of the last 10 years among certain types that keep regurgitating obviously wrong concepts.