I think that libertarianism is generally closer to the truth than any other political philosophy held by a substantial number of people. It is also the case that libertarianism attracts a lot of individuals inclined toward grifting, conspiratorial thinking, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

Those are the opening lines of Richard Hanania’s “Thoughts on Elite Versus Populist Libertarianism.” He continues,

These are two very different tribes, and it’s an interesting question of how they can both identify with the same political label. What exactly does the Cato Institute or George Mason University have in common with “The Redheaded Libertarian”? To put it another way, how does a philosophy that prioritizes nonaggression and individual liberty above all else so often end up represented in politics and the media by collectivists and authoritarians?

Also this:

Ultimately, elite libertarians are driven by ideas, while populist libertarianism is a strategy for gaining a large audience and a mode of emotional catharsis for those angry at the world.

This is something that I have wrestled with. Namely, I always have felt that the weirdness of those in the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party in particular was a combination feature with buggy byproducts and something that comes with the territory. Now there are clear fissures. “End the Fed” has become “Crush the Others.” It is a bad development. As Arnold Kling says directed in this case at the libertarian movement, “Have a nice day.”

II.

That the libertarian community if filled with contradictory actors is not exactly counter conventional wisdom for those paying attention. As for something that is CCW for those not paying attention, I offer this from Eli Stark-Elster:

For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?

If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

That is from his recent piece, “School is way worse for kids than social media.” The post is filled with substantiating facts and nuance. I find it problematic that the predictable knee-jerk reaction is a moral-panic when it comes to social media and kids. This will all be the subject of a future post in the Pessimist Archive Newsletter.

I find it additionally problematic and frustrating that the failures of schooling as we’ve made it are being overlooked while social media use is scapegoated along the way as an excuse for education failures. This is similar to how the go-to solution in education is “all this would be fixed if we just had [even more] money.” Money alone won’t solve it. We spend enormously on school already. And blaming social media use by the young won’t either.

From his conclusion:

But schooling is a system, and ultimately, it is the system itself that is ruining the minds of young people. Well before 2012, children were still committing suicide in the fall. Fundamentally, school is not what kids have evolved to do: they’re supposed to play freely with their friends, not spend their childhoods performing for adults under constant supervision.

Yet this is our brave new world. For the last fifty years, adults have opted to put their children in a panopticon. Social media bans are yet another brick in the wall.

The kids these days don’t know how good they got it. And the olds these days don’t know how bad they had it. Both can be true while the opposite is often claimed by each respective group.1

Here are some arguments with evidence to support my view.

Start with John Cochrane sharing an expanded version of his recent article “The 1950s: A Not-So-Golden Age.”

Many people say was the 1950s, when, as the fable goes, the economy was growing robustly, manufacturing was strong, there were good union jobs for not very skilled people, and a man (sorry, it was a man) could buy a house and support a family on such a job.

Not so fast.

Look at standards of living. Real gross domestic product per capita, which is also national income per capita, sat below $19,000 in 1955. In 2025 it approached $69,500. These figures are expressed in 2017 dollars, thus accounting for inflation. The average American is about 3.7 times better off today than in 1955. It’s not even close.

He cites a wealth of meaningful statistical measures along with many qualitative facts that are equally impactful. He counters and busts numerous myths held religiously by progressives or conservatives and sometimes both.

Next comes Zvi Mowshowitz who ponders the question “When Were Things The Best” looking at a large number of facets.

He makes a lot of arguments for today as the best version of these various things but not always. Some of them are quite compelling while others I have my doubts about. Sometimes it’s definitions and framing that might make today or some other period the unarguable answer. This is a nuanced topic.

We don’t have the best everything [today]. There are exceptions.

Most centrally, we don’t have the best intact families or close-knit communities, or the best dating ecosystem or best child freedoms. Those are huge deals.

But there are so many other places in which people are simply wrong.

. . .

The Best Cars

Today. We wax nostalgic about old cars. They looked cool. They also were cool.

They were also less powerful, more dangerous, much less fuel efficient, much less reliable, with far fewer features and of course absolutely no smart features. That’s even without considering that we’re starting to get self-driving cars.

. . .

Not everything is getting better all the time. Important things are getting worse.

We still need to remember and count our blessings, and not make up stories about how various things are getting worse, when those things are actually getting better.

To sum up, and to add some additional key factors, the following things did indeed peak in the past and quality is getting worse as more than a temporary blip:

1. Political division.

2. Average quality of new music, weighted by what people listen to.

3. Live music and live radio experiences, and other collective national experiences.

4. Fashion, in terms of awesomeness.

5. Roads, traffic and general infrastructure.

6. Some secondary but important moral values.

7. Dating experiences, ability to avoid going on apps.

8. Job security, ability to stay in one job for decades if desired.

9. Marriage rates and intact families, including some definitions of ‘happy’ families.

10. Fertility rates and felt ability to have and support children as desired.

11. Childhood freedoms and physical experiences.

12. Hope for the future, which is centrally motivating this whole series of posts.

The second half of that list is freaking depressing. Yikes. Something’s very wrong.

But what’s wrong isn’t the quality of goods, or many of the things people wax nostalgic about. The first half of this list cannot explain the second half.

Compare that first half to the ways in which quality is up, and in many of these cases things are 10 times better, or 100 times better, or barely used to even exist:

1. Morality overall, in many rather huge ways.

2. Access to information, including the news.

3. Logistics and delivery. Ease of getting the things you want.

4. Communication. Telephones including mobile phones.

5. Music as consumed at home via deliberate choice.

6. Audio experiences. Music streams and playlists. Talk.

7. Electronics, including computers, televisions, medical devices, security systems.

8. Television, both new content and old content, and modes of access.

9. Movies, both new content and old content, and modes of access.

10. Fashion in terms of comfort, cost and upkeep.

11. Sports.

12. Cuisine. Food of all kinds, at home and at restaurants.

13. Air travel.

14. Taxis.

15. Cars.

16. Medical care, dental care and medical (and nonmedical) drugs.

That only emphasizes the bottom of the first list. Something’s very wrong.

. . .

Once again, us doing well does not mean we shouldn’t be doing better.

We see forms of the same trends.

1. Many things are getting better, but often not as much better as they could be.

2. Other things are getting worse, both in ways inevitable and avoidable.

3. This identifies important problems, but the changes in quantity and quality of goods and services do not explain people’s unhappiness, or why many of the most important things are getting worse. More is happening.

As he makes clear in the post, not all is grand, but not all is lost either. And rightful hope springs eternal.

He followed that post up with another considering “The Revolution of Rising Expectations.” This one serves as an attempted reconciliation of the debate between those you claim "life sucks, you can't get ahead" and those who claim "but every measure is better than ever."

Thus In This House We Believe The Following

1. We live in an age of wonders that in many central ways is vastly superior.

2. I strongly prefer here to elsewhere and the present to the past.

3. It is still very possible to make ends meet financially in America.

4. Real median wages have risen.

However, due to rising expectations and rising requirements:

5. The cost of the de facto required basket of goods and services has risen even more.

6. Survival requires jumping through costly hoops not in the statistics.

7. We lack key social supports and affordances we used to have.

8. You cannot simply ‘buy the older basket of goods and services.’

9. Staying afloat, ‘making your life work,’ has for a while been getting harder.

10. This is all highly conflated with ‘when things were better’ more generally.

All of that is before consideration of AI, which this post mostly excludes.

For those who like a data-rich examination with helpful charts, I direct you to the American Abundance Index from Human Progress.

No, not everything is great much less perfect. But it’s getting better . . .

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. —Christopher Hitchens

This post from Greg Kukianoff is a great rundown of all the many recent challenges to the principle and right of free speech:

Rejecting European speech codes doesn’t leave Americans defenseless against the worst harms. Laws already exist against threats, stalking, harassment, discrimination and violence. A new category that turns moral disgust into police action is not needed. Disgust is a tribal instinct, and tribalism fuels the fire that reason is meant to extinguish.

Three from Scott Sumner in his post on systemic analysis, which is filled with pithy quotables including the third one in this group itself a quote originally from Alex Nowrasteh & Ilya Somin.

Systemic analysis is all about looking beyond the surface. Most people respond to a bad experience in a business by blaming the business. I do that on some occasions, but more often I blame government regulation. Today, I had a bad experience at CVS. I blame the government regulation that prevents me from buying medication without a prescription. In my view, bad regulations and a bad tort law system explain more than 90% of my bad experiences with the private sector. The other 10% are customer service phone lines.

and:

Environmentalists often oppose solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. Anti-trust advocates often oppose low prices. Immigration advocates often (unintentionally) create a public backlash against immigration. Affordable housing advocates tend to make housing less affordable. Labor advocates enact policies that lower real wages and raise unemployment. Safety advocates make the world less safe by making the perfect the enemy of the good. Civil rights advocates enact discriminatory policies. Peace advocates often give aid and comfort to aggressors. Medical ethics advocates enact policies that kill tens of thousands of people. Education reformers usually make kids dumber.

and the requote:

Nationalism’s failures in the 20th century, from starting two world wars to genocide to jingoistic economic policies that have immiserated millions, rank it as a horrific failed ideology, second only to communism. Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians rightly mock leftists who claim that “real communism hasn’t been tried” or that “the Soviet Union wasn’t really communist” when confronted with the disastrous effects of their policies. Those who make similar excuses for nationalism are on no firmer ground.

Bryan Caplan uses the “F” label (note that this was from before the homicides of Renee Good and Alex Pretti):

The world is a confusing place, and major events occasionally help us attain clarity. Almost anyone with a conscience has been troubled by stories about the brutality of recent immigration enforcement. But as long as you accept the idea that it’s morally acceptable for government to arrest and expel someone simply because “he’s not one of us,” the methods ICE has been using make sense. They’re treating the people they call criminals as if they’re criminals. Yes, brutally enforcing fascist laws is worse than enforcing them laxly. But the primary evil is not the methods of enforcement, but the laws themselves.

Alex Tabarrok checks in on the department of unintended consequences:

To let Americans buy smaller cars, Trump had to weaken fuel-efficiency standards. Does that sound crazy? Small cars, of course, have much higher fuel efficiency. Yet this is exactly how the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards work.

One goal I have in sharing these is to get you to click through to read the entire piece. Another is to invite you to follow these brilliant thinkers.

Substacks referenced:

I.

Let’s start with a truly magical example that is factual and very counterintuitive.

Anscombe’s quartet is an example as shown in the picture below where four very different datasets all have the same mean, variance, correlation, and linear regression. See for yourself if you would have predicted this just looking at the graphs.

Those seemingly couldn’t be more different, and they are! Yet they share common descriptive statistical properties to a high level of exaction. The point I draw from this is that math and statistics can deceive us and explicitly be used as a tool to lie1 to us by unsuspecting and (worse) motivated actors. Now let’s examine some cases of the latter.

II.

Every time a big expense comes up, President Donald Trump assures Americans that all the money raised from tariffs will take care of it. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has been tracking Trump’s promises on how he would spend the revenue going back to the campaign. Added together, Trump has said the windfall from his tariffs will help cover nearly $6 trillion in costs. That’s over 22 times more than the administration’s own estimates for how much revenue his taxes on imports will generate this year.

That is the opening paragraph from the Washington Post editorial board where they compare Trump’s promises of what his tariffs will pay for and how much they were estimated to bring in. The graph is from the piece as well. The boxed region is the amount the Trump administration estimates that tariffs will would have brought in.

The lie is made obvious by the analysis. Without tallying up and comparing the promises to the funding source however, one could easily be duped into thinking that the tariff revenue could deliver on these various, vast promises.

Government spending is in the realm of incomprehensible numbers. We just don’t have a way to grasp them in our heads intuitively. Very big numbers have this problem. I call it a “can’t see the trees for the forest problem” in that we can see that a small forest has lots of trees, but it is nearly impossible to understand how many trees even a small forest possesses. This is all the more impossible when we try to conceptualize how many trees are in all the world’s forests.

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the major portion of his tariff case as unconstitutional, I guess we will have to make do without the magical math the beautiful tariffs would have allowed.

III.

I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal Investments in America, like no other country has ever seen before. By his own accounting, in four years, Joe Biden got less than $1 trillion of new Investment in the United States. In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.

That is directly from the Liar in Chief himself, Donald Trump as quoted with the emphasis by Scott Lincicome.

Not only is that figure “unfathomable”. It is also hogwash. As Lincicome points out:

To be sure, Trump’s many threats and tariff reductions will doubtless induce some amount of new investment in the United States. The real question, however, is just how much—especially on net and as compared to recent history. At this stage, the short answer to that question is “nobody knows, and we won’t know for years.” In the meantime, however, it’s already clear that we’re getting nowhere near the number Trump keeps using. Put another way, Trump’s right that $18 trillion in new investment is “unfathomable,” but that’s because it’s completely—and impossibly—untrue.

In 2024 the U.S. had a record $4 trillion of private investment as shown in this chart:

Lincicome generously tries to reconcile Trump’s claim of $1 trillion under Biden by showing that it comes close to the total foreign direct investment made under his term. He then shows that the $18 trillion claim would indeed be astounding and that is it totally fake—any way you cut it, it doesn’t add up.

The deception lies in using very big figures that are lost on most of the audience to make audacious and unreliable claims. These are not harmless lies. They are being used to gain support of the populace for an administration that is pursuing bad ends using harmful means.

Again and again Trump invokes tariffs as a magical elixir that can cure all our woes. He hides behind nonsensical big numbers using confusion as his shield and desire for magically great outcomes as his sword.

We start with Alex Tabarrok.

In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)

What I learned recently is that it’s not just airport noise complaints. We see the same pattern in data from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights which enforces federal civil rights laws related to education funding. In 2023, for example, 5059 sexual discrimination complaints came from a single individual–from a total of 8151 complaints. Thus, one individual accounted for 68.5% of all sexual discrimination complaints in that year.

In the first case he’s talking about noise complaints at Reagan national Airport. So he is making and I am echoing a complaint about complaining. Or more accurately, we are complaining that we should not let the squeaky wheels have so much influence.

The granting of veto power from vocal, vested constituencies contributes strongly to development problems. These range from energy development (opposition to solar, nuclear, etc.) to housing development (NIMBYs) to immigration (xenophobes).

Everyone’s opinions matter (to a degree). But almost no one’s opinion should be unduly powerful much less decisive.

II.

When the complaints get strong enough, the proper answer is often exit rather than voice. And many are reasonably accepting that as pointed out by Jason Sorens:

Some of these rates are quite large! New York, for example, is losing fully one percent of its population to other states every year, on average. At the other extreme, Idaho, South Carolina, Montana, and Delaware are growing by more than one percent of their population moving in from other states, on average per year.

He is discussing the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent state population data release and the latest version of his and William Ruger’s analysis of it. Their claim is that relative levels of freedom (personal and economic) explain the migration trends quite well.

The states as 50 laboratories of experimentation are yielding a wealth of wisdom. If we would only take it to heart letting it guide policy . . .

III.

On the other hand, experiments that should not guide us include non-randomized observational studies on food.

Neither of our pleas changed anything. I asked Claude to estimate how many observational nutritional studies have been published in journals since 2017, limiting to Impact Factor > 2. The answer: 45,000-85,000 studies.

That is from Dr. John Mandrola where he is complaining from authority using a recent study that claims to show that coffee consumption prevents dementia to make a broader point. As he and others scream protest into the vast abyss, these “studies show . . .” keep churning out of the research-publishing factories. The incentive problem is clear: They are rewarded for telling us what we want to hear.

As delicious as the results seem to be, they unfortunately do not stand up to logical scrutiny. As he says,

You should pause there to Stop and Think. Dementia and cognitive decline are highly complex conditions caused by many different conditions, ranging from either vascular disease, bleeding conditions, genetic disorders, toxic exposures or the combination of these. Your Bayesian prior that exposure to one food (coffee) could influence this sea of complexity should be very low.

Another surprising stat:

We at Sensible Medicine had the great fortune to have a discussion with Dr Dana Zeraatkar from McMaster University regarding the way these studies are analyzed.

Her group famously showed using a meta-analysis of meat consumption’s effect on mortality, that there are literally a quadrillion different ways to analyze the data—and doing so yields different associations. Brian Nosek’s group has also shown this phenomenon. [emphasis added]

His conclusion could have made a pithy quotables link:

The three take-home messages are a) don’t be fooled by these studies, b) encourage researchers to resist the urge to perform these studies—especially with taxpayer money from NIH. And c) discourage journals from publishing these studies.

Tying these all together, complainers always have a point. Sometimes those points are valid but insignificant. Other times the magnitude matters.

Substack mention:

Immigrants reduced deficits by $14.5 trillion since 1994.

That’s trillion with a “T”!

The quote above and excerpts below come from the Cato Institute’s latest study “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023”. It contains a wealth of analysis many will find surprising as well as quite counter to conventional wisdom. And the gravity of it is of a massive magnitude—hitting triple themes here at MM.

David Bier is one of the authors. His recent post summarizes the findings well.

Here’s another way to look at our main conclusion. Immigrants accounted for 14 percent of tax revenue and 7 percent of government spending from 1994 to 2023. Even if the government had not spent a dollar on immigrants, while somehow still getting all their tax revenue, the US government at all levels would still have run a $20 trillion deficit. Immigrants are not to blame for government deficits. Indeed, they reduced the deficit by about $14.5 trillion.

None of this will be a surprise to those of us who actually know and have followed the issue closely.

From the study’s introduction:

The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:

• For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.

• Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.

• Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.

These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis.

To head off those who might think welfare fraud committed by immigrants would reverse these findings, the authors carefully account for any fraud impact. In a nutshell—legitimate and illegitimate welfare benefit expenses are in the numbers.

II.

Speaking of welfare fraud, Phil Gramm and John Early recently published an article highlighting the actual biggest fraud in welfare.

Yet even as our economy has experienced broad-based growth, real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year.

The source of this dramatic mismatch is a fraud built into how various programs determine welfare eligibility: The government doesn’t count any refundable tax credits or benefits that aren’t paid in cash as income to the recipients.

There are two major components of surprising stats in this article. First is how much uncounted benefits actually flow to those in poverty, which greatly reduces the actual poverty rate. The second is how much less it would take to achieve the same result without all the complexity the current process entails—with poorly aligned incentives creating unintended beneficiaries as well as anti-work incentives among intended beneficiaries not to mention the explicit fraud that expectedly results.

The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level.

A hardworking family earning anything like $64,128 in salary wouldn’t be eligible for any of these welfare benefits in four-fifths of the states. Meanwhile, the welfare family would be eligible for another 90 small federal benefits and sundry state and local welfare programs.

According to the Congressional Budget Office and other independent researchers, when all means-tested payments are counted as income, most welfare recipients have incomes that put them in the middle class, and the proportion of poor people in the U.S. falls from more than 10% to less than 1%.

...

If the government simply gave every poor family in America enough money to raise its income above the official poverty level, it would cost only $240 billion. That would reduce the annual deficit by two-thirds.

There are good arguments against switching to a flat benefit payment system like a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)1 even if we can assume we could achieve a switch rather than an add on to the current mess. However, we should think about the savings as a very meaningful benefit pushing us to consider such a move. Notably it could also remove the benefit cliff problem. Regardless, the difference between where we are and where we could be in terms of actual benefits flowing to those we actually seek to help is enormous.

From Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data:

Humans and livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass; wild mammals are just 5%.

This is a one-two punch on how humans dominate Earth. We have proliferated with +8 billion of us roaming far and wide plus we have converted the animal kingdom to do our bidding as about 92% of the animal kingdom as measured by biomass is our livestock and pets (59% of 64%). This is kind of amazing and kind of tragic. The tragic part is that so much of this weight/animal count is industrial farming. Yes, that is how we’ve fed the (human) world, and that is a good thing. But it is also a bad thing in terms of the conditions for many of these animals. I’ve written before on this ethical problem arguing essentially for moral relativism in this regard.

II.

When it comes to mammals, humans are the GOAT. That is seen somewhat in the stat above. But let’s talk about one of the very few (only two?) humans who can lay legitimate claim to being the GOAT in the domain of basketball.

LeBron James has played against 35% of all players who have ever played in the NBA. — CBS Sports

Argue what you will about the greatest of His Airness, I don’t think MJ comes close to this achievement.

III.

I’ll end with something sad about something happy—no good deed is achieved without hardship.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed that at least 468,000 dogs are currently kept on farms in cages nationwide, or at some 5,900 related businesses, including slaughterhouses, distributors and restaurants. Following the ban, there are few clear plans about how the dogs will be cared for, raising the possibility of some being left to fend for themselves in the wild.

That is from The Korea Times reporting on the happy thing (progress on ending dog meat consumption) that has a sad or at least worrisome outcome in getting from here to there.

A picture from the story:

I.

I think it is hard to fully comprehend just how remarkable this first one is from Roger Pielke, Jr.

Globally, 2025 has had one of the lowest annual death rates from disasters associated with extreme weather events in recorded history.

...

If [estimates] prove accurate, that would make 2025 among the lowest in total deaths from extreme weather events. Ever!

...

To put the death rate into perspective, consider that:

in 1960 it was >320 per 1,000,000;

in 1970, >80;

in 1980, ~3;

in 1990, ~1.3;

Since 2000, six years have occurred with <1.0 deaths per 1,000,000 people, all since 2014. From 1970 to 2025 the death rate dropped by two orders of magnitude. This is an incredible story of human ingenuity and progress.

The long-term implications of climate change are complex. I think it has been both a scientific as well as politically strategic error on the part of environmentalists and others concerned with climate change to make extreme weather their marketing tool. Not only do extreme weather predictions not hold up. The fact that man can adapt to them when they do happen makes dismissing the climate change issue too easy.

(Re-read that last paragraph until you realize what I’m saying.)

II.

Speaking of adaptation to a world that is always unintentionally trying to kill us:

In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months.

That is from a new study published in JAMA.

Unfortunately for some it is still a surprise (held in disbelief) that the COVID mRNA vaccines worked—in the strongest sense of the word. Regardless, this is great news. The breakthroughs in vaccines from this technology will yield benefits of great magnitude for decades.

III.

I knew long-distance calls were expensive in the past. I remember in the 1990s purchasing phone cards at a discount to defray some of this cost. I was still stunned to read this from Adam Omary at Human Progress:

By 1950, the luxuries of traveling between coasts in six hours and communicating across coasts in real time became possible. But these new services were still extraordinarily expensive. Transcontinental flights, both then and now, cost around $300; however, adjusted for inflation, a $300 flight in 1950 corresponds to well over $3,000 in today’s dollars. Likewise, while modern phone plans offer unlimited texts and calls for the equivalent of a few hours of the average minimum wage per month, transcontinental phone calls in the 1950s cost over $2.00 per minute, or over $27 per minute in today’s dollars.

Today that call is essentially free at the margin. The magnitude of the change goes well beyond the nominal cost difference. It means our business world has expanded from small, local networks to global in virtually every domain. We can keep up with loved ones (and others!) instantly and constantly—to be sure there is a downside to this, but the upside vastly outweighs it.

From Timothy Taylor:

The size of the global economy in 2025 is about $117 trillion, according to the IMF. The volume of trading in foreign exchange markets is now up to $9.5 trillion per day, according to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS).

II.

Larry Swedroe updates us on long-term yields for broad equity markets.

And here is the more familiar inverse of that chart for the U.S. portion courtesy of Multpl.com.

This is not surprising to any of us who have been paying attention, but it is nonetheless surprising when we consider the implications. It is extremely likely that the total return for large U.S. stocks will be quite poor over the next decade. That is even with the fact that some years in the next 10 are likely to be quite good. Good luck figuring those out ahead of time.

III.

California’s 5% wealth tax would take 50% of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Alphabet holdings. From Garry Tan’s X post (full thread).

While this is by far not the only problem with this tax concept (wealth taxes) or this specific version, it does highlight an unusual kind of unintended consequences. The usual ones would be taking more than 5% over time and driving out current wealth while strongly disincentivizing new wealth.

In part this is inspired by a reader’s request for me to write more on education—specifically what works and what doesn’t. This is one of several pieces I plan to do in fulfillment of that request.

I’ve linked to Professor Gray in the past including to a snippet of the longer interview I highlight below. Long-time readers can therefore be forgiven for their feeling of Déjà Vu.

First I would like to share his recent post on “Helping Kids (and Ourselves) Use Smartphones Safely”.

This is the most thorough and reasonable discussion on smart phone use by children that I have read recently. And I have read a lot on this topic.

In it he patiently walks through 9 benefits and 9 harms. As he argues, this is not a complete list nor does he give a definitive conclusion. We must be thoughtful about this new technology. A luddite’s opposition is as unhelpful as is a completely laissez faire approach. Parents have to engage and fine tune. This is very much in keeping with his philosophy generally.

Second I would like to share his post from July outlining “A Brief History of Education”. From this I will quote at length.

When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn’t force children to go to school, or if schools operated much differently, children would not grow up to be competent adults. Perhaps some really smart people have figured all this out and have proven it in some way, or perhaps alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have been tested and have failed.

…

Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.

Over time, from the early Prussian days to now, certain schooling premises about the nature of learning have remained unchanged: Learning is hard work; it is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children’s self-chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like “discovery”).

Clever educators today might use “play” as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this has decreased greatly in recent decades), but children’s own play is understood as inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can’t sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.

The theories and practices of education began in a most brutal form that included severe beating of children both physically and emotionally. It somewhat evolved into a less physical but still brutal form of forced learning, mainly for the purposes of obedience. One could say, as Gray points out, we have not learned much of how to teach or how we learn, especially in childhood.

From his conclusion:

Schools as we know them began centuries ago as Church-run institutions designed explicitly for obedience training and indoctrination. The curriculum and stated goals of schooling have changed over time, but the methodology has not. We still have today a system well designed for obedience training and indoctrination and poorly designed for anything else.

Think about it. The only way students can pass in school is to do what they are told to do, no matter how stupid and irrelevant it seems; and almost the only way they can fail is to not do what they are told to do. Teachers go into the profession for all sorts of idealized reasons and, generally, obedience training is not one of them. But once in the profession, they are, by necessity, obedience trainers. They reward for obedience and punish for disobedience. We don’t like to think of the school lessons today as doctrine, but when you require students to feed back, unquestioningly, whatever it is you “teach,” then what you are teaching is doctrine. Some great teachers can overcome it, but it takes much effort and cannot be fully overcome as the school structure doesn’t allow that.

Third and last I share the interview with John Papola from his podcast Dad Saves America. Here it is in podcast form and here it is on YouTube. The show’s synopsis sums up well Gray’s philosophy:

Peter explains how we stripped childhood of the one ingredient that actually builds competence: real freedom. We talk about the collapse of free, self-directed play, the fear-driven culture that keeps kids under constant adult management, and how modern schooling turns learning into compliance and metrics—resulting in bad habits and chronic stress. Play isn’t a “bonus” part of childhood; it’s how children learn judgment, resilience, social intelligence, and self-control. The path back to healthier kids starts with letting them take risks, solve problems, and grow up the way humans evolved to.

Gray’s Substack is Play Makes Us Human. There is a lot of wisdom in just that titling. I take from it several lessons.

• We shouldn’t take ourselves or the things around us too seriously. This isn’t a lesson of disregard but of humility.

• We learn by doing, trying, failing, and trying again. Mistakes are necessary.

• The playful spirit of a child is not something to be stamped out. It is something to be embraced. To say, “Though an adult, she had a child’s like curiosity,” is a strong compliment.

• There is no single method or formula, no one way. Again, experimentation and the freedom to try is what builds better people and richer societies (richer in all respects).

Play around with his ideas, and you might just learn something new as well as something you instinctively knew all along.

From Noah Smith,

But in the years since 2007, it feels like that Japanese future has been lost. Living standards grew only 6.5% between 2007 and 2022.:

Source: Our World in Data

And even that meager amount of growth was entirely due to increased labor input — women, old people, and young people going to work — rather than to productivity increases. In fact, Japanese workers produced less per hour in 2019 than in 2007, falling well behind other advanced nations:

He is making the argument that Japan collapsed after 2008 rather than in the 1990s as is the conventional wisdom. His description of what Japan was like before 2008 is remarkable, and his amazement is well placed. The same can be said for his hope for Japan and their prospects despite substantial headwinds.

II.

From Nate Silver,

The rate of field goal attempts of 55 yards or more has increased by 135 percent compared to just four seasons ago, in 2021. And the number of makes from 55-plus has tripled in just four seasons. I’m guessing we’re in for some mean reversion — but so far on the year, kickers are actually converting 64 percent of their attempts from super-long-range. [see the post for clickable source links]

In the post he has a lot of interesting stats on how football is changing from drive strategy to 4th-down decisions (the economists finally won the battle!).

III.

From Andrew G. Biggs,

Americans born in the 1960s and hitting age 65 over the next decade are promised an average of 33% more in Social Security benefits than they paid over their lifetimes in taxes, including interest on those taxes.

His proposed reforms are aligned with mine.1 Namely, reduce the maximum benefit and increase the minimum benefit. In my proposal all seniors would eventually get the same minimum benefit—and no more—making Social Security a universal basic income for the elderly. I would also gradually increase the date of when benefits begin and have that be the same date for all recipients. His reform might be more politically realistic by keeping some greater benefit for higher earners, who are of course higher payers into the system, but that would not be in the actual spirit of the program as a social safety net.

Substacks referenced:

Noahpinion

I want the Japanese future back!

My first book, Weeb Economy, came out in March of this year, but only in Japanese. Since then, a bunch of people have been asking me for an English translation…

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5 months ago · 246 likes · 13 comments · Noah Smith

Silver Bulletin

The NFL has entered the Scorigami Era

This article…

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5 months ago · 158 likes · 22 comments · Nate Silver

It is refreshing and surprising to see how far we’ve come in so short a span of time.

We live in a time of abundance as most importantly seen in the link above. You can also witness it metaphorically and literally by looking at light.

The light that cost 10,800 seconds in 1830 costs only 0.0735 seconds today. The time price has dropped by 99.99932 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour in 1830, workers today earn 146,980 hours of light today. That’s a 14,697,900 percent increase. Light abundance has been increasing around 6.3 percent annually on a compound basis, doubling every 12 years.

That is from Saul Zimet at Human Progress. It is hard to overstate the importance of being able to overcome darkness.

Here is more good news:

The FBI will likely report the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded when the Reported Crime in the US for 2025 comes out in the second half of 2026.

That is from Jeff Asher at his Substack. This decline in murder is seen not just in the United States as London had a record low 97 homicides in 2025.

Still more good news: Poverty in the U.S. is probably a lot lower than you probably think it is.

When measured by consumption, the much more appropriate method of assessing poverty as opposed to income especially given our generous welfare state, the poverty rate in the United States is a very minimal 2.4%. It should be noted (1) that this is still a representation of a lot of people not enjoying as much consumption as we would like for them to have, but also (2) that it represents a level of consumption much of the world would find to be quite desirable.

The source for that is Timothy Taylor relating finds from the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Another source, PovertyMeasurement.org, finds the figure of consumption poverty is about 1.1%. This was part of a great post in The Free Press by Cliff Asness and Michael Strain. I believe the differences between the two lies in the inflation adjustment. Regardless, this is great and perhaps surprising news. I share the chart of this progress below.

Lastly, you may have heard that the U.S. income level poverty line starts at $140,000. That would be surprising news for sure. Fortunately, it is completely wrong as thoroughly debunked by Scott Winship, Jeremy Horpedahl, Scott Lincicome, and Noah Smith among many others.

Substacks referenced in this post:

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

Self-Esteem, Microaggressions, and the IKEA Effect

Welcome to the October 2025 edition of the N3 Newsletter Linkfest: a monthly roundup of studies and stories that caught my eye over the last few weeks. On the menu this time, we’ve got five interesting facts about self-esteem, the first known case of a nonhuman animal whose evolution has been shaped by its culture, a major breakthrough in embryo selection for intelligence, and three new findings on sex differences. On top of that, we’ll explore the…

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5 months ago · 39 likes · 22 comments · Steve Stewart-Williams

Jeff-alytics

The FBI Will Likely Report The Lowest Murder Rate Ever Recorded In 2025

The FBI will likely report the lowest murder rate it has ever recorded when the Reported Crime in the US for 2025 comes out in the second half of 2026. Murder has only been reliably estimated nationally since 1960, but reaching the lowest level ever recorded just 5 years after the largest one-year increase on record would be quite remarkable…

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7 months ago · 33 likes · 13 comments · Jeff Asher

First World Problems

How Not to Redefine Poverty

I tried to let it go. Someone mentioned the essay to me on Monday, when it was a Substack post. I tweeted out some quick thoughts as to why no one should take it seriously, pointing out the glaring problem that I’ll walk through below. I tried to get back to my other work (a paper showing that declining homeownership among young adults is due to falling…

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4 months ago · 99 likes · 53 comments · Scott Winship

Allison Schrager commenting on the Mamdani tax plan:

I know this may seem small compared with everything else at stake in economic policy, including a four-year rent freeze on private property. But the fact that if you earn $1 more than $999,999 you’d owe $20,000 is just amateurish tax design — like something an eighth grader would come up with. It points to outright economic illiteracy — or that no one with even a passing familiarity with tax policy reviewed it.

Michael Munger arguing that government spending austerity is a myth:

My point is more than simple pedantry. While it is annoying to hear the false “austerity narrative” constantly repeated as Progressive gospel, the real problem is the policy implication. If we permit the “austerity cuts caused poverty, we need to spend more!” fable to become the stylized fact on which policy is based, we will not only be thinking of the wrong solution, but we’ll be working from a false history.

Arnold Kling discussing the problem with solutions to the real and supposed problems of extreme wealth:

Philanthropy, as opposed to charity, means giving to a cause, not to a community. I dislike philanthropy, as I have said before.

People assume that because non-profits do not seek profits, their intentions are good. And good intentions are sufficient to make them morally superior to profit-seeking enterprises. The intention heuristic ignores the possibility that the outcomes of profit-seeking businesses can be—and often are—more socially beneficial than the outcomes of nonprofits. We should evaluate enterprises based on outcomes, not on intentions.

Then there is the issue of accountability. A profit-seeking business is ultimately accountable to customers, who are in the best position to gauge the value of what the business provides. If customers do not pay more than the cost of what the firm provides, the firm loses money and goes out of business. In contrast, a nonprofit only has to keep its donors happy. If the services it provides are not worth the cost, it can continue to operate by maintaining good relationships between the executives of the nonprofit and the providers of funding.

A lot of supposed public goods turn out to be public bads. Take higher education. Please. Or government’s propensity to subsidize demand and restrict supply, turning health care, education, and housing into never-ending crises.

The theme of his post is “all men are created equal” and it is full of pithy quotables. Writing at the time in the season of generosity (both virtue-signaling intentionality and true giving), the case Kling makes is quite apropos.

Eric Nelson presents what he calls the most shocking retirement stat ever.

His point is that just like in circa 2000 the S&P 500 is very, very expensive today. That implies a very, very likely low return over the next decade or so. And bonds wouldn’t have saved you—the hypothetical withdrawal path of $50,000/year that he describes (5% of the initial portfolio) is depletive despite the seemingly conservative start and allocation.

Stock diversity was one’s only hope.

II.

Yet maybe there is another. The cost of living continues to decline in important areas like food. In fact as Jeremy Horpedahl demonstrates, “groceries in November 2025 are the most affordable they have ever been.”

Tying the two posts together, the key to not running out of money might be work longer so as to enjoy greater wage growth and then invest wiser so as to avoid backdoor concentration risk. Of course, one could also adjust spending down, but no one does that.

III.

Sticking with affordability since it seems to be the theme uniting both sides of the political force, Matthew Yglesias digs into the money illusion aspects including how a shallow understanding underlies much of the public’s frustration with high prices.

Just as in Jeremy (adjusted-for-inflation) Horpedahl’s post above, once you adjust for inflation things look very different. For example in the Yglesias post we see that the real (inflation adjusted) cost (tuition and fees) of college education at public institutions has been steadily declining for over a decade. It is down 11.7% since 2015-16.

Affordability is a nuanced topic. There are a lot of variables to consider. Be careful what assumptions you bring to your projections and update often. You can’t afford not to.

If you’ve ever been to NYC, you’ve probably noticed the blocks and blocks of scaffolding and boarded up store fronts for businesses that are otherwise open. But you probably didn’t realize the extent to which this is happening, nor would you likely know the reasons why. Alex Tabarrok fills us in:

Local Law 11 requires owners of New York City’s 16,000-plus buildings over six stories to get a “close-up, hands-on” facade inspection every five years. Repair costs in NYC’s bureaucratic and labor-union driven system are very high, so the owners throw up “temporary” plywood sheds that often sit there for a decade. NYC now has some 400 miles of ugly sheds.

The ~9,000 sheds stretching nearly 400 miles have installation costs around $100–150 per linear foot and ongoing rents of about 5–6% of that per month, implying something like $150 million plus a year in shed rentals citywide.

There is goodish news here, but don’t get your hopes up. They aren’t reforming the law or looking for technology solutions to stop the back log. How silly of you to think that. No, fool, they are just going to pretty the sheds up so the wrapped appearance will be slightly improved as they let them linger.

II.

It is a shame that NYC allows itself to look like a zombie apocalypse. The reasonable question is could there be a better way.

Let’s consider something else that demands but doesn’t get proper questioning: medical testing. In particular PSA tests for middle-aged men.

The absolute rates of prostate cancer deaths were 1.4% vs 1.6% in the screened vs control arm. So the absolute risk reduction was 0.2%. This means that the number needed to screen to prevent one prostate cancer death is approximately 500. I like to think of this as: 499 out of 500 men get no benefit from being invited to be screened.

That is from Dr. John Mandrola writing at Sensible Medicine discussing a study that began in 1993 that now has a 23-year follow-up. This is an important challenge to the conventional wisdom that medical testing is benign and always desirable.

It is hard to get it into your head yet true that it is not always better to fight cancer risk by screening for it. The silence of not knowing is better when what you “know” is not actually helpful. That is the case with much of prostate cancer—it is not a common cause of deaths. Additionally, not all prostate cancers are worth the bombs of surgery and radiation. As Mandrola says, “The problem is that PSA tests cannot distinguish the slow-growing from aggressive forms.”

III.

Something that we can distinguish quite easily is how much homeownership is changing seemingly everyday.

If owning a home is still the American dream, then it is increasingly out of reach for many young Americans. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40, up from 33 just a few years ago and 29 in 1981.

That is from Allison Schrager writing at Bloomberg.

She makes the point that this is not altogether a bad thing writing,

To which I say: It’s just as well. Buying a home in your 20s is not the best financial goal, nor should it define the American dream of financial success.

Her point is well made. One thing she only alludes to is how homeownership ties one down geographically hindering one’s willingness and ability to relocate—an on-going problem of late.

While arguing that the increase in age isn’t necessarily a bad thing, she does address the substantial increases in housing unaffordability. These developments have become impossible to ignore, and she emphasizes the negative effects.

Channeling Kevin Erdmann, I believe he would raise the point that the disastrous policy choice made 15 years ago to make mortgages all but illegal for what was the main mortgage consumer is a factor to consider here. And the knock-on effects of that contribute strongly to driving rental costs up.

So I’m not as sanguine as Schrager on the increase in first-time buyer age. There is more to it than simply young people making (or having made for them) a better financial decision. The underlying cause is what is critical—not the obvious effect. It’s never quite as it seems.

[Updated 2025-12-9]: It seems the estimate of the average homebuyer was from a National Association of Realtors survey, which only had a response rate of about 3.5%. Upon further review, the statistic is not standing up to scrutiny. The New York Federal Reserve estimates that the age for first time homebuyers has been fairly steady if not slightly declining over the past decade. They put the figure at about 36 years of age (see graph below).

Of the change, the points made above remain. There is a housing problem that is having strong negative and distorting effects.

I.

We are less deviant than ever in recent memory. So argues Adam Mastroianni in The Decline of Deviance.

Let’s start where the data is clear, comprehensive, and overlooked: compared to their parents and grandparents, teens today are a bunch of goody-two-shoes. For instance, high school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s:

They’re also less likely to smoke, have sex, or get in a fight, less likely to abuse painkillers, and less likely to do meth, ecstasy, hallucinogens, inhalants, and heroin. (Don’t kids vape now instead of smoking? No: vaping also declined from 2015 to 2023.) Weed peaked in the late 90s, when almost 50% of high schoolers reported that they had toked up at least once. Now that number is down to 30%. Kids these days are even more likely to use their seatbelts.

They’re even less likely to bring a gun to school.

I didn’t find a lot of these otherwise very interesting statistics to be that surprising, but perhaps you will. The story is we’ve gotten very homogenized and boring. The world is safer and less innovative it would seem. The reasons behind it and the implications as described in the post are themselves somewhat interesting and surprising.

This post from Mastroianni is certainly counter-conventional wisdom. It isn’t as long as it appears as there are a lot of great graphs and other pictorial evidence presented. Definitely worth the read and consideration of his thesis. The story about sculptor Arturo di Modica and his famous work, the Charging Bull, might make my 52 things learned for the year post.

II.

Consistent with the desire for increased safety, we have only a short leap to the current state and future status of Social Security.

According to the latest Social Security Trustees Report, closing the system’s funding gap would require raising the payroll tax to 16%, costing the median worker earning $67,000 about $110,000 more over their lifetime—the equivalent of working two full years for free. [emphasis added]

That is from Romina Boccia at The Debt Dispatch. The kids might not be taking risks, but their grandparents happen to be doing it for them financially. Well, at least they’ll have AI to help them through the coming mess, right . . .

III.

Well, maybe not.

Recently, analysts at JPMorgan Fundamental Research created a financial model that projects total investment in global AI infrastructure through 2030, taking physical limitations into account. That figure is $5 trillion.

Then they calculated how much new revenue these companies will have to generate to justify that $5 trillion investment in AI supercomputers. The result: AI products would have to create an additional $650 billion a year, indefinitely, to give investors a reasonable 10% annual return. That’s more than 150% of Apple’s yearly revenue, and a far cry from OpenAI’s current revenue of about $20 billion a year.

This equates to every iPhone owner in the world paying an extra $35 or so a month for products and subscriptions, according to the JPMorgan analysts.

That is from Christopher Mims and Nate Rattner in the Wall Street Journal.

The implication is not that AI won’t be revolutionary and a great boon to mankind. I certainly believe it will be. I just think that the benefits will flow to the consumer rather than the companies pouring TRILLIONS into it. The bad news is for the investors who are committing vast amounts of capital to investments that almost certainly will disappoint—even if they are profitable. Rate of return matters A LOT.

Risk is a tricky, harsh mistress.

When it comes to work-ethic stereotypes, you simply don’t think of Germans as being on the low end. And yet . . .

Germans have perhaps the lowest level of annual hours worked in the entire world:

That is from Scott Sumner discussing if stereotypes are often true. He works through good examples of how and where our thinking goes awry with these generalizations and false comparisons.

Specifically on German workers he goes on to write:

So where did the hard-working German stereotype come from? Consider that Germany is a very affluent country with a highly productive workforce. In addition, Germans are often seen as being quite orderly and disciplined. Those presumably accurate stereotypes are often (correctly) associated with hard work. And perhaps during the 1360 hours that the average German is on the job, they do work very hard. Maybe they take fewer coffee breaks. Or perhaps they study harder when young, allowing them to become more productive and thus work fewer hours. But it is not true that Germans are hard working in the conventional sense of the term—working long hours.

II.

There is a lot about the labor market most people don’t understand. One thing in particular is how dynamic it is.

Start with the basic facts. The Business Dynamics Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrate that, in a typical recent year, about 10% of establishments will close and another 10% will open. The job-creation rate hovers around 15% of total employment. The job-destruction rate is similar. Every five years, roughly half of all jobs turn over.

That is from Brian Albrecht in a larger discussion of creative destruction and the recent economic Noble winners.

III.

One implication of the underappreciated dynamism of the labor market is to realize how important immigrants are to it. This would include how much immigrants help add lubrication to the process filling much needed roles and changing with those changing needs. Cato’s David Bier gives examples specific to just one particular group of immigrant workers, H-1B visa holders.

In fact, tens of thousands of H‑1B workers leave their original H‑1B employers every year. Figure 1 shows the number of H‑1B workers switching to new employers by fiscal year. Between fiscal year 2005 and 2024, H‑1B workers changed jobs over one million times (1,115,069). The number of switches grew from about 24,000 in 2005 to a record 123,888 in 2022—a more than fivefold increase. The number of approved H‑1B petitions for a change of employer has fallen in the past two years, plummeting to just 63,865 in 2024.

Keep in mind that this is within a pool of only about 700,000 H-1B workers. So that is A LOT of turnover.

The middle class is shrinking! But don’t clutch your pearls and shriek in horror. It is a good thing as they are moving into the upper class. And before you try to counter with the obvious, the poor are getting richer too.

That graph is from Jeremy Horpedahl where as he notes in the subject line one-third of U.S. families earn over $150,000 [annually].

He followed up with another post digging deeper into the trends. In particular he wanted to address the question regarding if the rise in dual-income families explains the growth in family income. His answer:

In short: most of the growth of high-income families can not be explained by the rise of dual-income families. The basic reason is that the growth in dual-income families had mostly already occurred by the 1980s or 1990s (depending on the measure). So the tremendous growth since about 1990, when just about 15 percent of families were above $150,000 (in 2024 dollars), is better explained by rising prosperity, not a trick of more earners.

Kevin Erdmann, while agreeing with the general point of the original graph, does find something to challenge in the straightforward implication that the rising tide is lifting all the boats.

In a nutshell, this data is not fully adjusted for inflation. Or, rather, I should say, the adjustment is biased. The housing shortage creates rent inflation that is highly regressive, down to the neighborhood level. Go 5 miles in one direction to a neighborhood with residents earning more than $150,000 and go 5 miles in the other direction to a neighborhood with residents earning less than $50,000. It is likely that rents in the first neighborhood have risen along with general inflation and that rents in the second neighborhood have risen something like 40% more than general inflation since 2016.

II.

Back to the good news, Don Boudreaux elaborates on four ways you’re living better than ever. One of these is the surprising stat.

Supermarkets today carry many more items than they did in the past. Estimates vary, but supermarkets now carry roughly 32,000 different items (with some estimates being over 40,000 items, and some even as high as 50,000), while in 1975 the number was around 9,000.

There is more at the link certainly worth reading in full including this on life expectancy:

Life expectancy today is three percent longer than in 2000, five percent longer than in 1990, eight percent longer than in 1980, 12 percent longer than in 1970, and 13 percent longer than in 1960.

III.

Those stats on life expectancy might be surprising to you—especially if you pay much attention to the news media. That is because they tend to give A LOT of coverage to the sensational but unlikely causes of death while glossing over or ignoring totally the likely but unremarkable causes. Consider this graphic from Our World in Data as posted by Nathan Yau at FlowingData.

IV.

Finally, one potentially life-threatening ailment is in sharp decline: Peanut allergies in children. From the NYT:

In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies.

Pedestrian deaths [from motor vehicle accidents] have risen substantially in the US since 2009, by nearly 80%. This increase is seen across the US, though not in every single state. The increase is highest in states in the West and South. There has not been a similar increase in other types of motor vehicle deaths, or in pedestrian deaths in other countries.

That is from Brian Potter writing at Construction Physics. The post is a long examination of why so many pedestrians are killed by cars. He includes this chart, which I found surprising (and sad).

The likely causes of this, the continued mystery overall as to why, and the lack of support for the intuitive suspects are themselves surprising as well.

He followed with a second post where we took up some questions readers had raised. Digging deeper left him “more confused than before.” From his conclusion:

My (unsatisfying) current theory is that the increase in pedestrian deaths is due to a multitude of small factors (an uptick in homelessness, an increase in drug use, a reduction in traffic law enforcement, etc.) and/or some sort of complicated multi-factor interaction (such as reduced driver forward visibility exacerbating American’s tendency to use their phones while driving). But I’m not particularly confident of this.

II.

Changing gears (see what I did there?) . . .

Jeremy Horpedahl in writing about how much more affordable the Toyota Camry is today than 30 years ago pointed out a surprising fact about the age of cars on the road with a graph of the trend.

The average age of cars on the road in the US is 14.5 years. If we go back to 1995, it was almost half that, and the increase has been steady since over the past 30 years.

For those who won’t but should read the entire (short) post, the labor-hour price of a Camry has fallen over 35% over the past three decades (from around 1,600 average-wager-earner hours to about 1,000 today). So this means the average Joe can buy two Camrys today with money left over from a standard year’s labor whereas it would have taken him one and a half years to do so in the 1990s.

Workaholics are addicted to the solace they find in extreme fatigue; it’s like the high that a marathon runner might get in her last mile. I can be utterly depleted yet energized by that depletion. There’s a masochistic pride to overworking.

That is from Weike Wang writing in The New Yorker. I completely relate to this assertion.

Programs that provide in-kind benefits create political constituencies who have an interest in making sure that you don’t evaluate whether they work. Farmers and others in the food industry don’t want you to know whether food stamps work. Home builders and others in the housing industry don’t want you to know whether housing subsidies work. Health care providers don’t want you to know whether subsidies for health care work. Teachers unions don’t want you to know whether education subsidies work. Non-profits that sponge off government programs to help the homeless don’t want you to know that those programs don’t work.

That is from Arnold Kling explaining the lack of support for cash transfers to the poor. He is pointing out the combination of a Bootleggers and Baptists story along with simple bad incentives. The conflict of interests is strong with those who feed at the public trough.

Next and related is Matt Zwolinski discussing How (Not) to Shrink the State.

Shrinking the state without a plan is just vandalism; doing it right is the harder, but ultimately much more important work.

Read on for his partial list of four problems one must confront to successfully shrink the government: The problems of expectations, distributional [effects], vacuum, and politics. At least a couple go back to the points Kling was raising above.

We end with an extended one from Bryan Caplan expounding upon those who would raise objections to policy changes that amount to “someone, somewhere, in some way might be harmed”. The solution is cost-benefit analysis which crushes even GDP analysis. [emphasis added below]

I have a standard reply to all such criticisms: Even if you’re totally right, even if the problem is ten times worse than you fear, we should still implement the trillion-dollar proposal under discussion. Why? Because when we’re evaluating policies, we should “put a price tag” on every problem — and the price tag on your problem is a rounding error.

Logically, I think that’s a totally satisfactory answer. But recently I realized that many non-economists misunderstand my point.

. . .

That’s why I ask critics to put a “price tag” on their complaints. How much would you actually pay to reduce the murder rate by 1%? To reduce the illiteracy rate by 3%? To preserve 1000 unobstructed views of the San Francisco Bay?

Since these are marginal changes in outcomes that are barely even perceptible to the vast majority of people, the summed value for everyone in society isn’t in the trillions of dollars or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Probably not even in the tens of billions. As a result, I can casually grant the criticism. I can casually multiply the value of the criticism by a factor of ten. And the cost-benefit case for my trillion-dollar ideas remains overwhelming.

. . .

In slogan form, as I’ve said before, my response to such critics is not “I don’t believe you” but “You don’t believe you.” While cost-benefit analysis lets anyone put dollar value on anything, observed behavior tells us far more about dollar value than mere words.

Sorry, not sorry for the extend quote, but there was much pithiness in that post. And the point is one that resonates passionately within me. To be truthfully frank, I hear objections from so many to so much of what I have studied thoroughly while they have only just discovered it, and I find typically their objections childishly dumb. This is not because I expect them to be an expert. It is because the objections they raise, even if true (as Caplan points out), are “rounding errors” at best, illogical at worst.

Worse yet, as a call back to the points Kling and Zwolinski raise, if your objections are simply your selfish-benefit bias, my disdain for your position is equaled only by my contempt for you as a bad actor.

Working to fight bad reasoning and bad motives leaves me exhausted and not in a good way.