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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Effective emotional resilience tools (ex. basic concepts from CBT, Stoicism and mindfulness) and communication skills (like the 5 secrets of effective communication by Burns).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.