Silver attempts a dispassionate analysis. Her post simply asserts what she believes to be the problem with the housing bubble and ensuing meltdown, without much evidence or analysis.
She may be right. But Silver's larger point is evidence-based analysis. Where's the evidence to support her position? Why is her assertion any different than the political pundits' assertions? Is an email exchange between a couple of traders enough to prove global complicit awareness? There may well HAVE been global complicit awareness. But without enough data to statistically support her position, this response seems to prove Silver's point that we're better off looking at the data than we are working off what we 'know' is right.
This is anecdotal, but I'll posit it anyway. I did network administration for a number of title companies, mortgage lenders, real-estate agents, and other assorted firms involved in the selling and buying of houses between 2004 and 2011. Most of these people were what you would consider hard working honest employees, but due to perverse incentives helped in their part of making all of this worse. I saw plenty of lenders have the client flat out lie about their income. It didn't seem to matter, the banks rarely rejected the loans if the paper looked good. The better you lied, the more sales you got. If you were totally honest, people heard that it was hard to get a loan or closure from your firm and would head to others. At the time there was seemly no risk, it wasn't till after the financial crash that I heard of any arrests over paper manipulation. The problem is the people that have the data now are going to be very shy about releasing it. It will show fraud by the buyers, possible fraud by the lenders, poor research by the big banks. By the time the crash came it was a game. Interest only loans? You've got to be kidding me.
At a murder scene, evidence is how one determines the cause and the killer, but if your killer has means he can manipulate that evidence. The issue we have now is that the murder (banks) are the group holding all the evidence. They don't want it looked in to, it would show they were an accomplice.
She may be right. But Silver's larger point is evidence-based analysis. Where's the evidence to support her position? Why is her assertion any different than the political pundits' assertions? Is an email exchange between a couple of traders enough to prove global complicit awareness? There may well HAVE been global complicit awareness. But without enough data to statistically support her position, this response seems to prove Silver's point that we're better off looking at the data than we are working off what we 'know' is right.