You were pretty dismissive of David R and Geoffrey G's questions about consumer protections. "That's just the price we have to pay for living in the most dynamic economy in the world" does a lot of hand waving. People's complaints about expending mental energy trying to navigate through all the enshittification are legitimate, and I don't know who it serves (other than shareholders) for market economies to trend in that direction.
1. Enshittification may sometimes happen but it is vastly overstated. Is your smartphone shitty? Your new car? Your television set? Capitalism produces tons of non-shitty stuff.
2. Plenty of enshittified products are just consumers being cheap and stupid. E.g., flyers who insist on buying basic economy rather than paying for a bit of comfort.
My smartphone isn't shitty! Do I like having to replace it every 3-4 years because it slows to a crawl and crashes constantly? Do I like that I can't buy a high end refrigerator, microwave, or dishwasher that's built to last more than 10 years? Do I like that any car I buy now has a touch screen for basic functions which will break well before a knob or dial would? No!
I'm being a bit over the top because I do agree with your second point. But I really liked both of those questions and felt they deserved a more thoughtful answer. There's a middle ground between a Wild West of capitalism and Soviet Russia, and providing some consumer protections so that people don't have to expend every ounce of mental energy trying to find the best possible deal on the best possible product at every moment is worthwhile, and not incompatible with having a dynamic market economy.
My dishwasher is more than 10 years old and my refrigerator is 30, and while I do replace my smartphone every few years that's to get the latest features-- older smartphones still work and you can clear caches and offload data and unused apps to speed them up.
I have never had a touchscreen break on a car and I love the convenience of Android Auto, especially the maps and speakerphone calls.
Look how ridiculous you sound. This is not Soviet Russia.
Interestingly the 'right of repair' concept is one of the foundational ideas Marie Gluesenkamp Perez talks about. I have mixed feelings on it. On the one hand there's a very real sense in which certain appliances, hardware, and other consumer goods seems more fragile/not built to last quite like it used to be. Everyone has a grandma or uncle with a beer fridge in the garage that's been running for 40 years, inside of which you could survive a nuclear strike.
On the other I'm pretty hesitant to jump to conclusions without serious objective study. Again my go to example is that the power tools you will find today at every Home Depot are way better on nearly every metric and theres lots of stuff that wasn't even readily available or affordable to regular consumers in the not too distant past. Anecdotally I also feel like my Samsung phones hold up longer and better than the ones from 10 years ago. I actually got a call from Verizon last March to see if I was willing to replace my still perfectly well functioning 3 year old phone for a brand new one, essentially for price of doing the transfer. I of course took them up on it and when I asked the sales guy why this was happening he said that they've got too much inventory on annual releases, because they don't need to be replaced as often as before.
I believe a lot of the momentum behind "right to repair" is from farm equipment. Farmers, of course, have very tight margins, and are used to repairing their own equipment. With new equipment, repairs often can only be done by the dealers because of proprietary software.
Survivorship bias explains like 80% of this. Another 10-15% is easily explained by the fact that it is often less expensive to design something to go together once, work well, and be replaced at end-of-life.
Maintainability is actually expensive to design and manufacture into a durable good. Am I annoyed that the little plastic widgets in my dishwasher break down over time as they're exposed to major thermal cycling and aggressive cleaners? Sure I am. Would I pay 10x as much for each of those little injection-molded pieces to be replaced in the bill of materials with machined billet aluminum parts that would last longer than I will? No, I would not!
We don't have an entire industry of television repairmen anymore, and that's a good thing.
As far as government issues go, "right to repair" isn't high on my list, but I do agree with MGP on this one. I prefer to be able to tinker with things (hence my unreasonably strong aversion to Apple products) and it's frustrating that I can't do this the same way I could 30 years ago. But... there's a lot of truth to your comment (and others') in that you simply don't need to do that in many cases anymore.
Yes. The last time we bought an appliance, the salesperson straight out said, "Your last oven was 40 years old. Don't expect any new appliance to last that long. The standard is now 8-10 years."
I'd start blaming energy efficiency regulations for appliance hijinks, aside from stupid things like putting giant screens on refrigerators, but you don't have to buy those.
There are high end brands of appliances that are well know to last beyond 10 years on average (e.g. SubZero for fridges, Miele for dishwashers). Obvioulsy YMMV, and there certainly are high end appliances that do have longevity issues. But with a bit of research it's pretty easy to discern the brands that last.
I'm not a huge fan of the touchscreens in cars replacing buttons and knobs (especially for climate functions), but I've had cars where the buttons and knobs start showing signs of wear a year in (I'm looking at you Jeep). So its a bit of a wash, but I think there is some happy medium of screens and knobs that was present maybe 5 years ago that I hope carmakers go back to.
Sure. Five years ago there’d be at least two additional brands of dishwasher on that list, though. The market is not working to sustain those options. In some product areas no such options still exist.
It doesn't work for those brands because you, and the vast majority of consumers, are unwilling to pay the price to get them. A Speed Queen washer and dryer will last a lifetime or more but ther cost $2,500 each. Customers see that price tag and opt for the $500 -$1000 washer and dryer, or write them off because "for that price I can get the one with the IPad in it". If you look at inflation adjusted prices $2500 is just what washers/dryers used to cost back in the day and they cost more to operate and didn't wash/dry as well.
I have the same windows computer i built over 10 years ago and have minimal problems, and I've replaced my phone twice, and not because i felt forced to do so.
The problem is that making good technical products is difficult, and it's even more difficult to credibly signal or evaluate that you're doing so. What's really missing is a better Wirecutter/consumer reports, and whole government could step into that, it would not be through regulations, but a technical version of death panels that would be difficult to defend from the populist mob.
I hate to say it but as Dilan points out, you are being irrational and the reason that some things like appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever” is that they were overbuilt. As a free market does, this over investment got reallocated to bringing you abundance in other domains. That said I think this is dramatically overstated—I remember stuff breaking *all the time* as a kid in the 90s. Also remember when cars would sometimes just not work and not last more that 100k miles? Exactly.
I think things are getting cheaper and better while services are getting more expensive. The logic of this plays out in us buying appliances and electronics for a shorter time and then upgrading to the new rather than service or repair it.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is actually probably the best scenario considering the constraints.
I regrettably did the iPhone update to OS 26 a few days ago and my phone is shittier now. I guess on the plus side, the graphics are so ugly I don’t want to use it.
Yea I also thought the use of enshittification was a bit off on this topic. Now I actually think it's a real thing- you can see it with the degradation of social media and certain types of automation (IVR customer support for example) but I don't think it applies for general purchase of goods and services. The fact that I can login to instantaneously buy tickets to an event or schedule an appointment or service of some kind is really convenient compared to how the world used to be. I may have a little nostalgia for being a teenager, camping out in a mall parking lot for HFStival tickets, but it's not the way commerce needs to work.
I also think your point about goods is a strong one. My go to example is to look at any half competent DIYer's tool bench and compare it to what was there as recently as the 80s and 90s. And on top of that if you aren't a DIYer it's way easier to find someone who was able to equip themselves and can do your home repair work for a fee.
My wife and I bought our first television as a married couple pre 2000. We've bought a new TV 3 times since and every single time paid less in ACTUAL dollars. And every time the TV was bigger and better.
I have a 60 inch Panasonic flat-screen thats been running perfectly since 2012. Every time we go to Costco and see the new stuff I'm tempted to replace it, especially given how cheap newer, nicer TVs are but I just can't justify it to myself while the one I have is still operating without issue, and after multiple moves.
Consumer Reports does reliability surveys, and new cars are massively more reliable than they were in the 1980's, when only a few makes like Honda were reliable and even their most reliable models had more problems on average than now.
And especially in American cars there were just a parade of little problems like there'd be a short or a switch wouldn't work or your solenoid would go out or whatever. Plus, warranties tended to be shorter.
My tv and phone apps aggressively have shitty adds embedded within them. I tried very hard to avoid adds when I bought my TV, but it's extremely difficult, with a the best advice being "try to fine models built for demos on sales floors rather than for retail sale". And that's BEFORE trying to deal with the ads embedded in apps. Pause the stream? Get an ad. It's awful and ubiquitous.
Did you notice back in the day when you were entertained by TV and radio, there were ads there too (and many commercial breaks lasted far longer than the 10 seconds for a youtube ad?).
Look into buying a Raspberry Pi (tiny, cheap computer) and setting up PiHole. Costs about $30. It’s a bit of a pain to follow the instructions, but once you have it set up you can block most ads on all devices connected to your network, including smart TVs.
The best defense I've found against this is to never connect my TV to my home network. I do all my streaming from a box that isn't enshittified and it seems to work ok for me.
I replaced my Roku with an ONN Google TV box from Walmart that cost like $50. It was easy to customize so it gives me no advertising at all and a separate google account means no tracking as best as I can tell.
I agree. Enshittification is taken at face value these days. I may have agreed ten years ago but it certainly seems to me weve been quickly climbing out of that trough of technical despair.
Companies have discovered there are a substantial amount of people who shop solely on price, not value, so why not give them what they want? And complaining about the product is just part and parcel of that mindset.
A lot of the complaints people have are real, but what you mentioned is an underrated part of what's going on. Turn back the clock 40 years and you simply paid a lot more for your fridge (or whatever else) or simply did not have one. You can buy a much cheaper one now, but it might be annoying and unreliable.
To the extent of allowing online sales platforms to blow off safety regulations and sell (literally illegally sell) electronic devices with greatly enhanced fire and shock risks? Really?
Please don't conflate Geoffrey's arguments and mine, for one.
For another... yes, my television set and new car are pretty shitty across many dimensions, as was extensively discussed in the original comment thread a week and a half ago.
Your television set is likely a very large flat screen high definition set that delivers far better picture and sound quality than anything a middle class person could have bought 30 years ago.
And your new car likely has a backup camera, better cruise control, forward collision detection, parking sensors, smartphone interconnection, maps, and any number of other things that were not available on cars 30 years ago. Plus, maybe you got a lemon (that happened then and happened now) but statistically cars are far more reliable now.
Your threads talk about the decline in "do it yourself" repair of cars, but I think automobile hobbyists don't understand that most people just want their car to work and don't find it fun to spend Sunday afternoon changing out the distributor cap.
It's reminiscent of something I am wistful of-- I like manual transmissions. I bemoan that they are harder and harder to find. But your average person is not like me-- they don't find driving fun, they just want something convenient that automates the process as much as possible. And the market has to serve the average consumer, not the enthusiast.
The issue with cars is not that they're wildly less reliable (obviously not), but that the lifecycle costs for keeping them running for the full 12-13 years that were the average for cars produced from 1995 to 2010 have gone up considerably as they've become (deliberately) less accessible to independent mechanics and home ones.
We're very likely to start seeing average in-service times for vehicles falling a bit in the near future, as people decline to pay to keep them running the last few years. They've already plateaued.
This is particularly bad because American carmakers and foreign ones operating here have already adopted a "downmarket is used" strategy for market segmentation, whereby there are no new offerings for working class folks, the market is basically segmented by where in the depreciation curve one buys a car.
The increasing lock-in from the use and increasing centralization of solid-state electronics is driving up prices for independent mechanics as well, as I said earlier.
This is why if there was an actual competitive leasing market, it would actually be more efficient for most people, but that's a different discussion...
My car has manual roll-up windows. The last time I brought it in for an inspection, I made the guy's day. He was so excited to see this. It is also very cheap to repair. 2009 basic Toyota Corolla. Oh, how I will miss you when you are gone.
Fun at the valet is rolling up in a 2009 Subaru Legacy with a manual transmission. Sometimes there’s like one guy who can drive a manual of all the vaults working there. If it’s heavily immigrant valets, not fazed at all.
TVs are arguably a yes since they’re now adware vectors. ETA: See also Samsung fridges (nb: I do not recommend buying Samsung appliances) which now have screens for some reason, and on which screens Samsung wants to show you ads.
While this is true, I do think people are right to feel the squeeze. The combination of tech growth rate expectations colliding with those mammoth companies inevitably slowing toward rates typical of mature industries is introducing a lot of pressure, and it’s being relieved, in part, at the consumer’s expense.
To me that sounds like no substance and all ideology. "Mammoth companies"? What's wrong with a big company? I'd much rather deal with a big corporation than a small business in many situations.
And the consumer's expense? They are paying less! That's the enshittification dynamic-- consumers want a bargain and don't care about quality, and the market responds! The consumers are "expending" less. If they are getting less that's the reason.
I gotta ask, in what world does economy buy comfort relative to basic? The seats are the same, you're probably in the back unless you have status, you still don't get check luggage on domestic flights... at most you've managed to buy an aisle or window seat.
Airfare is about the one area in which I generally *do* cheap out as far as possible so long as I'm not setting myself up for extra connections.
I took the whole family on an ultra-economy airline's flights to and from Spain over the holidays and it was in no way different from cattle class on a regular airline, aside from preventing my wife from moving her closet with us on vacation.
Enshittification usually specifically refers to companies that used to make low margins to attract consumers during ZIRP now trying to increase profits by squeezing consumers. Anyone who uses e.g. Facebook or Uber or Amazon regularly can see this is happening. It’s not necessarily a problem with capitalism per se, just high interest rates that pressure companies to have high short-term margins plus market power which allows companies to do so.
Beat me to it. I can understand why Matt would be worried about going overboard with certain regulations, and such more aggressive cases could be scrutinized. But on some of the smaller stuff, I think it's also fair to consider a tradeoff of people getting a tad bit of relief from the pricing maze in exchange for a tad bit of market inefficiency.
Most Enshitification comes from the fact people don’t pay for services or platforms or in the past the service was juiced by VC capital and low interest rates.
This is also a good point. Obviously higher interest rates suck for a lot of reasons but I also wonder if one of the down sides of essentially 'free' money for Great Recession through Covid was a bunch of speculative investment in not even half baked ideas followed by offensively awful experiments in monetization.
I agree with your point here. Maybe to frame it a bit differently, more and more of the economy seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics.
While not directly related to this point, I think it is similar in that there and more and more ways for more intelligent and industrious to find better deals and more opportunities to take advantage of others.
Curious what others think, but I feel this does help contribute to the view that elites are screwing over regular people. This is true in cases but I do think in the big picture the modern economy becomes more and more oriented to reward “merit” in the smartest and most capable, and overwhelm others with complexity.
There was a ton of this in the Good Old Days. Ever heard of a tobacco company?
If anything there's far more information now that can empower a consumer to resist the sort of thing you are talking about. Back in the day it was much harder to seek out information about addictive marketing let alone fraud.
“seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics. “
Other than the online gambling this has always been true.
Yes agreed, and it’s also telling that so many smart people are dismissive of this as being a problem. Fairness matters, and the perception that our economy is set up in this way contributes to people’s sense the whole “system” is rigged and fuels cynicism about politics as well.
Perhaps the most high-profile example in recent years of the government trying to simplify and standardize the purchase of a complex product is the ACA exchange market's attempt to slot health insurance policies into a few supposed-to-be-easy-to-understand defined packages -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. Decidedly mixed results, and inefficiency leaking out all around, with examples like insurance companies paying thousands for things like MRIs that are available on the open market a la carte for hundreds.
But in simpler cases, there no reason, for example, why it should be intentionally hard to cancel a recurring subscription fee.
I'll take a stab at it. I'm not sure how in depth the price regulation being proposed here is, but if we're going as far as removing all price discrimination, like no matinée prices for movies or no surge pricing for Uber, then the losers are people who are willing to see movies on Tuesday afternoons who would have to pay as much as the people on Friday nights, and the people getting rides to the airport at 10am who have to pay the same amount as people getting rides home from the bar on New Year's Eve. And then secondly, the people at the high volume times would have longer lines, probably the movies sell out quicker and people on Halloween, or Thanksgiving Eve, or New Year's Eve would be standing in the rain for longer. I certainly wouldn't be out there as a driver on those nights for normal prices, I have other things to do. And in those scenarios, people would still be frustrated. They'd be frustrated that the movie sold out so quick and they'd be frustrated that they effectively can't get a ride home for at least an hour. Hell, I shared the anecdote of trying to buy the stupid Starbucks bear cup at 4am only to find they had been bought out by the employees of the store. I would have been happy in that situation to pay much more than get out of bed in the middle of the night for nothing.
Those are examples where price discrimination is probably less controversial. At the other extreme would probably be stuff like the fact that you have to play stupid app games to get good deals at McDonald's or literally just say the word "coupon" at Jiffy Lube to get $15 off your oil change. And then there's the big one, credit cards. My wife has the mental energy to play the credit card game, I don't. I've done the math and found that credit card A is better than credit card B IF we remember to use the correct card every single time, and if you forget ONCE per month, it's a wash. I trust her to do that, I don't trust myself. I will forget. I also just have a baseline expectation that stuff inexplicably goes wrong some 10% of the time. My favorite coffee shop is listed as a grocery store on my credit card statement. Why? I have no fucking idea. And there's nobody I can argue with to say "this is a coffee shop not a grocery store, so you owe me an extra point per purchase on this card." Having said all that, the reason I'm not too concerned about the credit card thing is precisely because the possible consumer surplus is so small I don't really feel like I'm missing out on much.
That was a long rambling post. I guess my own position to the extent I've thought it through is that price discrimination to alleviate actual scarcity is defensible, sending consumers through an endless maze of apps to get small discounts to ensnare them in to signing up for rewards programs they're probably never going to use is not.
City, James, and I were talking about credit cards last week and I feel compelled to point out that all of Brazil, India, Kenya, and I believe Bangladesh now have state-owned payments clearing infrastructure that operates at cost, Europe is building one, and China's duopoly charges 0.15%. The US has allowed the legacy infrastructure to congeal into an unregulated duopoly that charges 1.9-3.9% even though it would be extraordinarily easy to build a public version with open-source or off-patent technology at the Fed that could operate for under a tenth of that cost.
It almost makes me want to say we should regard it as a market failure if a technology doesn't fall in price by 90% within ten years after it exits patent protection and allow states or the federal government to form public-benefit corporations to exploit it.
That's probably further than I'd go on credit cards, but ideally the only people who would use them would be top 10% consumers. Kind of like my industry. Ideally the government would default 10-15% of people’s paychecks in to some lifecycle funds and FAs would be for the top 10% of Americans who need more in depth planning. Frequent travelers using credit cards makes sense. For everybody else, not really.
Given the huge gap between infrastructure costs and processing fees, I really don't see what possible harm could come from the Fed building a public alternative offered at cost and accidentally gutting the market for anything except utility credit cards in the doing. I see no case for capping interest rates or whatever, but the underlying payments infrastructure is a completely mature technology that could be run as a public utility or at least a public option to keep Visa and Mastercard from colluding to prop up their revenues.
Unlike low-info progressive bitching about healthcare, it is actually true that nowhere else in the world allows payments processors to sit on their laurels and take this kind of a cut.
I'm open to credit card regulation, but mostly for paternalistic reasons not because I'm upset that I lack the mental bandwidth to optimize my purchases. This is why I have a simple cash back card.
One more anecdote, I recently downloaded on of those sports gambling apps, which I can only use when present in Oregon, and the first thing they do is give you a bunch of freebies and boosted bets. Obviously a freebie is a freebie so I used those, but the free payout boosts are so evil. They force you to do a parlay to use them and then you get like a 30% boost if you win. So it's still like a +EV bet if you use it, like I put down CMC, Puka Nakua, and Stefon Diggs to all get touchdowns for $5, and if I won, I would have gotten $60 rather than the $45 usually offered. Obviously this didn't happen, and I'm not in the poor house for losing $5. But it's so clearly designed to introduce the parlay system, hook people, and slowly drain them as they bet dumber and dumber parlays.
Ban sports gambling. The ills of it being run by bookies in seedy backrooms and people occasionally having a leg broken are wildly outmatched by the ills of perfectly legal and seamless scale.
I wouldn't go that far, but having to be physically present at a place seems preferable to the status quo. The fact that I have to go to Oregon is kind of perfect for me but it's obviously not replicable.
Oh, I'd be fine with going back to the status quo from 1950-2000. Go to AC or Vegas, blow a goodly but survivable chunk of money in a weekend, go home and live out the rest of your life with few opportunities to overindulge and bankrupt your family.
As you're getting at, I think what's tricky here is that people are talking about a lot of different things:
- pricing complexity based on more price gradations for different varieties of a good or service (Basic Economy plane tickets, Uber surge pricing, cheaper matinee showings)
- price discrimination in the technical economics sense, where the same variety of the same product is sold at different prices to different consumers based on consumer profile (this is your Jiffy Lube example, or the many times when you can get a cheaper subscription service by trying to cancel, and it's probably related to the credit card case where part of what's happening is that the credit card company is negotiating for a lower net price for its price-sensitive consumers)
- information asymmetry problems about product quality
- scammy practices like making it very hard to cancel a subscription
The last two to my mind are unambiguous cases for regulation (with the caveat that, as for anything, some regulations intended to address the issue may be bad). The first practice is good and doesn't need regulation beyond price transparency. The second category is the trickiest--there's an efficiency case for price discrimination in that it reduces deadweight loss from uncompetitive pricing, but the cost is that it redistributes consumer surplus to above-normal profits and causes deadweight loss as consumers try to work the system to get the lower price and businesses respond. But some regulation in that area seems appropriate.
I'll fully the defend the first type pretty vociferously. As Dilan Esper points out, most complaining about that is just consumers being unreasonable. No, you cannot get tickets on the 50 yard line right before the game for $20. From the second type on down though I hate it. In CERTAIN situations, like frequent flyers, that type of price discrimination might make sense. But if it's just testing the patience of everybody to navigate systems and get the right customer service person, nah, I don't like that.
I didn't see Geoffrey's comment originally and frankly think he's full of shit. Few of the issues I would highlight as significantly increasing the complexity burden on consumers are solved there, about the only exception is within parts of the healthcare sector depending on the country.
Buying what are supposed to be moderately durable small consumer goods in Europe is almost exactly as irritating as it is in the US, for almost exactly the same reason.
The regulatory intervention I would pose would be to require all B2C vendors to confirm that small appliances, cheap electronic devices, etc. being sold on their marketplaces have been tested to meet American consumer safety/quality standards by an American laboratory like UL. If the seller cannot provide ironclad evidence, then it cannot be sold until tested. Back it with draconian fines and Amazon would have no choice but to put a floor on the quality that would be hugely impactful to the median American's experience of buying small items there.
Based on my own experience, I'd guess that spending 20-25% more up front gives you a longevity improvement of 3X to... much more than that. What argument is there for allowing Amazon, and only Amazon, to sell a bunch of stuff that's almost literally illegal?
There's a lot of truth to this comment. I'll just say this -- I'd much rather that Matt's reply to Geoffrey was along these lines and we could've framed the debate on this, rather than taking it at face value and shrugging and saying "hey, that's just how America and Europe are different, you take the good with the bad." Would love to hear more specific examples from Geoffrey and others who've had a different experience than what you've said here in that regard.
Yea, a major gripe I have with the neolibs at present is that they seem to want to abrogate, or simply don't believe in, government's role as the maker of markets.
All of this exists downstream of government; we decide what markets are legal (should sports gambling be?), we decide how financial vehicles are regulated (stocks are heavily regulated, "prediction markets" aren't regulated at all), we decide on minimum standards for safety in a variety of goods (but apparently if you're selling something online that goes out the window), we decide what constitutes illegal cartelism, whether you can sign an exclusive contract with a reseller, the form and prevalence of price discrimination...
There's definitely a case for less regulation in some instances, but MY seems deeply unwilling to acknowledge when there's a case for more regulation of market transactions, as opposed to externalities.
Just to understand your point of view, do you have these concerns when the market in question is highly competitive? (I can understand them when there’s some market power.)
I like the restaurant example. Suppose Restaurant X tries some gimmicky pricing scheme. If it’s something people hate, they’ll just go somewhere else. OTOH, if it’s profitable, then why not let them do it? People clearly don’t hate it that much. Competition with other restaurants will prevent them from extracting too much surplus.
Agreed, I thought the response was insightful but also totally missed the point. Personally, I’d take the tradeoff of a bit less economic dynamism if it meant I didn’t feel like a trained mouse being forced to run a maze with every online purchase.
I worry about the opposite: AI being used to do even more subtle and less obviously good price discrimination. For example, what if stores use AI to read people's faces and determine how distressed or desperate they are, and then charge them higher prices if they are in fact distressed or desperate? That seems really bad with no consumer upside, and it's also completely opaque to the customer.
Thanks. I'm not sure I'm getting the point though. Is the problem the profit from price discrimination or the complexity tax? I thought it was supposed to be the latter, but the argument here grants that the latter issue is solvable. Or are you saying that the AI would have to be overly complicated to use for some reason?
Anyway, I don't super trust a priori arguments like this to predict what will be possible in the future. Maybe AI companies will just provide general purpose AIs and you will be able to order them to handle these things for you, among the many other tasks you use them for.
On the simplicity tax thing, I think many people who complain about the airlines etc. don't realize that if everyone was charged the same price it would actually be higher. They fancy a world where there's no ticket scalpers and everyone pays $60 to see Taylor Swift, but in fact if there was no scalping she'd charge everyone $1,000 or whatever.
With event tickets in particular, I sense there's a mindset that "true" fans, however that's defined, should be able to attend regardless of income disparity. I've seen that particularly in the discourse over 2026 World Cup tickets. The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
And there's no way any more than a small percentage of "true" fans can ever attend. Do people really think every European soccer fan gets to go to a WC in Europe just because prices are supposedly cheaper and supposedly harder to scalp? Or do those with connections get most of the tickets and most fans watch on TV?
Effortpost elsewhere in thread, but I think I'm coming down on "price discrimination in the face of scarcity is fine, 'download our app and sign up for our rewards program we hope you'll forget about' is not."
>> The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
This seems comparatively easy to fix for event tickets, no? Just make them non transferable, bound to the buyer’s name and force people to show ID at the door. Scalper-based arbitrage being easy is a choice. It may be a good choice (eg, plans change, you can’t go, you can sell at market price to someone who wants to), but *is* a choice.
The public actually wouldn't like those changes very much. It would mean longer waits (especially at large events), higher average ticket prices, and pains in the neck when you wanted to informally transfer a ticket to a friend or travel separately to an event.
All for what? Because some people who weren't gonna get into the World Cup anyway object to the scalpers' prices?
Yeah I enjoy discounts, it’s fun to feel like you got a good deal. I just don’t like haggling but thankfully that is pretty much gone. And sometimes discounts even reduce cognitive load—like if I’m buying groceries and don’t know what I want to eat but have a lot of choices, sometimes I just buy the one on sale.
Why don't artists/sports teams use Dutch auctions for tickets? Seems like an efficient way to find market clearing prices for limited goods. Is it an optics thing?
Right - and a lot of people think that would be better, because we spend vast amounts of mental energy on getting the inside lane. It is important to acknowledge there are tradeoffs, like you say. But I'd rather live in a world where I can throw something in my grocery cart without worrying I'm getting ripped off than one where I can go to in-demand pop star concerts more often.
A lot of times dynamicity in pricing isn't making things cheaper as much as shifting price pressure from the attentive and prepared to the inattentive or harried. I think that Matt is very much the former kind of person and should appreciate that a lot of people are the latter, and are kind of sick of this bullshit.
I mean, I would love dynamic pricing if I had an assistant.
why would she charge more in the absence of scalping? it doesn't matter to her whether somebody buys a $60 ticket for themselves or to resell for $1000 (unless she's secretly getting a cut...)
if she charged $1000/ticket scalpers would disappear, but that doesn't mean if scalping disappeared she would have a reason to charge $1000/ticket. is your argument that TS selling $1000 tickets is the only way to get rid of scalping? or am i missing something?
Taylor Swift's tour, which was quite elaborate (as a Chargers SSL holder, I got in on one of the pre-sales and saw it), costs quite a bit of money to put on. So assuming she wants to put on that show, her ticket revenues need to be enough to cover that.
Right now, what her management does is after holding back a certain number of tickets for comps, pre-sales, fan clubs, etc., they sell the rest on the open market, scaled to approximate the demand for tickets. The high prices also cause some sticker shock, which has the effect of controlling demand somewhat.
Now what happens if scalping is banned? Well, she's not going to charge $60 a ticket, because she has to make a payroll and pay for all those elaborate stage tricks and make some money herself. What she's going to do is... wait for it... charge exactly what her people think the scalpers would have charged (i.e., the actual market clearing price for tickets), so that she maximizes her revenue and can pay for the show she wants to put on and make the profit she wants to make.
And because of that, the average fan gains nothing from the ban on scalping except being unable to sell their own ticket if they can't go.
In a scenario where scalping is banned, why would her management team charge what they believe scalpers would be charging? If that was how they were going to approach ticket pricing, wouldn't they be pricing them according to "theoretical scalper price" now, seeing as the artist does not receive proceeds from resold tickets?
I’m fascinated by Mamdani courting abundists too, given his co-ideologues like Warren are explicitly trying to wage factional war on abundance. Mamdani is a very talented politician, I see all kinds of factional players on opposite sides cheering him on (anti-monopolists, abundists, leftists, moderates), while he continues reaching out to low propensity voters digitally (he’s all over TikTok), doing nyc local retail politics & even developing a relationship with Trump (they text weekly!) without angering his base.
It feels surreal to see a talented Democratic politician navigate the political landscape with such ease, given how left wing he is. Dems should run known moderates in house and senate seats for the midterms but Mamdani reminds me of Mitch McConnell saying “candidate quality matters”. I’m convinced me that we need an outsider “moderate” in 2028, someone with real juice. The reason Obama was such a good politician was because he was able to send mixed signals to both leftists and centrists that he was on their side. We need the moderate Dem 2028 candidate to be inspiring so leftists want to come along for the ride, not by being scoldy about “electability” and telling the base they can’t have nice things. I don’t think any of the leading Dem contenders right now are that high quality.
There's a local angle to this that I think a lot of the takes are missing, which is that the "stationary bandits" in NYC who benefit from bad governance are mostly small-c conservative and don't like left-wing reformists or abundance-oriented reformists or street-safety reformists or what have you. So there is a natural reform coalition that can get behind someone like Mamdani (or Brad Lander, who exemplifies this kind of politics) even if the reform factions are ideologically different in ways that loom very large in discourse.
I agree, any talented moderate politician is going to at least win over some of the left flank by the end of the primary just by virtue of being super charismatic.
Within the intra party factional fights, him and Warren are on the same side? What are the ideological differences between the two? The point I was trying to make is that he seems much more flexible given his skill in assembling a coalition based on courting different groups with different ideologies by deploying different types of appeals (free social services, renters, abundists, south Asian ethnicity).
I think the main difference is that Mamdani is the lefty mayor of NYC (constituency has lots of young people, lots of renters) whereas Warren is a lefty senator from Massachusetts (constituency has lots of old people, lots of homeowners).
I suspect they have too much love for their animals. They are thinking about what makes the animal happy, and they know & trust the creature. They are failing to consider how other people might feel about their actions.
The last few years, especially having small children that are scared of dogs, has made me extremely anti dogs.
The playground we frequent most often has a sign saying all dogs must be leashed within 10 metres of the playground but I see unleashed dogs inside the playground nearly every time we go. And 10 metres is really far! Most people seem to think it means 1 metre....
The park area outside of the playground allows dogs unleashed but they have to be under "effective control". In practice, almost no dog owners train their dog to that standard.
I've seen a family step away from their picnic to kick a ball and a dog ran up from 50 metres away and started eating their food. My kids were playing tag and two large dogs ran at them at top speed from 30 metres away. I've had dogs steal my kid's soccer ball and run away with it.
If people let horses behave that way -- running up to strangers at top speed while the owner shouts from 100 metres away "he's really quite friendly!" people would be losing their shit. But because adults are bigger than dogs and they have zero ability to empathise with small people they DGAF.
I’m honestly astonished that Matt doesn’t see off-leash dogs in DC! In my less-cool neighborhood (near the historic strip mall 😩 but also near many parks and trails) they’re everywhere.
Oh, that Targhetto is very important to the local shoplifter community. (I remember seeing so many turnstile jumpers carrying like 4 to 5 Tide bottles.) It looks like the wine store that was never open is closed too.
Boise's first strip mall is something of an icon, too. Not historically protected as far as I know, and the owners are the family descendants of the developer (who was also a former mayor) that have no intention to change the land use, but it's close enough to downtown that if some day the highest and best use changed, nostalgic people would probably throw a shitshow over it.
I don’t think Matt goes to Rock Creek that much. He isn’t really big on exercising for fun.
I found the closer you got to silver springs the more off trail dogs I would find. There is a definitely a white income gradient to this. I just wish park police or rangers would ticket offenders.
100%. But around here the dog people take over literally any open space (school yards, the trail to the Glover Park Trader Joe’s, etc) and let their dogs run wild. Even a lot of dogs on leashes are very poorly controlled.
That's interesting. I grew up in the DC suburbs and they are full of unleashed dogs and as someone who was afraid of dogs as a kid I hated it. I live in NYC now and I see them in parks but not really elsewhere--when I saw Matt say that, my reaction was that it was probably a suburban/urban difference. (Even the unleashed ones in parks are usually pretty well-behaved compared to the ones I remember in the suburbs. Assuming this is a real difference and not a product of me being older and less scared, maybe the threshold for training is just higher in a much more densely populated area--you can't have your unleashed dog barking and running at every stranger in a city park.)
It’s just a lack of rules enforcement. Just like people playing TikTok on full volume on the metro. Fuck, and the people are old enough to know it’s rude! (So many middle aged people do this.)
The larger issue is that they're fucking morons who don't understand that they shouldn't trust the creature with anyone except themselves.
It should be legally permissible to shoot unleashed dogs on sight, not because I want them shot but because it's clearly the only way to get their owners to keep them on a leash.
I was walking on a trail this weekend. I was going 2.9 mph and this other guy was going 2.7 mph. But his unleashed dog was running around ±100 feet behind and in front of him. This meant that while I was executing my passing maneuver, I was in the dog chaos zone for a full 10 minutes.
If the dog approaches you can tell it to stop. You can also ask the owner to leash their animal. You can also physically keep a dog off you if it is not controlled.
Wow, this is the only space where I have seen multiple people on the unleashed dog side. They are everywhere where I live, but if anyone complains, the usual answer is "They are better behaved than kids." One of our suburban malls now has a dog-friendly policy, although I haven't seen nearly as many breakers of the leash rules there. (I also don't go there nearly as often as the sidewalks and parks in my neighborhood. Or even stores.) Maybe because mall security is ever present, and you can more easily kick people out of a private mall.
The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.
And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers. Like read about how dumb some consumer class actions are—the case that led to the Supreme Court upholding arbitration clauses (Concepcion) was about a couple trying to get a class action against a company that gave them free phones because they still had to pay sales tax. And now there’s a whole trend of “mass arbitration” where plaintiffs file arbitration complaints against companies just to bury companies in arbitration fees (most clauses require companies to pay the vast majority of the fees whether they win or lose) so they settle. This is not technically “regulation” but is actually worse and doesn’t happen in other countries.
There may be a regulatory problem but if so it’s probably more on the labor or perhaps capital markets side.
Also what is up with middle-class people and dogs? I live near a literal homeless encampment and still almost all the litter I get on my property is from middle-class people’s dog poop…
The issue is you can't actually *develop* a successful company in Europe, even if you can export the finished product or service there once it has been developed.
My last job was at a multinational American tech company, and US employees were all at-will, but German employees were basically impossible to fire after 6 months or so. It was made very clear to us that the hiring bar was higher in Germany, and we were to fire under-performers very aggressively within those 6 months.
These employment protections are obviously nice for workers in some ways, but they make it very hard to course-correct when trying to find product/market with limited runway.
There are all kinds of problems with European economic policy. I don't know European law well at all but for the particular issue of business size and development I would also look into how they regulate capital markets and corporate governance. But I am pretty skeptical about the problem being related to consumer price regulation.
IME, financial regulation in the EU is burdensome b/c the member countries get their say as well. So there are essentially two layers of regulation - one at the EU level and another at the country level. Whereas in the US, the feds preempt much of the state regulation. Its easier to navigate one set of rules.
The EU also loves reporting. The more the better, and no matter if its duplicative - reporting is good. I have no idea what they do with all the data, but it adds another layer of costs to doing business there.
Yes, like I said, labor regulations are an issue because a US company with a US head office wouldn’t have to follow them, but that’s different from consumer regulations which impact local and foreign companies equally.
Consumer regulations restrict flexibility just like labor regulations do. There was a while where GDPR and data residency requirements made it really painful to make certain kinds of consumer-facing tech products in Europe, because GDPR ruled out various business models. American companies did eventually figure out how to operate in a compliant way, because they could spend effectively infinite money on compliance. But if you were a French guy with a startup idea, you didn't have infinite money to spend.
I agree Matt's dodge on Europe was a bit weak. I think Americans dramatically underestimate how much not being a true single market hurts European companies. Even just something as simple as "we can't run the same ads because everything needs to be translated" sucks for a business trying to build scale.
Yep, there’s a reason the distant second in tech to the US is China and not the EU, even though China is poorer overall—China has a massive single market. Most successful tech businesses make a little bit of money off of a massive consumer base—that requires scale.
The best thing the EU can do is further integration and increase market size, e.g. remove some of these localization requirements, prevent small countries from using the EU to increase the reach of their idiosyncratic and sometimes corrupt regulations, and offer membership to Canada!
>>And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Is this true though? If to even start a company you need to hire a small army of lawyers to ensure you're compliant with 300 obscure regulations you never heard of then it's obvious why Europeans are less entrepreneurial and dynamic.
Regulations will always end up hurting small businesses more, which ends up in fewer start ups and more calcified large companies.
Yes it’s true. Small businesses can usually get away with doing what they want and they’ll get a warning first, unlike in the US where they get sued first. A lot of European regulations specifically exempt small businesses (what they call SMEs).
What regulatory issues are small businesses in the US getting sued for on the reg? Are they getting sued by regulators or plaintiffs' attorneys? From what I've seen, it's the large companies that get sued, as that's where the money is for the plaintiffs' attorneys (and the regulators).
I'm biased because I used to work with employment lawyers (and have done a small amount of employer-side defense work myself) but small businesses often face wage and hour and employment discrimination claims. The wage and hour laws are genuinely hard to navigate and employment discrimination liability is a bigger issue when you have a smaller and less sophisticated HR department.
“The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.”
This doesn’t follow at all. Just because Uber might be successful in Europe now, does that mean it could have ever started itself in Europe and moved the other way? Color me skeptical.
Regarding the wage compression question, there's the obvious tie in with inflationary conditions that pissed people off in many ways. Specifically with labor, there is the aspect of full employment, which is pretty standard to see as a good thing. However, one reaction I noticed that surprised me, and really so among certain people I know who I would take for otherwise being pretty labor friendly, were unhappy that the new leverage that workers got was causing them in their minds to deliver poorer service. Not sure how to deal with that.
Speed limits. I'd be fine with them being 100% enforced. But the limits would get changed, which would be good too. There are roads with 25 mph limits that I drive where no one is going below 30 and 90% of the traffic is 30 to 40 mph. The speeds are fine. The decision to penalize people though shouldn't be so discretionary.
It depends on each road. On controlled access freeways and rural highways, where usage is exclusively motorist or very close to it, I agree that higher limits would be warranted if consistent enforcement were implemented. But in more urban areas where there's heavy interaction with non-motorist traffic, the increasing argument is that slow posted speeds enforced strictly are needed to prevent death and serious injury. Obviously there can be cases in between that are more difficult to assess, as we saw in arguing this on Monday. And the argument for speed cameras in particular is that they can remove the element of discretion that you criticize here.
And also like with most crime the optimal enforcement rate may not be 100 percent. It just needs to be high enough that when it is dangerous to drive fast, drivers need to fear a ticket enough they slow down.
One thing that's puzzled me is that there's (in my perception at least) strong overlap between the "pro speed camera" crowd and the "Kleiman pilled" crowd, but nobody ever seems to combine the two viewpoints. We should have lots and lots of speed cameras, but make the fines low, at least for infrequent offenders - like start at $10, but escalate if you speed often. I think that would be an effective deterrent while also avoiding a lot of political backlash.
The real solution is to redesign the roads so that it feels unsafe to the driver to go much faster than 25 mph. Narrower lanes, curb bump-outs, reduce/eliminate multi-lane one-way roads, etc.
This is so much better than random speed bumps that are nowhere near a crossing, this actually pinpoints the places where slowing down is most appropriate.
I'm a big fan of road redesign and it should be part of the decision, but it's also something that costs and lot and may be impractical in some very built up areas.
There ought to be a trade-off of resources going to enforcement with the optimality of the rule being enforced (the marginal harm from violation. Speed cameras (very low cost) ought to be entirely calibrated to the optimal speed at that point/time of day.
Same principle as interior enforcement of no-visa residency.
This. Justice by expected value is a bad idea. If you only catch 5% of perpetrators, and then you charge them a fine that's 20x larger to make up for all the people you didn't catch, it creates a bunch of bad incentives.
If obsured/able plates were a vioation and citiznes were incintivized by a share of the fine -- as theyshoud be for reporting the location of vehicles with outstanding fines -- fot reporting it, the penalaty would not need to be so severe.
I think the future is "enforcement" where your car knows where it is and refuses to go above the posted speed limit unless you hit some manual "something has screwed up and I am making a human decision to override" (and have at least some camera-based enforcement to prevent abuse of that).
"But I think we’re seeing here that a lot of folks have the sense that “a criminal” is a certain kind of person, and that kind of person is simply not middle class with steady employment."
This does a ton of work in true crime discourse. People who think that, e.g., Scott Peterson is innocent aren't fairly evaluating evidence against him because he doesn't fit their stereotype of who might commit murder. People who think the Menendez brothers must have had a valid excuse think the same way-- they just don't "seem" like the types of people who might murder their parents to get the inheritance and go on a spending spree, even though that is what happened. People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent can't believe this nice well off white lady could have committed murder even though she left a bunch of her DNA mixed with the victim's at the crime scene.
The other day in comments to your MLK post, Racists of course made an appearance with their statistical arguments about who commits crimes and its the same thing. They want cops to do bigoted law enforcement because they assume (based on their supposed command of "statistics" of course) that people like themselves don't commit crimes.
In the real world, though, whatever the statistics may say, it happens with reasonable frequency that someone you don't think might commit a crime does so. My father, as a sportswriter and sportscaster, knew OJ Simpson pretty well. He- and most of his colleagues- thought OJ was one of the nicest athletes they ever met. But he turned out to be a spousal abuser and double murderer. The psychological heuristic that we can tell the sort of people who could be "criminals" is just wrong. Anyone can be one.
It's OK to do statistical enforcment, but not all statistics are creted equal. Stop and frisk does not have to be -- should not be done on a racial basis. It's no great harm for even an old white guy like myself to be respectifuly stopped if I were walking late at night in a gun-carrying prome area.
The thing is, the people who really like stop and frisk tend to be really into statistical enforcement including based on race and ethnicity.
And the point of my comment is that if you really take that to its conclusion you absolutely do run the risk of assuming that you can tell who is or isn't a criminal based on what groups they belong to. That is an accurate and natural description of how many people's brains work (which is what true crime cases can show you). Whereas if you require cops to stick to the evidence you actually are likely to get better law enforcement.
Agree. The statistics shoud not be on the basis of presumed group membership and I doubt that statistics fine grained enough for actual enforcement would show that.
Read their opinion! They found her not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by throwing out a bunch of DNA evidence, but also found she was at the scene of the murder and lying about it, and that there were multiple attackers (her supporters claim there was one).
So no, that court definitely is not convinced she is innocent and never says she is-- just that she wasn't proven guilty once key evidence was excluded.
Interesting - Wikipedia characterises their decision completely differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox#Final_decision You're definitely talking about her fourth trial in 2015 and not her second trial in 2011?
I didn't actually want to have a fight about the object-level question, I'd just thought that "Amanda Knox is guilty" was now the fringe position, and was surprised to see you talking as if the fringe position were still "Amanda Knox is innocent". But now you've got me interested in the object-level question!
Wikipedia is very susceptible to people with large fanbases and PR teams.
Here's the actual translated decision of the Cassation Court. At section 9.4.1 it calls Amanda's presence at the murder scene a "proven fact" at trial.
I don't think you're characterising that correctly. Here's the first part of section 9.4:
> 9.4 Now, a fact of assured relevance in favor of the current appellants, in the sense of excluding their material participation to the homicide, even in the hypothesis of their presence in the house of via della Pergola, lies in the absolute absence of biological traces referable to them (apart from the hook of which we will discuss later) in the room of the homicide or on the victim’s body, where in contrast multiple traces attributable to Guede were found. It is incontrovertibly impossible that that in the crime scene (constituted by a room of little dimensions: ml 2,91x3,36, as indicated by the blueprint reproduced at f. 76) no traces would be retrieved referable to the current appellants had they participated in the murder of Kercher.
> No trace assignable to them has been, in particular, observed on the sweatshirt worn by the victim at the moment of the aggression and nor on the underlying shirt, as it should have been in case of participation in the homicide (instead, on the sleeve of the aforementioned sweater traces of Guede were retrieved: ff. 179-180).
> The aforementioned negative circumstance works as a counterbalance to the data, already highlighted, on the absolute impracticality of the hypothesis of a posthumous selective cleaning capable of removing specific biological traces while leaving others.
> 9.4.1 Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions...
So they were present in the *house*, but cannot have been in the *room*, and therefore "It is incontrovertibly impossible that [...] they participated in the murder of Kercher."
The issue is Knox claims SHE WASN'T IN THE HOUSE. She says she was with her boyfriend at the time of the murders. When in fact she left plenty of forensic evidence in the house (which the Court throws out) and also her alibi is rebutted by computer records and eyewitnesses.
If she was in the house at the time of the murders, that makes her likely guilty of at least cleaning up after the crime, if not helping commit it, which is why her supporters and her go to great lengths to deny that.
So yeah, the Cassation Court is saying she's lying about not being in the house in 9.4.1. They also reject her lawyers' claim of only a single attacker. This isn't a court saying "she's innocent". This is a court applying Italy's exclusionary rule while being careful to say that Amanda was probably involved.
Another example in sportswriting that crossed my mind while reading your comment is Jonah Keri. He was a very highly regarded baseball writer...until it was discovered that he was a vicious abuser of his wife. At least he was pretty much made a forgotten pariah after that.
Restaurant below got World Restaurant of the Year in 2024. Next available table is 12 January, 2027. That's better than last time I looked when there were no tables available at all.
Honestly can't figure out who that's helping. Their menu isn't even expensive by the standards of such a prestigious restaurant. For some reason they're actively choosing to under-price.
(PS I was not actually planning on going, I was just curious how hard it would be to get a table at the World Restaurant of the Year given how hard it is to get tables at some more normal restaurants where I do live. In fairness, it is a lot harder than anywhere I've ever been)
Maybe they just like having a full house? Or maybe they prefer a clientele that isn't exclusively corporate executives?
*In general* (not specifically about this restaurant), Europeans are just less fussed on average about 'maximizing earnings potential' and often weigh other factors. Whether this is better or worse is beside the point, it's just a cultural difference.
I see the same playbook at In-N-Out and Chick-Fil-A. If there's always a line around the block, then you get prestige and brand value as the hot place that everyone wants to go. Even if there are more people total going to McDonald's, it doesn't look crowded, so people think that McDonald's isn't as popular and therefore isn't as good. It's like a Veblen good where the price is the amount of time you have to wait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
I think so. Ambience is usually a category and having your place rammed with people super excited to finally get that elusive table and happy the value for money is unusually good must help achieve a good vibe.
If I had to guess how undercharging for food makes them money in the end, these places can sell $10,000 bottles of wine. Maybe if it's really hard to get a table you're more likely to go for that special bottle of wine. Might also help sell private dining options.
My take on DC speed cameras is that two things can be true at the same time. They're a great public safety tool, and they also can be used rather aggressively as a revenue grab.
This is anecdotal, but I've had one speeding ticket in the last 20 years and it was from a DC speed camera on a 4 lane stretch of highway that for some reason had a speed limit of 50. Without any signage, I would have expected a 65 limit on this stretch. Given that I've probably driven 200k-300k miles outside of DC over the last 20 years, and < 500 miles inside DC, I'd contend there's probably something going on with DC speed traps being on the aggressive side.
I had no idea the speed limit was this low until I got the ticket in the mail. I was clocked at 61 on a sunny Sunday morning when traffic was light. I should have been more attentive to speed limit signs, but I also can't help but wonder how many others have been caught by this and whether such enforcement actually increases public safety or is just more of a $100 outsider tax. I will give credit where credit is due, the ticket was very easy to get taken care of online and it apparently doesn't affect driving points at least.
I definitely think that fines from law enforcement should not provide dependence for any government program. There certainly is potential for abuse similar to how some police departments have directly benefitted from civil asset forfeiture. And there can be a perverse incentive to encourage *more* of the activity at hand (same reason why I hate Pigouvian taxes). The best thing to do strikes me to just distribute the money back to the taxpayers, functioning somewhat like a safe driving check that insurers hand out.
But last Monday, I did repeatedly ask if there's been any credible reporting that the DC cameras in particular have discovered to have revenue generation as their top goal, and I've yet to get a satisfactory answer.
Do you know if the DC ones are controlled/operated by the district itself, or if there's a third-party contractor that runs them and makes part of their profit based on ticket revenue?
The heaviest abuse I've read about doesn't seem to be from municipalities themselves, but rather from the government outsourcing operations to companies (that then bribe officials to win contracts). I think the most blatant cases used this arrangement. IIRC, some states have gone as far as to ban this setup after widespread abuse was uncovered.
I don’t think we get Zohran Mamdani if Kamala Harris was elected. This is not to take away from Zohran’s political skills, but even Barack Obama was only possible because of the contingent circumstances of 2008.
This is an interesting counterfactual. I think the biggest difference is that Adams would still be under indictment and would have been less likely to run for re-election. But I'm not sure how that would have affected the Democratic primary (which he dropped out of anyway). All of Cuomo's weaknesses would still be there.
I found the regulatory answers in this one to be pretty weak. I am sure other people are going to talk about the price simplicity thing (I already see some) so I'm going to talk about efficiency standards.
Saying that we should regulate energy and water use with pricing makes some sense, but:
- pricing energy or water at marginal social cost is politically difficult
- because of how important they are for human needs, there are constraints on shutoffs, so pricing can only do so much
- there is a decent argument in some contexts (e.g., temperature control) that we don't actually want to price at marginal social cost because people skimping too much on energy use has bad health consequences
But if you underprice, people use too much water or energy, so you do need enforced efficiency standards.
One solution to the pricing problem is progressive rate structures. If the problem is that a few bad apples are over-using and not careful, then it's a good solution. If the problem is that we need everyone to cut their usage just a little bit, then that's really hard. I don't really know which domain we are in with water or energy.
The dog leash answer is wide off the mark. The answer they behave that way is enforcement. If people were fined for off leash dogs then they wouldn't let them off leash as much. The problem is that this is a fairly inefficient use of police/park ranger time so it is obviously not allocated to fining off leash dog owners.
Shaming is also inefficient as it relies on wider social stigma. If everyone had a problem with this then it might succeed, but if you loudly complain about this you're apt to being called a Karen as most people like dogs and will tell you to chill.
So the answer is to make a big stink about any damage you suffer, make people pay for it, and widely circulate knowledge of that so people know that could happen to them and adjust accordingly. Is if a dog eats your picnic food demand they pay for the food and some, if you get bit sue them, etc and then post about it in Twitter/reddit/whatever. Obviously this is not ideal as you want to avoid suffering damages in the first place, but it's the only way out of the equilibrium I see.
It seems like there is a close correlation between people with youngish kids and people who want to make sure dogs are under tight control (chh wrote a recent article, jennifer lawrence suggested a reverse john wick movie with a mad mother going on a dog killing rampage...).
Thanks for my answering my question. I would say in addition to why they didn’t court pro-housing voters, the nyc business and Dem establishment should also answer for why they let Eric Adams run the city as a corruption racket. He’s a total scam artist as we are seeing with the crypto token thing. Elevating such politicians breeds the kind of cynicism that gives rise to Trump (the mentality of everyone is corrupt!). I’ve been annoyed at some centrists giving Adams a pass on his corruption because of his policy achievements but the Trump era should make it clear how much integrity matters at the top. Eric Adams is the embodiment of personal profit, mismanagement, and lies.
Has Matt written about enshittification? His answer about business practices leads me to think he is pro-enshittification. Whereever he stands, he should do a post about it if he hasn't already.
"City of Trees: What's your take on enshittification, as hypothesized by Cory Doctorow? Is there something to this concept, or is it underbaked or missing some important aspects of what's going on?
I feel like the Enshittification Thesis comes in a soft and a hard form and gains a lot of traction from ambiguating between the two.
The way investors advise software founders is that in the initial case, they should focus overwhelmingly on making a product that is good and that solves problems in users lives and that users love. The idea is that in software, your marginal costs tend to be low, so whatever your business model problems are, they’re easier to solve with 100 million users than with one million users. That’s different from the restaurant business. If you have a chain with five outlets and it loses money, going to 5,000 outlets doesn’t solve your problems. But with software, it’s easier to figure out a way to be profitable if you get really big first, so you initially focus on growth. Eventually, though, you do need to make money, so a pivot has to occur where you start focusing more on revenue considerations and less on “do customers love this?” That does mean making the experience worse for many people, and they are entitled to be upset about that and even call it “enshittification” if they want.
But Doctorow and the people who cite him seem to want to draw sweeping ideological or public policy conclusions from this, when the point seems kind of banal to me. "
I think this answer neglects (a) network effects and (b) the particular perverse incentive where an ad-driven business, because it can't monetize quality of usage, focuses on quantity of usage.
I think there are public policy conclusions from this though:
1) Low interest rates are good because they make companies focus on the long-term. With less short-term pressure it’s more viable to make low margins to keep more consumer loyalty.
2) Competition is good. Enshittification doesn’t seem to have happened in China—we have to have massive tariffs to keep their EVs out when it was unheard of for people to be gushing about the quality of any Chinese products 10 years ago and people who visit recently all talk about how the consumer products and services have improved. This is because they have a lot more competition so companies can’t make big profits even if they wanted to.
You were pretty dismissive of David R and Geoffrey G's questions about consumer protections. "That's just the price we have to pay for living in the most dynamic economy in the world" does a lot of hand waving. People's complaints about expending mental energy trying to navigate through all the enshittification are legitimate, and I don't know who it serves (other than shareholders) for market economies to trend in that direction.
1. Enshittification may sometimes happen but it is vastly overstated. Is your smartphone shitty? Your new car? Your television set? Capitalism produces tons of non-shitty stuff.
2. Plenty of enshittified products are just consumers being cheap and stupid. E.g., flyers who insist on buying basic economy rather than paying for a bit of comfort.
My smartphone isn't shitty! Do I like having to replace it every 3-4 years because it slows to a crawl and crashes constantly? Do I like that I can't buy a high end refrigerator, microwave, or dishwasher that's built to last more than 10 years? Do I like that any car I buy now has a touch screen for basic functions which will break well before a knob or dial would? No!
I'm being a bit over the top because I do agree with your second point. But I really liked both of those questions and felt they deserved a more thoughtful answer. There's a middle ground between a Wild West of capitalism and Soviet Russia, and providing some consumer protections so that people don't have to expend every ounce of mental energy trying to find the best possible deal on the best possible product at every moment is worthwhile, and not incompatible with having a dynamic market economy.
My dishwasher is more than 10 years old and my refrigerator is 30, and while I do replace my smartphone every few years that's to get the latest features-- older smartphones still work and you can clear caches and offload data and unused apps to speed them up.
I have never had a touchscreen break on a car and I love the convenience of Android Auto, especially the maps and speakerphone calls.
Look how ridiculous you sound. This is not Soviet Russia.
My previous refrigerator was similarly old. I hope for your sake yours keeps working and you're not as shocked by the change in longevity as I was.
I was comparing us to the Wild West and not to Soviet Russia, sorry if that analogy didn't land.
Interestingly the 'right of repair' concept is one of the foundational ideas Marie Gluesenkamp Perez talks about. I have mixed feelings on it. On the one hand there's a very real sense in which certain appliances, hardware, and other consumer goods seems more fragile/not built to last quite like it used to be. Everyone has a grandma or uncle with a beer fridge in the garage that's been running for 40 years, inside of which you could survive a nuclear strike.
On the other I'm pretty hesitant to jump to conclusions without serious objective study. Again my go to example is that the power tools you will find today at every Home Depot are way better on nearly every metric and theres lots of stuff that wasn't even readily available or affordable to regular consumers in the not too distant past. Anecdotally I also feel like my Samsung phones hold up longer and better than the ones from 10 years ago. I actually got a call from Verizon last March to see if I was willing to replace my still perfectly well functioning 3 year old phone for a brand new one, essentially for price of doing the transfer. I of course took them up on it and when I asked the sales guy why this was happening he said that they've got too much inventory on annual releases, because they don't need to be replaced as often as before.
I believe a lot of the momentum behind "right to repair" is from farm equipment. Farmers, of course, have very tight margins, and are used to repairing their own equipment. With new equipment, repairs often can only be done by the dealers because of proprietary software.
Survivorship bias explains like 80% of this. Another 10-15% is easily explained by the fact that it is often less expensive to design something to go together once, work well, and be replaced at end-of-life.
Maintainability is actually expensive to design and manufacture into a durable good. Am I annoyed that the little plastic widgets in my dishwasher break down over time as they're exposed to major thermal cycling and aggressive cleaners? Sure I am. Would I pay 10x as much for each of those little injection-molded pieces to be replaced in the bill of materials with machined billet aluminum parts that would last longer than I will? No, I would not!
We don't have an entire industry of television repairmen anymore, and that's a good thing.
As far as government issues go, "right to repair" isn't high on my list, but I do agree with MGP on this one. I prefer to be able to tinker with things (hence my unreasonably strong aversion to Apple products) and it's frustrating that I can't do this the same way I could 30 years ago. But... there's a lot of truth to your comment (and others') in that you simply don't need to do that in many cases anymore.
"Anecdotally I also feel like my Samsung phones hold up longer and better than the ones from 10 years ago."
If smartphones still broke when you dropped them the way they did 15 years ago I would break two a week. How were we so careful????
Someone needs to make a dark comedy about a guy who suffocates inside a beer fridge during a nuclear strike.
Yes. The last time we bought an appliance, the salesperson straight out said, "Your last oven was 40 years old. Don't expect any new appliance to last that long. The standard is now 8-10 years."
I'd start blaming energy efficiency regulations for appliance hijinks, aside from stupid things like putting giant screens on refrigerators, but you don't have to buy those.
There are high end brands of appliances that are well know to last beyond 10 years on average (e.g. SubZero for fridges, Miele for dishwashers). Obvioulsy YMMV, and there certainly are high end appliances that do have longevity issues. But with a bit of research it's pretty easy to discern the brands that last.
I'm not a huge fan of the touchscreens in cars replacing buttons and knobs (especially for climate functions), but I've had cars where the buttons and knobs start showing signs of wear a year in (I'm looking at you Jeep). So its a bit of a wash, but I think there is some happy medium of screens and knobs that was present maybe 5 years ago that I hope carmakers go back to.
You have no guarantees even with these brands, to be frank. Anything with a compressor or condenser in it is a shitshow in my experience.
Sure. Five years ago there’d be at least two additional brands of dishwasher on that list, though. The market is not working to sustain those options. In some product areas no such options still exist.
It doesn't work for those brands because you, and the vast majority of consumers, are unwilling to pay the price to get them. A Speed Queen washer and dryer will last a lifetime or more but ther cost $2,500 each. Customers see that price tag and opt for the $500 -$1000 washer and dryer, or write them off because "for that price I can get the one with the IPad in it". If you look at inflation adjusted prices $2500 is just what washers/dryers used to cost back in the day and they cost more to operate and didn't wash/dry as well.
I have the same windows computer i built over 10 years ago and have minimal problems, and I've replaced my phone twice, and not because i felt forced to do so.
The problem is that making good technical products is difficult, and it's even more difficult to credibly signal or evaluate that you're doing so. What's really missing is a better Wirecutter/consumer reports, and whole government could step into that, it would not be through regulations, but a technical version of death panels that would be difficult to defend from the populist mob.
Appliances are shitty because of all the energy efficiency regulations.
Those require you to put a lot of electronics in to get the energy efficiency.
A clear case where government policy is making things worse.
I hate to say it but as Dilan points out, you are being irrational and the reason that some things like appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever” is that they were overbuilt. As a free market does, this over investment got reallocated to bringing you abundance in other domains. That said I think this is dramatically overstated—I remember stuff breaking *all the time* as a kid in the 90s. Also remember when cars would sometimes just not work and not last more that 100k miles? Exactly.
“appliances built “in that past” allegedly lasted “forever””
Also strong survivor bias. We remember the ones the lasted forever.
I think things are getting cheaper and better while services are getting more expensive. The logic of this plays out in us buying appliances and electronics for a shorter time and then upgrading to the new rather than service or repair it.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is actually probably the best scenario considering the constraints.
I regrettably did the iPhone update to OS 26 a few days ago and my phone is shittier now. I guess on the plus side, the graphics are so ugly I don’t want to use it.
Yea I also thought the use of enshittification was a bit off on this topic. Now I actually think it's a real thing- you can see it with the degradation of social media and certain types of automation (IVR customer support for example) but I don't think it applies for general purchase of goods and services. The fact that I can login to instantaneously buy tickets to an event or schedule an appointment or service of some kind is really convenient compared to how the world used to be. I may have a little nostalgia for being a teenager, camping out in a mall parking lot for HFStival tickets, but it's not the way commerce needs to work.
I also think your point about goods is a strong one. My go to example is to look at any half competent DIYer's tool bench and compare it to what was there as recently as the 80s and 90s. And on top of that if you aren't a DIYer it's way easier to find someone who was able to equip themselves and can do your home repair work for a fee.
My wife and I bought our first television as a married couple pre 2000. We've bought a new TV 3 times since and every single time paid less in ACTUAL dollars. And every time the TV was bigger and better.
I have a 60 inch Panasonic flat-screen thats been running perfectly since 2012. Every time we go to Costco and see the new stuff I'm tempted to replace it, especially given how cheap newer, nicer TVs are but I just can't justify it to myself while the one I have is still operating without issue, and after multiple moves.
“Your new car? Your television set? “
Yeah, I think the original poster is of the mindset that new cars, TVs and appliances are less reliable than the good old days.
Consumer Reports does reliability surveys, and new cars are massively more reliable than they were in the 1980's, when only a few makes like Honda were reliable and even their most reliable models had more problems on average than now.
You used to get your car "tuned up"! Regularly!
And especially in American cars there were just a parade of little problems like there'd be a short or a switch wouldn't work or your solenoid would go out or whatever. Plus, warranties tended to be shorter.
My tv and phone apps aggressively have shitty adds embedded within them. I tried very hard to avoid adds when I bought my TV, but it's extremely difficult, with a the best advice being "try to fine models built for demos on sales floors rather than for retail sale". And that's BEFORE trying to deal with the ads embedded in apps. Pause the stream? Get an ad. It's awful and ubiquitous.
Did you notice back in the day when you were entertained by TV and radio, there were ads there too (and many commercial breaks lasted far longer than the 10 seconds for a youtube ad?).
Best $10 a month I spend is YouTube Premium. No ads, downloads and podcast functionality when the screen is off.
Adblockers plus download sites/plugins allow me to do all of this on my web browser.
Watch and listen a lot on my TV and in car.
Look into buying a Raspberry Pi (tiny, cheap computer) and setting up PiHole. Costs about $30. It’s a bit of a pain to follow the instructions, but once you have it set up you can block most ads on all devices connected to your network, including smart TVs.
And what about every website that I try to read on my phone. Ads popping up to cover the screen. And then taking up 1/3 of the screen area.
And Windows 11 with its embedded ads.
As the average person who is not buying that much, the trade off of focus for services is terrible.
The best defense I've found against this is to never connect my TV to my home network. I do all my streaming from a box that isn't enshittified and it seems to work ok for me.
I replaced my Roku with an ONN Google TV box from Walmart that cost like $50. It was easy to customize so it gives me no advertising at all and a separate google account means no tracking as best as I can tell.
I feel lucky that for the grand majority of my TV watching, I can patch it through the web and take control away from a lot of this crap.
I agree. Enshittification is taken at face value these days. I may have agreed ten years ago but it certainly seems to me weve been quickly climbing out of that trough of technical despair.
<<flyers who insist on flying basic economy>>
People forget that the alternative is not being able to afford flying as a lower income person at all!
<flyers who insist on buying basic economy>
Companies have discovered there are a substantial amount of people who shop solely on price, not value, so why not give them what they want? And complaining about the product is just part and parcel of that mindset.
A lot of the complaints people have are real, but what you mentioned is an underrated part of what's going on. Turn back the clock 40 years and you simply paid a lot more for your fridge (or whatever else) or simply did not have one. You can buy a much cheaper one now, but it might be annoying and unreliable.
To the extent of allowing online sales platforms to blow off safety regulations and sell (literally illegally sell) electronic devices with greatly enhanced fire and shock risks? Really?
Shall we legalize opium, while we're at it?
Please don't conflate Geoffrey's arguments and mine, for one.
For another... yes, my television set and new car are pretty shitty across many dimensions, as was extensively discussed in the original comment thread a week and a half ago.
EDIT: See the exchange on cars here... https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/americas-lost-liberal-center?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=200290244
Your television set is likely a very large flat screen high definition set that delivers far better picture and sound quality than anything a middle class person could have bought 30 years ago.
And your new car likely has a backup camera, better cruise control, forward collision detection, parking sensors, smartphone interconnection, maps, and any number of other things that were not available on cars 30 years ago. Plus, maybe you got a lemon (that happened then and happened now) but statistically cars are far more reliable now.
Your threads talk about the decline in "do it yourself" repair of cars, but I think automobile hobbyists don't understand that most people just want their car to work and don't find it fun to spend Sunday afternoon changing out the distributor cap.
It's reminiscent of something I am wistful of-- I like manual transmissions. I bemoan that they are harder and harder to find. But your average person is not like me-- they don't find driving fun, they just want something convenient that automates the process as much as possible. And the market has to serve the average consumer, not the enthusiast.
The issue with cars is not that they're wildly less reliable (obviously not), but that the lifecycle costs for keeping them running for the full 12-13 years that were the average for cars produced from 1995 to 2010 have gone up considerably as they've become (deliberately) less accessible to independent mechanics and home ones.
We're very likely to start seeing average in-service times for vehicles falling a bit in the near future, as people decline to pay to keep them running the last few years. They've already plateaued.
This is particularly bad because American carmakers and foreign ones operating here have already adopted a "downmarket is used" strategy for market segmentation, whereby there are no new offerings for working class folks, the market is basically segmented by where in the depreciation curve one buys a car.
Most people always hired mechanics. And most people who were forced to fix their cars didn't like doing it.
The increasing lock-in from the use and increasing centralization of solid-state electronics is driving up prices for independent mechanics as well, as I said earlier.
This is why if there was an actual competitive leasing market, it would actually be more efficient for most people, but that's a different discussion...
My car has manual roll-up windows. The last time I brought it in for an inspection, I made the guy's day. He was so excited to see this. It is also very cheap to repair. 2009 basic Toyota Corolla. Oh, how I will miss you when you are gone.
Fun at the valet is rolling up in a 2009 Subaru Legacy with a manual transmission. Sometimes there’s like one guy who can drive a manual of all the vaults working there. If it’s heavily immigrant valets, not fazed at all.
TVs are arguably a yes since they’re now adware vectors. ETA: See also Samsung fridges (nb: I do not recommend buying Samsung appliances) which now have screens for some reason, and on which screens Samsung wants to show you ads.
While this is true, I do think people are right to feel the squeeze. The combination of tech growth rate expectations colliding with those mammoth companies inevitably slowing toward rates typical of mature industries is introducing a lot of pressure, and it’s being relieved, in part, at the consumer’s expense.
To me that sounds like no substance and all ideology. "Mammoth companies"? What's wrong with a big company? I'd much rather deal with a big corporation than a small business in many situations.
And the consumer's expense? They are paying less! That's the enshittification dynamic-- consumers want a bargain and don't care about quality, and the market responds! The consumers are "expending" less. If they are getting less that's the reason.
I gotta ask, in what world does economy buy comfort relative to basic? The seats are the same, you're probably in the back unless you have status, you still don't get check luggage on domestic flights... at most you've managed to buy an aisle or window seat.
Airfare is about the one area in which I generally *do* cheap out as far as possible so long as I'm not setting myself up for extra connections.
I took the whole family on an ultra-economy airline's flights to and from Spain over the holidays and it was in no way different from cattle class on a regular airline, aside from preventing my wife from moving her closet with us on vacation.
Enshittification usually specifically refers to companies that used to make low margins to attract consumers during ZIRP now trying to increase profits by squeezing consumers. Anyone who uses e.g. Facebook or Uber or Amazon regularly can see this is happening. It’s not necessarily a problem with capitalism per se, just high interest rates that pressure companies to have high short-term margins plus market power which allows companies to do so.
What's the Platonic level of profits and customer service for a business like Amazon or Facebook which didn't even exist until recently?
Econ 101 perfect competition: profits should be zero (after accounting for opportunity costs) and consumers should get all the surplus.
So everything should be like farming (which ends up requiring massive government aid)?
Seems wrong to me. Especially given we want people to have incentives to create all this amazing tech.
Beat me to it. I can understand why Matt would be worried about going overboard with certain regulations, and such more aggressive cases could be scrutinized. But on some of the smaller stuff, I think it's also fair to consider a tradeoff of people getting a tad bit of relief from the pricing maze in exchange for a tad bit of market inefficiency.
Most Enshitification comes from the fact people don’t pay for services or platforms or in the past the service was juiced by VC capital and low interest rates.
This is also a good point. Obviously higher interest rates suck for a lot of reasons but I also wonder if one of the down sides of essentially 'free' money for Great Recession through Covid was a bunch of speculative investment in not even half baked ideas followed by offensively awful experiments in monetization.
We live with the stupid consequences of stupid times.
I agree with your point here. Maybe to frame it a bit differently, more and more of the economy seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics.
While not directly related to this point, I think it is similar in that there and more and more ways for more intelligent and industrious to find better deals and more opportunities to take advantage of others.
Curious what others think, but I feel this does help contribute to the view that elites are screwing over regular people. This is true in cases but I do think in the big picture the modern economy becomes more and more oriented to reward “merit” in the smartest and most capable, and overwhelm others with complexity.
There was a ton of this in the Good Old Days. Ever heard of a tobacco company?
If anything there's far more information now that can empower a consumer to resist the sort of thing you are talking about. Back in the day it was much harder to seek out information about addictive marketing let alone fraud.
“seems to be shifting in a way that is predatory and takes advantage of lower educated people and/ or those with poor impulse control. The explosion of online gambling is probably the best example, but there is also buy-no-pay-later financing. I believe that the alcohol industry makes the vast majority of profits from a small percentage of alcoholics. “
Other than the online gambling this has always been true.
Yes agreed, and it’s also telling that so many smart people are dismissive of this as being a problem. Fairness matters, and the perception that our economy is set up in this way contributes to people’s sense the whole “system” is rigged and fuels cynicism about politics as well.
Perhaps the most high-profile example in recent years of the government trying to simplify and standardize the purchase of a complex product is the ACA exchange market's attempt to slot health insurance policies into a few supposed-to-be-easy-to-understand defined packages -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. Decidedly mixed results, and inefficiency leaking out all around, with examples like insurance companies paying thousands for things like MRIs that are available on the open market a la carte for hundreds.
But in simpler cases, there no reason, for example, why it should be intentionally hard to cancel a recurring subscription fee.
Leaving this here again for reference: https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
I'll take a stab at it. I'm not sure how in depth the price regulation being proposed here is, but if we're going as far as removing all price discrimination, like no matinée prices for movies or no surge pricing for Uber, then the losers are people who are willing to see movies on Tuesday afternoons who would have to pay as much as the people on Friday nights, and the people getting rides to the airport at 10am who have to pay the same amount as people getting rides home from the bar on New Year's Eve. And then secondly, the people at the high volume times would have longer lines, probably the movies sell out quicker and people on Halloween, or Thanksgiving Eve, or New Year's Eve would be standing in the rain for longer. I certainly wouldn't be out there as a driver on those nights for normal prices, I have other things to do. And in those scenarios, people would still be frustrated. They'd be frustrated that the movie sold out so quick and they'd be frustrated that they effectively can't get a ride home for at least an hour. Hell, I shared the anecdote of trying to buy the stupid Starbucks bear cup at 4am only to find they had been bought out by the employees of the store. I would have been happy in that situation to pay much more than get out of bed in the middle of the night for nothing.
Those are examples where price discrimination is probably less controversial. At the other extreme would probably be stuff like the fact that you have to play stupid app games to get good deals at McDonald's or literally just say the word "coupon" at Jiffy Lube to get $15 off your oil change. And then there's the big one, credit cards. My wife has the mental energy to play the credit card game, I don't. I've done the math and found that credit card A is better than credit card B IF we remember to use the correct card every single time, and if you forget ONCE per month, it's a wash. I trust her to do that, I don't trust myself. I will forget. I also just have a baseline expectation that stuff inexplicably goes wrong some 10% of the time. My favorite coffee shop is listed as a grocery store on my credit card statement. Why? I have no fucking idea. And there's nobody I can argue with to say "this is a coffee shop not a grocery store, so you owe me an extra point per purchase on this card." Having said all that, the reason I'm not too concerned about the credit card thing is precisely because the possible consumer surplus is so small I don't really feel like I'm missing out on much.
That was a long rambling post. I guess my own position to the extent I've thought it through is that price discrimination to alleviate actual scarcity is defensible, sending consumers through an endless maze of apps to get small discounts to ensnare them in to signing up for rewards programs they're probably never going to use is not.
I agree with this almost completely.
City, James, and I were talking about credit cards last week and I feel compelled to point out that all of Brazil, India, Kenya, and I believe Bangladesh now have state-owned payments clearing infrastructure that operates at cost, Europe is building one, and China's duopoly charges 0.15%. The US has allowed the legacy infrastructure to congeal into an unregulated duopoly that charges 1.9-3.9% even though it would be extraordinarily easy to build a public version with open-source or off-patent technology at the Fed that could operate for under a tenth of that cost.
It almost makes me want to say we should regard it as a market failure if a technology doesn't fall in price by 90% within ten years after it exits patent protection and allow states or the federal government to form public-benefit corporations to exploit it.
That's probably further than I'd go on credit cards, but ideally the only people who would use them would be top 10% consumers. Kind of like my industry. Ideally the government would default 10-15% of people’s paychecks in to some lifecycle funds and FAs would be for the top 10% of Americans who need more in depth planning. Frequent travelers using credit cards makes sense. For everybody else, not really.
Given the huge gap between infrastructure costs and processing fees, I really don't see what possible harm could come from the Fed building a public alternative offered at cost and accidentally gutting the market for anything except utility credit cards in the doing. I see no case for capping interest rates or whatever, but the underlying payments infrastructure is a completely mature technology that could be run as a public utility or at least a public option to keep Visa and Mastercard from colluding to prop up their revenues.
Unlike low-info progressive bitching about healthcare, it is actually true that nowhere else in the world allows payments processors to sit on their laurels and take this kind of a cut.
I had my own rant about credit cards in a top level comment upthread.
I'm open to credit card regulation, but mostly for paternalistic reasons not because I'm upset that I lack the mental bandwidth to optimize my purchases. This is why I have a simple cash back card.
One more anecdote, I recently downloaded on of those sports gambling apps, which I can only use when present in Oregon, and the first thing they do is give you a bunch of freebies and boosted bets. Obviously a freebie is a freebie so I used those, but the free payout boosts are so evil. They force you to do a parlay to use them and then you get like a 30% boost if you win. So it's still like a +EV bet if you use it, like I put down CMC, Puka Nakua, and Stefon Diggs to all get touchdowns for $5, and if I won, I would have gotten $60 rather than the $45 usually offered. Obviously this didn't happen, and I'm not in the poor house for losing $5. But it's so clearly designed to introduce the parlay system, hook people, and slowly drain them as they bet dumber and dumber parlays.
Ban sports gambling. The ills of it being run by bookies in seedy backrooms and people occasionally having a leg broken are wildly outmatched by the ills of perfectly legal and seamless scale.
I wouldn't go that far, but having to be physically present at a place seems preferable to the status quo. The fact that I have to go to Oregon is kind of perfect for me but it's obviously not replicable.
Oh, I'd be fine with going back to the status quo from 1950-2000. Go to AC or Vegas, blow a goodly but survivable chunk of money in a weekend, go home and live out the rest of your life with few opportunities to overindulge and bankrupt your family.
As you're getting at, I think what's tricky here is that people are talking about a lot of different things:
- pricing complexity based on more price gradations for different varieties of a good or service (Basic Economy plane tickets, Uber surge pricing, cheaper matinee showings)
- price discrimination in the technical economics sense, where the same variety of the same product is sold at different prices to different consumers based on consumer profile (this is your Jiffy Lube example, or the many times when you can get a cheaper subscription service by trying to cancel, and it's probably related to the credit card case where part of what's happening is that the credit card company is negotiating for a lower net price for its price-sensitive consumers)
- information asymmetry problems about product quality
- scammy practices like making it very hard to cancel a subscription
The last two to my mind are unambiguous cases for regulation (with the caveat that, as for anything, some regulations intended to address the issue may be bad). The first practice is good and doesn't need regulation beyond price transparency. The second category is the trickiest--there's an efficiency case for price discrimination in that it reduces deadweight loss from uncompetitive pricing, but the cost is that it redistributes consumer surplus to above-normal profits and causes deadweight loss as consumers try to work the system to get the lower price and businesses respond. But some regulation in that area seems appropriate.
I'll fully the defend the first type pretty vociferously. As Dilan Esper points out, most complaining about that is just consumers being unreasonable. No, you cannot get tickets on the 50 yard line right before the game for $20. From the second type on down though I hate it. In CERTAIN situations, like frequent flyers, that type of price discrimination might make sense. But if it's just testing the patience of everybody to navigate systems and get the right customer service person, nah, I don't like that.
"No, you cannot get tickets on the 50 yard line right before the game for $20"
If the home team is bad and doesn't have much of a fanbase even when they're good, don't count it out!
Blazers tickets are outrageously cheap. Not football but still a great deal. I go frequently.
I wonder if Timbers tickets are more expensive at this point.
I didn't see Geoffrey's comment originally and frankly think he's full of shit. Few of the issues I would highlight as significantly increasing the complexity burden on consumers are solved there, about the only exception is within parts of the healthcare sector depending on the country.
To cite a simple example, following on this exchange: https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/americas-lost-liberal-center?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=200360352
Buying what are supposed to be moderately durable small consumer goods in Europe is almost exactly as irritating as it is in the US, for almost exactly the same reason.
The regulatory intervention I would pose would be to require all B2C vendors to confirm that small appliances, cheap electronic devices, etc. being sold on their marketplaces have been tested to meet American consumer safety/quality standards by an American laboratory like UL. If the seller cannot provide ironclad evidence, then it cannot be sold until tested. Back it with draconian fines and Amazon would have no choice but to put a floor on the quality that would be hugely impactful to the median American's experience of buying small items there.
Based on my own experience, I'd guess that spending 20-25% more up front gives you a longevity improvement of 3X to... much more than that. What argument is there for allowing Amazon, and only Amazon, to sell a bunch of stuff that's almost literally illegal?
There's a lot of truth to this comment. I'll just say this -- I'd much rather that Matt's reply to Geoffrey was along these lines and we could've framed the debate on this, rather than taking it at face value and shrugging and saying "hey, that's just how America and Europe are different, you take the good with the bad." Would love to hear more specific examples from Geoffrey and others who've had a different experience than what you've said here in that regard.
Yea, a major gripe I have with the neolibs at present is that they seem to want to abrogate, or simply don't believe in, government's role as the maker of markets.
All of this exists downstream of government; we decide what markets are legal (should sports gambling be?), we decide how financial vehicles are regulated (stocks are heavily regulated, "prediction markets" aren't regulated at all), we decide on minimum standards for safety in a variety of goods (but apparently if you're selling something online that goes out the window), we decide what constitutes illegal cartelism, whether you can sign an exclusive contract with a reseller, the form and prevalence of price discrimination...
There's definitely a case for less regulation in some instances, but MY seems deeply unwilling to acknowledge when there's a case for more regulation of market transactions, as opposed to externalities.
Just to understand your point of view, do you have these concerns when the market in question is highly competitive? (I can understand them when there’s some market power.)
I like the restaurant example. Suppose Restaurant X tries some gimmicky pricing scheme. If it’s something people hate, they’ll just go somewhere else. OTOH, if it’s profitable, then why not let them do it? People clearly don’t hate it that much. Competition with other restaurants will prevent them from extracting too much surplus.
Agreed, I thought the response was insightful but also totally missed the point. Personally, I’d take the tradeoff of a bit less economic dynamism if it meant I didn’t feel like a trained mouse being forced to run a maze with every online purchase.
AI will soon be able to help people navigate the complexities we're talking about here. This is the wrong time in history to regulate them away.
I worry about the opposite: AI being used to do even more subtle and less obviously good price discrimination. For example, what if stores use AI to read people's faces and determine how distressed or desperate they are, and then charge them higher prices if they are in fact distressed or desperate? That seems really bad with no consumer upside, and it's also completely opaque to the customer.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/sunday-mailbag-thread?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=201676755
Thanks. I'm not sure I'm getting the point though. Is the problem the profit from price discrimination or the complexity tax? I thought it was supposed to be the latter, but the argument here grants that the latter issue is solvable. Or are you saying that the AI would have to be overly complicated to use for some reason?
Anyway, I don't super trust a priori arguments like this to predict what will be possible in the future. Maybe AI companies will just provide general purpose AIs and you will be able to order them to handle these things for you, among the many other tasks you use them for.
Might partially have been about recovering from flu.
On the simplicity tax thing, I think many people who complain about the airlines etc. don't realize that if everyone was charged the same price it would actually be higher. They fancy a world where there's no ticket scalpers and everyone pays $60 to see Taylor Swift, but in fact if there was no scalping she'd charge everyone $1,000 or whatever.
With event tickets in particular, I sense there's a mindset that "true" fans, however that's defined, should be able to attend regardless of income disparity. I've seen that particularly in the discourse over 2026 World Cup tickets. The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
And there's no way any more than a small percentage of "true" fans can ever attend. Do people really think every European soccer fan gets to go to a WC in Europe just because prices are supposedly cheaper and supposedly harder to scalp? Or do those with connections get most of the tickets and most fans watch on TV?
Effortpost elsewhere in thread, but I think I'm coming down on "price discrimination in the face of scarcity is fine, 'download our app and sign up for our rewards program we hope you'll forget about' is not."
>> The problem, as you say, is that scalpers will always find a way to reach market equilibrium.
This seems comparatively easy to fix for event tickets, no? Just make them non transferable, bound to the buyer’s name and force people to show ID at the door. Scalper-based arbitrage being easy is a choice. It may be a good choice (eg, plans change, you can’t go, you can sell at market price to someone who wants to), but *is* a choice.
The public actually wouldn't like those changes very much. It would mean longer waits (especially at large events), higher average ticket prices, and pains in the neck when you wanted to informally transfer a ticket to a friend or travel separately to an event.
All for what? Because some people who weren't gonna get into the World Cup anyway object to the scalpers' prices?
Business/first class is something like 70%+ of flight profits despite being like 10% of the available seats
Yeah I enjoy discounts, it’s fun to feel like you got a good deal. I just don’t like haggling but thankfully that is pretty much gone. And sometimes discounts even reduce cognitive load—like if I’m buying groceries and don’t know what I want to eat but have a lot of choices, sometimes I just buy the one on sale.
Why don't artists/sports teams use Dutch auctions for tickets? Seems like an efficient way to find market clearing prices for limited goods. Is it an optics thing?
This is something that srynerson has argued for multiple times on here.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/restaurants-should-charge-more-for/comment/55336679
Right - and a lot of people think that would be better, because we spend vast amounts of mental energy on getting the inside lane. It is important to acknowledge there are tradeoffs, like you say. But I'd rather live in a world where I can throw something in my grocery cart without worrying I'm getting ripped off than one where I can go to in-demand pop star concerts more often.
A lot of times dynamicity in pricing isn't making things cheaper as much as shifting price pressure from the attentive and prepared to the inattentive or harried. I think that Matt is very much the former kind of person and should appreciate that a lot of people are the latter, and are kind of sick of this bullshit.
I mean, I would love dynamic pricing if I had an assistant.
why would she charge more in the absence of scalping? it doesn't matter to her whether somebody buys a $60 ticket for themselves or to resell for $1000 (unless she's secretly getting a cut...)
if she charged $1000/ticket scalpers would disappear, but that doesn't mean if scalping disappeared she would have a reason to charge $1000/ticket. is your argument that TS selling $1000 tickets is the only way to get rid of scalping? or am i missing something?
OK, let's get into this.
Taylor Swift's tour, which was quite elaborate (as a Chargers SSL holder, I got in on one of the pre-sales and saw it), costs quite a bit of money to put on. So assuming she wants to put on that show, her ticket revenues need to be enough to cover that.
Right now, what her management does is after holding back a certain number of tickets for comps, pre-sales, fan clubs, etc., they sell the rest on the open market, scaled to approximate the demand for tickets. The high prices also cause some sticker shock, which has the effect of controlling demand somewhat.
Now what happens if scalping is banned? Well, she's not going to charge $60 a ticket, because she has to make a payroll and pay for all those elaborate stage tricks and make some money herself. What she's going to do is... wait for it... charge exactly what her people think the scalpers would have charged (i.e., the actual market clearing price for tickets), so that she maximizes her revenue and can pay for the show she wants to put on and make the profit she wants to make.
And because of that, the average fan gains nothing from the ban on scalping except being unable to sell their own ticket if they can't go.
In a scenario where scalping is banned, why would her management team charge what they believe scalpers would be charging? If that was how they were going to approach ticket pricing, wouldn't they be pricing them according to "theoretical scalper price" now, seeing as the artist does not receive proceeds from resold tickets?
"as a Chargers SSL holder"
Unrelated, but I'm curious if you show any affinity to the Chargers, or if you just enjoy watching football in general.
I’m fascinated by Mamdani courting abundists too, given his co-ideologues like Warren are explicitly trying to wage factional war on abundance. Mamdani is a very talented politician, I see all kinds of factional players on opposite sides cheering him on (anti-monopolists, abundists, leftists, moderates), while he continues reaching out to low propensity voters digitally (he’s all over TikTok), doing nyc local retail politics & even developing a relationship with Trump (they text weekly!) without angering his base.
It feels surreal to see a talented Democratic politician navigate the political landscape with such ease, given how left wing he is. Dems should run known moderates in house and senate seats for the midterms but Mamdani reminds me of Mitch McConnell saying “candidate quality matters”. I’m convinced me that we need an outsider “moderate” in 2028, someone with real juice. The reason Obama was such a good politician was because he was able to send mixed signals to both leftists and centrists that he was on their side. We need the moderate Dem 2028 candidate to be inspiring so leftists want to come along for the ride, not by being scoldy about “electability” and telling the base they can’t have nice things. I don’t think any of the leading Dem contenders right now are that high quality.
There's a local angle to this that I think a lot of the takes are missing, which is that the "stationary bandits" in NYC who benefit from bad governance are mostly small-c conservative and don't like left-wing reformists or abundance-oriented reformists or street-safety reformists or what have you. So there is a natural reform coalition that can get behind someone like Mamdani (or Brad Lander, who exemplifies this kind of politics) even if the reform factions are ideologically different in ways that loom very large in discourse.
I agree, any talented moderate politician is going to at least win over some of the left flank by the end of the primary just by virtue of being super charismatic.
'[Mamdani's] co-ideologues like Warren'
I feel like these two people, while both left-wing, are not really 'co-ideologues' and come from different intellectual traditions.
Within the intra party factional fights, him and Warren are on the same side? What are the ideological differences between the two? The point I was trying to make is that he seems much more flexible given his skill in assembling a coalition based on courting different groups with different ideologies by deploying different types of appeals (free social services, renters, abundists, south Asian ethnicity).
I think the main difference is that Mamdani is the lefty mayor of NYC (constituency has lots of young people, lots of renters) whereas Warren is a lefty senator from Massachusetts (constituency has lots of old people, lots of homeowners).
The damn unleashed dog people!
I suspect they have too much love for their animals. They are thinking about what makes the animal happy, and they know & trust the creature. They are failing to consider how other people might feel about their actions.
The last few years, especially having small children that are scared of dogs, has made me extremely anti dogs.
The playground we frequent most often has a sign saying all dogs must be leashed within 10 metres of the playground but I see unleashed dogs inside the playground nearly every time we go. And 10 metres is really far! Most people seem to think it means 1 metre....
The park area outside of the playground allows dogs unleashed but they have to be under "effective control". In practice, almost no dog owners train their dog to that standard.
I've seen a family step away from their picnic to kick a ball and a dog ran up from 50 metres away and started eating their food. My kids were playing tag and two large dogs ran at them at top speed from 30 metres away. I've had dogs steal my kid's soccer ball and run away with it.
If people let horses behave that way -- running up to strangers at top speed while the owner shouts from 100 metres away "he's really quite friendly!" people would be losing their shit. But because adults are bigger than dogs and they have zero ability to empathise with small people they DGAF.
This sounds like something to bring up with the city council or local governing board.
I wonder if people who were busybody’s stopped?
I mean, we called them all Karens derogatorily.
I’m honestly astonished that Matt doesn’t see off-leash dogs in DC! In my less-cool neighborhood (near the historic strip mall 😩 but also near many parks and trails) they’re everywhere.
How fortunate you are to live near such a renowned historic site!
It’s a crucial element of neighborhood character! 🙄
Is this the strip mall off Grubb?
No, it’s the “Park and Shop” on Connecticut, next to the Cleveland Park metro station. Disgraceful land use at this location!
Oh, that Targhetto is very important to the local shoplifter community. (I remember seeing so many turnstile jumpers carrying like 4 to 5 Tide bottles.) It looks like the wine store that was never open is closed too.
Boise's first strip mall is something of an icon, too. Not historically protected as far as I know, and the owners are the family descendants of the developer (who was also a former mayor) that have no intention to change the land use, but it's close enough to downtown that if some day the highest and best use changed, nostalgic people would probably throw a shitshow over it.
I don’t think Matt goes to Rock Creek that much. He isn’t really big on exercising for fun.
I found the closer you got to silver springs the more off trail dogs I would find. There is a definitely a white income gradient to this. I just wish park police or rangers would ticket offenders.
100%. But around here the dog people take over literally any open space (school yards, the trail to the Glover Park Trader Joe’s, etc) and let their dogs run wild. Even a lot of dogs on leashes are very poorly controlled.
The big problem is many people have gotten dog breeds that are not appropriate for their housing situation.
No one is complaining about pugs or fluffy stumpers.
That's interesting. I grew up in the DC suburbs and they are full of unleashed dogs and as someone who was afraid of dogs as a kid I hated it. I live in NYC now and I see them in parks but not really elsewhere--when I saw Matt say that, my reaction was that it was probably a suburban/urban difference. (Even the unleashed ones in parks are usually pretty well-behaved compared to the ones I remember in the suburbs. Assuming this is a real difference and not a product of me being older and less scared, maybe the threshold for training is just higher in a much more densely populated area--you can't have your unleashed dog barking and running at every stranger in a city park.)
I saw far less of this when I lived in NYC and dogs did seem to be much better trained/controlled.
They are definitely everywhere -dc and suburbs. Most dog owners are selfish af
It’s just a lack of rules enforcement. Just like people playing TikTok on full volume on the metro. Fuck, and the people are old enough to know it’s rude! (So many middle aged people do this.)
The larger issue is that they're fucking morons who don't understand that they shouldn't trust the creature with anyone except themselves.
It should be legally permissible to shoot unleashed dogs on sight, not because I want them shot but because it's clearly the only way to get their owners to keep them on a leash.
why shoot the dog? it's the owner who should know better
I agree, but I suspect that shooting the owner would be frowned upon...
I was walking on a trail this weekend. I was going 2.9 mph and this other guy was going 2.7 mph. But his unleashed dog was running around ±100 feet behind and in front of him. This meant that while I was executing my passing maneuver, I was in the dog chaos zone for a full 10 minutes.
If the dog approaches you can tell it to stop. You can also ask the owner to leash their animal. You can also physically keep a dog off you if it is not controlled.
It's not failure to consider, it's that the happiness of "man's best friend" is worth more to them than the discomfort avoidance of a stranger.
Wow, this is the only space where I have seen multiple people on the unleashed dog side. They are everywhere where I live, but if anyone complains, the usual answer is "They are better behaved than kids." One of our suburban malls now has a dog-friendly policy, although I haven't seen nearly as many breakers of the leash rules there. (I also don't go there nearly as often as the sidewalks and parks in my neighborhood. Or even stores.) Maybe because mall security is ever present, and you can more easily kick people out of a private mall.
Under my administration, if you don't clean up your dog's excrement on a public sidewalk, you will receive life imprionment.
I am shocked that Matt doesn’t see many off-leash dogs. I live in downtown Chicago and I see it all the time.
The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.
And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers. Like read about how dumb some consumer class actions are—the case that led to the Supreme Court upholding arbitration clauses (Concepcion) was about a couple trying to get a class action against a company that gave them free phones because they still had to pay sales tax. And now there’s a whole trend of “mass arbitration” where plaintiffs file arbitration complaints against companies just to bury companies in arbitration fees (most clauses require companies to pay the vast majority of the fees whether they win or lose) so they settle. This is not technically “regulation” but is actually worse and doesn’t happen in other countries.
There may be a regulatory problem but if so it’s probably more on the labor or perhaps capital markets side.
Also what is up with middle-class people and dogs? I live near a literal homeless encampment and still almost all the litter I get on my property is from middle-class people’s dog poop…
The issue is you can't actually *develop* a successful company in Europe, even if you can export the finished product or service there once it has been developed.
My last job was at a multinational American tech company, and US employees were all at-will, but German employees were basically impossible to fire after 6 months or so. It was made very clear to us that the hiring bar was higher in Germany, and we were to fire under-performers very aggressively within those 6 months.
These employment protections are obviously nice for workers in some ways, but they make it very hard to course-correct when trying to find product/market with limited runway.
There are all kinds of problems with European economic policy. I don't know European law well at all but for the particular issue of business size and development I would also look into how they regulate capital markets and corporate governance. But I am pretty skeptical about the problem being related to consumer price regulation.
IME, financial regulation in the EU is burdensome b/c the member countries get their say as well. So there are essentially two layers of regulation - one at the EU level and another at the country level. Whereas in the US, the feds preempt much of the state regulation. Its easier to navigate one set of rules.
The EU also loves reporting. The more the better, and no matter if its duplicative - reporting is good. I have no idea what they do with all the data, but it adds another layer of costs to doing business there.
Yes, like I said, labor regulations are an issue because a US company with a US head office wouldn’t have to follow them, but that’s different from consumer regulations which impact local and foreign companies equally.
Consumer regulations restrict flexibility just like labor regulations do. There was a while where GDPR and data residency requirements made it really painful to make certain kinds of consumer-facing tech products in Europe, because GDPR ruled out various business models. American companies did eventually figure out how to operate in a compliant way, because they could spend effectively infinite money on compliance. But if you were a French guy with a startup idea, you didn't have infinite money to spend.
I agree Matt's dodge on Europe was a bit weak. I think Americans dramatically underestimate how much not being a true single market hurts European companies. Even just something as simple as "we can't run the same ads because everything needs to be translated" sucks for a business trying to build scale.
Yep, there’s a reason the distant second in tech to the US is China and not the EU, even though China is poorer overall—China has a massive single market. Most successful tech businesses make a little bit of money off of a massive consumer base—that requires scale.
The best thing the EU can do is further integration and increase market size, e.g. remove some of these localization requirements, prevent small countries from using the EU to increase the reach of their idiosyncratic and sometimes corrupt regulations, and offer membership to Canada!
>>And following regulations is actually less harmful to businesses than the way we regulate-by-litigation in the US—at least government regulators in theory are there to act in the public interest, unlike plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Is this true though? If to even start a company you need to hire a small army of lawyers to ensure you're compliant with 300 obscure regulations you never heard of then it's obvious why Europeans are less entrepreneurial and dynamic.
Regulations will always end up hurting small businesses more, which ends up in fewer start ups and more calcified large companies.
Yes it’s true. Small businesses can usually get away with doing what they want and they’ll get a warning first, unlike in the US where they get sued first. A lot of European regulations specifically exempt small businesses (what they call SMEs).
What regulatory issues are small businesses in the US getting sued for on the reg? Are they getting sued by regulators or plaintiffs' attorneys? From what I've seen, it's the large companies that get sued, as that's where the money is for the plaintiffs' attorneys (and the regulators).
I'm biased because I used to work with employment lawyers (and have done a small amount of employer-side defense work myself) but small businesses often face wage and hour and employment discrimination claims. The wage and hour laws are genuinely hard to navigate and employment discrimination liability is a bigger issue when you have a smaller and less sophisticated HR department.
“The reason for Europe being behind the US is not consumer regulation—we know this because US companies operating in Europe have to follow all the same consumer regulations as European companies, and European companies operating in the US get to follow US regulations. Yet this doesn’t prevent US companies from being highly successful in Europe or cause European companies to be more successful in the US.”
This doesn’t follow at all. Just because Uber might be successful in Europe now, does that mean it could have ever started itself in Europe and moved the other way? Color me skeptical.
Hm good points. I've seen the claim that the big difference is at will employment?
It's both labor and capital markets, regulation and fragmentation.
Damned little to do with consumer protection laws, though some of those are ill-considered and annoying.
Regarding the wage compression question, there's the obvious tie in with inflationary conditions that pissed people off in many ways. Specifically with labor, there is the aspect of full employment, which is pretty standard to see as a good thing. However, one reaction I noticed that surprised me, and really so among certain people I know who I would take for otherwise being pretty labor friendly, were unhappy that the new leverage that workers got was causing them in their minds to deliver poorer service. Not sure how to deal with that.
first three words of today's dispatch: "I got laid".
oh, never mind. Damn.
Speed limits. I'd be fine with them being 100% enforced. But the limits would get changed, which would be good too. There are roads with 25 mph limits that I drive where no one is going below 30 and 90% of the traffic is 30 to 40 mph. The speeds are fine. The decision to penalize people though shouldn't be so discretionary.
It depends on each road. On controlled access freeways and rural highways, where usage is exclusively motorist or very close to it, I agree that higher limits would be warranted if consistent enforcement were implemented. But in more urban areas where there's heavy interaction with non-motorist traffic, the increasing argument is that slow posted speeds enforced strictly are needed to prevent death and serious injury. Obviously there can be cases in between that are more difficult to assess, as we saw in arguing this on Monday. And the argument for speed cameras in particular is that they can remove the element of discretion that you criticize here.
Once you are above 25MHP the risk of injury/death for a pedestrian goes way up.
And also like with most crime the optimal enforcement rate may not be 100 percent. It just needs to be high enough that when it is dangerous to drive fast, drivers need to fear a ticket enough they slow down.
One thing that's puzzled me is that there's (in my perception at least) strong overlap between the "pro speed camera" crowd and the "Kleiman pilled" crowd, but nobody ever seems to combine the two viewpoints. We should have lots and lots of speed cameras, but make the fines low, at least for infrequent offenders - like start at $10, but escalate if you speed often. I think that would be an effective deterrent while also avoiding a lot of political backlash.
I once got a $0 ticket for speeding. No points either. It was from a camera. It's actually worked. I am more leery.
The real solution is to redesign the roads so that it feels unsafe to the driver to go much faster than 25 mph. Narrower lanes, curb bump-outs, reduce/eliminate multi-lane one-way roads, etc.
Make pedestrian crossings in high conflict areas the same height as the sidewalk.
This is so much better than random speed bumps that are nowhere near a crossing, this actually pinpoints the places where slowing down is most appropriate.
Never seen this idea before but it sounds very smart. Surprised I've never came across it! Would also improve pedestrian visibility.
Some places do it. Saw it in Europe and Boston.
I'm a big fan of road redesign and it should be part of the decision, but it's also something that costs and lot and may be impractical in some very built up areas.
There ought to be a trade-off of resources going to enforcement with the optimality of the rule being enforced (the marginal harm from violation. Speed cameras (very low cost) ought to be entirely calibrated to the optimal speed at that point/time of day.
Same principle as interior enforcement of no-visa residency.
Econ 101 just solves lots of problems. :)
Also, with higher enforcement, the fines could be a lot lower.
This. Justice by expected value is a bad idea. If you only catch 5% of perpetrators, and then you charge them a fine that's 20x larger to make up for all the people you didn't catch, it creates a bunch of bad incentives.
That means you need to apprenhed a larger percentage. "Enforcement" is not just the fine/punishment.
I think people who have motorized plate obscurers should have their vehicles seized and auctioned off.
Or crushed into a tiny cube, and then being told that they have 30 minutes to move their cube.
If obsured/able plates were a vioation and citiznes were incintivized by a share of the fine -- as theyshoud be for reporting the location of vehicles with outstanding fines -- fot reporting it, the penalaty would not need to be so severe.
Counterpoint: but they’re asshats!
I think the future is "enforcement" where your car knows where it is and refuses to go above the posted speed limit unless you hit some manual "something has screwed up and I am making a human decision to override" (and have at least some camera-based enforcement to prevent abuse of that).
"But I think we’re seeing here that a lot of folks have the sense that “a criminal” is a certain kind of person, and that kind of person is simply not middle class with steady employment."
This does a ton of work in true crime discourse. People who think that, e.g., Scott Peterson is innocent aren't fairly evaluating evidence against him because he doesn't fit their stereotype of who might commit murder. People who think the Menendez brothers must have had a valid excuse think the same way-- they just don't "seem" like the types of people who might murder their parents to get the inheritance and go on a spending spree, even though that is what happened. People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent can't believe this nice well off white lady could have committed murder even though she left a bunch of her DNA mixed with the victim's at the crime scene.
The other day in comments to your MLK post, Racists of course made an appearance with their statistical arguments about who commits crimes and its the same thing. They want cops to do bigoted law enforcement because they assume (based on their supposed command of "statistics" of course) that people like themselves don't commit crimes.
In the real world, though, whatever the statistics may say, it happens with reasonable frequency that someone you don't think might commit a crime does so. My father, as a sportswriter and sportscaster, knew OJ Simpson pretty well. He- and most of his colleagues- thought OJ was one of the nicest athletes they ever met. But he turned out to be a spousal abuser and double murderer. The psychological heuristic that we can tell the sort of people who could be "criminals" is just wrong. Anyone can be one.
It's OK to do statistical enforcment, but not all statistics are creted equal. Stop and frisk does not have to be -- should not be done on a racial basis. It's no great harm for even an old white guy like myself to be respectifuly stopped if I were walking late at night in a gun-carrying prome area.
The thing is, the people who really like stop and frisk tend to be really into statistical enforcement including based on race and ethnicity.
And the point of my comment is that if you really take that to its conclusion you absolutely do run the risk of assuming that you can tell who is or isn't a criminal based on what groups they belong to. That is an accurate and natural description of how many people's brains work (which is what true crime cases can show you). Whereas if you require cops to stick to the evidence you actually are likely to get better law enforcement.
Agree. The statistics shoud not be on the basis of presumed group membership and I doubt that statistics fine grained enough for actual enforcement would show that.
> People (and there are a lot of them including in the media) who think Amanda Knox is innocent
Including, notably, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation...
Read their opinion! They found her not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by throwing out a bunch of DNA evidence, but also found she was at the scene of the murder and lying about it, and that there were multiple attackers (her supporters claim there was one).
So no, that court definitely is not convinced she is innocent and never says she is-- just that she wasn't proven guilty once key evidence was excluded.
Interesting - Wikipedia characterises their decision completely differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Knox#Final_decision You're definitely talking about her fourth trial in 2015 and not her second trial in 2011?
I didn't actually want to have a fight about the object-level question, I'd just thought that "Amanda Knox is guilty" was now the fringe position, and was surprised to see you talking as if the fringe position were still "Amanda Knox is innocent". But now you've got me interested in the object-level question!
Wikipedia is very susceptible to people with large fanbases and PR teams.
Here's the actual translated decision of the Cassation Court. At section 9.4.1 it calls Amanda's presence at the murder scene a "proven fact" at trial.
http://www.themurderofmeredithkercher.net/docupl/filelibrary/docs/motivations/2015-03-27-Motivations-Cassazione-Marasca-Bruno-annulling-murder-conviction-Knox-Sollecito-translation-TJMK.pdf
I don't think you're characterising that correctly. Here's the first part of section 9.4:
> 9.4 Now, a fact of assured relevance in favor of the current appellants, in the sense of excluding their material participation to the homicide, even in the hypothesis of their presence in the house of via della Pergola, lies in the absolute absence of biological traces referable to them (apart from the hook of which we will discuss later) in the room of the homicide or on the victim’s body, where in contrast multiple traces attributable to Guede were found. It is incontrovertibly impossible that that in the crime scene (constituted by a room of little dimensions: ml 2,91x3,36, as indicated by the blueprint reproduced at f. 76) no traces would be retrieved referable to the current appellants had they participated in the murder of Kercher.
> No trace assignable to them has been, in particular, observed on the sweatshirt worn by the victim at the moment of the aggression and nor on the underlying shirt, as it should have been in case of participation in the homicide (instead, on the sleeve of the aforementioned sweater traces of Guede were retrieved: ff. 179-180).
> The aforementioned negative circumstance works as a counterbalance to the data, already highlighted, on the absolute impracticality of the hypothesis of a posthumous selective cleaning capable of removing specific biological traces while leaving others.
> 9.4.1 Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions...
So they were present in the *house*, but cannot have been in the *room*, and therefore "It is incontrovertibly impossible that [...] they participated in the murder of Kercher."
OK so you are an Amanda Knox fan!
The issue is Knox claims SHE WASN'T IN THE HOUSE. She says she was with her boyfriend at the time of the murders. When in fact she left plenty of forensic evidence in the house (which the Court throws out) and also her alibi is rebutted by computer records and eyewitnesses.
If she was in the house at the time of the murders, that makes her likely guilty of at least cleaning up after the crime, if not helping commit it, which is why her supporters and her go to great lengths to deny that.
So yeah, the Cassation Court is saying she's lying about not being in the house in 9.4.1. They also reject her lawyers' claim of only a single attacker. This isn't a court saying "she's innocent". This is a court applying Italy's exclusionary rule while being careful to say that Amanda was probably involved.
This comment is just a a couple of strawmen.
In a trenchcoat?
Another example in sportswriting that crossed my mind while reading your comment is Jonah Keri. He was a very highly regarded baseball writer...until it was discovered that he was a vicious abuser of his wife. At least he was pretty much made a forgotten pariah after that.
Yeah, the "good person" who turns out not to be good is a STANDARD part of all walks of life.
There's also the inverse, where sometimes people are too suspicious of strangers that they don't (yet) know. Human psyche dissonance can be odd.
Restaurant below got World Restaurant of the Year in 2024. Next available table is 12 January, 2027. That's better than last time I looked when there were no tables available at all.
Honestly can't figure out who that's helping. Their menu isn't even expensive by the standards of such a prestigious restaurant. For some reason they're actively choosing to under-price.
(PS I was not actually planning on going, I was just curious how hard it would be to get a table at the World Restaurant of the Year given how hard it is to get tables at some more normal restaurants where I do live. In fairness, it is a lot harder than anywhere I've ever been)
https://www.disfrutarbarcelona.com/bookings
'Honestly can't figure out who that's helping.'
Maybe they just like having a full house? Or maybe they prefer a clientele that isn't exclusively corporate executives?
*In general* (not specifically about this restaurant), Europeans are just less fussed on average about 'maximizing earnings potential' and often weigh other factors. Whether this is better or worse is beside the point, it's just a cultural difference.
Kinda wild they have tables available as far out as 2027. They should release reservations a month or two in advance
"Honestly can't figure out who that's helping". People who like planning and have very stable lives, I guess.
I see the same playbook at In-N-Out and Chick-Fil-A. If there's always a line around the block, then you get prestige and brand value as the hot place that everyone wants to go. Even if there are more people total going to McDonald's, it doesn't look crowded, so people think that McDonald's isn't as popular and therefore isn't as good. It's like a Veblen good where the price is the amount of time you have to wait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Does price affect them being considered for awards?
I think so. Ambience is usually a category and having your place rammed with people super excited to finally get that elusive table and happy the value for money is unusually good must help achieve a good vibe.
If I had to guess how undercharging for food makes them money in the end, these places can sell $10,000 bottles of wine. Maybe if it's really hard to get a table you're more likely to go for that special bottle of wine. Might also help sell private dining options.
My take on DC speed cameras is that two things can be true at the same time. They're a great public safety tool, and they also can be used rather aggressively as a revenue grab.
This is anecdotal, but I've had one speeding ticket in the last 20 years and it was from a DC speed camera on a 4 lane stretch of highway that for some reason had a speed limit of 50. Without any signage, I would have expected a 65 limit on this stretch. Given that I've probably driven 200k-300k miles outside of DC over the last 20 years, and < 500 miles inside DC, I'd contend there's probably something going on with DC speed traps being on the aggressive side.
I had no idea the speed limit was this low until I got the ticket in the mail. I was clocked at 61 on a sunny Sunday morning when traffic was light. I should have been more attentive to speed limit signs, but I also can't help but wonder how many others have been caught by this and whether such enforcement actually increases public safety or is just more of a $100 outsider tax. I will give credit where credit is due, the ticket was very easy to get taken care of online and it apparently doesn't affect driving points at least.
I definitely think that fines from law enforcement should not provide dependence for any government program. There certainly is potential for abuse similar to how some police departments have directly benefitted from civil asset forfeiture. And there can be a perverse incentive to encourage *more* of the activity at hand (same reason why I hate Pigouvian taxes). The best thing to do strikes me to just distribute the money back to the taxpayers, functioning somewhat like a safe driving check that insurers hand out.
But last Monday, I did repeatedly ask if there's been any credible reporting that the DC cameras in particular have discovered to have revenue generation as their top goal, and I've yet to get a satisfactory answer.
Do you know if the DC ones are controlled/operated by the district itself, or if there's a third-party contractor that runs them and makes part of their profit based on ticket revenue?
The heaviest abuse I've read about doesn't seem to be from municipalities themselves, but rather from the government outsourcing operations to companies (that then bribe officials to win contracts). I think the most blatant cases used this arrangement. IIRC, some states have gone as far as to ban this setup after widespread abuse was uncovered.
Highways with unreasonably low speed limits should also come with big yellow signs that say "SLOW. NIMBY CROSSING"
I don’t think we get Zohran Mamdani if Kamala Harris was elected. This is not to take away from Zohran’s political skills, but even Barack Obama was only possible because of the contingent circumstances of 2008.
This is an interesting counterfactual. I think the biggest difference is that Adams would still be under indictment and would have been less likely to run for re-election. But I'm not sure how that would have affected the Democratic primary (which he dropped out of anyway). All of Cuomo's weaknesses would still be there.
I found the regulatory answers in this one to be pretty weak. I am sure other people are going to talk about the price simplicity thing (I already see some) so I'm going to talk about efficiency standards.
Saying that we should regulate energy and water use with pricing makes some sense, but:
- pricing energy or water at marginal social cost is politically difficult
- because of how important they are for human needs, there are constraints on shutoffs, so pricing can only do so much
- there is a decent argument in some contexts (e.g., temperature control) that we don't actually want to price at marginal social cost because people skimping too much on energy use has bad health consequences
But if you underprice, people use too much water or energy, so you do need enforced efficiency standards.
One solution to the pricing problem is progressive rate structures. If the problem is that a few bad apples are over-using and not careful, then it's a good solution. If the problem is that we need everyone to cut their usage just a little bit, then that's really hard. I don't really know which domain we are in with water or energy.
The dog leash answer is wide off the mark. The answer they behave that way is enforcement. If people were fined for off leash dogs then they wouldn't let them off leash as much. The problem is that this is a fairly inefficient use of police/park ranger time so it is obviously not allocated to fining off leash dog owners.
Shaming is also inefficient as it relies on wider social stigma. If everyone had a problem with this then it might succeed, but if you loudly complain about this you're apt to being called a Karen as most people like dogs and will tell you to chill.
So the answer is to make a big stink about any damage you suffer, make people pay for it, and widely circulate knowledge of that so people know that could happen to them and adjust accordingly. Is if a dog eats your picnic food demand they pay for the food and some, if you get bit sue them, etc and then post about it in Twitter/reddit/whatever. Obviously this is not ideal as you want to avoid suffering damages in the first place, but it's the only way out of the equilibrium I see.
It seems like there is a close correlation between people with youngish kids and people who want to make sure dogs are under tight control (chh wrote a recent article, jennifer lawrence suggested a reverse john wick movie with a mad mother going on a dog killing rampage...).
Fewer people have kids now, maybe our numbers dropped below the level needed to socially shame the dog owners effectively.
Thanks for my answering my question. I would say in addition to why they didn’t court pro-housing voters, the nyc business and Dem establishment should also answer for why they let Eric Adams run the city as a corruption racket. He’s a total scam artist as we are seeing with the crypto token thing. Elevating such politicians breeds the kind of cynicism that gives rise to Trump (the mentality of everyone is corrupt!). I’ve been annoyed at some centrists giving Adams a pass on his corruption because of his policy achievements but the Trump era should make it clear how much integrity matters at the top. Eric Adams is the embodiment of personal profit, mismanagement, and lies.
Has Matt written about enshittification? His answer about business practices leads me to think he is pro-enshittification. Whereever he stands, he should do a post about it if he hasn't already.
I asked him about it just a little more than a year ago: https://www.slowboring.com/p/new-year-new-mailbag-33f
"City of Trees: What's your take on enshittification, as hypothesized by Cory Doctorow? Is there something to this concept, or is it underbaked or missing some important aspects of what's going on?
I feel like the Enshittification Thesis comes in a soft and a hard form and gains a lot of traction from ambiguating between the two.
The way investors advise software founders is that in the initial case, they should focus overwhelmingly on making a product that is good and that solves problems in users lives and that users love. The idea is that in software, your marginal costs tend to be low, so whatever your business model problems are, they’re easier to solve with 100 million users than with one million users. That’s different from the restaurant business. If you have a chain with five outlets and it loses money, going to 5,000 outlets doesn’t solve your problems. But with software, it’s easier to figure out a way to be profitable if you get really big first, so you initially focus on growth. Eventually, though, you do need to make money, so a pivot has to occur where you start focusing more on revenue considerations and less on “do customers love this?” That does mean making the experience worse for many people, and they are entitled to be upset about that and even call it “enshittification” if they want.
But Doctorow and the people who cite him seem to want to draw sweeping ideological or public policy conclusions from this, when the point seems kind of banal to me. "
I think this answer neglects (a) network effects and (b) the particular perverse incentive where an ad-driven business, because it can't monetize quality of usage, focuses on quantity of usage.
I think there are public policy conclusions from this though:
1) Low interest rates are good because they make companies focus on the long-term. With less short-term pressure it’s more viable to make low margins to keep more consumer loyalty.
2) Competition is good. Enshittification doesn’t seem to have happened in China—we have to have massive tariffs to keep their EVs out when it was unheard of for people to be gushing about the quality of any Chinese products 10 years ago and people who visit recently all talk about how the consumer products and services have improved. This is because they have a lot more competition so companies can’t make big profits even if they wanted to.
One of Matt's very first articles here stated that "low interest rates are a curse". I wonder what he thinks about that now.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/low-interest-rates-are-a-curse-we
Enshittification seems like it is being over applied in the discourse.