For what it's worth, I just graduated from college a few weeks ago and all the points you made line up pretty clearly with my personal experience. Choosing a major with a reputation of being difficult was probably the best decision I made academically for exactly the reasons you brought up, although I would also add that it was a great way to find friends who shared my values. Being a varsity athlete was transformative for similar reasons, and while it's obviously a commitment in and of itself, I found that it introduced a lot of positive structure into my life that would otherwise be taken up by less productive activities. My brother's in college right now and while he's done very well for himself, I suspect that if he had selected into different groups, it would have a positive effect on his performance similar to what I experienced.
On the UK, I would push back on the idea that more London is the answer. We need the capital city - our largest and richest local economy - to do well for the country to succeed, but it's not the solution to all of our problems.
Yes, we definitely need Yimbyism and major reform of our San Francisco-style discretionary planning system, and to replace it with a new flexible zoning system. But our economic geography problems are bigger than just housing.
The other major issue is that the other big cities - Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle etc - all massively underperform their international peers despite having a very large share of the population, meaning lots of our missing agglomeration effects are outside London and the Greater South East. I think most Americans who have visited nice bits of the UK on holiday would honestly be shocked at just how poor some parts of these large European cities really are.
There seem to be a mix of reasons for this, including the low-density, terraced/post war urban environment of lots of these urban areas and a lack of either public or motorway transport infrastructure - they're cramped but not dense.
But one of the most important seems to be the exceptional level of centralisation and the almost complete lack of financial incentives in the local government tax system for places to pursue growth. Even if a poor city does well and creates jobs and builds new homes, it all gets 'equalised' away with reduced grants from central government, to fund more subsidies to poorer/Nimby places that did not achieve or rejected growth in the name of fairness.
What this implies is that digging up James II to rule absolutely over us from Whitehall Palace isn't really the answer. We need to do very hard reforms to the planning system and local finance - but ultimately we need to distribute power outside of London to ensure every place is hungry for growth and tries to defeat Nimbys to keep local taxes as low as possible/fund better public services in the community.
It’s a very marginal thing but the UK education system is extremely good, and the outlying universities have become extremely good (I have fantastic coauthors at Warwick and Imperial) but (and there are exceptions) if you don’t go to Oxbridge you might as well not exist to the policy class.
In particularly my Warwick friend gets called more frequently by the American and Canadian governments more than he does the UK government and it’s a little frustrating.
The answer to the actual question asked was hopeless - 'expand London, pave over the Home Counties, and tell the rest of the country you don't care about them' would see a guillotining in no time - but the question itself is a terrible framing so I don't know how well anyone could answer it as written. The actual political problems can't be waved away in the short term but are also probably exaggerated in the longer term. This government had lots of ideas, many of which could have led to more growth, but also a) didn't commit to them, b) is led by a deeply unpopular guy who never makes decisions and is terrible at politics, and c) hampered the effectiveness of those ideas by coming up with other ones that mechanically reduce growth prospects. Avoid problems a) and b) and reduce the number of c) and the problems might get less acute.
What's ironic about the point on hard work in youth sports is that on the more intense end, it's done with the hopes of paying it off with an athletic scholarship, which doesn't always succeed, and in any case is a very odd way of getting into college when we set aside the history, since it's a purely non-academic way to get in.
I'd also be curious as to what Matt thinks about the gap year concept. It certainly doesn't have to be an aimless experience, but it is potentially delaying a discrete path toward formally learning a profession.
Parents are often shocked to learn how few athletic scholarships there actually are. There's a separate tier that substantially helps with admissions but comes with no money, but it ends up with more athletes mismatched academically. Either under performers at an elite school or picking a school that's less selective than they could or should.
" A striking fact about the U.K. is that (in part just because Demis Hassabis likes London) it has an A.I. industry. They also manufacture airplane components, including jet engines, in the U.K."
British and French manufacturing output appears to be half of the United States' output, per capita. That doesn't seem too great, particularly for the French with the amount of propping up they've done of their old industrial champions.
Also the over Londonization already seems really bad. 38% of the UK GDP runs through greater London, while it is 8% for NYC Metro and the US. And I imagine this over Londonization is related to the first post about lack of manufacturing productivity.
WRT to health care, all our budget woes would be solved if US health care costs were in line with rest of the OECD. So perhaps some attention beyond tweets are in order.
Part of those lower costs come from paying medical professionals a lot less, requiring less training from professionals, and really squeezing down drug/equipment costs. The last things is only really possible because the U.S. consumer cross subsidizes drugs and equipment for other markets. If the U.S. really negotiated down payments then I suspect some costs would transfer to the rest of the oecd.
Prescription drug spending gets an outsided amount of attention but is only about 10% of total spending on healthcare. The share of total healthcare spending that goes to drugs in the US in the middle of the pack of the OECD, which reenforces that other healthcare spending is the main driver.
And of US spending on prescription drugs, about 90% of the spending is on about 10% of the drugs -- those that are still under patent. Cut patent abuse and excessively long patent terms, and you almost mechanistically reduce spending on prescription drugs without the additional market distortion that comes from trying to do it with measures like price controls.
Yes, healthcare law is so full of bad, distortionary policies that finding examples is like shooting fish in a barrel. Take the federal 340B drug program. It was created as a patch to fix and unintended consequences of the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, that accidentally penalized drug manufacturers that sold a low prices hospital and a few other provider types. It requires mfrs to sell drugs at a low, submarket wholesale price to hospitals (something mfrs previously did voluntarily until the poorly designed MDRP program disincentivized that), and allow hospitals to resell to patients at a regular commercial market price, and use the profits from the spread to fund their general operations. So it has grown into a general federally mandated but off-the-books of the federal budget subsidy to hospitals, funded by pharma mfrs. Just about the dumbest, most distortionary way to subsidize healthcare providers imaginable, yet it is vigorously defended by politicians of all stripes, who seem unable to imagine a better way to do this. Imagine if Congress designed a food assistance program by requiring food producers to sell at submarket prices to grocery stores, but allowed grocery stores to resell to the public at market prices and pocket the different - that's 340b in a nutshell.
I think the NBA situation is probably related to the best prospects being extremely tall. It’s not hard to scout that and my understanding is that tall people get asked about basketball all the time (nice to meet you, wow, do you play basketball?). So the bulk of the NBA is filled out with the normal for sports mix of hard work and talent and body type, which pulls from the country that plays it most the USA. But the elite is pulling from a much broader global distribution than youth sport distribution would suggest.
I don't think the point of the question was to suggest a 62 seat Senate was likely to happen, but I really really really think that voters of the Democratic party need to reevaluate both the likelihood of such an event and how you actually would get there.
I don't see anything that gives me confidence of anything other than 50/50 for a decade more.
High school history students will hate us for letting Build Back Better and Big Beautiful Bill happen so close to each other. Fortunately for them, the former will be a footnote much less likely to show up on tests, and the latter sounds so much like a joke that it'll be easy to remember.
My only cope is that the polls look really solid now (only real vulnerability this cycle looks like Michigan, North Carolina looks all but locked in as a pick up, and we lead in Maine, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and also Nebraska for some reason). I don't think we get all of those, but going from 47 seats to 52 (still unlikely but possible) could get us in the mid-high 50s in 2028. I'd still say odds are the most seats we have in 2028 is like 55 - the only remotely plausible pick ups in 2028 would be WI, NC, and IA - but I do think in my heart of hearts we could get our biggest Senate majority since 2012. Probably not likely, but plausibly
Ugh, picking Smells Like Teen Spirit for the 1990s is so cliche. One of the most overrated songs either.
I do appreciate the Johnny B. Goode and Respect choices to start though--and especially resisting the temptation on the latter to go into the Beatles well. 1970s is a really tough choice, lots of good stuff then.
Agreed on Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I'm a Nirvana fan. I'm willing to entertain the idea that its opening riff is one of the greatest hooks of all time, but the rest of the song is good, not great.
I've got nothing against Public Enemy, but picking Fight the Power as the best song of the 80s absolutely reeks of Poptimist apologizing for not appreciating rap enough earlier, or something. The 80s were the creative highpoint of Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, to name only a few of the pop stars (and that's not even getting into New Wave, Industrial, Metal, etc.) Fight the Power is very far from the best song of that decade.
I don't see how that Medicaid expansion message is going to do much. John Roberts says the states have to do it themselves, most of the fruit has been picked via either Democratic elected politicians or ballot initiatives, and the few remaining holdouts mostly have neither. There's not much that can be done other than defeating Republican trifectas, and that's easier said than done. At least there's still two big prizes out there in Texas and Florida if the goal is to, say, try to flip a governor's seat.
As an avid Arsenal fan, the club was pilloried in Wengers early years (a legendary prior manager) for fielding a largely foreign team. Eventually every other club did it and the point was dropped. I expect the same thing will happen to the NBA
University seem like a compulsory part of a certain class. Almost everyone I mix with has a degree despite graduates making up only half the population.
From my experience, there can be a split among this in multiple classes. Some blue collar parents are really adamant that their kids go to college for betterment purposes, and some white collar parents can trend toward seeing college as overrated if they think their kids are talented enough to get to being professionals.
I don’t know anything about Bores, but most proposed AI regulations are in fact very dumb and part of a moral panic, especially at the state level, and seem designed to nerf the economic value of AI and create huge compliance burdens while also blatantly violating the First Amendment and for state regulations various federal preemptions without addressing any of the purported existential risks (which no one knows how to address anyway) or even the mass job displacement risk (which is addressed by UBI not by forcing intrusive disclosures on AI content or restrictions on what AI chatbots can discuss or making people check consent screens before interacting with AI or getting AI content kicked off or shadowbanned from online platforms which is just a rent-seeking handout to existing IP holders).
Matt's young dad sounds like a young AG. School sucks, everyone (exept me obviously) is as dumb as they are stupid, it's so hard to find brains with a pulse. Whatever is the point of wasting my youth like this? Plus we have this cool new thing called Google*, clearly there's no need to go through the stuffy educational establishment to learn things anymore. A picture is worth a thousand words is something you can only write using words, therefore the pen is mighter than the sword, QED. Let's grow up to be a novelist and/or President!
Oh, you sweet summer child. They'll never let you. Should have listened to your grandparents, who wished up till their deathbeds that you'd be the first in the family to graduate college, set down real roots in America. Heed the cautionary Tale of Grandfather, passed up for countless promotions and raises, for want of a degree rather than lack of skills - then given severance a day before qualifying for pension. Or Father's Saga with the same plot beats, just different faces. Or Mother's Lament, where real career success only came after getting a ~fake long distance degree. This is the way the world works, AG: we live in an overeducated society, worshipping the Cult of Smart. (Thanks Freddie.)
At least I stayed long enough to learn about "compound interest", so despite being hourly, my marginal wage is not quite $0. I hope they're still proud of me anyway. Have to believe it, sometimes, to not feel like such a fuckup. Is it better to have matriculated and dropped out, than to have never matriculated at all? Rarely is the question asked...
Thank you very much for answering my question! I appreciate the candor in saying that DIY is just not for you, that's not something that a lot of people admit up front.
I also think that DIY can be broadened more than just home improvements that have gotten a lot of attention in The Discourse. One example is cooking--some people just don't like it, and get more enjoyment for saving time having something already prepared for them. That can include things like frozen meals, but of course all the talk about going out to restaurants, or even getting that food delivered. And while no parents can ever completely forgo plenty of DIY childcare, it's clear that some want to outsource a good chunk of that to hiring other people so they can maximize their own earning potential, and that creates plenty of debate as to what extent society should collectively support that.
My theory on cooking is that while everyone can handle boiling some pasta and pouring some jarred sauce over, a number of folks try the next level and hit a problem with it (burning something or overcooking etc), get frustrated and stop. But cooking is a skill like anything else. If you spend some time on it, you will get better at it AND if you get better at it you’ll probably like doing it more. Just like DIY projects there’s real satisfaction in eating a tasty meal you made yourself. Another criticism you hear is that for small households, cooking often ends up leaving you with a lot of leftovers you don’t want to keep eating for days and days. Here I would highly recommend getting a vacuum sealer- they aren’t that expensive and your leftovers will freeze for months, and soon you’ll have some very low cost options when you just don’t feel like cooking (which happens to even good cooks).
Totally agreed on all points. I just nailed one of my regular dishes in paella last night, but it's certainly not something I got 100% right the first try way back.
As to the NBA question, I just don’t really think analogies between football (soccer) and the NBA really hit the mark.
With the exception of Messi and Ronaldo, the vast majority of football fans are fans of teams, not players. This is increasingly not true in the NBA. Players just have a truly outsized impact on success in basketball, and in the modern age, people are very often fans of players and just follow them around to whichever team they move to.
For what it's worth, I just graduated from college a few weeks ago and all the points you made line up pretty clearly with my personal experience. Choosing a major with a reputation of being difficult was probably the best decision I made academically for exactly the reasons you brought up, although I would also add that it was a great way to find friends who shared my values. Being a varsity athlete was transformative for similar reasons, and while it's obviously a commitment in and of itself, I found that it introduced a lot of positive structure into my life that would otherwise be taken up by less productive activities. My brother's in college right now and while he's done very well for himself, I suspect that if he had selected into different groups, it would have a positive effect on his performance similar to what I experienced.
On the UK, I would push back on the idea that more London is the answer. We need the capital city - our largest and richest local economy - to do well for the country to succeed, but it's not the solution to all of our problems.
Yes, we definitely need Yimbyism and major reform of our San Francisco-style discretionary planning system, and to replace it with a new flexible zoning system. But our economic geography problems are bigger than just housing.
The other major issue is that the other big cities - Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle etc - all massively underperform their international peers despite having a very large share of the population, meaning lots of our missing agglomeration effects are outside London and the Greater South East. I think most Americans who have visited nice bits of the UK on holiday would honestly be shocked at just how poor some parts of these large European cities really are.
There seem to be a mix of reasons for this, including the low-density, terraced/post war urban environment of lots of these urban areas and a lack of either public or motorway transport infrastructure - they're cramped but not dense.
But one of the most important seems to be the exceptional level of centralisation and the almost complete lack of financial incentives in the local government tax system for places to pursue growth. Even if a poor city does well and creates jobs and builds new homes, it all gets 'equalised' away with reduced grants from central government, to fund more subsidies to poorer/Nimby places that did not achieve or rejected growth in the name of fairness.
What this implies is that digging up James II to rule absolutely over us from Whitehall Palace isn't really the answer. We need to do very hard reforms to the planning system and local finance - but ultimately we need to distribute power outside of London to ensure every place is hungry for growth and tries to defeat Nimbys to keep local taxes as low as possible/fund better public services in the community.
It’s a very marginal thing but the UK education system is extremely good, and the outlying universities have become extremely good (I have fantastic coauthors at Warwick and Imperial) but (and there are exceptions) if you don’t go to Oxbridge you might as well not exist to the policy class.
In particularly my Warwick friend gets called more frequently by the American and Canadian governments more than he does the UK government and it’s a little frustrating.
The answer to the actual question asked was hopeless - 'expand London, pave over the Home Counties, and tell the rest of the country you don't care about them' would see a guillotining in no time - but the question itself is a terrible framing so I don't know how well anyone could answer it as written. The actual political problems can't be waved away in the short term but are also probably exaggerated in the longer term. This government had lots of ideas, many of which could have led to more growth, but also a) didn't commit to them, b) is led by a deeply unpopular guy who never makes decisions and is terrible at politics, and c) hampered the effectiveness of those ideas by coming up with other ones that mechanically reduce growth prospects. Avoid problems a) and b) and reduce the number of c) and the problems might get less acute.
What's ironic about the point on hard work in youth sports is that on the more intense end, it's done with the hopes of paying it off with an athletic scholarship, which doesn't always succeed, and in any case is a very odd way of getting into college when we set aside the history, since it's a purely non-academic way to get in.
I'd also be curious as to what Matt thinks about the gap year concept. It certainly doesn't have to be an aimless experience, but it is potentially delaying a discrete path toward formally learning a profession.
Parents are often shocked to learn how few athletic scholarships there actually are. There's a separate tier that substantially helps with admissions but comes with no money, but it ends up with more athletes mismatched academically. Either under performers at an elite school or picking a school that's less selective than they could or should.
" A striking fact about the U.K. is that (in part just because Demis Hassabis likes London) it has an A.I. industry. They also manufacture airplane components, including jet engines, in the U.K."
British and French manufacturing output appears to be half of the United States' output, per capita. That doesn't seem too great, particularly for the French with the amount of propping up they've done of their old industrial champions.
Also the over Londonization already seems really bad. 38% of the UK GDP runs through greater London, while it is 8% for NYC Metro and the US. And I imagine this over Londonization is related to the first post about lack of manufacturing productivity.
British electricity prices are 4 times that of the US which is destroying manufacturing.
https://iea.org.uk/were-number-one-in-unaffordable-electricity/
WRT to health care, all our budget woes would be solved if US health care costs were in line with rest of the OECD. So perhaps some attention beyond tweets are in order.
Part of those lower costs come from paying medical professionals a lot less, requiring less training from professionals, and really squeezing down drug/equipment costs. The last things is only really possible because the U.S. consumer cross subsidizes drugs and equipment for other markets. If the U.S. really negotiated down payments then I suspect some costs would transfer to the rest of the oecd.
Prescription drug spending gets an outsided amount of attention but is only about 10% of total spending on healthcare. The share of total healthcare spending that goes to drugs in the US in the middle of the pack of the OECD, which reenforces that other healthcare spending is the main driver.
And of US spending on prescription drugs, about 90% of the spending is on about 10% of the drugs -- those that are still under patent. Cut patent abuse and excessively long patent terms, and you almost mechanistically reduce spending on prescription drugs without the additional market distortion that comes from trying to do it with measures like price controls.
Evergreening is such a bullshit practice.
Yes, healthcare law is so full of bad, distortionary policies that finding examples is like shooting fish in a barrel. Take the federal 340B drug program. It was created as a patch to fix and unintended consequences of the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, that accidentally penalized drug manufacturers that sold a low prices hospital and a few other provider types. It requires mfrs to sell drugs at a low, submarket wholesale price to hospitals (something mfrs previously did voluntarily until the poorly designed MDRP program disincentivized that), and allow hospitals to resell to patients at a regular commercial market price, and use the profits from the spread to fund their general operations. So it has grown into a general federally mandated but off-the-books of the federal budget subsidy to hospitals, funded by pharma mfrs. Just about the dumbest, most distortionary way to subsidize healthcare providers imaginable, yet it is vigorously defended by politicians of all stripes, who seem unable to imagine a better way to do this. Imagine if Congress designed a food assistance program by requiring food producers to sell at submarket prices to grocery stores, but allowed grocery stores to resell to the public at market prices and pocket the different - that's 340b in a nutshell.
Many examples like that in healthcare.
There needs to be a healthcare DOGE that works.
There is a general issue in healthcare that policies that work and save money aren't spread and copied.
I think the NBA situation is probably related to the best prospects being extremely tall. It’s not hard to scout that and my understanding is that tall people get asked about basketball all the time (nice to meet you, wow, do you play basketball?). So the bulk of the NBA is filled out with the normal for sports mix of hard work and talent and body type, which pulls from the country that plays it most the USA. But the elite is pulling from a much broader global distribution than youth sport distribution would suggest.
I don't think the point of the question was to suggest a 62 seat Senate was likely to happen, but I really really really think that voters of the Democratic party need to reevaluate both the likelihood of such an event and how you actually would get there.
I don't see anything that gives me confidence of anything other than 50/50 for a decade more.
I don’t think Democratic activists and donors are capable of tolerating someone like Manchin much less two Manchins.
I don't even hold the activists and donors responsible for this.
The actual electeds need to stand up for their colleagues.
Ya, but it was easier to paint Manchin as a villain than telling some people that their pet projects can’t fit in BBB.
High school history students will hate us for letting Build Back Better and Big Beautiful Bill happen so close to each other. Fortunately for them, the former will be a footnote much less likely to show up on tests, and the latter sounds so much like a joke that it'll be easy to remember.
Me, criticize Manchin? No, comrade, we need two Manchins! No, ten, no, *fifty* Manchins!
“Five Hundred Joe Manchins”
Joking aside, America's politics would look very different if 50 centrists who caucus with the Democrats were viable Senate candidates in red states.
My only cope is that the polls look really solid now (only real vulnerability this cycle looks like Michigan, North Carolina looks all but locked in as a pick up, and we lead in Maine, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and also Nebraska for some reason). I don't think we get all of those, but going from 47 seats to 52 (still unlikely but possible) could get us in the mid-high 50s in 2028. I'd still say odds are the most seats we have in 2028 is like 55 - the only remotely plausible pick ups in 2028 would be WI, NC, and IA - but I do think in my heart of hearts we could get our biggest Senate majority since 2012. Probably not likely, but plausibly
Ugh, picking Smells Like Teen Spirit for the 1990s is so cliche. One of the most overrated songs either.
I do appreciate the Johnny B. Goode and Respect choices to start though--and especially resisting the temptation on the latter to go into the Beatles well. 1970s is a really tough choice, lots of good stuff then.
Agreed on Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I'm a Nirvana fan. I'm willing to entertain the idea that its opening riff is one of the greatest hooks of all time, but the rest of the song is good, not great.
I've got nothing against Public Enemy, but picking Fight the Power as the best song of the 80s absolutely reeks of Poptimist apologizing for not appreciating rap enough earlier, or something. The 80s were the creative highpoint of Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, to name only a few of the pop stars (and that's not even getting into New Wave, Industrial, Metal, etc.) Fight the Power is very far from the best song of that decade.
I don't see how that Medicaid expansion message is going to do much. John Roberts says the states have to do it themselves, most of the fruit has been picked via either Democratic elected politicians or ballot initiatives, and the few remaining holdouts mostly have neither. There's not much that can be done other than defeating Republican trifectas, and that's easier said than done. At least there's still two big prizes out there in Texas and Florida if the goal is to, say, try to flip a governor's seat.
I suspect that there isn’t much to be gained electorally by expanding social insurance and income transfers to the less well off.
As an avid Arsenal fan, the club was pilloried in Wengers early years (a legendary prior manager) for fielding a largely foreign team. Eventually every other club did it and the point was dropped. I expect the same thing will happen to the NBA
University seem like a compulsory part of a certain class. Almost everyone I mix with has a degree despite graduates making up only half the population.
From my experience, there can be a split among this in multiple classes. Some blue collar parents are really adamant that their kids go to college for betterment purposes, and some white collar parents can trend toward seeing college as overrated if they think their kids are talented enough to get to being professionals.
I don’t know anything about Bores, but most proposed AI regulations are in fact very dumb and part of a moral panic, especially at the state level, and seem designed to nerf the economic value of AI and create huge compliance burdens while also blatantly violating the First Amendment and for state regulations various federal preemptions without addressing any of the purported existential risks (which no one knows how to address anyway) or even the mass job displacement risk (which is addressed by UBI not by forcing intrusive disclosures on AI content or restrictions on what AI chatbots can discuss or making people check consent screens before interacting with AI or getting AI content kicked off or shadowbanned from online platforms which is just a rent-seeking handout to existing IP holders).
Matt's young dad sounds like a young AG. School sucks, everyone (exept me obviously) is as dumb as they are stupid, it's so hard to find brains with a pulse. Whatever is the point of wasting my youth like this? Plus we have this cool new thing called Google*, clearly there's no need to go through the stuffy educational establishment to learn things anymore. A picture is worth a thousand words is something you can only write using words, therefore the pen is mighter than the sword, QED. Let's grow up to be a novelist and/or President!
Oh, you sweet summer child. They'll never let you. Should have listened to your grandparents, who wished up till their deathbeds that you'd be the first in the family to graduate college, set down real roots in America. Heed the cautionary Tale of Grandfather, passed up for countless promotions and raises, for want of a degree rather than lack of skills - then given severance a day before qualifying for pension. Or Father's Saga with the same plot beats, just different faces. Or Mother's Lament, where real career success only came after getting a ~fake long distance degree. This is the way the world works, AG: we live in an overeducated society, worshipping the Cult of Smart. (Thanks Freddie.)
At least I stayed long enough to learn about "compound interest", so despite being hourly, my marginal wage is not quite $0. I hope they're still proud of me anyway. Have to believe it, sometimes, to not feel like such a fuckup. Is it better to have matriculated and dropped out, than to have never matriculated at all? Rarely is the question asked...
*Germany called, it wants its AI Overviews back
Thank you very much for answering my question! I appreciate the candor in saying that DIY is just not for you, that's not something that a lot of people admit up front.
I also think that DIY can be broadened more than just home improvements that have gotten a lot of attention in The Discourse. One example is cooking--some people just don't like it, and get more enjoyment for saving time having something already prepared for them. That can include things like frozen meals, but of course all the talk about going out to restaurants, or even getting that food delivered. And while no parents can ever completely forgo plenty of DIY childcare, it's clear that some want to outsource a good chunk of that to hiring other people so they can maximize their own earning potential, and that creates plenty of debate as to what extent society should collectively support that.
My theory on cooking is that while everyone can handle boiling some pasta and pouring some jarred sauce over, a number of folks try the next level and hit a problem with it (burning something or overcooking etc), get frustrated and stop. But cooking is a skill like anything else. If you spend some time on it, you will get better at it AND if you get better at it you’ll probably like doing it more. Just like DIY projects there’s real satisfaction in eating a tasty meal you made yourself. Another criticism you hear is that for small households, cooking often ends up leaving you with a lot of leftovers you don’t want to keep eating for days and days. Here I would highly recommend getting a vacuum sealer- they aren’t that expensive and your leftovers will freeze for months, and soon you’ll have some very low cost options when you just don’t feel like cooking (which happens to even good cooks).
Totally agreed on all points. I just nailed one of my regular dishes in paella last night, but it's certainly not something I got 100% right the first try way back.
As to the NBA question, I just don’t really think analogies between football (soccer) and the NBA really hit the mark.
With the exception of Messi and Ronaldo, the vast majority of football fans are fans of teams, not players. This is increasingly not true in the NBA. Players just have a truly outsized impact on success in basketball, and in the modern age, people are very often fans of players and just follow them around to whichever team they move to.
In terms of making school harder, would it be good to make work harder as well? If not why not?