I wouldn’t say I avoided “The Devil Wears Prada”. But I never watched it. I mean, a chick flick about fashion isn’t in my wheelhouse. At the same time, I’ve always had a soft spot for chick flicks — “The Proposal,” not even a stellar example of the genre, is one of my favorites. I wasn’t against watching “The Devil Wears Prada”; it was more that no one ever proposed watching the 2006 film starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci.

Then I got married. One of the wonderful things about tying the knot is that you get to find your new life partner’s movie dead zones. Everyone has incredibly famous, popular movies that, due to a series of unfortunate events, they have never seen. In some cases, it’s far worse: your partner hasn’t even heard of a classic you grew up watching over and over again. I’ll never forget the look on my wife’s face when I asked, “What’s ‘Practical Magic 2’? Was there an original ‘Practical Magic’?”

This was not a smart question.

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At any rate, when my wife found out I had never seen “The Devil Wears Prada,” it was a problem that needed to be remedied immediately. Because this discovery occurred during the stage of our marriage defined by rent payments and dinner reservations rather than yardwork and diapers, we watched it that very night.

I loved it. What a fantastic movie. Pitch-perfect acting, witty dialogue, colorful sets, tried-and-true main plot with engaging melodramas throughout, and the magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Streep) is my favorite antihero in all of fiction. It’s both classic fish-out-of-water tale and novel story. The movie has become one of my go-to background movies; the bright colors and constant movement even keep little kids engaged. My main critique is the constant reinforcement that Anne Hathaway’s character, Andy, is somehow not skinny.

The movie is chock-full of memorable scenes and monologues. The most famous, of course, is the one about the cerulean sweater (transcript below):

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.

You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it? Who showed cerulean military jackets.

And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

My favorite monologue, however, comes from another magazine employee, Nigel:

Andy, please. Be serious. You’re not trying. You’re whining.

What is it that you want me to say to you? Do you want me to say poor you, Miranda is picking on you? Poor you. Poor Andy. Hmmm? Wake up, Six. She’s just doing her job. Don’y you know you were working at the place that first published some of the greatest artists of the century — Halston, Lagerfeld, De La Renta. And what they did, what they created, was greater than art. Because you live your life in it — well not you, obviously, but some people. You think this is just a magazine? Hmm?

This is not just a magazine. It’s a shining beacon of hope for, oh, I don’t know, let’s say a young boy growing up in Rhode Island with six brothers, pretending to go to soccer practice when he was really going to sewing class and reading Runway at night under the covers with a flashlight.

You have no idea how many legends have walked these halls and what’s worse, you don’t care. Because this place, that people would die to work, you only deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn’t give you a kiss on the forehead and put a gold star on your homework at the end of the day.

Wake up, sweetheart!

What makes both monologues so powerful is that they challenge the viewer’s preconceived notions about the fashion industry. The movie, told from Andy’s perspective, makes the audience initially take her side: that haute couture fashion is worthless. A waste of time, a waste of resources. A hustle performed by wealthy dilettantes bilking the gullible. That would have been an easy movie to make, and a movie that has been made many times.

Instead, we see that those at the apex of the fashion industry view it as a vibrant industry, one that melds form and function, art and practicality. Sure, some of the runway shows may be more about shock and show than anything else. But most of us care about some essence of fashion, as exemplified by Andy choosing a cerulean sweater from the clearance bin, having no idea it was the end result of a haute couture trend from years prior.

The big monologues are interspersed with delightful scenes. One of my favorites is when Andy picks up some sketches from the designer James Holt, played by the underrated Daniel Sunjata. The interaction is quick, but Holt, after learning she is Miranda Priestly’s new assistant, says she must need a drink. He walks her over to the bar, orders her a punch, and, handing her the drink before departing, says, “It’s deadly. Have fun.”

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It’s a masterclass in how to be a good host and play industry politics. Holt recognizes that it is worth being on Andy’s good side. She may only be a second assistant, but she’s the second assistant to the most powerful person in fashion: the person in front of the throne, who answers the phones and decides who gets through and who doesn’t. She is someone well placed to grant you a major favor in the future — if she wants to. She’s also young, attractive, and a fresh face, so she’s worth keeping around at a party. At the same time, Holt has a lot of obligations and far more important people to entertain. As a host, he spends exactly the right amount of time engaging in a bit of banter, offering a sincere welcome, getting her a drink in hopes she will stick around, and then politely making clear he has other hosting duties to attend to. The gambit works. Andy doesn’t stay for long, but she does connect with a well-known writer, Christian Thompson, who plays a big role later in the film.

Perhaps what elevates “The Devil Wears Prada” to the next level is the underlying theme of authenticity. As Nigel makes clear, he authentically loves fashion. Andy’s boyfriend, Nate, authentically loves being a chef. Miranda was born to be editor of the magazine. Andy, meanwhile, does not love the fashion industry. The dramatic tension builds as Andy struggles with her lifelong dream of being a legitimate writer while trying to succeed at a job firmly in the part of the journalism industry that most “serious” writers look down their noses at. Nate makes a great point when he accuses Andy of duplicity, making clear that he doesn’t view himself as working for a higher cause: “Andy, I make port wine reductions all day. I’m not exactly in the Peace Corps. I wouldn’t care if you were out all night pole dancing if you did it with some integrity.”

It’s a tough spot for a recent college grad to be in. Andy’s job at Runway Magazine pays the bills. It’s a great stepping stone for someone entering journalism. But it’s fashion. Countless 22-year-olds are in this position right now. They have been told their entire lives to follow their dreams. What do they do when reality hits them in the face instead? Be authentic to themselves? Or sell their soul to make some money?

Put in those terms, the former is clearly preferable. But the happy truth is that one doesn’t have to love one’s job or industry to have an authentic life. One can work in a career that provides financial stability and still find meaning. It’s certainly nice to have a career one loves, but it isn’t necessary. To the contrary, many people have found to their dismay that turning what they love into a career doesn’t make them love the job; it leaves them hating their former passion. The mistake is viewing one’s job as the most important aspect of one’s life. Work to live; don’t live to work.

Andy slowly comes to enjoy the fashion industry. She grows to respect the men and women who devote their lives to designing clothing. When Miranda Priestly pushes Andy’s ethics too far, she quits. But her former boss provides a positive job reference, which leads to a job at a reputable New York newspaper. She gets the opportunity she dreamed of — but only because she was willing to play the game on someone else’s terms.

In November 2005, an independent journalist named Dan Buettner published an article in National Geographic called “The Secrets of Long Life.” The article examined the communities of Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Loma Linda, USA. According to Buettner, these communities had life expectancies far longer than expected. One Sardinian town, Silanus, was dubbed a “Blue Zone” by demographers, who would mark a map with a blue pen every time they identified a centenarian, a person who is at least 100 years old. Along with listing the areas, Buettner identified daily habits that plausibly contributed to the longevity of these areas, such as staying active, finding purpose, and, best of all, drinking red wine.

The prospect of growing very old has fascinated humanity for millennia. Some notable figures in the Bible, most famously Methuselah, are known for their great age. According to popular myth, Ponce de León spent years looking for the Fountain of Youth. Today, Silicon Valley founders are injecting themselves with various compounds and dramatically altering their lifestyles to extend their lifespans.

When the National Geographic article dropped, it was easy to turn its findings into a sales pitch. Buettner, with help from demographers Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, monetized the blue zone concept. He wrote seven books about blue zones and founded a company, Blue Zones LLC. Cities around the world paid for his consulting services. They would adopt his suggestions, follow blue zone approaches to life, and receive a Blue Zone Community certificate upon completion. Word spread. Netflix made a four-episode series called “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.” People everywhere wondered if a few disparate communities had cracked the code.

This popularity began to draw the attention of other scholars, who immediately questioned the conclusions.

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First and foremost was the provenance of the data. One of the earliest presentations ever made about blue zones was by the researcher Gianni Pes at a demography conference in France in 1999. The reaction, according to one article, was bemusement. Most other scientists weren’t convinced that individual communities in Sardinia could have a significantly higher concentration of centenarians than the rest of the island.

Detractors have a simple explanation: fraud and poor record keeping. Throughout the 20th century, war and upheaval resulted in incomplete records. Many parts of the world didn’t keep reliable birth records until the second half of the century. Some still don’t. When that was paired with the beginnings of generous welfare states after World War II, the incentive was obvious: lie about your age. If the Italian government says everyone over the age of 65 will now receive a state pension, someone who is 45 has every reason in the world to claim to be 55. Someone in their mid-thirties can just as easily say they are in their early forties. Without accurate records, this would be impossible to confirm. Decades later, voilà! People qualify for public pensions earlier than they should. Several decades after that, communities that did this have an overabundance of centenarians.

Worse yet, some of these supposed centenarians may not even exist. Once the welfare checks start coming, families have a strong financial motive to keep an elderly relative on the books after they die. This doesn’t mean a dead body propped up at the dinner table, à la “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Rather, families can bury their deceased matriarch and simply never tell the government that Grandma Rosina has passed away.

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Beyond fraud, there’s also plain luck. One supposed blue zone is Ikaria, a small Greek isle in the Aegean Sea. The problem? It’s home to fewer than 10,000 people. Maybe Ikarians have found the secret to a longer life. Maybe they are committing pension fraud. Or maybe there are just a lot of old people there by random chance. There are hundreds of islands in the Mediterranean with small populations. Statistically, some should have a preponderance of centenarians. Some should have a dearth. Not because of healthy living or good diets, but simply through the luck of the draw.

Several years ago, a professor named Saul Newman began examining the issue. He found that after accounting for disputes about birth records, the supposed blue zones didn’t have any more centenarians than one would expect. It conveniently turned out that having unreliable birth records and having a lot of old people go hand in hand. He won an Ig Nobel for his efforts. The Ig Nobel is a tongue-in-cheek academic prize for work that “makes people laugh, and then think.”

Newman noticed something remarkable and potentially devastating to the blue zone thesis. It is widely known that wealthier populations are healthier. Richie Rich is far likelier to make it to 100 than Tiny Tim. Yet many of the blue zones have the opposite trend. The areas of Sardinia with the most 100-year-olds are poorer than average. Okinawa, perhaps the most famous blue zone, is poorer than the rest of Japan. This coincides with worse record keeping; affluent areas are more likely to have capable governments. True, this is circumstantial evidence, but proponents of blue zones need to explain how poor areas with incomplete records magically have a bunch of people in the century club walking around.

Those advocating for blue zones sometimes exhibit textbook confirmation bias. Any evidence that supports their theory is accepted at face value, while any contradictions are ignored. Whenever the charge of sloppy record keeping is leveled, supporters of the blue zone theory will claim to have used multiple sources to verify that centenarians are as old as they say they are. The problem, however, is that multiple sources are not necessarily independent of each other. Once a person’s birthdate is incorrectly listed, other sources will repeat that error. Thus, a person who has five different censuses or forms with the same age may still, in reality, only be one data point. An objective researcher would have an easier time seeing this then someone with a financial stake in the outcome.

Today, the blue zone camp is split in two. Both camps agree that Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Ikaria, Greece, are blue zones. Dan Buettner, however, includes Loma Linda, California, even though he admits it made it into the original National Geographic article only because his editor wanted an American example… which is, uhhh… quite the admission. Michel Poulain, meanwhile, considers Martinique a blue zone, while Buettner has floated adding Singapore.

The good news is that blue zones are a fantastic example of how science is supposed to work. There is some credible evidence that blue zones exist. Researchers presented their findings and began publicizing them. Then, other scientists looked at the data and reached different conclusions. Now they are duking it out, making their case to the scientific community and the public. In the next few years, a new researcher could emerge with novel evidence either for or against blue zones. Either way, progress.

Last week I was sitting in my basement in Connecticut, writing my weekly Econ Soapbox post for my loyal readers, when I heard a knock at the front door. Looking out my window, I saw what I suspected to be solar panel salesmen or nonprofit fundraisers at my door. I almost didn’t answer. As they started to walk away, I decided, for whatever reason, to see what they were about.

As it turns out, it wasn’t salesmen trying to get me to cut down trees to install solar panels or someone asking for donations to protect the right to arm bears. Instead, it was my local state representative, canvassing door to door and asking if residents had any concerns or questions.

This was a perfect opportunity. While New England has many admirable qualities, one of the most bizarre is its hatred of sidewalks. There are many streets, some of them with significant pedestrian traffic, that don’t have any. Want to go for a long walk? Be prepared to spend substantial time walking on the shoulder as cars whiz past. Other times, sidewalks will suddenly end. Sometimes they cease in the middle of a residential block.

I mentioned to my state representative that one road near my house needs a sidewalk. It is heavily trafficked and narrow, and it has a blind curve. Worse yet, the restaurants and bars at the end of the road are incredibly popular. Walking to these places is unsafe, so you literally have to drive, which makes no sense. This isn’t a destination on the side of the highway or in the middle of nowhere. Thousands of people live within a mile but can’t walk there.

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Given that the road is a state highway, this seemed like a perfect issue for my state rep. to address. Instead, she grimaced and said something along the lines of, “I know exactly where you’re talking about. I’ve tried for years to get a sidewalk put in. But we would have to buy land from homeowners to do it. It would cost a fortune. We would have to regrade the road. And a lot of people like their traditional New England streets.”

Rarely does an opportunity to write a new blog post arise whilst one is writing a blog post.

This is the same issue I’ve written about previously. We have a complete lack of state capacity. The signature achievements of the 20th century, like the Interstate Highway System, Hoover Dam, or Golden Gate Bridge, are now laughably unachievable. There is no possible way the US government could manage anything as extraordinary as the first transcontinental railway. We can’t even build a railway halfway across California! At the micro level, a town can’t add a sidewalk to an existing roadway, in part because it would “disrupt the character” of the area. Which is, of course, absurd.

Even replacing existing infrastructure has now become difficult. Consider the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. On March 26, 2024, a container ship lost power and collided with one of the bridge’s piers. Constructed in the 1970s, the Key Bridge had no redundancy in case it lost a central pier. The bridge collapsed into the harbor, killing six people. The replacement was originally estimated to cost under $2 billion and was supposed to be finished by the end of 2028. Fast-forward two and a half years, and construction… hasn’t even begun. There aren’t even contractors lined up for the main span. Expected costs have ballooned to around $5 billion, and the target completion date is 2030. Let’s not kid ourselves though. New Year’s Eve 2031 is almost certain to be rung in without a bridge at the mouth of the Patapsco River. Almost a century ago, the Golden Gate Bridge was constructed in under four and a half years. Today, replacing an existing bridge is going to take far longer.

The truth is that there is a segment of people who hate change. Any change. Everything should remain exactly as it is. Airports shouldn’t add new routes. Abandoned buildings shouldn’t be converted into open businesses. Parking lots must be preserved at all costs.

You might think I’m joking about the last one. I’m not:

This picture is from a community meeting in Boulder, Colorado. The city council decided to sell a 59-spot parking lot for $5.8 million to a developer who will turn it into a 110-room hotel. This seems like a no brainer, especially in an environmentally city like Boulder. Parking lots are the worse use of public space. It’s reserved space for people’s private property that isn’t even in use! No other object made by man is treated with such reverence. Meanwhile, a hotel is great for a city. It increases the number of tourists who visit. Tourists are wonderful - they spend money without straining city budgets. They stimulate the local economy and spend money at businesses that are generally owned by locals. People don’t go on vacation and then eat at the Olive Garden and shop at Kohls.

Parking lots, on the other, are about the worst way to develop a space. Was the Spruce Street Parking Lot convenient? Yes. When I could get a spot, that was one of my go to places to park in Boulder. But if that lot was full, there was plenty of other parking nearby. But this is some of the highest-value real estate in the country! A company is willing to pay almost $6 million for a tiny parking lot. It’s a no brainer.

There have always been people who were against all change. But now they actually have the power to enforce it. We live in a vetocracy. If any single interest group, and in some case a single person, wants to stop a development, they can. This began as a way to preserve community character and prevent the slash and build attitude that led to quite a bit of destruction in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe some guardrails are warranted. But when a city can’t build a sidewalk or develop a parking lot, its time to push the pendulum back.

In 2016, the educational writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long piece for the New York Times about how she had deliberately chosen a Black, low-income public school for her daughter, who was then six. She had done this because she wanted her Black daughter to be among other Black students. She also wanted to practice what she preached. For years she had covered educational systems across America, and for years she had dealt with parents who proclaimed to want integrated, equal-opportunity schools for everyone, only to have those same parents send their own kids to magnet public schools, or worse yet, expensive private schools that effectively ensure a homogenous student body of means and privilege.

The article, naturally, provoked quite the response. Some read it in admiration, seeing a high-profile public intellectual standing by her principles. Others were shocked. Not sending your child to a private school is one thing, but deliberately choosing the worst public school in the area, rather than the better public school your neighbors are sending their children to, is quite the decision. Many questioned whether Hannah-Jones was using her kid as a social experiment, trying to prove that one can still succeed in an underperforming school.

In the years that followed, Hannah-Jones never gave any indication that she had made the wrong choice. Around eight years ago, at a talk at the Iowa City Public Library, she said, “A New York Times reporter in a high poverty school, fucking changes the school. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school, and say there’s a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.”

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In 2024, as her daughter was graduating from eighth grade, she posted, “By test-score metrics many would label this school a failing school, but just as I write in the piece, we judge these schools AND their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice.”

So it was quite a surprise when she recently published a follow-up article titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The subtitle was equally provocative: “A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.”

The thesis was simple. Her daughter, Najya, had been failed by the schools she was deliberately placed in. Despite the confidence in interviews and online posts, her daughter was now struggling at a highly selective public high school. Even algebra, Najya’s strongest subject, was difficult. A private tutor told Hannah-Jones that, "Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions."

The accusations from Najya, when she realized what had happened, are hard to read. They include: “Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?”, “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” And, most damaging, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

Ouch.

First, Nikole Hannah-Jones deserves a lot of credit. She wrote and published this piece knowing that her detractors, of whom there are many, would jump all over it. And they have. The internet erupted with people taking victory laps over this woke journalist who doomed her child to a subpar education. This wasn’t a single bad decision, but a re-up against social norms for an entire decade in order to prove a point that can’t be proven by a single child, no matter what their outcome.

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So credit where credit’s due. This was one of the most gutsy articles written by one of the most polarizing journalists in America. That said, it’s worth incorporating the individual story of the journalist and her daughter into some of the larger issues that have made Hannah-Jones such a controversial writer, as well as issues plaguing American education. Because this is personal for Hannah-Jones, it reads differently than some of her other writings. With any polemical public intellectual, whether on the right or the left, it can be hard to tell where the delusions end and the mendacity begins — that is, how much is “true believer” and how much is “shameless propagandist.” Because this article is clearly heartfelt and exposed Hannah-Jones to attack from all sides, some seems like the former.

For instance, take the following passage:

But fourth grade was the worst year. At the first parent-teacher conference in November 2019, Najya’s teachers told us that she was not performing on grade-level in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader. We were perplexed. Najya was always a good student, and her past reading assessments were always at or above grade level…

…Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.

Given that Najya would struggle mightily later on in school, a biased teacher probably was not the cause of the low assessment. Rather, as Hannah-Jones crows, she had become "a thorn in the principal's side." She openly admits to using her status as a New York Times journalist to make sure Najya was given good grades… and Najya did… right up until some poor teacher didn't get the message and accurately assessed Najya as not meeting standards. This becomes more obvious as Hannah-Jones reports:

Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.

One can easily imagine a colleague coming up to Najya’s fourth-grade teacher and saying, “You told Najya Hannah-Jones’ mother that Najya wasn’t meeting standards? You idiot! The mom is a reporter for the New York Times. She’s on the phone with the principal every week complaining about something. Just say Najya’s doing fine and spare us any additional hassle. It’s not like the mom ever checks her homework anyway.”

The reality was, as in so many schools, teachers were simply passing students along. Najya was getting good grades, but she was not learning. Hannah-Jones had drunk the Kool-Aid for so long that she honestly believed her daughter, who had supposedly met standards so far, was learning. None of Najya’s homework was ever checked, no attempts were made to verify.

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In another bit of the delusion so common on the left, Hannah-Jones implies that standardized tests, even in subjects like math, are untrustworthy. Najya failed a statewide math test in middle school. This wasn’t seen as a problem, however, because she was getting As in her class. These are the types of conclusions that make one realize it isn’t just an act: people have been told standardized tests are bad for so long that they honestly believe it. If their child is getting As in class, then they must be learning. Who cares that she crashed out on a standardized test with transparent scores? The teacher with subjective assessments would have no incentive to lie, right?

On the mendacity end of the spectrum, however, the biased reporting that has drawn Hannah-Jones so much ire repeats itself. She goes out of her way to say that Black schools are underfunded and under-resourced. As an education writer, she knows this claim is now decades out of date. Of course, she has no problem finding a study that looks at “white” and “nonwhite” students and finds the latter receive less funding. Never mind that “nonwhite” is not the same as “Black,” or that the study she cites ignores federal funding. Accounting for federal funding, as this study does, compensates for those disparities. The reality is that income and race are no longer clearly correlated with per-pupil spending.

One can quibble with national details, but Hannah-Jones makes a dishonest argument by drawing so much attention to a flawed national study while ignoring the specifics of her daughter’s school. Najya attended P.S. 307, a school that received a gobsmacking $52,000 in funding per student and has a 10:1 student/teacher ratio. By any measure, this is one of the most well-funded and well-resourced schools in the country. Whatever issues P.S. 307 has, it isn’t a lack of money or staff. Not mentioning this is a considerable omission.

Beyond that, her narrative about the racial breakdowns of various schools doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. P.S. 307 was low-income and majority Black. The alternative, P.S. 008, was not some exclusive, all-White enclave. In 2016–2017, the first year for which data is provided, P.S. 008 was 61 percent White — so White-majority, but there was still a good number of nonwhite students. The real gap, however, between the narrative and the facts has to do with Najya’s eventual public high school, which had to be applied for and rejected many prospective students. Hannah-Jones’ hand-wringing is intense:

Could I spare myself the judgment I had meted out to others when they justified why they — despite believing in integration — sent their own children to schools that entrenched segregation? Across the country, I’d lectured about how educational inequality is systemic, but that this fact did not absolve each of us of our individual choices. And in the end, I could not even sustain the cause within my own family.

But the school Najya attends, which is left anonymous in the article but based on its description is likely Millennium Brooklyn High School, is also not a homogenous enclave. Far from it. 26 percent of the students are Asian. 18 percent are Black. 18 percent are Hispanic. 33 percent are White. For someone who fights against school segregation and wants opportunities for all children, Millennium Brooklyn High School seems like a mission accomplished — certainly not a school that should be avoided. It’s representative of all races. There is a moderate economic need and a normal number of students with IEPs. There’s a fundamental disconnect here that never gets addressed.

Hannah-Jones claims multiple times that her daughter isn't worth more than other daughters. From a societal view, she's right. No child should be valued above another. But that conclusion only holds from a neutral vantage point. A person should believe that one child has the same value as another. A parent should believe their child is worth the most of all.

The Fed Chair stands alone. Over the last few decades, one government office after another has been politicized. Key positions like the Attorney General or the Director of the FBI, once a testament to the strength of US government rules and mores, have become a tool of the president. The halcyon days of independently minded members of the judicial branch and justice system are long gone. Even the Supreme Court, where members never have to worry about their next job, let alone running for reelection, has seen judges on both sides of the aisle conveniently change their priorities depending on who is sitting in the Oval Office.

The most powerful exception to this rule, and a powerful one indeed, is the chair of the Federal Reserve. The chair of the Fed manages America’s central bank. This organization helps set interest rates, buys and sells treasury bonds by the hundreds of billions of dollars, and oversees the US banking system. While the chair of the Fed is just one of 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee who vote on interest rate targets, historically other members have deferred to the chair to maintain a sense of unanimity. The Fed chair is arguably the second most powerful person in America, and one of the most powerful individuals in the world.

For decades, presidents of both parties have recognized the importance of an independent Fed chair. This is despite a real tension between the interests of the nation and the interests of the president. The Fed is responsible for maintaining price stability in the United States. That means setting interest rates high enough to prevent inflation, but not so high that it causes undue unemployment. This is a difficult task, one that cannot be accomplished with certainty. The president, on the other hand, would usually benefit from lower rates, especially before an election, as lower interest rates would juice the economy before causing inflation. Richard Nixon, for example, put substantial pressure on Fed chair Arthur Burns to keep rates low in order to win reelection, only to see inflation surge as a result. Since then, both Republican and Democratic presidents have recognized the wisdom of letting the Fed chair manage the economy.

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The result has been an unparalleled success in economic management. While the US economy has had its problems, notably being the epicenter of the Great Recession in 2008, it’s hard to argue with the long-term dominance of the economy. As I have written, there are few economies that have had a half-century like the United States. The economy has grown and grown and grown. Its citizens have become fantastically wealthy.

There are many reasons for this, some significantly more important than the Fed, but let’s give credit where credit is due. We have had a magnificent series of Fed chairs. Beginning with Paul Volcker in 1979, and then Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell, the Fed has maintained a steady hand and reassured markets. They have, of course, not been perfect. In just the last few years, Jerome Powell waited far too long to act to combat rising inflation in 2021, a result of the Covid stimulus packages and ultra-low interest rates. Greenspan could have exercised more regulatory power over the mortgage industry in the 2000s and mitigated the subprime mortgage crisis. That said, overall, America has been blessed with competent Fed chairs that have acted independently and in the country’s best interests.

That independence has become more tenuous of late. For decades, the norm was for a president to reappoint a Fed chair who had only served one term, even if that Fed chair was originally appointed by a member of the other party. Donald Trump broke with that tradition by declining to reappoint Janet Yellen, an Obama appointee. This was in part because he thought she was too short (really). He did, however, appoint a qualified replacement in Jerome Powell. Joe Biden, when president, later faced calls from the activist wing of his party to defenestrate Powell, just as Trump had done to Yellen. Senator Elizabeth Warren in particular opposed the reappointment of Jerome Powell, instead supporting Lael Brainard, or another Fed chair that would place a bigger emphasis on the environment. This would have been a disaster. The Fed chair shouldn’t be concerned with the environment. He or she should be concerned with the economy. Likewise, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should not be concerned with interest rates. He or she should be concerned with the environment. Happily, President Biden recognized that Jerome Powell had done a good job in his first term, and reappointed him to a second.

Trump, in his second term, has attempted to take a wrecking ball to Fed independence. He has called on the Fed to lower interest rates. He publicly said he should fire Powell, although it was unclear whether he had the authority to do so. When the Fed didn’t lower rates as fast as Trump wanted, the US Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, supposedly based on what the Fed chair said to Congress regarding the renovation of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. The investigation was later dropped, but it was clear Trump wanted someone malleable in the office.

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Powell’s term as chair of the Fed ended on May 15, 2026. Trump nominated Kevin Warsh, a Stanford and Harvard grad with a long career in the federal government, private industry, and academia, as his replacement. At face value, Warsh was a conventional pick. He was generally known as an inflation hawk, or someone who advocated higher interest rates to tame inflation. In the leadup to Powell’s retirement, however, he transformed into an inflation dove, or someone who accepts higher inflation as a consequence of lower interest rates. It was clear he was angling for the Fed chair job, a role he had been considered a candidate for in 2018 but lost out to Powell. There was justifiable concern that Warsh would not be independent. No one really knows his true views. Did he really decide inflation would be manageable with lower interest rates after Covid? Or was he willing to say what needed to be said to get the nod from President Trump? Would he become a Trump toady, or maintain his independence?

On September 16, he made a decisive signal that it was the latter. The Fed unanimously voted to raise interest rates by a quarter point, the first increase since 2023. Despite the pressure from Trump, including a bizarre threat to further harm the economy if he didn’t get what he wanted, the Fed did what needed to be done. The case for raising rates was straightforward. The economy is growing. Not quickly, but it is growing. Unemployment remains low. Jobs are still being created. Inflation, however, has stayed elevated. For more than five years, it has been above the Fed’s two percent target. These are the two goals of the Fed regarding interest rates: low inflation and low unemployment. Thus, if unemployment is low and inflation is high, rates should be raised. The Fed should not have lowered rates when they did in 2024, but no use crying over spilled milk. The reality is the Fed recognized that inflation is a bigger issue facing the American economy right now than unemployment, and they acted accordingly.

So cheers to the Fed. In a nation of deteriorating norms and unprecedented animosity from the White House, they made the right decision. May America continue to be blessed with a competent leader of the world’s most powerful financial institution.

Several years ago, a friend recommended I listen to “The History of Rome” podcast. At the time, Rome was having a moment. A social media trend had just begun where women asked their husbands or boyfriends how often they think about the Roman Empire. Hilarity ensued. Male partners often responded to the effect of, “Not that often. Probably only once a week or so.” That sounds normal to me, but apparently, the female species does not think about the Roman Empire on a regular basis, a fascinating difference between the sexes. A meme was born.

“The History of Rome” is a fantastic podcast. It was developed and hosted by Mike Duncan, just a regular guy with a passion for history. In some ways, this is better than having a professional historian, because they often lose sight of how little the average Joe knows about their favorite time period. Instead of diving into the weeds or engaging in controversial analyses, Duncan sticks to the basics. He doesn’t include any original research and generally restates the opinions of the majority of historians on various topics. His speaking style and cadence are perfect, and he uses the occasional quip or joke to keep the audience engaged. Most episodes are around 20-30 minutes long, wonderful for a short commute or when picking up the house.

Going into the podcast, I knew the basics of Roman history. I knew Rome started as a republic, then became an empire, at one point split in two, and slowly collapsed after hundreds of years as Europe and Western Asia’s premier power. I knew some of the big names: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Hannibal, Cleopatra, Nero, Constantine, etc. But my knowledge was very surface-level. For about two years, I slowly worked through the 193 episodes and 73 hours of “The History of Rome” and enjoyed it immensely. Here are some facts about the Roman Empire worth sharing:

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• The name “The Roman Empire” is a bit misleading. The Roman Empire did start in Rome, but for many years, Rome was not the capital city. In 286 AD, Emperor Diocletian moved the capital to Milan. In 330 AD, Emperor Constantine moved it to Constantinople. Even before 286 AD, Rome was often not the seat of power. Some Emperors would spend much of their reign in the Eternal City, while others barely set foot in the capital, instead taking their retinue around the empire as they fought battles against Rome’s numerous enemies. The point is that when Rome was sacked in 410 AD, this wasn’t as big a deal as one might think. Rome was still an important city and had great symbolic value, but by that point, many of the power structures of the Roman Empire had been elsewhere for over a century. However, because Rome was the founding city and capital of the empire for so long, even long after Rome fell, citizens referred to their administrative structure as the “Roman Empire”.

• Much of the early history of Rome is lost to the sands of time. Rome was sacked for the first time in 390 BC by the Gauls, when it was just one of several city-states attempting to dominate the Italian Peninsula. The 390 BC sacking of Rome destroyed almost all written records of the Roman Republic. All that remains today are histories that were written long afterwards. Fact and fiction are impossible to untangle.

• The greatest threat to the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries BC was the Carthaginian Empire, located in modern-day Tunisia in North Africa. For 43 years, the two dominant powers of the Western Mediterranean battled it out for supremacy. This is where Hannibal, the Carthaginian general and perhaps the most famous enemy of Rome, makes his appearance. In a bold gambit, Hannibal sailed across the Mediterranean and marched through the Alps with an entire army, including a large contingent of war elephants. For 14 years, he terrorized the Italian Peninsula, winning battle after battle, but never had the strength to take the city of Rome itself. Eventually, Rome resorted to a desperate gamble: they hastily built a navy and invaded Carthage. Hannibal was recalled to Africa, where he was defeated by Roman General Scipio Africanus. History is written by the victors, so I find it fascinating that Hannibal has become a much larger figure in history than the Roman general who beat him, someone I couldn’t name before listening to the podcast. Carthage would attempt to beat Rome one more time after Hannibal’s defeat, and the results were catastrophic. The Roman army sacked the city of Carthage, enslaved its people, and burned the city to the ground, ensuring no new empire would ever form there.

• Hannibal’s story didn’t end at the Battle of Zama. He went into self-exile and spent several years living in the Seleucid Empire in West Asia. Eventually, the Seleucids went to war with the Romans, and Hannibal was even given a command. He lost a key naval battle, however, but survived and fled yet again, this time to the Kingdom of Bithynia. After all this, Hannibal still proved to be a capable commander, fighting for the Bithynians against Roman allies. Rome, fed up with this meddlesome general, finally said enough was enough, and gave the Bithynians an ultimatum: hand over Hannibal, or else. Hannibal, however, got wind of the plot and committed suicide before he could be captured, going down in history as the most able of Rome’s enemies.

• Fast forward more than a century, and you reach the most famous Roman: Julius Caesar. His story is well-known: he became one of Rome’s best generals, then rebelled against the Senate in 49 BC, overthrowing the Roman Republic and proclaiming himself dictator before being assassinated in 44 BC. While his story is legitimately fascinating, it often omits what happened in the decades prior to his rise. After generations of being a successful and mostly peaceful republic, civil war broke out in 91 BC. In the years that followed, several famous generals would battle for control, including Gaius Marius and Sulla. Sulla eventually won out, and Rome was still technically a republic, but the foundation was broken beyond repair. I think it is likely that even without Julius Caesar, Rome was either going to become an empire or collapse entirely.

• The actual power dynamics of the Roman Empire are mostly unknown. Augustus Caesar became the first Emperor in 27 BC, but named himself Princeps, or “first citizen”. Augustus was clearly the boss, but the Senate remained. Exactly how power was divided up in both theory and practice is unknown, but it appears that the Senate still had real power during the initial stages of the empire. Over the centuries that power would slowly be ceded to the Emperor.

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• For an astounding 500 years, Rome would be an empire. Its power would wax and wane as wars, both civil and interstate, would occasionally prompt a crisis. During times of peace, the empire would flourish. “The History of Rome” podcast is filled with hundreds of interesting anecdotes about emperors, praetorian prefects, generals, and my favorite Roman trope: the evil stepmother. One of the most interesting things I learned was that for centuries, there wasn’t just one emperor at a time. Beginning with Diocletian, there were often two, and sometimes as many as four. As time went on, Rome began to look less and less like a single coherent entity and more like a confederation of states.

• The end of the Roman Empire was not a single major event. Historians today date the fall of Rome to 476, but in reality, the empire slowly collapsed over the course of many years. Rome in 450 was a far different place than the Rome of 350, and the Rome of 500 was still a powerful entity. On top of that, what was once the eastern half of the Roman Empire would continue along for another thousand years. Today it is known as the Byzantine Empire, but at the time, its citizens considered themselves Romans as much as Julius Caesar did. So there isn’t an end to the Roman Empire in the way, say, the USSR collapsed nearly overnight.

• Two things struck me about Rome throughout the podcast. First, the Romans were not good people. Contrary to their depiction on film, they had no sense of honor. The Romans were constantly backstabbing, in some cases literally, and betraying one another. Soldiers would pledge allegiance to an emperor one day, and then murder him in his sleep the next. Men would murder their own family members if it meant a chance to wear the purple robes of the emperor.

• The second is that the fall of Rome is, in my armchair expert opinion, erroneously attributed to problems within Rome, as opposed to the growing strength of its enemies. Rome had many periods of crisis throughout its long history. What caused those problems to be fatal in the fifth century AD was an added element: competition. The various barbarian hordes, from the Goths to the Vandals to the Huns, were growing rapidly through the fourth and fifth centuries. Eventually, Rome had too many enemies. Even with good leadership and coherent governance, I think it is likely Rome would not have been able to withstand wave after wave of barbarian assault.

Every year it seems there is at least one high-profile closure in American higher education. And every year, academics around the country proclaim the end is nigh. College of Saint Rose in Albany closed in 2024, and Hampshire College will shut its doors this December. Sometimes it doesn’t even take an actual closure to prompt the handwringing. Sweet Briar College made waves in 2015 when it announced it would close, especially given its relatively large endowment and wealthy alumni base. Happily for the Vixens, that announcement was premature, and Sweet Briar is still trundling along more than a decade later (you can read my article on the attempted closure of Sweet Briar College, one of the more bizarre tales to come out of American higher ed, here).

This time, it isn’t even a possible closure that’s making waves. Instead, it’s a Wall Street Journal article about the deteriorating finances of Syracuse University. Syracuse finds itself in a unique and unenviable position. Enrollment is dropping. It just took out a near-half-billion-dollar loan to build new dorms closer to the main campus. Worst of all, how do you attract students to Syracuse, New York, the snowiest metropolitan area in the entire United States? At least if you go to school in Anchorage, you get to live among the mountains and moose. In Syracuse, you get a city formerly known for having one of the biggest General Electric campuses. Now, like Buffalo and Rochester, empty factories and office buildings are the norm.

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Syracuse University definitely has its work cut out for it. Recruiting against schools located in Boston or even Philadelphia is going to be an uphill battle. Diving into the details, however, gives a much more nuanced picture. Despite the scary WSJ headline “Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills,” things aren’t going that poorly. Just five years ago, the school had so many students they were putting freshmen up in a nearby Sheraton Hotel after the dorms reached capacity. The school has a $2.5 billion endowment. Yes, they missed their enrollment target this year, but it resulted in a manageable 1.5% budget deficit. The school decided that running a modest deficit while maintaining its standards was preferable to admitting students from the wait list. This is not the behavior of an institution that is having trouble paying its bills.

The reality is Syracuse screwed up the last admissions cycle. They didn’t admit students and give scholarships until after most other schools. Unless you are Yale or Williams College, this will lead to disaster. Sure, Syracuse is the dream school for some students. But for many, it’s going to be one good option among several. If an alternative, especially one in a better location, has admitted you and given you a decent aid package, why wait around for Syracuse to extend an offer? This is one of the most common sources of financial difficulty for otherwise solid schools - not a bad location or poor student outcomes, but simply being too late.

Syracuse administrators are likely quite peeved about the Wall Street Journal article. Here they are, just a few years removed from record-breaking enrollments, and now a reporter comes around predicting gloom and doom after a single down year. The headline blows the trouble way out of proportion. Given the size of Syracuse’s endowment, the school could likely run a 1.5% deficit forever, drawing solely from the gains on its investments. The WSJ article will probably do real damage, as a non-trivial number of students will avoid enrolling there, fearing the school is going to collapse within the next four years. That is absolutely not going to happen.

American higher education does face significant challenges. The number of graduating high school seniors, an 18-year consequence of the Great Recession, is falling. The Trump Administration’s decision to reject student visas at an unprecedented rate has cut off an important income stream. And academia’s leftward bias has led many to question the value of spending six figures on a college degree.

Undoubtedly, some schools will close over the coming decade. That’s not new, though. There are over 1,500 four-year colleges and universities in the United States. Even if a mere 1% closed every year, that would still be a good survival rate for any industry, especially a competitive one with extremely limited geographic mobility.

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Moreover, the schools that have closed over the last decade aren’t anywhere close to Syracuse University’s level. Syracuse, while not a top school in the United States, would be a point of national pride in just about any other country. It enrolls over 20,000 students, receives hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding every year, and has a historically strong (if currently struggling) men’s basketball program.

The schools that actually close are a different breed entirely. Some of the biggest recent examples include Clarion University, Medaille University, and Limestone University. Readers will, of course, recognize those famous institutions from Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina, respectively. Or, more likely, they won’t, because no one outside the immediate area or the alumni base even knows they exist. In reality, only a few dozen schools with enrollments over 1,000 students have shut down since Covid. Their endowments are generally under $30 million, and these are schools that have been in decline for decades.

Consider my own employer, the University of New Haven. Even people in Connecticut are often unaware the University of New Haven exists. We don’t have a national brand or a national championship sports team. Athletics only moved up to Division I last year. New England is facing the steepest demographic cliff of any region in the country, and the Trump Administration’s student visa policy has caused major headaches: our international enrollment dropped from the thousands to the hundreds. But we have strong academic programs. I’m consistently amazed by the research my colleagues produce, often without the resources of a research-first institution. Our students, especially the top ones, compete for and land top jobs in the private sector and in government. We just welcomed our largest freshman class. So yes, some schools are in trouble. Most are doing just fine.

Even more heartening: American higher education is currently facing a perfect storm of bad circumstances, and it’s still doing alright. Along with government hostility, the U.S. economy has had an unprecedented bull run. Other than in 2020, the U.S. hasn’t had a year-on-year economic contraction since 2008. That’s great for the economy, but higher education is countercyclical. When the economy does well, universities see enrollment drop; during recessions, everyone wants a degree. Especially over the last five years, as wages have risen and unemployment has stayed low, the payoff from spending four years in college has looked increasingly shaky. Eventually, though, there will be another recession. The next time unemployment hits six percent and wages flatline, college graduates will start pushing everyone else out of the job market entirely, and the industry will rebound. Undergraduates finish their degrees more often when there isn’t a robust labor market ready to snatch up college dropouts.

Higher education has its challenges. Along with everything already discussed, AI is rapidly changing the landscape and causing headaches for professors everywhere. But the fact that one good-not-great university’s 1.5% budget deficit merits an entire article in America’s premier business newspaper, far from being an indicator of DEFCON 1, is itself a sign of a healthy industry.

On April 29th, 2005, a newborn and formerly healthy baby boy named Tariq Jamieson suddenly stopped eating. As the day progressed, his parents became increasingly concerned. A child that age should be eating every few hours. By evening, scared that something was wrong, his parents called a telehealth service. An ambulance was sent to their home. Shortly before it arrived, Tariq stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead that night at a top hospital in Toronto, Canada.

An unspeakable tragedy had just befallen this family.

Why would a healthy newborn die in such a strange manner? He had been eating and sleeping fine. For a child to simply stop eating, sleep for most of a day, and then die is almost unheard of. Given the unique circumstances, a full autopsy was performed. The results were surprising. Tariq had a lethal amount of codeine and morphine in his bloodstream.

A specialist and world-renowned expert, Dr. Gideon Koren, was brought in to determine what happened. He quickly made the connection that Tariq’s mother, Rani, had been prescribed Tylenol with codeine after birth. At the time, this wasn’t uncommon. Women in North America were often prescribed codeine or other opiates after a difficult delivery. It is known that codeine metabolizes into morphine in the liver, and that some of that morphine can pass into breast milk and then into a newborn. The dose, however, would typically be far too low to cause any reaction, let alone harm or death, in a newborn.

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Some women, however, have a genetic mutation that causes their liver to metabolize codeine into morphine at a much higher rate. Rani Jamieson took a DNA test and had that mutation. Some of Rani’s breast milk was also tested and found to have a morphine concentration of 87 nanograms per milliliter, far higher than typical. Dr. Koren quickly published a paper explaining the case study in The Lancet, a top medical journal.

The implications were massive. Millions of women were being prescribed codeine or other opioids after giving birth. Around five percent of American women have the genetic mutation that supercharges codeine metabolization. If there was a chance, even a small one, that the codeine could be converted into morphine at a high enough dose to kill an infant, prescription guidelines needed to be changed immediately. Dr. Koren quickly spread the alarm, becoming an evangelist against codeine. Health organizations adopted new standards. In 2017, the FDA restricted the prescription of codeine in children and strongly recommended against it in breastfeeding women. Change rippled around the world, and codeine went from a commonly prescribed post-partum medication to a rarity.

It was all for naught.

As expertly relayed by Ben Taub in a recent New Yorker article, the findings of Dr. Koren made no sense. Yes, Rani Jamieson had the genetic mutation that could have resulted in a high amount of morphine in her breast milk. Yes, Tariq died of a morphine overdose. But the amount transferred simply wasn’t possible. Rani had a morphine concentration of 87 nanograms per milliliter in her breast milk. But in another case, a mother was found to have 500 nanograms per milliliter in her breast milk. Even in that extreme instance, a typical feeding would result in a roughly 0.05 milligram morphine dose to the child. And morphine, while potentially dangerous, is still prescribed to babies in pain. A four-kilogram newborn in a hospital could be prescribed 1.00 milligrams of morphine orally. In other words, the amount of morphine that could have been transferred to Tariq from Rani via breast milk was more than an order of magnitude less than a fatal dose. Tariq’s concentration was more than fifty times the expectation. It’s like an otherwise healthy adult getting fatal alcohol poisoning from drinking a single beer. Something else was going on.

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It took a dinner between Dr. Nick Bateman, then the director of the Scottish branch of the U.K.’s National Poisons Information Service, and Dr. David Juurlink, a toxicologist, to get the ball rolling. Bateman had been stewing over The Lancet article for some time. There was just no way for a baby to have such a high concentration of morphine in their system from codeine taken by their mother, regardless of genetics. He eventually dropped a bombshell: “David, whatever the intention, that baby was poisoned.”

To his credit, Dr. Juurlink took that ball and ran with it. He spent years developing an argument and developing evidence that Dr. Koren’s conclusions were wrong. This takes serious fortitude. Dr. Koren was a world-class expert. Even in the best of circumstances, challenging such a titan in the sciences is risky. Also, Dr. Juurlink is critical of opioid use and has said medical professionals must accept blame for fentanyl overdoses. Yet here he was, taking on a superstar in his field whose broad conclusions agreed with his own. But the truth matters. If newborns can be fatally poisoned by morphine that was metabolized in the mother, that matters. It’s yet another reason to limit opioid use. But if newborns cannot be fatally poisoned in that manner, that matters too. New mothers should have their pain properly treated, and opioids, for all their flaws, are fantastic at treating pain.

Dr. Juurlink quickly realized nothing about the Tariq Jamieson case added up. First was the morphine disparity, which, again, was impossible to reconcile with the facts. Then, additional evidence came to light. Not only was Tariq found to have an elevated amount of morphine and codeine in his system, but he was also found to have an elevated level of acetaminophen, the main component of Tylenol. This made even less sense than the morphine and codeine. Acetaminophen can’t easily pass from the digestive tract of a nursing mother to her breast milk. Tariq’s concentration of acetaminophen was around two hundred times the expected level. On top of that, the coroner’s case files showed that Tariq had two milliliters of “white curdled material” in his stomach, and that substance tested positive for codeine. For a newborn who hasn’t eaten in 18 hours, no milk can remain in the stomach for nearly this long. Dr. Juurlink came to a clear conclusion: Tariq had been fed Tylenol with codeine. Only that could explain the concentration of morphine in his blood.

In a bizarre twist, Dr. Juurlink also spoke with Dr. Michael Rieder, who co-authored a separate article with Dr. Koren about a second child, nicknamed “Baby Boy Blue”, who overdosed on morphine via breast milk, but survived after doctors in the hospital administered naloxone. This indicated that maybe Dr. Juurlink was missing something in the Tariq Jamieson case. Two babies suffering from the same rare condition aren’t a lot, but it could provide missing information that explains how Tariq’s morphine concentration was so high. To Dr. Juurlink’s astonishment, when asked, Dr. Rieder said, “Oh, we made it up.”

The entire case was fictional, but there was no indication of this in the published article. Anyone reading it, including other medical professionals, would assume these were true incidents. After an outcry, the journal issued corrections on all 138 case reports in the series the “Baby Boy Blue” article was published in, describing them as fictional. This came as a surprise to Dr. Farah Abdulsatar, who published one of the other 137 case studies in the series. Hers, however, was true. There was apparently a gentlemen’s agreement that the cases could be fictional, but this was only known to those with inside knowledge. To this day, it isn’t clear how many of these case studies, all published in a legitimate medical journal, are fictional.

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Dr. Juurlink published his own study in 2020, titled “The Implausibility of Neonatal Opioid Toxicity from Breastfeeding.” The conclusion is right there in the title. Newborns cannot consume a fatal dosage of morphine from breastfeeding.

The circumstances surrounding Dr. Koren, the doctor who originally published the article about Tariq Jamieson, went from strange to outright bizarre. In the 1990s, long before the Tariq Jamieson overdose, he sent a series of anonymous deranged letters to colleagues who disagreed with him about a drug’s efficacy. Those who knew Dr. Koren believed it had to have been him who sent the letters, but he denied responsibility. It was only after DNA evidence from licking the envelopes proved his guilt that he admitted sending them. In 2015, Dr. Koren’s lab, Motherisk, was shut down after it was found to have performed thousands of tests without following standard procedure. At least one of these faulty tests led to a mother being falsely imprisoned. In 2019, Dr. Koren surrendered his medical license and agreed to never practice medicine in Ontario.

He was also fiercely protective of his publications, at one point trying to block an article calling his Lancet publication into question by claiming the rebuttal was defamatory and the product of someone being paid by Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol. “It is one thing to philosophize in a journal, it is another thing to knowingly injure a grieving family,” Dr. Koren wrote to the editor at The Lancet. In other words - never mind science, won’t someone think of the children? He also authored an implausible two thousand academic articles, at one point publishing more than a paper a week. Many of these have since been retracted.

Yet despite all the scandal, the recommendations remain. The FDA still recommends against prescribing new codeine to nursing mothers. Other organizations around the world do the same. This despite the retraction of numerous articles, aberrant behavior, and the medical banishment of Dr. Koren. That’s bad enough, but the underlying recommendations themselves are mystifying.

To those in the medical community, what the hell are you doing?

Even if Tariq Jamieson died from morphine in breast milk. Even if the paper Dr. Koren wrote was totally legitimate, why on earth would that result in any significant recommendations? It’s a single case study! Even a significant research effort that surveys hundreds of patients shouldn’t have this kind of impact. I expect individual researchers to make mistakes like this. But not the entire medical community. Doctors rarely commit fraud à la the Andrew Wakefield autism paper, but they make mistakes all the time. Blood tests are incorrect. Patients misremember. Researchers flip signs and make math mistakes. These things happen. All. The. Time. In every field.

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That’s why science builds on a body of work. Why dozens of researchers ask the same question from different angles and in different circumstances. Over time, a body of literature develops that generally, but not always, points towards the truth. It is simply unthinkable that one case study could result in entirely new guidance on the use of a commonly prescribed medication. Common sense shows that morphine overdose via breast milk doesn’t happen this way. Five percent of American women have the genetic mutation that increases morphine metabolism. If this was dangerous, there would be hundreds of newborns overdosing on morphine every year. The risk would have been identified decades ago.

It is defensible for a single bad paper to avoid detection and even become well-cited. Things happen. People defer to the experts, and most don’t have time to check the math of their colleagues. It is not defensible for the entire medical industry to develop guidelines based on a single case study.

I honestly cannot fathom how these decisions were made. How do the FDA and other organizations decide that medical guidance should rest on a single instance of an adverse reaction? People die every year from having wisdom teeth removed and taking birth control. That doesn’t mean those things are banned. Nor should it. It’s the responsibility of medical organizations to make informed decisions. To take into account costs and benefits. To recommend against an important pain medication because of a single reported death is obscene. It goes against science. It goes against common sense. And it makes one question how other decisions are being made.

While running for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani made headlines by promising to create five government-owned grocery stores, one in each New York borough. These stores would prioritize low prices over profits. At a time when affordability is the political buzzword of choice, this was catnip for the left. Food prices have been rising across the country. Especially in the Big Apple, groceries are expensive. By having a government run a few grocery stores, the thinking goes, prices can be kept low for consumers.

This is complete nonsense. It’s hard to think of a better distillation of bad government policy.

As many have pointed out, food is not a high-profit industry. The margins on selling groceries are razor thin. Kroger does not buy an item for $5 and sell it for $15, as many clothing stores and other retail outlets do. Instead, the typical margin is somewhere around 1-3 percent. Blaming a supermarket for high food prices is like blaming a waiter for an overcooked steak. It’s convenient and might feel sensible, but isn’t remotely close to addressing the source of the problem. The clearer culprits for rising food prices include the war in Ukraine, high gas prices, tariffs, and other geopolitical factors. Not price-gouging grocers.

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Second, New York is partially responsible for their relatively high gas prices. The largest grocer in the United States, and the largest private employer in the entire nation, is Walmart. A stupendous one percent of all workers are employed by this one retail store from Bentonville, Arkansas. It’s an economic colossus. How many Walmarts are in New York City? None. Zero. The largest retailer, the largest company, in the entire country has no presence in the country’s largest city. No other country has such an imbalance. Can you imagine a Paris without Carrefour or a Tesco-less London? No! Because it makes no sense.

This is not, as some claim, because of expensive real estate or other market characteristics unique to New York. Walmart has tried to open locations in the city several times. Instead, special interests are keeping the mart of Sam Walton out. Unions and the municipal government do not want Walmart in their fair city. Can you imagine what would happen if New York ceased to be filled with mom-and-pop storefronts, and big corporations moved in? Chaos would surely ensue. Special interests have prevented the cheapest grocer from entering New York. This has enabled smaller businesses to enter. Of course, this comes at a literal cost: higher prices.

Instead of allowing the cheapest supermarket in, Mayor Mamdani has instead decided to keep prices high, but obfuscate the true cost. The city will now explicitly subsidize five grocery stores and undercut the rest of the market. Of course, the city is able to do this by using taxpayer dollars. The prices on the shelves of the “Mamdani marts” may be lower, but the cost to the typical New Yorker will likely be higher.

Incredibly, these will be government-owned grocery stores, but they will not be government-run. The city is planning to hire a private contractor to operate all five. This, again, is government run amok. The city is going to subsidize one private company, increasing the chances that competitors who are not bestowed such treatment are put out of business. It is unclear to me how this makes the city a better place.

Of course, this all assumes the stores open at all. The City of New York is the largest landowner in the city. They hold dominion over a massive 44,000 acres, which is roughly the size of Brooklyn. The municipal budget is around $125 billion dollars. And yet, if all goes well, the first city-owned grocery store will open “by the end of 2027”. For those keeping score, it will take almost two years from Mamdani swearing in to open a single grocery store. The already modest five stores across the city? Doubtful they are open by the end of his first term. Most haven’t even found a location yet, despite literally thousands of acres to choose from.

These are not serious people.

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Not content to let a campaign promise wither on the vine, Mamdani has doubled down and said that, “A core basket of everyday groceries will be 30 percent cheaper at the five new municipal grocery stores. The basket will include all fresh produce, meat and seafood, along with roughly 20 additional categories of pantry staples, dairy and refrigerated goods.” Grocery stores don’t make anywhere close to 30 percent margins. Having meat and seafood priced 30 percent below market will depend on massive government subsidies.

I’m legitimately fascinated to see what happens. If there are really five grocery stores in New York offering meat at 30 percent below the competition, how will they keep it stocked? Prices that low create a clear arbitrage situation. It will be profitable for people to buy dozens of pounds of meat every day, and resell it at a markup. Even restaurants may find it cheapest to buy their ingredients every day from a Mamdani mart rather than a traditional purveyor.

Mamdani has backed himself into a corner.

So what will happen? There isn’t a clear way out. Sure, some simple rules can keep the worst abusers in the system in check. There may be a two-pound cap per person on meat or seafood. But even with such restrictions, if shrimp is 30 percent cheaper than the competitors, how are they going to keep it in stock? One of the attacks on Mamdani was that as a socialist, there would be bread lines and empty shelves in New York if he was elected mayor, similar to the USSR in the 1980s. A few government-owned shops won’t result in systemic bread shortages. People waiting in long lines for cheap meat, or empty shelves, however, are terrible optics. Mamdani’s political opponents will run roughshod by comparing photos from the Soviet Union to the government stores. There’s no way around it. If a grocery store is selling meat at a 30 percent discount, there will either be long lines, empty shelves, or a steady stream of trucks constantly trying to keep up with demand.

Of course, a lot is loaded into that “if”. There are two realistic outs for the Mamdani administration. The first is to spin the 30 percent discount. Perhaps it will only be for one type of unpopular meat, say chicken thighs, and one type of seafood, say cod. The 30 percent discount will also be interesting. How is it calculated? Will the government stores be 30 percent cheaper than the typical supermarket, or 30 percent cheaper than the gourmet grocery store that only sells chickens that are grass-fed and raised by virgins in the moonlight? It will be worth keeping a close eye on how the benchmark price is calculated.

The second out is to never open the stores. Given the initial slow-walking and difficulty in doing anything in New York, this is fairly likely. Let some environmental review bog things down. Get the public on the side of competitor grocery store owners who claim they will be put out of business. Maybe, eventually, one store in the Bronx opens with a 30 percent discount relative to Lower Manhattan, allowing Mamdani to save face.

Or you could just, you know, let a Walmart open and save everyone else a great deal of trouble.

When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in March of this year, analysts predicted dire consequences. Around 20%, that’s one in every five barrels, of the world’s oil supply used to transit through this narrow body of water. For decades, Iran has effectively held the strait hostage. If attacked, they were prepared to mine, missile, and shoot any vessel that attempted to transit through. Why the Trump Administration ignored this consequence is unknown. Perhaps they thought Iran would be unable to close the strait in practice, or that the US military would be able to execute a knockout blow and render the point moot. Regardless, for the last five months the amount of oil passing through the strait has slowed to a trickle. Transit totals are thought to be only 10-20% of prewar levels.

The worst has come to pass. Yet, the feared result didn’t. Many predicted that oil prices would hit $150 a barrel if the Strait of Hormuz was closed for an extended period. Some even predicted prices would hit $200 a barrel. Instead, oil prices peaked at around $126 a barrel, and is currently trading below $90. Gas prices in the US have gone up, but we are still substantially below the $5 or $6 per gallon some predicted. Why didn’t the gloom and doom come true?

Likely a few things in tandem.

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First, China. The People’s Republic was easily the world’s largest importer of crude oil. Then the war started, prices rose, and China drastically cut oil imports. Not completely, but by 40%. Overnight. No one predicted this and it has sparked a great deal of speculation. How were they able to do so? The proximate reason is that China had the world’s biggest oil reserves, likely over a billion barrels, and possibly far more. That, of course, begs another question. Why did China have such a large stockpile? It could have been that they wanted to maintain extensive reserves in case of a supply issue, like a war in the Persian Gulf. A more disturbing possibility is that China was preparing to invade Taiwan. It is distinctly possible the US-Iran war prevented a China-Taiwan war. Alternatively, China may have substituted with more Russian oil. At any rate, the lack of Chinese demand on the global market has helped cushion the blow.

Second, the Hormuz transit data may not be entirely accurate. It is currently quite dangerous to transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Doubly so if the ship in question is an oil tanker. The profits for doing so, however, would be enormous. Anyone who runs the gauntlet and emerges with a ship full of oil will be paid handsomely. Thus, it is reasonable to expect there is a decent number of tankers sneaking through the strait, either by paying off the Iranians or making a run for it. Given the lack of ships on fire or sinking, the former is more likely.

Third, necessity is the mother of invention. Because oil is so valuable, suppliers have found workarounds. Gulf nations have spent billions upgrading pipelines and improving roads. Shipping oil by sea may be one of the most effective methods of transportation, but there are alternatives. Nations that depend on oil to keep the peace are not going to let their golden goose die. It may seem ludicrous to replace one large oil tanker with 10,000 trucks, but if that’s the only way to bring black gold to the market, it’s going to happen.

Fourth, life, uh, finds a way. Petroleum has a lot of uses. As Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok point out in their MRU video, there are low-value and high-value uses for petroleum. At the low end, oil can be used to make rubber ducks. At the high end, it’s used for jet fuel. As the price of oil rises, low-value users switch inputs. These changes are unpredictable and difficult to model, which is why many analysts overstated the risk of a long-term Hormuz closure.

Market economies are flexible. They will adjust to new information and adapt. Even command economies will evolve when needed. Oil is necessary for today’s economy, so many overestimate how disruptions to the current supply chain will affect the final price.

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This ability to adapt needs to be learned over and over again. It calls to mind the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission in World War II. An audacious plan, the Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid would send hundreds of American bombers from England deep into the heartland of Germany. The planes would take off from England, fly hundreds of miles over enemy territory, and bomb a series of ball bearing plants in Bavaria. Rather than flying back over Germany and returning home, the planes would then fly South over the Alps, cross the Mediterranean Sea, and land in Allied-controlled Tunisia. The plan was incredibly risky and would likely involve high casualties, but was deemed worth it because of the necessity of ball bearings for the German war effort. Destroy these plants, it was thought, and the mechanized elements of the Wehrmacht would grind to a halt.

The mission was a tactical success. The factories targeted by the Allied planes were mostly destroyed or heavily damaged. The Germans estimated that ball bearing production fell by as much as 50%. The tactical success, however, was overshadowed by the total strategic failure. Because the ball bearings were so crucial to the German war effort, vast resources were devoted to creating equipment to make them elsewhere. Existing stockpiles provided a stopgap. In a matter of weeks, ball bearing production was near its pre-raid average. The war continued without missing a beat, but at the cost of 60 bombers and over 550 Airmen. The allies were correct that preventing Germany from manufacturing ball bearings would be catastrophic. Of course, given this premise, it was shortsighted to assume that destroying a handful of factories would permanently cripple production of such a key component.

Just as the Third Reich was able to adapt to the destruction of their factories, so too is the world able to adapt to a single closed body of water. Oil is the fuel that powers the world economy. Either by substitution, adaptation, or subterfuge, people will find a way to overcome obstacles. Especially when billions of dollars are on the line.

Cruising. No other form of travel provokes such a disparate response. Some people vacation almost entirely via cruise ship. They have logged dozens of cruises and hundreds of nights over the years. They have their favorite cruise line, and have even more brand loyalty than Apple fanboys. Then there are the cruise ship antagonists. Those who view cruising as a total waste of money and even unethical form of travel. One that contributes to global warming and gives nothing back to the local community while padding the dollar of some anonymous multinational corporation.

Regardless, the cruise ship business model is fascinating.

The larger ships are floating cities, capable of hosting over 5,000 paying customers and requiring over 2,000 crew to keep things moving. These 7,000 people all need to be fed and housed while sailing around the world. The logistics of the food alone are staggering. It’s not like the cruise ship can simply send someone down the street to a nearby Costco if they run low on butter. If a cruise plans to serve salmon one night in the dining hall, they crunch data on past cruises, passenger nationality, and even the weather to predict how many people will order it. Because space on a cruise ship is at an incredible premium, they don’t want to over-stock. But they also don’t want to run out and have to tell late diners that a menu item has been scratched.

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Then there’s the maintenance. A cruise ship is, again, a floating city. Every system a city of 7,000 people has to deal with, so too does a cruise ship. That includes electricity, plumbing, and sewage. All of these systems need regular maintenance and will have breakdowns. Workers who can make repairs and the parts they will need need to be onboard. Every time the cruise ship docks, and sometimes even while at sea, maintenance staff is dealing with everything from busted electrical circuits to misaligned floor paneling. All this ignores the additional obstacle every cruise ship faces: a never-ending and unwinnable battle against the ravages of salt water. The cruise ship can never win; it can only hope for an endless draw.

Yet, because cruise ships offer what has been considered luxury for hundreds of years, travel by sea, cruising remains a popular choice for vacationers worldwide. Passengers can board ships and sail just about every corner of the world, from Antarctica to the Persian Gulf to Svalbard. Some cruises are only a single night, such as the infamous Baltic Booze Cruises from Helsinki to Stockholm. On the other end of the spectrum, “The Ultimate World Cruise” by Royal Caribbean lasted for 274 nights. Much more common are cruises that run seven nights, beginning and ending on Saturdays during peak travel seasons.

Despite its long history, the cruise industry is not stuck in its ways. It is constantly evolving. A lot of this out of necessity. Travel by ship used to be more about getting from point A to point B than anything else. Wealthy patrons would pay top dollar to travel in a luxury hotel at sea, while lower-income passengers would be packed in like sardines and treated as cargo. With the advent of air travel, this all changed. The low-class options disappeared, and travel by boat became a vacation in itself. Cruise lines had to compete by offering bigger and better onboard amenities. Large ships began building entire amusement parks on board, complete with rock walls, ice skating rinks, high ropes courses, water parks, and everything else a holiday-maker expects on land.

Despite this cornucopia of possibilities, cruising hasn’t become noticeably more expensive over the last 30 years. If anything, after correcting for inflation, cruising has become cheaper. As ship capacity has increased, cruise lines have been able to spread fixed costs over more and more passengers. One surprise for first-time cruisers is that a special guest singer or comedian may only perform one time while on board the ship. This may not seem economical at first. Why pay a lot of money for a performer to only spend one night on the stage? but if the artist’s booking fee is spread over thousands of paying customers, it quickly becomes trivial.

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Cruising has never been nor will ever be a cheap way to travel; the cost of building a ship alone guarantees that. However, it is no longer the province of the wealthy. Middle-class families can often afford low-end cruises, especially shorter ones that leave from Miami or Fort Lauderdale.

The other reason cruise prices have not increased with inflation over the last 30 years is a change in income stream. Cruises used to follow a nearly “all-inclusive” model. Some things, like spa services and alcohol, always cost extra, but most people expected to pay little once on board the ship. Today, a significant share of revenue comes from additional money spent on board.

There’s still the spa and the alcohol, but they are now accompanied by a plethora of other spending options. Large ships today have a veritable shopping mall on board. Passengers can buy souvenirs, clothes, art, or just about anything they can purchase landside. Then there are the premium restaurants. Standard cruise fares still include three meals a day, either at a buffet or a multi-course traditional dinner. Now, however, multiple “premium” restaurants offer a supposedly better dining experience. For a price. This has left long-time cruisers disgruntled. Many feel that the quality of the food in the buffet or in the standard dining hall has dipped. How much of that’s a true decline versus rose-tinted nostalgia is hard to say.

Regardless, it’s a fascinating Veblen good, that is, a good where demand can actually rise as price rises. In other words, conspicuous consumption. 30 years ago, it would have seemed absurd to most who were shelling out thousands for a vacation that already includes a three-course dinner to pay even more to go to a more exclusive restaurant. If nothing else, eat in the standard dining hall, pocket the extra money, and put it towards a dinner back home. Similar to the phenomenon that is DoorDash, however, today it is normal. Premium restaurants on cruise ships do brisk business. But then again, if you’re already spending $5,000 for a week at sea, what’s another $100?

Love 'em or hate 'em, cruises are here to stay. They transported everyone from the poor to the ultra-rich around the world for centuries, then entered the realm of the elite, and now have become more accessible. The ships get bigger and bigger and are closer to Vegas-on-the-seas than watercraft. As tourism continues to grow, it will be interesting to see where the industry goes next. Will some cruise lines begin to charge separately for the room and buffet? Will cruising continue to become accessible to the middle class? Will Disney still be able to charge unbelievable amounts for their cruises? It will be interesting to see how the cruise industry continues to evolve.

“It’s just gonna ask you a quick question.”

Ugh.

It’s a phrase that’s gone from novel to hackneyed in just a few years. An employee swings their tablet around and there are several options for how much you can tip. No longer private, the entire line can now see you deciding whether to tip 15%, 20%, or even 25%. On a coffee. Or… you could hit the “no tip” option, especially because the coffee somehow already costs $7. But then the person behind you would see your stingy, selfish choice. The barista will surely spit in your drink. Lightning may strike your miserly body down in the parking lot. The end is near. You admit defeat, tip 20%, and spend over $8 on a single drink.

Once the province of only a few niche industries, tipping has expanded to many interactions between customers and staff. Tipping at full-service restaurants has expanded to include counter joints and even food trucks. Tipping for taxis has expanded to ride-share services, when one of the explicit benefits originally touted by Uber was that customers didn’t need to tip. Even standard retail outlets sometimes ask for tips. Not only that, but percentages have increased. While 15% used to be the norm for tipping at a sit-down restaurant, that is now seen as the minimum. Tablets will often now have a 25% tip option, even for counter service. As tipping in America continues to expand, it’s worth examining how we got here and what can be done.

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First, it’s important to note that tipping exploded during Covid. Many customers, flush with cash and wanting to recognize employees in high-contact industries, wanted to tip. Tipping a grocery store employee would have seemed absurd in 2019, but all of a sudden seemed reasonable in the depths of the pandemic. Customers wanted to tip more employees, and it seemed wrong not to give them that option. Then, the Great Resignation in 2021-2022 caused short-staffing in many hospitality businesses, and tipping seemed like a good way for businesses to improve employee retention.

As Covid faded into memory and people spent their stimulus checks, attitudes changed. Now, being asked to leave a tip at a bodega seemed obnoxious. Unethical, even. Companies like DoorDash enable workers to deduce whether they will be tipped for delivering an order and allows them to reject untipped deliveries. Hospitality workers seem to expect 20% tips for providing standard service. The emergency ended, but cultural norms had shifted. People were being asked for tips everywhere, but there was no crisis. Also, tips were becoming more common at businesses like coffee shops, where customers pay before they receive their product, forcing them to tip before they even know the quality of service they are tipping for.

Some defend the practice as a way to redistribute wealth and reward the hardworking people of the hospitality industry. Others see a system built on false-pricing and emotional manipulation. Both sides often rely on sentiment more than rationale. One common argument from the anti-tipping camp is that tipping is subsidizing the employer and is nothing more than corporate welfare. This overlooks the simple fact that ALL money paid to the employee ultimately comes from the customer. Businesses don’t create money out of thin air. A customer pays the business who then pays the employee. Obviously. Tipping just eliminates the middleman, the employer. Pro-tippers often act as if it’s cruel or heartless to not tip, as if violating a social more is akin to committing a crime.

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The problem anti-tippers have, however, is they never have a plausible solution for a way forward. Tipping has been standard in the United States for almost 200 years. While tipping for a coffee may be relatively new, tipping a porter for carrying your bags was something your great-great-grandparents did.

The most common solution anti-tippers advocate for is to simply remove the tipped minimum wage, which is still a paltry $2.13 per hour at the Federal level (most people live in states with a significantly higher state minimum wage). Unfortunately, this will not work. Seven states, including California, don’t have a tipped minimum wage. Servers at California restaurants make $16.90 an hour, the same as a clerk at a retail store or other non-tipped, minimum-wage profession. Servers in the Golden State are still tipped. Data shows they receive less, as a percentage, than servers in other states, but the difference is small. If anything, getting rid of the tipped minimum wage is going to make things worse. If restaurants have to pay their employees more, they will raise prices. Since tips are calculated as a percent, higher menu prices mean higher tips.

Any effort to end or reduce tipping runs up another barrier: servers love it. Tipping culture may be annoying to consumers, but it is a boon to hospitality staff. Servers at even moderately priced restaurants can make a middle-class salary for working a job that can be, and is, performed by high school students. That isn’t to say being a server is easy; it isn’t, but the qualifications for entry are low. There aren’t any other jobs a middle-America teenager can get with a salary of $40,000 a year. Tipping culture, for all its faults, does provide a useful entry point into the labor force. It enables young workers without a high level of education to gain valuable experience. Older workers who are out of a job can wait tables as a stopgap. If tipping was somehow banned in the United States, it would increase inequality and decrease income for over a million Americans.

The reality is that tipping is here to stay. So what to do? Those who are anti-tipping need to toughen up. If being asked to tip at a food truck feels like you’re being extorted or your food is being held hostage, chill out. It isn’t that hard to hit the “no tip” button. Might the employee purse their lips at you? Yes. But oh well. Such is life. Tipping at a food truck is not mandatory. It isn’t a long-held cultural norm going back to the Civil War. Some people do, and some people don’t. It’s reasonable to not want to tip before service is given. It’s also reasonable to tip service workers regardless of whether it’s a bartender or barista. Deal with it.

On June 30th, 1960, the Belgian Congo became an independent country. It was a long time coming. The area had a unique colonial history. Rather than being colonized by a country, as South Africa was colonized by the Dutch and then the British, or as Senegal was colonized by the French, the Congo was first colonized by a man. King Leopold II of Belgium was given rights to the Congo in 1885. Not the Belgian country or government, but the king himself. He ruled over the land with an iron fist. Horrific atrocities resulted. Thousands had their hands cut off as punishment. Millions died of disease and famine. Even in a world where not many cared for the plight of Africans, the international community was outraged. King Leopold II was forced to hand over control of his personal empire to the Belgian state in 1908. The worst, but not all, atrocities were abated, and the Belgian government slowly developed the country, building thousands of miles of roads, setting up infrastructure, and trying to exploit as many of the natural resources as possible. Then, in 1960, the Congo gained its independence.

This was the high-water mark of life in the Congo. Since then, the country has undergone a slow and steady decay that has left it arguably the worst place to be born on planet Earth. The book “Blood River” by Tim Butcher, which chronicles Butcher’s 2004 journey through the country, is the most shocking travel book I have ever read. Even though it’s now 20 years old, the situation on the ground today isn’t dissimilar from what Butcher experienced. It’s an instructive lesson on just how wrong things can go.

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Now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, it isn’t a country in the normal sense of the word. The government doesn’t have control over large swathes, perhaps most, of the land. Armed militias pillage areas with impunity, killing and destroying everywhere they go. The nation has become a post-apocalyptic dystopia. This might not sound terribly unique. From Sudan to Afghanistan to Myanmar, there are certainly other lawless areas. Countries that have fallen apart through civil war and strife. What separates the DRC, however, is both how far it has fallen and how little we know about what’s occurring there.

In 1960, the Congo had a lot going for it. It had a young and independence leader in Patrice Lumumba. The Belgians had left behind decent institutions and infrastructure. The land is chock-full of natural resources, from gold to diamonds. The Congo River allows for far easier transportation than overland travel. Soon after independence, things unraveled. Belgium was not a fan of Lumumba, and assisted a coup that resulted in his overthrow and execution. Democracy was replaced by military government led by Mobutu Sese Seko, who would systematically loot the country for over a quarter century. The nation slowly fell into disrepair. In the 1990s, civil war would spill over from Rwanda. Since then, the Congo has devolved into a patchwork of rival fiefdoms and chaos. It’s “Mad Max” in the jungle.

Some of Butcher’s anecdotes from “Blood River” are stunning. According to his estimation, the Congo once had around 100,000 kilometers of road. These were often made of dirt or gravel, but they were passable during the dry season and capable of handling a standard amount of car and truck traffic. Over the last 60 years, however, the jungle has taken back its land. The roads slowly disintegrated. First they weren’t passable by truck, then by car. Gasoline couldn’t be transported without passable roads, so even motorbikes stopped traveling. Today, what used to be drivable roads are overgrown footpaths. At one point, Butcher stays in a village deep in the jungle, and he talks with the chief. As a young man, the chief was sent, by bus, to the nearest city to get an education. A road went right by the village. Now, the village children are shocked to see Butcher arrive on a motorbike. According to the chief, the last time he saw a vehicle successfully pass was around 1985. Today, people only walk.

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Decay of this scale is unprecedented. Congo used to have developed cities. Movies were filmed deep in the jungle, most notably “The African Queen” starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. Towns had hotels and running water and electricity. Today, empty shells are all that’s left. In cities where even the middle class once had electricity, most now live in thousands of simple huts. The “Rumble in the Jungle,” a boxing match between George Foreman and Mohamed Ali, took place in Kinshasa, and may be the most watched television event of all time. Today, even aid groups restrict themselves to areas reachable by jeep, leaving millions of people without any outside contact.

The entire economy now revolves around who gets scraps. Few are trying to create wealth, because anything created will be stolen. Even if an enterprising Congolese did, say, start a palm plantation, which used to be common, a militia would soon turn up and take it by force. If a company built a road and started a bus service, the vehicles would be stolen by the end of the month. In one city, hydroelectric generators were donated to replace the broken ones at the nearby dam, a dam that powered the city in the 1950s. The generators never made it. They were stolen by some government official and likely sold for a fraction of their value. One man makes a decent chunk of change, and an entire city stays in the dark. That’s the Congo.

Along with “Mad Max”, Butcher’s story reminded me of another post-apocalyptic film, “The Book of Eli”. In the film, the elderly villain Carnegie tells the protagonist Eli that despite being so old, they are the future of society. They are the only ones who remember what life was like before society was destroyed. The Congo was like that in the 2000s. Only the elderly remembered. Now, nobody does.

There are lessons to be learned from the Congo. One of the central questions in economics is what causes growth? How do some countries, like South Korea, grow, while others, such as the Congo, stagnate or even retrograde? There are several different theories, and much ink has been spilled over the question. One of the leading arguments, and the one I’ve long supported, is that strong institutions are a necessary ingredient for sustained growth. A government that provides security and enforces basic rules fairly and equally must be present. This is what separates the Saudi Arabias from the Venezuelas.

The DRC showed just how important institutions are. The Belgian Congo, while a place of racist brutality and exploitation, did leave behind some institutions and infrastructure in place. Under Mobutu those institutions were slowly degraded and destroyed in the service of propping up a tiny elite. The entire country was left to rot. When a civil war started in next-door Rwanda, a nation of tens of millions of people was a house of cards. One push and it all collapsed. Institutions are crucial. With them, an agrarian economy on a peninsula in East Asia with a deranged neighbor can become an economic powerhouse. Without them, a country with massive potential functionally ceases to exist.

This summer, I ventured with my wife and two young children to Europe. It was hot. Our first destination was Hamburg, Germany. (We also visited Alsace, which you can read about here.) Here are some notes on Germany’s second-largest city.

• Hamburg occupies a unique place in the American mind. It’s a city most have heard of, but not one thinks of very often. Many could probably place it in Germany because of its Teutonic name, but few know much about it. This is a bit surprising, given it’s the sixth-largest city in Europe. Check out the Top 10:

  

  Each city is either a capital city, a world-renowned tourist attraction, or both. Hamburg, however, is neither. Despite being closer in size to Paris than Budapest, it receives far less international attention than either. Far more tourists visit Munich, a significantly smaller city. What gives?

• The reality is Hamburg doesn’t have a tremendous draw for tourists. I was only there because I was about to board a cruise ship in nearby Kiel, and I’ve always heard Kiel is one of the ugliest cities in Europe. So we went to Hamburg. At the same time, I’d also always wanted to visit the city. I love Germany, and I wanted to see an urban area that isn’t jam-packed with tourists. A place people actually lived in.

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• That’s Hamburg’s first saving grace. It’s a true city. Subway, bus network, dense neighborhoods, the whole shabang. But there aren’t a lot of tourists around. There are some - this isn’t the German equivalent of Peoria, but it is a far cry from other major European cities. The picture of Speicherstadt at the top of this article is undoubtedly the most famous viewpoint in the city (it’s part of the collage of the Hamburg Wikipedia page). When I went there to grab the required picture, there was hardly anyone around. This was in the evening of a beautiful June day. The bridge from which the picture is taken wasn’t packed. It wasn’t even crowded. Every once in a while a lone group would walk by, take a picture, and move on. It was nice.

• One night at dinner, our waiter asked us where we were from. When we replied the United States, he looked at us with surprise and asked why we were in Hamburg. That question would make no sense in any of the other nine largest European cities. With the possible exception of Bucharest, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an American in any of them. I’ve been to restaurants in Europe where there were more Americans than locals. Yet in Hamburg, meeting an American is still noteworthy.

• Of course, there’s a reason tourists don’t flock to Hamburg. It isn’t the most charming European city. Looking at photos of Hamburg from before World War II is depressing. Hamburg used to have a gorgeous old town and would have been an A-list attraction. Alas, starting and then losing the largest war in the history of the world laid waste to many German old towns, resulting in far more glass and steel today than one sees in most of Western Europe. Nothing exemplifies this better than St. Nicholas Church. When completed in 1874, it was one of the most important Lutheran churches in Germany, and, oh yeah, was the tallest building in the world. Then it was bombed in World War II, and today, only the central tower remains:

  

• Lack of charming old town aside, Hamburg still has a lot going for it. Like all European cities, there is a high degree of walkability. There is a main pedestrian shopping street and many outdoor cafes. The nightlife is also supposed to be world-class, although traveling with two young children made that a moot point. Hamburg is a good city; it just isn’t a charming European one. Similar to Charlotte, North Carolina, it strikes me as a great place to live, but not a top place to visit.

• That said, there are a few worthwhile attractions. The Hamburger Kunsthalle is a respectable fine arts museum. The Elbphilharmonie is one of the most unique opera houses in the world, and the views from the top are superb. I would recommend against spending a week in Hamburg, but a visitor will not go wanting over 2-3 days.

• If all this sounds like a somewhat mixed review, it’s because that’s how I felt about Hamburg. A pleasant city to spend a few days in, good for nightlife if you don’t have two kids in strollers, with a few decent attractions. As Samuel Johnson famously said, “worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see”.

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• Then we went to Miniatur Wunderland. Usually billed as “the largest model railway in the world”, calling Miniature Wunderland a model railway is like calling Disney World an amusement park. While true, it’s a massive understatement. Miniatur Wunderland, is, fittingly, a miniature wonderland. It is an entire tiny world, with mind-blowing detail. There are miniature cities and villages and replicas from around the world. Yes there are model trains zipping back and forth on dozens of tracks, but there are also hundreds of model vehicles, thousands of model people, all hand created and unique. The entire place is the epitome of “bumping the lamp”. The level of detail is astonishing. I could have spent all day there. I spent a good 30 minutes watching the model airport alone. Planes that land but don’t have a gate will roll to a remote stand. The plane will stop and the lights in the plane will turn on. Then a bus will drive out to a plane, stop for a few moments, and then drive back to the terminal. The cabin lights turn off. It’s an entirely functional airport, just each plane is around a foot long. I don’t know that there’s any attraction on Earth comparable to Miniatur Wunderland. It is truly worth going to see, and single-handedly elevated Hamburg to a place I plan to revisit.

This summer, I spent a week in Alsace with my parents, wife, and children. (We also visited Hamburg - see my post about Germany’s second-largest city here.) I was excited to see Alsace. In 2024, I spent two weeks in Northwest France, one of my favorite vacations of all time. I fell in love with the cute towns and French culture. Ever since, I’ve wanted to visit Alsace, a region in Eastern France known for having some of the most fairytale like towns in Europe. Here are some thoughts:

• Alsace is quite literally the crossroads of Western Europe. Situated in France, but on the border of Germany and Switzerland, the area is a fascinating mix of Franco-Prussian culture. Depending on the century, Alsace has been part of “the Kingdom of Alamannia, the Frankish Empire, Lotharingia, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the German Empire.” (Wikipedia) The people there have their own dialect. The region is French, but sauerkraut, called choucroute, is the most popular food. A lot of places will claim to be a mix of cultures, but it’s usually 90% of one and 10% of another. Alsace truly is a mix of both France and Germany.

• Strasbourg, the largest city of Alsace, is a gem. There is block after block after block of beautiful buildings. Some may be tempted to skip Strasbourg in favor of the gorgeous small towns and villages around the area, but this would be a mistake. It’s hard for me to think of a city that has such a large and preserved old town but isn’t a top-tier tourist attraction. I couldn’t believe that on every walk we were ambling up and down streets with centuries-old buildings straight out of a movie.

• Along with cute, walkable areas, Strasbourg has a few worthwhile attractions. The biggest, both literally and in terms of popularity, is the Strasbourg Cathedral. Finished in 1439, the Strasbourg Cathedral was the tallest building in the world until 1874, when it was passed by St. Nicholas Church in Hamburg. The Cathedral is the tallest structure built in the Middle Ages, and is one of the best examples of Gothic architecture of all time. The exterior is, simply put, extraordinary. Hundreds of statues on the facades. The central portal is astonishing in its detail and complexity. The interior is more austere, although the church does have one of the best collections of stained glass in the world, which even my very non-architecturally-knowledgeable family noticed. The cathedral is also home to an elaborate astronomical clock that dates from the 19th century.

  

• The reason most people visit Alsace, however, is for the towns and villages. I don’t think I’ve ever been somewhere with so many gorgeous towns in such close proximity. Colmar is the main tourist draw and where we stayed, but there are many alternatives. Eguisheim, Riquewihr, Kaysersberg, Ribeauvillé, Obernai, Turckheim, etc. All beautiful towns, and all within a one hour drive.

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• We visited Riquewihr, Kaysersberg, and Eguisheim on day trips and loved all three. Riquewihr is probably the most crowded, and felt almost too perfect at times. Eguisheim is the smallest and is unique in that the main drag, rather than being a central street through the heart of town, is a narrow road that goes in a complete circle just inside the Medieval walls. In the center of town is a postcard-perfect square. My favorite of the three was Kaysersberg, which felt more lived-in than the other two, but you really can’t go wrong.

• Despite visiting in July, the crowds were bearable. (The heat, on the other hand… let’s just say I recommend against doing a three-generational trip to a region with almost no air conditioning during the worst heatwave in Europe’s history.) In fact, summer isn’t the main tourist season. Alsace is most known for its Christmas markets, something my entire family agreed would be worth coming back to see, even though I was told the crowds are fearsome.

• There are perhaps two negatives to Alsace. First, although the food is good, it isn’t as good as mainline French cuisine, which I view as the best in the world. The combination of French food and German food is a bit like putting ketchup on your steak. I like both steak and ketchup, but the latter is best on a cheeseburger.

• The other detraction, is that other than the Strasbourg Cathedral, there aren’t many top attractions in the area. Alsace is more about walking through the streets, walking into stores, and drinking either coffee or beer at an outdoor table throughout the course of the day. Those looking for headline attractions might be disappointed. There aren’t a lot of top churches, museums, castles, or palaces. On the other hand, those who want to live in the “Beauty and the Beast” will be in heaven. You could practically see Belle walking down dozens of Alsatian streets.

• I’m running out of superlatives writing this post. Beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, astonishing, postcard-perfect. It’s probably getting repetitive to read, but Alsace really is that special. It is just town after town after town. All in a very compact area. Anchored by Strasbourg. For those wanting to get away from the Romes and Londons of the old country and visit small-town Europe, put Alsace at the top of your list.

Trevor Jackson, professor of economic history at Berkeley, recently published the article “The Aging Class” in the New York Review of Books (NYRB). What drew my attention was the subhead, “Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.”

Huh?

The United States has an incredibly generous retirement program. Senior citizens have money thrown at them, in some cases for decades, for no other reason than they are old. The subhead, however, seems to suggest the opposite, that the elderly are being taken advantage of. What follows are some excerpts from the article in block quotes, with my commentary below.

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If modern retirement was born in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act, it is now entering its ninth decade. Over that time retirement has been diminished and degraded; Social Security in particular has survived several assassination attempts.

Diminished and degraded? By what standard? In 1970 the maximum payout for someone retiring at age 65 was about $190. Today it is $4,150. To be fair, there’s a lot going on here. Obviously inflation needs to be taken into account. Also, Social Security expanded its tax base to higher earners in the interim, meaning the max payout should increase. The reality is that after accounting for inflation and relative incomes, monthly payouts have stayed roughly the same over the last half-century. Some workers are probably moderately better off, some moderately worse off, but there hasn’t been a significant shift. This is a far cry from “diminished and degraded”.

…Although older Americans are far more politically active than younger ones, account for an enormous proportion of federal spending, and may constitute one of the most effective voter interest groups in the US (to say nothing of their gerontocratic lock on all national political leadership), they have seen no institutional changes to old-age policy for a half-century. What they’ve seen instead is a continual erosion of their ability to retire and their standards of living once they do.

Another claim that flies in the face of facts. How has their ability to retire been eroded? How have their standards of living decreased? This needs evidence, facts, statistics, ANY kind of support.

And further, according to Chappel, it is “responsible for the invention of old age in this country. Before 1935, there was very little sense that ‘old age’ was a coherent stage of life, with its own institutions and benefits.”

This is one of the key aspects of “retirement”. It didn’t used to exist. The whole idea that people should have a time at the end of their life where they are taken care of by the state is an invention of the 20th century. The reason many countries set their original retirement ages at 65 (or in Germany’s case, 70), was that this was beyond the life expectancy of its citizens. The original idea of retirement, far from funding an entire phase of life, was that those who live longer than expected should be cared for, the same way those who are sick should be cared for. The architects of Social Security didn’t plan on millions of healthy, able-bodied citizens being paid middle-class wages simply for being alive. That happened unintentionally, as life expectancy increased rapidly after World War II but the retirement age stayed the same.

The number of Americans with employer-sponsored pensions quintupled to 33 million. The first retirement community was established in 1954 by a utopian Russian immigrant in Arizona.

Love that fun fact. I had no idea retirement communities are younger than many of the people living in them.

Medicare and Medicaid were the landmark achievements—but these too were not intended to be steps toward universality, poverty reduction, or health care as a human right. Medicare was intended to help older Americans pay for emergency hospital visits, not to deal with disability, long-term care, or prescription drugs. Medicaid was funneled through the state-level welfare system, ensuring that it remained underfunded and stigmatized.

Again, please provide some, any, evidence here. Medicaid is underfunded? In the last 20 years spending on Medicaid has tripled! And why would state-administration increase stigma? That doesn’t make any sense.

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One generation, who spent their prime working years in the 1950s–1970s, experienced the full benefits of Social Security, and as with so many other elements of that limited welfare state system, it was then dismantled, with the acquiescence or even active collaboration of that same generation.

This is a common canard: The US used to have a massive welfare state that was taken apart by neoliberals and Reagan and Clinton. This flies in the face of all facts. Across the board, programs have been created and funded. As already discussed, Social Security payouts, accounting for inflation, have stayed mostly the same. Medicare and Medicaid have increased dramatically. Many cities provide housing assistance on top of Federal aid. Nutrition assistance programs such as SNAP have ballooned in recent decades.

This claim gets made again and again and again by people who should know better. What programs have shrunk in the last 50 years? What benefit has become less generous? What has been dismantled? Because across the board, from healthcare to housing to food, the welfare state has expanded. Every article that claims otherwise is conveniently short on details and long on conclusions.

The rise of the AARP has been emblematic of the shift from old age as a social problem to old age as an individual misfortune. By 1988 the AARP had more members than any other institution in American life except the Catholic Church, and its magazine is the most widely circulated periodical in the country.

Again, I love the fun facts.

The creation of Medicare Part C in 1997 (to buy supplementary insurance) and Part D in 2003 (to provide for prescription drugs) has only increased older Americans’ reliance on private companies, transforming them from “beneficiaries into empowered but inept consumers.”

I’m not going to lie; I have no idea what this means.

Her point is consistent: older Americans are working more and working longer. They also have inadequate savings, insufficient Social Security payments, and risky defined-contribution pensions. As she summarizes, of Americans aged 62–70, only 10 percent are retired and financially stable. Another 11 percent could retire comfortably but choose not to. A full 51 percent are retired, but their living standards have diminished significantly since they stopped working, and 28 percent are still working and cannot afford to stop.

Ugh. Older Americans should be working more and working longer - they are living longer! It is perfectly normal for a 75-year-old to still be living at home, watching grandkids during the week, and playing golf on the weekends. That used to be vanishingly rare. This gets to the main tension here: in a society with increasing life expectancy and health, retirement programs are not fixed. They are growing. They are becoming more generous, not less.

As for the percentages, what a worthless statistic. Asking people, “Are you financially stable?” is totally meaningless. It’s like the surveys seeing how many live “paycheck to paycheck” or are in the “middle class”. Any question like this needs to be sorted out with an objective benchmark, not an amorphous standard like “financially stable”.

The reason for this consensus, she argues, is blunt class warfare. Working longer exacerbates the inequalities of the labor market, and the allocation of time between work and nonwork is about dominance, not efficiency. Longer working life spans, like longer working days, are not a requirement for improving economic efficiency and increasing national output; they are a result of the coercive power of employers over workers.

Was this written by AI?

Whether it’s the World Cup or a concert tour, all fans bemoan the same thing: live events are expensive. Sports tickets, concert tickets, or any other live show cost a lot more than they used to. This isn’t just inflation or false nostalgia for a simpler time. There has been a real shift in ticket prices. Matt Slater recently wrote in The Athletic that he paid $25 for a ticket to Game 1 of the 1988 NBA Finals. The average price for a ticket to an NBA Finals game last year was $1,147. This isn’t the most fair comparison - Slater is comparing the primary market price for a season ticket holder in 1988 to the secondary market in 2025, but the fact remains: tickets for both sporting events and concerts cost far more than they used to be.

There are a few reasons for this. First, as has been reported exhaustively, many events use Live Nation/Ticketmaster to sell their tickets. This one company has leveraged its market power to act like a monopolist and raise prices above the competitive level. Earlier this year, a jury found that Live Nation had violated federal and state antitrust laws. The courts have yet to assess a penalty. Fans around the country cheered the result. At last, evil Ticketmaster was getting its just desserts. Lost in the fine print, however, was how much the company had inflated tickets. The jury found customers were overcharged… one dollar and seventy-two cents. So as much fun as it is to blame Ticketmaster, they are not the real cause.

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Online resale markets is one of the more proper villains. 50 years ago, ticket scalping had to be done in person. Often this involved risk. Stories of people selling fake tickets were common. Getting a ticket on the resale market often involved going to the stadium and handing over large amounts of cash on the street to a shady figure in a transaction not unlike a drug deal.

The lack of a well-functioning resale market hurt consumers, but it also hurt the sellers. Venues didn’t have a good handle on how much they could charge their customers. Sure, it was clear that tickets were being resold at a higher price for high-profile events, but sellers didn’t know what price they could charge for generic games or concerts. Most event spaces preferred a sold-out venue with underpriced tickets to higher prices and empty seats. Having a well-functioning secondary market changed everything. Performers could now see with total clarity how much they were undercharging. It was common for tickets to sell out immediately and then reappear online at double the price. Ticket resellers use straw buyers and bots to gobble up hundreds of tickets and make a tidy profit while the actual performers lose out.

This is not only unfair to the fans, but unfair to the people doing the work. As Bruce Springsteen once said, “Why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?” Before the internet, some artists would underprice tickets to enable all of their fans to attend their shows, regardless of money. That makes sense. A performer can sacrifice money today in pursuit of a loyal fanbase. When tickets are being resold by the thousands and middlemen are raking in the dough, it puts a performer in a tough spot. Sure, some of the cheap tickets will go to diehard fans who can’t afford to pay a lot. But most will go to the highest bidder. If that’s the case, the initial price might as well rise to meet the demand.

Demand. That’s it. That’s the real reason tickets are so expensive these days.

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Consider the NFL, the most valuable sports league in the world. In 2001, 84.34 million people watched the Super Bowl. A quarter of a century later, it was 124.9 million. Football has gone from the most popular sport in America to the dominant sport in America. In 2001, a regular-season game averaged around 13 million viewers. Fast forward to 2026, and 13.2 million viewers tuned in to watch the NFL Draft. As many people now watch a guy read names off a notecard as used to watch the sport itself. At the same time, the league has barely expanded. In 2001, there were 31 teams and each played 16 regular-season games. In 2026, there were 32 teams and each played 17 regular-season games. America is a larger, wealthier, and football-crazier nation. The supply has barely budged, while the demand has exploded. Thus, prices increased.

Premium concerts are the same. There are a lot more people with a lot more money than there used to be. Experiences have surpassed things as the most common form of conspicuous consumption. But the size of stadiums hasn’t increased. Seeing Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is going to cost a lot of money. It isn’t because of greed or monopoly pricing or anything nefarious. It’s just the simple fact that millions of people are willing to pay thousands of dollars to see one person sing.

People can moan about high ticket prices all they want, but it’s like complaining about the cost of handbags or single malt Scotch. These are luxury goods, not necessities. If people are willing to spend a lot of money, then vendors will charge a lot of money. The good news is, there are still plenty of affordable opportunities available. Seeing a World Series game, yes, costs a lot of money. But seeing professional baseball in the US is still an inexpensive night out. Minor league tickets can be had for a bargain. The same goes for concerts. Seeing an A-list performer during a sold-out stadium tour is going to be expensive. But seeing an up-and-coming band at a mid-sized venue can still be quite reasonable.

To use one example, I saw an up-and-coming band at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago in 2005. They had one modest hit that reached 51 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and their latest album was generating buzz, but they weren’t a band most music fans would recognize. The tickets, with fees, cost $40. Looking at the Riviera’s current lineup, bands with limited recognition have similar prices today, accounting for inflation. $60-70 is enough to get in the door. Seeing a B-list band is still affordable.

Of course, sometimes fate intervenes. Sometimes the regular-season game with affordable tickets becomes an instant classic. Sometimes the no-name band with $40 tickets has a single that becomes a sleeper hit right before the show. All of a sudden it becomes the hottest ticket in town. I spent $40 on tickets to see an up-and-coming band from Las Vegas most people had never heard of, and next thing I know, I’m watching The Killers sing Mr. Brightside from the front row. The next year, front row tickets for The Killers cost hundreds. Simple supply and demand.

The headline makes an audacious claim: “China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice”. The subhead is equally audacious, and sounds like it was written by ChatGPT: “Despite the US’s economic success, income inequality remains breathtaking. But this is no glitch – it’s the system”.1 This article, published by the Guardian and written by Eduardo Porter, makes some damning claims, using the chart above as a lynchpin. In 1990, over 80% of Chinese citizens lived on $3 per day or less, while 0.5% of Americans suffered the same fate. Today, the Chinese rate is near zero, while the US rate has nearly tripled to 1.25%. What’s going on?

First, this chart suffers from the same issue I’ve discussed previously in my “Terrible Chart” series: graphs with one variable but two different scales on the vertical axis. In this case, the variable in question is percent of population. Note how different the scale is. When China is the country in question, the vertical axis ranges from 0% to 80%. For the US, however, the axis begins at 0% and ends at… roughly 1.5%. This is misleading. It puts a magnifying glass on US poverty. One Twitter user equalized the scaling, and the effects are clear:

When the scales on both charts are equalized, the reader can’t even tell what’s happening in the United States! That’s because extreme poverty rates are too low.

It gets worse.

Calculating extreme poverty rates is tricky business. How do international agencies determine who is living on $3 a day, the current measure of extreme poverty, versus $5 a day? It varies. In poor and middle-income countries like China, usually by measuring consumption. Thousands of survey takers are asked how much they spend over a given period. If the total is less than $3 a day, then they are said to be living in extreme poverty. This alone has its issues. In much of the world, large portions of the lower class are subsistence farmers. They may only spend $3 a day, but their consumption is significantly higher. Some own the land and the house they live in. They grow their own food. This is still an arduous life and one the world has made enormous strides in removing, but the $3 a day is a bit of a misnomer.

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High-income countries, like the United States, do not use consumption as the measurement, however. They use income. This makes a direct comparison between China and the United States impossible. One cannot compare low consumption to income and say they are the same thing. Spending is not the same as earning.

Additionally, measuring income in the United States is rife with measurement error. It may sound impossible that over 1% of Americans are earning less than $3 a day. That’s because it is. Just as subsistence farmers have consumption that goes unrecorded, so too do low-income Americans have income that is not properly accounted for. Specifically, the existence of America’s increasingly robust welfare state. Between Medicaid, housing assistance, food stamps, and a plethora of other programs, even Americans with $0 of labor income receive a great deal of money. As one study found, when welfare payments are properly accounted for, the number of Americans living on less than $3 a day is near zero. There are many Americans who earn less than $3 a day, but are given tens of thousands of dollars a year in healthcare, housing, and food benefits. Or, as one report by the World Bank found:

In practice, income is generally more volatile in the sense that it may be influenced greatly by seasonal factors or by a lack of regularity, particularly in agriculture and in the informal sector. It also has other important shortcomings, such as the frequent case of households that declare zero income on a survey, but exhibit a consumption level that is not zero.

To give an example, if someone in China has (correcting for currency differences and the cost of living) an income of $1,000 a year, $1,000 a year in government benefits, and they spend $1,500 a year, they would not qualify as being in extreme poverty because their consumption is more than $3 a day. Meanwhile, if an America has an income of $0, but receives $6,000 a year in disability payments, $4,000 a year in housing assistance, and $3,000 a year in food stamps, and they spend $18,000 a year, then that person is said to be in extreme poverty, all because their income was $0. Expenditure based on past savings and most welfare programs are ignored entirely.

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Ironically, this very welfare state is one of the drivers behind the mythical increase in extreme poverty in the American data. In a society with no welfare system, people have only three options. They can be self-sufficient, depend on family, or die. As the welfare state grows, a new option opens up: they can depend on the government. This is, after all, the whole point of the welfare state: to lift citizens out of poverty or prevent them from dying because they can’t afford the necessities of life. In a world with no welfare state, people who can’t take care of themselves, absent family intervention, will perish. Dead people don’t appear in poverty statistics. In countries with robust welfare programs, the state steps in and keeps its citizens alive. Thus, the poverty rate increases. A more generous system can show up in weird statistical ways.

As I’ve written about before, the reality is that the US has made enormous strides in fighting poverty, which has halved since 1990. This amazing achievement often gets overlooked because the official poverty measure does a horrible job measuring actual poverty. It’s worth striving for continued progress, but the success we have had so far needs to be recognized at every opportunity.

Finally, one should be a little suspicious of the data coming out of China. It’s extremely difficult to get any bad statistic to zero. Illiteracy rates, maternal mortality, and other bad outcomes can drop very low, but there are always a few people who never learned to read, and women who die in labor. So just as we should be a bit skeptical when North Korea reports that its literacy is 100%, we should question whether China has truly eradicated extreme poverty. There’s no doubt it’s made enormous strides in the area, and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty, but everyone? As former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang famously said with a knowing smile, Chinese data should be used “for reference only”.

I recently finished the biography “Truman” by noted historian David McCullough. At 977 pages of text, it is one of the longest books I have ever read. I chose “Truman” not because I was terribly interested in the 33rd president of the United States, but because the book is often listed as one of the best biographies of all time. Additionally, I was curious about post-World War II America. It often seems as if American history jumps from the end of World War II in 1945 to the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Never mind the beginning of the Cold War or, you know, that actual war in Korea.

The book was fantastic, although it has a few flaws. McCullough goes into too much detail in places, and I found myself skipping over a few pages now and then. Like many biographies, it also borders on hagiography, making Truman seem like a better person than he could possibly have been. That said, I greatly enjoyed reading the book. I learned a lot not only about Truman, but about the United States from 1945 to 1953, the years Truman was president.

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A quick Truman timeline:

1884: Born in Missouri. He would spend his entire childhood there.

1917: Enlisted in the US Army and served bravely in Europe during WWI.

1919: Married Bess Wallace, who was part of an upper-middle-class Missouri family.

1922: Elected as a county court judge in Missouri as part of the local Democratic political machine. This was not a judicial role, and would be akin to a county administrator today.

1934: Elected to the US Senate from Missouri.

1940: Chaired what became known as the “Truman Committee”, which sought to remove waste and profiteering during World War II. This raised his profile to the national level for the first time.

1944: Elected as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president.

1945: FDR dies three months into his fourth term. Truman becomes president.

1948: Truman is reelected president in his own right.

1953: Truman’s second term ends, and he retires.

1972: Truman dies of pneumonia at age 88.

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Below are some additional facts I found interesting.

• Contrary to what many today believe, education in rural America in the early 20th century was not for men. According to McCullough, “High school, like piano lessons, was primarily for girls. In Harry’s class, largest yet at the new high school, there were thirty girls and just eleven boys.”

• When serving in World War I, Truman ran the regimental canteen. This taught him excellent management skills, similar to the skills Ulysses S. Grant learned when he served as quartermaster during the Mexican-American War. He also saw extensive action. While serving in WWI, Harry Truman was promoted to Captain, but was never told. He only found out after seeing it in the New York Times.

• The Truman Committee, especially today, stands out for its bipartisanship. Their goal was to identify government money being wasted or stolen among the billions of dollars of government contracts going to fund WWII. Instead of playing favorites, members of both parties diligently worked to make sure Uncle Sam’s money was being spent responsibly. They excelled at this, saving the government millions and helping the country stay on a war footing.

• As FDR prepared to run for a fourth term, it was clear he might die in office and needed a new vice president who would be up to the job as president. He liked the idea of Truman, but was concerned about the latter’s age. Roosevelt told an aide that he thought Truman might be nearing 60 and was too old. The aide knew that, in fact, Truman already was 60, but supported Harry’s candidacy as Vice President. Eventually, Roosevelt sent for a book that listed every senator’s age, which the aide dutifully retrieved, but kept it out of sight, and Roosevelt forgot to ever look it up. That forgotten request may have changed history.

• As it was, Roosevelt was easily reelected in 1944 and began his fourth term in January of 1945, but died after just three months. It was around 5PM on April 12, 1945, when Truman received a call from the White House at the Capitol Building. Steve Early, the White House Press Secretary, told Truman to come to the White House as “quickly and quietly” as he could. Truman turned white and said, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson.”

  What happened next seems like something straight out of a movie. When he arrived at the White House, he was met by Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “Harry, the president is dead,” she said.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Truman asked.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” she replied, “for you are the one in trouble now.”

• Both Harry Truman and his wife, Bess, were quite fond of bourbon. Shortly after arriving in the White House, Bess ordered an old-fashioned with dinner. The bartender made it the usual way at the time: an ounce of bourbon, orange slices, a teaspoon of sugar, and bitters. This was far too sweet for Bess’s liking, and she asked that future old-fashioned drinks be less sweet. The next night, however, was not much better, and Bess told the White House usher it was the worst old-fashioned she had ever tasted, and she didn’t “care for fruit punch”. The third night, the bartender simply poured two ounces of bourbon on ice and served that. Bess took a sip, looked at the bartender, and said, “Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds.”

• After several missteps and still in the shadow of Roosevelt, Truman entered the 1948 campaign as an underdog. Public polling, a recent invention by Gallup, consistently showed his approval rating below 40 percent. His opponent, Thomas Dewey, was an experienced politician who had learned much after losing to FDR in 1944. Everyone thought Truman would lose. He responded by inventing the modern-day presidential campaign. He traveled the country by train, speaking in hundreds of towns across America. Few thought it would work, leading the Chicago Tribune to famously print the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman” in advance of the election results. To the surprise of many, Truman pulled the upset and won reelection relatively easily. His whistle-stop train tour should be given credit for changing the tide. As one comedian quipped, “Harry Truman was the first president to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk.”

• On June 25th, 1950, thousands of North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. There was nothing unique about the demarcation line of the two Koreas that exists to this day. Before WWII, the entire Korean peninsula had been occupied by Japan. At the end of the war, the US and USSR divided Korea much the same way Germany had been divided by the allies. Those North of the line would surrender to the Soviets. Those South, to the Americans. The 38th parallel was chosen simply because it roughly divided Korea in half and because it was already on most maps of Korea. History can be odd sometimes.

• The Korean War would become a millstone around Truman’s neck. Despite some military successes, the war dragged on longer and was far more costly than most had initially anticipated. Over 36,000 American soldiers would die in Korea, and eventually the war would stalemate at the 38th parallel, nearly exactly where things had started years before.

• Truman’s biggest mistake as president was to write an unhinged letter to a journalist who wrote a negative review of a singing performance by Margaret Truman, Harry’s daughter. Harry wrote that the journalist was a “frustrated old man” and said if they ever met, the journalist would need “a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

  The letter from Truman was printed in the journalist’s newspaper the next day. This was a terrible look for the normally reserved president, especially with war raging in Korea. Thousands of people wrote to him expressing their disapproval. One letter in particular stuck with him:

  ---

  Mr. Truman:

  As you have been directly responsible for the loss of our son’s life in Korea, you might just as well keep this emblem on display in your trophy room, as a memory of one of your historic deeds.

  One major regret at this time is that your daughter was not there to receive the same treatment as our son received in Korea.

  ---

  Enclosed with the letter was a Purple Heart awarded to the son before he was killed in action. Truman kept the letter in his desk for years, no doubt using it to remind him of the stakes of his decisions.

• One story stuck out as a reminder of just how racist America was at the time. In 1950, Sergeant John Rice of Sioux City, Iowa, was killed in Korea. Months later, his body was returned home, and he was to be interred at Sioux City Memorial Park. As the casket was literally about to be lowered into the grave, however, city officials stopped the ceremony and said Sergeant Rice couldn’t be buried there because it was a whites-only cemetery. John Rice was native American. Truman, reading about this, immediately sent an Air Force plane to pick up the body and Rice’s widow and three children. Sergeant John Rice was then buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

• The closest Truman came to being assassinated was on November 1, 1950. Two Puerto Rican secessionists attempted to kill Truman while he was residing at the Blair House in Washington during major White House renovations. The two men opened fire at White House police officers and Secret Service agents. Officer Leslie Coffelt was shot three times in the chest and abdomen at close range in his guard booth. As the shooters engaged with other officers, Coffelt somehow kept his composure. In an event straight out of an action movie, he propped himself up against his guard booth, and fired his service revolver once, hitting one of the attackers in head and killing him from a distance of 30 feet. Coffelt then collapsed and died at the hospital four hours later. What an incredible last act of heroism. The other attacker was wounded and captured. Truman did stick his head out of his bedroom window at one point to see what was happening, but was unharmed.

• Winston Churchill met with Truman during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. The meetings did not go great, and the two would not see each other again until Churchill visited the United States in 1952. In an amazing admission, Churchill told Truman, “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard then. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man have saved Western civilization.”

• Truman had a long ex-presidency, nearly 20 years, that was mostly uneventful. Like many ex-presidents, at times he resented the loss of the limelight and lack of advice sought from him. Overall, however, the last decades of his life were happy ones. He spent them as a private citizen back in Independence, Missouri. He opened the second presidential library and enjoyed old age, saying, “When a good politician dies he becomes a statesmen. I want to continue as a politician for a long time.”

On June 5, the Chicago Bears made a major announcement: they were leaving the City of Chicago and State of Illinois for nearby Hammond, Indiana. The announcement was not a surprise. For years the Bears had been agitating for a new stadium. Their current stadium, Soldier Field, was renovated in 2003, but leaves much to be desired in today’s NFL. Notably, it is an open-air venue, not the best choice for a team that plays in one of the country’s coldest major cities. In 2023, the Bears purchased land in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights and considered building a stadium there. Then they asked the City of Chicago to build a new stadium near their existing venue on the Chicago lakefront. Neither project was getting the legal terms or public financing they requested, so the Bears began to look farther afield.

They settled on the town of Hammond, Indiana. Hammond may be in an entirely different state, but it’s still part of the Chicago metropolitan area. The town line is less than 20 miles from Soldier Field and has easy highway access. Unfortunately, Hammond is a byword for industrial decay. It may not quite get the bad press of nearby Gary, Indiana, but both are textbook examples of blight and post-industrial malaise. Much of the city would be considered a brownfield if it were ever built on.

Chicago Bears fans were furious. The Bears have always played in Illinois and been in Chicago for over a century. Despite their lack of on-field success, they are the most beloved franchise in the city. More than the Cubs, one of the most storied franchises in all of sports. More than the Bulls, the team that put together arguably the most dominant sports dynasty in history in the 1990s. Chicagoans love the Bears. The team brings the city together more than anything else, except maybe a revulsion to putting ketchup on hot dogs. Every spring Chicagoans divide between the Cubs and the White Sox. Every fall, they come together over a shared passion for the Bears.

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The dispute over the Bears’ next stadium revolves around money. Despite the immense wealth the NFL generates, most stadiums teams play in are unique in that they are not owned by the team. Instead, cities usually pony up hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, build a stadium, and then lease the stadium to a local NFL team under favorable terms. This is exactly what the Bears currently have. In 2003, Soldier Field reopened after a multiyear, $600 million renovation, over $400 million of which was paid for by the taxpayer. The Bears signed a 30-year lease for $7 million a year. Not a bad deal for a franchise valued at $8 billion dollars.

Now that the lease is coming to an end, the Bears want a second new stadium. The State of Illinois, understandably, doesn’t want to pay for one. Given that renovated Soldier Field is less than 25 years old, it seems ridiculous to put the public on the hook for even more money to support a franchise worth billions of dollars. The Bears then pursued building a private stadium in the suburbs, but don’t want to pay property taxes on it. It looked like the Illinois legislature was close to passing a bill granting the Bears tax relief, but ultimately it never came to a vote. Indiana, meanwhile, quickly passed a bill that would provide up to $1 billion in funds if the Bears move to Hammond.

Public subsidization of sports stadiums is an interesting issue. Both sides of the argument have good points. Critics of the approach correctly point out that this is a terrible use of public funds. Economic studies have consistently found that the amount of money spent is not recovered by increased economic gains. Teams like to claim that by picking up the tab, states will later make additional tax revenue that more than covers initial expenditures, but that is generally not the case. It’s also a zero-sum game. Despite high demand, increased popularity, and ticket prices through the stratosphere, public financing doesn’t increase the number of sports franchises. The NFL currently has 32 teams, most of which play in publicly-owned stadiums. If none of those stadiums were subsidized by the taxpayer, the number of NFL teams would still probably be 32. This is just corporate welfare of the highest order. Teams will exist either way; they just go to whoever is willing to give them the most money.

On the flip side, when it comes to corporate welfare, sports teams are sometimes unfairly singled out. States and cities give tax incentives all the time to preferred businesses, but it usually doesn’t attract as much attention as when it’s a sports franchise. Illinois has a long history of this. In 2001, the state gave Boeing $61 million dollars in tax subsidies to move its corporate headquarters to Chicago. This would bring 500 jobs to the city. This was not a good deal. First, Boeing used some creative accounting to reach those promised 500 jobs. Second, as soon as the subsidies ended, Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Virginia. Oops.

The Boeing deal, however, is chump change compared to the deal Illinois offers Amazon. A decade ago, Amazon announced it was building a second headquarters, and announced a national competition where cities could make their case. States tripped over themselves trying to give one of the largest companies on Earth as much money as they could. Illinois was willing to give this corporate behemoth an astonishing $1.4 billion in tax credits. Amazon, of course, eventually announced it would split the new headquarters between New York City and the DC area, confirming suspicions that this was the plan all along and they just wanted as much money as possible.

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Despite the bad economics of building the Bears a new stadium or letting them build their own tax-free one in the suburbs, those who support public subsidies have a point. If Chicago and Illinois are willing to hand over millions of dollars to other private companies, why not do it for sports teams? They may be private entities, but so too are many museums. They may be for-profit, but they are an important part of the fabric of a city. Non-sports fans may scoff, with some justification, at the loyalty fans have to their sports teams. But the reality is sports play a key unifying role in many cities. Subsidizing them isn’t the worst idea in the world.

This is doubly true in a place like Chicago. As Chicagoans constantly complain, America’s second city is terrible with money. So is the state. Government employees get sweetheart pension deals and move to Florida. Millions are spent on schools where little learning is taking place. Corrupt construction deals have been the norm for decades. As long as billions of dollars are being spent on things with no tangible benefit, why not lavish some money on organizations that are loved throughout the city? It’s a strange argument, but one that makes a depressing sort of sense.

Really, this is a problem that collective action could easily solve. Teams will not go bankrupt if cities and states stop subsidizing them. If Congress passed a national law banning the subsidization of sports franchises the problem would disappear. Teams would build their own stadiums, like SoFi Stadium in California. Teams would probably move less often and play in older buildings. What a wonderful dream, but a dream it will stay.