Comment by evil-olive

2 days ago

> It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made.

yeah, I never said it was.

Thompson himself says:

> Still, I wanted to spend more time engaging with the arguments of the antitrust housing folks.

he says he wanted to engage with the arguments made by the antitrust left.

which means he chose which of those arguments he was going to engage with.

and he chose to make this a 2-part post about why he thinks the antitrust left is wrong about homebuilding monopolies:

> Thanks for reading. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of my analysis, where I’ll explain what really happened in Dallas and why I think unaffordability became a national phenomenon if the cause isn’t oligopolies.

now, if there's a part 3 where he talks about RealPage and antitrust as it applies to rentals rather than single-family homebuilding, I'll gladly eat crow.

but until that happens, I'm going to call Thompson intellectually dishonest, because there's a cute little sleight-of-hand trick he's doing here. his opening paragraph:

> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.

he's saying some of the best criticisms of his book come from the antitrust left.

and that he's evaluated some of the arguments made by the antitrust left and thinks they're wrong.

if you miss the sleight-of-hand, you might come away thinking that he's responding to the best arguments made about housing by the antitrust left.

but he's pretty clearly not doing that. because the "antitrust left" argument against RealPage doing algorithmic rent-fixing (detailed in a 115-page federal lawsuit [0]) is much stronger than the "antitrust left" argument about homebuilding monopolies in Dallas (detailed in a Substack post by some guy)