I think the whole pricing thing is dystopian but I also think it would most likely end up being defeated by consumer price monitoring apps, possibly run for you by a little shopping AI assistant, and maybe even businesses whose strategy involves deciding 'we don't screw people like that.'
At which point the AI pricing apps will charge highly customized prices capturing the vast majority of the surplus they salvaged for consumers.
The neoliberals are just dead wrong on this; this is an extraordinarily obvious case for regulation to preserve the functioning of markets.
Price discrimination on the basis of the identity of the buyer is *poison* and must be destroyed everywhere it already exists and prevented from taking a single step forward in expanding.
"At which point the AI apps will charge highly customized prices capturing the vast majority of the surplus they salvaged for consumers"
This is the PBM business model -- started as a way to do better price comparison shopping for health plans, and then moved ever closer towards "capturing the vast majority of the surplus they salvaged".
Good analogy. It also worries me even more because the PBM have already crossed the line into “deliberately making markets more opaque so they can generate more surplus for themselves,” and all the same incentives would apply to an AI shopping assistant’s developer.
Yea very good comparison and I think you and David are both right about the inherent inefficiency of prices being battled out in such a way. Probably a situation where the theoretical rationality of a market leads to bad outcomes for everyone.
Theoretical rationality is not the per se issue in re the market concept here but rather than unexamined potential for market equilibriums that may not be consumer optimal. Perfectly rational equilibrium outcomes possible sans necessity being consumer optimal. (speaking as a proper economist)
I haven't personally any views here as there are so many unknowns and factors pushing in different directions, I would be reluctatant to jump to any a priori conclusion (although for that same reason jumping to regulations which are comparatively easier to code into law than to later unwind if they end up having perverse outcomes [see rent controls, Jones Act etc]
Fair enough, I'm no economist, just a law talkin guy. That said my law talkin' has been in house healthcare and Allan's point about the PBMs resonates. Now part of that is that they're part of a larger, much messier ecosystem than retail groceries but it's a good example of something that was supposed to be a patient-supporting counter thrust to opaque (and downright shady) practices on the payer side. Instead they've evolved into just another massive rent seeker with no apparent value to the consumer.
I'd be careful applying the PBM business model to other industries. Health care is an extremely weird industry - it's highly regulated, medication is often patented or otherwise not subject to competition, the person paying often isn't the person buying, and the end customer often isn't in a good position to evaluate other options. All of these royally screw up competitive pressures. None of these are particularly relevant to Cheerios.
However, over 90% of prescription drugs used are not patented; they are commodity products that could be sold more like Cheerios or OTC drugs. To the extent there's dysfunction in that market in the US -- and there absolutely is -- it's more due to policy choices than anything inherent about the product class.
While I think the arms race of AI seems to favor the producer, there seems to be a clear under current where the ability for us to use personalized tools will be cheap. I don't think the setup of the producers having an AI fighting an expensive AI that consumers are paying to fight it will pass. We already see free AI models that rival paid versions. Consumers should have access to free shopping assistants.
What would the regulations look like? I'm having a hard-time getting my head around how the government could regulate the price of cheerios without also causing big problems.
Nik got it. Ban personalized pricing. Retailers must, at a given time and location, display and charge a single price to all via all sales channels. Online sales channels must display and charge a single price, period.
Price discrimination via time and most of the other currently extant methods serve actual purposes and enhance utility. We already limit them in various ways, no need for much change.
Ban the use of personal data for personalized pricing except for specific defined categories. You could still charge e.g. higher prices in a richer neighborhood like we do now.
This is really easy in practice. I go to the store and see Cheerios for $3.99. Someone else goes to the same store and sees Cheerios for $4.29. You may not know the mechanism, but it’s obvious they’re doing some kind of personalized pricing.
I get that it's easy to engage the rational brain and find easy reasons laying about demonstrating that a thing would be hard (I'm guilty of this all the time!), but sometimes you gotta take a moral stand and do the hard work of making it happen.
The grocery store sends coupons that significantly discount items they know I purchase (or a lot of times they will give a huge discount on a store brand alternative, like ground turkey if I've bought Jennie-O in the past they will send a coupon for $2 Kroger turkey). Is that a personalized price? Who does it benefit to prohibit targeted loss-leaders?
I work at a retailer (not Kroger). Generally speaking, discounts like that are available to everyone and they are just advertising the discount to past purchasers in the form of a mailer. But that same coupon is available in other places, like the weekly circular or a "digital discount" that can be scanned at the shelf in the store or on a deals page on the website or in the app.
I don't know how Kroger does things exactly but I think it's highly plausible they are doing it as I describe above.
I think it would just look like MA liquor law. You must sell any product you sell to all comers at the same price for at least one full day. (Yes, you can't have happy hour discounts on alcohol in MA.) It seems like posted coupons could be incorporated pretty easily (those aren't allowed for alcohol.)
yes - this seems very much like something that at current level of knowledge it is nigh impossible to develop at this time a regulation that would not have near certain chances of really perverse and destructive outcomes.
But that ignores competition between AI pricing apps! If you have five big apps and any firm can launch another with moderate capex, the pricing apps will compete on price.
Yo dawg, I heard you like AI pricing apps that prevent you from getting ripped off, so I made an AI pricing app that prevents you from getting ripped off by the AI pricing apps so you can not get ripped off while you don't get ripped off.
In general, the prevailing form of pessimism I hear from zoomers / young millennials is that everything in modern life is an unending rat race. And the people I encounter who *aren't* pessimistic about this don't even disagree, they just think they're gonna make it on top over all the other rats through day trading or crypto or some form of passive income scheme. Widespread price discrimination feels like a way to entrench this further in a way that could have pretty worrying social impacts, whatever its economic impacts.
(for the record, I think the dystopian scenario is unlikely, and some combination of stores just declaring they won't use customized pricing, and most of the profit coming from bilking rich people is more likely, Matt kind of changed my mind here)
The obvious rejoinder is “why allow it to come to this at all?”
But also, B2C SaaS is insanely sticky because the consumer has to do all the work of providing sufficient info and configuration for it to work well, and that will probably be even more true for this, so the apps are going to leverage the hell out of the “inconvenience” factor to gouge long-time users, exactly how most ISPs and cable providers do.
These things can be sticky, but not always. I used to have both GrubHub and Seamless accounts. People already bounce back and forth between AI apps, and AI apps should be able to help with the transition.
I just don't see a "find me the best price" app being that sticky. It seems like the sort of thing that barely requires a login. And if you try to make yours sticky, it's likely you are going to lose out to other companies that do not.
Zero capex essentially. Basically anyone could create an agent today to check the price of their shopping list at Walmart, Target and Amazon/WF and get the cheapest price for each item.
I feel like we already went through this when we transitioned from markets where you have to haggle to stores with set prices where we can all save time and mental energy.
Of course it could end up like clothing, where everything seems to always be on sale or it could require a coupon to get a reasonable price. But I imagine a lot people will generally be willing to pay a bit more overall for consistent prices they don't need to think about and businesses will adapt to serve that customer.
Have made this point here before but it's also worth noting that places where haggling is more common tend to be lower trust societies more broadly, and I doubt that's a coincidence.
"People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals."
Decent article, but I didn't care for the diversion into blaming corporations. A lot of these things are just choices we believe we need to make. Like the anecdote used to open the article - the grocery store isn't purposely hiding capers from you! And one of the main examples, airline refunds, weren't even a thing before COVID (and I don't know which airline she's talking about, but it's extremely easy with Delta).
In credit to her thesis though, I dared to do an online chat with Comcast a week ago for a discount I hadn't received. The poor guy kept trying to offer me all sorts of "free" add-ons. When I told him I'd rather just pay more than deal with keeping track of things I don't need (and will inevitably lead to new charges later), he put me through to a supervisor who gave me a price for internet only like I wanted from the beginning. But they are particularly well known bad actors.
That's interesting. I really wonder how "intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition" is attributed to "the left."
I would say the forces of de-regulation and using market-based policies contributes to this type of modern society and those seem more aligned to right wing beliefs.
Mostly yes, except for drugs, which are left-coded, but by happenstance happen to fall under the libertarian deregulatory umbrella, which is more often characterized as right under the binary left-right axis.
Your comment reminds me of the brief period when JC Penney said they were going to have fewer sales and, instead, have lower base prices on standard items and essentials. I liked this because shopping there felt less like I was being gamed and I could feel confident I was getting a decent price no matter which week I shopped, but I guess I was an outlier because they soon went back to extreme weekly sales (50% off all shirts!) due to customer outcry.
This is a good point. Market fans should hate this kind of friction! Transaction costs!
More broadly, I don't think "everyone hates this but businesses want to do it and it's plausibly a progressive transfer" just does not seem like enough to justify a practice's inevitability. We have lots of ways to achieve progressive transfers. Businesses' interests should be weighed against consumers, and not assumed to be positive-sum when there's a serious mismatch.
Matt’s whole take here was kind of underbaked — “private entities will extract more from richer people in a ubiquitous surveillance dystopia with astronomical transaction costs and this is good because it will narrow the gap between the rich and the poor” is exactly the sort of handwavey bullshit that he would scoff at in other contexts. Inter alia whence the incentive to earn more if it just gets immediately extorted away by the time you want to consume stuff?
Not related to dynamic pricing, but: my daughter asked me to bring home a box of Cheerios yesterday and I felt like I was going to retire in poverty.
On that subject: FedNow tells me the price index for a bushel of oats is about the same as it was in 2011, but the price of a box of Cheerios has doubled. I know some of this is labor etc. but (according to Google) generic "toasted oat" cereals are only up 30%, while Cheerios brand is up 90%. So on the subject of whether dynamic prices will be efficient or extractive, I'm going to lean towards "extractive".
You can definitely buy store brand generic-Os and they are a lot cheaper. Same with corn flakes which are more my thing.
IMO the texture is slightly different, but not a lot different. I wish I could say I prefer the cheaper version but it does appear to be missing "something" although the difference is small enough that it might just be placebo effect or familiarity.
Just a few days ago I was asking the ChatGPT about the high price of cereal, and the biggest surprise was that the cardboard packaging is one of the biggest cost inputs. So if you can find cereal in a bag it might be a lot cheaper. But at my local grocery store the only cerreals that come in a bag are super surgery shite I would never eat.
Also on the topic - plain raw oats are much cheaper, more filling and probably healthier than any brand of cereal. For a long time now I've ben sprinkling a layer of raw, plain oats on my breakfast cereal (and sometimes on a few other things). If you don't overdue it it mostly just makes whatever you're eating feel more filling and substantial which might make you less hungry later. YMMV!
It's amazing to me that we haven't seen any sort of packaging innovation in brand-name cereals. Isn't this the sort of progress that the free market is supposed to give us?
With that said, the 2019 Cheerios packaging cost was $0.07-$0.12 lower than the current cost. Whereas the retail cost is up $1.50-$2.00 in the same time period (and shrinkflated down by 5%). So maybe the answer is: packaging only matters a little.
Name brand breakfast cereal has insane price fluctuations, it'll be $5 for a box one week then they will be trying to unload it and sell you 5 boxes for $6. I really don't understand it.
Isn't it strange? Occasionally bigger boxes are more expensive per oz than the smaller boxes. And there's always weird couponing going on where a box is $6 but if you clip a coupon in the app it's $1.99.
I have to admit that price discrimination and related subjects are areas where I don’t really have settled views and my intuitions seem all scrambled, which is rare for me on economic issues.
On the one hand I definitely think “price gouging” after natural disasters to bring scarce water and gasoline and such into areas that desperately need it is good, regulations against it are wrong etc. And I am similarly fine with Uber charging more during busy times. And I get the concept that price discrimination means more trades and more total value for society.
But the idea of personal tracking and charging the just barely market clearing price to everyone seems terrible to me for reasons I cannot fully rationally defend! I am unsure if this is an “it’s complicated” situation or a “I am not being rational about this” situation. Should probably do some reading on it.
Basically it’s a massive redistribution of welfare from consumers to producers. Most of the time consumers are not paying enough their full willingness to pay. In this world every consumer is paying the maximum of their personal willingness to pay for a whole range of products. Who benefits?
It's hard to grasp because at this point for consumer goods it's basically science fiction. But today it could already happening for truly personalized products like Uber rides today; I regularly "cross-shop" between Uber/Lyft/Waymo in a way I didn't previously need to. Does something like that trigger the outrage sensors? It doesn't for me.
Individual price discrimination is illegal under our current antitrust arrangement. With all the information we have firms are moving closer and closer to this.
In a world with minimal consumer surplus, many consumers will feel much antipathy towards products and brands.
Amazon recently got an injunction against an AI powered app consumers used to monitor prices for set products on the store.
It’s only illegal where anticompetitive (and consumer sales by non-dominant retailers would probably almost never be considered anticompetitive), not illegal per se.
The whole everyone gets custom prices seems unworkable to me.
Just as one example, I’m frequently in a section of the store where me and 1-2 other people are browsing. How are these price labels going to know who is looking at them?
And people are good at gaming systems. The rich MY’s of the world could hire people to do the shopping - people who have a “cheap price” profile.
Margins in grocery stores are already pretty slim. I’m skeptical that surveillance and AI can change that.
Well, the stores will probably be a panopticon where the cameras not only execute facial recognition but use AI to interpret your facial expressions to calculate the probability that you are intent on purchasing and not just browsing.
Yeah, this seems like one of those fantasy things we like to muse about but no commercial entity will ever really be interested in.
We tend to grossly exaggerate what is coming. Remember the story about the woman who received coupons for pregnancy-related goods before she'd even told her partner? (Or maybe her parents.) That was, what, 20 years ago? Not that much has changed since that one-off event. And I still get all those pop up ads for something I've already bought on line. Is our algorithms learning? Doesn't seem so.
Yeah, I don't buy that this is going to be a dystopia. Amazon already does dynamic pricing, and it doesn't sell $50 Cheerios and most current forms of dynamic pricing (coupons, sales, buy 1 get 1), bring prices down.
If my Stop & Shop starts trying to sell $50 Cherios, I'm not just going to walk across the street for my Cheerios; I'm going to walk across my street for everything, and I think that's going to keep them from trying.
"The one thing that does temper my populist outrage is the recognition that the whole point here is that custom pricing algorithms are going to try to screw me personally because I’m pretty affluent."
Yeah, I don't think that's how these things tend to work. Affluent people don't get screwed on car loans and consumer credit even though they could totally afford a 10% interest rate, who even knows the difference?
Supermarkets may give wealthy people competitive prices because they want them shopping there and buying high end food in their stores, and they're willing to not maximize their earnings on low margin food that would just piss them off.
That seems more likely to me too at least at a macro level. Now obviously you've still got your 'tourist trap' captive situations where something like what MY talks about might happen. It's the only gas station for 50 miles or you're already in the vacation town and it's really inconvenient to leave so you suck it up. But big picture wealthier people get better deals because they're more likely to be good for the money and because they'll buy nicer stuff with higher margins to work within.
I remember my wife was listening to some kind of podcast where they talked about how this stuff works in the grocery space in particular. One of the examples they mentioned was Costco where they apparently sell chicken and some of the other products as a significant loss leader because the upside on the higher end stuff people buy once they're in the door makes it worthwhile.
"I remember my wife was listening to some kind of podcast where they talked about how this stuff works in the grocery space in particular. One of the examples they mentioned was Costco where they apparently sell chicken and some of the other products as a significant loss leader because the upside on the higher end stuff people buy once they're in the door makes it worthwhile."
Yes, I was going to bring up Costco. I have noticed Bentleys and Aston Martins in the parking lot at various Costcos, and they are not shopping there because they enjoy being screwed on cheap products.
That works at the supermarket level, not so much on the individual product level. As I mentioned above, Cheerios are up 90% from their 2011 prices while generic versions are up 30%. Does GM want to earn my loyalty on commodities so I'll buy high-margin products from them? Or are they going to correctly recognize that kids like "the brand" and many adults are lazy, and ruthlessly exploit people until they stop buying?
Yeah. I’m not sure what price difference would get me to buy International Delight creamer instead of the Coffeemate, but ewww. If the price of the good creamer got too high I’d probably just switch to NoDoz instead and lose weight to boot. Nasty coffee is worse than no coffee at all.
Yea it's the sh*t. We got a membership years ago to bulk buy the kind of household stuff and non perishables that you burn through with kids. Now we've bought major appliances, electronics, furniture, and have the ultra membership where you get money back every year. Knock on wood but we have never had any quality or service issues with them either, something I can't say for the big box hardware and similar stores and other online retailers. The local grocery store still has better produce and certain other fresh food items but that's really about it.
One thing Costco seems to do very well is vetting the quality of items they sell. I've almost never bought something at Costco that ended up being low-quality.
Costco is the best for diapers, baby formula, and snacks! And frozen fruit for smoothies. I got my membership after Li’l Velociraptor was born, and it has paid for itself several times over!
This question and the responses are making me consider turning into my aunt, who didn't even use banks for the longest time, but instead hid big wads of cash around her apartment. I am now looking even more askance at places that don't accept cash, although I understand it for efficiency and safety reasons. I am trying to wean myself from taking my phone everywhere I go. Maybe tin foil hat. Maybe not.
Google is the one remaining vendor where I have a free account even though I know I’m the product and not the customer, precisely because it provides so much value.
If they offered an annual premium package with a bit more cloud storage but mainly the promise that they would never sell or provide my data to anyone absent a warrant that specifies me by name, I would pay for it.
I’ve finally pulled the plug on Reddit, which was the only other free service I had after killing all my other social media
EDIT: oops, Spotify. Which also doesn’t offer a tracking-free premium product haha
It might drive more people to Costco/BJs/Sams wholesale type places as well which seems like it would be bad for the people who don’t have the extra cash for the membership fee and for the diversity of stores and selection.
A Costco membership is 65 USD per year and includes membership cards for two people. I know that there are people in destitute poverty, but $65 is really, really reasonable overall.
Especially as each person with a card can bring two cardless people with them, it quickly becomes feasible to take the whole family to Costco for dinner at the food court for like $15.
I adore my Costco membership (and we usually get 3 meals from the chicken), but I’m not certain the value would be there if I was only shopping for myself.
Aldi by us has generally cheaper apples, strawberries, asparagus, zucchini, bell peppers, hot peppers, canned beans, dried beans, most ice cream, and is pretty close on various stocks and meat. Part of that is Costco often just has the organic option, but some things are just more expensive.
Costco isn’t always the cheapest, it’s best for decent quality, reasonable price stuff or bulk. If you don’t use Costco gas often, don’t have space for bulk goods, or want to do your own bargain shopping, paying $65/yr for the option to buy from Costco doesn’t make as much sense.
There should be legislation that prohibits price discrimination based on personal health data. Individualized pricing is going to find more and more areas of pricing inefficiency and charge some people more.
That said, the question and answer are very overstated. First, retail pharmacies are in existential crisis because of a shift from buying consumable household goods in stores to online. If pharmacies raise Tylenol prices that much, customers will add Tylenol to their Amazon cart.
Second, the price discrimination identified in the question is between individuals shopping at the same store. Perceptions of fairness are a major constraint to price discrimination. Effective price discrimination either needs to happen opaquely (individualized prices on an online store) or through a visible scheme that consumers perceive as fair (airline tickets). Store prices are too transparent to others’ to make this effective. Price discrimination between consumers is also limited by the homogeneity of consumers. In Matt’s example, if he can pay more for Cheerios, it’s likely that most of the shoppers at his store come from the same, affluent neighborhood and can also afford it. Sadly, unfettered price discrimination can sometimes lead to higher prices for those who can’t pay. Even though they are more price sensitive, they tend to live in neighborhoods with limited options.
Airline pricing really doesn’t feel transparent! My partner is convinced that you have to price shop on one computer but actually buy it from a different one, because he thinks it will raise the price if you search multiple times from the same device.
I’m semi-convinced of the same thing. But I wonder if the number of times a fare is searched in a short time is a reliable price signal, rather than individualized pricing. It’s better to search on google flights first and then check the airline site.
What I meant is that the major ways that airlines price discriminate are well known and perceived to be okay: charging more closer to the flight, raising prices as inventory decreases, etc.
In the recent past, however, United did something sneaky and not transparent. It’s rare that first class seats on domestic flights are all sold versus being given out as upgrades. They started selling first class seat upgrades at fairly low prices ($150 - $300 or so) to infrequent travelers. The result is selling a first class seat for very little (let’s say $500 total) and eliminating the possibility of an upgrade for a frequent traveler. I don’t think they do this any more, which is why I’m skeptical of things that are really outside the norms. Customers figure it out and the backlash can be worse than the surplus profit earned.
If you pay attention to the fare classes, it's not so surprising. If he notices that, it's probably because he waits too long to finally buy and the more discounted class is no longer available. And now that my university forces me to buy through their travel agency, I can confirm that the price is practically identical when I check on the airline's website and then the agency's.
And yes, it’s wild how the same grocery store chain will have noticeably cheaper prices in my less affluent neighborhood than at other locations. We have two Kroger affiliate chains in town and I find one is pretty much always cheaper than the other, too.
Yeah, in the end higher grocery prices are good because grocery store pharmacy staff should be cross-subsidized. Let’s make a box of Cheerio’s $10 and subsidize pharmacy operations with it!
This is already possible and proven. AVs can already move inches apart with no issue. If we have downtown cooridors with nothing but AVs on the road it would be almost trivial to remove all stoplights, create easements for hopping on/off, and then shuttling around with just a few centrally managed protocols that new AVs must interact with.
That's my point though. Downtown cores should be AV only. It would be trivial to implement. Your own car can be brought to you as you leave the city center. Theres 0 downside at all. Who likes driving 5 mph through city centers that cause all sorts of safety issues for everyone involved. Who likes finding that one narrow street parallel parking spot. Inbound traffic can stop at the edge of the city and you can get personally shuttled to where you are going. It would actually be far, far faster for commuters.
In the precise areas where congestion is the worst, AVs will do much less to resolve it absent huge levels of IoT integration that either cannot happen at all or will take a huge amount of time to assemble and train AVs to function within.
Further in this direction, it amuses me how this is basically inching close to recreating subway systems. Just with smaller vehicles.
The point to point nature of it going to your office does have advantages. But so does using bigger vehicles to go to buildings where we have purposely built up a lot of commuters.
Like, I could also imagine personalized vehicles to pick up all of the kids at the end of school and take them directly to their house. I don't know that that is automatically better than just having a few bus routes for most of them.
This is also trivially solved by more lane separation. Without street parking in urban cores there's a lot more room to play with. Crosswalk signals being connected to AVs stops them when people want to cross, otherwise there are fully separated barriers.
Also if has already been proven that AVs react to people/kids running into the street far faster and safer than people do. Moot point.
It will not take long to do fleet training, that, again, has already been done in a thousand different use cases. The tech is already there across every part of the stack.
I agree with you in general, but you're talking about a downtown where there are no traffic lights because the AVs are programmed to drive within inches of each other and seamlessly allow each other to pass. That only works if there's no outside interference from pedestrians.
Your vision of cities full of fast AVs inches apart is a vision for streets only as fast transportation. It ignores street life entirely. It assumes that nobody wants to go outside except to hop into an AV.
You're again picturing the whole city full of cars as-is. The point is that the higher speed and higher utilization of every car means there's FEWER cars on the road. Likely traveling in tighter groupings so there's MORE space between each group for people to cross. Instead of 10 cars on a block with a few feet of space and 7 of them only with a single driver, there are 3 AVs traveling in a pack and the rest of the street is empty.
This is completely wrong. Higher utilization might mean fewer vehicles overall, but who cares? The actual number of cars in the road at a given time would not decrease unless the number of *trips* decrease, and everything you’ve said implies they will increase. After all, if you can send your kid to school in an AV and then take a separate AV to work yourself, rather than put them on the bus or take them yourself on the way, you’ve created an additional trip and therefore an additional car on the road that was not there before.
How about merging on and off freeways? A lot of inherent congestion on them comes when there are too many vehicles all trying to weave within the same space.
I don't think AV-only should include freeways. I thought you meant how would human drivers navigate this with AV-only downtown cores. I think they should park at the city edge at large park&rides and hop onto fleets of AVs from there.
That seems like an added step of inconvenience that people might not like, especially if they're having to move a significant amount of goods between vehicles. And it strikes me as of now that even coordinated AVs aren't going to fix problems of freeway congestion, which would mean that there needs to still be considerable room for non-motorist forms of transportation.
I don't get the animosity in that aren't there going to be self driving buses as well at some point? I have to imagine there will be a day where self driving technology will make it cheaper for many mid sized transit systems to expand the frequency of their bus service. Buses will still probably present a significant savings to self-driving taxis for riders.
There is an element of the left that views transit as a jobs program but I thought a lot of transit advocates are against that. And being a bus driver in many mid-sized metros sucks because it's a strenuous job where they don't even have the money to pay you decently.
I've always thought that buses were the obvious first-use-case for autonomous driving. They already cost a lot of money so $20,000 in sensors is reasonable, they have a lot of space for sensors, they're tall so sensors can be mounted up high, they travel on predictable paths, there's a huge roof for a Starlink dish or radio antennas.
My guess is that a bunch of cameras and a way for people to anonymously report antisocial behavior is the best we're going to do on a lot of public transit.
The driver is such a high % of the operating cost that the bus itself would change; instead of one huge 30-person bus that runs every 15 minutes you could have 3 10-person vans that run every 5 minutes.
Or you could have 3 30-person buses! Theres not much savings from introducing smaller vehicles. It’s often better for your mechanics to only have to deal with one type of vehicle, even if the vehicle is largely empty a lot of the time.
Yeah I wonder. It probably depends on peak usage. Fuel costs would be lower (probably the next leading cost even in an EV scenario) and if you could downscale to use Sprinter vans (or similar) you get a much better economies of scale for parts, support, etc.
Yeah this is all extremely inevitable. People can disagree with the vision I have laid out but it's clearly heading towards AV+EV in every area.
The 'jobs program' thing is more than frustrating, because 15y+ ago when uber/lyft were replacing taxis these same people were decrying these services as bad gig make-work jobs. Now theyre sacrosanct and people MUST have their own cars in urban areas taking up huge swaths of street parking. That is the combo that has led to far greater traffic, every piece of street taken up for parking and nowhere for uber/lyft/instacart/doordash drivers to stop as they have swelled in use. Increasing AVs and decreasing street parking options are clearly the way out here.
Plus the fact that the labor needs of most transit systems are difficult given the need for max drivers during highest demand periods, like morning and evening commuting time.
No need for hyperbole here. The average car gets about 4% utilization (an hour a day). If AVs can bump that up to 20% it will be a huge win. I hope utilization doesn't go above 70% because I, for one, plan on being asleep at 4 AM.
Also, ride share is typically about 50% deadheading.
In this context I mean rate of driving v. parked. Waymos already are ~56% driving time w/ passengers and 45%–55% charging time with extremely little staging during low demand. The point is not taking up parking spots
You're assuming broad adoption of AV taxis over ownership. When rideshare was building out, the same claims were made. Turns out to be very not true. The likely substitution is public transit if the costs are as low as Uber's subsidized start, so more cars, not less, with the same need for parking.
Overtime, that might change (although will people really chose a shared car over one they can do whatever they want in?), but what a disaster in the long transition period
Yeah that's the point. Ride share didn't do the same because it added drivers who bought more cars. This removes them both AND the street parking. Avoiding long transition period via making AV only downtown cores is the whole point.
If you're going to do that, again, why not just limit cars? Places that do that in the US have done well. They tend to be smaller cities and no place has committed as thoroughly as Paris, but Montreal and small cities that have done it show it can work in the U.S.
Your assumption that AV will reduce demand for owned vehicles so far has no evidence behind it. The information we do have says it won't work. I know that's hard to accept, but that's the state of the data at present. If that changes, we'll see that in early adoption cities like Phoenix and can revise plans. But for now, grounding planning in known reality is better than chasing a low-probability assumption.
I am glad we're both aligned on the vision of more open space for pedestrians and cyclists, and car-limited cities. Fight for that now. We can fill it with whatever technology works best when we get there.
They only park to charge. In the morning they drive into the city from a lot 10-30 miles away. Congestion charges discourages driving into the city if they wouldn't make any money.
I suspect that some of the hostility to self-driving cars has to do with the fact that they come out of the tech industry. I can think of several people (well educated and affluent) people who are of the opinion that the tech industry as a whole and not just say Facebook or Elon Musk is deeply evil and that anything that comes out of tech is going to be bad in the long run, and they've been this way fro over 10 years. They're going be against self-driving cars even if they save tens of thousands of lives each year because they come from an industry that they view negatively. And so they make claims about self-driving cars being really dangerous and somehow the tech companies and governments are hiding all these accidents.
I'm honestly surprised how vitriolic the anti AV movement is. It achieves tons of the goals of the transit movement in a far more sustainable, tax-free way. People truly are just bound by their hatred of the tech industry while they use every new product released without a second thought
Yeah, when I encounter someone who's anti AV and ask them to explain their why they don't like TVs, they'll say something that's demonstrably false and if I point out that it's not true they start yelling at me.
More air pollution (air pollution comes from tires as well as exhaust, and faster AVs are going to cause more pollution because they're faster)
More noise
More parking (hello, you have to put those cars somewhere at night)
The claim is pedestrians and cyclists will be safer. But will we? The people inside the AVs are still going to want to get rid of us, or deny our safety. They'll argue that the next regulation they propose won't make us any less safe—but I want to be more safe, not just as safe but now there are twice as many cars on the road and actually as a cyclist I'm less safe.
This isn't a win-win for me, because I don't think I'll win more safety and I'll lose everything else.
How can you say there would be no more traffic, when the AVs would be a significant portion of the time, and when people would use AVs instead of transit?
Expecting to relieve traffic by making the cars move faster, closer together, and more coordinated is fundamentally the same as expecting to relieve traffic by building more lanes, and will run into the same issues.
Cons—cities that are even more built around the assumption that large, heavy, motorized devices are the best/only way to get around. AVs might be part of the solution, but if all they switch people from the most space efficient forms of transportation to individual cars, you're making a world that's more hostile to anybody who isn't in a metal box.
not at all. AVs as the focus FOR CARS means you can remove street parking almost entirely. this allows for widening of sidewalks, areas for ebikes (which are quickly becoming the norm as well), easement areas for restaurants like we had during covid, etc. It opens the aperture far more for everything else by reclaiming tons of street space used for parking
That's a nice theory, but the data that people will swap their personalized cars for shared/taxi cars isn't good. People didn't give up their cars en mass when Uber was offering very cheap, subsidized transit.
If you're changing city laws to restrict cars, then why not just restrict cars? Small cars driving super close to each other is just a bad version of a bus. You're sketching a solution to a problem that's been solved and that we have many examples of successful implementations of that solution.
theres a lot of variety needed in automobiles still to eliminate every type of car, truck, bus, etc. No to mention remote power issues in rural and suburban areas. The overall goal is trying to retake urban areas by opening up the sheer 25%+ of urban space used for parking.
Removing every human driven car from an urban area means that (a) the replacement must solve the same issues as having the car in a city helped with, and (b) do it better, faster, more efficiently. That has not been solved with ebikes, scooters, trains, etc.
Urbanists hate AVs because the value proposition of urbanism depends on the car-dependent status quo being bad. If it sucks less, urbanism offers less improvement but retains a high cost.
Personally I would love an urbanist future but I'm not willing to sacrifice the meaningful gains from AVs today for a (IMO very long) shot at remaking America's cities from the ground up.
Plus I think AVs and urbanism could be more compatible than meets the eye, but only if a lot of rules at every level of government were changed to facilitate that synergy. The current automotive and street forms are not compatible with urbanism.
The dirty little secret of left wing urbanists is that a lot of them are authoritarians who want to use the government to force people to stop living lives they disapprove of. Things like pedestrian safety are just the hook for those beliefs.
While I like self-driving cars, I am well aware that there are a lot of people who would love to use them to physically control where people can and cannot go by programming what routes the cars can follow and what locations they can go to. This is why I don't want to completely ban driving.
I don’t think Will Stancil would be allowed to follow and document ICE officers in a world where the government had access to AVs. On a less individual level, you could imagine a world where AVs are banned from disaster areas for safety (e.g., there’s a flood here, we ban that in the master system), and then eventually protest zones become “safety hazards” that you’re not allowed to drive to.
Stopping at random places not really, but there’s plenty of realistic failure modes that could come from an authoritarian government having control over an autonomous vehicle system with human driving banned. Think an auth-left regime shutting down the AV system for COVID lockdowns, or an auth-right one banning Latinos from the platform to make them easier targets for ICE.
Those are interesting points. But it’s worth noting that this is already how the air travel system works, and even in late March 2020 it never got shut down this way, despite being much less relevant for daily life for 95% of people than the within-city transportation system.
There are definitely some people who want to destroy all suburbs, most of us just want to stop our own policymakers in our our already-urban homes from crafting transportation policy for the convenience of non-resident drivers over residents of all stripes.
Which is basically just another form of NIMBY-ism - "if you don't live here already, why should there be any infrastructure to enable you to come here?"
There are incredibly obvious trade-offs between the convenience of suburban drivers and the safety of urban residents. For the last 60-70 years they’ve basically all been resolved in favor of the former.
This is very much a case where simply not favoring suburban drivers is going to make them feel as if you’re losing their rights, but… I really don’t care?
It’s not a “fantasy.” The power of the state has been used to banish the lifestyle I prefer to a tiny sliver on urban land, where 2-bedroom apartment is now well over a million dollars.
As someone who’s income is regularly confused with that of a billionaire, I have no choice but to commute 1.5 hours each way to a car-dependent suburb if I want to keep my career and have a room for a child to sleep in at the same time, because that is the will of the voters in my region.
The urban/suburban culture war could be resolved with just four words:
To. Each. His. Own.
Maybe I want to live in a high-rise apartment. Maybe I want to live in a single-family ranch home on an acre lot. Maybe I want something in between. Let the mix of different types of developments reflect the aggregate of individual choices.
Of course, we do need to consider if there is a level playing field. Land use and transportation choices are subject to all kinds of taxes, subsidies and regulations pulling in different directions.
Suburban areas are formed by transforming farmland, which mostly doesn’t object. Urban areas don’t pencil on cornfields; they are formed by transforming increasingly valuable suburban areas, which do object. So unfortunately there is a zero sum element - a previously-suburban ring around the city center urbanizes, or urbanism doesn’t happen at all.
A left wing urbanist friend of mine never stops talking about how great buses are, but whenever anyone says they don't want to ride them, he accuses them of not wanting to be around brown people. He doesn't want everyone to do their own thing, he wants everyone to ride the bus and like it.
The types of urban areas urbanists are concerned about are a tiny part of the overall country. People who want to drive a lot could just live in the suburbs? No visa is required, you can still commute to the same job, and it’s most likely a lot cheaper.
No, a lot of them think they shouldn't exist, or define "the externalities" dishonestly so high that they can try to force people out of them, because obviously auto-centered suburbanites shouldn't exist and should be forced to live more "virtuous" lives.
I don't have to define externalities dishonestly to say that drivers don't pay their own way, and freeload over non-drivers. I just have to look at roads and street parking, and know who pays for them. I just have to look at air pollution, and know who pays for it. I just have to look at giant required parking lots, and parking requirements for every kind of building, and know who pays for them.
There are definitely very real externalities that drivers don't have to pay for proportional to use, but Dilan is talking more about the crazy urbanists who genuinely don't think sprawly suburbs should exist at all. This isn't a strawman, I personally know people like this - it probably teeters on the edge of being "nutpicking" but it's a pretty large group of people in the urbanism community who overlap with the "f*ckcars*" community
Conversely, you don't appear to appreciate the massive agglomeration benefits drivers can provide by putting large numbers of people in daily economic contact.
I don’t think they should exist by regulatory fiat at distances from the city center where urbanism is commercially viable, in regions where the cost of living is spiraling.
It's intriguing that Matt sees the consumer surplus to customized pricing in terms of how much money is spent, whereas others might see consumer surplus instead in terms of how much time and effort is spent. That view would invert who would benefit as consumers from what Matt states. Then, the question would be whose view of consumer surplus we want to prioritize.
Amazon is a clear winner of the view that most people believe that consumer surplus that people want to save on is time and effort. The sacrifice of any real pricing discrimination is so over the top I avoid it as much as possible.
Consumer surplus is a technical economic term that refers to the difference between the maximum price one is willing to pay and the price actually paid. Price discrimination specifically attacks that surplus. Of course, one can pay a “price” in terms of time and effort but that doesn’t figure in the technical calculation.
I thought surplus was supposed to subtract out the deadweight loss? It’s supposed to be consumer welfare gains minus consumer welfare losses, while producer surplus is producer welfare gains minus producer losses. Deadweight losses are the part that no one gains from, while surplus is just the result of negotiation about the positive sum components.
It depends on the context. Price discrimination works on prices paid, not implicit costs to the consumer. So deadweight loss reduces the total surplus but price discrimination ignores that
In a world full of AI and online shopping tools, time and effort spent should inevitably decline towards zero. The only reason they wouldn't do that is if the corporate world uses AI to ensure they remain high.
I disagree. Go to any car rental counter at an airport. You'll find that they all sell essentially the same product, but the "economy" ones have one desk serving four different companies and a much longer line. Sure, this saves money for them. But to customers, time and convenience is a valuable resource that companies can exploit for profit.
I highly doubt raising the salience of race would be good for the YIMBY movement.
"Hey person with latent NIMBY tendencies, do you want to vote to change your neighborhood so poorer people of color can move in?" Doesn't seem like the best strategy imo.
Yes, 100%. It's all about behavior and forced underclass integration brings all sorts of neighborhood ruining blight that turns functional working class neighborhoods into shitholes. That's why we have suburbs.
So long as progressives enact policies that demand more equal outcomes without any acknowledgement of the destructive behavior and lifestyle choices of the intended beneficiaries of policy we are just doubling down on bad assumptions. And once you implement something, you can't go back.
True. But I suspect that most people's stereotype of a black/white person moving in is the opposite, so prospectively "more black people will live near you" sounds worse, even if in practice it means "more upper-middle-class black people because you live in an UMC area".
I'm not saying that there aren't any racist Americans because that would be a stupid thing to say, but I do think that there's a lot of class prejudice that operationalises as racial stereotypes (ie people think black people are poor and they don't like poor people).
This links to another answer, the one about well-off black men getting stopped a lot: because Americans have the stereotype that black people are poor, seeing a rich black person runs through that stereotype as "this is a poor person with rich person stuff, they must have stolen it".
Yeah, however racist you assume homeowners are, in practice they are probably a lot more racist than that. Nextdoor comments are not a statistically sound measure of homeowner racism but they are definitely strong anecdotal evidence of it.
So I have absolutely no doubt that submerging the racial implications of zoning reform is the tactically correct choice. It's depressing and disturbing that that's so, but from the crooked timber of humanity etc etc.
Particularly because blue-team initiatives are structurally incapable of outright denying that their plan is to move members of the underclass in with you!
Mind you, the 40+ shitlib crowd has about as much desire to live near the underclass as the 40+ tardcon crowd.
(I use "underclass" because I don't think very many people who would ever consider YIMBYism are scared of non-white PMC people moving in. This corresponds to race only insofar as the white underclass doesn't live in cities.)
Philly is getting richer, but the professional class transplants mostly don’t believe in public safety enforcement, so at this point I don’t wanna go full YIMBY because I want to price out the worst of the trash and exile it to the suburbs.
Luckily the professional class transplants aren’t very YIMBY either.
That is how it would probably be phrased if it was a local ballot measure in Denver . . . . (Like, seriously, almost every local election cycle for the past decade there's been at least one ballot measure where my reaction to reading it is, "Could we at least pretend that the municipal government serves all members of society without regard to race?")
Agreed. But academically there is a large racial justice issue which is that minorities were largely legally excluded from buying when housing prices were much cheaper so didn’t benefit from the appreciation and have to pay higher prices now. It’s one of the main ways in which past discrimination demonstrably causes part of the wealth gap today. It’s smart not to emphasize this in political messaging but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true or that people don’t sincerely believe it.
Yeah I think it's unambiguously true that pro-YIMBY policies would be very good for racial justice (and personally I'd argue that they'd be much better for racial justice than the current criminal justice push).
But as Zagarna said below, the median voter is what you find on Nextdoor.
This is where there’s a big difference between market rate and affordable housing. If prices fall from $1.5 to $1m you’re going to get marginally less affluent professionals. Hardly a threat to the schools. Probably still higher income than established homeowners, who are mostly there by virtue of being early, not high-income. But if the state moves in genuine underclass people it’s a different ball game.
I suspect the correlation between poor and thrifty is less perfect than Matt imagines here. I had a boss, who obviously made more money than me, but was an avid deal hunter and points optimizer. They would claim rich people are rich because they don't spend their money.
At the same time I had a couple of young renter neighbors who were getting Dunkin doordashed every weekend.
Things like navigating bureaucracy, paper work or educational opportunities we see high socio-economic people bring much better at than lower, so I wouldn't count on price discrimination being that different.
The other important question is how much retail or groceries would actually expand, I am skeptical. But that's very much key as without supply expansion price discrimination lowers consumer surplus.
But I am skeptical of the whole scenario, at least in the extreme, it doesn't take too many $50 cheerios boxes before someone doesn't return and starts writing nasty things on the internet.
I think the difference will be less stark than people think. It will be the choice of going to your local discount grocery with a default price, or going to your corner Amazon Go (or whatever) store where they have your favorite brands in the exact quantities you want for a little more money. No way can they capture the entire consumer surplus with any amount of competition.
Amazon has data to execute near-perfect price discrimination, and chooses not to.
Instead of trying to extract the maximum consumer surplus on a single transaction, they prefer that consumers reflexively go to Amazon to buy something without even having to check competitor prices. Why? It's much better for business that way.
Even "lazy" consumers hear things via word of mouth, or read a newspaper or reddit or Substack. If consumers suspect they are receiving a personalized higher price trust evaporates.
Prices are highly dynamic, but for all consumers, and is based on aggregate demand and competitor prices.
"There’s a roster of grocery staples — Cheerios, milk, butter, apples, cantaloupe, eggs — that we always stock in our house..."
We've found him, people! The person who gets excited when the cut fruit bowl is nothing but cantaloupe leavened with the occasional soupçon of pineapple. Normal people's hopes are dashed, whereas it's days of wine and cantaloupe at the Yglesiases.
Speaking of feeling crazy; I feel like he’s only an OK at best actor, and him winning is completely baffling to me. He was also just “fine” in Black Panther (though playing a more interesting character, his performance was notably not as good as Boseman’s).
He was really good in Creed. I don't think he was even asked to do that much in Sinners; yes the two brothers clearly had different personalities but it wasn't like he really had to flex his acting chops for either.
They felt very similar to me (though that is down to the direction too I am sure). Which, I mean, they are identical twins who are super close and play up their twinness so it’s not that weird they act exactly alike and have the same mannerisms etc., but it wasn’t really even playing two characters! Probably an acting challenge to do scenes together with a stand in though.
It does seem less ambitious compared to other gimmicks like Face/Off (ok John Travolta you're playing an FBI agent... now you're playing Nicholas Cage trapped in the body of that FBI agent... now you're playing Nicholas Cage trapped in the body of that FBI agent pretending to be the FBI agent to trick his family)
Thank you for this! I was gonna say, damn he's not even recognizable as the second brother.
I haven't seen Sinners yet, but tbh I'm not a big fan of the two roles gimmick as it's been done previously (Fargo/Ewan MacGregor, The Deuce/James Franco, though I did really like the two Cages in Adaptation which is I guess the gold standard)
You probably didn’t think to mention Dr Strangelove/Peter Sellers because he played three roles, not two. Otherwise that would have been the obvious first choice.
Orphan Black, which I have been rewatching now that it has been picked up by Netflix, is the epitome of this, as Tatiana Maslany plays no fewer than 17 (!) clones, many of whom spend some number of scenes pretending to be specific other clones. (Two other actors also play multiple clones.)
>The big ones are: allow more doctors and engineers to immigrate, don’t cut Social Security, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expand Medicaid, and raise the income tax rate on people earning more than $400,000 per year to 45 percent.
Why is mandatory parental leave and vacation time never mentioned in these? Every poll I've looked at says it's incredibly popular and I find it weird we went through a democratic trifecta and they chose to spend their time on low impact low priority issues like renewable energy instead of something pretty close to universal.
One issue is that for upper middle income and above corporations will already include these as benefits, so this is mostly a working class issue. And the democratic party is no longer the working class party, so maybe they stopped caring?
I think there's a worry about the fact that small businesses would have the hardest time complying with it, so there would have to be minimum size small business carveouts, but that would leave a bunch of the working class in a position where they couldn't benefit anyway. There's also the worry that businesses would just start cutting back on positions for the working class.
These seem like solvable problems to me. For vacation you could accrue over time, have use it or pay out policies, give employers flexibility on when it can be used, exceptions for seasonal/short term jobs, etc. For parental you should have enough notice to plan and temp those roles appropriately.
Vacation is easily solvable and there are working systems to copy from a host of other countries.
To make parental leave work in a fair manner for small employers, you need a collective insurance system.
If an employee takes six months paid leave (so you now have to pay them, and hire a temporary replacement and pay that temporary replacement) and this happens on average about once in every 35 years of employment (average 2 child per adult, average working life is 35 years or so), and you have five employees, then you're only dealing with it one year in seven on average, but if you get unlucky, you get two employees at once and that cripples your business.
Adverse selection means that getting commercial insurance against that is really expensive; the only solution is a forced insurance system. You could require commercial insurance, but it's almost certainly far more efficient to just collect money through the payroll tax system and then reimburse employers while an employee is on parental leave (example: they can claim reimbursement for the full salary or the FICA cap, whichever is lower for six months of parental leave per child).
If you're a large employer, then you can effectively self-insure: if you have 3500 employees, you have 100 on parental leave every year, that's just a cost of doing business.
I know a guy who did basically the opposite: went on parental leave, then took a long vacation, then came back for a couple of weeks to reveal he had been poached for the best job in his field and left.
Is there anything wrong with that? That’s just going to happen sometimes when you offer benefits. My sister was on maternity leave when her husband got transferred to a different city. She never went back to work there. That’s just the way of things. We should just have plenty of government support to reduce the burden on the private sector for this.
If you don't allow people to take parental leave when they become parents, you're just saying women can't change jobs when they're pregnant. Which seems unfair to young women, to me.
Life often is not fair. Much of what we do as a society is decide who gets to bear that, how much, and when. If I hired someone to start doing a job and they immediately go out on parental leave (man or woman), it really sucks as an employer. We as a society can decide the employer should still bear those costs. But lets not deceive ourselves into thinking that there isn't a cost borne by somebody.
Someone (I think on this blog) recently argued that the underlying problem driving Daylight Savings arguments wasn't so much differing intrinsic preferences for earlier versus later daytime hours, but the basic scarcity of total daylight hours in Northern Hemisphere winter. This seems conceptually similar: the fundamental problem is loss allocation downstream of the immutable fact that "having children imposes substantial burdens."
Sure. But so does owning a house. In both cases, people both get significant personal pleasure out of having them; and also both are a critical need for society. There are people who *don't* want to have one and/or the either, but they are the exception to the rule.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People want it to not be true and look for reasons it might not be true rather than thinking about what might happen if it *were* true.
Why would women decide to stop having babies because of this?
There are tons of work requirements that make things harder for many of my life goals, but I don't give up on those life goals because of that. I'm not handing my agency in life over to an employer benefit choices. I might choose an employer who is more helpful in meeting the goals though, so there could be an incentive for an employer to offer it.
Ideally a parental leave law would have enough benefit symmetry that this is also a risk when hiring a man. That way women would not be discriminated against as much.
(Obviously no amount of symmetry will protect against the fact that women can be visibly pregnant and that might be used against them in the interview process).
This is why a federal system should just use the payroll tax to reimburse parental leave (at least up to the FICA cap). Back of my envelope suggests that you might have to raise the payroll tax by 1% to fully fund six months leave per baby.
You could also do this for the SECA tax, which would mean that the US had better parental leave for self-employed people than almost anywhere in Europe.
I'm all for proportional representation, but it is structurally unworkable at the federal level without major constitutional change, and since that would need to include abolishing the Senate, that is extremely daunting. It needs to be a bottom up movement where municipalities demonstrate its worth first, then hopefully filtering up to the state level, where unlike the federal level they can deviate much more than things like the sole exception of Nebraska's unicameral legislature. That's going to take a long time to do. So in the here and now we're going to have to find a way to improve what we have.
I had an unanswered question a few weeks ago about the value in calling for a constitutional convention. It's obviously far-fetched and I've always felt there'd be a "be careful what you wish for" element to it, but considering where we are now and Trump showing us the risk of a strongman hijacking the GOP, I'd at least like to see more ideas along the lines of yours. We're at the point where we need structural reform.
I could totally see an American constitutional convention following Chile's path: left-wingers won the first convention elections and wrote a left-wing constitution, which was voted down. Right-wingers won the second convention elections and wrote a right-wing constitution, which was voted down. Original constitution stands and it was all a waste of time. We're just so polarized.
I also honestly have abject fear about what a Republican-dominated constitutional process would result in.
Ezra Klein made a point years ago that one of the reasons we've really slowed down at the rate we pass constitutional amendments is that we don't trust ourselves collectively these days.
Pedantry of the day: If Alabama is the tipping point state, that means all states bluer than that passed it more easily. That's probably a pretty good constitution, much better than if the tipping point state were, say, Minnesota.
This is actually not true, and it's worth unpacking the reason why it's not true, because it involves unpacking the distinction between two separate sins of the current Senate-- malapportionment and winner-take-all.
So one of the major problems with the Senate is that it gives small states a level of power that large states lack. The people there, very directly, get more representation than those in big states-- sometimes comically more, like the average voter in Wyoming has almost three times as much representation as the average voter in California. This is an intractable problem because the entrenched language in the Senate precludes depriving a state of "equal representation" without its consent. The only real way to tweak this is by deliberately making all states about the same size, which isn't going to happen for other practical reasons. And short of a revolution destroying the Constitution outright, we're stuck with it.
But the other problem with the Senate is that consistently getting 51 percent of the vote gets you 100 percent of the representation. That makes the otherwise academic question of whether the majority of states are "blue" or "red" massively consequential. Nonproportionality IS a solvable problem, and it's a solved problem even within the context of a malapportioned Senate. Australia's Senate, like ours, is constitutionally malapportioned such that every state has equal representation-- Tasmania, with 580,000 people, gets the same representation as New South Wales, with 8.5 million people. However, the way that equal representation gets manifested is through electing six senators per cycle per state, not one, and the way the six senators are distributed uses single transferable vote, which is basically a form of proportional representation (I will spare everyone the math on that, but if you look it up on Wikipedia you'll get all the gory details). As a result there's always at least one Labor senator and one Liberal or National senator (the two biggest parties) in every Senate election regardless of whether you're talking about super-libbed-out South Australia or right-wing Queensland. Six seats per cycle is also enough to allow for a decent number of senators from outside of the two major parties, enough to where it's basically impossible for there to ever be a majority for the government in that chamber. That means some level of minor-party buy-in is needed for most laws to pass.
It would not take a revolution overthrowing the Constitution to move to Australia's system of equal proportional representation for each state. I think the Australian Senate is quite badly designed, and the malapportionment is a big reason for that, but it's a whole lot better than ours in that third-party voices are really important in getting laws through it.
An Australian style Senate would be an improvement, but I still think it's going to be very daunting for the current Senate to sign off on without pressure from lower level examples.
If we made the House elected via proportional voting, I would swap most of the "extra" Senate powers to the House. Confirmations, treaties, etc. Would still require the Senate to pass legislation. This would require a constitutional amendment obviously.
Scott Alexander had a cool guest post on "Giant Congress." The Congressional Apportionment Amendment exists and "just" needs to be ratified. Fun fact: it is the last remaining unratified amendment form the original 12 considered for the Bill of Rights. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights
True, although it is not the last remaining unratified amendment, period; there are still amendments pending that would strip citizenship from people who take titles of nobility (take that, Meghan Markle), allow Congress to regulate child labor, and, uh, re-legalize slavery... or something. Frankly, I don't think anyone knows what ratifying the Corwin Amendment would actually do at this point.
With how easy it apparently is to tear down government buildings to build big-ass ballrooms, presumably making a significantly larger senate chamber would be doable. Or just put Frontier Airlines in charge of seating for the current chamber and you'd fit thousands of reps easily! (Though given the age demos that may significantly slow down entry/exit from the room)
I think the only way it works is for a state to do that with its own legislature as a test case. I think the main problem is that wouldn’t be popular. People are used to the current system and the status quo bias is strong.
Does not have to involve abolishing the Senate. Does need constitutional change.
You just make the Senate bigger so it can be elected proportionally in each state.
But if you really want to do it, the first stage is creating actual political parties (ie legal entities with the power to, as an entity, select candidates in any manner they choose).
Since the likelihood of a state doing that (ie banning primaries) is as close to zero as makes no difference, here's my proposal.
Allow party *factions* to formally nominate candidates in primaries and for primary candidates to have the formal label of a party faction. Let's say the first state where this happens is Illinois. IL-DSA registers as a faction in the Democratic Party. In primaries, there would be one candidate who would be the DSA candidate, chosen by the DSA according to its internal procedures (whether that be a nominating convention or a postal ballot of dues-paying members or the decision of a nominating committee, or however they choose to operate). The primary ballot would then list candidates with their factional affiliations. So there might be a DSA candidate and a Progressive candidate and a New Democrat and a Blue Dog.
Over on the GOP side, there might be a Tea Party candidate and a MAGA candidate and Republican Main Street candidate.
Over time, those factions can harden into things that operate like multi-party-system parties and that's when you can turn those into real political parties and a real PR system.
Let's not throw up our hands prematurely. Just because we can't change everything doesn't mean we can't make a huge amount of progress at the federal level right now.
There is a ton that can be done that would make Congress work dramatically better without any constitutional changes. IMO, the most important thing is just getting rid of the filibuster, which doesn't even need legislation. This strikes me as a far bigger problem in practice, actually, than the disproportionality of the Senate.
Then you could do proportional representation in the House and ranked choice voting for the Senate through legislation without any constitutional changes.
No, it's still only for one person from one party for each seat. If the person/party you want doesn't get that seat, then you have no representation in that chamber.
Considering that Kroger mails me coupons on all the time specifically for the items I buy most often, I don't think ultra-specific, individualized price hikes from supermarkets is something we will have to be concerned about.
Yes, my wife had a bit of a freakout recently when she looked at the Kroger coupons and realized that every single one of them was for a product that we routinely buy.
Back in the 2000s when Kroger first started their loyalty card (Kroger plus, iirc), my dad freaked out about them tracking his purchases. At the time he felt they would sell your data to insurance companies who would raise premiums based on your diet or to the government who might audit you if your spending didn’t match what they thought was appropriate for your income. It’s interesting to see his paranoia circle back and seem a bit more reasonable two decades later. AFAIK, he still doesn’t shop anywhere with a loyalty card and pays cash for just about everything “so they can’t track you.”
My dad is the same way, I'd classify him as a "Michael Moore liberal" who's very skeptical of any kind of tracking stuff (doesn't have a loyalty card at the grocery store, refuses to use a credit card online, etc). Sometimes the mistrust pays off, like in early Feb 2020 when he told me to stock up on masks. Other times he's watching a shittily-made documentary on "questions" about 9/11
Ha. The Kroger pharmacy app/mobile site has a “Nutrition Insights” tab that scores your monthly food purchases. It thinks we’re good so it must be pretty lax in its criteria. Of course, since families share a loyalty card it mixes everyone’s purchases together so is a pretty useless proxy for health.
Having spent most of my career doing dynamic pricing, I'm extremely skeptical that the degree of custom pricing described in that question is even possible. Dynamic pricing relies on broad statistical averages - we don't know who's willing to pay $500 for the last seat on a flight but we're 98% sure someone will - and works as well as it does in transportation because capacity is usually pretty limited relative to demand. There are too many unknown unknowns affecting someone's willingness to pay for Cheerios and that would still be true even if we somehow had total consumer surveillance and an AI capable of sifting through that volume of data.
I don't really get the problem with the Streetsblog/GGWash article Matt links to. It reports study findings that autonomous cars would increase driving and suggests that regulatory responses to that (like congestion pricing) are appropriate. That seems like the same conclusion you would reach from a standard externalities analysis; unless I'm missing something, it doesn't support a ban or something like an autonomous vehicles cap and it explicitly notes the potential safety benefits.
I'm not sure it's a "problem", but GGW clearly views reducing vehicle miles travelled as a bigger priority than traffic safety.
The article's conclusion illustrates this well:
> America could end up embracing a mode that addresses many of our traffic violence troubles, but fails to uproot the deeper rot of car dependency that has hollowed out our society.
"car dependency has hollowed out our society". I'm not sure what that means unless the vision is of everyone living in dense urban highrises within walking distance of trains. Not for me, I need a plot of land.
I want to live in 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 the same kind of city as urbanists, but I hate the agressive tendency to ignore contrary preferences and exaggerate externalities.
Trains still need a lot of expensive special purpose infrastructure, and the only advantage they have over other modes is that they carry a lot more people in less space. So they really do need density, even if the particular threshold of density they need might change when you get rid of the driver.
Studies pretty consistently show that married people have way more sex than unmarried people and its unusual for children to appear without sex. So lower marriage/fertility rates strongly suggest a substantive lower rate of "fucking" as well.
The main problem with personalised pricing,is the same as with haggling,it might lead to better pricing but it would take a lot of effort and mental energy. I really don't want to have to create a plan for optimising grocery prices. It would make buying things stressful and with lots of regret for mistakes, I would pay a lot of money not to have that stress.
Regarding abusive pricing for groceries and other necessities, one likely market response is the emergence of more retail brands that avoid such practices to optimize trust in Lazy Guys. An exemplar of this is the HEB chain in Texas, which elevates consumer trust above essentially all other values. It is assisted in this because it is privately held by a family (egads, billionaires) who are not hostage to quarterly results, but nevertheless illuminates a path forward. HEB dominates its markets in Texas, *and* it resists the urge to do sneaky things, which results in almost unbelievable brand loyalty. People really do talk about "my HEB," the store they go to. Never seen anything like it.
I think the whole pricing thing is dystopian but I also think it would most likely end up being defeated by consumer price monitoring apps, possibly run for you by a little shopping AI assistant, and maybe even businesses whose strategy involves deciding 'we don't screw people like that.'
At which point the AI pricing apps will charge highly customized prices capturing the vast majority of the surplus they salvaged for consumers.
The neoliberals are just dead wrong on this; this is an extraordinarily obvious case for regulation to preserve the functioning of markets.
Price discrimination on the basis of the identity of the buyer is *poison* and must be destroyed everywhere it already exists and prevented from taking a single step forward in expanding.
"At which point the AI apps will charge highly customized prices capturing the vast majority of the surplus they salvaged for consumers"
This is the PBM business model -- started as a way to do better price comparison shopping for health plans, and then moved ever closer towards "capturing the vast majority of the surplus they salvaged".
Good analogy. It also worries me even more because the PBM have already crossed the line into “deliberately making markets more opaque so they can generate more surplus for themselves,” and all the same incentives would apply to an AI shopping assistant’s developer.
Yea very good comparison and I think you and David are both right about the inherent inefficiency of prices being battled out in such a way. Probably a situation where the theoretical rationality of a market leads to bad outcomes for everyone.
Theoretical rationality is not the per se issue in re the market concept here but rather than unexamined potential for market equilibriums that may not be consumer optimal. Perfectly rational equilibrium outcomes possible sans necessity being consumer optimal. (speaking as a proper economist)
I haven't personally any views here as there are so many unknowns and factors pushing in different directions, I would be reluctatant to jump to any a priori conclusion (although for that same reason jumping to regulations which are comparatively easier to code into law than to later unwind if they end up having perverse outcomes [see rent controls, Jones Act etc]
Fair enough, I'm no economist, just a law talkin guy. That said my law talkin' has been in house healthcare and Allan's point about the PBMs resonates. Now part of that is that they're part of a larger, much messier ecosystem than retail groceries but it's a good example of something that was supposed to be a patient-supporting counter thrust to opaque (and downright shady) practices on the payer side. Instead they've evolved into just another massive rent seeker with no apparent value to the consumer.
I'd be careful applying the PBM business model to other industries. Health care is an extremely weird industry - it's highly regulated, medication is often patented or otherwise not subject to competition, the person paying often isn't the person buying, and the end customer often isn't in a good position to evaluate other options. All of these royally screw up competitive pressures. None of these are particularly relevant to Cheerios.
Yes, in general agree.
However, over 90% of prescription drugs used are not patented; they are commodity products that could be sold more like Cheerios or OTC drugs. To the extent there's dysfunction in that market in the US -- and there absolutely is -- it's more due to policy choices than anything inherent about the product class.
Sorry, what’s a PBM?
Pharmacy Benefits Manager. The thing companies hire to "negotiate" drug prices for their employees.
While I think the arms race of AI seems to favor the producer, there seems to be a clear under current where the ability for us to use personalized tools will be cheap. I don't think the setup of the producers having an AI fighting an expensive AI that consumers are paying to fight it will pass. We already see free AI models that rival paid versions. Consumers should have access to free shopping assistants.
What would the regulations look like? I'm having a hard-time getting my head around how the government could regulate the price of cheerios without also causing big problems.
Nik got it. Ban personalized pricing. Retailers must, at a given time and location, display and charge a single price to all via all sales channels. Online sales channels must display and charge a single price, period.
Price discrimination via time and most of the other currently extant methods serve actual purposes and enhance utility. We already limit them in various ways, no need for much change.
Ban the use of personal data for personalized pricing except for specific defined categories. You could still charge e.g. higher prices in a richer neighborhood like we do now.
impossible to effect, who is going to determine
A. What is personalised pricing
B. that a price is in fact "personalised"
C. Prove both of A & B in legal terms
Never mind the selectin of categories, etc.
This is the perfect recipe for a solution with by historical precedent near-certain perverse outcomes and manipulation.
It’s a restriction on data use like what already exists in GDPR and similar laws and has shown to be enforceable, not on pricing per se.
This is really easy in practice. I go to the store and see Cheerios for $3.99. Someone else goes to the same store and sees Cheerios for $4.29. You may not know the mechanism, but it’s obvious they’re doing some kind of personalized pricing.
Wait, how does this work?
I'm standing there with 5 other people in the aisle and we see the same price tag, but different prices on it at the same time?
I get that it's easy to engage the rational brain and find easy reasons laying about demonstrating that a thing would be hard (I'm guilty of this all the time!), but sometimes you gotta take a moral stand and do the hard work of making it happen.
The grocery store sends coupons that significantly discount items they know I purchase (or a lot of times they will give a huge discount on a store brand alternative, like ground turkey if I've bought Jennie-O in the past they will send a coupon for $2 Kroger turkey). Is that a personalized price? Who does it benefit to prohibit targeted loss-leaders?
I work at a retailer (not Kroger). Generally speaking, discounts like that are available to everyone and they are just advertising the discount to past purchasers in the form of a mailer. But that same coupon is available in other places, like the weekly circular or a "digital discount" that can be scanned at the shelf in the store or on a deals page on the website or in the app.
I don't know how Kroger does things exactly but I think it's highly plausible they are doing it as I describe above.
I think it would just look like MA liquor law. You must sell any product you sell to all comers at the same price for at least one full day. (Yes, you can't have happy hour discounts on alcohol in MA.) It seems like posted coupons could be incorporated pretty easily (those aren't allowed for alcohol.)
Create the right to demand a swift capital trial, by a jury of leftists, of the CEO of any corporation offering a price thought to be too high
yes - this seems very much like something that at current level of knowledge it is nigh impossible to develop at this time a regulation that would not have near certain chances of really perverse and destructive outcomes.
But that ignores competition between AI pricing apps! If you have five big apps and any firm can launch another with moderate capex, the pricing apps will compete on price.
Yo dawg, I heard you like AI pricing apps that prevent you from getting ripped off, so I made an AI pricing app that prevents you from getting ripped off by the AI pricing apps so you can not get ripped off while you don't get ripped off.
In general, the prevailing form of pessimism I hear from zoomers / young millennials is that everything in modern life is an unending rat race. And the people I encounter who *aren't* pessimistic about this don't even disagree, they just think they're gonna make it on top over all the other rats through day trading or crypto or some form of passive income scheme. Widespread price discrimination feels like a way to entrench this further in a way that could have pretty worrying social impacts, whatever its economic impacts.
My agents monitor your agents while placing side bets on kalshi on the top price paid for bananas on October 7th, 2029
It's called "Banana for Scale"
(for the record, I think the dystopian scenario is unlikely, and some combination of stores just declaring they won't use customized pricing, and most of the profit coming from bilking rich people is more likely, Matt kind of changed my mind here)
What if they start bidding on goods where demand is dependent on the climate but hedge by betting on the Kalshi weather markets
The obvious rejoinder is “why allow it to come to this at all?”
But also, B2C SaaS is insanely sticky because the consumer has to do all the work of providing sufficient info and configuration for it to work well, and that will probably be even more true for this, so the apps are going to leverage the hell out of the “inconvenience” factor to gouge long-time users, exactly how most ISPs and cable providers do.
These things can be sticky, but not always. I used to have both GrubHub and Seamless accounts. People already bounce back and forth between AI apps, and AI apps should be able to help with the transition.
I just don't see a "find me the best price" app being that sticky. It seems like the sort of thing that barely requires a login. And if you try to make yours sticky, it's likely you are going to lose out to other companies that do not.
Zero capex essentially. Basically anyone could create an agent today to check the price of their shopping list at Walmart, Target and Amazon/WF and get the cheapest price for each item.
Except that assumes no competition between AI pricing apps, which there very likely will be.
Asked and answered: https://matthewyglesias.substack.com/p/the-racial-justice-case-for-zoning?utm_source=direct&r=20s&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=230643294
That link just brought me to the article. Assume you're talking about your response to Jake, I'll respond there.
Fahhhkkkking substack…
I feel like we already went through this when we transitioned from markets where you have to haggle to stores with set prices where we can all save time and mental energy.
Of course it could end up like clothing, where everything seems to always be on sale or it could require a coupon to get a reasonable price. But I imagine a lot people will generally be willing to pay a bit more overall for consistent prices they don't need to think about and businesses will adapt to serve that customer.
Have made this point here before but it's also worth noting that places where haggling is more common tend to be lower trust societies more broadly, and I doubt that's a coincidence.
Yeah, I feel like the pricing system described in the post would be poisonous for public trust.
I am also reminded of this post by Joseph Heath https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
"People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals."
Also
https://yourbrainonmoney.substack.com/p/adulting-tax
Decent article, but I didn't care for the diversion into blaming corporations. A lot of these things are just choices we believe we need to make. Like the anecdote used to open the article - the grocery store isn't purposely hiding capers from you! And one of the main examples, airline refunds, weren't even a thing before COVID (and I don't know which airline she's talking about, but it's extremely easy with Delta).
In credit to her thesis though, I dared to do an online chat with Comcast a week ago for a discount I hadn't received. The poor guy kept trying to offer me all sorts of "free" add-ons. When I told him I'd rather just pay more than deal with keeping track of things I don't need (and will inevitably lead to new charges later), he put me through to a supervisor who gave me a price for internet only like I wanted from the beginning. But they are particularly well known bad actors.
That's interesting. I really wonder how "intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition" is attributed to "the left."
I would say the forces of de-regulation and using market-based policies contributes to this type of modern society and those seem more aligned to right wing beliefs.
Mostly yes, except for drugs, which are left-coded, but by happenstance happen to fall under the libertarian deregulatory umbrella, which is more often characterized as right under the binary left-right axis.
Your comment reminds me of the brief period when JC Penney said they were going to have fewer sales and, instead, have lower base prices on standard items and essentials. I liked this because shopping there felt less like I was being gamed and I could feel confident I was getting a decent price no matter which week I shopped, but I guess I was an outlier because they soon went back to extreme weekly sales (50% off all shirts!) due to customer outcry.
There were dozens of us! Dozens!
This is the first time I have thought of JC Penney in probably 20 years, if not longer
This is a good point. Market fans should hate this kind of friction! Transaction costs!
More broadly, I don't think "everyone hates this but businesses want to do it and it's plausibly a progressive transfer" just does not seem like enough to justify a practice's inevitability. We have lots of ways to achieve progressive transfers. Businesses' interests should be weighed against consumers, and not assumed to be positive-sum when there's a serious mismatch.
Matt’s whole take here was kind of underbaked — “private entities will extract more from richer people in a ubiquitous surveillance dystopia with astronomical transaction costs and this is good because it will narrow the gap between the rich and the poor” is exactly the sort of handwavey bullshit that he would scoff at in other contexts. Inter alia whence the incentive to earn more if it just gets immediately extorted away by the time you want to consume stuff?
I wonder if it would lead to the return of haggling and bargaining? That would make the checkout line a total nightmare.
Obligatory Monty Python reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2iZjxSGca8
Not related to dynamic pricing, but: my daughter asked me to bring home a box of Cheerios yesterday and I felt like I was going to retire in poverty.
On that subject: FedNow tells me the price index for a bushel of oats is about the same as it was in 2011, but the price of a box of Cheerios has doubled. I know some of this is labor etc. but (according to Google) generic "toasted oat" cereals are only up 30%, while Cheerios brand is up 90%. So on the subject of whether dynamic prices will be efficient or extractive, I'm going to lean towards "extractive".
Hey that honey bee has a lifestyle to maintain too!
You can definitely buy store brand generic-Os and they are a lot cheaper. Same with corn flakes which are more my thing.
IMO the texture is slightly different, but not a lot different. I wish I could say I prefer the cheaper version but it does appear to be missing "something" although the difference is small enough that it might just be placebo effect or familiarity.
Just a few days ago I was asking the ChatGPT about the high price of cereal, and the biggest surprise was that the cardboard packaging is one of the biggest cost inputs. So if you can find cereal in a bag it might be a lot cheaper. But at my local grocery store the only cerreals that come in a bag are super surgery shite I would never eat.
Also on the topic - plain raw oats are much cheaper, more filling and probably healthier than any brand of cereal. For a long time now I've ben sprinkling a layer of raw, plain oats on my breakfast cereal (and sometimes on a few other things). If you don't overdue it it mostly just makes whatever you're eating feel more filling and substantial which might make you less hungry later. YMMV!
It's amazing to me that we haven't seen any sort of packaging innovation in brand-name cereals. Isn't this the sort of progress that the free market is supposed to give us?
With that said, the 2019 Cheerios packaging cost was $0.07-$0.12 lower than the current cost. Whereas the retail cost is up $1.50-$2.00 in the same time period (and shrinkflated down by 5%). So maybe the answer is: packaging only matters a little.
You have to shop around with the store brands. Trader Joe's version tastes like eating dirt or hay, but my local supermarket brand is very good.
Heresy. Joe's O's are the standard and whenever I have Cheerios, they taste burnt.
Name brand breakfast cereal has insane price fluctuations, it'll be $5 for a box one week then they will be trying to unload it and sell you 5 boxes for $6. I really don't understand it.
Isn't it strange? Occasionally bigger boxes are more expensive per oz than the smaller boxes. And there's always weird couponing going on where a box is $6 but if you clip a coupon in the app it's $1.99.
I have to admit that price discrimination and related subjects are areas where I don’t really have settled views and my intuitions seem all scrambled, which is rare for me on economic issues.
On the one hand I definitely think “price gouging” after natural disasters to bring scarce water and gasoline and such into areas that desperately need it is good, regulations against it are wrong etc. And I am similarly fine with Uber charging more during busy times. And I get the concept that price discrimination means more trades and more total value for society.
But the idea of personal tracking and charging the just barely market clearing price to everyone seems terrible to me for reasons I cannot fully rationally defend! I am unsure if this is an “it’s complicated” situation or a “I am not being rational about this” situation. Should probably do some reading on it.
Basically it’s a massive redistribution of welfare from consumers to producers. Most of the time consumers are not paying enough their full willingness to pay. In this world every consumer is paying the maximum of their personal willingness to pay for a whole range of products. Who benefits?
It's hard to grasp because at this point for consumer goods it's basically science fiction. But today it could already happening for truly personalized products like Uber rides today; I regularly "cross-shop" between Uber/Lyft/Waymo in a way I didn't previously need to. Does something like that trigger the outrage sensors? It doesn't for me.
It’s weird how much the price changes when I go back and forth a couple times!
That’s sort of where I am too.
Individual price discrimination is illegal under our current antitrust arrangement. With all the information we have firms are moving closer and closer to this.
In a world with minimal consumer surplus, many consumers will feel much antipathy towards products and brands.
Amazon recently got an injunction against an AI powered app consumers used to monitor prices for set products on the store.
It’s only illegal where anticompetitive (and consumer sales by non-dominant retailers would probably almost never be considered anticompetitive), not illegal per se.
The whole everyone gets custom prices seems unworkable to me.
Just as one example, I’m frequently in a section of the store where me and 1-2 other people are browsing. How are these price labels going to know who is looking at them?
And people are good at gaming systems. The rich MY’s of the world could hire people to do the shopping - people who have a “cheap price” profile.
Margins in grocery stores are already pretty slim. I’m skeptical that surveillance and AI can change that.
Well, the stores will probably be a panopticon where the cameras not only execute facial recognition but use AI to interpret your facial expressions to calculate the probability that you are intent on purchasing and not just browsing.
Yeah, this seems like one of those fantasy things we like to muse about but no commercial entity will ever really be interested in.
We tend to grossly exaggerate what is coming. Remember the story about the woman who received coupons for pregnancy-related goods before she'd even told her partner? (Or maybe her parents.) That was, what, 20 years ago? Not that much has changed since that one-off event. And I still get all those pop up ads for something I've already bought on line. Is our algorithms learning? Doesn't seem so.
It was mailed to her father after she was searching online.
Good post with an A+ callback
Yeah, I don't buy that this is going to be a dystopia. Amazon already does dynamic pricing, and it doesn't sell $50 Cheerios and most current forms of dynamic pricing (coupons, sales, buy 1 get 1), bring prices down.
If my Stop & Shop starts trying to sell $50 Cherios, I'm not just going to walk across the street for my Cheerios; I'm going to walk across my street for everything, and I think that's going to keep them from trying.
Dynamic pricing is a whole different story from identity-based pricing.
I dont think it gets you that much of a different result. And we already have loyalty cards.
Yes, their profit maximization algorithm would have to take into account the risk of royally pissing off some (especially affluent!) customer.
Amazon prices can vary based on a lot of factors, but they don't price discriminate per user.
I agree, but I really want to avoid an AI arms race every time I go to the grocery store.
"The one thing that does temper my populist outrage is the recognition that the whole point here is that custom pricing algorithms are going to try to screw me personally because I’m pretty affluent."
Yeah, I don't think that's how these things tend to work. Affluent people don't get screwed on car loans and consumer credit even though they could totally afford a 10% interest rate, who even knows the difference?
Supermarkets may give wealthy people competitive prices because they want them shopping there and buying high end food in their stores, and they're willing to not maximize their earnings on low margin food that would just piss them off.
That seems more likely to me too at least at a macro level. Now obviously you've still got your 'tourist trap' captive situations where something like what MY talks about might happen. It's the only gas station for 50 miles or you're already in the vacation town and it's really inconvenient to leave so you suck it up. But big picture wealthier people get better deals because they're more likely to be good for the money and because they'll buy nicer stuff with higher margins to work within.
I remember my wife was listening to some kind of podcast where they talked about how this stuff works in the grocery space in particular. One of the examples they mentioned was Costco where they apparently sell chicken and some of the other products as a significant loss leader because the upside on the higher end stuff people buy once they're in the door makes it worthwhile.
"I remember my wife was listening to some kind of podcast where they talked about how this stuff works in the grocery space in particular. One of the examples they mentioned was Costco where they apparently sell chicken and some of the other products as a significant loss leader because the upside on the higher end stuff people buy once they're in the door makes it worthwhile."
Yes, I was going to bring up Costco. I have noticed Bentleys and Aston Martins in the parking lot at various Costcos, and they are not shopping there because they enjoy being screwed on cheap products.
That works at the supermarket level, not so much on the individual product level. As I mentioned above, Cheerios are up 90% from their 2011 prices while generic versions are up 30%. Does GM want to earn my loyalty on commodities so I'll buy high-margin products from them? Or are they going to correctly recognize that kids like "the brand" and many adults are lazy, and ruthlessly exploit people until they stop buying?
Yeah. I’m not sure what price difference would get me to buy International Delight creamer instead of the Coffeemate, but ewww. If the price of the good creamer got too high I’d probably just switch to NoDoz instead and lose weight to boot. Nasty coffee is worse than no coffee at all.
Someone suggested that you shouldn’t enjoy you addictions, so I switched to coffee without sweetener. And I found my brain doesn’t care at all.
Yea it's the sh*t. We got a membership years ago to bulk buy the kind of household stuff and non perishables that you burn through with kids. Now we've bought major appliances, electronics, furniture, and have the ultra membership where you get money back every year. Knock on wood but we have never had any quality or service issues with them either, something I can't say for the big box hardware and similar stores and other online retailers. The local grocery store still has better produce and certain other fresh food items but that's really about it.
One thing Costco seems to do very well is vetting the quality of items they sell. I've almost never bought something at Costco that ended up being low-quality.
I think you can strike the "almost". It's never happened.
I easily pay for my Costco membership just on cheese prices.
Costco is the best for diapers, baby formula, and snacks! And frozen fruit for smoothies. I got my membership after Li’l Velociraptor was born, and it has paid for itself several times over!
My old boss’ stated retirement plan is to subsist on Costco chicken. He is cheap and disciplined enough to walk in, buy the chicken and leave.
This question and the responses are making me consider turning into my aunt, who didn't even use banks for the longest time, but instead hid big wads of cash around her apartment. I am now looking even more askance at places that don't accept cash, although I understand it for efficiency and safety reasons. I am trying to wean myself from taking my phone everywhere I go. Maybe tin foil hat. Maybe not.
When grandpa died, mom knew where the coffee can was buried on the land; there was $50k in there
Google is the one remaining vendor where I have a free account even though I know I’m the product and not the customer, precisely because it provides so much value.
If they offered an annual premium package with a bit more cloud storage but mainly the promise that they would never sell or provide my data to anyone absent a warrant that specifies me by name, I would pay for it.
I’ve finally pulled the plug on Reddit, which was the only other free service I had after killing all my other social media
EDIT: oops, Spotify. Which also doesn’t offer a tracking-free premium product haha
It might drive more people to Costco/BJs/Sams wholesale type places as well which seems like it would be bad for the people who don’t have the extra cash for the membership fee and for the diversity of stores and selection.
A Costco membership is 65 USD per year and includes membership cards for two people. I know that there are people in destitute poverty, but $65 is really, really reasonable overall.
Especially as each person with a card can bring two cardless people with them, it quickly becomes feasible to take the whole family to Costco for dinner at the food court for like $15.
I adore my Costco membership (and we usually get 3 meals from the chicken), but I’m not certain the value would be there if I was only shopping for myself.
Aldi by us has generally cheaper apples, strawberries, asparagus, zucchini, bell peppers, hot peppers, canned beans, dried beans, most ice cream, and is pretty close on various stocks and meat. Part of that is Costco often just has the organic option, but some things are just more expensive.
Costco isn’t always the cheapest, it’s best for decent quality, reasonable price stuff or bulk. If you don’t use Costco gas often, don’t have space for bulk goods, or want to do your own bargain shopping, paying $65/yr for the option to buy from Costco doesn’t make as much sense.
AI giveth and AI taketh
There should be legislation that prohibits price discrimination based on personal health data. Individualized pricing is going to find more and more areas of pricing inefficiency and charge some people more.
That said, the question and answer are very overstated. First, retail pharmacies are in existential crisis because of a shift from buying consumable household goods in stores to online. If pharmacies raise Tylenol prices that much, customers will add Tylenol to their Amazon cart.
Second, the price discrimination identified in the question is between individuals shopping at the same store. Perceptions of fairness are a major constraint to price discrimination. Effective price discrimination either needs to happen opaquely (individualized prices on an online store) or through a visible scheme that consumers perceive as fair (airline tickets). Store prices are too transparent to others’ to make this effective. Price discrimination between consumers is also limited by the homogeneity of consumers. In Matt’s example, if he can pay more for Cheerios, it’s likely that most of the shoppers at his store come from the same, affluent neighborhood and can also afford it. Sadly, unfettered price discrimination can sometimes lead to higher prices for those who can’t pay. Even though they are more price sensitive, they tend to live in neighborhoods with limited options.
Airline pricing really doesn’t feel transparent! My partner is convinced that you have to price shop on one computer but actually buy it from a different one, because he thinks it will raise the price if you search multiple times from the same device.
I’m semi-convinced of the same thing. But I wonder if the number of times a fare is searched in a short time is a reliable price signal, rather than individualized pricing. It’s better to search on google flights first and then check the airline site.
What I meant is that the major ways that airlines price discriminate are well known and perceived to be okay: charging more closer to the flight, raising prices as inventory decreases, etc.
In the recent past, however, United did something sneaky and not transparent. It’s rare that first class seats on domestic flights are all sold versus being given out as upgrades. They started selling first class seat upgrades at fairly low prices ($150 - $300 or so) to infrequent travelers. The result is selling a first class seat for very little (let’s say $500 total) and eliminating the possibility of an upgrade for a frequent traveler. I don’t think they do this any more, which is why I’m skeptical of things that are really outside the norms. Customers figure it out and the backlash can be worse than the surplus profit earned.
All the airlines have gotten much better at selling first class seats. Delta, for example, is at ~90%, compared to 14% 15 years ago.
https://onemileatatime.com/news/delta-selling-first-class-seats/
If you pay attention to the fare classes, it's not so surprising. If he notices that, it's probably because he waits too long to finally buy and the more discounted class is no longer available. And now that my university forces me to buy through their travel agency, I can confirm that the price is practically identical when I check on the airline's website and then the agency's.
And yes, it’s wild how the same grocery store chain will have noticeably cheaper prices in my less affluent neighborhood than at other locations. We have two Kroger affiliate chains in town and I find one is pretty much always cheaper than the other, too.
Yeah, in the end higher grocery prices are good because grocery store pharmacy staff should be cross-subsidized. Let’s make a box of Cheerio’s $10 and subsidize pharmacy operations with it!
GoodRx is currently a rather crude proto-version of that idea.
Pros of self driving cars:
-less traffic accidents+fatalities
-less erradic drivers
-safe option for shuttling kids around
-risk free elderly driving
-New mobility for the disabled
-ability to coordinate across vehicles, removing needs for even stop lights in AV-only areas
-95%+ utilization aka less on-street parking
-all EVs
-reduces overall insurance cost
Cons:
-someone elses idea other than transit activists
“ability to coordinate across vehicles, removing needs for even stop lights in AV-only areas”
Lolz at anyone who thinks the level of IoT penetration for this is coming.
It literally might not be achievable at all.
This is already possible and proven. AVs can already move inches apart with no issue. If we have downtown cooridors with nothing but AVs on the road it would be almost trivial to remove all stoplights, create easements for hopping on/off, and then shuttling around with just a few centrally managed protocols that new AVs must interact with.
The IoT-light model of reducing headways is dependent on assuming nothing outside the control of the AVs exists.
There is no panacea for traffic inbound.
That's my point though. Downtown cores should be AV only. It would be trivial to implement. Your own car can be brought to you as you leave the city center. Theres 0 downside at all. Who likes driving 5 mph through city centers that cause all sorts of safety issues for everyone involved. Who likes finding that one narrow street parallel parking spot. Inbound traffic can stop at the edge of the city and you can get personally shuttled to where you are going. It would actually be far, far faster for commuters.
I said and meant “nothing.”
That means pedestrians, cyclists, kids playing.
In the precise areas where congestion is the worst, AVs will do much less to resolve it absent huge levels of IoT integration that either cannot happen at all or will take a huge amount of time to assemble and train AVs to function within.
Further in this direction, it amuses me how this is basically inching close to recreating subway systems. Just with smaller vehicles.
The point to point nature of it going to your office does have advantages. But so does using bigger vehicles to go to buildings where we have purposely built up a lot of commuters.
Like, I could also imagine personalized vehicles to pick up all of the kids at the end of school and take them directly to their house. I don't know that that is automatically better than just having a few bus routes for most of them.
This is also trivially solved by more lane separation. Without street parking in urban cores there's a lot more room to play with. Crosswalk signals being connected to AVs stops them when people want to cross, otherwise there are fully separated barriers.
Also if has already been proven that AVs react to people/kids running into the street far faster and safer than people do. Moot point.
It will not take long to do fleet training, that, again, has already been done in a thousand different use cases. The tech is already there across every part of the stack.
This is the kind of talk that makes urbanists anti-AV. This does not sound very compatible with pedestrians!
AVs are already far safer for pedestrians. It would be an enormous boon to pedestrians.
I agree with you in general, but you're talking about a downtown where there are no traffic lights because the AVs are programmed to drive within inches of each other and seamlessly allow each other to pass. That only works if there's no outside interference from pedestrians.
No it doesn't. Just install crosswalk buttons. That's literally all it takes.
Your vision of cities full of fast AVs inches apart is a vision for streets only as fast transportation. It ignores street life entirely. It assumes that nobody wants to go outside except to hop into an AV.
You're again picturing the whole city full of cars as-is. The point is that the higher speed and higher utilization of every car means there's FEWER cars on the road. Likely traveling in tighter groupings so there's MORE space between each group for people to cross. Instead of 10 cars on a block with a few feet of space and 7 of them only with a single driver, there are 3 AVs traveling in a pack and the rest of the street is empty.
This is completely wrong. Higher utilization might mean fewer vehicles overall, but who cares? The actual number of cars in the road at a given time would not decrease unless the number of *trips* decrease, and everything you’ve said implies they will increase. After all, if you can send your kid to school in an AV and then take a separate AV to work yourself, rather than put them on the bus or take them yourself on the way, you’ve created an additional trip and therefore an additional car on the road that was not there before.
In the AV future, there will not be fewer cars on the road, because you haven't eliminated any trips and you've added a lot of them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what causes traffic
Agreed.But I fully resist any attempt to make any public roadways AV only
How about merging on and off freeways? A lot of inherent congestion on them comes when there are too many vehicles all trying to weave within the same space.
Park&rides
I don't think AV-only should include freeways. I thought you meant how would human drivers navigate this with AV-only downtown cores. I think they should park at the city edge at large park&rides and hop onto fleets of AVs from there.
That seems like an added step of inconvenience that people might not like, especially if they're having to move a significant amount of goods between vehicles. And it strikes me as of now that even coordinated AVs aren't going to fix problems of freeway congestion, which would mean that there needs to still be considerable room for non-motorist forms of transportation.
What do you mean by this?
I don't get the animosity in that aren't there going to be self driving buses as well at some point? I have to imagine there will be a day where self driving technology will make it cheaper for many mid sized transit systems to expand the frequency of their bus service. Buses will still probably present a significant savings to self-driving taxis for riders.
There is an element of the left that views transit as a jobs program but I thought a lot of transit advocates are against that. And being a bus driver in many mid-sized metros sucks because it's a strenuous job where they don't even have the money to pay you decently.
I've always thought that buses were the obvious first-use-case for autonomous driving. They already cost a lot of money so $20,000 in sensors is reasonable, they have a lot of space for sensors, they're tall so sensors can be mounted up high, they travel on predictable paths, there's a huge roof for a Starlink dish or radio antennas.
Do you need a cop on board for people doing antisocial things and/or refusing to pay the fare?
That would be great, but seems really expensive.
My guess is that a bunch of cameras and a way for people to anonymously report antisocial behavior is the best we're going to do on a lot of public transit.
The driver is such a high % of the operating cost that the bus itself would change; instead of one huge 30-person bus that runs every 15 minutes you could have 3 10-person vans that run every 5 minutes.
Or you could have 3 30-person buses! Theres not much savings from introducing smaller vehicles. It’s often better for your mechanics to only have to deal with one type of vehicle, even if the vehicle is largely empty a lot of the time.
Yeah I wonder. It probably depends on peak usage. Fuel costs would be lower (probably the next leading cost even in an EV scenario) and if you could downscale to use Sprinter vans (or similar) you get a much better economies of scale for parts, support, etc.
Yeah this is all extremely inevitable. People can disagree with the vision I have laid out but it's clearly heading towards AV+EV in every area.
The 'jobs program' thing is more than frustrating, because 15y+ ago when uber/lyft were replacing taxis these same people were decrying these services as bad gig make-work jobs. Now theyre sacrosanct and people MUST have their own cars in urban areas taking up huge swaths of street parking. That is the combo that has led to far greater traffic, every piece of street taken up for parking and nowhere for uber/lyft/instacart/doordash drivers to stop as they have swelled in use. Increasing AVs and decreasing street parking options are clearly the way out here.
Plus the fact that the labor needs of most transit systems are difficult given the need for max drivers during highest demand periods, like morning and evening commuting time.
> 95% utilization
No need for hyperbole here. The average car gets about 4% utilization (an hour a day). If AVs can bump that up to 20% it will be a huge win. I hope utilization doesn't go above 70% because I, for one, plan on being asleep at 4 AM.
Also, ride share is typically about 50% deadheading.
In this context I mean rate of driving v. parked. Waymos already are ~56% driving time w/ passengers and 45%–55% charging time with extremely little staging during low demand. The point is not taking up parking spots
You're assuming broad adoption of AV taxis over ownership. When rideshare was building out, the same claims were made. Turns out to be very not true. The likely substitution is public transit if the costs are as low as Uber's subsidized start, so more cars, not less, with the same need for parking.
Overtime, that might change (although will people really chose a shared car over one they can do whatever they want in?), but what a disaster in the long transition period
Yeah that's the point. Ride share didn't do the same because it added drivers who bought more cars. This removes them both AND the street parking. Avoiding long transition period via making AV only downtown cores is the whole point.
If you're going to do that, again, why not just limit cars? Places that do that in the US have done well. They tend to be smaller cities and no place has committed as thoroughly as Paris, but Montreal and small cities that have done it show it can work in the U.S.
Your assumption that AV will reduce demand for owned vehicles so far has no evidence behind it. The information we do have says it won't work. I know that's hard to accept, but that's the state of the data at present. If that changes, we'll see that in early adoption cities like Phoenix and can revise plans. But for now, grounding planning in known reality is better than chasing a low-probability assumption.
I am glad we're both aligned on the vision of more open space for pedestrians and cyclists, and car-limited cities. Fight for that now. We can fill it with whatever technology works best when we get there.
If you get usage up to 20% you have to increase parking a lot.
I agree with some of what you’ve said but this is exactly the opposite of the case; if AVs become cheap enough, urban ownership drops to near-zero.
They have to be parked somewhere. Where would that be?
They only park to charge. In the morning they drive into the city from a lot 10-30 miles away. Congestion charges discourages driving into the city if they wouldn't make any money.
So there are vast parking lots 10-30 miles away. But there are a lot of people who live 10-30 miles from a city center.
Increasing their utilization means there are many fewer of them and fewer are parked at any given moment.
Induced demand means there are more.
Increasing their utilization doesn't mean there are many fewer of them, if the utilization is because there are more of them at peak times.
If people substitute taxis for cars. No evidence that will happen.
I suspect that some of the hostility to self-driving cars has to do with the fact that they come out of the tech industry. I can think of several people (well educated and affluent) people who are of the opinion that the tech industry as a whole and not just say Facebook or Elon Musk is deeply evil and that anything that comes out of tech is going to be bad in the long run, and they've been this way fro over 10 years. They're going be against self-driving cars even if they save tens of thousands of lives each year because they come from an industry that they view negatively. And so they make claims about self-driving cars being really dangerous and somehow the tech companies and governments are hiding all these accidents.
I'm honestly surprised how vitriolic the anti AV movement is. It achieves tons of the goals of the transit movement in a far more sustainable, tax-free way. People truly are just bound by their hatred of the tech industry while they use every new product released without a second thought
Yeah, when I encounter someone who's anti AV and ask them to explain their why they don't like TVs, they'll say something that's demonstrably false and if I point out that it's not true they start yelling at me.
Cons:
More traffic
More air pollution (air pollution comes from tires as well as exhaust, and faster AVs are going to cause more pollution because they're faster)
More noise
More parking (hello, you have to put those cars somewhere at night)
The claim is pedestrians and cyclists will be safer. But will we? The people inside the AVs are still going to want to get rid of us, or deny our safety. They'll argue that the next regulation they propose won't make us any less safe—but I want to be more safe, not just as safe but now there are twice as many cars on the road and actually as a cyclist I'm less safe.
This isn't a win-win for me, because I don't think I'll win more safety and I'll lose everything else.
Rebuttals:
>More traffic: Not when theres no other cars on the road in urban areas
>More air pollution: Far lower v. non-EVs on the road today starting+stopping all the time. Non-AVs speed way more than AVs do.
>More noise: AVs are not nearly as loud, and youd need far less of them starting/stopping, and theyre EVs so no humming of engines as they idle
>More parking: Way, way, way less parking. No street parking! They go back to the depots to charge overnight, also easily can be outside city limits.
>The claim is pedestrians and cyclists will be safer. But will we?: Yes this is already proven many times over
>This isn't a win-win for me, because I don't think I'll win more safety and I'll lose everything else: Lose what? Literally what are you losing?
How can you say there would be no more traffic, when the AVs would be a significant portion of the time, and when people would use AVs instead of transit?
Because they coordinate movement and so do not need to follow traditional traffic lights. Traffic light coordination is for humans
Expecting to relieve traffic by making the cars move faster, closer together, and more coordinated is fundamentally the same as expecting to relieve traffic by building more lanes, and will run into the same issues.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what causes traffic
Still better than the feasible alternative. Which is the status quo.
I don’t get the parking point. Taxis also had to be put somewhere at night! They went to a garage.
Cons—cities that are even more built around the assumption that large, heavy, motorized devices are the best/only way to get around. AVs might be part of the solution, but if all they switch people from the most space efficient forms of transportation to individual cars, you're making a world that's more hostile to anybody who isn't in a metal box.
not at all. AVs as the focus FOR CARS means you can remove street parking almost entirely. this allows for widening of sidewalks, areas for ebikes (which are quickly becoming the norm as well), easement areas for restaurants like we had during covid, etc. It opens the aperture far more for everything else by reclaiming tons of street space used for parking
That's a nice theory, but the data that people will swap their personalized cars for shared/taxi cars isn't good. People didn't give up their cars en mass when Uber was offering very cheap, subsidized transit.
they dont have to. they can keep their cars at city limits and the cars can get shuttled by other AVs to meet them wherever the exit point is.
If you're changing city laws to restrict cars, then why not just restrict cars? Small cars driving super close to each other is just a bad version of a bus. You're sketching a solution to a problem that's been solved and that we have many examples of successful implementations of that solution.
theres a lot of variety needed in automobiles still to eliminate every type of car, truck, bus, etc. No to mention remote power issues in rural and suburban areas. The overall goal is trying to retake urban areas by opening up the sheer 25%+ of urban space used for parking.
Removing every human driven car from an urban area means that (a) the replacement must solve the same issues as having the car in a city helped with, and (b) do it better, faster, more efficiently. That has not been solved with ebikes, scooters, trains, etc.
“Small cars driving super close to each other is just a bad version of a bus.”
It’s clearly not, because a bus doesn’t solve the last mile problem.
Urbanists hate AVs because the value proposition of urbanism depends on the car-dependent status quo being bad. If it sucks less, urbanism offers less improvement but retains a high cost.
Personally I would love an urbanist future but I'm not willing to sacrifice the meaningful gains from AVs today for a (IMO very long) shot at remaking America's cities from the ground up.
Plus I think AVs and urbanism could be more compatible than meets the eye, but only if a lot of rules at every level of government were changed to facilitate that synergy. The current automotive and street forms are not compatible with urbanism.
The dirty little secret of left wing urbanists is that a lot of them are authoritarians who want to use the government to force people to stop living lives they disapprove of. Things like pedestrian safety are just the hook for those beliefs.
While I like self-driving cars, I am well aware that there are a lot of people who would love to use them to physically control where people can and cannot go by programming what routes the cars can follow and what locations they can go to. This is why I don't want to completely ban driving.
Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland.
First I've ever heard of this.
You've never heard of how a lot of software in cars can be used for anti-consumer ends? Like kill switches?
Wait, you think there are people who want to just force your car to stop at random places? What sort of theory is this?
I don’t think Will Stancil would be allowed to follow and document ICE officers in a world where the government had access to AVs. On a less individual level, you could imagine a world where AVs are banned from disaster areas for safety (e.g., there’s a flood here, we ban that in the master system), and then eventually protest zones become “safety hazards” that you’re not allowed to drive to.
Stopping at random places not really, but there’s plenty of realistic failure modes that could come from an authoritarian government having control over an autonomous vehicle system with human driving banned. Think an auth-left regime shutting down the AV system for COVID lockdowns, or an auth-right one banning Latinos from the platform to make them easier targets for ICE.
Those are interesting points. But it’s worth noting that this is already how the air travel system works, and even in late March 2020 it never got shut down this way, despite being much less relevant for daily life for 95% of people than the within-city transportation system.
Tom Cruise is escape in Minority Report would’ve been a lot easier if the cars weren’t all automated.
Uh, do those people exist?
There are definitely some people who want to destroy all suburbs, most of us just want to stop our own policymakers in our our already-urban homes from crafting transportation policy for the convenience of non-resident drivers over residents of all stripes.
Which is basically just another form of NIMBY-ism - "if you don't live here already, why should there be any infrastructure to enable you to come here?"
There are incredibly obvious trade-offs between the convenience of suburban drivers and the safety of urban residents. For the last 60-70 years they’ve basically all been resolved in favor of the former.
This is very much a case where simply not favoring suburban drivers is going to make them feel as if you’re losing their rights, but… I really don’t care?
They don’t vote in my elections lol.
Amen!
nobody thinks the laws they like breaking should be enforced
True enough, but a lot of people fantasize about using the power of the state and its guns and violence to eradicate the lifestyles they don't like.
It’s not a “fantasy.” The power of the state has been used to banish the lifestyle I prefer to a tiny sliver on urban land, where 2-bedroom apartment is now well over a million dollars.
As someone who’s income is regularly confused with that of a billionaire, I have no choice but to commute 1.5 hours each way to a car-dependent suburb if I want to keep my career and have a room for a child to sleep in at the same time, because that is the will of the voters in my region.
Excuse me for fighting back.
We've got quite a few of them at the federal level these days but they are ubiquitous.
What they really believe in is bike supremacy.
Do they care at all for bike identity and bike ultimatum
<3 You've been doing a damn good job of filling the dysphemistic-treadmill-shaped hole here.
That is high praise. Far higher than is deserved.
The urban/suburban culture war could be resolved with just four words:
To. Each. His. Own.
Maybe I want to live in a high-rise apartment. Maybe I want to live in a single-family ranch home on an acre lot. Maybe I want something in between. Let the mix of different types of developments reflect the aggregate of individual choices.
Of course, we do need to consider if there is a level playing field. Land use and transportation choices are subject to all kinds of taxes, subsidies and regulations pulling in different directions.
Suburban areas are formed by transforming farmland, which mostly doesn’t object. Urban areas don’t pencil on cornfields; they are formed by transforming increasingly valuable suburban areas, which do object. So unfortunately there is a zero sum element - a previously-suburban ring around the city center urbanizes, or urbanism doesn’t happen at all.
A left wing urbanist friend of mine never stops talking about how great buses are, but whenever anyone says they don't want to ride them, he accuses them of not wanting to be around brown people. He doesn't want everyone to do their own thing, he wants everyone to ride the bus and like it.
Source without nutpicking?
The types of urban areas urbanists are concerned about are a tiny part of the overall country. People who want to drive a lot could just live in the suburbs? No visa is required, you can still commute to the same job, and it’s most likely a lot cheaper.
Urbanists think automobile suburbs should not exist.
Urbanists think automobile-suburb dwellers should have to pay the costs of their own externalities.
No, a lot of them think they shouldn't exist, or define "the externalities" dishonestly so high that they can try to force people out of them, because obviously auto-centered suburbanites shouldn't exist and should be forced to live more "virtuous" lives.
I don't have to define externalities dishonestly to say that drivers don't pay their own way, and freeload over non-drivers. I just have to look at roads and street parking, and know who pays for them. I just have to look at air pollution, and know who pays for it. I just have to look at giant required parking lots, and parking requirements for every kind of building, and know who pays for them.
There are definitely very real externalities that drivers don't have to pay for proportional to use, but Dilan is talking more about the crazy urbanists who genuinely don't think sprawly suburbs should exist at all. This isn't a strawman, I personally know people like this - it probably teeters on the edge of being "nutpicking" but it's a pretty large group of people in the urbanism community who overlap with the "f*ckcars*" community
*I don't know the language filter policies here
Conversely, you don't appear to appreciate the massive agglomeration benefits drivers can provide by putting large numbers of people in daily economic contact.
What do you have in common with a prison in a Spanish-speaking country?
answer: both are car-cels
I don’t think they should exist by regulatory fiat at distances from the city center where urbanism is commercially viable, in regions where the cost of living is spiraling.
Out in the sticks, who cares.
It's intriguing that Matt sees the consumer surplus to customized pricing in terms of how much money is spent, whereas others might see consumer surplus instead in terms of how much time and effort is spent. That view would invert who would benefit as consumers from what Matt states. Then, the question would be whose view of consumer surplus we want to prioritize.
Amazon is a clear winner of the view that most people believe that consumer surplus that people want to save on is time and effort. The sacrifice of any real pricing discrimination is so over the top I avoid it as much as possible.
Bargain hunting is an inferior good
It can be kinda fun with clothes, but with groceries it’s crap
Consumer surplus is a technical economic term that refers to the difference between the maximum price one is willing to pay and the price actually paid. Price discrimination specifically attacks that surplus. Of course, one can pay a “price” in terms of time and effort but that doesn’t figure in the technical calculation.
Wait, time and effort doesn’t figure in the technical calculation? The technical calculation seems like it’s making a fundamental mistake then.
No, because the seller doesn’t receive a price that includes the time and effort. Time and effort amount to deadweight loss like taxation would
I thought surplus was supposed to subtract out the deadweight loss? It’s supposed to be consumer welfare gains minus consumer welfare losses, while producer surplus is producer welfare gains minus producer losses. Deadweight losses are the part that no one gains from, while surplus is just the result of negotiation about the positive sum components.
It depends on the context. Price discrimination works on prices paid, not implicit costs to the consumer. So deadweight loss reduces the total surplus but price discrimination ignores that
That's fair, I'm not sure what term would be better for the non-monetary version of consumer surplus, so I tried to explain it in those terms.
In a world full of AI and online shopping tools, time and effort spent should inevitably decline towards zero. The only reason they wouldn't do that is if the corporate world uses AI to ensure they remain high.
The corporate world has no interest in people spending time and effort. They only care if people spend money.
I disagree. Go to any car rental counter at an airport. You'll find that they all sell essentially the same product, but the "economy" ones have one desk serving four different companies and a much longer line. Sure, this saves money for them. But to customers, time and convenience is a valuable resource that companies can exploit for profit.
And one of the biggest perks status with them offers is the ability to "skip the counter".
The corporate world has no interest in people spending time and effort. They only care if people spend money.
I highly doubt raising the salience of race would be good for the YIMBY movement.
"Hey person with latent NIMBY tendencies, do you want to vote to change your neighborhood so poorer people of color can move in?" Doesn't seem like the best strategy imo.
The poor part is probably more important than the race part.
Most people would have no problem with a black Doctor moving next door. But would have a big problem with poor white trailer Trash moving next door
Yes, 100%. It's all about behavior and forced underclass integration brings all sorts of neighborhood ruining blight that turns functional working class neighborhoods into shitholes. That's why we have suburbs.
So long as progressives enact policies that demand more equal outcomes without any acknowledgement of the destructive behavior and lifestyle choices of the intended beneficiaries of policy we are just doubling down on bad assumptions. And once you implement something, you can't go back.
But in many cases the “undesirables” the NIMBYs keep out are their own kids who can’t afford to live where they grew up.
True. But I suspect that most people's stereotype of a black/white person moving in is the opposite, so prospectively "more black people will live near you" sounds worse, even if in practice it means "more upper-middle-class black people because you live in an UMC area".
I'm not saying that there aren't any racist Americans because that would be a stupid thing to say, but I do think that there's a lot of class prejudice that operationalises as racial stereotypes (ie people think black people are poor and they don't like poor people).
This links to another answer, the one about well-off black men getting stopped a lot: because Americans have the stereotype that black people are poor, seeing a rich black person runs through that stereotype as "this is a poor person with rich person stuff, they must have stolen it".
Definitely fair.
Yeah, however racist you assume homeowners are, in practice they are probably a lot more racist than that. Nextdoor comments are not a statistically sound measure of homeowner racism but they are definitely strong anecdotal evidence of it.
So I have absolutely no doubt that submerging the racial implications of zoning reform is the tactically correct choice. It's depressing and disturbing that that's so, but from the crooked timber of humanity etc etc.
One think I hate/like about the internet is that now I know that many people in my region are much more racist than I ever suspected.
Particularly because blue-team initiatives are structurally incapable of outright denying that their plan is to move members of the underclass in with you!
Mind you, the 40+ shitlib crowd has about as much desire to live near the underclass as the 40+ tardcon crowd.
(I use "underclass" because I don't think very many people who would ever consider YIMBYism are scared of non-white PMC people moving in. This corresponds to race only insofar as the white underclass doesn't live in cities.)
Self-reinforcing problem.
Philly is getting richer, but the professional class transplants mostly don’t believe in public safety enforcement, so at this point I don’t wanna go full YIMBY because I want to price out the worst of the trash and exile it to the suburbs.
Luckily the professional class transplants aren’t very YIMBY either.
That is how it would probably be phrased if it was a local ballot measure in Denver . . . . (Like, seriously, almost every local election cycle for the past decade there's been at least one ballot measure where my reaction to reading it is, "Could we at least pretend that the municipal government serves all members of society without regard to race?")
Agreed. But academically there is a large racial justice issue which is that minorities were largely legally excluded from buying when housing prices were much cheaper so didn’t benefit from the appreciation and have to pay higher prices now. It’s one of the main ways in which past discrimination demonstrably causes part of the wealth gap today. It’s smart not to emphasize this in political messaging but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true or that people don’t sincerely believe it.
Yeah I think it's unambiguously true that pro-YIMBY policies would be very good for racial justice (and personally I'd argue that they'd be much better for racial justice than the current criminal justice push).
But as Zagarna said below, the median voter is what you find on Nextdoor.
This is where there’s a big difference between market rate and affordable housing. If prices fall from $1.5 to $1m you’re going to get marginally less affluent professionals. Hardly a threat to the schools. Probably still higher income than established homeowners, who are mostly there by virtue of being early, not high-income. But if the state moves in genuine underclass people it’s a different ball game.
I suspect the correlation between poor and thrifty is less perfect than Matt imagines here. I had a boss, who obviously made more money than me, but was an avid deal hunter and points optimizer. They would claim rich people are rich because they don't spend their money.
At the same time I had a couple of young renter neighbors who were getting Dunkin doordashed every weekend.
Things like navigating bureaucracy, paper work or educational opportunities we see high socio-economic people bring much better at than lower, so I wouldn't count on price discrimination being that different.
The other important question is how much retail or groceries would actually expand, I am skeptical. But that's very much key as without supply expansion price discrimination lowers consumer surplus.
But I am skeptical of the whole scenario, at least in the extreme, it doesn't take too many $50 cheerios boxes before someone doesn't return and starts writing nasty things on the internet.
I think the difference will be less stark than people think. It will be the choice of going to your local discount grocery with a default price, or going to your corner Amazon Go (or whatever) store where they have your favorite brands in the exact quantities you want for a little more money. No way can they capture the entire consumer surplus with any amount of competition.
Amazon has data to execute near-perfect price discrimination, and chooses not to.
Instead of trying to extract the maximum consumer surplus on a single transaction, they prefer that consumers reflexively go to Amazon to buy something without even having to check competitor prices. Why? It's much better for business that way.
Even "lazy" consumers hear things via word of mouth, or read a newspaper or reddit or Substack. If consumers suspect they are receiving a personalized higher price trust evaporates.
Prices are highly dynamic, but for all consumers, and is based on aggregate demand and competitor prices.
This “perfect discrimination” hypothetical was cooked up in lab to screw with Peter Thaler
Richard?
"There’s a roster of grocery staples — Cheerios, milk, butter, apples, cantaloupe, eggs — that we always stock in our house..."
We've found him, people! The person who gets excited when the cut fruit bowl is nothing but cantaloupe leavened with the occasional soupçon of pineapple. Normal people's hopes are dashed, whereas it's days of wine and cantaloupe at the Yglesiases.
Diabolical.
Do people not like cantaloupe? It's one of my favorite fruits.
Yeah, it's not honeydew!
What? Cantaloupe is great. If you think otherwise, your ability to judge ripeness is probably lacking.
Note: Michael B Jordan is playing only one brother in your leadoff image. The actor on the right is Miles Caton as Sammie.
Oh, thank God, I thought I was going crazy when I saw that caption!
Speaking of feeling crazy; I feel like he’s only an OK at best actor, and him winning is completely baffling to me. He was also just “fine” in Black Panther (though playing a more interesting character, his performance was notably not as good as Boseman’s).
He is very handsome though. Is that it?
He was great in The Wire.
He did a good job as Wallace but definitely was not a standout in that cast (even among the kids).
He was really good in Creed. I don't think he was even asked to do that much in Sinners; yes the two brothers clearly had different personalities but it wasn't like he really had to flex his acting chops for either.
They felt very similar to me (though that is down to the direction too I am sure). Which, I mean, they are identical twins who are super close and play up their twinness so it’s not that weird they act exactly alike and have the same mannerisms etc., but it wasn’t really even playing two characters! Probably an acting challenge to do scenes together with a stand in though.
It does seem less ambitious compared to other gimmicks like Face/Off (ok John Travolta you're playing an FBI agent... now you're playing Nicholas Cage trapped in the body of that FBI agent... now you're playing Nicholas Cage trapped in the body of that FBI agent pretending to be the FBI agent to trick his family)
Thank you for this! I was gonna say, damn he's not even recognizable as the second brother.
I haven't seen Sinners yet, but tbh I'm not a big fan of the two roles gimmick as it's been done previously (Fargo/Ewan MacGregor, The Deuce/James Franco, though I did really like the two Cages in Adaptation which is I guess the gold standard)
You probably didn’t think to mention Dr Strangelove/Peter Sellers because he played three roles, not two. Otherwise that would have been the obvious first choice.
Lest we forget Mike Myers as everybody in Austin Powers
Surely the obvious choice is Alec Guinness for playing eight different roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets?
Let’s not forget Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy in Twin Peaks
Orphan Black, which I have been rewatching now that it has been picked up by Netflix, is the epitome of this, as Tatiana Maslany plays no fewer than 17 (!) clones, many of whom spend some number of scenes pretending to be specific other clones. (Two other actors also play multiple clones.)
I like the late episode of The Good Place where D’Arcy Carden plays all of the other characters.
I like the late episode of The Good Place where D’Arcy Carden plays all of the other characters.
I liked Tilda Swinton in three roles in Suspiria, but that movie is pretty divisive.
Good movie! And it doesn’t really rely on the twins being compelling characters IMO. Just fun stuff.
>The big ones are: allow more doctors and engineers to immigrate, don’t cut Social Security, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expand Medicaid, and raise the income tax rate on people earning more than $400,000 per year to 45 percent.
Why is mandatory parental leave and vacation time never mentioned in these? Every poll I've looked at says it's incredibly popular and I find it weird we went through a democratic trifecta and they chose to spend their time on low impact low priority issues like renewable energy instead of something pretty close to universal.
One issue is that for upper middle income and above corporations will already include these as benefits, so this is mostly a working class issue. And the democratic party is no longer the working class party, so maybe they stopped caring?
I think there's a worry about the fact that small businesses would have the hardest time complying with it, so there would have to be minimum size small business carveouts, but that would leave a bunch of the working class in a position where they couldn't benefit anyway. There's also the worry that businesses would just start cutting back on positions for the working class.
These seem like solvable problems to me. For vacation you could accrue over time, have use it or pay out policies, give employers flexibility on when it can be used, exceptions for seasonal/short term jobs, etc. For parental you should have enough notice to plan and temp those roles appropriately.
Vacation is easily solvable and there are working systems to copy from a host of other countries.
To make parental leave work in a fair manner for small employers, you need a collective insurance system.
If an employee takes six months paid leave (so you now have to pay them, and hire a temporary replacement and pay that temporary replacement) and this happens on average about once in every 35 years of employment (average 2 child per adult, average working life is 35 years or so), and you have five employees, then you're only dealing with it one year in seven on average, but if you get unlucky, you get two employees at once and that cripples your business.
Adverse selection means that getting commercial insurance against that is really expensive; the only solution is a forced insurance system. You could require commercial insurance, but it's almost certainly far more efficient to just collect money through the payroll tax system and then reimburse employers while an employee is on parental leave (example: they can claim reimbursement for the full salary or the FICA cap, whichever is lower for six months of parental leave per child).
If you're a large employer, then you can effectively self-insure: if you have 3500 employees, you have 100 on parental leave every year, that's just a cost of doing business.
How do people feel about getting hired and then immediately going on parental leave? Some companies allow this, some don’t.
I know a guy who did basically the opposite: went on parental leave, then took a long vacation, then came back for a couple of weeks to reveal he had been poached for the best job in his field and left.
Is there anything wrong with that? That’s just going to happen sometimes when you offer benefits. My sister was on maternity leave when her husband got transferred to a different city. She never went back to work there. That’s just the way of things. We should just have plenty of government support to reduce the burden on the private sector for this.
Mostly I just thought it was funny.
If you don't allow people to take parental leave when they become parents, you're just saying women can't change jobs when they're pregnant. Which seems unfair to young women, to me.
Life often is not fair. Much of what we do as a society is decide who gets to bear that, how much, and when. If I hired someone to start doing a job and they immediately go out on parental leave (man or woman), it really sucks as an employer. We as a society can decide the employer should still bear those costs. But lets not deceive ourselves into thinking that there isn't a cost borne by somebody.
Someone (I think on this blog) recently argued that the underlying problem driving Daylight Savings arguments wasn't so much differing intrinsic preferences for earlier versus later daytime hours, but the basic scarcity of total daylight hours in Northern Hemisphere winter. This seems conceptually similar: the fundamental problem is loss allocation downstream of the immutable fact that "having children imposes substantial burdens."
Sure. But so does owning a house. In both cases, people both get significant personal pleasure out of having them; and also both are a critical need for society. There are people who *don't* want to have one and/or the either, but they are the exception to the rule.
You can take this "life is often not fair" business and see how you like it when women decide to stop having babies.
Do the countries that have this policy have higher birthrates than countries that don't? I haven't seen evidence of this.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People want it to not be true and look for reasons it might not be true rather than thinking about what might happen if it *were* true.
Why would women decide to stop having babies because of this?
There are tons of work requirements that make things harder for many of my life goals, but I don't give up on those life goals because of that. I'm not handing my agency in life over to an employer benefit choices. I might choose an employer who is more helpful in meeting the goals though, so there could be an incentive for an employer to offer it.
Not *just* this, but rather the general attitude that life isn’t fair so women should just put up with inequities around childcare issues.
Ideally a parental leave law would have enough benefit symmetry that this is also a risk when hiring a man. That way women would not be discriminated against as much.
(Obviously no amount of symmetry will protect against the fact that women can be visibly pregnant and that might be used against them in the interview process).
This is why a federal system should just use the payroll tax to reimburse parental leave (at least up to the FICA cap). Back of my envelope suggests that you might have to raise the payroll tax by 1% to fully fund six months leave per baby.
You could also do this for the SECA tax, which would mean that the US had better parental leave for self-employed people than almost anywhere in Europe.
Yeah, without a system like yours, it's basically an unfunded mandate.
The government doesn't have to "pay for it" if they just require someone else to provide it.
Maybe the energy on parental leave is at the state level
I'm all for proportional representation, but it is structurally unworkable at the federal level without major constitutional change, and since that would need to include abolishing the Senate, that is extremely daunting. It needs to be a bottom up movement where municipalities demonstrate its worth first, then hopefully filtering up to the state level, where unlike the federal level they can deviate much more than things like the sole exception of Nebraska's unicameral legislature. That's going to take a long time to do. So in the here and now we're going to have to find a way to improve what we have.
I had an unanswered question a few weeks ago about the value in calling for a constitutional convention. It's obviously far-fetched and I've always felt there'd be a "be careful what you wish for" element to it, but considering where we are now and Trump showing us the risk of a strongman hijacking the GOP, I'd at least like to see more ideas along the lines of yours. We're at the point where we need structural reform.
Yeah, it is "be careful what you wish for," but it also seems nuts that we don't do this semi-frequently.
It’s just that it’s disturbing to think of things like the First and Eighth amendments disappearing.
I could totally see an American constitutional convention following Chile's path: left-wingers won the first convention elections and wrote a left-wing constitution, which was voted down. Right-wingers won the second convention elections and wrote a right-wing constitution, which was voted down. Original constitution stands and it was all a waste of time. We're just so polarized.
I also honestly have abject fear about what a Republican-dominated constitutional process would result in.
Ezra Klein made a point years ago that one of the reasons we've really slowed down at the rate we pass constitutional amendments is that we don't trust ourselves collectively these days.
Tell me which state would be the tipping point for ratification of the new constitution and I'll tell you if I have any interest in such an attempt.
If that state is, say, Alabama or South Carolina then I'll pass.
Pedantry of the day: If Alabama is the tipping point state, that means all states bluer than that passed it more easily. That's probably a pretty good constitution, much better than if the tipping point state were, say, Minnesota.
I take it to mean that Alabama has a veto and it doesn't matter what the blue states l8ke
You need a 3/4 supermajority, so the tipping point state would either be very red or very blue.
I want it to be blue so we can put the kibosh on a bad constitution
This is actually not true, and it's worth unpacking the reason why it's not true, because it involves unpacking the distinction between two separate sins of the current Senate-- malapportionment and winner-take-all.
So one of the major problems with the Senate is that it gives small states a level of power that large states lack. The people there, very directly, get more representation than those in big states-- sometimes comically more, like the average voter in Wyoming has almost three times as much representation as the average voter in California. This is an intractable problem because the entrenched language in the Senate precludes depriving a state of "equal representation" without its consent. The only real way to tweak this is by deliberately making all states about the same size, which isn't going to happen for other practical reasons. And short of a revolution destroying the Constitution outright, we're stuck with it.
But the other problem with the Senate is that consistently getting 51 percent of the vote gets you 100 percent of the representation. That makes the otherwise academic question of whether the majority of states are "blue" or "red" massively consequential. Nonproportionality IS a solvable problem, and it's a solved problem even within the context of a malapportioned Senate. Australia's Senate, like ours, is constitutionally malapportioned such that every state has equal representation-- Tasmania, with 580,000 people, gets the same representation as New South Wales, with 8.5 million people. However, the way that equal representation gets manifested is through electing six senators per cycle per state, not one, and the way the six senators are distributed uses single transferable vote, which is basically a form of proportional representation (I will spare everyone the math on that, but if you look it up on Wikipedia you'll get all the gory details). As a result there's always at least one Labor senator and one Liberal or National senator (the two biggest parties) in every Senate election regardless of whether you're talking about super-libbed-out South Australia or right-wing Queensland. Six seats per cycle is also enough to allow for a decent number of senators from outside of the two major parties, enough to where it's basically impossible for there to ever be a majority for the government in that chamber. That means some level of minor-party buy-in is needed for most laws to pass.
It would not take a revolution overthrowing the Constitution to move to Australia's system of equal proportional representation for each state. I think the Australian Senate is quite badly designed, and the malapportionment is a big reason for that, but it's a whole lot better than ours in that third-party voices are really important in getting laws through it.
An Australian style Senate would be an improvement, but I still think it's going to be very daunting for the current Senate to sign off on without pressure from lower level examples.
It would still take a constitutional amendment.
Also I think the senate is a feature, not a bug.
If we made the House elected via proportional voting, I would swap most of the "extra" Senate powers to the House. Confirmations, treaties, etc. Would still require the Senate to pass legislation. This would require a constitutional amendment obviously.
Scott Alexander had a cool guest post on "Giant Congress." The Congressional Apportionment Amendment exists and "just" needs to be ratified. Fun fact: it is the last remaining unratified amendment form the original 12 considered for the Bill of Rights. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights
True, although it is not the last remaining unratified amendment, period; there are still amendments pending that would strip citizenship from people who take titles of nobility (take that, Meghan Markle), allow Congress to regulate child labor, and, uh, re-legalize slavery... or something. Frankly, I don't think anyone knows what ratifying the Corwin Amendment would actually do at this point.
With how easy it apparently is to tear down government buildings to build big-ass ballrooms, presumably making a significantly larger senate chamber would be doable. Or just put Frontier Airlines in charge of seating for the current chamber and you'd fit thousands of reps easily! (Though given the age demos that may significantly slow down entry/exit from the room)
I think the only way it works is for a state to do that with its own legislature as a test case. I think the main problem is that wouldn’t be popular. People are used to the current system and the status quo bias is strong.
Nebraska seems like a good test case. NE is already unicameral and only has 49 members of its state legislature.
Does not have to involve abolishing the Senate. Does need constitutional change.
You just make the Senate bigger so it can be elected proportionally in each state.
But if you really want to do it, the first stage is creating actual political parties (ie legal entities with the power to, as an entity, select candidates in any manner they choose).
Since the likelihood of a state doing that (ie banning primaries) is as close to zero as makes no difference, here's my proposal.
Allow party *factions* to formally nominate candidates in primaries and for primary candidates to have the formal label of a party faction. Let's say the first state where this happens is Illinois. IL-DSA registers as a faction in the Democratic Party. In primaries, there would be one candidate who would be the DSA candidate, chosen by the DSA according to its internal procedures (whether that be a nominating convention or a postal ballot of dues-paying members or the decision of a nominating committee, or however they choose to operate). The primary ballot would then list candidates with their factional affiliations. So there might be a DSA candidate and a Progressive candidate and a New Democrat and a Blue Dog.
Over on the GOP side, there might be a Tea Party candidate and a MAGA candidate and Republican Main Street candidate.
Over time, those factions can harden into things that operate like multi-party-system parties and that's when you can turn those into real political parties and a real PR system.
You're right about the Senate, but I think you can do House PR by statute.
Let's not throw up our hands prematurely. Just because we can't change everything doesn't mean we can't make a huge amount of progress at the federal level right now.
There is a ton that can be done that would make Congress work dramatically better without any constitutional changes. IMO, the most important thing is just getting rid of the filibuster, which doesn't even need legislation. This strikes me as a far bigger problem in practice, actually, than the disproportionality of the Senate.
Then you could do proportional representation in the House and ranked choice voting for the Senate through legislation without any constitutional changes.
Agreed on all of this in essence, though see my comments to Sean O. about RCVing the Senate.
The Senate could be more proportional with ranked choice voting or run-off style elections.
No, it's still only for one person from one party for each seat. If the person/party you want doesn't get that seat, then you have no representation in that chamber.
PR systems do this too with minimum vote thresholds. Some people will always be left out.
Sure, but far less so.
Considering that Kroger mails me coupons on all the time specifically for the items I buy most often, I don't think ultra-specific, individualized price hikes from supermarkets is something we will have to be concerned about.
Yes, my wife had a bit of a freakout recently when she looked at the Kroger coupons and realized that every single one of them was for a product that we routinely buy.
I had a friend who used to work at Dunn Humby before Kroger bought them out. He used to work with that data.
Back in the 2000s when Kroger first started their loyalty card (Kroger plus, iirc), my dad freaked out about them tracking his purchases. At the time he felt they would sell your data to insurance companies who would raise premiums based on your diet or to the government who might audit you if your spending didn’t match what they thought was appropriate for your income. It’s interesting to see his paranoia circle back and seem a bit more reasonable two decades later. AFAIK, he still doesn’t shop anywhere with a loyalty card and pays cash for just about everything “so they can’t track you.”
I sometimes think your dad is the smart one.
Yeah like he’s both bonkers and a genius. It’s maddening and still screws with my judgement.
Has he considered investing in facial dazzle paint or sunglasses? Tracking him doesn't require loyalty cards per se.
He wears sun glasses and a UV hood a lot when away from home, does that count?
My dad is the same way, I'd classify him as a "Michael Moore liberal" who's very skeptical of any kind of tracking stuff (doesn't have a loyalty card at the grocery store, refuses to use a credit card online, etc). Sometimes the mistrust pays off, like in early Feb 2020 when he told me to stock up on masks. Other times he's watching a shittily-made documentary on "questions" about 9/11
Ha. The Kroger pharmacy app/mobile site has a “Nutrition Insights” tab that scores your monthly food purchases. It thinks we’re good so it must be pretty lax in its criteria. Of course, since families share a loyalty card it mixes everyone’s purchases together so is a pretty useless proxy for health.
Having spent most of my career doing dynamic pricing, I'm extremely skeptical that the degree of custom pricing described in that question is even possible. Dynamic pricing relies on broad statistical averages - we don't know who's willing to pay $500 for the last seat on a flight but we're 98% sure someone will - and works as well as it does in transportation because capacity is usually pretty limited relative to demand. There are too many unknown unknowns affecting someone's willingness to pay for Cheerios and that would still be true even if we somehow had total consumer surveillance and an AI capable of sifting through that volume of data.
I don't really get the problem with the Streetsblog/GGWash article Matt links to. It reports study findings that autonomous cars would increase driving and suggests that regulatory responses to that (like congestion pricing) are appropriate. That seems like the same conclusion you would reach from a standard externalities analysis; unless I'm missing something, it doesn't support a ban or something like an autonomous vehicles cap and it explicitly notes the potential safety benefits.
I'm not sure it's a "problem", but GGW clearly views reducing vehicle miles travelled as a bigger priority than traffic safety.
The article's conclusion illustrates this well:
> America could end up embracing a mode that addresses many of our traffic violence troubles, but fails to uproot the deeper rot of car dependency that has hollowed out our society.
"car dependency has hollowed out our society". I'm not sure what that means unless the vision is of everyone living in dense urban highrises within walking distance of trains. Not for me, I need a plot of land.
I want to live in 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 the same kind of city as urbanists, but I hate the agressive tendency to ignore contrary preferences and exaggerate externalities.
My plan is not trains for all. My plan is trains for all *who want it*.
When they are driverless, no reason you would need density for trains.
Trains still need a lot of expensive special purpose infrastructure, and the only advantage they have over other modes is that they carry a lot more people in less space. So they really do need density, even if the particular threshold of density they need might change when you get rid of the driver.
“Traffic violence”
The problem is that car-dependence leads to nobody fucking.
That was not my experience in high school.
No, it’s the cars, you see. Gotta be the cars…
born in?
If you look at places in the world that are American urbanist dreams, they have much worse marriage/fertility rates than car obsessed America.
I said fucking
Studies pretty consistently show that married people have way more sex than unmarried people and its unusual for children to appear without sex. So lower marriage/fertility rates strongly suggest a substantive lower rate of "fucking" as well.
How so?
Cars and phones both lead to people spending less time in public spaces paying attention to others, which is how you make friends and lovers.
On the other hand, making out in the backseat of your parents' borrowed minivan is generally acceptable, but doing that on the bus is less so
The main problem with personalised pricing,is the same as with haggling,it might lead to better pricing but it would take a lot of effort and mental energy. I really don't want to have to create a plan for optimising grocery prices. It would make buying things stressful and with lots of regret for mistakes, I would pay a lot of money not to have that stress.
Regarding abusive pricing for groceries and other necessities, one likely market response is the emergence of more retail brands that avoid such practices to optimize trust in Lazy Guys. An exemplar of this is the HEB chain in Texas, which elevates consumer trust above essentially all other values. It is assisted in this because it is privately held by a family (egads, billionaires) who are not hostage to quarterly results, but nevertheless illuminates a path forward. HEB dominates its markets in Texas, *and* it resists the urge to do sneaky things, which results in almost unbelievable brand loyalty. People really do talk about "my HEB," the store they go to. Never seen anything like it.
I have never been to a HEB or even to Texas beyond transferring at an airport, and even I have heard many people gush about HEB.
There are some striking similarities to Hy-Vee in the midwest (although employee-owned, not family-owned).
Winco in the Intermountain West is a little like this too
As a Boisean I almost mentioned Winco, but they're structured differently than HEB.
“A smile in every aisle,” back in the day.
At this point, I could never leave their footprint.