HUD Says Realtors Can Now Speak the Truth (about crime rates and school quality)

By Alex Tabarrok. 

"HUD: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.

“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”

The background is that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and via later amendments) familial status, and disability. Discrimination included “steering” buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. The Biden administration ramped this up with a directive and Executive Order that essentially said the Fair Housing Act must be interpreted not just to prohibit discrimination but to redress and undo past discrimination:

This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.

…the [HUD] Secretary shall take any necessary steps,…to implement the Fair Housing Act’s requirements that HUD administer its programs in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing and HUD’s overall duty to administer the Act (42 U.S.C. 3608(a)) including by preventing practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect.

The “discriminatory effect” language reinforced that so-called disparate impact, not just intentional discrimination counted as discriminatory—and it contributed to a legal and reputational environment in which platforms and agents had strong incentives to avoid anything that could be characterized as steering. As a result, by the end of the year, Realtor.com had removed its crime map from all search results, as did Trulia, Redfin announced it would not add crime data to its platform and since Zillow already didn’t include such data, by early 2022 all the major portals had dropped crime information. Similarly, the National Association of Realtors published material instructing agents not to directly answer client questions about neighborhood safety. One article in “The Safety Series” was titled “‘Is This a Safe Neighborhood?’ Don’t Answer That” and by “Safety Series” they meant safety for the realtor not the client.

So without explicitly making such information illegal, the government created a legal and reputational climate that chilled its provision. Portals removed crime maps and realtors became reluctant to answer ordinary buyer questions about neighborhood safety and school quality. That is a degradation of service, not a civil-rights victory. The pretext was that crime information might not be accurate but the real fear was that it would accurately suggest neighborhoods with high percentages of black residents had more crime. Withholding information about crime and schools, however, does not change the facts; it just shifts the informational advantage toward buyers who are wealthy, well-connected, or sophisticated enough to find the data themselves. Moreover, it should go without saying that black homebuyers also want information about neighborhood crime rates–don’t these buyers count? Suppressing truthful information is rarely a good way to improve outcomes. As with Ban the Box, blocking direct access to relevant information encourages worse proxy-based decision-making.

Trump’s HUD is correct: fair housing law should prohibit discrimination, not prevent realtors from telling the truth."

What the Meta–Google Verdict Gets Wrong

Is a product defective if it gives you too much of what you want? And are social-scroll algorithms regulated products — or protected speech?

By Logan Tantibanchachai of AIER. 

"A few weeks ago, social media skeptics received their best news in years.

In KGM v. Meta, a jury found Meta and Google negligent for their role in fueling a youth mental health crisis. Now, six million dollars in damages is basically meaningless to companies that gross hundreds of billions in revenue annually. But the reason this case has gotten so much media attention is for what it might represent. Some have compared the case to the beginning of litigation against Big Tobacco last century, which culminated in a $206 billion master settlement with more than 40 states.

In this case, however, the jury got it wrong. It concluded three things:

• Instagram and YouTube were designed in ways that encouraged uncontrollable use and addictive behaviors.
• The companies failed to adequately warn users, especially minors, about the risks.
• The design of their platforms was a considerable factor in causing the plaintiff’s mental health problems.

All three of these things could be true, but neither Meta nor Google should be held liable for any of them. Unlike prior cases involving social media, KGM treated YouTube and Instagram as fundamentally defective products. The central question wasn’t whether malicious users could misuse these platforms, but whether the platforms themselves posed inherent risks. In general, online companies aren’t legally accountable for what users post due to Section 230 protections — Meta, for instance, wouldn’t be held liable for someone using its products to incite violence. In this case, though, Judge Carolyn Kuhl ruled that platform design elements — like algorithm-driven feeds, autoplaying videos, and push notifications — could be challenged. 

In other words, Instagram and YouTube should be held liable because they’re addictive, and too effective at providing content users want.

In a motion denying summary judgment, Judge Kuhl wrote: “The fact that a design feature like ‘infinite scroll’ impelled a user to continue to consume content that proved harmful does not mean that there can be no liability for harm arising from the design feature itself.” In other words, Meta and Google can be held responsible for designing a product that fulfills a consumer desire. Such an argument is dubious. Product innovation exists precisely to meet the demands of consumers — and that’s a good thing.

If such a conclusion holds, where could it not apply? Oreos are delicious — should Mondelez International be forced to make their product less appealing because a “design feature” of Oreos causes repeated consumption of Oreos, with negative health outcomes? Should TV shows that end on a cliffhanger be banned because such a “design feature” creates an addictive cycle, causing the viewer to continue watching? In excess, many other products besides social media can become addictive, but it’s not the government’s job to single out certain products or consumer desires as addictive. 

And then there’s the First Amendment problem. Even assuming that social media is addictive in a way analogous to tobacco, the two differ in a key respect. Social media companies are being held liable for their speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. As Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, put it:

The plaintiffs in these lawsuits argued that companies design algorithms that are tailored to individual users to keep them hooked. But algorithms are themselves speech, and there is no reason to treat this speech differently from the code that encourages people to keep playing video games. 

Or, as the Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in Moody v. NetChoice, “the First Amendment … does not go on leave when social media [is] involved.” And while social media is almost certainly a drain on society — decreasing attention spans, increasing depression, and spreading misinformation — neither restricting First Amendment-protected speech nor regulating the free market is the answer.

Forcing social media companies to restrict access to social media won’t necessarily lead to meaningfully lower social media usage by teenagers. For one, even the most extreme option — simply banning social media usage by teenagers — is easily circumvented by most teenagers. Teenagers have cleared visual age checks. As one Australian teenager put it, “I scrunched my face up to get more wrinkles, so I looked older, and it worked!” Perhaps not a high-tech workaround, but it nevertheless worked, and many other techniques do, too.

And even if the current mainstream social media companies — Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. — were forced to make their products less addictive, that would just open the door for competitors to replace them. And then what? Regulate those products until they’re less addictive, too? At some point, the government will just be playing First Amendment Whac-A-Mole. 

Ultimately, this is not a problem for the courts — nor even legislatures — but rather for civil society. Regulating trillion-dollar companies out of existence won’t fix the underlying problem. If social media were intrinsically detrimental, in the way that cigarettes cause a chemical addiction and subsequent health problems, then almost every teenager who uses social media would struggle with addiction and see some demonstrable negative impact on their life. But that’s not the case. About one in five teens say social media has hurt their mental health. Another study found that social media usage beyond three hours a day increased internalizing problems (like anxiety/depression) by about 60 to 80 percent. Neither of these numbers are great. But they also reveal that a significant percentage of teenagers who use social media are perfectly fine. 

So what explains how one teen could use social media and neither become addicted nor have their mental health suffer, and another teen could experience the opposite? Very likely having access to a robust civil society — family, activities, community organizations, religious groups, and other social supports. Social media accounts for about one percent of the variation in life satisfaction. By contrast, family situations explain about a third of life satisfaction for young adults. Running to government for legislation to fix our minor woes allows these important community bonds to atrophy. An important aspect of the liberal political order is the recognition that voluntary, robust civil society can play a much more effective role in addressing these societal problems than can even well-intentioned meddling by the government. Social media is no exception."

Earth Day’s Bad Bet Against Humanity

The Malthusian mind does not see the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt

By Marian L. Tupy of Cato. Excerpts:

"Malthus had already lost his main argument before his essay even appeared in print. Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England rose from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, an increase of 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal GDP per person rose from 12.37 British pounds to 23.97 pounds, an increase of 93.8 percent. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread, a staple that fed much of the poor, rose from 5.2 pence to 7.4 pence, or 42.3 percent. Because incomes rose much faster than the price of bread, the latter became 36.2 percent more abundant, not less."

"Human beings are not trapped in the same ecological logic as bacteria in a dish or buffalo on a plain. We exchange with one another. We build institutions. We create tools. We improve production methods. We substitute one material for another. We grow more from the same soil—sometimes much more. In other words, we create new knowledge."

"Higher prices signal a problem. Those higher prices then encourage knowledge creation, and new knowledge leads to greater abundance."

"The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people."

 

"By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent. Resources growing at a faster pace than the population is what Pooley and I call superabundance. It is the opposite of Malthus’ conjecture that each additional person leaves less for everyone else.

The critics sometimes retreat to complaining about the short-term noise, as though any temporary spike in prices confirms the Malthusian creed. Our report addresses that, too. In 2025, 27 commodities became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The abundance of oranges rose the most, by 65.6 percent, while coconut oil’s abundance fell the most, by 36.3 percent. But commodity markets always swing because weather changes, disease hits crops, wars disrupt transport, and investment arrives late or early. Simon never argued that every price falls every year in a straight line. He argued that scarcity signals provoke adjustment. A temporary setback is not a vindication of Malthus. It is often the first stage of a correction. That is why the long trend matters more than the annual changes.

Our findings do not show that pollution is imaginary or that every environmental question has been solved. It has not. But environmental problems should be addressed as side effects of human flourishing, not as evidence that human flourishing itself is a mistake. The Earth Day mentality blurred that distinction. It converted planetary stewardship into misanthropy. It taught millions to look at a growing population and see only a burden, never a contribution. It treated the human animal as uniquely destructive when, in fact, people are the only animals who can recognize ecological damage and fix it. It is new knowledge—human knowledge—that gives societies the capacity to clean rivers, regulate toxins, build sewage systems, improve fuel efficiency, and move from dirtier technologies to cleaner ones. A poor society burns what it can find and dumps what it cannot manage. A rich society can afford scrubbers, pipelines, wastewater treatment, research labs, and better rules.

The green extremists often speak as though abundance is the disease, when in fact abundance is usually what makes environmental improvement possible. And so, despite half a century of doomsaying, the Earth is not collapsing under the weight of humanity. It is supporting far more people who can command far more resources with far less labor than their predecessors could. That is not the picture of a planet in terminal decline. It is the picture of a planet made more habitable by the one species clever enough to improve it. The Earth is not a museum piece. It is a working planet inhabited by learning beings who desire and are entitled to flourish." 

Quantitative easing and the Fed’s free lunch problem

By Steve Swedberg of CEI. Excerpt:

"QE operates primarily through asset price channels, which means that it compresses risk premia and increases market responsiveness to central bank communication. This can create artificially elevated asset prices, encourage greater risk-taking during periods of accommodation, and also increase financial system exposure.

Over time, this weakens the informational role of prices. Capital allocation becomes increasingly shaped by policy-driven conditions instead of market-based signals. That shift can reduce the efficiency of investment, thereby directing resources less consistently to their most productive uses.

Because productivity is the primary driver of long-run growth, wages, and economic resilience, even incremental distortions in capital allocation can weigh on the economy’s underlying performance over time. What begins as a stabilization tool can, if sustained, alter the structure of financial decision-making.

Setting the stage for the hard part

Against this backdrop, balance sheet reduction is a means of re-establishing clearer price discovery and restoring policy space for future downturns. It is a step toward rebalancing the role of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in monetary policy. QE has altered financial markets in ways that persist well beyond the crisis it was meant to address. Sustained intervention weakens the role of market signals and makes financial conditions more reliant on policy-driven forces. As these effects become embedded in market behavior, stepping back from QE becomes more difficult. The central challenge is whether the balance sheet can be reduced without severe consequences."

Yale Takes Itself to Reform School

A faculty study agrees with many of academia’s critics, believe it or not

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the critique: rising tuition that prices out the middle class; an explosion in bureaucracy that steals resources from instruction; runaway grade inflation; an opaque admissions process that prizes race, gender and identity over achievement; disdain for America’s founding and its abiding principles; and a largely left-wing monoculture that discourages honest (or any) debate, among other sins."

"Yale’s report by an internal Committee on Trust in Higher Education treats those criticisms with respect and in many cases agrees with them."

"Trump. They essentially agree with the criticism about rising costs, admissions that lack transparency, and the failure to support free speech on campus and genuine academic freedom." 

Police Chiefs Allegedly Faked Robberies in $5,000-a-Pop Visa Fraud Scheme

For nearly a decade, four Louisiana lawmen and a Subway shop owner manufactured phony crime reports to help foreign nationals stay in the U.S., prosecutors say

By Joe Barrett of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"In a case still winding through court, federal officials allege the men spent nearly 10 years manufacturing false crime reports as part of a visa-fraud scheme. The operation netted the officers $5,000 per “victim” and helped hundreds of foreign nationals secure U visas—a status that allows certain crime victims to remain in the U.S., Van Hook said."

"The center of the scheme, authorities said, was Chandrakant “Lala” Patel, the friendly owner of a Subway and other small businesses. Patel, himself a U visa recipient, would allegedly connect with crime “victims” looking to stay in the U.S."

"He would then turn to one of the law-enforcement officials to draw up paperwork for crimes that never happened"

"The officers would generate false reports and swear in writing that the people named were legitimate crime victims"

"For years, it worked, authorities said. Investigators with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spurred the multiagency probe in July 2024 after uncovering a pattern of inconsistencies in U-visa applications."

"Hundreds reportedly obtained U visas through the scheme, and Louisiana isn’t alone."

"Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Boston indicted 10 Indian nationals for allegedly staging convenience-store holdups in Massachusetts and elsewhere to secure U visas. A bogus robber and getaway driver would appear to rob the clerk or owner at gunpoint, then flee, authorities said. Minutes later, the clerk would call police and present security-camera footage as evidence."

Also see Five Things to Know About the Visa Fraud Case Shaking Small-Town Lousiana: Prosecutors say the little-known U visa is at the heart of an alleged scheme. 

A Minnesota Mining Liberation Act

The GOP overturns a Biden rule that banned resource development

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"a Biden public land order that withdrew some 225,500 acres of land in the Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota from mining and other resource development."

"Expanding domestic critical mineral development ought to be a bipartisan cause as China seeks to weaponize its control of the supply chain. The Duluth Complex beneath Minnesota’s Superior National Forest boasts nearly eight billion tons of critical minerals"