Having said that, you still need to be careful with your investment because real estate cycles - fueled by rapid changes in demand for housing - can afflict markets where the economic situation is otherwise good.
The same problem afflicts BigOven, where a pork shoulder recipe with kosher salt turned up.
It particularly afflicts countries where officials are bribable, health systems lax and consumers desperate.
The measles increase in Latin America was partly attributable to an economic calamity afflicting Venezuela, where many public health services have stopped or are mired in dysfunction.
Professor Ruhm, who teaches economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has spent years studying localized economic downturns like the one now afflicting New York City, where the unemployment rate now tops 7percentt.
A somewhat different illness afflicted Ireland and Spain, where low interest rates helped to inflate a property bubble that, when it burst, ruined banks, indebted households and the public finances.Whether the EU will in future detect such problems sooner and enforce policy changes to avoid them remains to be seen.
The direction of housing values could also help determine whether the American economy will bounce back gradually or risk a long slide, like the one afflicting Japan, where a downward spiral in stock and real estate values has depressed the world's No. 2 economy for more than a decade.
The issue has particularly afflicted Facebook, where despite promises from the social media giant to address the issue, users are regularly overrun by hate speech.
The mess is a stark reminder of the governmental crisis afflicting Lebanon, where politicians divided by local and regional conflicts can't even agree on where to dump the capital city's rubbish.
Something is afflicting the places where Trump's supporters live, but Trump's supporters do not exhibit more severe economic distress than do those who view him unfavorably.
The judicial branch is particularly badly afflicted by this, where access to legal documents and data is dominated by an oligopoly of pay services both official (PACER) and private-sector (Westlaw, LexisNexis).
