Author: devangoldstein

Myths, Media, Motives: A Cautionary Tale

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Housing Market Media Mayhem

As a homeowner, I have a heightened interest the housing market, to which my financial future is closely tied. But it’s not just “the housing market” in the abstract that makes me nervous right now. More than that, its the ways different media spheres are talking about the market that make me shudder.

Given my position, when I ended up reading the eFinanceDirectory article “Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market,” I got a little sad. For reasons I’ll explain later, I’m confident this deeply troubling article will reach millions of people positioned to read uncritically.

First, Don’t Be Wrong

In short, the article is a run-down of five “myths” that, the unnamed author claims, caused the demise of the housing market. Each piece of the argument has problems, but I’ll focus on two:

“Myth #1: Renting is Like Throwing Your Money Away”

The argument here is that renters, unlike homeowners, “pay for one thing every month: shelter. They don’t pay interest to the bank, property taxes, or maintenance fees.” With “the money they save by renting,” they can “invest in stocks, bonds and other vehicles.” This argument—that renters pay less money, all else being equal, than owners—is echoed throughout the piece.

There’s a massive misunderstanding of real estate here, if not of basic capitalist economy. Renters write only one check each month, but it’s a rare landlord who’s not making sure her costs—including mortgage, taxes, insurance, and upkeep—are covered, and indeed that she’s making a profit. If I can rent an apartment for $850 each month, my landlord’s monthly PITI payment is perhaps hundreds of dollars less than that. In other words, landlords, in the interest of making money at their jobs, take a profit.

So, in seeking shelter, my choices are to come up with some initial capital (a noteworthy hurdle, to be sure) for the privilege of building equity with, let’s say, a $550 payment each month. Initially, only a small portion of my payment goes towards the principal of my loan, but out of an $850 rent check, none of it builds equity. Ever. So not only am I spending more for shelter if I’m renting, but I don’t get to keep any of my money. If I am lucky enough to have the choice, then renting is, indeed, throwing my money away (unless I really like my landlord).

“Myth #2: There are Tax Benefits to Owning”

There’s more weird logic here: “Mortgage interest can only be deducted from taxable income. This essentially means that buyers pay a dollar just to save 30 cents.”

The first sentence is true, but what it “essentially means” is that homeowners save “30 cents” on the dollars that they have to spend anyway for shelter. Again, given two equal payments, the renter comes out behind, every time. (And again, the payments, rent and PITI, are never equal.)

But it doesn’t end there: “Furthermore, deducting interest has no tax advantage unless a buyer pays so much in interest that the amount exceeds the standard deduction that everyone—including renter—is allowed to take.”

The first sentence is false. Deducting interest has no tax advantage unless the interest combined with all the myriad other deductions one can itemize exceeds the standard deduction. I should note here that I’m a homeowner in Pittsburgh, a city with relatively low property tax, and that I bought when the market last bottomed out, so I pay about as little interest as one can in this country (5.625%).

Despite the insane bargain I’ve got, I’ve itemized my deductions every year since I bought the house, and not once before. In other words, my mortgage interest presents a significant tax advantage, as it would for just about everybody out there.

Beyond Wrong: Myths and Motives

The “Myths” article is worse than just being inaccurate, though. There is, in the end, a particular political agenda advanced in the piece, one that ought not be part of something that projects itself as impartial financial advice. (“Our goal is to provide you non-biased original articles about the housing and mortgage issues that matter to you most,” reads introductory copy on the site’s home page.)

The piece reads, “Potential buyers bought into all sorts of rent vs. buy myths to justify buying houses that they could not afford during the boom.” Placing blame on the buyers make a certain amount of sense, on the face of it: Why didn’t they understand that an adustable-rate mortgage, for example, would come back to bite them?

That’s a valid point. However, holding buyers solely responsible is also a tactic that conservative pundits often use to keep government spending down. Proposed ARM bailouts, for many conservatives, aren’t appropriate use of tax money. If you blame the borrowers, then you don’t have to give them anything. For me, that argument doesn’t hold, as it’s unclear how the history of the situation should have anything to do with economic arguments for and against bailouts. The point is, it’s a popular argument for a conservative position on the mortgage crisis.

(Another article on the site, “The Truth About Home Prices and Mortgage Bailouts,” makes good on this hidden motive, with falsehoods more problematic than in the “Myths” piece.)

Reader Beware

There’s an obvious problem with purportedly “unbiased” advice that’s so deeply biased. Notwithstanding that issue, there’s a larger lesson here. As readers, we have to look out for ourselves. I found the “Myths” piece linked to from one of my favorite sites, kottke.org. Though I find absolutely no fault with the site for posting the link, I worry for its visitors, who numbered 600,000 per month two years ago, and who has at least 100,000 subscribers in Google Reader alone.

It’s our human propensity to believe trusted sources—the limits of which can be extreme indeed—that can get us into hot water in situations like this. A site I and many others trust and respect linked to an article that’s misleading, untruthful, and deeply biased. My worry here is that because of our relationship to the site, we might shed our usual skepticism and read a troubling article more favorably than we should. I hate to advocate widespread suspicion, but surely some measure of caution is in order, no matter where we get our reading material.

A Phenomenology of the Clipboard

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I’ve noticed: When I have an image or sentence or URL copied (or cut) to the clipboard, but not yet pasted into its destination, my left hand—with which I always perform my pasting operations—feels, somehow, different.

I struggle to describe the sensation, but my hand and wrist feel a little higher in my brain’s list of sensory priorities, like there’s an urgency attached to the nerves there. The phenomenon, albeit subtle, has nonetheless proved effective as a safeguard against the accidental overwriting of clipped items with new copy operations.

The effect is heightened with increases in a clip’s “importance,” a flexible term in this case. Usually, “importance” maps onto one of two factors, or a combination of them:

  • a lack of redundancy (the clip doesn’t exist elsewhere, or not in a readily accessible location)
  • a personal attachment to the details of the clip (I’m particularly attached to this way of structuring that paragraph and don’t want to figure it out again).

The effect is also particularly intense when the destination of the clip is unknown at the time I perform the original copy operation. In those cases, I have not only to remember to paste the clip, but also to figure out how I intend to use it. My conscious cognitive faculties are more heavily “booked,” in other words.

To recap, the intensity (and also the likelihood of occurrence) of the cognitive outsourcing effect seems to correlate independently with these two factors:

  1. an increase in the consequences of losing the clip
  2. an increase in the chance of losing the clip

It is as though my cerebral cortex, in great demand when I’m sitting at my computer doing cognitively intense work, makes use of my sensory cortex, mostly unengaged at those times, for assistance: “Here, sensory center, take this responsibility—We’re too busy.”

This is a sensible system indeed, though its effects can be distractingly intense. Sometimes, when I have failed to paste for several minutes, I often relief myself into a new text document or browser window, and the sensation quickly dissipates.

(I am then left with a separate feeling, a kind of emotional vulnerability associated with having unsaved work open. But that’s fodder for another post.)

On “Breaking Through”

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It’s not so much that I think Lynn Hirschberg’s Oscar portfolio piece, “Breaking Through,” doesn’t get the job done. In her triangulation of the cinematic breakthrough performance, she does showcase a dozen-plus nominees.

My problem with the piece, instead, is its lack of reach. In looking for the origins of classic actors’ “templates”—which, she says, can be formed by breakthrough performances—she doesn’t look far enough. Though she convincingly locates some decades-old breakthroughs (e.g., Diane Keaton’s; see below), her aim is off with many more recent career- or character-making moments.

For example, Hirschberg names the performance in which Vince Vaughan created his primary comedic personae—”the brilliant motormouth”—as Wedding Crashers. In an age where IMDB is a click away, how can she (or her editors) not look further back than 2005? In 2004, they’d find Vaughan revising the role—already become a cliché, if an enjoyable one—in Starsky & Hutch. A year earlier still, one can find his rapid-fire banter in Old School. (“All you gotta do is say ‘earmuffs’ to him…”) Indeed, there’s a strong case to be made that it all goes back to 1996’s Swingers.

Hirschberg traces Owen Wilson’s “slacker deadbeat extraordinaire” back to Starsky & Hutch. I’ll allow a dismissal of Bottle Rocket [1996] on the grounds that nobody saw it; Hirschberg makes a similar argument about Diane Keaton’s breakthrough being Annie Hall, despite her appearance in three prior Woody Allen films. (She writes that “as with almost everything else in life, context is everything.”) But what about 2001’s Zoolander and The Royal Tenenbaums?

The list goes on: Harrison Ford “has never strayed far from men like Indiana Jones” (which is to say, men like Han Solo); George Clooney went “debonair” as Danny Ocean (after he did so as Bruce Wayne and Doug Ross, among others).

If this all seems of little consequence, consider each example in terms of the creative and financial circumstances of its production. When you slight Swingers for Wedding Crashers, you slight every pair of Hollywood outsiders who ever broke in with sheer creativity: not just Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughan, but Damon and Affleck, Smith and Mewes, and so on.

The same goes for the Owen Wilson question: Wes Anderson may be the most important American filmmaker to emerge in the last two decades, and his writing with Wilson, alongside his landmark cinematic point-of-view, made his career. That legacy is nowhere to be found in a discussion of Starsky & Hutch.

In George Clooney’s case, it’s not the buddy system but television that’s getting overlooked. I understand Batman & Robin (1997) wasn’t Clooney’s best work, but he simply couldn’t have been the Bruce Wayne he was without the charming precedent of E.R.‘s Doug Ross character. These days, one can hardly accept the argument that a cinematic breakthrough can’t happen on television, not after James Gandolfini, Dennis Franz, and, well, Clooney.

What we have here, in other words, is a failure to acknowledge changing circumstances of star production: Stars can make themselves, with the right combination of luck and talent, and television is as important in making movie stars as are the movies. Neither change is reflected in Hirschberg’s piece; it is telling, indeed, that she spends so much time looking into the past—at Keaton, De Niro, and Nicholson; but also Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Clark Gable —in an article so pointedly “about” the up-and-coming.

Firefox Horizontal Trackpad Scrolling

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UPDATE: Smoothwheel’s developer took the time to write a thoughtful comment; please find it below the post.

I’ve spent so, so long trying to figure out how to get horizontal trackpad scrolling working in my installation of Firefox (on a Mac, running 10.3 – 10.5 while the problem persisted). I finally got it, and tracked it down to a problem extension: Smoothwheel.

For me, scrolling horizontally on the trackpad had scrolled the window vertically, for as long as I could remember. All the hints I saw indicated that a slight change to the preferences in about:config would resolve the issue, that the defaults in Firefox were for horizontal scrolling to move forward and backward in the history.

But those hints were from 2005, and I don’t think the forward/backward behavior has been the default for at least a year. So I started looking through my add-ons for potential problems.

The only one I had that should’ve been affecting scrolling behavior was Smoothwheel, which has options for compatibility mode and disabling. Sadly, neither fixed the problem. I tried disabling Smoothwheel at the Firefox level. No dice. Then I tried uninstalling it. Still no fix.

At this point, I thought, it couldn’t be Smoothwheel, so I went back to endless combinations of mousewheel and mousewheel.horizscroll settings in about:config. But nothing helped.

In the end, I took a wild shot and decided to delete [Profile Directory]/chrome/smoothwheel/ entirely to fix the problem. Very strange behavior for an add-on, residing in the chrome folder and not respecting disabling and uninstalling…

Based on the number of problems listed on Smoothwheel’s mozdev page, I can’t imagine I’m the only one having problems here.

What’s Your Vote Worth?

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Half of group of NYU students said they’d give up their right to vote forever for $1 million.

My question is, what about the other half?
Let’s say I could earn just 6% per year (after taxes) on $1 million. Isn’t $60,000 in contributions to the party of my choice worth more than my vote?

What about to non-profits dedicated to advancing the causes that I’m essentially voting for in the first place?

I understand the question is about the societal worth of one’s vote as compared to some measure of personal gain, but even if we stay altruistic, shouldn’t one make the trade in every case?

[Via Kottke]