University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee provides common sense advice on sellling a house:

So by being hung up about whether your condominium will sell for what you paid for it, you arenít just driving yourself crazy trying to get a buyer. You may be threatening the very performance of the economy and driving up the unemployment rate ó provided that many others behave in a similar way.
What is to be done? Well, if you are holding out for an above-market price to recoup your losses, perhaps you would do well to hear the advice that Professor [Christopher] Mayer gives his own family members.
ìIf you want to sell your house then you list it at the market price and you sell it,î he said. ìIf you donít really want to sell then donít put it on the market. But donít say you want to sell and then set the price so high that you spend the year cleaning up every morning, having people walk through your living room and look in your medicine cabinets and reject you. Thatís just painful ó and expensive.î
His research offers a simple lesson for everyone out there waiting for a high price to push them back into the black: Get real.

The folks over at Political Calculations take Goolsbee’s advice one step further and provide a handy calculator for determining the true value of a house.

Yeah, things might be a bit testy lately in the credit markets, but Brad DeLong does a magnificent job of reminding us just how much better we have it than folks who lived not all that long ago:

. . . in 1905 an anonymous American college professor–“G.H.M.”–wrote a four-page article for the Atlantic Monthly in which he pleaded for more money for college professor salaries, and claimed to be vastly underpaid. The first thing to note is his salary: he claimed that the “average college professorís salary”–the salary that he saw as clearly inadequate and unfairly low–“is about $2,000” in the dollars of that day, 1900. Yet Stan Lebergott’s estimates in the Historical Statistics of the United States are that the average annual earnings of an employee in America in 1905 were $490 dollars if employed for the entire year (or $451 taking account of the hazards of unemployment): $2,000 was four times average of GDP per worker at the turn of the century. In order to match turn-of-the-century professors in terms of income relative to the national average, a professor today would have to make an academic salary of $300,000ña height rarely attained, and far above any average.

There is much more, so don’t miss it. DeLong’s chapter is a vivid reflection of the power of compounding economic growth. Sort of makes you wonder about those folks who advocate shaving a bit of economic growth here and there to promote some special interest. Over a century, compounding that small loss of economic growth can have a huge impact.

Following on this post from ealier this week in regard to American’s currently failed system of health care finance, Arnold Kling follows with another one:

. . . Kling’s Iron Trilemma. We want:
–what I call insulation, where consumers enjoy the peace of mind of having their medical services paid for by a third party;
–unrestricted access, where consumers and doctors can choose medical procedures without bureaucratic interference or government budget limits;
–less stress over rising health care costs.
The trilemma is that we can have at most two out of three. Much of the “reality-based community” (an Orwellian label if there ever was one) denies that the trilemma exists. [Jonathon] Gruber [the M.I.T. economist who helped design the universal health insurance plan in Massachusetts] does not deny its existence, but he prefers restricting access to reducing insulation. I prefer the latter.