WEBNERBOB Often you see news stories that combine odd facts and statistics, and you wonder:  is the story reporting causation, or just correlation? Consider the so-called “Starbucks Effect.” If you’ve bought a house recently, you’ve probably used Zillow, a real estate website that provides lots of useful information about houses on the market with just a few keystrokes.    Zillow’s CEO and its chief economist, Spencer Rascoff and Stan Humphries, wrote a book called Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate that addresses the economics of home buying and home owning and attempts to answer questions that have long bedeviled home owners … Continue reading THE STARBUCKS EFFECT