That's fair. And I hesitated to bring Sailer up, but when I read Goolsbee's op-ed and the justification he uses--that it's a means of expanding minority home-ownership--my thoughts turned to the theory that Sailer likes to push--on Matt Yglesias' blog for instance, which is where I encountered it. I confess I found it vexing (too ignorant to convincingly refute it) and I was hoping some of the more knowledgable people on this list could provide figures or a kind of history of modern day mortgage practices so as to help me clear it up.
If I could rewrite my earlier email, though, I would.
Of course, my first question was: who the hell is Steve Sailer and why should we care what he thinks about economics?
A Google search turned up this text intensive (and not in a good way) blog:
Steve has quite a few thoughts on race, none of them worth reviewing. Since you're citing him as a source without irony (and apparently to dredge up a discredited trope about home loans to 'minorities' leading to the global credit crisis), I think we should ask a few questions about you DeLucas.
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