Posts by David Hood
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to David Hood,
I should also note, that when it comes to my data matching skills Kylie Matthews (who inherited a historical data set I had linked together) once wrote
“As a side note, I took over responsibility for keeping David’s database online and available for the public after he left our common workplace, and there should be laws against allowing him access to big data. The maps for starters…”
The techniques I was (then) inventing were not creepy and stalkerish because they were being used to match together information about long dead people.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to chris,
My wife’s family name is Tang, I will give you a free car if you can tell me her ethnicity, not simply the country her name originated from, but her actual ethnicity, I’ll give you one guess.
I'm not guessing yet, but she has only a 1/11146375 of being connected to Greenland
http://forebears.co.uk/surnames/tang#nations2014
But as Ben noted, that was what was done- for example if some called Tang came up in some names data then that name frequency might be 0.9478 Chinese, but it also gets a 0.0012 contribution towards Canada, and while individuals are wrongly ascribed by the time you add a large group the errors balance out- this is the Central Limit Theorem at work.
I assume for the car offer, it is OK to match against secondary sources, just as labour also used other sources to match against? I should perhaps give you the option to reconsider the offer first though.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to John Farrell,
With the houses thing only being with one day of the polling period, it can' that've had much effect.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Ok I will try again,
by writing things like
"Of course in gentrifying areas like Ponsonby, the $20,000 villa of the 1970s is now fetching closer to $2 million than $1 million. All without anyone from mainland China in sight.
The only ethnic change in these desirable suburbs is the Polynesian renters who'd made the suburb home were driven out to the fringes by Pakeha baby-boomers like myself."
Where he is factually wrong in a delicate area, any discussion of his factual wrongness feeds into a wrong-headed focus arguments about what percentage of houses in Ponsonby have been bought by Chinese people. I wish he hadn't written that whole section, and had stuck with carefully thought out factual based arguments. Being factually wrong about anyone is bad, and drawing attention to the Chinese immigrants to Ponsonby is going down the wrong route.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Regulars will know I’m no great fan of Brian Rudman, but I’ve got to admit today’s column makes a lot of sense – someone at Te Harold has to.
I really, really dislike that article.
My reason for that is by saying mainland China migration to Ponsonby is not the cause, and getting your facts wrong (as Brian has if you go to the census data, but I would prefer not to explain in detail why as it will just give fuel to racists) you give fuel to racists arguing "see you are wrong so they are a problem" when immigration is orthogonal.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Mike Steinberg,
It would be fairly to say I disagree with Michael Reddell et al, because rather than asserting that immigration is primary as a matter of underlying theory (an a priori) if you actually run a correlation New Zealand immigration to house prices, it is an OK relationship. However, you add-in capital flows to the model, they are both a much better correlation and cause the immigration influence to disappear as an important factor (as if you look at them together capital flows explain all of immigration and more beside). Which makes complete sense if among immigrants only those with enough money can buy houses, and the money of immigrants is only a subset of capital flows buying houses.
I think traditional models of "buying houses" are predicated on what has been the case for almost all countries in the world for almost all of history- that you have to be there to buy a houses. Perhaps the demand-side model, rather than being a local one of competition, should be a model of one of the few places in the world where anyone, from anywhere in the world, can buy property even if they cannot buy property where they actually are. The traditional model is like discussing the way demand for bookstores will rise with population growth from data from the 1940s to the 1990s, and completely ignoring the effect of the rise of Amazon, the internet etc on the sector.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Sacha,
Could be, we just don't know. What the 2008 drop literally means is that for a few key quarters a bunch of people were buying houses much cheaper than the previous quarter. We don't know who was selling or buying.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Value is a proxy. REINZ (private) having actual sales data, and through an arcane process generate something called the house price index, which they publically publish a graph of, but don't give the accompanying time series data. QV (kinda private) use REINZ and other data to do the house valuations rates are based on via an arcane and unknown formula, and publish the Total value of New Zealand houses via the RBNZ . While this is technically different to the REINZ data it makes an almost identical graph just at a different scale, so it makes a good proxy for what is happening with property sales providing you are not trying to work out actual dollar values from it (it is good for the long term pattern). So for example we can confidentially say that a lot of new money compared to what was there has come into the housing market, and there is evidence that it could not have come from inside New Zealand.
To the best of my knowledge LINZ only gets title information, nothing about price.
Certainly as sectors of the economy go it is rather opaque.
If I can generalise, when I was passing this to people in 2013 the general response from people on the left was "I believe you but I don't understand you" while the general response from people on the right was "we all agree the price rises are due to constrained supply due to local government regulation, so this is irrelevant". No one seemed to have their heads around it being a completely open economic sector exposed to the world (freakishly so by world standards) and that world pressures may be very different to that of a market internal to the country.
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Here is a new graph (so I am kinda out of retirement with this topic on this one). Based on the idea that the arcane REINZ house price index basically matches the house value total that QV produces and is available on the RBNZ site, we can use the QV total numbers as a representation of sales (since it makes the same graph as the REINZ sales graph), providing we do not claim it is the specific value of sales.
One thing a few people have asked is "but can you use household debt"- wouldn't mortgages be better. So I've taken the RBNZ C6 series, checked that debt for housing tracks total debt so I can go back to 1990 with the total, and graphed it.
If mortgage borrowing was controlling the price of houses, you would expect a quarterly increase of x in money loaned to buy houses to be associated with a fairly fixed y amount in the value of houses, so the two lines should track more or less together and up to 2001 they pretty much do (there is a late 80s dip that balances the early 90s rise that I have seen in other data sources. Once we get into the 2000s the NZ market is not being influenced by people getting NZ bank loans, it is being governed by capital from elsewhere. There is also z pretty clear trend going on at the moment. Shall we have a sweepstake on house prices as of October 2016?
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I wonder whether the margin between the very poor and the very rich is wider than for other ethnic groups?
Not in income. from NZStat Selected ethnic groups (total responses) by total personal income (grouped), for the census usually resident population count aged 15 years and over, 2013 (RC, TA, AU)
