The most plausible explanation for the increase in housing costs over the last decade is a lack of supply.
A friend on dating apps recently told me she is often presented with men who are lying about their age — or rather, as they tell it, being forced to lie. The culprit, they are eager to explain, is the algorithm. “I am actually 57,” reads one profile she showed me, “but lowered my age because of the algos, LOL.”
What’s disturbing about her story is not that so many men are pretending to be younger than they are (what else is new?), but that they don’t seem to know what an algorithm is. Their problem is not a sinister program preventing them from finding a younger woman. It is that many women set an age range they don’t fall into. The algorithms are just doing their job, which is optimizing to find a solution for a given set of data.
Yet algorithms have become the villain of this technological era — blamed for depriving us of love, manipulating us on social media and increasing our rent. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has issued a plan to address that last problem, proposing to crack down on real estate companies that use “algorithmic price fixing” software to raise rents.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
___________________
Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Feverpitched/Getty Images
