When Housing Prices Become Fish Stories, the Economy Suffers | Chappaqua Real Estate

Over at Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham points us to new research from Ireland suggesting that an awful lot of people don’t know how much they paid for their houses. I’ve adapted the main chart from the study on the right. As you can see, most people who get this wrong underestimate how much they paid—sometimes by gigantic amounts. Very few people overestimate how much they paid, and virtually no one overestimates by more than a quarter or so.

What accounts for this? As it happens, the authors are mostly concerned with how this poor recall affects estimates of the wealth effect—which I admit I didn’t really understand.¹ Because of this focus, they don’t spend a lot of time speculating on the underlying causes. But they do mention that the older the loan, the less accurate people are; that younger people remember better than older people; and that errors are smaller among the well-educated.

But none of this explains why the bad recall is overwhelmingly on the low side. So here’s my guess: people lie. Or, more charitably, they’re in denial. They don’t want to admit to themselves or their friends how much they lost during the housing crash. Or, when prices are rising, they like to brag about how much they’ve made. Everyone else claims to have made a killing, so they slice a little bit off their buying price to make it seem like they made a killing too. No one wants to be a sucker, after all. Do this enough times, and eventually you come to believe it yourself.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/03/when-housing-prices-become-fish-stories-economy-suffers