Some Links, 8/19/2025

Yascha Mounk on phones and youth; Housing economics and folk economics; Paul Levinson on Andrey Mir; LLM simulation generates social network power laws

Yascha Mounk writes,

Young people today are less likely to be in a stable relationship than they were a few decades ago. While nearly 4 in 5 Boomers had a romantic partner for some or all of their teenage years, for example, only about half of Gen Zers had a boyfriend or girlfriend in high school—and there are strong indications that this decline in couple formation persists as young people become adults. According to a 2023 Pew survey, for example, the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married has significantly increased over the course of the past decade.

He suspects phones.

the internet has inspired a worldwide return to identity and tribalism. Though it presents us with an endless stream of potential romantic partners, it has left more people single and celibate. While it makes it easy to find people who share the same interests, it has made people far less likely than in the past to socialize “in the real world.” And all of that has somehow led young people to cultivate personality traits, like neuroticism, that make them increasingly ill-equipped to face the world.

Chris Elmendorf and others write,

ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability.

In the same symposium, Boaz Abramson and Tim Landvoigt write,

new construction in the high-end segments improves affordability by more in all segments of the housing market compared to new construction in bottom-end segments.

This claim runs counter to the folk housing economics that dominates Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live. Housing policy is focused on the percentage of “affordable” housing that a developer must build in order to get the County’s permission. I tried to explain in an email to an “affordable housing advocate” that this amounts to a tax on housing supply and reduces affordability. She emailed back that she understood the “housing is housing” argument but somehow did not think it applied.

Paul Levinson writes,

Mir's Digital Reversal, then, delves into something that happened to us -- is still happening to us, right now -- after the revolution in personal computers and the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s. The reversal happened quickly, virtually overnight, if we look at the time it took the printing press to make its mark, and then electronic media, and every media shift that came before those two momentous developments. "The blogosphere, cellphones, and tablets already belong to media archaeology," Mir correctly notes. And he proceeds to tell us the results of this reversal.

Petter Törnberg describes the results of agent-based modeling of social network behavior.

The definition of an online social network is that you have this kind of posting, reposting, and following dynamics. It's quite fundamental to it. That alone seems to be enough to drive these negative outcomes.

…attention draws attention, and this leads to a power law distribution, where 1 percent [of users] dominates the entire conversation.

When it comes to attracting followers, the rich tend to get richer. Actually, the same thing happened with web sites. If you were an early leader in a niche, you just got more and more traffic. Four years after I created the homefair site, Microsoft put up a comparable site that was at least as informative. You would think that, being Microsoft, they would have blown us out of the water. But they were late to the game, and they did not put much effort into publicizing their HomeAdvisor site, so our lead held up.

substacks referenced above:

@

How We Got the Internet All Wrong