Also at The Daily Caller

From the previous article, I found this gem by Juan Williams. Talking about the Shirley Sherrod episode, Williams writes:

How is it possible that such a bright man as the president repeatedly reacts without the facts when it comes to a topic so explosive as race?

[snip]

How is it possible that the once glorious NAACP – the leading name in America’s fight against racial segregation – has come to the point where it is pushing the first black president to fire anyone – but especially a black woman — on a charge of racism without checking to be sure she was a hateful racist?

The entire first page of the article is spent bashing Obama and the NAACP. After describing the life story of Sherrod, Williams finally gets around to why the scandal happened in the first place:

But then someone – still unknown – took Sherrod’s touching speech and edited it to create the impression that she was a black racist. The editor made it appear that Sherrod claimed to a black audience that she withheld help from a white man because he is white.

That twisted tape was placed for all to see on a right-wing website, BigGovernment.com, as a two and half minute video clip.

[snip]

Everyone – the White House, the Agriculture Department, the anonymous editor, the website – has political dirt and racial guilt all over their hands.

A pox on both their houses, I tell you. Can't we all just agree that they are all equally guilty? Interestingly enough, Williams doesn't assign any blame to Breitbart by name. Perhaps because the article was originally posted on Fox Forum?

The Public Has a Right to Know

Tucker Carlson, on why he is refusing to release the entire text of the e-mails he is excerpting:

The second line of attack we’ve encountered since we began the series is familiar to anyone who has ever published a piece whose subject didn’t like the finished product: “You quoted me out of context!”

The short answer is, no we didn’t. I edited the first four stories myself, and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with.

That assurance won’t stop the attacks, of course. So why don’t we publish whatever portions of the Journolist archive we have and end the debate? Because a lot of them have no obvious news value, for one thing.

[snip]

Plus, a lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal. In addition to being partisan hacks, a lot of these guys turn out to be pedestrian thinkers. Disappointing.

Okay, so most of it is "pretty banal" and has "no obvious news value". However, some of the e-mails are obviously interesting enough, with enough "obvious news value", to excerpt on The Daily Caller. If they pass this test, why won't he release the entire e-mail? Are only the excerpts newsworthy and interesting?

However, Carlson does make a valid point when he says:

Anyone on Journolist who claims we quoted him “out of context” can reveal the context himself.

I guess for people in Washington, this is another game of "screw over the opposition", but I was under the impression that the point of journalism is to shine a light. Why, in a spat between two groups of reporters, is neither side willing to release the e-mails over which they are arguing?

Another Blog Post With a Conclusion Listed as a Question?

This post by William Easterly at Aidwatch asks, "Was the poverty of Africa determined in 1000 BC?" Easterly cites an article by Diego Comin, Erick Gong, and himself:

78 percent of the difference in income today between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe is explained by technology differences that already existed in 1500 AD – even BEFORE the slave trade and colonialism.

Moreover, these technological differences had already appeared by 1000 BC. The state of technology in 1000 BC has a strong correlation with technology 2500 years later, in 1500 AD.

Whenever looking at a "strong correlation", it is important to ask yourself, "Could some third variable explain both factors?" My immediate thought is there are probably two confounding variables. Firstly, Africa is largely landlocked, with a dearth of navigable rivers, making trade and the diffusion and adoption of technology much more difficult. Secondly, Africa has conditions that are ideal for the spread of tropical diseases such as malaria.

When the authors do not control for these factors, they find that "78 percent of the difference in income today between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe is explained by technology differences that already existed in 1500 AD".

However, when the authors add independent variables for "distance to equator", "distance to equator squared", and "landlocked", the regression coefficient for "migration-adjusted technology level in 1500 AD" drops to 1.770 (significant at the 5% level). With this coefficient, only 42% of the difference is attributable to technology differences in 1500 AD.

Lastly, when the authors perform a regression analysis using "landlocked" and "tropical dummy" as independent variables, they find that the regression coefficient for "migration-adjusted technology level in 1500 AD" is 2.590 (significant at the 1% level). This coefficient explains 62% of the difference in income between Europe and Africa in 2002.

I also have a fairly major quibble with the "landlocked" variable. If you look at Wikipedia's list of landlocked countries, you will notice that DR Congo is not considered landlocked because it has 40 km of coastline. However, looking at a map, you will see that DR Congo is effectively landlocked. Furthermore, the "landlocked" countries of Western Europe seem to all be outliers in terms of GDP per capita on a purchasing power parity basis: Luxembourg (#3), Liechtenstein (#1), San Marino (#18), Switzerland (#19), and Vatican City (not ranked). In fact, if you were to only look at Western Europe, you would say that being landlocked is in fact an advantage. The only non-landlocked country in Western Europe with a higher rank than Switzerland is Ireland at #16 (and I have a feeling that they may have fallen a bit in the standings since 2009).

A Shallow Idea Visualized

David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has a graphic visualizing the fact that US adults spend 200 billion hours watching TV, while it only took 100 million hours to create Wikipedia. He introduces the graphic thus:

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.

I cannot believe that Clay Shirky would be so self-centred (not in the sense of vanity, but rather of lack of ability to see the world from others' perspectives) to believe that all those people watching TV would rather be spending their time under high cognitive workload, such as editing Wikipedia articles. I know that when I watch TV, it's because I don't want to think.

The Badder-Meinhoff Phenomenon Strikes Again

I was reading Christopher Hitchens in Slate, and stumbled upon the phrase "a Niagara of cloacal abuse". Having never previously encountered the word cloacal, I looked it up. It is either a "sewer", a "cesspool", or "the common chamber into which the intestinal and urogenital tracts discharge especially in monotreme mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and elasmobranch fishes".

Later, I decided to watch the Futurama episode "30% Iron Chef", and Dr. Zoidberg says, "When the professor finds out, he'll tear me a new cloaca." And that is how I learned how to pronounce cloaca.

It's Not a Straw Man If People Are Arguing For It

Tearing into Ezra Klein's latest defense of the JournoList, Andrew Sullivan writes:

It's telling to me that he sets up a straw-man. There was no "conspiracy" on Journolist, so far as I can tell, and I haven't claimed there was.

Of course, other people have. A quick search reveals many such accusations. At Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism, John Sexton wrote:

Turns out the real irony here is that people who viewed it as a “secretive conspiracy” were right.

At The American Thinker, Rick Moran:

The Daily Caller has acquired documents that show the conspiratorial nature of the list and its ability to massage and manipulate the news.

Over at beliefnet, Rod Dreher:

It is true that there is a sense of tribalism among some leading journalists on the Right that often prevents them from taking on conservative sacred cows, but I never saw anything remotely close to the Journolist conspiracy -- and would have been disgusted if I had, and left the room, so to speak.

I could go on. Sullivan is upset that Ezra Klein has not responded to Sullivan's complaints. This is a valid complaint. But then he argues that Klein is setting up a straw man. This is not true. He is arguing against a huge number of people who have claimed there was a conspiracy.

Following the NYT Style Guide

Silly Glenn... don't be daft. At issue is this passage by New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein:

Others named in the same warrant and caught by the Chinese police had described beatings, suffocation, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture to get them to disclose details about the human rights group to which they all belonged.

However, we know that the NYT does not allow calling beatings and sleep deprivation torture, as this would involve taking sides in a political dispute over what is and is not torture. What Bernstein ought to have written is this:

Others named in the same warrant and caught by the Chinese police had described beatings and sleep deprivation to get them to disclose details about the human rights group to which they all belonged. They also described suffocation, electric shocks, and other forms of torture.

It is unfortunate that Bernstein is such a poor reporter that she is unable to follow the NYT's own style guide.

Who Do You Believe?

From Slate:

Scholars have since theorized that the $ sign evolved out of an abbreviation for peso: The plural for pesos was "ps," which eventually became "ps," and then simply an "S" with a single stroke denoting the "p." One early instance of the $ symbol crops up in a letter written by the merchant Oliver Pollock in 1778. Pollock also uses the "ps" abbreviation, making the letter a bridge between the two. The double-line through the S variation is less easily explained. Some believe they represent the twin pillars of Gibraltar depicted on the Spanish coat of arms. Others say it's shorthand for the letter "U" superimposed over the letter "S"—for U.S.

Since reading Atlas Shrugged, I thought that the latter explanation was the correct one:

Incidentally, do you know where that sign [the dollar sign] comes from? It stands for the initials of the United States.

Looking up this quote in Atlas Shrugged, I stumbled upon this hilarious quote:

Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity? Ask yourself why. Ask yourself how long a country that did that could hope to exist, and whose moral standards have destroyed it. It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade...

Ah yes, America... the land where wealth was not acquired by force or looting, but by production and trade. You might want to ask the Native Americans about that one...

A False Equivalence

I know we're not supposed to trash right-wingers when they take on right-wing myths, but this article by Kevin D. Williamson is getting a lot of play in liberal blogs, and it's wrong.

Both are rooted in magical thinking: Naïve supply-siders believe tax cuts pay for themselves, naïve Keynesians believe spending pays for itself through the magic of the multiplier effect.

Well, it may be technically correct: naïve Keynesians may believe that "spending pays for itself through the magic of the multiplier effect." However, Keynesians who understand its theoretical underpinnings do not believe this. They believe that, during a severe downturn in demand, government can increase demand by spending money (stimulus). This spending must be temporary, so that as the recession ends, government spending returns to its previous level. As a result of the stimulus, the recession is shallower and does not last as long. As GDP returns to the pre-recession trendline, the country is richer than it would have been had the stimulus not occurred. Remember, however, that the country borrowed money to finance the stimulus. In the future, therefore, the government has to raise taxes to pay off that debt. Fortunately, the increase in taxes owed due to the stimulus is less than the increase in GDP due to the stimulus, so the country is richer than it would have been had the stimulus not occurred.

Quote of the Day

Marc Ambinder, world-renowned anthropologist:

Her primary means of communication is via Facebook and Twitter...

You know who he's talking about.

Hackery and Quackery

In a post yesterday at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum links to a study claiming that taxing sugary soda would "reduce net calorie intake from all beverages". Drum argues that, even if the study is correct, "it's pretty likely that you'll just make up the calories somewhere else. In fact, if this study is correct, it's possible that you might increase your total calorie intake." [Italics in original]

Unfortunately for Drum, the article merely shows a correlation between drinking a lot of diet soda and being overweight/obese. It does not prove that drinking diet soda causes obesity. From the article:

Fowler [the lead investigator on the study] is quick to note that a study of this kind does not prove that diet soda causes obesity. More likely, she says, it shows that something linked to diet soda drinking is also linked to obesity.

Drum appears to have missed this sentence in the article, which is very excusable, since the quote is about 2/3 of the way down the first page.

More seriously, I do not know how Drum found this study, but if you search on Google for "diet soda causes obesity", the first link is to the article Drum cites. It gets even uglier if you look at the screenshot for the search result (click on the picture for a larger size):

The text from the article under the link specifically states "a study of this kind does not prove that diet soda causes obesity". I do not know how Kevin Drum could accidentally mislead his readers like this.

Note: To me, Drum's theory that if you drink more diet soda, "it's pretty likely that you'll just make up the calories somewhere else" sounds plausible but wrong. I find that sugary beverages fill me up no more than water fills me up. However, I have not looked into the research, so I do not feel qualified to argue one way or the other.

Fighting straw men

Doug Mataconis has a piece up defending air-conditioning:

It’s hard to tell if Cox and others like him hate air-conditioning because of it’s impact on the environment, because it caused people to move south, or because it allegedly led to the resurgence of the Republican Party as a Southern-SouthWestern party. Whatever the reason, it hardly qualifies as serious scholarship. If Cox wants to spend the next week without air-conditioning, that’s is choice. I, on the other hand, will be keeping him at a tolerable temperature completely guilt-free.

I don't know about Cox, but most environmentalists hate air-conditioning because, as Cox's article states, "Americans now use as much electricity to power our A.C. as the entire continent of Africa uses for, well, everything." Air-conditioning is a major factor in power consumption, and its prevalence makes tackling global warming that much harder.

Andrew Sullivan, in one of his unthinking "lefty environmentalists like it, so I've gotta hate it" moments, adds:

The worst thing about the Cape is that they pride themselves on not needing much air-conditioning. And then this current heat wave happens, and you end up hotter out here than in the oven that is Washington DC. I regard air-conditioning as one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century.

The worst thing about the Cape is that the residents enjoy not having to spend money on air-conditioning? And "one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century"? Really? Off the top of my head, items that I think are greater contributors to human well-being: vaccines (measles, mumps, smallpox, polio), organ transplants, automobiles, airplanes, the Internet, computers (even without the Internet), cellular phones, plastics, the liberalization of trade, the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union, the peaceful rise of China... I could go on. Unfortunately, Mr. Sullivan frequently feels the need to distance himself from the DFH's, and so air-conditioning is "one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century".

One of these things is exactly like the other

Via Andrew Sullivan, I stumbled upon Dana McCourt making a very weak argument. After acknowledging that it "strikes me as completely plausible that Palin exaggerated the extent to which she was in labor during the plane flight", McCourt then compares it to other politicians:

I have heard that male politicians have sometimes exaggerated their influence in important legislation or their status as a war hero.

What bothers me is the epistemic leap from Palin probably isn’t wholly truthful big friggin’ shocker to Therefore, we have a right to demand the birth certificate of her child to prove that she’s the mother. [Italics in original]

I don't know if we have a right to demand a birth certificate, but we do have a right to demand to know whether or not she lied about the plane flight. After all, could you imagine the press ignoring a story about a male politician exaggerating their status as a war hero? I can't. In fact, Talking Points Memo has an entire page devoted to politicians whose lies about war service hurt their careers.

Joe Klein does not understand the implications of his argument

Over at Swampland, Joe Klein thinks that we should be having a "race to the top" in public services:

There aren't so many high-paying manufacturing jobs anymore; the relative security of government work doesn't need to be augmented by ridiculously obstruse [sic] procedures for firing incompetents or by 20-year pension packages. A nice 401k, with healthy matching funds, should be sufficient.

Does he seriously think that the government is competing for the same workers as the manufacturing industry? However, his analysis gets worse:

This is a sad choice, but an essential one. We can either continue to fund the pension system and lose essential services; or we can change the pension system and continue the service-levels--the policing, firefighting, emergency response and garbage pickup--that we've come to expect. The public seems quite unwilling to continue to pay the higher taxes necessary to sustain both. And given our straitened circumstances, and the need to encourage a new burst of private entrepreneurialism, there is a strong argument that any further government stimulus needs to be accompanied by a rigorous program of governmental reform.

By "a rigorous program of governmental reform", he actually means a dramatic cut in compensation for public employees, coming entirely from their pensions. Yet he doesn't seem to ponder the implications of cutting the pay of police, firefighters, and garbage collectors. His preferred option is to "change the pension system and continue the service-levels ... that we've come to expect." However, his changes to the pension system involve making it significantly less generous. Of course, cutting the compensation of public employees will result in lower-quality public employees, who will not provide the level of service to which Americans have become accustomed.

Obama's a Thug

Via Andrew Sullivan, I was introduced to the "once-judicious, meticulous, balanced columnist and political analyst" Michael Barone. Mr. Barone writes:

Then there is Obama's decision to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf. This penalizes companies with better safety records than BP's and will result in many advanced drilling rigs being sent to offshore oil fields abroad.

The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly "peer reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more economically devastating than the oil spill and "counterproductive" to safety.

And this is where it gets weird. Notice how he said "eight of the cited experts"? It's odd that there were eight experts cited. Appendix 1 of the Interior Department report begins:

The Department consulted with a wide range of experts in state and Federal governments, academic institutions, and industry and advocacy organizations. In addition, draft recommendations were peer reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.

In addition to the 7 experts identified by the NAE, another 8 "Other Experts" were consulted. 5 of the 7 NAE-identifed experts and 3 of 8 "Other Experts" signed a letter criticizing the final report. From the letter:

However, we do not agree with the six month blanket moratorium on floating drilling. A moratorium was added after the final review and was never agreed to by the contributors. The draft which we reviewed stated:

"Along with the specific recommendations outlined in the body of the report, Secretary Salazar recommends a 6-month moratorium on permits for new exploratory wells with a depth of 1,000 feet or greater."

Mr. Barone summarizes their letter as follows: "But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium." Mr. Barone needs to issue a correction, because this statement is factually false. The draft the eight experts reviewed included a "6-month moratorium on permits for new exploratory wells with a depth of 1,000 feet or greater."

It turns out that the eight experts are upset because, in the final report, this phrase was changed to "a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs." The experts all agree on the need for a moratorium. The debate is on whether it should apply to floating rigs, or exploratory wells with a depth of 1,000 feet or greater. A blanket moratorium does not appear either in the draft or in the final report. However, this does not stop the eight experts from insisting: "A blanket moratorium is not the answer. It will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation's economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill." How does Mr. Barone summarize this? "Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more economically devastating than the oil spill and 'counterproductive' to safety." Mr. Barone's work is disgraceful.

p.s. Writing the title for this post, I just noticed for the first time the racial undertones to calling Obama a thug.

David Sanger Doesn't Understand Capitalism

I was first made aware of David Sanger because of the Biden beach party he attended with Marc Ambinder. His column on June 17 managed to

Along the way, he will have to avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.

What Sanger is condemning here is... capitalism. Big mistakes leading to bankruptcy? That's exactly what happens in a competitive marketplace. It's the creative destruction that fuels a capitalist society.

O'Hanlon's Update

Michael E. O'Hanlon and his co-workers at the Brookings Institute have put out the latest update to their chart on "The States of War". They have the chart colour-coded, with light grey for "More favorable conditions" and dark grey for "Less favorable conditions". However, their colour-coding appears to be seriously faulty. Under the heading "Judges in Kandahar Province (need: at least 50)", we discover that there were five in 2008, colour-coded as "Less favorable conditions". In 2009, there were 7, which O'Hanlon et al. decided to to colour-code as medium. And in 2010, there were 8 judges, which was colour-coded as "More favorable conditions".

And this is where the colour code breaks down. While hiring 3 extra judges in 2 years resulted in a "more favourable" ranking, while they are still 42 judges away from what is needed.

A further quibble: under the section "Trends in Pakistan", the "Number of Aerial Drone Attacks by U.S. (monthly average)" has changed from 3 in 2008, to 4 in 2009, to 8 in 2010. As the report was released by the Brookings Institute, the increase in drone attacks is considered movement to "More favorable conditions".

The Arrogance of a Theist

I've always loved the video about factors of 10, where they show how you are simultaneously enormous at an atomic scale and minuscule at a galactic scale. When I think about how small I am relative to the Earth, and how small the Earth is relative to the Sun, and how the Sun isn't even a speck on the windshield of the galaxy, that is sort of how I have imagined humans must look at a godly scale. Humans knowledge would be insignificant next to godly knowledge. God would know every thought ever thunk by a human; humans cannot even figure out why the stock price of Accenture dropped to a penny on May 6.

It is in this context that I read a letter to Andrew Sullivan from one of his readers:

If Jesus was little more than a uniquely-adept Jewish mystic with a profound experience of the Divine (God-as-"Daddy," a pretty great idea), then while that is profound, it's no reason for me to follow him uniquely as opposed to the path of the Buddha, the Hindu mystics, or the Kabbalah.

So what is Christianity's trump card against these other faiths?

[The Resurrection] was the thing that separated Jesus from all the other miracle-working Torah commentators of his day (as stated previously, if one just takes Jesus at face value, he's pretty unremarkable). The Resurrection divinizes Jesus and humanizes God (the most amazing part, I think), and as such, makes Christianity unique.

Firstly, the "Resurrection humanizes God"? How? The Resurrection was when Jesus rose from the dead. This is not human. I have never heard of a human doing this. The Resurrection clearly establishes an enormous distance between humans and God. No human has ever risen from the dead; God has.

Secondly, it's interesting that the reader thinks that "if one just takes Jesus at face value, he's pretty unremarkable". Unremarkable? He walks on water! He turns water into wine! He feeds enormous crowds with paltry amounts of food! I have never seen anyone do any of those things. And yet, compared with "all the other miracle-working Torah commentators of his day", Jesus was "unremarkable". What sets Jesus apart is that he rises from the dead.

Therein lies Christianity's real trump card.

It's not that we have a unique experience of God, it's not that we have a monopoly on God, it's not that our ceremonies and rituals are better (they're pretty terrible sometimes). It's that God knows what it's like to be a human being. God eats, drinks, sleeps, cries, gets angry, bleeds, dies, and then shows us that death is not the end.

How desperate is this reader to be on par with God? An all-knowing god such as the Christian God does not need to be born as a human to know what it is to be human. An all-knowing god will already know what it is like to eat, drink, sleep, cry, get angry, bleed, and die. But an all-knowing knows so much more than any human ever will about any of those things. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a woman with no teeth to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a man whose tongue has been cut out to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a master chef to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a smoker to eat. In short, an all-knowing god knows so much more than any human ever will about the human condition. And yet this reader believes that God needed to be born as a human, die, and rise from the dead, all that "He" may be humanized.

A Study That You Can Safely Ignore

Via Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy, it appears that "the further left you are, the less you know about economics". This is based on a paper in Econ Journal Watch by Zeljka Buturovic and Daniel B. Klein. In addition to the problems pointed out by Matthew Yglesias, the entire basis of the study is severely flawed. The study is based on a "survey" (for some reason, they do not call it a poll) by Zogby:

The survey was administered by Zogby International by usual procedure. It was a nationwide survey of American adults, randomly selected from the Zogby International online panel routinely used in political and commercial research. On December 5, 2008, Zogby sent by email 63,986 invitations to the members of the panel.

In conducting opinion polls, you must start with a random sample to prevent sampling error (the difference between the people you interview and the people in the overall population being studied). It is good that was Zogby randomly selecting adults from the Zogby International online panel. Unfortunately, the Zogby International online panel is not randomly chosen: you can sign up for it here. This is like having an online poll, receiving 10,000 unique votes, and then "randomly selecting" 1,000 of the votes. Even though you are randomly sampling, the pool from which you are sampling was not randomly chosen. Anything coming out of such a poll (or survey) is garbage. But you don't have to take my word for it. Listen to Nate Silver:

All told, between 48 contests that he's surveyed over the past two election cycles, Zogby's Internet polls have been off by an average of 7.6 points. This is an extreme outlier with respect to absolutely anyone else in the polling community.

These Internet polls, simply put, are not scientific and should not be published by any legitimate news organization, at least not without an asterisk the size of an Alex Rodriguez steroidal syringe.

Note: As to the actual content of the Econ Journal Watch paper, it would not surprise me at all if self-described conservatives have better economic knowledge than self-described liberals. This study, however, does not prove anything either way.

Can This Possibly Be True?

Via Matthew Yglesias, it seems that Casey Mulligan is not sure there was even a housing bubble. As part of her argument, however, she says something that sounds very wrong:

Now that the bubble is behind us, people today should be no more willing to pay to own a house than they were in the late 1990s. (It’s true that population has grown since the 1990s, but population growth is nothing new and should not by itself increase real housing prices. Don’t forget that greater population also means more people available to do construction work.)

The cost to build a house is essentially land, materials, and labour. Increasing population means less land per person, so (all else being equal) the price of land will increase. I imagine that over the last decade the price of raw materials has increased. Even if the labour costs are constant (and in Vancouver, at least, they have soared), the price of the house should still increase.

On this shaky foundation, Mulligan builds a very unconvincing argument. She shows the following inflation-adjusted housing price graph, normalized so that 1994-1997 is 100:

She argues that, according to bubble theorists, there was a 3-4% "over-build" of houses during the bubble, so there must be a 3-4% drop in prices from the pre-bubble level. This estimate is shown in the blue line. She concludes:

But another interpretation is that a large fraction of the housing price boom was justified by fundamentals (and next week I’ll consider some of the specific fundamentals that may have permanently increased housing demand in the 2000s). If so, we are probably asking too much of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to accurately disentangle bubbles from fundamentals the next time that asset prices rise.

So what sort of a "large fraction" are we talking about? In February, 2000, the index was around 105. Today, it's around 111. Assuming that Mulligan is right and that housing is now properly priced, this 6 points of growth can be attributed to fundamentals. However, at the peak in 2006-7, the index reached 130. Assuming 6 points of this was fundamentals, that still leaves 19 points of bubble. The "large fraction" is therefore 6/25, or 24%.

Please note that this is assuming everything that Mulligan says is true. I would argue that it is not. Mulligan does not even mention the role of the $8,000 home buying tax credit in boosting demand for housing. In the Northeast, the most expensive housing market in the US, the median selling price last month was $249,800. The home buying tax credit represents 3.2% of the cost of buying the house. Neglecting this from your analysis is negligent.