Thompson is responding to a specific paper.
'One of the most detailed articles in this space is an analysis of the Dallas, Texas, housing market by the lawyer and writer Basel Musharbash. In “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable”'
Musharbash doesn't mention RealPage either, so go blame him, since he doesn't think RealPage contributes to Dallas's problems.
> Thompson is responding to a specific paper.
yes, he's responding to [0] which was written by Musharbash and published in Matt Stoller's newsletter.
and as I said, he's being selective about what criticism he's responding to and what he's ignoring. because Stoller has also published, in the same newsletter, articles about RealPage price fixing [1, 2].
Thompson says:
> The antitrust left, however, claims...
if he's going to say "here's what the antitrust left believes" and then proceed to debunk it, I think it's reasonable to point out that his response is cherry-picking only part of what that "antitrust left" believes.
of course, if he wants to publish a follow-up article defending RealPage, I'd love to read it.
0: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
1: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...
2: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental...
It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made. Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited, which is both interesting to read and also telling.
Stoller is free to find similarly decisive refutations of arguments Thompson had made (they're unlikely to be forthcoming).
I think for this to be interesting to an outside observer, it should at least address the bulk of the debate around the topic. If the GP is right and it's missing the key points of the anti-abudance critique, then I'm afraid it's missing the forest for the trees and misleading to a general audience.
>Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited
That's not true. At all. That's what Thompson _claims_. Look at what was actually written.
It's incredibly sleazy writing. It's so one-sided it might as well be a celebrity gossip magazine piece.
I feel like not a lot of celebrity gossip consists of calls with economics professors who wrote cited papers discussing those citations, but we might just read different rags.
Notably, he never included the full conversation. It's almost like the question asked to the economic professors and their responses are completely different from the way the questions are presented in the article. Claims and questions the target article never mentions or implies.
I think there's like, I don't know, a few fallacies named for such practices.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Here's Musharbash very patiently dealing with this himself: https://x.com/musharbash_b/status/1950938130447479281
Also just some general life advice, if reading Thompson's article didn't didn't set off any red flags for you (regardless of what you did or did not know going into this conversation) I would employ a little bit more skepticism and spend a little more time reading the source material in the future.
Disagree with him if you want but calling Thompson a grifter makes it hard for me to take anything Musharbash seriously or want to dive deeper into whatever he's written.
"If you point out that someone I like is doing something bad, that's too uncomfortable and I'll just stop listening" - You
> 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)
0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline
Thompson writes these articles to deflect valid criticism.