if prices fell enough, would demand fall too?

gg, to get back to your op. it has seemed to me in the last few years that we've needed more and more baubles to satisfy ourselves. RE became a toy, an overpriced fad, with HGTV being all the rage, a home improvement boom, etc.

if we have a secular shift in ownership perspective, it most certainly could change buying habits, and thus pricing. a large number of people will be very hesitant to buy again. once burned, shame on you...

I missed a lot of this stuff. I think most people born with ability and/or rich parents tend to take a rigid stance toward personal responsibility. Those of us with even more intelligence realize its difficult to relate to helplessness and lack of privilege. We voted for Obama.

"Brain is like a muscle. Yes some we all can't be Arnold Schwartzeneger, but the average person can work hard and get good grades. Far too many parents don't take an interest and are totally happy blaming the school and the teachers yet don't help with homeowrk and keep the kids up late at night"

Bingo.

I can't tell you how many 5 year olds I see out at midnight near the projects.

you hang near the projects at midnight?

Stop dragging out (can't keep track of who said what) the old "immigrant chestnut" - immigrants are outliers, bottom line. The profile of your average immigrant (health, education, etc.) is WAY different from the average person from the country he/she emigrated from. So while immigrants may not be wealthy, you can't equate them with native-born citizens from the same socio-economic class.

michael jordan clearly practiced his heart out and worked his ass off. but, 99.9 out of 100 guys could have done the same thing and not been him...never, ever.

bill gates is clearly a hell of a smart guy and beat an awful lot of people along the way. but, supposing IBM hadn't been so stupid and hadn't licensed DOS---we;ll obviously never know but hard to believe that Gates would have achieved the same degree of financial success.

most people born with ability and/or rich parents tend to take a rigid stance toward personal responsibility. Those of us with even more intelligence realize its difficult to relate to helplessness and lack of privilege.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?

no RS, you're the one who is doctrinaire.

bill gates is clearly a hell of a smart guy and beat an awful lot of people along the way. but, supposing IBM hadn't been so stupid and hadn't licensed DOS---we;ll obviously never know but hard to believe that Gates would have achieved the same degree of financial success.

Speaks to opportunity. Warren Buffet said he could not have done what he did in medieval Europe, but how many people could not have done what Bill Gates did given the same circumstance.

more people could have capitalized on ibm's colossal error than bill gates could have achieved absent that error.

Gates? the kid from the very wealthy Seattle family? who didn't have to worry about dropping out of Harvard to do something else?

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

how about michael jordan? skipped over him, huh?

Bill Gates is the multiplication of two very small probabilities. He's a genius and he was very lucky. Outliers is a good treatment of this topic. There was a chapter on him. He (and Ballmer) lived in rare areas where computing time was available cheaply (or was it free..)

I still say the US is very upwardly mobile from middle to top, but for the bottom quartile, a lot of work remains to be done. Jordon is a rarer talent than Gates. B-Ball is way more accessible and visible and way more of an efficient meritocracy. Nor did he need weird luck vis a vis IBMs bad decisions.

no RS, you're the one who is doctrinaire.

because I think it's wrong to tell a child "IQ is just a matter of luck, via genetics. you don't do anything to deserve it, you don't earn it, you're given it". If that's docrinaire so be it.

how about michael jordan? skipped over him, huh?

Q How many kids could have aced that spanish exam if they really had studied. I mean really.
A A lot more.

i didn't know we were talking to children here. Genetics (to the individual) is obviously luck; IQ is clearly a function of genetics although proper nurture certainly assists.

You might do well to examine your need to argue everything. It seems more important to you to argue than ever actually believe something. May be fun in a frat house (although i wouldn't know having spent little time in that environment) but in the real world it is annoying and completely counter productive.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind given new facts---I do it often. Its the endless on the one hand, on the other hand that leads to nothing but blather.

RS I think you dont realize how difficult it is to be that kid studying if you are in a shithole.

i think you have every opportunity to be a part of your own success. i think you should also be aware that many of the attributes that others so smugly enjoy in themselves are merely gifts.

does that mean i think that anyone should be unaware that they are lucky, or not strive to use those gifts? no. i mean they shouldn't be self-centered, dogmatic, narrow-minded, selfish people.

like rand.

Smug by it's very defintion is negative. Feeing a sense of Pride, dignity and self respect is positive. There are so few Einsteins and people of the opposite end of the spectrum. I think Rhino's point is well made, but many parents have raised their kids in meager circumstances and have raised their kids right. Sure it was harder, but your SUV, Summer home, vacations to Europe...not necessary.

wow, i clearly have a different view of "luck". winning the lottery, finding the golden ticket in a wonka bar, being in the right place at the right time, drawing a royal flush...those seem like instances of luck to me. Genetics? Not so much. But, fine if you want to define it as "that which happens to you that you cannot will". Seems to strip the word of any real meaning, but so be it.

and you, unfortunately are the epitome of smug.

so...if you're born with extraordinary athletic ability (for example), how would you define that?

this is such a funny, and bizarre, conversation :)

why? particularly, what is bizarre about it?

STOP WITH THE FUCKING PERSONAL SHIT. do you think bill gates didn't ever go to europe? do you think they didn't have a summer home? what the fuck does one thing have with another?

no they're not necessary. and no they won't by definition "spoil" a child. and a child doesn't need to grow up in an Extell glass box condo either. oh, and did you answer? are you a parent?

what did you not get about encouraging children to strive to use their gifts?

My take, too many people say, if you succeeded it was due to luck, if you failed, too many obstacles. But of course if the successful don't help the failed , well that's awful. In my high school the majority who failed, well it was smoking too much pot and partying.

extraordinary outcomes do not equal luck. there are likely many concrete explanations for such outcomes other than fairy dust.

not talking about outcomes....and its not 100% luck but....

was Brad Pitt lucky that he was born looking as he does? did he make something of it? yes to both. would he be in the position he is if he didn't look the way he does? did he do anything to look that way? no to both. (Ok...of course, he works out but so do i!)

doesn't there need to be some randomness involved?

hey, i may be way off. no prob.

Point being parents with a few bucks, yea it helps. but more than two parents sitting home and playing scrabble with the kids, discussing the NY Times over dinner, making sure the kids get 8 hours sleep and eat right? There are stories about children going to private school and blowing it, and other kids going to a city and/or state college doing alright.

of course there is....but lets stick to brad pitt and michael jordan for a moment. i don't think that they randomly achieved fame. nor do i think they did it without working for it. but....the whole point is the raw material they began with.

according to riversider the key to success is not to smoke pot and party and high school. can tell you that i know quite a few people who managed to do quite well and smoke pot and party in high school. certainly helped to have a high IQ and a good homelife.

I agree with the post that called these examples outliers, and not worthy of discussion.

bizaree & funny for a board designated to real estate.

brad pitt? hmm....i just don't think everything we can't control is luck (or not).

then what is it?

uwsmom, what do you mean?

there is a whole continuum of outcomes. being a self-sufficient, happy, well-adjusted person in a nine-to-five job may be deemed to be less than success for a highly intelligent person by some. they may not have optimized their potential. but they may be much better off than someone who has achieved more at a certain cost.

rs, where do you hear such things? i certainly almost always hear the opposite, that if you succeed it's because you're worthy, and if you fail it's because you haven't tried hard enough.

10023 said immigrants are outliers. not worthy of discussion? you were going strong for awhile.

How about if you don't try your best you are less likely to succeed. Never heard success is only given to those that are worthy like a prize. If you looked at the top students in your daughter's school, I would feel comfortable speculating that they study longer and work harder than the bottom students.

Discussing Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein. They are still outliers. statistical aberrations that detract. but you knew that.

what is what? genetics? genetics = genetics. i'm not a geneticist, but isn't it predetermined (unless you to toy with them). isn't it contradictory to call something predetermined "luck"?

rs, that was reasonably put. but it's not really correct. you'd be amazed at the range of abilities. some kids are good in some areas, and a few lucky ones are good at many things, a few are middling across the board, and some are really awful in a couple of areas. some at the top get there because they work extremely hard, for others the effort is not so intense. many of the kids toward the bottom, sadly, study the most. they have the tutors, and the tears, and more than their share of frustrations, because their parents want them to get the same grades as those at the top.

Its more luck (and I include genetics) than most successful people especially in this discussion care to admit to themselves or there kids. You have to be there to work hard and have it matter a lot.

lol predetermined luck great oxymoron!

rs: bullshit. first, you attribute their outlier status to another poster; then you declare it to be true. bullshit.

they are merely more extreme examples of the obvious. all other things being equal, hard work is a plus. but...all other things are rarely equal except in the narrow minded world of a riversider.

do you know the story of lawrence taylor of the new york giants...a noted user of drugs yet arguably one of the top 10 players of all time in the NFL. would he have been better without the drugs...most likely. could most people who didn't take drugs come close to his performance...no way.

genetics are not 100% of the answer...but, to return to where we started. to assume that everyone who succeeds is deserving and that everyone who doesn't is a victim of their own lack of will, etc. is so small minded and childish as to be laughable.

what's an outlier? top 1%?

genetics is predetermined. but the fact that YOU have those genetics is luck. statistically you got lucky. out of all kids you were granted those genetics, not some other kid.

so riversider...I assume from your lack of an answer that you don't have kids. nothing wrong with that. but once you have kids, many people's perspectives on what they previously thought to be true often change. if nothing else, kids can be great humblers to their parents.

ar - either genetics is luck or it isn't. it can't be luck for some, unlucky for others, and neutral for the rest. an outlier can be so w/o luck being involved.

i think part of the confusion is that i'm using luck as a noun, not as an adjective. luck as its own thing, not as a descriptor.

of course it can. your genetic results don't occur in a void. they occur within a given set of circumstances. which, is why genetics and luck or lack thereof only explain so much. and genetics are complicated. you can be bestowed with great gifts and great liabilities.

sorry, i'm going to the evil wikipedia here. there are other social, religious and phsychological interpretations of luck. this is the first one presented.

Luck as Lack of Control
"Luck refers to that which happens to a person beyond that person's control. This view incorporates phenomena that are chance happenings, a person's place of birth for example, but where there is no uncertainty involved, or where the uncertainty is irrelevant. Within this framework one can differentiate between three different types of luck:

Constitutional luck, that is, luck with factors that cannot be changed. Place of birth and genetic constitution are typical examples.
Circumstantial luck - with factors that are haphazardly brought on. Accidents and epidemics are typical examples.
Ignorance luck, that is, luck with factors one does not know about. Examples can be identified only in hindsight."

uwsmom, there are plenty who would disagree with me. even within the wikipedia listing there are some definitions others would prefer. i actually agree with the following, but only to the extent that the philosophy dictates that people use luck as an "excuse." there is no denying, to me, that being diagnosed with leukemia at 5 is bad genetic luck. but obviously to survive and then subsequently blame unconnected negativity with that occurrence would be to misuse the concept of luck. complicated. luck, positive or negative, doesn't negate all personal responsibility.

Luck as a Placebo
Some encourage the belief in luck as a false idea, but which may produce positive thinking, and alter one's responses for the better. Others, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud, feel a belief in luck has more to do with a locus of control for events in one's life, and the subsequent escape from personal responsibility. According to this theory, one who ascribes their travails to "bad luck" will be found upon close examination to be living risky lifestyles. In personality psychology, people reliably differ from each other depending on four key aspects: beliefs in luck, rejection of luck, being lucky, and being unlucky.[16] People who believe in good luck are more optimistic, more satisfied with their lives, and have better moods.[16] If "good" and "bad" events occur at random to everyone, believers in good luck will experience a net gain in their fortunes, and vice versa for believers in bad luck. This is clearly likely to be self-reinforcing. Thus, a belief in good luck may actually be an adaptive meme.

i'm partial to the "luck as a fallacy" bit.

i knew you would be!! but i wasn't quite generous enough to post it for you.

Cc it seems we agree on most things. You must be smart. Or lucky. Or both. Or maybe you just work hard.

Let's take Michael Phelps as an example. I remember from the olympics that he had a rare long slender body, unusually long arms and, I do believe, webbed feet. Now these are genetic predispositions that would enable him to consider the actions that yield athletic sucess. If Michael was a stoner from PA with a fear of the water which, dates back to a inatentive bathing experience a 4 months of age, we would have never heard of him. It all comes down to 10% predisposition 89% perspiration 1% gungho mom.
Luck is the randomness in the machine...it is also the residue of design.

"michael jordan clearly practiced his heart out and worked his ass off. but, 99.9 out of 100 guys could have done the same thing and not been him...never, ever."

Since when is michael jordan the model for upward mobility?

We're not talking about becoming president, we're talking about finishing an education and getting a decent job.

In the end... there are few people on earth who could put Michael Jordan-type effort into their education. and not create a decent life for themselves.

"Point being parents with a few bucks, yea it helps. but more than two parents sitting home and playing scrabble with the kids, discussing the NY Times over dinner, making sure the kids get 8 hours sleep and eat right? There are stories about children going to private school and blowing it, and other kids going to a city and/or state college doing alright."

Bingo. Talk of being the richest man on earth is stupid if we're talking about upward mobility for the masses.

Point is, most folks who complain about luck simply haven't taken advantages of all the opportunity afforded them.

lol ar. i think wikipedia may be the vessel for world peace.

for lurkers. it's only fair:

Luck as a fallacy
Another view holds that "luck is probability taken personally." A rationalist approach to luck includes the application of the rules of probability, and an avoidance of unscientific beliefs. The rationalist feels the belief in luck is a result of poor reasoning or wishful thinking. To a rationalist, a believer in luck who asserts that something has influenced his or her luck commits the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy: that because two events are connected sequentially, they are connected causally as well. In general:

A happens (luck-attracting event or action) and then B happens;
Therefore, A influenced B.

In the rationalist perspective, probability is only affected by confirmed causal connections.

The gambler's fallacy and inverse gambler's fallacy both explain some reasoning problems in common beliefs in luck. They involve denying the unpredictability of random events: "I haven't rolled a seven all week, so I'll definitely roll one tonight".

Luck is merely an expression noting an extended period of noted outcomes, completely consistent with random walk probability theory. Wishing one "good luck" will not cause such an extended period, but it expresses positive feelings toward the one—not necessarily wholly undesirable

> lol ar. i think wikipedia may be the vessel for world peace.

I once used wikipedia to prove an argument.

Of course, I went and changed the entry myself first.

;-)

"what asset price is not ultimately tied to incomes?"

GOLD

:)
New highs today....oh that's right..gold isn't viewed as an asset here.

If you think michael phelps is 90 percent perspiration you are in lala land. I mean once you said webbed feet I thought you got the joke. Unless he had a mom who put cigarette butts out on him he was going to the olympics. Perspiration accounted for his historic number of medals. Very little was going to stop him from being a top tier swimmer other than never being put in a pool.

wait. one can have natural inclinations and do nothing with them. one needs to work hard (i think that's what falco means by 90% perspiration) to achieve success. like i said, it doesn't happen sitting in a black box. though, give it 5 years and we may hear about performance enhancing something or other (maybe he got "lucky" and scored some good shit)

There is a problem with Falcos basic premise. If we know that humans with giant torsos and webbed feets are less than 1 in 10, THEN WE FUCKING KNOW THAT IT WASNT 90% PERSPIRATION. Do people here understand basic compound probabilities or not? Lets start there. Michael Phelps is a 1 in 1000 physical specimen, CONSERVATIVELY...so to say his success is 90% perspiration is either lazy in use of language or math illiterate or both.

Ericho is an idiot, but gold is an asset.

my penis is webbed. agree Ericho is an idiot asset.

Rhino - what are you talking about? Do you know how many long torsoed, web footed specimens never make it into the pool? LOL. does it matter?

not really.
swimming is a learned trait. there are genetic predispositions that create conditions where learned traits may manifest themselves as extraordinary. My point was, regardless of the genetic predisposition if Michael didn't spend a million hours in the pool doing laps and driving to succeed you would have never heard of him.
Rhino, what part of this simplistic concept eludes you?

btw - i don't think mike's penis or feet are webbed. i think its his arm span that is unusually long.

UWSMOM, its actually irrelevant....if they are less than 1 in 10 humans, then mathematically less than 9/10ths of Phelps success is hard work. Please tell me you do not require further explanation. Wild success like Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, and Michael Phelps is due to some combination of luck (including the genetic lottery) and hard work. What we are left with is what we know. What we know is the US is less upwardly mobile than many European socialist econonomies and that if you need to guess someones socioeconomic status, the single most predictive piece of information you can have is the socioeconomic status of their parents.

Falco, I'll answer you when you digest my post and correct your shitty math.

Rhino - i don't clearly understand that first sentence, but i think you're talking about the probability of phelp's body composition and then i'm not sure what you're doing mathematically.

webbed penis? as in, spends a lot of time with you surfing the 'WEB'?
that makes more sense.

Rhino take a look at this statement...
'If we know that humans with giant torsos and webbed feet's are less than 1 in 10, THEN WE FUCKING KNOW THAT IT WASNT 90% PERSPIRATION'
this my brother, is a logical fallacy of the most elementary order.
OUCH!
Round One:
Analytical thinking = 1 / Rhino = 0

Back to the original question: someone I know has always said : Real Estate is the only thing no one buys when it's one sale. You go to Bloomingdale's and take a table full of women's sweaters and mark them off by 50% and women will be knifing each other to get at them. But Real Estate prices fall 50% and NO ONE wants to buy any". I can tell as a broker, it has almost always been much harder to sell at the bottom of cycles (even after it was pretty clear that we were past the bottom) than at the frenzy prices when things have clearly overshot their worth. The lemming (momentum) effects are amazingly strong in RE.

So, as to the question of whether dropping prices might actually lead to a decrease in demand, it is certainly possible. We can see it in the phrase which gets bandied about here every day (mostly ironically) "buy now or be priced out forever". On the way up, this is actually how people act. On the way down and even afterward, it's clear to people that this isn't the case. For a very long number of years in this WAAAYYY too long up cycle, an awful lot of buying was to at least some extent "fear buying". Well, if we agree arguendo that this was the case, then it's pretty easy to see how falling prices could lead to decreased demand.

When one says, it's luck or genes, it sounds like an excuse, "it's not my fault, i had bad genes". What's next the guy who robs, murders, etc. Sorry, I don't buy it, the combination of genes from two parents is just too random and not predictable. Sure it comes a little easier for some than others, but on average it's more about hard work and determination + opportunity. Maybe some of you are confusing a good home where the family nurtures the skills that will come into play later in life.

90 percent can't be work if you concede fewer than one in ten has a body type capable of such wild swimming success.

Falco you said nothing in your last post. I defy anyone to argue you said anything in your last post.

More often than not, it's mediocre people doing great things,

uwsmom, genetics may seem like the luck of the draw, but it isn't exactly gambling. you, yourself, didn't say i'll be born to these people because i'll have a much higher chance of good genes.

you didn't have a say in it at all. the theory may apply to your parents' happiness at your genetic superiority. but it doesn't to your own.

wiki is just easy, i knew the theories already. i didn't feel like going to my daughter's school research databases and finding the appropriate links.

and RS, I had an absolutely shitty home. so no, I don't think i'd be confusing it at all. i worked my ass off to escape. you'd think i'd be the last to buy into the theory of luck. but i'm not. i escaped because i was lucky enough to have been given the raw material to work with. i give VERY little credit to my parents.

Nailed it, AR.

it's ok, we could go back and forth forever about this. i just don't attribute "everything out of one's control" to luck, genetics included. no biggee.

Its really amazing how little can be conceded here for conversations sake. Its kind of surreal to me that you wouldnt call genetics luck. Have you ever heard the term, "genetic lottery"?

"More often than not, it's mediocre people doing great things".... this is so trite and so smug at the same time.

Its really amazing how little can be conceded here for conversations sake

back at ya!

Right, because there is anything I have said here nearly as ridiculous as 'I dont call genetics luck'.

well, i'm an amazing woman.

Nature vs Nurture debate has been going on for a long time. It won't be solved here.

i, genuinely, seriously, whole-heartedly find the concept of genetics = luck absurd. i'm sorry to be so dense, so hard-headed, so completely ignorant and ill-informed. not everyone is as bright as you rhino.

This thread is a debate bus that was trying to get to the subject of free will but ended up losing a wheel somewhere...

80sMan, very good comment!

http://social.jrank.org/pages/666/Twin-Studies.html

Three generations of identical female Russian twins. There is some evidence that identical twins are more likely to be dressed alike; there is no evidence, however, that this increased similarity is linked to the types of behaviors that psychologists typically study, such as mental abilities or psychopathology. (Gerald Davis/Phototake NYC

Read more: http://social.jrank.org/pages/666/Twin-Studies.html#ixzz0Vtk9DsVJ

Its amazing that a woman such as yourself can deny a truism and then puff up with pride about it.

I am sorry that it scares folks or somehow offends their Puritan ethos to admit that ones wealth at birth is the single best by far bar none piece of info to predict their ultimate socioeconomic status. The US is less upwardly mobile than you think. Its clear from the data. Further, we're less upwardly mobile than many European socialist nations. This was actually the swing topic of the recent election if you didnt notice the landslide/mandate given to Obama.

rhino, i'm sorry, but i just can't wrap my head around the concept of something as predetermined as genetics being attributed to luck. it's bizarre to me that one would argue for it. it's bizarre to me that i'm the only one getting this point.

is it predetermined which sperm gets to the egg first or is that luck?

again, i'm no geneticist, but don't they all contain same dna? maybe i'm wrong. don't have time to google it.

and i'm not arguing nature/nurture nor am i arguing for free will. i was just trying to make what i thought was a very simple point when someone said they attributed their success to luck then proceeded to state a variety of good decisions they made to get to where they are.

AR - am I misunderstanding you? Your "raw material" is the genetics from your parents, right? So you should give them credit for that beginning, though they may not have nurtured it the way you would have liked. Or, if you prefer, possibly you were the classic overachiever.

"What we know is the US is less upwardly mobile than many European socialist econonomies "

We don't actually know it. You've said it twice, with no support... and I noted the two sources I've seen say otherwise.

murray, i don't give them much credit. i am thankful they had at least the raw genetic material, but they did nothing other than copulate and then my mother gave birth (and as my mother was a raging alcoholic while she was pregnant, i think i have even more reason to attribute this genetic bonanza to luck). i actually loved my mother greatly, despite everything, so i guess that was a gift of sorts. not so my father.

uwsmom, it is stunning how you only read half of what i write. and i'm not the norm. i'm two or three levels higher in the socioeconomic strata than my parents. most people have little movement available to them. i don't attribute my success to luck. far from it, i succeeded despite my environment. but i do attribute some of my genetics to luck. the alcoholism and cancer that are prevelant i could do without.

i did nothing to "earn" my dna, good or bad. i worked hard to overcome my environment (but i had a couple of lucky moments there as well). those are two very different things. and study after study shows that most people don't overcome their environment.

There was a very interesting NOVA episode recently on epigenetics. It is a field of research into environmental effects on how your genes are expressed, and how these modified expressions can be passed between generations. It gets back to a very old and discredited idea, that a parent's life experiences can physically change thier child.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/02.html