Are NYT reporters inherently bigoted?

A very odd piece in the NYT. The Epicenter of the Housing Bust Is Booming Again. (That’s a Warning Sign.) by Matthew Goldstein, Robert Gebeloff, Ross Mantle, and Matt Ruby.

The argument is that because the Las Vegas housing market is booming again, that is a leading indicator of a housing bust.

I am sympathetic to that argument. I believe our public servants are almost precisely replicating the same policies which led to the Great Recession of 2007 which had its roots in easy financing in the housing market. The main mistake was using government regulation and policy to extend mortgages to as many people as possible regardless of their capacity to repay. All along, that policy was anchored in two errors of thinking.

Error 1: If there are differentials in home ownership based on age, race, gender, etc. it must because of malicious or systemic bias. The intent is to change policy and regulation so that everyone has equal access to home ownership. Diagnosis - There is discrimination going on but it discrimination based on capacity/likelihood of repaying a mortgage rather than discrimination based on age, race, gender, etc. And the capacity/likelihood of repaying a mortgage is based on the historical markers such as steady income, demonstrated savings, credit record of paying debts on time, etc. Extending credit to those who do not have a high probability of repaying that debt is a recipe for both personal and financial disaster as the Great Recession demonstrated. And now we are doing it again.

Error 2: If middle class people own homes then owning a home must cause people to become middle class. Make it easy to own a home and you will expand the middle class. Diagnosis - It looks naive and stupid to make the causal flow error so explicit but that is the essence of the argument in the nineties (Democrats and Republicans). Of course it was presented with greater sophistication. Something along the lines of "When people own their own home, they take greater care of it and it induces them to better decision-making and more responsible behavior." Put like that it sounds plausible but that is just the rhetorical superstructure on the flawed premise that home ownership causes people to behave in a middle class fashion. The reality is that home ownership is a consequence of middle class behaviors not a cause of it.

And now we are doing it again because free stuff is always a vote winner.

But the odd thing about this article (which took four journalists to write?) is that the content does not match the headline. That in itself is not too surprising. Journalists don't write their headlines, editors do.

When you read the article, though, it is easy to see why the editor had a challenge. The content of the article is all over the place. There is one British born home builder who is setting aside a very small percentage of homes for the low income. Cheery human interest.

There are a couple of sisters with three children who bought a $300,000 home with only a $1,000 down payment through a special government program. Presented as winners in the boom market, I look at that with alarm. That is exactly what happened last time. Two years from now, they'll be in personal bankruptcy, home repossessed, any savings they might have accumulated will be wiped out and they will have the mark of financial Cain on their credit record.

All the rest of the vignettes are basically sob stories. People who were wrecked by the Great Recession or who are struggling now.

It is striking that across the seven personal stories, there are no men involved. Looks like all their interviewees are single women, most with children. All the individuals who are pictured are African American. All their stories involve divorce, financial struggles, and peripatetic lives.

If you wanted to create a composite of bad risks, this would be it. No steady income. No traditional familial structure. No record of careful financial management.

The headline should have been something like Down and Out in Booming Las Vegas.

And why focus only on women and African Americans. The NYT surely can't be deliberately trying to foster a negative stereotype.

I am guessing that perhaps their assignment was to go find sympathetic victims of the financial mess and report on them. That the journalists, in an uncoordinated fashion, went off to find their interviewees and, based on their unstated prejudices, all picked black women for interviews. Getting back together after a couple of days of field reporting, they suddenly discover that they have been constructing a negative stereotype. But they are out of time and budget so they run it anyway hoping no one notices.

Which leads to the second peculiar thing about journalists which I have commented on before - their incapacity to understand what the great middle of America will consider sympathetic. Americans tend to be astonishingly generous to those who have suffered from circumstances beyond their control - health, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. Americans tend to be much tighter fisted when people are suffering the consequences of their own behavior.

In this NYT article, only one case study seems of the former category, a retired grandmother on a fixed income with a daughter recovering from cancer living with her along with the grandson.

All the rest seem to fall into the category of victims of their own decisions; the group towards whom Americans tend to turn a cold shoulder. And yet that is who is fore-fronted by the reporters as if they think Americans should help shoulder the burden arising from bad decision-making.

Most peculiar.