One Of The Most Asinine Editorials On Housing I Have Ever Read

Steve Dibert, MFI-Miami

Five years ago, most people had never heard of Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Professor who lectured about consumer affairs.  After the market crash in 2007, she became a regular talking head on cable news talking about the financial crisis.  She tried to claim that this whole crisis was the fault of unscrupulous mortgage brokers doing dastardly things to unsuspecting homeowners.  What she wasn’t doing was blaming Wall Street and as we later learned, Wall Street was behind this $70 trillion Ponzi scheme.

Warren’s arguments were later proven wrong but that wasn’t before for she used her influence as a Harvard Professor with key members of Congress to perform her version of “Sherman’s March” on the wholesale lending industry.

Five years after Elizabeth Warren burst on the scene with her crazy claims dreamt up at the Harvard Faculty Club while being serenaded by the Harvard Mens’ Choir singing Fair Harvard, another whacked out academic type is emerging from that same bubble.

This new Warren-wannabe is Erika Christakis who some how convinced the fine editors at the Financial Times in London to let her write an op-ed piece in yesterday’s edition about how home ownership is bad for Americans because it fosters a sense of hate and despair.  Her logic is if you buy a house and hate the people in your neighborhood you’re screwed.

She writes:

“First, why, in the face of overwhelming reasons for selfishness, are humans altruistic and co-operative? Second, how do groups stay co-operative when confronted by people in their midst who don’t want to co-operate?”

It’s apparent her parents never let her watch Sesame Street as a kid because any American who grew up watching Sesame Street can still recite the words to “Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood?”

Like Bob and the Muppets tell us that if we talk to our neighbors, even the grumpy ones, we can live and work to make our neighborhoods a community.

Ms. Christakis’ cynical response to this is that Americans only communicate out of their own self interests.   It appears instead of watching Sesame Street, her parents brainwashed her with Ayn Rand novels.

After reading her editorial, its pretty clear Ms. Christakis never worked in lending or real estate.  It also appears that like my 50 year old friend who still lives at home with his parents, she has never left the warm comfy bed of academia.   According to her biography on her blog, she is a:

Hybrid-educator/public health advocate/Harvard College administrator/ journalist. Uncommon sense for the common good. Unmarketable bachelor’s degree (Harvard, anthropology) Semi-marketable graduate degrees (Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania…). Career at the intersection of family, society, and schools. (Including pop-culture diversions and long stint in parenting vortex.) Forging a new path to connect all of the above.

During my time researching her, I found that other than writing uninformed and asinine editorials about real estate, she penned a whacked out neo-feminist editorial for Time Magazine that read like a treatment for a Lifetime movie.  In that piece, she used her same inept logic to claim that men who hated the Twilight movies are sexist and bigoted because they want to deny women their right to fantasize.

The big difference between Elizabeth Warren and Erika Christakis is Elizabeth Warren actually had some knowledge of what she was talking about and would later educate herself enough to learn that mortgage brokers weren’t the reason for the housing crisis.  Erika Christakis on the other hand is more like Mel Brooks’ character Comicus in “History of the World, Part 1″: