A Thai court has ordered the dissolution of the reformist party which won the most seats and votes in last year’s election - but was blocked from forming a government.
The ruling also banned Move Forward’s charismatic, young former leader Pita Limjaroenrat and 10 other senior figures from politics for 10 years.
The verdict from the Constitutional Court was expected, after its ruling in January that Move Forward’s campaign promise to change royal defamation laws was unconstitutional.
Speculation happens, sure. I don’t buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.
I also hear about “Murphy’s law”, which is self-evidently not (literally) true in all cases. If you’re teaching an actual Econ 101-type course and you don’t mention market failure, you’re teaching it badly.
Not exactly. A drop in housing prices triggered it IIRC, but the actual chain of dominoes played out on paper in financial instruments.
In an ideal market the big banks would have just been replaced with new ones who take less risks of that sort, but they were too big to fail. That’s definitely a problem, but I don’t really know enough to comment on what the fix should be intelligently; banking economics is on a whole other level.
The total shortfall is in the neighborhood of 3.5 million units.
There’s always some, just because people move unpredictably - a “frictional” amount. I’m sure someone somewhere is sitting on an empty house for no good reason, but they’re losing money, so I doubt it’s a lot by comparison to the frictional amount.
Homeless people aren’t let in for a really sad reason that has nothing to do with necessity: few voters care and nonprofits can’t raise enough money - or alternately donated space - without government help. A lot of those people have “high needs”, and are at risk of causing damage or just leaving a mess, so it’s not like it’s free to let them stay in a building until the next tenant shows up.
Capitalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for politics. Look at the USSR and all the various times they flip-flopped on whatever issue or person. Or Republican Spain and it’s many warring factions, if that’s more your idea of non-capitalism.
It’s true that some scientists are on the hook to say things convenient for a sponsor. The nice thing is that a valid observation will stand the test of time regardless of who makes it. Marx made a huge impact on social sciences, and you don’t have to agree with him on any particular thing (left or right wing - he was still a Victorian white man) to appreciate economics as a driver of history. The same goes for marginalism and friends.
Your link isn’t talking about actual housing supply, it is talking about affordability. If you think that addresses my point, you don’t understand what I’m saying. Like on a fundamental level, you don’t get it.
And you keep throwing up vague, unsourced opinions like:
Like, okay? You don’t buy it, but you’re not going to bother much more with it, you’re not going to make an argument, it’s your opinion so you can just handwave anything I say away. If you’re not convinced, fine, don’t be, but there’s literally nothing for me to respond to here.
This is incredibly frustrating. I don’t even know what your point is anymore, you seem to just be knee-jerk arguing with every point no matter how weak or irrelevant your response is, and you seem content to throw up smokescreens of details rather than actually engage with anything in a substantive manner.
You seemed responsive for most of this, so I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but this is going in circles and you’re not actually taking on board anything I’m saying. Just focus for a second, deal with the speculation thing. Make a point. If you can’t do that, I’m not going to keep giving you the benefit of the doubt.
That probably means we’ve reached the end of the useful period of conversation. It happens, human working memory is small and language is slow, relative to the complexities of the things we’re talking about. I feel like it’s been pretty successful anyway; my mind has been changed about a few things, you seemed to like the yardsale model.
If we were to keep going, we’d need to rely heavily on data. Yeah, speculation resulting in “few” empty houses is my stance. Your stance is the opposite. It’s empirical, and no amount of abstract arguing can answer it. Ditto for supply and demand in general - you know the abstract arguments about entrepreneurs not leaving money on the table already, and you’re not convinced. The trick, of course, is that this isn’t an economics journal, and we’re not full time economists (hetero or orthodox). That limits how much data we can use to not enough.
I thought markets were garbage once too, and the thing that convinced me, besides the alternate explanation for billionaires I shared, was just having to budget out things myself. Everything runs at cost plus investor dividends, and every investment gives about the same return per principle, assuming similar risk profiles. That’s a life experience I can’t share, though.
Just in the name of explaining myself: I didn’t actually check the methodology again. What I’ve seen in the past is an actual measure of the physical housing stock, and then a comparison of it per capita to other developed countries. It’s smaller.