The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed. I’ve seen well-to-do liberals who pretend to be horrified by Trump and “go back to Mexico” casually drop “go back to Ohio” at community board meetings. As if that sentiment is different. Boggles my mind.
I am convinced that there is nothing more than NIMBYs would like - even or maybe especially the ones who call themselves “liberal” - than a hukou policy. If you’re born in Ohio, you have to stay there. No moving for that good job and polluting our charming, quirky nabe with your outsider-ness! Bloom where you are planted!
Berkeley, which has proudly been a sanctuary city (for undocumented immigrants) since the 80’s, is also one of the NIMBY-est places I’ve ever seen. That is slowly changing, though not enough - that jerkwad NIMBY and his faction have apparently successfully blocked a lot of student housing and got UC Berkeley to cap enrollment. And - Berkeley is a college town! Students are what made it what it was! But no, we must have our neighborhood character.
But the point stands, that this very liberal, and I’m sure well-meaning, city, never put its money where its mouth was because “character” and “charm” and all that nonsense.
I wish I had more than one upvote, or some Slow Boring Gold, to give this comment.
And I wish I had more than one upvote to give to you for raging against those asshole NIMBYs that kneecapped UC Berekley's enrollment level. Still makes me seethe with anger.
It made me seethe, too. And not cope. I do not live in Berkeley, though I do live near enough by that I hear news about it all the time. (And pre-pandemic I’d go there with friends to shop and have lunch, but alas for Body Time closing! Yes, I have hoarded China Rain. I also loved the Solano Stroll.) That and the continued guarding of People’s Park as some kind of “must be preserved in amber so that Mario Savio would still recognize it if he arose from the dead.”
For all kinds of reasons, it’s infuriating. Berkeley is, fundamentally, a college town, not a tourist town. Yes, tourists and nearby suburbanites (raises hand) go there, but strolling down College Avenue - notice the name? - is not the point of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is. And you cannot have a college without students, who do have to live somewhere, sorry NIMBYs.
Oh man, when I took a look at People's Park on Google Maps, I was like "WTF is there that there's actually worth keeping? If you're going to make it a park, at least make it a nice park!"
It’s a piece of junk! It’s no place you want to have a picnic or take your kid to play. The only thing guaranteed is some headline saying “We need to identify this person who OD’d in People’s Park.”
Notice the NIMBY organizations are called “Make UC A Good Neighbor” (no, Mr. Rogers would not have approved) and “People’s Park Historical Advocacy Group.” I think I can fill in most if not all my NIMBY Bingo Card with these.
Strong, strong upvote. I use this line all the time to challenge good hearted people who would be abhorred at being tarred as racist or xenophobic from the former when they start to show NIMBY tendencies as they complain about growth from the latter.
My favorite line to use is "Look, we're not going 'Make [city] Great Again' by building a wall around [city] and making [tech company/apartment developer/etc] pay for it".
The place where I go after the left most hard is basically where the labor movement is in the same pool with the NIMBYs, the immigration opponents, and the anti-trade people. It's all the same state imposed barriers to entry, protectionist horseshit.
But only on a super local level. I can't blame SL houseowner for opposing the conversion of his next-door neighbor's house into a 8 family low rise. I do blame them for opposing the same or larger several blocks over by the Metro. But the blame is not for being racist, but for not valuing the good of those who will live in the new residences and the revenue the city will raise.
Eric Adams’s embrace of ‘go back to Iowa’-type rhetoric back when he was Brooklyn Borough President is one of the things that gave me pause about him (although the housing issue has actually been one of the brighter spots for his mayoral admin). I feel like he and Andrew Cuomo unfortunately appeal to a subset of the Dem electorate who would have been MAGA if they had the moral unluck to be born as white southerners or Midwesterners.
>The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed<
Totally. This was an insightful observation by Yglesias. Nimbyism, immigration restrictionism and (increasingly) a general antipathy for population growth all go hand in hand these days based on my internet arguments.
From the way back machine. I remember when the Oregon governor had a sign installed at the California border: Thanks for visiting. But don't move here. (or words to this effect)
Disagree. I've witnessed so many people at community board meetings say they were born in the neighborhood and lived in their home their entire lives. As if that entitles them to something.
Also I'm not sure that's a meaningful difference even if it's true. "I don't believe poor people are entitled to live in my neighborhood" is not really better than "I don't believe immigrants are entitled to live in my country"
These are the people who complain about small town xenophobia where you only get respect if your family is “from here.” But they are heading down the same path - “I was born here and lived here all my life!” Some add that their parents were born here too. I wish they could really hear what they are saying.
This mostly applies to places where property taxes are capped. People living in now-million-dollar homes wouldn't be as anti-development if they actually had to pay property taxes on the true value of their homes.
I don't know if that's true. I mean I talk to these people regularly. They don't usually have the same understanding of cause and effect that your comment implies. They usually blame rising prices on the gentrifiers and see it as part and parcel with the development.
I have the exact opposite reaction. Claiming for protectionist immigration principles simply affirm the basic democratic notion “the government of the people for the people by the people”. The state literally exists to serve its citizens. To the extent that you think immigration will impoverish your citizenry it’s basically your *duty* to limit it. Of course, you may well dispute the premise, but that’s a second order question.
By contrast nimbyism is class snobbery. And worse, it’s class entrenchment. It’s the idea that very often the accident of your birth (when you were born, whether your parents already owned a nice house you could inherit/sell off) should determine all. It’s anti egalitarian and nasty.
I think it’s fair to characterize both under either or both rubrics as “I, a geographic incumbent, believe that newcomers to the relevant area affected by my vote will not redound to my benefit and will reduce my quality of life, and therefore oppose them” - that’s literally the mechanism of action in both cases, and indeed immigration is manifestly anti-egalitarian under the second rubric because citizenship is (to first order) overwhelmingly an accident of birth.
The fundamental hurdle run into by opposing either NIMBYism or immigration restriction under this view is that “geographic incumbents get a say in issues of governance” is literally what citizenship and voting are. YIMBYism differs chiefly in that it has a substantive persuasive argument (“more housing is good”) but also the meta argument that local control of zoning shouldn’t exist (basically because when such control does exist, people vote for zoning.) Conversely, there’s not the same meta-case to be made on immigration because obviously US citizens are the relevant electoral constituency for US immigration policy.
One of the rights of US citizenship is equal protection under the laws in every state, including free movement. As much as some regions would like to prioritize their incumbents for access to housing, all they can Constitutionally get away with is protecting existing tenancies. This is effective in the short term, but people’s needs change over their lives - for example, children grow up and need their own homes. They can’t get them, unless outsiders of similar economic circumstances also can. In the long run, something like “California for Californians” isn’t actually workable. It’s at most “California for this particular generation of Californians.”
Ethnostates may not be desirable, but they are clearly doable, even over thousands of years. NIMBY regions will fail at social reproduction as long as US citizenship is meaningful in this way.
Yes, and the feudal/aristocratic characteristics are one of the best arguments against NIMBYism. This is America. Who your parents are and what land you were born on is not supposed to have this kind of role. This kind of reversion to Old World norms is antithetical to the democratic project. It’s not made any less so because the lords held an election among themselves.
How so? The pro-NIMBY / pro-restriction point is precisely that citizenship is (1) meaningful and (2) overwhelmingly reflects geographic incumbency (local for NIMBYism and national for immigration restriction), which is empirically true. The problem YIMBYs face is that according control of governance based on geographic incumbency is *presumptively legimate* because it’s how every election from school board to POTUS is organized.
US citizenship is meaningful. It confers the right to live in the United States. There’s not a secondary citizenship system at the state or local level. That’s China.
This gets to the heart of the 'somewheres' vs 'anywheres' issue.
If people want to say that there is no meaningful difference between those inside vs outside the boundary of the nation - that it is purely a geographic entity with no other value - then I don't see how you can be that far from basically opting for open borders/unrestricted immigration, and ultimately some form of true global govt.
I don't disagree but I think that in practice you can have "anywhere" mobile types who appreciate the need for the nation state and national solidarity, and also "somewhere" hyper-local types who don't give an F about Uncle Sam.
See: a ton of exurban and rural MAGA types. They rail against government and politicians but they are often fiercely loyal to “their” city, state or place (place in the sense of being proudly rural or whatever).
What? No satrap governors? No Star Crèche? No way! (A reference to the Vorkosigan Saga and Cetaganda, which might derail the conversation but in a fun way.)
It's precisely the same. NIMBY people are genuinely concerned with things like their wealth, traffic, school quality etc and think that are the residents of the relevant polity they should be able to use the state to protect those things at the cost of new entrants. It's just a smaller polity. Identical logic.
except that a neighborhood or town isn't a "polity". It's only the same if you ignore the fundamental division of the world to sovereign states, and don't consider the concept of citizenship qualitatively meaningful above and beyond simple zip code.
P.S. NIMBYISM is a purely economic or class based snobbery, citizenship doesn't work the same way and in fact cuts across class.
I am not a monarchist, so I don't think sovereignty is a metaphysical fact about the world no.
In both the USA and city case, you have governments, which is to say collections of geographically incumbent voters coordinating action through the use of force, to protect the perceived interests of existing voters.
"neighborhood character" or "national culture" it's really the same stuff, just smaller scale. Just as "our parking will get worse and our houses will depreciate" isn't different in kind than "they will burden welfare programs and will decrease wages" are both the material concerns of incumbent voters to whom the government responds.
You're not following through to the proper conclusion of your otherwise impeccable logic. If one is truly committed to immigration restrictionism, one ought to champion NIMBYism because an America characterised by housing scarcity is an America that is a weaker magnet for immigrants.
Not really. You can believe in the power of the state to enforce its laws. Purposefully impoverishing your citizens in order to limit immigration in order to prevent the impoverishing of your citizens doesn't make much sense to me.
To be fair to the racists and xenophobes (ha!!!) I think they’re mostly assuming the immigrants can’t afford to live in the US and that’s why they don’t want them here. Hence Trump’s (still idiotic) statement about “shithole countries” being paired with “why don’t we get more immigrants from [rich, but also white] Nordic countries”
Totally. My only point was that the difference between NIMBYism and xenophobia is not that dramatic- you are using a minimal slice of information about someone (where they are from, what ethnicity they are) to make broad assumptions about their ability to assimilate into your community and improve it (or not deteriorate it). It's wrong either way!
We get a lot of immigrants via chain migration, so while the initial legal immigrants may be relatively high skilled (and thus a clear benefit from the US), once you go down the chain far enough, you lose the ability to ensure that quality.
And then the whole rampant illegal immigration/asylum abuse thing poisons everything.
Homes are scarce resources in the same way that visas are. It’s true that you can only live there if you get one, and lots of seekers won’t, but the arbitrary limitation of quantity is the fundamentally debated question.
My opinion on gambling is there needs to be more friction in the process. Having it be legal is good but having it be two clicks in your phone is bad. You should have to place bets in person at a casino or other location. I also feel the same way about alcohol, here in NC you have to go to an ABC store to buy liquor and it’s annoying to go to another store and the hours are often inconvenient. It doesn’t stop anyone from buying but it makes impulse buys less likely and discourages things at the margin.
The sheer amount of British gambling ads is surreal. Sometimes I watch the UFC via, um, streams that do not involve me purchasing a PPV or an ESPN subscription. So the streams are always off of BT Sport. When I started I just could not believe how many gambling ads you guys have.
On the flip side, I've heard that the rest of the world doesn't have pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about" etc. etc.
They are overwhelmingly on live sport; we don't get nearly as much on other programmes.
It drives me berserk if I'm watching BT Sport or Sky Sports (no, I don't know why one is singular and the other plural). It's always a relief when a game is on BBC (no ads).
The funniest thing is US sports on BBC; they cut to studio analysis when the US network is on an ad break, and you see more of the studio analysts than you do of the players.
Advertising restrictions are always going to run into First Amendment challenges over here in the United States. Tobacco is an exception to that due to the Master Settlement Agreement that headed off other court challenges.
We don't have the First Amendment in the UK, we have lots of restrictions on advertising alcohol as well as tobacco. And we have gambling ads everywhere and I hate them.
Clarence Thomas is probably the only justice that might buy that argument, as he regularly rattles off solo dissents claiming that minors should have no First Amendment rights at all.
I wonder if states could do it as part of their legalization efforts. Basically stipulate that you can open an online casino in state X in exchange for agreeing to forgo advertising in that state as much as possible (ie national broadcasts are okay but local broadcasts or billboards are out). I’m not a lawyer but it seems like the casinos have already agreed to add those problem gambling tags to their ads not sure why you couldn’t get them to go further.
The First Amendment steelman argument I'd try to make is that quotas have already been accepted in other industries, whether they're good or bad, thus there's no need to make this speech restricting quid pro quo.
I thought the First Amendment doesn't protect commercial speech like it does political speech. After all, the government was able to get cigarette advertisements banned.
We should adopt a version of this for cocaine. You can buy, but only a couple grams every month, and only at state approved stores in the bad parts of big cities
The other thought I had is that gambling should be cash only. I think people would be less willing to place bets if they had to physically hand over bills.
Unfairly sucks if you're geographically far away from those places, though. It'd be interesting to see which towns got screwed the most when you also factor in tribal casinos.
One issue I feel like I'm out of step with most Slow Borers here is my having a considerable disdain for vice laws, where my guard rails get limited to genuine adverse impact on the non-vicers.
I don’t think I ever had an occasion where someone was like “hey, let’s do a responsible amount of cocaine and go to bed at a reasonable hour” it was always “let’s buy what we can afford and do it til it’s gone babbbyyyyyy!!!!!”
Cocaine is a helluvadrug.
I’m fine with cocaine, meth and heroine staying illegal. The desperate and depraved things people will do to get more of those drugs speaks to their non therapeutic and terrible nature.
Weed, shrooms and maybe a few other drugs with less aggressive addictive potential are fine with me though.
Cocaine used to be in coca cola. Its chemical effects are very similar to adderrol. This is to say, doing a little cocaine is perfectly consistent with being employed and normal and doing a moderate amount isn’t so bad if you do it once every couple months on a friday or saturday night. The problem is many people will keep snorting way past any moderate limit, some will od and many will go broke.
It’s an interesting test case for how well guard rails can work.
Welcome, free subscribers! Here's why you should level up to paid:
"As a paid member, you also have access to the comments section and daily discussion threads...."
Matt's articles are honestly kinda meh, only so-so (1), but the comments section is awesome and you want to be here. Think of Matt's articles as the tax you have to pay in order to participate in one of the best commenting communities on the web. It's worth it!
(1) Not my opinion -- Roman Polanski said this to me once. But if I mention him that tends to derail the conversation.
> But what’s good about them is that a new business is likely to be relatively small, and we want an economy where a new small business that’s superior to other existing small businesses can put them out of business and grow large.
I think we should remember that the currently disparaged juggernauts of Walmart and Amazon both began as small businesses, and their massive success was the result of their superior business practices. Walmart due to their obsession with low prices and by being an early adopter of information technology. Amazon by inventing the online retail business model. Both firms defeated larger rivals by winning over consumers with these improvements.
To learn more, I’d recommend the Acquired podcast, which has some informative and entertaining long-form episodes on the history of both Walmart and Amazon.
The Amazon episodes call back to some commonalities and differences within the Walmart story. It also covers the war between these two firms, including Amazon poaching several logistics leaders from Walmart.
I strongly recommend these episodes to learn the fascinating and entertaining history of these companies. Acquired also have some great episodes on the history of the video game industry as well as the turbulent story of Nvidia’s rise to dominate the GPU industry.
I've noted before, but one of my first personal experiences realizing that "mom and pop" firms were not necessarily better than "big corporate" firms was trying rent off campus housing in college. Or more specifically my friends' experiences. Consistently, my friends' experiences living in "corporate owned" buildings was much more pleasant than my friends who lived in apartments owned by someone as their side gig; especially in regard to maintenance requests.
Matt sort of alluded to this in his "tourist town" aside, but there is definitely a case to be made those certain businesses or certain areas of town being restricted to small businesses can possibly be a good thing. I'm thinking specifically of restaurants. Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*. And it probably is a good thing that certain areas of cities actually do have restrictive zoning and are designated "historical" districts like French Quarter or North End Boston (to bring up two examples I've brought up before). The problem is too many towns and cities don't treat these as exceptions but rather a general rule. So you have situations like San Francisco that basically ban (or severely limit) chains to a degree that is almost certainly harmful to the city's residents. Or in general just how much this is abused to stop all development (when you're trying to designate a gas station as "historic", it might be time to take a step back and ask yourself how you got to this point).
>Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*<
Restaurant variety and quality is richer now than at any time in US history. Being an exceedingly wealthy country, America has championed foodie-ism with gusto for many years now. You can get good Sichuan just about anywhere these days, as Matt is fond of saying. Artisanal this and that (beer, cookies, bread, tea, cheese, chocolate) are practically cliches of life in prosperous urban America. I wouldn't be surprised if the pandemic may have actually *improved* things a bit (or at least will have done so once we're fully over the hump of that crisis in another few years), by culling weaker operations, and freeing up restaurant leases for ambitious, creative chefs.
And as for chains, well, aren't there a lot more of them? When I was a kid I recall, like, five or six big ones, and a few regional chains. But there are now at least a dozen burger chains or more depending on what part of the country you're in, a similar number of pizza chains, quite a good number of Asian chains, multiple Mexican and Tex-Mex chains, fast casual of every stripe, Italian, steak houses, and so on. So, even in that bland exurb you find yourself in when you've travelling on business, you'll probably have a lot more variety than you would've had in a similar situation in the 80s.
I have found this to be one aspect of life that's quite similar in China: the PRC has an extremely robust and lively restaurant chain scene—characterized by a seemingly limitless variety of concepts and a steady stream of new entrants into the market—typically operating out of shopping malls (a lot of Chinese people strongly prefer such establishments, as they believe food safety standards are higher).
Oh, I'm totally with Matt that food quality is one of the more underrated things in life that has gotten immeasurably better the past 20-25 years. I think he also noted before that innovation is often way over associated with Silicon Valley when we should really appreciate places like Chipotle and Five Guys being pretty big innovators in the "fast casual" business. Sort of buttressing your point about there being a greater variety of chains and higher quality chains then existed 20 years ago. Also, this gets murky when we are talking about restaurant groups. I'm sort of thinking of David Chang and how he has multiple establishments just in NYC that range from fast casual to fine dining. Sort of blurs the line for sure as to what we would call a chain.
Having said that, I think I'm on relatively solid ground that the "best" restaurants are one off establishments (want to try to acknowledge that there is a pretty wide berth between celebrity chef and the town diner owned by the same family for 50 years). As a commentator noted below, as much growth as there's been in restaurant options from different cultures throughout the suburbs and in cities we wouldn't have traditionally thought of as restaurant meccas, there are still a variety of places in this country that only have pretty bland options when it comes to food.
I think the point I was trying to say is that one of things that unites the various readers of this sub stack is agreement with Matt that zoning and NIMBY is quite bad and is quite detrimental to this Country in a variety of ways. But that like everything in this world, there are exceptions where restrictive zoning and NIMBY may actually have validity. And one of those exceptions is actual historic neighborhoods and vacation towns where there is a case to be made that it's beneficial to restrict new buildings and restrict businesses to non chain restaurants and non-chain retail (or at least limit).
Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher. Sort of think that could be a whole Slow Boring post as to why that is. Or least a mailbag question.
>Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher.<
Like anything it's not 100%, but yeah, I find this to be a common attitude, and I know people who just very rarely eat at small "whole in the wall" places, of which there are thousands in Beijing. And forget street food. Sadly Anthony Bourdain passed away before developing much of a following here. Part of it might be driven by the very sharp differences between regions, or, more precisely, between rural areas and big cities. Beijing, like most large Chinese cities, is home to gigantic numbers of folks who've come to live here in recent decades from other provinces (mostly in Northern China). Anyway, their hometowns and villages are invariably a lot poorer than Beijing. And I think many of them eschew the rusticity and authenticity of establishments that remind them of home. They live in the big city now, dammit, and want bright lights, fancy decor and pristine settings. And yes, chains here (just like back home) provide consumers with signalling as to the quality they'll receive. (My impression is there's a whole sector of restaurant chains who have highly specialized business models that work best when being operated in the food service spaces available in malls). Similar vibe (albeit a Chinese version) to Cheesecake Factory or Rainforest Cafe. But there's a gigantic number of them (some are no doubt regional). Also, needless to say, I expect you can't afford mall rents, at least not in big cities, unless you're well capitalized. Which usually means a chain.
That’s kind of like the people who lived through the Depression, or who came to newly built suburbs from small towns and farms, embracing packaged food, cake mixes, Jello and so on with such gusto. It was modern, it was scientific, it was sanitary, and consuming it showed they were with-it suburbanites, not hicks and yokels.
Their grandkids and great-grandkids want that “authenticity” and rusticity that Grandma left behind because cake mix saved time, the kids just ate the frosting anyway, and it was so much better being a suburban housewife than a farm wife. The grandkids, of course, get a cleaned up, prettified, often much tastier (not to mention more sanitary because of public health regulations) experience. The grandkids never had to live with the grind that was subsistence farming or being married to one and popping out 10 kids, which gave them a safe distance from the awfulness that Grandma and Grandpa fled.
90% on board with this, though I think it's important to recognize that there's a trade-off: we usually have to pay a premium for the quality / variety bump that comes with one-off establishments.
It’s absolutely true that variety has increased even in bland exurbs over recent decades. But in a place like Bryan/College Station you can’t even get good generic Chinese food (you can get mediocre generic Chinese food) let alone Sichuanese food.
Really? That sucks. You'd think there'd be a fairly large Chinese community in that part of Texas given the substantial number of Chinese students at Texas A&M. Perhaps their numbers have shrunk? And it's only 1.5 hours from Houston.
There’s a lot of mediocre Chinese food and some mediocre vietnamese, Thai, and Indian food. But since students are a large part of the demand for international food, it’s not aiming at especially high quality. As you say, houston is just an hour and a half away, so people who want good food can go there (and Houston has great food!)
Hey, don't knock taco bell. Have spent a lot of my hard-earned money there in my younger days.
I should note the * was because I had meant to make a note at the end that I want to try to make more oblique references to terrible Sylvestor Stallone action movies going forward.
I was praising the Sylvester Stallone reference in question. I don't have a problem with Taco Bell as a restaurant, but I was happy to spot a Demolition Man reference in the wild :P.
People eagerly waiting for 2015 to see what BTTF Part 2 got right and wrong was amateur hour, I'm waiting for 2032 to see what Demolition Man gets right and wrong.
Whether it's "superior" or not is a value judgment. Certainly it made them more money and outcompeted many other small firms, but equally Walmart and Amazon have done tremendous harm to small towns and local businesses. We've seen what happens when Walmart outcompetes every other store in an area, becomes its largest employer, and then leaves.
Cancer cells similarly outcompete all other kinds of cells, but they do so at a tremendous cost to the organism.
Few other businesses can replace Walmart once they've moved out of a location as the building is just too big for almost any other retailer to use. As with other big-box stores leaving a location, the buildings tend to remain vacant for long periods of time once this happens. (And note also that a big-box store closing similarly has a larger impact on local employment than most other stores; I see estimates online of something like 300 employees for a supercenter, which can be a significant chunk of a small town's population.)
Beyond that, the article examines employment and wages, but that doesn't tell the whole story. One important thing you might want to know: was there another grocery store or pharmacy already there when Walmart came to town? Did it close down after being unable to compete?
This might not make a dent in the number of businesses examined in the article because in the US we tend not to have very many grocery stores in an area compared to, say, restaurants. But on the ground it matters quite a lot if the one or two grocery stores nearby close down in favor of Walmart - and especially if Walmart then leaves.
Sure, and my stance is not specifically anti-Walmart, it's anti-sprawling-big-box-store in general. They all have similar issues, Walmart is just a particularly large example.
Sprawling big-box stores are good. They offer more variety, at lower prices, employ more people at higher wages and with significantly better benefits than mom-and-pop stores.
It's unfortunate that small towns are doing so poorly economically that they can't sustain multiple redundant retail locations (and more frequently even single retail locations) - but big-box retailers aren't the proximate cause of that problem.
I think Matt underrates just how annoyed your average person (by my definition, me) is getting by automated tip suggestions. Two recent examples:
1) I ordered pizza from Papa Johns to pick up, using their "all mediums $6.99 deal". On an order I picked up myself, the lowest suggested tip was $9 on a $30 order - 30%! On pizza I drove to the store to fetch! The reason is the tip was 15% of the "regular" price - but no one ever pays the regular price at a chain pizza store - it's just marketing!
2) Had my beard trimmed at the local Great Clips. I always tip for that, and since the base price is low I always try to tip 25-30%. The store got a new POS kiosk that suggested three tip amounts - the lowest was 50%(!) of the service cost! I felt like a chump having to click "Other" and then manually put in a 30% tip.
We need to go back to standard tip being 15% and only for traditionally tipped services, like restaurant table service.
We need to ban the use of any pricing mechanism that isn’t spelled out on the price list. This is just companies getting clever at hiding costs, like Spirit and Allegiant airlines.
I'm never going to tip someone just working a register but I've (almost) started to wonder if I'm a bad person for just mindlessly hitting the "no tip" button when they come up since everyone posts like it's some big moral crisis they face everyday. But it's odd to me to think anyone in a 'regular' job would be reliant on tips, especially these days when you can just bounce to a better job
My 'heel turn' on this was being presented a 20% default tip option on a 6 pack of beer at a local liquor store, that I took out of the fridge case and brought to the counter myself. Nope, not doing that. I will tip for actual service, but no more for take out or fast food style counter service.
I think for me it's not that it's a moral crisis, it's just that I want to be a good dude and I don't really know what that requires. For instance, I never learned growing up that you should leave a tip for hotel housekeeping (my parents tipped, but we didn't stay in hotels a lot, and I guess I just never really noticed), and when I found out, I was mortified that I had been such a jerk not tipping for a few years. Now I kind of feel like I might accidentally be a jerk all the time. I have always tipped 10% for takeout. Pre-pandemic, I think that made me a good tipper. Now ... I dunno. Does it make me a bad tipper? If so, should I raise what I tip? It's not that I really mind the money so much (though honestly if I need to up what I pay for takeout by 10%, then I'll probably order a bit less), it's that I don't know what the "right" thing to do is, and though I'm financially comfortable, I'm not in a position to randomly hand out $5-$10 just to be generous to service employees.
There are lots of things where people say you "should" tip but actually you shouldn't; you actually shouldn't tip hotel housekeepers, for instance. You shouldn't tip on takeout. You don't tip the Sonic carhops. You don't tip taxi drivers unless they handle your bag. The right thing to do in those situations is fight against tip inflation by not tipping non-tipped workers.
I recently used a terminal at a coffee shop (no table service) that “helpfully” defined what each tip level represented, with 15% defined as “fair.” Whereas in the famous tipping discussion in Reservoir Dogs, Nice Guy Eddie says (of a hypothetical waitress performing a sexual favor) “I think I’d go over 12% for that.” We already have regular inflation; do we need tip percentage inflation too?
The other day I purchased a bowl from a new “healthy” restaurant in my city where you order and pay at a kiosk but someone actually makes and hands you the food. The tip options were 25, 30 and 35% with no custom option - I chose not to tip at all. Normally I would tip some nominal amount between 10 and 15% but was honestly just disgusted that the only options were 25-35%, in a scenario where I was receiving basically 0 service.
1. isn't the obvious answer probability & statistics? Like so obvious it might not even be underrated anymore, but just something we don't do enough. I'm talking less about the fancy math and more about a basic understanding of tail risk, distributions, Bayesian inference, expected values, etc.
2. Proper long shot: Having binged the Revolutions podcast recently, I think the French Revolution needs to be taught to everyone as a bit of a civics lesson and an important tale of unintended consequences. Also just to remind everyone that no matter how tempting the guillotine solution sounds, it has always ended poorly...
I think the people that promote stats as a core high school class base it off the assumptions that stats is more commonly used in the workforce and/or that statistics will promote statistical thinking in other contexts, i.e. tail risk.
I took AP Stats at a college-prep high school. Then I majored in Industrial Engineering, which is heavily stats-based. My experience is that taking statistics courses is very ineffective at promoting statistical thinking, even among those who are good at applying the statistical methods. It's just not how most people's brains are wired. The ability to apply statistical methods in the classroom does not really flow into the ability to think probabilistically. Statistics is more common in the workforce, and especially in academia, but still a very very small portion of jobs use it with any frequency.
Yeah, I was trying to say I'm interested in teaching everyone that same "think probabilistically" part you mention. That's what I meant by "not fancy math". Like no need to recall the difference between standard deviations and variance, but very good if you understand how a long tailed distribution creates an important difference between means and medians.
I think even if your goal is probabilistic thinking rather than proficiency in statistical methods, a high school class will not be effective. Thinking probabilistically is too unnatural for too many people. So many of my statistics classmates understood the academics of things even as "simple" as means vs. medians perfectly but would never think to apply the concepts outside of a statistics classroom. Honestly, I think a more effective method would be to incorporate probabilistic concepts in elementary education and hope that the mindset sticks.
"My experience is that taking statistics courses is very ineffective at promoting statistical thinking, even among those who are good at applying the statistical methods. It's just not how most people's brains are wired."
This is essentially what the original Kahneman and Tversky collaboration proved. Their subjects were not random college studuents, but rather trained professionals, and they still got most of the answers wrong!
I'm all for teaching statistics in school, but I think that the results will be somewhat disappointing. It's genuinely a hard topic to teach well (more so than calculus IMHO --- something as fundamental as the meaning of a p-value is complicated and often explained incorrectly), and people have an impressive ability to forget what they've learned.
I took AP statistics back in highschool, and it was the most poorly taught class that I ever took. I somehow did well on the test, so I got college credit for it, which ended up being a bad thing because I didn't bother to take a non-crappy statistics class in college. (I eventually did an online class years later on my own).
Also, I'll note that a typical statistics class is not really targeted at the "real world" in the way that proponents are hoping for (e.g. making people understand covid risks or scientific studies better). For example, I can count on one hand the number of times I've done a chi-square test (a whole unit in the AP curriculum IIRC) in the real world, but I look at histograms, calculate confidence intervals, and do linear regression somewhat frequently. So, it's easy to dismiss calculus as abstract and not useful in the real world, but a lot of material in statistics classes has the same problem.
That's not to say that it can't be taught well or targeted towards real-world use, but getting it right won't be easy.
I feel like for almost every subject there has to be a way to use really simple, ELI5 type analogies so that primary school students could at least grasp the concepts a bit while their minds are still quite pliable.
I'm sure there are useful qualitative things to be learned that way, but I think that statistics advocates are looking for more than that. An example that comes up a lot is statistics related to the pandemic, and familiarity with various concepts could probably frame stuff a bit, but if you actually want to understand what's going on, at some point you need to start doing math, and concepts and qualitative understanding aren't going to cut it.
It's even possible that qualitative understanding could backfire in some ways. E.g., it's easier to see the flaws in a study than it is to see that a study is well designed, so a high-level understanding of statistics may mostly translate into dismissing too much --- including good studies with small failings.
I somehow missed ever taking a statistics class, and it's a shame, as I think I'd be more powerful with stats as opposed to learning it on the fly myself.
My college stats class was not particularly revelatory. My watered down (with a thin little textbook) med school biostats class, however, turned out to be one of the most important ones. Learned about experiment design, population distributions, and other pragmatic things in as plain language (and minimal math) as possible. I'm not a strong numbers person but that class gave me better statistical insight than most others on a hospital covid policy committee I ended up on.
I am forever grateful for the instructors who actually did explain it to us like we were 5. The class seemed dumb but it turned out to be just dumb enough.
I spent sooooo much time during Covid explaining statistics to other educated liberals. I also did a lot of explaining of things like confounding factors and age adjustment of rates. It was an interesting experience because many of those people are smarter than me but they would say “I understand what you’re saying but that can’t be true”. A lot of this goes against how humans tend to think of the world.
A non-politicized example is independent events. People have a hard time grasping it because it doesn’t make sense. In my case it involved genetics: if there is a one in four chance that a baby from two parents will have a specific genotype (this was usually discussed regarding genetic diseases) and the parents have two kids without that genotype, there is a 1/4 chance their next kid will have it because each baby’s genotype is independent. People have a hard time grasping that and even if they do, they often have a hard time believing it
Ugh, I heard that too from conservatives. I am always tempted to explain exponential growth by using the pyramid scheme as an example. Except that Americans keep falling for them. Probably because people have difficulty grasping exponents
I think what would have been hard for me learning it in primary school was that I did not have enough class identity to see myself in the groups and connect to how the dynamics undermined them.
Listening to it as an adult, the Girondins go from just one more French contingent to "oh no, my brothers, how did things slip away from you so badly?"
And I can point to the French countryside and tell my BernieBro friends "you see, elevating those people does not get you President Warren, it gets you MAGA!"
The problem with making high school history more nuanced is that there's a huge gap in level between standard-track high school history and good college-level history. Most high school students aren't capable of doing textbook-based AP history, let alone reading/writing-intensive college-level history.
Back in the day, I had a speech class (not speech therapy but one of those community college distribution requirements, more like public speaking and presentation) where one of my classmates gave a presentation on living through the Khmer Rouge. Out of his parents and seven siblings, he was the only survivor. That…was the last presentation of this particular day. We had to wrap up.
Every so often when I’m in one of those self-pitying moods, I flash back to this man and his life story and think “nah, my problems are small and solvable by comparison.”
Kinda disagree on tipping. I think there are two features of this that come up here in similar contexts. First, it’s kinda like the mandatory resort fees at hotels in that it disguises the true cost of the service, which is annoying. Second, every time I’m in this situation, I worry both that I am being ungenerous and that I’m being a sucker, which is unpleasant.
I just tell myself “I’m fortunate enough to earn 5x more than this service worker for less physically demanding work, a couple bucks means a lot more to them than to me” and punch the 20% button pretty much every time. Then immediately move on with life.
I feel the same in the sense that I can afford it. What I dislike is the loss of convention. prior to the pandemic I tipped at restaurants and just always tipped at 20%. I figured the market had arrived at the 15% as standard figure and I just went to the high end of the scale. Now, I don't think there is a market arrived at convention, and I have no idea what a "proper" tip is for a barista vs a delivery driver vs the gang at Jersey Mike's.
I'd like us to arrive at a consensus so I know I'm neither underpaying nor over paying. Of course what I'd really like is to just eliminate tipping and simply have people paid what they're entitled to without all the shenanigans and bullshit.
Not to be one of those Everything Is About The Pandemic people, but my tipping surged a few years back when it wasn't clear how much service workers could depend on having a job tomorrow. 18-odd months ago, I didn't feel tugged back from that per se, but rather I no longer felt the constant pressure that was required to keep me in that aggressive tipping posture. The tips dropped.
I’ve been one of those people who inflated my tipping during the pandemic and then never pulled back. I can’t tell whether that’s good or bad. But I think it should be banned and prices on the menu should list what you actually pay (including tax and any service charge).
I could totally get behind an embedded service fee/gratuity model. I think there's a place for a regulated gratuity system. Restaurant owners, for instance, surely appreciate an effective server who not only pleases patrons but upsells them. My real problem is the anarchic, ambiguous and opaque nature of what America's tipping culture has evolved toward. And that includes the utterly batshit crazy tip creep. What's next, tipping the mailman? The supermarket cashier? The bank teller?
A couple of restaurants in Los Angeles famously tried this, printing on their menu a statement saying to the effect of, "The employees here are on a livable salary and benefits much more generous than the normal restaurant wage, and that is baked into the prices of everything. Do Not Tip."
Every one of them had to renege on this model. It wasn't too publicly stated why, but I'm going to conjecture that the restaurant got less business because people balked at the prices, seeing something akin to sticker shock without registering that with tip factored in it was all the same in the end. Maybe the business model just didn't pencil out at all, with tips placed in some other income bracket that the restaurant industry accounting relies on to show some sort of profit. I'm not sure.
Nowadays the better restaurants add a default "service fee" to the bill and explicitly state the fee is for better wages and benefits and can be taken off by request. I usually just subtract this fee from my normal tip amount and the difference is the new "tip."
Yeah, it's very difficult for a few restaurants to try to do it unilaterally. It's only going to really work if there's a regulation that requires them all to do it simultaneously, so that everyone with sticker shock sees how it works everywhere.
Same. I've become something of an anti-tipping evangelist since moving to Asia and having the proverbial scales fall from my eyes. But I tip generously or at least fairly whenever I'm back home (as I did before I moved abroad). If one doesn't want to tip in the US, one shouldn't dine out or access the services of tip-dependent employees.
Having just posted a comment wishing tipping wasn't a thing, I now have to contradict myself. Last night I was at a bar where the bar tender had trained his cute little chihuahua to carry a hat around the place soliciting tips. I don't ever want something like that to be driven from the market.
"Kenosha is just an awfully small place — it’s the fourth largest city in Wisconsin"
Complete tangent here, but....
As someone who lives near Kenosha, close enough that my gym is there and I go there to gas up because it's cheaper than Illinois, there was this aspect to the reporting during the riots there that drove me nuts. If you watched Fox, or engaged with loonies on Twitter (I know, I KNOW), there was this idea of "Oh, this quiet, sleepy hamlet in Wisconsin, was burned to the ground!".
But it's like....yeah, Kenosha is small compared to a major city, sure. But it's like the 335th largest city in the US (out of over 100,000). Nearly 100k people live there. The rioting was absolutely terrible and Iwould never defend it, but it was mostly contained to like, a three block area. I was literally at the gym when the riots were happening and you would not have been able to know anything was going on.
Question for you: has WI experienced much of an influx over the years from Illinois people leaving for greener pastures? I always assumed this was the case (similar to NH-MA) but was never too sure.
The SALT deduction cap is a huge part of this. $25k property taxes are common and then tack on 5% income tax on top of that. Trump's move here was brilliant and I don't think gets enough coverage.
Among other things, there's a bit of a boomerang effect. If you're a recent college grad in WI, and you want a big-city experience without getting too far from home, Chicago is the place to go. Those who tire of the big-city experience often return to WI (as opposed to staying in the Chicago suburbs).
I suppose you wanted something a tad more detailed, sorry. So, for example, I pay about 3.5x the national average (percent-wise) in property taxes. My dad lives in a different, slightly more well off community on the state line (Illinois side). His property taxes where he lives are 2.5x the national average, but he's much closer to retirement than I am and doesn't have kids at home,, so for him it's very tempting to move 5-10 minutes north for a nice cut in property taxes.
For what it's worth that's a different situation from NH. That state has no income or sales tax. But its property taxes (not surprisingly) are very, very high. Higher than those in Massachusetts, I'm pretty sure (though home prices are lower). NH has received a large number of Bay Staters over years, but I'm pretty sure that exodus has slowed down recently (though maybe it's picked up since remote working increased): Massachusetts was the fastest growing of the New England states per the last census.
I got a good chuckle when Matt (very correctly!) swatted down any concern with GMOs in just one sentence, then used it as a launching pad to go back on his hobbyhorse against gain of function technology.
I’m surprised that immigration and diversity wasn’t high mentioned when it came to US success.
Europes diversity has been a fairly recent thing compared to the United States. And given the United States size, we have had a lot more mobility than European countries historically. People moving to the west coast. Or moving up and down the East coast.
This has made American culture more dynamic. We have had this for two centuries.
In recent decades europe has been far more open to immigration than the US. In fact nowadays us is probably the most restrictive to *legal* immigrants of all major western countries. Hence for the analysis for the past two decades, at least, MY’s suggestions seem more plausible as the main factors.
Yes... but they have centuries of very little immigration. Even now, in a lot of countries with immigration, it just hasn’t integrated as well as the US has. They will get there. We just have a head start.
As I understand it, much of immigration in the EU is from other EU members. In terms of external to EU or US, I think the US is still has much larger numbers.
My perspective is on a particular kind of immigration. Highly educated professionals. How easy it is to move there? More importantly, how easy is it to get permanent residence and citizenship. I can tell you there is no question US immigration is borderline hostile to educated immigrants at this point. Native born Americans have no clue- just ask your immigrant friends. I’m sure the data is reflecting it too if you look closely.
P.S. it’s also gotten noticeably worse in the past two decades. Americans are used to the ethos of their country as the immigration center of the world and haven’t caught up to the new realities. Just like American infrastructure used to be world leading and now Europeans or Asians visiting the states are rightly shocked by the primitive state of eg us cell phone +internet technology.
A lot of my immigrant friends (physicians mostly) have assisted their family members in moving here. I don't know if they share your desire to prioritize highly educated immigrants, but the system seems to be working for them.
To THPacis point, I think the US system prioritizes families of people already here, but significantly disadvantages educated people with no relatives who just want to move to the US.
1. Marriage is easy. So are dependent underage kids. All other family sponsorships take a LONG time. For the best category people its like 8 years wait before you can come. For many others much worse (e.g. Mexicans who want to immigrate the legal way by these non-immediate family categories, which can include e.g. parnets or an adult child, have a waiting list of 20 years or soem such!)
2. As John E pointed out, that's the problem with the system (in my view). It's all about family sponsorships (with the important #1 caveat). To actually immigrate based on employement, including the most economically desireable fields, is a very slow tormenting hell. Whereas other western countries welcome you with open arms and minimal hassle. THAT'S the key point I'm making.
P.S.
When did your immigrant friends immigrate? It used to be better e.g. 20 years a go. If they immigrated recently, how did they receive their green card? Was it the employment route? If so - ask them about the experience? How long and enjoyable of a route it was!
Regarding the causes for strong US economic growth, I found it very odd that Matt did not mention lower taxes and a generally more free and market oriented economy. As I understand it, this is broadly considered the key cause for faster growth in the US among economists. This explanation also has a strength in that it relates to a persistent difference between the US and Europe over many decades.
It also intuitively makes sense to me. People in the US just work harder than people in Europe, in particular if you focus on the most productive members of the economy. Which makes sense, given that in the US, they are rewarded far more generously for doing so.
Now you could argue that the European model is better - that working shorter hours is good, that taxes provide money for valuable things such as improving public health, that the high levels of inequality in the US are corrosive, etc. But it seems disingenuous to not at least acknowledge that an upside of a (relatively) low-tax deregulated economy is faster growth.
"I find it odd that Matt did not mention lower taxes and a generally more free and market oriented economy. As I understand it, this is broadly considered the key cause for faster growth in the US among economists."
Providing goods and services through taxation and public provision, rather than buying them individually, is basically a form of collective shopping. For certain services, like insurance, you can get massive gains in efficiency by providing them in this way. See Joseph Heath's "Filthy Lucre." https://russilwvong.com/blog/collective-shopping/
If you're talking about generally "free market" systems vs. "communist" systems, then yes, the former is better economically. But that's qualitatively different then level of taxation.
Reality is it doesn't make much sense to say "European" tax systems. While in general there are higher taxes in Europe, it really does vary from country to country. But more perhaps more importantly, it depends what type of taxes you're talking about. One of the biggest sources of higher taxes in Europe is the VAT and this is one of the more economically efficient taxes a country can have.
It should also be noted that the US states with the highest taxes (Massachusetts, New York and California) are three of the richest and economically vibrant states in America and quite frankly the world. It's not to say that the tax systems in these states aren't littered with unnecessary costs and expenses (hello infrastructure costs), but it's hard to say it's been a burden on economic growth.
And this is even assuming these supposedly slower-growing economies have grown more slowly. Which economies? And are there any exceptions? I’m pretty confident if you go back to 60 years ago, you’ll find the US was a lot richer then, too.
It seems pretty clear they have, in fact, grown more slowly. The US% of global GDP hasn't changed much, but it has increased relative to other rich countries(except for example very tiny Luxembourg). Developing countries like China have also done well, which is why the global share isn't higher than the US.
My understanding is that Americans tend to work more, which could be a function of our relatively stingy safety net and lower taxes. However, in terms of GDP per hours worked, the US hasn't really outperformed northwestern Europe that much, until the financial crisis.
It’s easy to blame academics for writing bad studies (and to some extent I agree, as an academic physician), but universities promote faculty mostly based on publication volume not quality, and journals publish based on what’s interesting rather than developing a methodology that actually promotes good science. Honestly it’s a miracle studies are as good as they are, given the incentives. I’d fix academia before I fixed classes about how to read shitty academic products
In the context of “Better macroeconomic stabilization policy” for US vs. Europe, I think a lot of this comes down to the fundamental contradiction of the eurozone; it is a monetary union without a fiscal union. Ie, the European Central Bank has to set a single uniform monetary policy for a collection of countries with fragmented fiscal policies. Eg, what is best for Germany may be suboptimal for Italy.
Ideally, the eurozone would move towards a more unified fiscal policy. The Next Generation EU—an economic recovery package in the wake of the pandemic—is a promising move in that direction. But domestic politics will be a strong headwind in that direction. Eg, why Merkel felt compelled to push austerity on Greece and other periphery EZ nations in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. But as Yglesias explains, that was worse for all countries.
What the EZ ultimately needs is a proper fiscal union with large fiscal transfers from prosperous northern countries to the struggling southern ones. This would be comparable to the large fiscal transfer between California and Alabama in the US. With this single fiscal policy, the ECB could then create the appropriate monetary policy.
But domestic politics in these wealthy northern countries, particularly Germany, would never allow for that; even though these benefactors would also soon become even more prosperous with such a proposal. The nationalist currents within Europe are just far too strong.
I remember before 2008, someone noted that what places like Italy or Greece wanted from the EU was essentially Germany's credit rating so as to lower borrowing costs. Sort of like a teenager getting a credit card under Dad or Mom's name*.
It's one article, but he was banging this drum before 2000 and before 2008 when it seemed like the Euro was nothing but a success.
I know Matt is being snarky about how much this the fault of Merkel, but is should be said that this really the fault of the EU central bank. And specifically, the fact that the EU central bank policy is essentially controlled by Germany. It just seems really clear to me that Germans almost maniacal focus on avoiding inflation has been extraordinarily damaging to itself and the European economy as whole.
I can't entirely blame Germany for not wanting it's credit compromised by Greece and Italy, unless it has some say in their budget and can basically guarantee that they won't f*** it over.
Sure, but the fact that Germany and Southern Europe have widely divergent interests because they have widely divergent fiscal management and governance is exactly why Krugman was banging the drum through the entirety of the aughts and well into the GFC that monetary union without fiscal union was a horrible mistake that was going to (and did) bite the continent in the ass, hard. While the Germans' stance may have been substantively misguided, the real problem was that the Euro didn't allow Europe to take a "Deutschlanders gonna Deutschland" approach but instead Germany and Southern Europe each acted as an albatross about the others' neck.
One thing I haven't seen stats on and would like to, though, is what the magnitude of trade benefits were by having a common currency and basically completely removing intracontinental exchange-rate risk. Seems like it's gotta have been at least a few percentage points of Euro GDP, right?
"In 2010-12 Italy, along with other Southern European nations, experienced a debt crisis, with “lo spread” — the difference between Italian and German interest rates — exploding. But as a handful of analysts, above all Belgium’s Paul De Grauwe, pointed out, this crisis seemed driven less by fundamental insolvency than by self-fulfilling panic. In effect, investors engaged in a run on the debts of Southern European nations, creating a cash shortage that these countries, which didn’t have their own currencies and hence couldn’t print more money, were unable to resolve."
A pithier way of stating Matt H’s nice summary: the problem for the EZ is that it isn’t the European Union, it’s the European Agglomeration, with Germany stirring the pot.
I reflexively felt the need to (try to) defend my state, since you used it in an example.
However, it's not really feasible. Except to maybe point out that a decent % of our federal $ received is in defense spending, and maybe that should be excluded? (But not really)
Anyways, since defense isn't going to work, I'd like to point out that CA is basically balanced between federal income vs expenditures.
Effective emotional resilience tools (ex. basic concepts from CBT, Stoicism and mindfulness) and communication skills (like the 5 secrets of effective communication by Burns).
I've been thinking recently about the old "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" yarn that our parents taught us. We all knew it was not quite true ("you're dumb and stupid and ugly" hurts!), but we knew it was a state we should work towards, a mental and emotional resilience to which we aspire.
It seems like that whole attitude is on the retreat among The Dang Kids These Days, and I think it is a terrible loss.
I’d add basic financial literacy / numeracy (which could be everything from what are stocks and bonds and how do they differ, to how retirement savings accounts work, to making sense of marginal tax rates, to something as simple as how to understand price per unit at the supermarket)
I got a decent intro to economics in high school but I was still shocked to learn that half of what you pay for a mortgage is interest (if you take the full 30 years)
It would be good to compare how much one pays in compound interest via the mortgage versus how much one gains in compound interest from the appreciation of the asset one leveraged to get.
And this gets into a more advanced but also important aspect of how to take best advantage of compound interest. There are times where it may be better to loan instead of buy, if it means keeping assets generating higher interest than what one's paying on the loan.
Yeah. My husband and I paid off our very low interest mortgage early even though we knew strictly speaking it was better to invest that money in the market, but damn, it has felt good to live rent-free ever since. The heart wants what it wants. (We caught up on investing quickly thereafter anyway)
The smart kids learn about stock and bonds soon enough, and then worry about how much of their portfolio is in each. The less clever kids would benefit from the basics - do not borrow money long term on credit cards etc.
Totally agree - understanding the implications of interest and interest rates (also as it relates to things like payday loans) is another core thing to add to this curriculum!
I wish there was some way to teach the Bible / the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament / (or whatever you want to call it) in a way that it would come across as fresh. "The Bible as literature" is how this used to be phrased. Its words and stories are a dominant strand in our culture, even more so than Shakespeare. It is such a powerful fount of culture, that alas, our diverse subcultures have overlaid it with their own interpretations to the extent that it would be impossible for students to just read it, wonder and marvel. This is what I did at the age of twelve when my grandparents gave me a red-letter KJV. Later, in college I tried to do this again after my Freshman resolution to lay aside all former beliefs and address the Great Books with an open mind.
Typology in conservative Christian societies removes the possibility of reading the Hebrew scriptures in their own historical and cultural contexts, since all they can see is prophesies of Christ. Radical secularists dismisses the entire set of books as "false" or "unprovable" without ever opening the covers; they just mindlessly circulate misinformation about anything that has to do with "religion."
That looks fantastic. I was just reading about the history of the gospels (curious after Easter) and although I went to church for my entire childhood, there's a lot I don't know about the background these were written in.
It's so good. I listened to it all ~ straight through on a drive from Chicago to Banff and back. It's been a minute but super heavy, heavy topics I had never thought about. A historical non-fiction take on John the Baptist (i.e., what does him baptizing Jesus mean?). Whether Jesus ever refereed to himself as the son of God or if that was "canonized" later. So much on Paul. How the Apocalypse hangs over everything and then passes. Highly recommend.
> How the Apocalypse hangs over everything and then passes.
Right, I read none of the gospels were written down contemporaneously because everyone expected Jesus to come back within their lifetimes. It was only after a few decades that people are like "oh shit, we'd better write this down so it isn't forgotten".
Exactly - the Academic / Biblical Criticism path could indeed get some of those radical secularists and their inadvertent followers interested in exploring religion from the perspectives of history, culture and literature.
My sister teaches high school social studies, and we were just talking about how her students social and emotional development is incredibly stunted post pandemic, and she's having to spend a lot more time teaching her students how to work in groups, how to talk to the person sitting next to them, etc. We were speculating that with AI being able to do personalized content instruction, you'll see in person instruction shift to focusing much more on the soft skills which enable the use of academic skills in society.
I would agree except I’ve never understood CBT and Stoicism to advocate for simple fatalism. Behavioural activation for example is one of the most powerful techniques in the CBT toolbox. And one of *the* major concepts of Stoicism is to carefully discern between what is in your control and what is not (not to tell yourself that everything is out of your control).
A curriculum of these concepts would have to be carefully designed to avoid the pitfalls you describe and kept fairly basic (certainly not as a form of group therapy in class or anything like that). The idea is just to have some good tools for dealing with the inevitable setbacks and challenges that life so generously provides us so that we can constructively pursue success in those areas of life that you listed.
The most underrated/needed school subject of all time is financial planning. It’s an essential skill for life they you sometimes get bites of in math class but it’s far more important than most of what you learn in high school math.
I went to a fairly good school and had a pretty stable home life but graduated with very little understanding of how to approach my young adult life from a finance perspective. It took a decade of trial and error to figure it out and that has lifelong repercussions.
Also, some of these requirements did not exist when us commenters were in high school, so the portion of us that had this requirement is even lower than the portion of students today who do, which I suspect further contributes to it being mentioned in the comments here.
My version of Matt's fascination with zoning are rules around saving and investing. We should have one retirement account (not split between 401ks, multiple types of IRAs, etc.) You should be able to put about 25k into them a year. There should be no roths. Balances should be capped at 100x the median income in the US. Anything over that has to be removed into a parallel non tax deferred savings account.
We should reduce taxes on interest slightly, while increasing the progressiveness of capital gains taxes so they cap out closer to 30-35%.
I think that advantages people who can work the rules way to much. Dropping the penalty also removes reason for the tax advantaged part of the account.
An aside on the Chicago thing: I hadn’t heard about the disruption, so I clicked through to the NBC article, which described the events as a “gathering.” Sounds pretty anodyne! It’s depressing that the media is still apparently running scared from calling violence violence.
The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed. I’ve seen well-to-do liberals who pretend to be horrified by Trump and “go back to Mexico” casually drop “go back to Ohio” at community board meetings. As if that sentiment is different. Boggles my mind.
I am convinced that there is nothing more than NIMBYs would like - even or maybe especially the ones who call themselves “liberal” - than a hukou policy. If you’re born in Ohio, you have to stay there. No moving for that good job and polluting our charming, quirky nabe with your outsider-ness! Bloom where you are planted!
Berkeley, which has proudly been a sanctuary city (for undocumented immigrants) since the 80’s, is also one of the NIMBY-est places I’ve ever seen. That is slowly changing, though not enough - that jerkwad NIMBY and his faction have apparently successfully blocked a lot of student housing and got UC Berkeley to cap enrollment. And - Berkeley is a college town! Students are what made it what it was! But no, we must have our neighborhood character.
But the point stands, that this very liberal, and I’m sure well-meaning, city, never put its money where its mouth was because “character” and “charm” and all that nonsense.
I wish I had more than one upvote, or some Slow Boring Gold, to give this comment.
And I wish I had more than one upvote to give to you for raging against those asshole NIMBYs that kneecapped UC Berekley's enrollment level. Still makes me seethe with anger.
It made me seethe, too. And not cope. I do not live in Berkeley, though I do live near enough by that I hear news about it all the time. (And pre-pandemic I’d go there with friends to shop and have lunch, but alas for Body Time closing! Yes, I have hoarded China Rain. I also loved the Solano Stroll.) That and the continued guarding of People’s Park as some kind of “must be preserved in amber so that Mario Savio would still recognize it if he arose from the dead.”
For all kinds of reasons, it’s infuriating. Berkeley is, fundamentally, a college town, not a tourist town. Yes, tourists and nearby suburbanites (raises hand) go there, but strolling down College Avenue - notice the name? - is not the point of Berkeley, UC Berkeley is. And you cannot have a college without students, who do have to live somewhere, sorry NIMBYs.
Oh man, when I took a look at People's Park on Google Maps, I was like "WTF is there that there's actually worth keeping? If you're going to make it a park, at least make it a nice park!"
It’s a piece of junk! It’s no place you want to have a picnic or take your kid to play. The only thing guaranteed is some headline saying “We need to identify this person who OD’d in People’s Park.”
UC Berkeley has been trying to get approval to build housing there, and the last I read was that this is being kicked all the way up to the California Supreme Court. What with Gavin Newsom being on the side of YIMBY’s, I am hopeful they will rule in favor of UC: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/03/21/city-council-to-consider-supporting-uc-berkeley-appeal-against-peoples-park
Notice the NIMBY organizations are called “Make UC A Good Neighbor” (no, Mr. Rogers would not have approved) and “People’s Park Historical Advocacy Group.” I think I can fill in most if not all my NIMBY Bingo Card with these.
From what I've seen I've been pleased with Newsom taking CEQA to task over this whole UC Berkeley mess.
Strong, strong upvote. I use this line all the time to challenge good hearted people who would be abhorred at being tarred as racist or xenophobic from the former when they start to show NIMBY tendencies as they complain about growth from the latter.
My favorite line to use is "Look, we're not going 'Make [city] Great Again' by building a wall around [city] and making [tech company/apartment developer/etc] pay for it".
The place where I go after the left most hard is basically where the labor movement is in the same pool with the NIMBYs, the immigration opponents, and the anti-trade people. It's all the same state imposed barriers to entry, protectionist horseshit.
There's some logic to the labor movement's incentives here, even if it's logic that gives very bad results for the population in general.
You can say the same thing for NIMBYs.
But only on a super local level. I can't blame SL houseowner for opposing the conversion of his next-door neighbor's house into a 8 family low rise. I do blame them for opposing the same or larger several blocks over by the Metro. But the blame is not for being racist, but for not valuing the good of those who will live in the new residences and the revenue the city will raise.
Eric Adams’s embrace of ‘go back to Iowa’-type rhetoric back when he was Brooklyn Borough President is one of the things that gave me pause about him (although the housing issue has actually been one of the brighter spots for his mayoral admin). I feel like he and Andrew Cuomo unfortunately appeal to a subset of the Dem electorate who would have been MAGA if they had the moral unluck to be born as white southerners or Midwesterners.
I've always said this - the primary reason Adams and Cuomo are Democrats is because that's how to get elected in NYC and NYS.
>The correlation between NIMBYs in cities and anti-immigrant attitudes in the Midwest is under-discussed<
Totally. This was an insightful observation by Yglesias. Nimbyism, immigration restrictionism and (increasingly) a general antipathy for population growth all go hand in hand these days based on my internet arguments.
"Don't Californicate [non-California state]" is the proper terminology used here.
From the way back machine. I remember when the Oregon governor had a sign installed at the California border: Thanks for visiting. But don't move here. (or words to this effect)
Good reason not to go to Oregon.
To be fair, this was in the 1970's. I think things have changed.
You've earned your Northwest stripes, you're fine.
Fuck that noise indeed, I'm getting more aggressive in pushing back on that with every passing day.
Disagree. I've witnessed so many people at community board meetings say they were born in the neighborhood and lived in their home their entire lives. As if that entitles them to something.
Also I'm not sure that's a meaningful difference even if it's true. "I don't believe poor people are entitled to live in my neighborhood" is not really better than "I don't believe immigrants are entitled to live in my country"
These are the people who complain about small town xenophobia where you only get respect if your family is “from here.” But they are heading down the same path - “I was born here and lived here all my life!” Some add that their parents were born here too. I wish they could really hear what they are saying.
This mostly applies to places where property taxes are capped. People living in now-million-dollar homes wouldn't be as anti-development if they actually had to pay property taxes on the true value of their homes.
I don't know if that's true. I mean I talk to these people regularly. They don't usually have the same understanding of cause and effect that your comment implies. They usually blame rising prices on the gentrifiers and see it as part and parcel with the development.
It’s actually far worse. Seem my comment above.
Uh...some NIMBYism is definitely "because they were born in a different place", whether those NIMBYs actually cop to it or not.
I hear plenty of good progressives complaining about tech workers who aren’t “from here” ruining the city or neighborhood
I have the exact opposite reaction. Claiming for protectionist immigration principles simply affirm the basic democratic notion “the government of the people for the people by the people”. The state literally exists to serve its citizens. To the extent that you think immigration will impoverish your citizenry it’s basically your *duty* to limit it. Of course, you may well dispute the premise, but that’s a second order question.
By contrast nimbyism is class snobbery. And worse, it’s class entrenchment. It’s the idea that very often the accident of your birth (when you were born, whether your parents already owned a nice house you could inherit/sell off) should determine all. It’s anti egalitarian and nasty.
I think it’s fair to characterize both under either or both rubrics as “I, a geographic incumbent, believe that newcomers to the relevant area affected by my vote will not redound to my benefit and will reduce my quality of life, and therefore oppose them” - that’s literally the mechanism of action in both cases, and indeed immigration is manifestly anti-egalitarian under the second rubric because citizenship is (to first order) overwhelmingly an accident of birth.
The fundamental hurdle run into by opposing either NIMBYism or immigration restriction under this view is that “geographic incumbents get a say in issues of governance” is literally what citizenship and voting are. YIMBYism differs chiefly in that it has a substantive persuasive argument (“more housing is good”) but also the meta argument that local control of zoning shouldn’t exist (basically because when such control does exist, people vote for zoning.) Conversely, there’s not the same meta-case to be made on immigration because obviously US citizens are the relevant electoral constituency for US immigration policy.
One of the rights of US citizenship is equal protection under the laws in every state, including free movement. As much as some regions would like to prioritize their incumbents for access to housing, all they can Constitutionally get away with is protecting existing tenancies. This is effective in the short term, but people’s needs change over their lives - for example, children grow up and need their own homes. They can’t get them, unless outsiders of similar economic circumstances also can. In the long run, something like “California for Californians” isn’t actually workable. It’s at most “California for this particular generation of Californians.”
Ethnostates may not be desirable, but they are clearly doable, even over thousands of years. NIMBY regions will fail at social reproduction as long as US citizenship is meaningful in this way.
Sounds like a problem that could be solved by a return to primogeniture!
Yes, and the feudal/aristocratic characteristics are one of the best arguments against NIMBYism. This is America. Who your parents are and what land you were born on is not supposed to have this kind of role. This kind of reversion to Old World norms is antithetical to the democratic project. It’s not made any less so because the lords held an election among themselves.
This analysis works only if you dispute the democratic premise i.e. if your don’t consider citizenship to be meaningful.
How so? The pro-NIMBY / pro-restriction point is precisely that citizenship is (1) meaningful and (2) overwhelmingly reflects geographic incumbency (local for NIMBYism and national for immigration restriction), which is empirically true. The problem YIMBYs face is that according control of governance based on geographic incumbency is *presumptively legimate* because it’s how every election from school board to POTUS is organized.
US citizenship is meaningful. It confers the right to live in the United States. There’s not a secondary citizenship system at the state or local level. That’s China.
This gets to the heart of the 'somewheres' vs 'anywheres' issue.
If people want to say that there is no meaningful difference between those inside vs outside the boundary of the nation - that it is purely a geographic entity with no other value - then I don't see how you can be that far from basically opting for open borders/unrestricted immigration, and ultimately some form of true global govt.
I don't disagree but I think that in practice you can have "anywhere" mobile types who appreciate the need for the nation state and national solidarity, and also "somewhere" hyper-local types who don't give an F about Uncle Sam.
See: a ton of exurban and rural MAGA types. They rail against government and politicians but they are often fiercely loyal to “their” city, state or place (place in the sense of being proudly rural or whatever).
> It's only a matter of time until we need a Republic.
One with two senators per planet, as God intended it.
What? No satrap governors? No Star Crèche? No way! (A reference to the Vorkosigan Saga and Cetaganda, which might derail the conversation but in a fun way.)
It's precisely the same. NIMBY people are genuinely concerned with things like their wealth, traffic, school quality etc and think that are the residents of the relevant polity they should be able to use the state to protect those things at the cost of new entrants. It's just a smaller polity. Identical logic.
except that a neighborhood or town isn't a "polity". It's only the same if you ignore the fundamental division of the world to sovereign states, and don't consider the concept of citizenship qualitatively meaningful above and beyond simple zip code.
P.S. NIMBYISM is a purely economic or class based snobbery, citizenship doesn't work the same way and in fact cuts across class.
I am not a monarchist, so I don't think sovereignty is a metaphysical fact about the world no.
In both the USA and city case, you have governments, which is to say collections of geographically incumbent voters coordinating action through the use of force, to protect the perceived interests of existing voters.
"neighborhood character" or "national culture" it's really the same stuff, just smaller scale. Just as "our parking will get worse and our houses will depreciate" isn't different in kind than "they will burden welfare programs and will decrease wages" are both the material concerns of incumbent voters to whom the government responds.
Nitpicking here, but an HOA or a historic district overlay is kind of a perverse polity...
You're not following through to the proper conclusion of your otherwise impeccable logic. If one is truly committed to immigration restrictionism, one ought to champion NIMBYism because an America characterised by housing scarcity is an America that is a weaker magnet for immigrants.
Not really. You can believe in the power of the state to enforce its laws. Purposefully impoverishing your citizens in order to limit immigration in order to prevent the impoverishing of your citizens doesn't make much sense to me.
To be fair to the racists and xenophobes (ha!!!) I think they’re mostly assuming the immigrants can’t afford to live in the US and that’s why they don’t want them here. Hence Trump’s (still idiotic) statement about “shithole countries” being paired with “why don’t we get more immigrants from [rich, but also white] Nordic countries”
Totally. My only point was that the difference between NIMBYism and xenophobia is not that dramatic- you are using a minimal slice of information about someone (where they are from, what ethnicity they are) to make broad assumptions about their ability to assimilate into your community and improve it (or not deteriorate it). It's wrong either way!
We get a lot of immigrants via chain migration, so while the initial legal immigrants may be relatively high skilled (and thus a clear benefit from the US), once you go down the chain far enough, you lose the ability to ensure that quality.
And then the whole rampant illegal immigration/asylum abuse thing poisons everything.
(Otherwise, agreed with almost everything else.)
Homes are scarce resources in the same way that visas are. It’s true that you can only live there if you get one, and lots of seekers won’t, but the arbitrary limitation of quantity is the fundamentally debated question.
My opinion on gambling is there needs to be more friction in the process. Having it be legal is good but having it be two clicks in your phone is bad. You should have to place bets in person at a casino or other location. I also feel the same way about alcohol, here in NC you have to go to an ABC store to buy liquor and it’s annoying to go to another store and the hours are often inconvenient. It doesn’t stop anyone from buying but it makes impulse buys less likely and discourages things at the margin.
I'd be a lot happier if there were more restrictions on advertising it. Like there are for advertising tobacco.
The sheer amount of British gambling ads is surreal. Sometimes I watch the UFC via, um, streams that do not involve me purchasing a PPV or an ESPN subscription. So the streams are always off of BT Sport. When I started I just could not believe how many gambling ads you guys have.
On the flip side, I've heard that the rest of the world doesn't have pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about" etc. etc.
They are overwhelmingly on live sport; we don't get nearly as much on other programmes.
It drives me berserk if I'm watching BT Sport or Sky Sports (no, I don't know why one is singular and the other plural). It's always a relief when a game is on BBC (no ads).
The funniest thing is US sports on BBC; they cut to studio analysis when the US network is on an ad break, and you see more of the studio analysts than you do of the players.
Advertising restrictions are always going to run into First Amendment challenges over here in the United States. Tobacco is an exception to that due to the Master Settlement Agreement that headed off other court challenges.
We don't have the First Amendment in the UK, we have lots of restrictions on advertising alcohol as well as tobacco. And we have gambling ads everywhere and I hate them.
Edited my post to clarify, thanks.
I wasn't really criticising - just annoyed that we have exactly the same problem without the legal barrier to fixing it.
I'd have thought that restrictions on advertising age-restricted products to minors should be possible even in the context of the First Amendment.
Would be amusing to see that applied to cars....
Clarence Thomas is probably the only justice that might buy that argument, as he regularly rattles off solo dissents claiming that minors should have no First Amendment rights at all.
I wonder if states could do it as part of their legalization efforts. Basically stipulate that you can open an online casino in state X in exchange for agreeing to forgo advertising in that state as much as possible (ie national broadcasts are okay but local broadcasts or billboards are out). I’m not a lawyer but it seems like the casinos have already agreed to add those problem gambling tags to their ads not sure why you couldn’t get them to go further.
The First Amendment steelman argument I'd try to make is that quotas have already been accepted in other industries, whether they're good or bad, thus there's no need to make this speech restricting quid pro quo.
I thought the First Amendment doesn't protect commercial speech like it does political speech. After all, the government was able to get cigarette advertisements banned.
Yes, but the test for it is still demanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hudson_Gas_%26_Electric_Corp._v._Public_Service_Commission#Holding
And as I said, much of the remaining ad bans on tobacco came via settlement, to avoid further constitutional questions.
The pre-Murphy v. NCAA legal régime served this purpose well.
We should adopt a version of this for cocaine. You can buy, but only a couple grams every month, and only at state approved stores in the bad parts of big cities
The other thought I had is that gambling should be cash only. I think people would be less willing to place bets if they had to physically hand over bills.
Or maybe it should be mostly illegal except for Vegas and Atlantic City, the way it used to be until 2018.
Unfairly sucks if you're geographically far away from those places, though. It'd be interesting to see which towns got screwed the most when you also factor in tribal casinos.
I can't tell if you're serious but if you are I actually kinda agree.
i’m totally serious.
I don’t like vice laws, but I’ve come to realize there have to be guard rails along some lines, so I actually kind of agree as well.
One issue I feel like I'm out of step with most Slow Borers here is my having a considerable disdain for vice laws, where my guard rails get limited to genuine adverse impact on the non-vicers.
I don’t think I ever had an occasion where someone was like “hey, let’s do a responsible amount of cocaine and go to bed at a reasonable hour” it was always “let’s buy what we can afford and do it til it’s gone babbbyyyyyy!!!!!”
Cocaine is a helluvadrug.
I’m fine with cocaine, meth and heroine staying illegal. The desperate and depraved things people will do to get more of those drugs speaks to their non therapeutic and terrible nature.
Weed, shrooms and maybe a few other drugs with less aggressive addictive potential are fine with me though.
Cocaine used to be in coca cola. Its chemical effects are very similar to adderrol. This is to say, doing a little cocaine is perfectly consistent with being employed and normal and doing a moderate amount isn’t so bad if you do it once every couple months on a friday or saturday night. The problem is many people will keep snorting way past any moderate limit, some will od and many will go broke.
It’s an interesting test case for how well guard rails can work.
Welcome, free subscribers! Here's why you should level up to paid:
"As a paid member, you also have access to the comments section and daily discussion threads...."
Matt's articles are honestly kinda meh, only so-so (1), but the comments section is awesome and you want to be here. Think of Matt's articles as the tax you have to pay in order to participate in one of the best commenting communities on the web. It's worth it!
(1) Not my opinion -- Roman Polanski said this to me once. But if I mention him that tends to derail the conversation.
It probably doesn't even need to be expressly said, but the top tier humor of dysphemistic treadmill is a big selling point for this comments section.
"This, what is it, dysphemistic treadmill fellow is painfully unfunny" -- Roman Polanski.
I am genuinely LOLing at that footnote
> But what’s good about them is that a new business is likely to be relatively small, and we want an economy where a new small business that’s superior to other existing small businesses can put them out of business and grow large.
I think we should remember that the currently disparaged juggernauts of Walmart and Amazon both began as small businesses, and their massive success was the result of their superior business practices. Walmart due to their obsession with low prices and by being an early adopter of information technology. Amazon by inventing the online retail business model. Both firms defeated larger rivals by winning over consumers with these improvements.
To learn more, I’d recommend the Acquired podcast, which has some informative and entertaining long-form episodes on the history of both Walmart and Amazon.
* https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/walmart
* https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-com
The Amazon episodes call back to some commonalities and differences within the Walmart story. It also covers the war between these two firms, including Amazon poaching several logistics leaders from Walmart.
I strongly recommend these episodes to learn the fascinating and entertaining history of these companies. Acquired also have some great episodes on the history of the video game industry as well as the turbulent story of Nvidia’s rise to dominate the GPU industry.
I've noted before, but one of my first personal experiences realizing that "mom and pop" firms were not necessarily better than "big corporate" firms was trying rent off campus housing in college. Or more specifically my friends' experiences. Consistently, my friends' experiences living in "corporate owned" buildings was much more pleasant than my friends who lived in apartments owned by someone as their side gig; especially in regard to maintenance requests.
Matt sort of alluded to this in his "tourist town" aside, but there is definitely a case to be made those certain businesses or certain areas of town being restricted to small businesses can possibly be a good thing. I'm thinking specifically of restaurants. Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*. And it probably is a good thing that certain areas of cities actually do have restrictive zoning and are designated "historical" districts like French Quarter or North End Boston (to bring up two examples I've brought up before). The problem is too many towns and cities don't treat these as exceptions but rather a general rule. So you have situations like San Francisco that basically ban (or severely limit) chains to a degree that is almost certainly harmful to the city's residents. Or in general just how much this is abused to stop all development (when you're trying to designate a gas station as "historic", it might be time to take a step back and ask yourself how you got to this point).
>Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*<
Restaurant variety and quality is richer now than at any time in US history. Being an exceedingly wealthy country, America has championed foodie-ism with gusto for many years now. You can get good Sichuan just about anywhere these days, as Matt is fond of saying. Artisanal this and that (beer, cookies, bread, tea, cheese, chocolate) are practically cliches of life in prosperous urban America. I wouldn't be surprised if the pandemic may have actually *improved* things a bit (or at least will have done so once we're fully over the hump of that crisis in another few years), by culling weaker operations, and freeing up restaurant leases for ambitious, creative chefs.
And as for chains, well, aren't there a lot more of them? When I was a kid I recall, like, five or six big ones, and a few regional chains. But there are now at least a dozen burger chains or more depending on what part of the country you're in, a similar number of pizza chains, quite a good number of Asian chains, multiple Mexican and Tex-Mex chains, fast casual of every stripe, Italian, steak houses, and so on. So, even in that bland exurb you find yourself in when you've travelling on business, you'll probably have a lot more variety than you would've had in a similar situation in the 80s.
I have found this to be one aspect of life that's quite similar in China: the PRC has an extremely robust and lively restaurant chain scene—characterized by a seemingly limitless variety of concepts and a steady stream of new entrants into the market—typically operating out of shopping malls (a lot of Chinese people strongly prefer such establishments, as they believe food safety standards are higher).
Oh, I'm totally with Matt that food quality is one of the more underrated things in life that has gotten immeasurably better the past 20-25 years. I think he also noted before that innovation is often way over associated with Silicon Valley when we should really appreciate places like Chipotle and Five Guys being pretty big innovators in the "fast casual" business. Sort of buttressing your point about there being a greater variety of chains and higher quality chains then existed 20 years ago. Also, this gets murky when we are talking about restaurant groups. I'm sort of thinking of David Chang and how he has multiple establishments just in NYC that range from fast casual to fine dining. Sort of blurs the line for sure as to what we would call a chain.
Having said that, I think I'm on relatively solid ground that the "best" restaurants are one off establishments (want to try to acknowledge that there is a pretty wide berth between celebrity chef and the town diner owned by the same family for 50 years). As a commentator noted below, as much growth as there's been in restaurant options from different cultures throughout the suburbs and in cities we wouldn't have traditionally thought of as restaurant meccas, there are still a variety of places in this country that only have pretty bland options when it comes to food.
I think the point I was trying to say is that one of things that unites the various readers of this sub stack is agreement with Matt that zoning and NIMBY is quite bad and is quite detrimental to this Country in a variety of ways. But that like everything in this world, there are exceptions where restrictive zoning and NIMBY may actually have validity. And one of those exceptions is actual historic neighborhoods and vacation towns where there is a case to be made that it's beneficial to restrict new buildings and restrict businesses to non chain restaurants and non-chain retail (or at least limit).
Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher. Sort of think that could be a whole Slow Boring post as to why that is. Or least a mailbag question.
>Lastly, interesting to know about Chinese people preferring to eat shopping malls due to safety standards being higher.<
Like anything it's not 100%, but yeah, I find this to be a common attitude, and I know people who just very rarely eat at small "whole in the wall" places, of which there are thousands in Beijing. And forget street food. Sadly Anthony Bourdain passed away before developing much of a following here. Part of it might be driven by the very sharp differences between regions, or, more precisely, between rural areas and big cities. Beijing, like most large Chinese cities, is home to gigantic numbers of folks who've come to live here in recent decades from other provinces (mostly in Northern China). Anyway, their hometowns and villages are invariably a lot poorer than Beijing. And I think many of them eschew the rusticity and authenticity of establishments that remind them of home. They live in the big city now, dammit, and want bright lights, fancy decor and pristine settings. And yes, chains here (just like back home) provide consumers with signalling as to the quality they'll receive. (My impression is there's a whole sector of restaurant chains who have highly specialized business models that work best when being operated in the food service spaces available in malls). Similar vibe (albeit a Chinese version) to Cheesecake Factory or Rainforest Cafe. But there's a gigantic number of them (some are no doubt regional). Also, needless to say, I expect you can't afford mall rents, at least not in big cities, unless you're well capitalized. Which usually means a chain.
That’s kind of like the people who lived through the Depression, or who came to newly built suburbs from small towns and farms, embracing packaged food, cake mixes, Jello and so on with such gusto. It was modern, it was scientific, it was sanitary, and consuming it showed they were with-it suburbanites, not hicks and yokels.
Their grandkids and great-grandkids want that “authenticity” and rusticity that Grandma left behind because cake mix saved time, the kids just ate the frosting anyway, and it was so much better being a suburban housewife than a farm wife. The grandkids, of course, get a cleaned up, prettified, often much tastier (not to mention more sanitary because of public health regulations) experience. The grandkids never had to live with the grind that was subsistence farming or being married to one and popping out 10 kids, which gave them a safe distance from the awfulness that Grandma and Grandpa fled.
90% on board with this, though I think it's important to recognize that there's a trade-off: we usually have to pay a premium for the quality / variety bump that comes with one-off establishments.
It’s absolutely true that variety has increased even in bland exurbs over recent decades. But in a place like Bryan/College Station you can’t even get good generic Chinese food (you can get mediocre generic Chinese food) let alone Sichuanese food.
Really? That sucks. You'd think there'd be a fairly large Chinese community in that part of Texas given the substantial number of Chinese students at Texas A&M. Perhaps their numbers have shrunk? And it's only 1.5 hours from Houston.
There’s a lot of mediocre Chinese food and some mediocre vietnamese, Thai, and Indian food. But since students are a large part of the demand for international food, it’s not aiming at especially high quality. As you say, houston is just an hour and a half away, so people who want good food can go there (and Houston has great food!)
"Having a variety of restaurants in your town in city is almost certainly better than having every restaurant be Taco Bell*"
Ah, a man of culture, I see.
Hey, don't knock taco bell. Have spent a lot of my hard-earned money there in my younger days.
I should note the * was because I had meant to make a note at the end that I want to try to make more oblique references to terrible Sylvestor Stallone action movies going forward.
I was praising the Sylvester Stallone reference in question. I don't have a problem with Taco Bell as a restaurant, but I was happy to spot a Demolition Man reference in the wild :P.
People eagerly waiting for 2015 to see what BTTF Part 2 got right and wrong was amateur hour, I'm waiting for 2032 to see what Demolition Man gets right and wrong.
I'm embarrassed that I didn't pick up on that earlier, very well done.
Whether it's "superior" or not is a value judgment. Certainly it made them more money and outcompeted many other small firms, but equally Walmart and Amazon have done tremendous harm to small towns and local businesses. We've seen what happens when Walmart outcompetes every other store in an area, becomes its largest employer, and then leaves.
Cancer cells similarly outcompete all other kinds of cells, but they do so at a tremendous cost to the organism.
The evidence for “Walmart destroys small towns” is extremely weak. Theres even some
evidence that the opposite is in fact true. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2008/the-walmart-effect-poison-or-antidote-for-local-communities
This article examines what happens when a Walmart opens, but it doesn't address the primary point I brought up: what happens when one closes? It's not great: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/walmart-stores-nationwide-closures-impact-small-towns-employees/
Few other businesses can replace Walmart once they've moved out of a location as the building is just too big for almost any other retailer to use. As with other big-box stores leaving a location, the buildings tend to remain vacant for long periods of time once this happens. (And note also that a big-box store closing similarly has a larger impact on local employment than most other stores; I see estimates online of something like 300 employees for a supercenter, which can be a significant chunk of a small town's population.)
Beyond that, the article examines employment and wages, but that doesn't tell the whole story. One important thing you might want to know: was there another grocery store or pharmacy already there when Walmart came to town? Did it close down after being unable to compete?
This might not make a dent in the number of businesses examined in the article because in the US we tend not to have very many grocery stores in an area compared to, say, restaurants. But on the ground it matters quite a lot if the one or two grocery stores nearby close down in favor of Walmart - and especially if Walmart then leaves.
This is just a generalized case of "when largest employer closes in small town, small town suffers".
None of it is unique to Walmart, and none of it justifies a specifically anti-Walmart stance.
Sure, and my stance is not specifically anti-Walmart, it's anti-sprawling-big-box-store in general. They all have similar issues, Walmart is just a particularly large example.
Sprawling big-box stores are good. They offer more variety, at lower prices, employ more people at higher wages and with significantly better benefits than mom-and-pop stores.
It's unfortunate that small towns are doing so poorly economically that they can't sustain multiple redundant retail locations (and more frequently even single retail locations) - but big-box retailers aren't the proximate cause of that problem.
I think Matt underrates just how annoyed your average person (by my definition, me) is getting by automated tip suggestions. Two recent examples:
1) I ordered pizza from Papa Johns to pick up, using their "all mediums $6.99 deal". On an order I picked up myself, the lowest suggested tip was $9 on a $30 order - 30%! On pizza I drove to the store to fetch! The reason is the tip was 15% of the "regular" price - but no one ever pays the regular price at a chain pizza store - it's just marketing!
2) Had my beard trimmed at the local Great Clips. I always tip for that, and since the base price is low I always try to tip 25-30%. The store got a new POS kiosk that suggested three tip amounts - the lowest was 50%(!) of the service cost! I felt like a chump having to click "Other" and then manually put in a 30% tip.
We need to go back to standard tip being 15% and only for traditionally tipped services, like restaurant table service.
We need to ban the use of any pricing mechanism that isn’t spelled out on the price list. This is just companies getting clever at hiding costs, like Spirit and Allegiant airlines.
I'm never going to tip someone just working a register but I've (almost) started to wonder if I'm a bad person for just mindlessly hitting the "no tip" button when they come up since everyone posts like it's some big moral crisis they face everyday. But it's odd to me to think anyone in a 'regular' job would be reliant on tips, especially these days when you can just bounce to a better job
My 'heel turn' on this was being presented a 20% default tip option on a 6 pack of beer at a local liquor store, that I took out of the fridge case and brought to the counter myself. Nope, not doing that. I will tip for actual service, but no more for take out or fast food style counter service.
I think for me it's not that it's a moral crisis, it's just that I want to be a good dude and I don't really know what that requires. For instance, I never learned growing up that you should leave a tip for hotel housekeeping (my parents tipped, but we didn't stay in hotels a lot, and I guess I just never really noticed), and when I found out, I was mortified that I had been such a jerk not tipping for a few years. Now I kind of feel like I might accidentally be a jerk all the time. I have always tipped 10% for takeout. Pre-pandemic, I think that made me a good tipper. Now ... I dunno. Does it make me a bad tipper? If so, should I raise what I tip? It's not that I really mind the money so much (though honestly if I need to up what I pay for takeout by 10%, then I'll probably order a bit less), it's that I don't know what the "right" thing to do is, and though I'm financially comfortable, I'm not in a position to randomly hand out $5-$10 just to be generous to service employees.
There are lots of things where people say you "should" tip but actually you shouldn't; you actually shouldn't tip hotel housekeepers, for instance. You shouldn't tip on takeout. You don't tip the Sonic carhops. You don't tip taxi drivers unless they handle your bag. The right thing to do in those situations is fight against tip inflation by not tipping non-tipped workers.
I recently used a terminal at a coffee shop (no table service) that “helpfully” defined what each tip level represented, with 15% defined as “fair.” Whereas in the famous tipping discussion in Reservoir Dogs, Nice Guy Eddie says (of a hypothetical waitress performing a sexual favor) “I think I’d go over 12% for that.” We already have regular inflation; do we need tip percentage inflation too?
None of us should be taking lessons in gratitude from the characters in Reservoir Dogs.
The other day I purchased a bowl from a new “healthy” restaurant in my city where you order and pay at a kiosk but someone actually makes and hands you the food. The tip options were 25, 30 and 35% with no custom option - I chose not to tip at all. Normally I would tip some nominal amount between 10 and 15% but was honestly just disgusted that the only options were 25-35%, in a scenario where I was receiving basically 0 service.
Under-rated school subjects:
1. isn't the obvious answer probability & statistics? Like so obvious it might not even be underrated anymore, but just something we don't do enough. I'm talking less about the fancy math and more about a basic understanding of tail risk, distributions, Bayesian inference, expected values, etc.
2. Proper long shot: Having binged the Revolutions podcast recently, I think the French Revolution needs to be taught to everyone as a bit of a civics lesson and an important tale of unintended consequences. Also just to remind everyone that no matter how tempting the guillotine solution sounds, it has always ended poorly...
I think the people that promote stats as a core high school class base it off the assumptions that stats is more commonly used in the workforce and/or that statistics will promote statistical thinking in other contexts, i.e. tail risk.
I took AP Stats at a college-prep high school. Then I majored in Industrial Engineering, which is heavily stats-based. My experience is that taking statistics courses is very ineffective at promoting statistical thinking, even among those who are good at applying the statistical methods. It's just not how most people's brains are wired. The ability to apply statistical methods in the classroom does not really flow into the ability to think probabilistically. Statistics is more common in the workforce, and especially in academia, but still a very very small portion of jobs use it with any frequency.
Yeah, I was trying to say I'm interested in teaching everyone that same "think probabilistically" part you mention. That's what I meant by "not fancy math". Like no need to recall the difference between standard deviations and variance, but very good if you understand how a long tailed distribution creates an important difference between means and medians.
I think even if your goal is probabilistic thinking rather than proficiency in statistical methods, a high school class will not be effective. Thinking probabilistically is too unnatural for too many people. So many of my statistics classmates understood the academics of things even as "simple" as means vs. medians perfectly but would never think to apply the concepts outside of a statistics classroom. Honestly, I think a more effective method would be to incorporate probabilistic concepts in elementary education and hope that the mindset sticks.
"My experience is that taking statistics courses is very ineffective at promoting statistical thinking, even among those who are good at applying the statistical methods. It's just not how most people's brains are wired."
This is essentially what the original Kahneman and Tversky collaboration proved. Their subjects were not random college studuents, but rather trained professionals, and they still got most of the answers wrong!
https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/Psyc590Readings/TverskyKahneman1974.pdf
I'm all for teaching statistics in school, but I think that the results will be somewhat disappointing. It's genuinely a hard topic to teach well (more so than calculus IMHO --- something as fundamental as the meaning of a p-value is complicated and often explained incorrectly), and people have an impressive ability to forget what they've learned.
I took AP statistics back in highschool, and it was the most poorly taught class that I ever took. I somehow did well on the test, so I got college credit for it, which ended up being a bad thing because I didn't bother to take a non-crappy statistics class in college. (I eventually did an online class years later on my own).
Also, I'll note that a typical statistics class is not really targeted at the "real world" in the way that proponents are hoping for (e.g. making people understand covid risks or scientific studies better). For example, I can count on one hand the number of times I've done a chi-square test (a whole unit in the AP curriculum IIRC) in the real world, but I look at histograms, calculate confidence intervals, and do linear regression somewhat frequently. So, it's easy to dismiss calculus as abstract and not useful in the real world, but a lot of material in statistics classes has the same problem.
That's not to say that it can't be taught well or targeted towards real-world use, but getting it right won't be easy.
I feel like for almost every subject there has to be a way to use really simple, ELI5 type analogies so that primary school students could at least grasp the concepts a bit while their minds are still quite pliable.
I'm sure there are useful qualitative things to be learned that way, but I think that statistics advocates are looking for more than that. An example that comes up a lot is statistics related to the pandemic, and familiarity with various concepts could probably frame stuff a bit, but if you actually want to understand what's going on, at some point you need to start doing math, and concepts and qualitative understanding aren't going to cut it.
It's even possible that qualitative understanding could backfire in some ways. E.g., it's easier to see the flaws in a study than it is to see that a study is well designed, so a high-level understanding of statistics may mostly translate into dismissing too much --- including good studies with small failings.
I somehow missed ever taking a statistics class, and it's a shame, as I think I'd be more powerful with stats as opposed to learning it on the fly myself.
IDK. A practical understanding is pretty powerful. It's not like the classes on heteroskedasticity have been super useful.
EDIT: I only even remember this because the Professor's cat was named Heteroskedasticity and yeah ... it was about as weird as it sounds.
My college stats class was not particularly revelatory. My watered down (with a thin little textbook) med school biostats class, however, turned out to be one of the most important ones. Learned about experiment design, population distributions, and other pragmatic things in as plain language (and minimal math) as possible. I'm not a strong numbers person but that class gave me better statistical insight than most others on a hospital covid policy committee I ended up on.
I am forever grateful for the instructors who actually did explain it to us like we were 5. The class seemed dumb but it turned out to be just dumb enough.
I spent sooooo much time during Covid explaining statistics to other educated liberals. I also did a lot of explaining of things like confounding factors and age adjustment of rates. It was an interesting experience because many of those people are smarter than me but they would say “I understand what you’re saying but that can’t be true”. A lot of this goes against how humans tend to think of the world.
A non-politicized example is independent events. People have a hard time grasping it because it doesn’t make sense. In my case it involved genetics: if there is a one in four chance that a baby from two parents will have a specific genotype (this was usually discussed regarding genetic diseases) and the parents have two kids without that genotype, there is a 1/4 chance their next kid will have it because each baby’s genotype is independent. People have a hard time grasping that and even if they do, they often have a hard time believing it
Ugh, I heard that too from conservatives. I am always tempted to explain exponential growth by using the pyramid scheme as an example. Except that Americans keep falling for them. Probably because people have difficulty grasping exponents
I think what would have been hard for me learning it in primary school was that I did not have enough class identity to see myself in the groups and connect to how the dynamics undermined them.
Listening to it as an adult, the Girondins go from just one more French contingent to "oh no, my brothers, how did things slip away from you so badly?"
And I can point to the French countryside and tell my BernieBro friends "you see, elevating those people does not get you President Warren, it gets you MAGA!"
The problem with making high school history more nuanced is that there's a huge gap in level between standard-track high school history and good college-level history. Most high school students aren't capable of doing textbook-based AP history, let alone reading/writing-intensive college-level history.
Back in the day, I had a speech class (not speech therapy but one of those community college distribution requirements, more like public speaking and presentation) where one of my classmates gave a presentation on living through the Khmer Rouge. Out of his parents and seven siblings, he was the only survivor. That…was the last presentation of this particular day. We had to wrap up.
Every so often when I’m in one of those self-pitying moods, I flash back to this man and his life story and think “nah, my problems are small and solvable by comparison.”
Kinda disagree on tipping. I think there are two features of this that come up here in similar contexts. First, it’s kinda like the mandatory resort fees at hotels in that it disguises the true cost of the service, which is annoying. Second, every time I’m in this situation, I worry both that I am being ungenerous and that I’m being a sucker, which is unpleasant.
I just tell myself “I’m fortunate enough to earn 5x more than this service worker for less physically demanding work, a couple bucks means a lot more to them than to me” and punch the 20% button pretty much every time. Then immediately move on with life.
I feel the same in the sense that I can afford it. What I dislike is the loss of convention. prior to the pandemic I tipped at restaurants and just always tipped at 20%. I figured the market had arrived at the 15% as standard figure and I just went to the high end of the scale. Now, I don't think there is a market arrived at convention, and I have no idea what a "proper" tip is for a barista vs a delivery driver vs the gang at Jersey Mike's.
I'd like us to arrive at a consensus so I know I'm neither underpaying nor over paying. Of course what I'd really like is to just eliminate tipping and simply have people paid what they're entitled to without all the shenanigans and bullshit.
I guess I just decided 20% is “proper”
for pretty much anything and I don’t care who judges me for it 😄 Not worth the mental tax!
Not to be one of those Everything Is About The Pandemic people, but my tipping surged a few years back when it wasn't clear how much service workers could depend on having a job tomorrow. 18-odd months ago, I didn't feel tugged back from that per se, but rather I no longer felt the constant pressure that was required to keep me in that aggressive tipping posture. The tips dropped.
I’ve been one of those people who inflated my tipping during the pandemic and then never pulled back. I can’t tell whether that’s good or bad. But I think it should be banned and prices on the menu should list what you actually pay (including tax and any service charge).
I could totally get behind an embedded service fee/gratuity model. I think there's a place for a regulated gratuity system. Restaurant owners, for instance, surely appreciate an effective server who not only pleases patrons but upsells them. My real problem is the anarchic, ambiguous and opaque nature of what America's tipping culture has evolved toward. And that includes the utterly batshit crazy tip creep. What's next, tipping the mailman? The supermarket cashier? The bank teller?
A couple of restaurants in Los Angeles famously tried this, printing on their menu a statement saying to the effect of, "The employees here are on a livable salary and benefits much more generous than the normal restaurant wage, and that is baked into the prices of everything. Do Not Tip."
Every one of them had to renege on this model. It wasn't too publicly stated why, but I'm going to conjecture that the restaurant got less business because people balked at the prices, seeing something akin to sticker shock without registering that with tip factored in it was all the same in the end. Maybe the business model just didn't pencil out at all, with tips placed in some other income bracket that the restaurant industry accounting relies on to show some sort of profit. I'm not sure.
Nowadays the better restaurants add a default "service fee" to the bill and explicitly state the fee is for better wages and benefits and can be taken off by request. I usually just subtract this fee from my normal tip amount and the difference is the new "tip."
Yeah, it's very difficult for a few restaurants to try to do it unilaterally. It's only going to really work if there's a regulation that requires them all to do it simultaneously, so that everyone with sticker shock sees how it works everywhere.
Same. I've become something of an anti-tipping evangelist since moving to Asia and having the proverbial scales fall from my eyes. But I tip generously or at least fairly whenever I'm back home (as I did before I moved abroad). If one doesn't want to tip in the US, one shouldn't dine out or access the services of tip-dependent employees.
Exact same.
Having just posted a comment wishing tipping wasn't a thing, I now have to contradict myself. Last night I was at a bar where the bar tender had trained his cute little chihuahua to carry a hat around the place soliciting tips. I don't ever want something like that to be driven from the market.
Tipping is terrible, and any sort of drip pricing is bad economically as well as unpleasant.
"Kenosha is just an awfully small place — it’s the fourth largest city in Wisconsin"
Complete tangent here, but....
As someone who lives near Kenosha, close enough that my gym is there and I go there to gas up because it's cheaper than Illinois, there was this aspect to the reporting during the riots there that drove me nuts. If you watched Fox, or engaged with loonies on Twitter (I know, I KNOW), there was this idea of "Oh, this quiet, sleepy hamlet in Wisconsin, was burned to the ground!".
But it's like....yeah, Kenosha is small compared to a major city, sure. But it's like the 335th largest city in the US (out of over 100,000). Nearly 100k people live there. The rioting was absolutely terrible and Iwould never defend it, but it was mostly contained to like, a three block area. I was literally at the gym when the riots were happening and you would not have been able to know anything was going on.
It's also in the Chicago CSA, a metropolis of ten million souls.
Listen, *I* know that, but folks on the WI side of the cheddar curtain get all in their feelings when you tell them they are a Chicago suburb.
I mean, it's got a Metra station. The only Metra station in Wisconsin.
BUT IT HARDLY EVER GOES THERE
Noted!
Question for you: has WI experienced much of an influx over the years from Illinois people leaving for greener pastures? I always assumed this was the case (similar to NH-MA) but was never too sure.
The SALT deduction cap is a huge part of this. $25k property taxes are common and then tack on 5% income tax on top of that. Trump's move here was brilliant and I don't think gets enough coverage.
Anecdote, but my neighborhood in Alabama had three lots (out of ~30) bought by people from Chicago in 2020-2021. PMC folks.
And then my step-father in southern TN had a few people from Chicago buy land from him in the same time frame.
I'm sure it's at least partially just an anomaly, but it's been noticed and noted locally.
People are blaming the 'big city buyers' for a recent housing/land price spike.
Oh, I have no doubt it's happening. Remote working is helping, too.
Among other things, there's a bit of a boomerang effect. If you're a recent college grad in WI, and you want a big-city experience without getting too far from home, Chicago is the place to go. Those who tire of the big-city experience often return to WI (as opposed to staying in the Chicago suburbs).
Yes.
I suppose you wanted something a tad more detailed, sorry. So, for example, I pay about 3.5x the national average (percent-wise) in property taxes. My dad lives in a different, slightly more well off community on the state line (Illinois side). His property taxes where he lives are 2.5x the national average, but he's much closer to retirement than I am and doesn't have kids at home,, so for him it's very tempting to move 5-10 minutes north for a nice cut in property taxes.
No worries.
For what it's worth that's a different situation from NH. That state has no income or sales tax. But its property taxes (not surprisingly) are very, very high. Higher than those in Massachusetts, I'm pretty sure (though home prices are lower). NH has received a large number of Bay Staters over years, but I'm pretty sure that exodus has slowed down recently (though maybe it's picked up since remote working increased): Massachusetts was the fastest growing of the New England states per the last census.
I got a good chuckle when Matt (very correctly!) swatted down any concern with GMOs in just one sentence, then used it as a launching pad to go back on his hobbyhorse against gain of function technology.
I’m surprised that immigration and diversity wasn’t high mentioned when it came to US success.
Europes diversity has been a fairly recent thing compared to the United States. And given the United States size, we have had a lot more mobility than European countries historically. People moving to the west coast. Or moving up and down the East coast.
This has made American culture more dynamic. We have had this for two centuries.
In recent decades europe has been far more open to immigration than the US. In fact nowadays us is probably the most restrictive to *legal* immigrants of all major western countries. Hence for the analysis for the past two decades, at least, MY’s suggestions seem more plausible as the main factors.
Yes... but they have centuries of very little immigration. Even now, in a lot of countries with immigration, it just hasn’t integrated as well as the US has. They will get there. We just have a head start.
As I understand it, much of immigration in the EU is from other EU members. In terms of external to EU or US, I think the US is still has much larger numbers.
My perspective is on a particular kind of immigration. Highly educated professionals. How easy it is to move there? More importantly, how easy is it to get permanent residence and citizenship. I can tell you there is no question US immigration is borderline hostile to educated immigrants at this point. Native born Americans have no clue- just ask your immigrant friends. I’m sure the data is reflecting it too if you look closely.
P.S. it’s also gotten noticeably worse in the past two decades. Americans are used to the ethos of their country as the immigration center of the world and haven’t caught up to the new realities. Just like American infrastructure used to be world leading and now Europeans or Asians visiting the states are rightly shocked by the primitive state of eg us cell phone +internet technology.
A lot of my immigrant friends (physicians mostly) have assisted their family members in moving here. I don't know if they share your desire to prioritize highly educated immigrants, but the system seems to be working for them.
To THPacis point, I think the US system prioritizes families of people already here, but significantly disadvantages educated people with no relatives who just want to move to the US.
1. Marriage is easy. So are dependent underage kids. All other family sponsorships take a LONG time. For the best category people its like 8 years wait before you can come. For many others much worse (e.g. Mexicans who want to immigrate the legal way by these non-immediate family categories, which can include e.g. parnets or an adult child, have a waiting list of 20 years or soem such!)
2. As John E pointed out, that's the problem with the system (in my view). It's all about family sponsorships (with the important #1 caveat). To actually immigrate based on employement, including the most economically desireable fields, is a very slow tormenting hell. Whereas other western countries welcome you with open arms and minimal hassle. THAT'S the key point I'm making.
P.S.
When did your immigrant friends immigrate? It used to be better e.g. 20 years a go. If they immigrated recently, how did they receive their green card? Was it the employment route? If so - ask them about the experience? How long and enjoyable of a route it was!
I think immigration got mentioned by-the-by a bit with "demographics -young vs old". The economist article does specifically talk about it though.
Regarding the causes for strong US economic growth, I found it very odd that Matt did not mention lower taxes and a generally more free and market oriented economy. As I understand it, this is broadly considered the key cause for faster growth in the US among economists. This explanation also has a strength in that it relates to a persistent difference between the US and Europe over many decades.
It also intuitively makes sense to me. People in the US just work harder than people in Europe, in particular if you focus on the most productive members of the economy. Which makes sense, given that in the US, they are rewarded far more generously for doing so.
Now you could argue that the European model is better - that working shorter hours is good, that taxes provide money for valuable things such as improving public health, that the high levels of inequality in the US are corrosive, etc. But it seems disingenuous to not at least acknowledge that an upside of a (relatively) low-tax deregulated economy is faster growth.
"I find it odd that Matt did not mention lower taxes and a generally more free and market oriented economy. As I understand it, this is broadly considered the key cause for faster growth in the US among economists."
I don't believe this is correct. Economists who study the relationship between total taxation and growth have concluded that there isn't much correlation. https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2009/08/economic-policy-advice-for-the-ndp-part-ii-defending-big-government.html
Providing goods and services through taxation and public provision, rather than buying them individually, is basically a form of collective shopping. For certain services, like insurance, you can get massive gains in efficiency by providing them in this way. See Joseph Heath's "Filthy Lucre." https://russilwvong.com/blog/collective-shopping/
The Economist had a cover story last week talking about the remarkable record of US economic growth, and reviewing various contributing factors. The level of taxation wasn't one of them. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-from-americas-astonishing-economic-record https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/04/13/from-strength-to-strength
If you're talking about generally "free market" systems vs. "communist" systems, then yes, the former is better economically. But that's qualitatively different then level of taxation.
Reality is it doesn't make much sense to say "European" tax systems. While in general there are higher taxes in Europe, it really does vary from country to country. But more perhaps more importantly, it depends what type of taxes you're talking about. One of the biggest sources of higher taxes in Europe is the VAT and this is one of the more economically efficient taxes a country can have.
It should also be noted that the US states with the highest taxes (Massachusetts, New York and California) are three of the richest and economically vibrant states in America and quite frankly the world. It's not to say that the tax systems in these states aren't littered with unnecessary costs and expenses (hello infrastructure costs), but it's hard to say it's been a burden on economic growth.
And this is even assuming these supposedly slower-growing economies have grown more slowly. Which economies? And are there any exceptions? I’m pretty confident if you go back to 60 years ago, you’ll find the US was a lot richer then, too.
It seems pretty clear they have, in fact, grown more slowly. The US% of global GDP hasn't changed much, but it has increased relative to other rich countries(except for example very tiny Luxembourg). Developing countries like China have also done well, which is why the global share isn't higher than the US.
>The US% of global GDP hasn't changed much, but it has increased relative to other rich countries<
Europe/Japan's share of world population has dropped quite a bit faster than America's.
Fair. It looks like Europe population grew.. 4%?? In last 30 years. That seems crazy low. US was 30%.(worldometers.info)
Tradingeconomics.com indicates our per Capita PPP only beat Europe's slightly during that time. 57% vs 55%.
I don't think anyone has determined the exact numbers, but Europe has to have higher deadweight loss from taxes, and it has compounded over decades.
My understanding is that Americans tend to work more, which could be a function of our relatively stingy safety net and lower taxes. However, in terms of GDP per hours worked, the US hasn't really outperformed northwestern Europe that much, until the financial crisis.
It’s easy to blame academics for writing bad studies (and to some extent I agree, as an academic physician), but universities promote faculty mostly based on publication volume not quality, and journals publish based on what’s interesting rather than developing a methodology that actually promotes good science. Honestly it’s a miracle studies are as good as they are, given the incentives. I’d fix academia before I fixed classes about how to read shitty academic products
In the context of “Better macroeconomic stabilization policy” for US vs. Europe, I think a lot of this comes down to the fundamental contradiction of the eurozone; it is a monetary union without a fiscal union. Ie, the European Central Bank has to set a single uniform monetary policy for a collection of countries with fragmented fiscal policies. Eg, what is best for Germany may be suboptimal for Italy.
Ideally, the eurozone would move towards a more unified fiscal policy. The Next Generation EU—an economic recovery package in the wake of the pandemic—is a promising move in that direction. But domestic politics will be a strong headwind in that direction. Eg, why Merkel felt compelled to push austerity on Greece and other periphery EZ nations in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. But as Yglesias explains, that was worse for all countries.
What the EZ ultimately needs is a proper fiscal union with large fiscal transfers from prosperous northern countries to the struggling southern ones. This would be comparable to the large fiscal transfer between California and Alabama in the US. With this single fiscal policy, the ECB could then create the appropriate monetary policy.
But domestic politics in these wealthy northern countries, particularly Germany, would never allow for that; even though these benefactors would also soon become even more prosperous with such a proposal. The nationalist currents within Europe are just far too strong.
I remember before 2008, someone noted that what places like Italy or Greece wanted from the EU was essentially Germany's credit rating so as to lower borrowing costs. Sort of like a teenager getting a credit card under Dad or Mom's name*.
It's interesting, because this was a pretty huge focus of Paul Krugman's writing for years, the huge structural problems with the EU and the inappropriateness of a common currency to a union without a united fiscal policy. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/25/133112932/paul-krugman-the-economic-failure-of-the-euro#:~:text=Paul%20Krugman%3A%20The%20Economic%20Failure%20Of%20The%20Euro%20Using%20a,for%20the%20global%20trading%20system.
It's one article, but he was banging this drum before 2000 and before 2008 when it seemed like the Euro was nothing but a success.
I know Matt is being snarky about how much this the fault of Merkel, but is should be said that this really the fault of the EU central bank. And specifically, the fact that the EU central bank policy is essentially controlled by Germany. It just seems really clear to me that Germans almost maniacal focus on avoiding inflation has been extraordinarily damaging to itself and the European economy as whole.
I can't entirely blame Germany for not wanting it's credit compromised by Greece and Italy, unless it has some say in their budget and can basically guarantee that they won't f*** it over.
Sure, but the fact that Germany and Southern Europe have widely divergent interests because they have widely divergent fiscal management and governance is exactly why Krugman was banging the drum through the entirety of the aughts and well into the GFC that monetary union without fiscal union was a horrible mistake that was going to (and did) bite the continent in the ass, hard. While the Germans' stance may have been substantively misguided, the real problem was that the Euro didn't allow Europe to take a "Deutschlanders gonna Deutschland" approach but instead Germany and Southern Europe each acted as an albatross about the others' neck.
One thing I haven't seen stats on and would like to, though, is what the magnitude of trade benefits were by having a common currency and basically completely removing intracontinental exchange-rate risk. Seems like it's gotta have been at least a few percentage points of Euro GDP, right?
From a Krugman column in July, 2022
"In 2010-12 Italy, along with other Southern European nations, experienced a debt crisis, with “lo spread” — the difference between Italian and German interest rates — exploding. But as a handful of analysts, above all Belgium’s Paul De Grauwe, pointed out, this crisis seemed driven less by fundamental insolvency than by self-fulfilling panic. In effect, investors engaged in a run on the debts of Southern European nations, creating a cash shortage that these countries, which didn’t have their own currencies and hence couldn’t print more money, were unable to resolve."
A pithier way of stating Matt H’s nice summary: the problem for the EZ is that it isn’t the European Union, it’s the European Agglomeration, with Germany stirring the pot.
I reflexively felt the need to (try to) defend my state, since you used it in an example.
However, it's not really feasible. Except to maybe point out that a decent % of our federal $ received is in defense spending, and maybe that should be excluded? (But not really)
Anyways, since defense isn't going to work, I'd like to point out that CA is basically balanced between federal income vs expenditures.
https://howmuch.net/articles/federal-budget-receipts-and-expenditures-across-the-united-states
(Graphic is kind of misleading, but numbers are included)
Under-rated school subjects:
Effective emotional resilience tools (ex. basic concepts from CBT, Stoicism and mindfulness) and communication skills (like the 5 secrets of effective communication by Burns).
I've been thinking recently about the old "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" yarn that our parents taught us. We all knew it was not quite true ("you're dumb and stupid and ugly" hurts!), but we knew it was a state we should work towards, a mental and emotional resilience to which we aspire.
It seems like that whole attitude is on the retreat among The Dang Kids These Days, and I think it is a terrible loss.
Recently thinking the same thing!
I’d add basic financial literacy / numeracy (which could be everything from what are stocks and bonds and how do they differ, to how retirement savings accounts work, to making sense of marginal tax rates, to something as simple as how to understand price per unit at the supermarket)
And how compound interest can work against you or for you!!
I am going to reflexively upvote any comment I see that contains the phrase "compound interest" in this context.
I got a decent intro to economics in high school but I was still shocked to learn that half of what you pay for a mortgage is interest (if you take the full 30 years)
It would be good to compare how much one pays in compound interest via the mortgage versus how much one gains in compound interest from the appreciation of the asset one leveraged to get.
And this gets into a more advanced but also important aspect of how to take best advantage of compound interest. There are times where it may be better to loan instead of buy, if it means keeping assets generating higher interest than what one's paying on the loan.
Yeah. My husband and I paid off our very low interest mortgage early even though we knew strictly speaking it was better to invest that money in the market, but damn, it has felt good to live rent-free ever since. The heart wants what it wants. (We caught up on investing quickly thereafter anyway)
The smart kids learn about stock and bonds soon enough, and then worry about how much of their portfolio is in each. The less clever kids would benefit from the basics - do not borrow money long term on credit cards etc.
Totally agree - understanding the implications of interest and interest rates (also as it relates to things like payday loans) is another core thing to add to this curriculum!
Some of the CBT tips Matt has mentioned on here have been very helpful for me in dealing with my mild anger management problem.
Since you mention it I thought this was an excellent post on managing anger from a Stoic perspective https://medium.com/stoicism-philosophy-as-a-way-of-life/an-illustrated-guide-to-stoic-anger-management-78cfd193ab21
Glad that's helped you! You have youthful exuberance, but you haven't struck me as angry.
I wish there was some way to teach the Bible / the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament / (or whatever you want to call it) in a way that it would come across as fresh. "The Bible as literature" is how this used to be phrased. Its words and stories are a dominant strand in our culture, even more so than Shakespeare. It is such a powerful fount of culture, that alas, our diverse subcultures have overlaid it with their own interpretations to the extent that it would be impossible for students to just read it, wonder and marvel. This is what I did at the age of twelve when my grandparents gave me a red-letter KJV. Later, in college I tried to do this again after my Freshman resolution to lay aside all former beliefs and address the Great Books with an open mind.
Typology in conservative Christian societies removes the possibility of reading the Hebrew scriptures in their own historical and cultural contexts, since all they can see is prophesies of Christ. Radical secularists dismisses the entire set of books as "false" or "unprovable" without ever opening the covers; they just mindlessly circulate misinformation about anything that has to do with "religion."
Totally agree. This Yale course on the origins of Christianity is / was on iTunes U and awesome.
https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152
That looks fantastic. I was just reading about the history of the gospels (curious after Easter) and although I went to church for my entire childhood, there's a lot I don't know about the background these were written in.
It's so good. I listened to it all ~ straight through on a drive from Chicago to Banff and back. It's been a minute but super heavy, heavy topics I had never thought about. A historical non-fiction take on John the Baptist (i.e., what does him baptizing Jesus mean?). Whether Jesus ever refereed to himself as the son of God or if that was "canonized" later. So much on Paul. How the Apocalypse hangs over everything and then passes. Highly recommend.
> How the Apocalypse hangs over everything and then passes.
Right, I read none of the gospels were written down contemporaneously because everyone expected Jesus to come back within their lifetimes. It was only after a few decades that people are like "oh shit, we'd better write this down so it isn't forgotten".
Exactly - the Academic / Biblical Criticism path could indeed get some of those radical secularists and their inadvertent followers interested in exploring religion from the perspectives of history, culture and literature.
My sister teaches high school social studies, and we were just talking about how her students social and emotional development is incredibly stunted post pandemic, and she's having to spend a lot more time teaching her students how to work in groups, how to talk to the person sitting next to them, etc. We were speculating that with AI being able to do personalized content instruction, you'll see in person instruction shift to focusing much more on the soft skills which enable the use of academic skills in society.
The AI uprising may be just the event to bring people back together 😬
I would agree except I’ve never understood CBT and Stoicism to advocate for simple fatalism. Behavioural activation for example is one of the most powerful techniques in the CBT toolbox. And one of *the* major concepts of Stoicism is to carefully discern between what is in your control and what is not (not to tell yourself that everything is out of your control).
A curriculum of these concepts would have to be carefully designed to avoid the pitfalls you describe and kept fairly basic (certainly not as a form of group therapy in class or anything like that). The idea is just to have some good tools for dealing with the inevitable setbacks and challenges that life so generously provides us so that we can constructively pursue success in those areas of life that you listed.
The most underrated/needed school subject of all time is financial planning. It’s an essential skill for life they you sometimes get bites of in math class but it’s far more important than most of what you learn in high school math.
I went to a fairly good school and had a pretty stable home life but graduated with very little understanding of how to approach my young adult life from a finance perspective. It took a decade of trial and error to figure it out and that has lifelong repercussions.
This is taught. Nearly all states have required financial literacy units.
Students don't pay attention.
Not so fast. According to this article, only 14 states have this requirement: https://www.axios.com/2022/06/08/personal-finance-education-states-full-list
Also, some of these requirements did not exist when us commenters were in high school, so the portion of us that had this requirement is even lower than the portion of students today who do, which I suspect further contributes to it being mentioned in the comments here.
It is the children who are wrong : D
Not wrong, just kids.
My version of Matt's fascination with zoning are rules around saving and investing. We should have one retirement account (not split between 401ks, multiple types of IRAs, etc.) You should be able to put about 25k into them a year. There should be no roths. Balances should be capped at 100x the median income in the US. Anything over that has to be removed into a parallel non tax deferred savings account.
We should reduce taxes on interest slightly, while increasing the progressiveness of capital gains taxes so they cap out closer to 30-35%.
I think that advantages people who can work the rules way to much. Dropping the penalty also removes reason for the tax advantaged part of the account.
An aside on the Chicago thing: I hadn’t heard about the disruption, so I clicked through to the NBC article, which described the events as a “gathering.” Sounds pretty anodyne! It’s depressing that the media is still apparently running scared from calling violence violence.