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.

Last April, NJ Transit officials dropped a bombshell. Round-trip tickets from New York Penn Station to MetLife Stadium for World Cup games would cost $150 a piece. No discounts would be given for children or anyone else. That’s $150 for a 15-minute ride that covers all of 9 miles. The fare is usually $12.90. Due to the immediate outrage, the ticket price was lowered to $105. Then $98. One suspects this may have been the plan all along, to begin with a very crazy price to make a less extreme but still crazy price more palatable. Boston followed suit, announcing that train tickets from Boston to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough would cost $80, quadruple the $20 fans usually pay to attend New England Patriots games.

There are some good reasons for the price increases. Hosting the World Cup is a demanding task. FIFA has many requirements that host cities need to follow. Still, one has to wonder how the state of New Jersey plans to spend a claimed $60 million transporting fans to the tournament. MetLife Stadium has a capacity of 82,500 and is hosting eight World Cup games. Assuming that every person were to take public transit and every game is sold out, that equates to $90 in costs per person per ride. To take people a total of 18 miles. It’s hard to take these people seriously.

Part of the reason for the pinch is that there won’t be much traditional parking for fans. For reasons unclear to me, FIFA has severely limited the parking availability. Due to “security concerns,” only a few of the 23,000 parking spaces at MetLife will be available to fans. Never mind that MetLife has hosted plenty of high-profile events previously, including the Super Bowl and several Taylor Swift Eras Tour concerts.

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The economic arguments for charging these extreme prices are straightforward. This World Cup is unlike any other. At other World Cups locals could buy tickets relatively easily. This World Cup has extreme prices. To see many games in the United States, fans can expect to shell out hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. There has never been a soccer tournament like this. Clearly, many of those attending are relatively affluent, or at least have money to burn. Second, groups like NJ Transit know that a lot of the fans are coming from out of town. They are not New Jerseyans going to or from work, or New Jerseyans at all. Given the limited parking, it makes sense from an economic perspective to charge a lot of money.

There are two problems with using this argument, however.

The first is itself economic: competition. Noticing that $98 for less than 20 miles is exorbitant, several other groups have sensed a moneymaking possibility. The State of New York stepped in, initially with its own $80 bus that would pick up at various points in New York City. This prompted it’s own chorus of howls from affronted New Yorkers, who reasonably expect their sky-high taxes to pay for regular-priced services. The State retreated and announced that the new bus price would be $20, and that a fifth of the seats would be reserved for New York residents.

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Uber also noticed an opportunity to make a quick buck. The ride-sharing company announced it would offer buses from various New York City pickup points to MetLife for $49. It goes without saying that when Uber, one of the more reviled companies in the US, is undercutting public transportation, something isn’t right.

Given the State of New York and Uber’s alternatives, NJ Transit risks being left with serious egg on its face. If the state really is spending $60 million on World Cup infrastructure (it isn’t), then it does need to recoup a lot of that investment and have trains packed with farepayers. If those trains travel mostly empty and fans choose alternative options, then charging such a high fare will backfire.

The second, more important problem with charging $98 for a short train ride isn’t economic; it’s existential. Public transportation is not justified based on supply and demand. Government employees are not trying to maximize profits or minimize costs when designing routes and setting fares. Public transportation is meant to provide the public with an affordable way of traveling from A to B while reducing congestion.

There are many, many bus and train routes that are far from capacity. These routes cost millions of taxpayer dollars per year. When small-government types bring this up and advocate for cutting routes, the response is that public transit is not meant to make money. That many half-empty buses serve low-income areas, and while they may not be full, those on them need those routes to get to work or other necessary appointments.

By attempting to charge a market rate for high-income riders, NJ Transit risks undermining the raison d’être of its existence. If the Penn Station to MetLife route needs to recoup costs, why not other routes? If the taxpayer can’t be expected to subsidize sports fans, why should they be expected to subsidize anyone else?

Other governments understand this. Far from charging inflated prices, transit authorities in other countries have recently gone the other direction. Fans who bought tickets to see the World Cup in Qatar were given free access to Doha’s metro system for the entire tournament. During the 2024 UEFA Euro tournament in Germany, all tickets included free public transit on the day of the match. This attitude helps people buy into the idea that public transit should be for everyone, and encourages fans who can afford to drive to instead take the train.

It’s easy to mentally carve out fans who paid thousands of dollars to watch grown men kick a ball around. To say they should pay nearly $100 for a short train ride. Those who support public transit should be wary of this argument. Once that box is open, it will be expanded. People will begin to question why the state should subsidize some riders while charging others through the nose. If the World Cup fans can be charged high prices, maybe others should as well. If World Cup routes need to recoup their costs, then so too should others. It’s not worth undermining a pillar of public transit to make a few bucks on gameday.

As travel season begins in the Northern Hemisphere, I thought it would be useful to combine my two favorite topics, economics and travel, and write an article about how to use economics when travel planning. This won’t list where to go or where to avoid, where the “10 best cutest authentic German villages of 2026!” are. Instead, some simple advice on how to use economics to maximize the value of a trip.

1. Two constraints

Every trip has two constraints: money and time. People are generally good at evaluating the former. How much will a trip cost is often the first question asked when trip planning. Time, however, is more likely to fall by the wayside. Most recognize that a direct eight-hour flight for $500 is better than a two-stop flight that will take a total of 15 hours and costs $400, but this logic should be applied to all parts of a vacation.

I often meet Americans who are going to Europe for a ten-day vacation. Their itinerary comprises seven cities across five countries. This type of trip is obviously expensive monetarily, but so too is it expensive temporally. Visiting that many cities requires countless hours spent on planes, trains, and automobiles. What people often don’t properly account for is that every hour spent in an airport costs an hour in a museum or wandering a beautiful neighborhood or even just sitting at a café.1 I once met someone who visited seven European countries over eight days. She spent far more time on trains than in neighborhoods.

This isn’t an argument for “slow travel” or taking things easy. One can easily spend a week in cities like Rio de Janeiro and tour from dawn to midnight. Rather, the time cost of spending seven days in five different Brazilian cities instead of seven days in two cities needs to be properly accounted for. For someone who has this one chance to see Brazil and wants a sampler tour of “A Terra do Futebol”, then constant moving may be worthwhile. For most, however, it makes far more sense to maximize the value of a trip by spending less time in airports and more time sitting on the beach.

This is why I recommend only going to Australia or New Zealand from North America or Europe on 14-day trips or longer. The travel time to Australia, door-to-door from the US, can easily hit 30 hours. It is simply not worth it to leave home on a Saturday and return a week later, having spent 60 hours traveling. That’s two and a half days! Include the jet lag as well, and a week-long trip to the opposite side of the world is a poor use of time. Far better to travel from the United States to Buenos Aires or from Europe to South Africa and not spend a good chunk of a trip in airports.

Every traveler should think about their money and time constraints. Which is the more binding of the two? As a professor with a decent income but incredible vacation time, my constraint when traveling is money. I am constantly looking for the best deals and figuring out ways to stretch my dollar. I don’t, however, have much of a time constraint. As long as class isn’t in session, I can easily take a two-week vacation. I’m more willing to do layovers to save some money, as the main downside to an additional flight is hassle, not lost vacation time.2

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For others, the main constraint is time. This sometimes manifests itself when a location gets on the jet set itinerary. Flights from New York to the Caribbean generally cost around $600. Around Christmas, however, the cost can top $2,000. Now, flights usually go up in price during the holidays, but a trebling is insane. Why does it happen? The demand. Thousands of ultra-high-net-worth New Yorkers who work in finance and private equity are often off work between Christmas and New Year’s. These are people who get two weeks of vacation a year and make at least mid six-figure salaries. They have virtually no monetary constraint. Instead, their constraint is time. They would rather pay outrageous amounts to visit a nearby island destination quickly than spend a few extra hours on a plane or have to deal with jet lag. When you have more money than God but only a precious few weeks to kick back and relax, spending an extra $1,400 on a flight is easily worth it.

2. Bang for your buck

Travel articles often talk about the best budget destinations or the best luxury destinations. This has its use, but a better metric is value for money (VfM). VfM doesn’t refer to how much or how little something costs, but what that dollar can obtain. As a general rule, at least within a region, more expensive travel destinations have better amenities. They are safer, have more to do, etc. Germany is more expensive than Bosnia, and most people prefer to visit Germany. This rule, however, does not always hold. Some places are simply overpriced. It could be because the cost of living is high, tourism is more of a niche industry, or geography. Other places are great values. They offer much for tourists and cost relatively little.

I am always on the lookout for high VfM destinations. This does not stay constant. Some destinations become more or less expensive over time. Japan, for example, is currently fantastically cheap for Americans to visit. The Japanese Yen, which for years traded at around 110 for 1 US dollar, is now trading at above 150 per US dollar. For American tourists, it’s as if everything were 30-40 percent cheaper than it would have been in 2021. This makes it a great VfM destination. Other places become more expensive, especially if they enter mainstream tourism. Prague, while still relatively cheap, is nowhere near the bargain it was. Twenty years ago, Prague was mainly sought out by backpackers on a budget. Today, it is an A-list European capital. As more affluent travelers have visited Prague, prices have followed.

This requires some experience to parse, but it’s worth attempting to discern where VfM will be high and where it will be low before visiting. After booking flights but before traveling to Belize, a friend warned me the dollar value there was low. I enjoyed Belize a lot, but this is accurate. Belize is still very much a developing country with the infrastructure to boot. The tourist areas, however, are on islands off the coast that cater primarily to tourists, mainly Americans. Thus they charge inflated prices. There are still some decent deals to be had by American standards, but restaurant prices are snorkel trips can cost as much in Belize as in the US, and the quality is lower.

Similarly, the British Isles are a bad value for money. England, Scotland, and Ireland are worth visiting. Great cities, millennia of culture, etc. But they are very expensive. Not as bad as Norway or Switzerland, but a lot. Trains, rental cars, meals, and especially lodging cost far more than in, say, France or Italy. On top of that, the food is terrible. Again, that isn’t to say don’t go to the British Isles. I’ve visited multiple times and plan to return. It’s just recognizing that you pay a lot of money for what you get.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Southeast Asia. World-class beaches in Thailand, the legendary temples of Cambodia, and plentiful scenery in Vietnam. Great tourist infrastructure. Relatively safe. And cheap. Laughably, unbelievably cheap. Oceanfront rooms in nice hotels for under $100 a night. Meals for under $10, sometimes under $5. Southeast Asia is by far the best bang for your buck destination. Unfortunately it’s far away.

Other good VfM destinations include the Baltics, Italy, South Africa, Peru, and New Mexico.

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3. Weather

Weather can make or break a trip. There’s nothing worse than spending a whole trip in the rain, only to have the sun appear hours before heading to the airport. Since the weather is somewhat idiosyncratic, most tourists don’t think a ton about it when choosing a destination. The general traveler consensus is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

This is wrong.

There are some places that have reliably good weather during certain times of the year. This should not be discounted when trip planning. The Algarve in Portugal is a great example. Lagos, one of the most popular destinations in the Algarve, offers some of the most dependable weather on Earth during the summer. The average high temperature is 81°F (27°C). The nearby ocean generally prevents the oppressive heatwaves that hit the interior of the Iberian Peninsula.

The average amount of precipitation in Lagos in July is zero. Nada. Zero days of rain, zero millimeters of rain. Lagos averages an astonishing 12 hours of sunshine a day in July. If you want sun, withstandable heat, and no rain, the Algarve offers the closest to a guarantee as you can get. This makes it a great beach destination. No worrying about days of rain or unseasonal coolness ruining a trip. This is a serious advantage.

Other locations are much more variable. About a decade ago, a friend and I backpacked the W trek through Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. It was a fantastic trip. Absolutely jaw-dropping scenery, including from the British Lookout at the top of the French Valley, one of the coolest places I’ve ever stood. We even saw a few avalanches from a safe distance. We had amazing views of the Cordillera Paine mountains and surrounding lakes the entire trip.

We got incredibly lucky.

Even during the height of summer, the weather in Torres del Paine is unpredictable. Sunny, calm days can quickly give way to intense storms. Worse yet, the valleys and mountains are often socked in with clouds. A group of hikers that visited the French Valley the day before us saw nothing the entire time. No avalanches, no mountains, nothing more than the ground in front of them, because of dense cloud cover. This happens all the time. Guides often recommend lining your backpack with a garbage bag because it rains so much. Torres del Paine without the views is not worth it. And all this ignores the ferocious winds, which even during our beautiful weather were strong enough to knock down a grown adult in places.

This contrasts strongly with my favorite hike of all time - the Santa Cruz trek in the Cordillera Blanca mountains of Peru. In July and August, the weather is pristine. Every morning is sunny. Temperatures are cold at night but perfect for hiking during the day. In the afternoon, clouds often form and rain showers hit infrequently, but they pass quickly. Most of the hike will be in sunshine at a comfortable temperature. You can depend on it.

Not accounting for these differences is a mistake. That isn’t to say one should always do the Santa Cruz trek in Peru and never the W trek in Chile. It’s just that being able to plan a trip and knowing the weather will be good is a huge bonus. It is wise to avoid planning trips where bad weather could derail the entire itinerary.

Traveling always has unknowns. The best laid plans of even the most fastidious traveler will often go astray. Delayed or canceled flights cost time and money, even if the traveler isn’t at fault. Budgeting is difficult - I always recommend travelers bring half the stuff and twice the amount of money as planned. Outside of a few locations, the weather is always a bit of a question mark. That said, using some basic economics can help ensure a good trip. Consider the risk of variable weather. Get a sense of how much a place costs versus what it delivers. Make sure to incorporate time cost into travel plans. This will help you get the most out of your trips.

Bon voyage.

For most of the Middle Ages, England had two distinct social classes. At the top was the nobility. These were the dukes and earls, the marquises and barons. These few individuals, less than one percent of the population, ruled over the peasants. Although poor by today’s standards, the medieval nobility had immense relative wealth, more than the other 99 percent of the population combined. The rest were commoners. A lucky few of the commoners were merchants or tradesmen, but all the rest were farmers. They tilled the land of the nobility, surviving on whatever scraps they could manage to scrounge.

Then, during the 15th century and the early Renaissance, a new class began to form: the landed gentry. The landed gentry did not have titles or hopes of becoming royals. Instead, they were landowners with means but no official social status. Although they comprised less than 3 percent of the population, even when broadly defined, they changed England forever. No longer were people either rich and titled or poor and untitled. Now, there was a new breed: those who were rich but untitled.

The landed gentry became a powerful force in English life. They were not the nobility, but they slowly accrued enough wealth to develop their own spheres of power. Some families of the landed gentry married into the nobility. Others slowly faded into poverty. But many families kept their status for centuries. Generation after generation, families kept substantial land holdings and wealth. They were a dominant force of the local community, handing power down from father to eldest son. Those born into the landed gentry weren’t guaranteed success, just as those born as simple commoners weren’t guaranteed poverty, but the odds were certainly stacked for and against. Culture and regulation meant the eldest sons of the gentry would inherit a fortune. Those born into peasant families were likely to live and die as peasants themselves.

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This was not a good system. For centuries, wealth stagnated. Those living in the 17th century didn’t have a significantly higher standard of living than those who lived in the 7th. There were many reasons for this, but one was a lack of economic mobility. The haves were able to keep, and the have-nots unable to procure.

The United States is showing signs of heading that direction.

To be sure, this comparison is limited. America of the 21st century is far, far more equal than England of the 16th century. Income mobility is exponentially higher. Every year, millions of Americans increase (and decrease) their incomes by substantial amounts. It’s useful to use American presidents as a barometer. Some, such as Trump and the Bushes, came from money. Others, like Biden, were middle-class. Then some, like Obama and Clinton, were lower-class, at least for part of their childhoods. America is not medieval England.

That said, it’s impossible to look at the wealth of the United States and not recognize that property has become a potentially self-propelling engine of wealth. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $84 trillion is going to be passed on to Gen Xers and Millennials over the next 20 years from the older generations. This has been dubbed “The Great Wealth Transfer”. The Baby Boomers are beginning to die of old age. Some of their wealth is going be spent maintaining a high standard of living and consuming healthcare, but much will be passed on to the younger generations.

A lot of this wealth being passed down isn’t going to be in the form of equity or gold bars. It’s real estate. Housing. There are literally millions of millionaires in the United States today whose main source of wealth is their house. These aren’t mansions or private islands. They are above-average single-family homes that are now in highly desirable areas. Homes once owned by factory workers but are now bought by doctors and lawyers.

The children of these individuals will someday inherit an immensely valuable asset. Not because their parents worked harder or smarter. But because their parents bought property in the 1980s in a place that both 1) became popular to live in and 2) curtailed new housing from matching demand. The housing market nationwide has increased by almost 500 percent over the last forty years. What was once a simple and wise investment has become a good financial investment. Those who chose to buy property decades ago stand to bequeath immense wealth to their children. Those who didn’t buy in the 1980s will, by and large, not. Property ownership will become the primary driver of inequality. Those who have property will be able to borrow against it, increase their wealth, and bequeath similar amounts to their children. The rest will be on the outside looking in.

This is already happening in California. Due to a series of laughably short-sighted regulations clearly crafted to make the rich richer, the children of property owners in the Golden State now have an immense advantage in life.

California starts out by doing one thing right: setting the assessed value the same as the sale value. If someone buys a house in California for $700,000, then the assessed value is $700,000. Property taxes are generally around 1.2 percent of assessed value.

Then the system breaks down.

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Proposition 13, passed by referendum by California voters in 1978, limits assessed value to a two percent increase per year. Even if property values increase by five percent a year, which is conservative by California standards, the assessed value only increases by two percent. Over decades, this adds up to a huge difference. Someone who bought a house for $200,000 in 1995, its assessed value today would be at most $362,000, even if the home’s value on the open market is $1.5 million. People living on the same block, in identical houses, could be paying $170 a month in property taxes. Or they could be paying $1,000 a month. All depending on when they bought the house.

Worse yet, this same assessed value is passed on if a child inherits a primary residence from their parent and moves there themselves. There is a $1 million value-added cap, so a house valued at $400,000 that sells for $1.5 million would be reassessed as $400,000+$100,000=$500,000, but the advantages of having property-owning parents are massive. Two identical homes could have carrying costs that differ by a thousand a month. And that doesn’t include the value of the inherited house!

These rules follow the landed gentry playbook. In both today’s California and yesteryear’s England, one of the main reasons behind this perpetual wealth was regulatory. For centuries, English estates had “entailments”. These entailments stipulated that an estate had to be kept in one piece. It was illegal to split up or partially sell off. Thus, only one person could ever inherit. This clearly was not optimal. It meant younger sons and daughters had to scramble to secure their place in life, while the oldest son could sit back and wait for his parents to die. So too is it in California. It isn’t just the economy or climate making California housing unaffordable; it is deliberate government action.

This creates a massive misallocation of resources. Children are heavily incentivized to live where their parents did, regardless of what job market best matches their skills. If a child doesn’t live in their parent’s property, then they have to navigate the California housing market, where the median house now costs over $900,000 and property taxes push $1,000 a month. Stay in the same house as your parents, and those costs disappear. Thus, market distortions result in people living in suboptimal places.

Having an estate handed to you as the eldest son in 1674 shouldn’t have guaranteed wealth then. Having parents who bought a house in the San Fernando Valley in 1987 shouldn’t ensure wealth now.

In the 1960s, the federal government of Mexico decided it needed to generate more tourism, specifically tourism from the United States. At the time, international tourism to Mexico underperformed. There were a few hot areas. Acapulco had been a jet set destination for decades. Tijuana always drew in day-trippers and weekenders from California. But given the sheer amount of coastline, Mexico was leaving a lot on the table. Acapulco was great for West Coast Americans, but was a haul for those from the East Coast. Tijuana was seedy and not pulling in serious money. Americans were beginning to head en masse to Miami, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. Mexico wanted to get into the action.

The government fed a bunch of statistics from existing tourist hotspots along with data from various Mexican seashores into a computer. Data about climate, hurricane risk, oceanic conditions, etc. The computer helped identify places that could be developed into tourism areas. Then Mexican officials went to these areas to see first-hand what could be done. They met with locals, walked the beaches, and considered what areas would benefit most from tourism.

After careful study, the government decided to develop a tourist area near the northeastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, on a large barrier island off the coast. At the time, the barrier island had only three residents, all caretakers for the only development there: a coconut plantation. Nearby, on the mainland, was a small fishing village with a population of around 100. Otherwise, the place was empty. The entire state of Quintana Roo, which is larger than the state of Maryland, only had a population of about 88,000 people in 1970. Most of the interior was dense jungle. Most of the coast, deserted. This was not sparsely populated agricultural land; it was wilderness. The state capital of Chetumal was hundreds of miles away. It was here that the Mexican government decided it would create a destination for American tourists.

They named it Cancún.

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It was a smashing success. Despite having to finance the first group of hotels with government money because no private bank would agree to lend to such a hair-brained scheme, Cancún took off immediately. An airport was hacked out of the jungle, hotels were built, and an entire city was constructed for hotel employees. Americans arrived by the thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. A mere 50 years after the first hotel opened its doors, Cancún now has over 30,000 hotel rooms and welcomes an astounding 10 million visitors a year. Take a look at this time-lapse footage. The expansion isn’t the hotel zone or tourist area, which is the thin strip of land to the right of the lagoon. This is the growth of the city of Cancún, which exists solely to staff the hotels on the aforementioned barrier island:

Those tens of thousands of hotel rooms occupy skyscrapers being pumped with air conditioning in the tropical heat. Millions and millions of gallons of water are pumped into hundreds of gigantic swimming pools. Every night, performers sing and dance in front of throngs of crowds. The whole thing is insane.

It’s hard to think of a place that rivals Cancún as far as government successes. Many, many other governments have tried to turbocharge tourism. Some have succeeded, but these were usually only in places that already had, you know, people living there. The Algarve Coast in Portugal was mostly sleepy fishing villages 50 years ago, but it wasn’t empty. Tavira, Faro, and Lagos were small cities, but still cities nonetheless. The Algarve also developed somewhat organically, with help from the government but no master plan. Perhaps one of the few exceptions is Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, which was a small village in the 1970s but is now the premier North African beach destination.

In some ways, Cancún is like Las Vegas. A Las-Vegas-by-the-Sea. A century ago, both were desolate places. The small fishing village of Puerto Juárez and the railroad town of Las Vegas were mere hamlets in 1910. Both had geography working against them. Las Vegas is in a brutally hot desert. Cancún a brutally hot jungle. Both take extravagance to extremes, offering anything and everything under the sun - for a price. Both have evolved and changed with the times, Vegas from gambling mecca to family-friendly wannabe destination to corporate convention hub. Cancún from all-you-can-eat-and-drink bargain destination to upscale locale.

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Neither place should exist. They are both ludicrous aberrations that would be declared unrealistic if put into a novel. A giant road in the middle of the desert that goes by a giant pyramid, half-sized statue of liberty, and artificial lake with a dancing fountain? Tens of thousands of hotel rooms built on top of a small barrier island surrounded by nothing but jungle? Neither Las Vegas nor Cancún should be real places.

This really hits home for those who drive. Driving east from Barstow, California, is like leaving civilization (some might argue Barstow already is outside civilization). For over two hours, one drives through empty desert, punctuated by minuscule towns and the occasional gas station. Then, out of nowhere and in the middle of the desert, appears a city with over a million people. Not only that, but a city with the greatest architectural absurdities man has ever dreamed of building. Cancún is the same. There is very little to see from Merida, the only city not dominated by tourism on the Yucatan peninsula, and Cancún. Just mile after mile of endless jungle. But suddenly, you are not only at the ocean, but at the place of a thousand swimming pools.

Yet exist they do. Both Las Vegas and Cancún have found their niche. Vegas became America’s playground when the state of Nevada bucked the trend and legalized gambling. At first Southern Californians flocked to Sin City. Then the country. Then the world. Cancún began as a strip of fewer than ten hotels in the 1970s. One of the first, now the Temptation Cancun Resort1, is still open for business. Millions of Americans flock to both. May they forever prosper.

The school bus of the skies is no more. On Saturday, May 3rd, after 34 years in business, Spirit Airlines shut down. The company had been circling the drain for months, and filed for bankruptcy in both November 2024 and August 2025. A failed merger with JetBlue tightened the screws. Finally, rising fuel prices proved to be the final nail in the coffin. Hemorrhaging money and unable to keep the lights on, the closure stranded thousands of passengers who flew on an outbound Spirit flight only to discover no plane would be there to take them home.

How things have changed. A pioneer in the ultra-low-cost airline model, Spirit offered barebones flights at rock bottom prices. Passengers had to pay for everything, from checked bags to bottles of water to printed boarding passes. Decried by many for nickel and diming their customers, these low prices helped usher in the current age of flying, open to anyone who can scrounge together a small chunk of change.

Only a decade ago, Spirit Airlines was putting serious pressure on the competition. Their cheap fares undercut all other airlines. The “Spirit effect” had been noted for years by airline industry watchers. When Spirit Airlines began a new route, other airlines immediately lost business. This forced all airlines, including often Spirit itself, to lower fares. This usually worked to Spirit’s advantage. The airline regularly turned a profit until Covid hit all airlines with a sledgehammer. We may look back to the 2010s as the cheapest time to fly in history. If so, Spirit Airlines was one of the root causes.

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There are several reasons for Spirit’s demise. The first, which often goes overlooked, is that the airline business is brutal. Massive fix costs, never-ending maintenance, and unreliable demand have always made it tough to be profitable. Less we forget, Pan Am, one of the most recognizable American companies and unofficial flagship carrier for the US, closed its doors in 1991 after more than 60 years. Other airlines have come and gone since. Far from being a bad thing, this is the sign of a healthy market. Incumbent firms get complacent and are disrupted by new entrants.

Second, there were a lot of people who hated Spirit Airlines. Some of this distaste was misplaced. Contrary to popular belief, their efficiency and safety were above average. The airline never had a crash, even a minor one. On-time arrival percentages were about average, with Spirit Airlines below Delta and Southwest but above United and American in 2025. When it came to satisfaction, however, Spirit was dismal. According to JD Power’s 2026 North America Airline Satisfaction Study, Spirit only ranked above WestJet and Frontier. It turns out that customers may take the cheapest option when buying a ticket but then regret it later. Having low prices is nice, but over time, airlines need customer loyalty, and Spirit had not built up any goodwill. At times they seemed to be intentionally making life difficult for customers. And low prices need not beget unhappy customers. Allegiant Air, another low-cost carrier similar to Spirit, has an average customer satisfaction rating. Spirit really went out of its way to make customers angry.

Having flown Spirit around five times in the last decade, I found the experience to be acceptable. The lack of legroom was never any fun, and the absence of a large tray table was annoying, but you get what you pay for. One thing I liked about Spirit that most others hated was the aggressive flight attendants. There is nothing more infuriating than when boarding passengers act like they are the only ones on the plane and block the aisle to slowly reorganize their belongings into the overhead bins. Every flight is assigned a roughly 10-minute departure window. Miss that, and your plane gets bumped to the back of the queue. Spirit flight attendants were the only ones I’ve seen to forcefully tell passengers to clear the aisle as they try to fish their headphones out of the bottom of their backpack and block everyone else from reaching their seat. That made the planes board quicker and reduced delays.

The third reason for Spirit’s demise was changes by the competition. Legacy carriers began to offer “basic economy”, which copies the Spirit approach of a low price with many add-ons. Combined with their loyalty programs, this removed one of the key reasons to fly Spirit. Customers could now pay a low price and fly with a legacy carrier, avoiding the stigma of a low-cost carrier while, at least in some cases, still earning mileage points. Without a competitive edge, Spirit was doomed.

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Unfortunately, this all may have been avoided. In 2022, Spirit announced that it would be bought by JetBlue. The proposed merger would have created the nation’s fifth-largest airline, behind American, Delta, Southwest, and United. The Biden Administration aggressively opposed the merger, saying it would reduce competition and increase prices. In January 2024, Judge William G. Young sided with the government and blocked the merger.

Let the Monday morning quarterbacking begin.

Republicans immediately began blaming Democrats, specifically former President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for Spirit’s demise. Obviously, the argument goes, the Biden administration was wrong to sue to prevent Spirit and JetBlue from merging, and the judge was wrong to side with the government. Spirit said they would go bankrupt if the merger was blocked, and they did. This argument has its merits, but is heavily biased by hindsight. It is common for companies to say they need to merge to prevent bankruptcy. That doesn’t mean it’s true. On top of that, JetBlue stated they would change Spirit’s business model to be like theirs, which is an implicit admission that fares would rise.

The better argument for allowing the merger is that by creating a fifth airline that would rival the existing big four, fares may go up in some markets, but overall the industry will benefit and consumers will not be significantly harmed. It seems odd to block any merger that will create the fifth-largest firm in the industry. At the time it looked to many that the Biden Administration was being overly aggressive and singling out a merger unnecessarily. Spirit’s bankruptcy just two years later doesn’t prove that to be true, but does put a bit of egg on everyone’s face. Yes, allowing the merger may have caused fares to rise. But it’s incorrect to draw the conclusion that blocking the merger will keep fares low. As it turns out, that was going to happen in either case.

The result is the demise of America’s least liked airline. Yet, it is a bit of a sad day. Spirit was not pleasant to fly. But it allowed people to fly who were otherwise priced out of the market. It was a disrupter, to the point that its competitors copied its strategies even while ridiculing its business model. As a recent Atlantic headline puts it, “The Only Thing Worse Than Spirit Airlines… is a world without Spirit Airlines”.

Go on Google Maps and look up a popular nearby brewery. One that has a nice outdoor space. Most reviews will be positive. People will compliment the beer, the friendly staff, and the patio. They will extol the return of the craft brewery, once a staple of American life before Prohibition, which has now returned for a second act. There will also, without fail, be a complaint about the brewery allowing children.

This has always been an issue, but in recent years, it has become the biggest controversy in the brewery scene. Like everything else in America, both sides have turned things up to 11. There are a lot of people out there who wish for breweries, and in fact most third places, to be children-free spaces, the preserve of adults alone. Then there are parents who treat breweries, and all other businesses, as personal playgrounds and let their kids roam free and wreak havoc. Now that breweries have become a staple third place in American life, it’s worth working through the problem, because a lot of people on both sides of the issue are clutching their pearls and responding with knee-jerk impulse.

First, every brewery has the right to only serve customers who are 21 years of age or older. In fact, many bars do just that. Anyone under 21 years of age is not allowed on the premises. This shields the bar from liability issues from serving underage patrons. By being 21+ bars can keep out children entirely. The fact that most breweries, especially those with outdoor spaces, are not 21+ signifies that the business itself is welcoming to children. In fact, many breweries have high-chairs and changing tables in the bathrooms, which explicitly signals they want families to patronize the business. Customers who want a child-free space while drinking should go to a child-free bar. There are plenty, either by explicit rule or through local custom. Or go to the family-friendly brewery, but go at night after the children have gone to bed. Those going to a brewery that allows children, especially during the day, should expect children to be there.

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Second, those who are against children in breweries have concocted a false history. A common complaint in online reviews is some variant of, “parents should leave their kids at home like they used to. Breweries are meant for adults.” This is totally false. First, to almost anyone older than 30, your parents did not regularly go to brewpubs when you were a kid and leave you at home. They didn’t exist! The craft brewery craze began in the 1990s, but even then, most craft breweries were in industrial parks and indoor only. The purpose-built, outdoor-space microbrewery didn’t become a common thing until the 2010s.

This type of brewery has always been child-friendly. There was never a time when breweries with outdoor spaces were for adults alone. Ever. Those claiming otherwise are making up a false reality. Older Zoomers and young Millennials who are now having children of their own should salute Gen Xers for establishing, from the get-go, that outdoor breweries are fun for the whole family. Those arguing that breweries should be adults-only are the ones trying to change the status quo, not the opposite.

Third, the constant gripes about children at breweries are a bit odd. There is a lot of bad behavior at breweries, but most of it is not from misbehaving children. It’s from misbehaving adults. Having a child run into you because they are running through a brewery and not looking where they are going is bad behavior, and something one can legitimately complain about. But so too is having an adult walk into you because they aren’t looking where they are going. Or having an adult spill beer on you because they are drunk. All these things happen, but people only go to the keyboard to complain when it’s a child. I’ve yet to read a negative review about a brewery that complains another adult customer was having a conversation on speaker phone at max volume, and that made the brewery unpleasant. Those who are more annoyed by unruly children than by unruly adults need to reexamine their priorities.

That said, breweries that welcome children are not playgrounds. One of the top breweries in the New Haven area, New England Brewing Co., widely known as NEBCO, recently opened a second location with a large outdoor space. After a few months they put up this sign all around the premises:

This is a great sign. Some parents let their kids roam entire breweries and treat them like McDonald’s PlayPlaces. This is not appropriate. While taking the “arm’s reach” literally is probably a bit much, having children nearby and making sure they are well-behaved is a must for parents. Climbing all over the jungle gym at a local park is great. Climbing on top of tables at a brewery and jumping off is unacceptable. Parents need to make clear to their children what type of behavior is expected. This, of course, is what parenting is all about. Many a time I have seen parents at one table talking and drinking, with kids at the next table playing games. Perfect.

Kids will of course misbehave, but as long as the parents quickly rein in bad behavior, it needs to be tolerated. This is how typical children become well-adjusted adults. Sometimes kids will act out, but as long as a parent is on hand to correct them, the system is working. For those who don’t want to deal with even the smallest of inconveniences regarding children, go to the local dimly lit hole-in-the-wall and drink with all the alcoholic barflies that have been at the same stool for decades. No kids will be there and you can have your adult-only space.

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More broadly, the rights and toleration of children need to be about balance and awareness of the type of establishment. Adults and children should be welcome in public parks. However, adults need to hold themselves to a higher standard when in spaces designed for children. It is not appropriate to swear like a sailor next to the swing set. On the other hand, even if a sports bar allows children, parents need to be aware that they are entering a primarily adult space. When watching a big game on a Friday night, adults are going to misbehave and act like adults. Those not comfortable with their kids seeing those behaviors should watch the game at home.

Breweries are a great middle ground. During the day they are a great space for parents to take their children and meet up with other parents. It’s also a great place for adults to meet up and share a beer. America has a severe lack of businesses with outdoor spaces where people are free to circulate. Breweries are one of the few, and a great place for all people to mingle. Dividing all venues into places where either children reign supreme or are banned entirely is not good for society. Parents should take their children to breweries and make sure they are behaving. Adults should expect children to be well-behaved but extend some latitude. It’s not that complicated.

The rich don’t pay taxes.

It’s a totem recited again and again. People post it online, discuss it with Ezra Klein, and make YouTube videos that hit one million views. Almost as if saying it enough times will make it come true.

It isn’t.

The idea the rich don’t pay taxes is a total shibboleth, right up there with “public schools are underfunded” and “Americans don’t care about senior citizens”. The rich do pay taxes. Not only do they pay taxes, but they pay a lot in taxes. Proportionally, rich Americans pay a higher percentage of taxes collected than just about any other country.

The United States is relatively unusual in that there isn’t a national sales tax. If you buy a steak dinner at a restaurant or a sweatshirt at a store, the federal government doesn’t see a dime. In most other wealthy countries, this would trigger a value-added tax (VAT), which is similar to a national sales tax. Such taxes are often regressive, in that lower income individuals have to pay a higher percentage of their income. Instead, the US, especially the federal government, relies heavily on personal income taxes. Most countries have some sort of personal income tax, where people pay a direct tax not on what they buy, but on the money they earn. These systems are usually designed to be progressive. Not progressive in the political sense, but progressive in an economic sense. That is, the rich pay more. Not only more in dollars and cents, but more proportionally.

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Consider a few simple examples. A single American who made $25,000 last year would pay about $900 in personal income tax. Social security and Medicare (FICA) add another $1,913. Across income tax and FICA, that’s a tax rate of 11.3 percent. Which is fairly low. Making $25,000 a year as a single adult is lower-class, but isn’t living in poverty. Especially for those living in areas with robust welfare programs, life would be adequate, albeit not particularly pleasant. Importantly, someone in this situation keeps 89 percent of their income.

Let’s say our individual making $25,000 a year gets a raise that doubles their income to $50,000. What happens to the taxes owed? They more than double. Income tax increases to $3,871. FICA to $3,825, for a total of $7,696. Income doubled, but taxes due almost tripled. Combined, our worker’s effective tax rate is now 15.4 percent. Our worker is now firmly in the middle class, and still keeps about 85 percent of their earnings.

Now let’s say our individual gets their dream job and gets a raise from $50,000 to $200,000. They have graduated from the middle class to the upper class. Great job! But their taxes increase a tremendous amount. Personal income taxes are now $37,067. FICA is $13,818. Total federal taxes paid are now $50,885, for an effective tax rate of 25.4 percent.

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For an individual who goes from $50,000 a year and the middle class to $200,000 a year and the upper class, taxes paid go up by a factor of 6.6. A quadrupling of income leads to a more than sextupling of taxation. None of this is necessarily unfair. But it is inaccurate to say the rich don’t pay taxes, when someone who is upper class pays a significantly higher percentage of their income than someone who is middle class.

Because the United States relies so much on income tax, this leads to a highly progressive system. Europe, with its high national sales tax, disproportionally taxes the poor and the middle class, who have to spend a higher percentage of their income on consumption. Now, those same people get the taxes they pay back in terms of the vaunted European social safety net we always hear about. But they are paying for that privilege, and paying a lot. The European middle class gets hit especially hard. An American who makes $50,000, someone firmly in the middle class, only pays $7,696 in income tax and FICA. A Dutchman, on the other hand, who makes €50,000 a year, a middle-class Dutch salary, would pay €18,056 in taxes, over double the amount of an American.

Again, there are plenty of other factors at play. The Dutch have a robust social safety net. There are other taxes that need to be considered as well. The US has state income and sales tax in most states. The Dutch have a high value-added tax. But from an income perspective, the differences aren’t even close. The Dutch middle class pays far more in taxes than the American middle class. The American rich pay a much larger share of taxes than the rich in other countries. Just look at this chart:

The top one percent, that is, just one out of every 100 people, singlehandedly pay 38.5 percent of all income taxes! That one person pays more than the bottom 90 people combined. This is not to argue that this taxation is unfair. That one person also makes over a fifth of the total adjusted gross income, a tremendous amount. The point is that it is untrue to say the rich don’t pay taxes. They not only pay taxes, they pay a lot.

So why is there such a disconnect? Why do people claim the rich don’t pay any tax when the statistics say they do? A few reasons. First, organizations like ProPublica run a disingenuous series of articles titled “The Secret IRS Files” and “Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax”, using stolen tax documents. They correctly document that in some years, the richest Americans have paid very little in income tax. In some cases, zero dollars. That income tax is then compared to how their wealth has grown to calculate a “True Tax Rate”.

It is not a true tax rate.

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First, to figure out a “true tax rate”, one must know how much someone paid in tax. ProPublica does not know this information. ProPublica knows how much these individuals paid in income tax, but not how much they paid in things like property tax, let alone sales tax. So their true tax rate is based on only a partial accounting of how much they have paid in tax.

Second, their “true tax rate” is calculated based on their increase in wealth, which is an irrelevant concept when it comes to taxation in America. Wealth is not taxed. Income is taxed. Capital gains are taxed. But if you bought $1,000 in Bitcoin in 2013, and it’s now worth $1,000,000, that isn’t taxed. Nor should it be. After all, you haven’t made any money yet. That $1,000,000 wealth is just a digital asset. Once the bitcoin is sold, then the $999,000 in gains is taxed. That’s how it works for everyone.

This is all very frustrating because there are good arguments for raising taxes on the wealthy. The top income tax rate, which is currently 37 percent and begins for those making $626,351, could be raised to a higher rate at a lower income. Make the top tax rate 40 percent have it begin at $300,000. No complaints here - although many who make $300,000 will shamelessly claim to be middle class and plead poverty. Inheritance tax also needs to be completely overhauled, so that the wealthy can no longer buy-borrow-die and bequeath their riches to relatives without paying tax.

To make this happen, however, we need to have an honest conversation about where taxes come from. We need to make clear that yes, there are a few very high net worth individuals who pay seemingly low taxes, but that our tax system, far from coddling the rich, depends on them. The top 10 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income taxes. Obscuring this reality makes change harder to achieve.

It’s a common complaint. Tourists show up at a far-flung destination and immediately want to experience “the authentic”. They want to “avoid tourist traps” and “travel like a local”. This can be exasperating. Plenty of Reddit threads complain about it. I’ve traveled with people who are obsessed with finding “authentic spots”. To which I say, then why are you staying in South Beach? The worst is when people I’ve traveled with want to find “local shops” to pick up a souvenir. Local shops, almost by definition, don’t have souvenirs. They have canned tomatoes and blue jeans and power tools. You know, the exact same things YOU buy when you’re at home. As one friend of mine put it, “You want the local experience… so you want to go to the Jiffy Lube with me and watch them change my oil?” Often, the same people that claim the want a local experience would be aghast at staying at an Airbnb in a local suburb that’s 60 minutes from the airport and 30 minutes from the downtown. Never mind that that’s where all the locals live.

So yes, some tourists can be annoying this way. Especially when they insist on simultaneously having authentic experiences and staying in the most tourist-friendly part of a city. There really isn’t such thing as a local restaurant in South Beach or Cinque Terre. Of course a restaurant with great views of the ocean is going to be overpriced and chock full of tourists. But eating fresh seafood with a panoramic view of the ocean is awesome. Do I really care if the person at the table next to me is a local accountant or another foreigner? Not really. The locals mostly work minimum wage jobs in the hospitality industry. They aren’t interested in spending $100 a person at dinner with a view that they can look at every day on their way to work.

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Additionally, there’s a reason that tourist attractions are tourist attractions. Will you find many locals in Notre Dame Cathedral? No. But Notre Dame is still one of the most beautiful buildings ever constructed by man. It’s one of the best things to see in Paris. Also, and this is important, almost all Parisians have visited Notre Dame themselves at some point, so it isn’t a “tourist trap” built to ensnare foreigners who don’t know any better. One of the best tourist things to do in Chicago is to take an architecture river cruise. At the same time, most Chicagoans have done it as well. Tourism and localism are not always mutually exclusive.

That aside, I think complaining about tourists wanting the authentic experience is being a bit obtuse. Of course tourists don’t want to ride the commuter rail or go to the dentist’s office. When a tourist says they want to see how locals live, they want to see how locals play. And that, in my opinion, is a sensible way to travel. When I visit a new city, whether it be in America or abroad, I generally want to see the tourist attractions. But I also want to know what leisure is like for those who live there. I don’t want to see the office buildings or the DMV, but I absolutely want to see the parks, restaurants, and bars. I want to see the libraries, college campuses, and main streets. Even supermarkets and post offices can be interesting. I want to see the third places locals spend their leisure time in.

I think back to a group trip I took to San Antonio several years ago. After seeing it on TV for many years, usually in a short clip before a sporting event, I wanted to see the San Antonio River Walk. Yes it was touristy. Yes it was expensive. There was a Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant. I doubt most of the people I rubbed shoulders with were from San Antonio. At the same time, it was spectacular. The San Antonio River Walk should be studied by urban planners everywhere. It’s one of the most unique places I’ve ever been in my life. The dinner was excellent. The piano bar a blast. I even saw one guy who jumped in the river to try to recover a cell phone. I didn’t go to the San Antonio River Walk to live like a local. I went because it kicks ass.

At the same time, yes, I wanted to have an “authentic” San Antonio experience. I wanted to see what the locals did for fun. So we ordered puffy tacos. We visited the Pearl District, which seemed to have a mix of tourists and locals. And we went out one night on St. Mary’s Strip, where the locals go on their Saturday nights. It was great, but in a different way than the River Walk.

I think doing both makes sense. I want to see the tourist attractions. Visit the Bean in Chicago. Drink on the Bourbon Streets of the world. And I also want to see what locals do for fun. When they are celebrating a birthday or going out on Friday night, where do they eat? Where do they drink? What do they do on pleasant Saturday afternoons? I look forward to this almost as much as the sites.

So yes, tourists can be annoying when they insist on the “local experience”. Tourist attractions are tourist attractions for a reason. But local experiences are worth having. Local recreation is a lot different in Chicago than Boulder. The authentic experience for an Alaskan is exotic for a Texan, and vice versa. Enjoy both.

After a seven-month pilot program, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are no longer roaming the streets of New York. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, had been testing eight autonomous vehicles around the five boroughs. Their permit to do so was granted under the Adams administration and has not been renewed with Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Going forward, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Transportation said, “Our top priority for AV testing is public safety and, as the mayor has made clear, any AV policy decisions will center workers and their well-being.”

Well, which is it? This is a great example of what Ezra Klein has called “everything-bagel liberalism”. This is where progressives try to accomplish many goals at once, to the detriment of the actual objective of a single project. In this case, the two goals are public safety and labor conditions. The City of New York is understandably concerned with both. But AVs present a case where the two conflict.

AVs are indisputably safer than cars being driven by humans. With millions of miles of testing and hundreds of rides taken every day by AVs, the differences are substantial. Detractors will moan that many of these studies come from the companies themselves, which is a fair critique, but the differences are massive. Some studies have found a 90% decrease in serious injury or fatal crashes. If the mayor’s office is concerned with public safety, then it should be embracing AVs with open arms. Given the nanny-state attitude the New York government often embraces, it could even go a step further. Perhaps AVs should be mandated, and human-driven cars banished from the city like the horse and carriage.

Unfortunately, this would not be good for workers.

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Tens of thousands of New Yorkers make their living as drivers. There are around 180,000 people with active Taxi & Limousine Commission licenses. AVs represent an existential threat to their interests. Now, in a sensible world, people would recognize that this is just the price of progress. AVs will destroy many jobs, but so too has the self-checkout lane at the supermarket. The existence of a job in 2025 does guarantee the existence of a job in 2030 any more than the existence of a job in 1926 guarantees its existence in 2026. Economists have understood for decades that growth often comes through creative destruction, whereby cobblers become a thing of the past, and people now make a living designing cell phone apps.

This not being a sensible world, a government official can openly say they will not hesitate to prevent progress if it means protecting jobs. One is instantly reminded of the delightful story of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman visiting India in the 1960s. During his tour, he was taken to see a canal being built. To Friedman’s surprise, all the digging was being done by hand, despite the presence of at least rudimentary machinery nearby. When Friedman asked why the workers were using shovels instead of machines, he was told it was because the road was being built as part of a jobs program. Using machinery to build the road would mean fewer jobs. Thus, the workers used shovels. Friedman replied, “Oh, I see. I thought you were trying to build a canal. If you really want to create jobs, then by all means give these men spoons, not shovels.”

It isn’t surprising that the New York government would explicitly state that regulatory approval will take into account how many jobs a new technology would destroy, but it is disappointing.

Of course, the greatest irony is that the very people who are protesting AVs were themselves the object of protests a mere decade ago.

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When UberX launched in 2012, it immediately prompted howls of protest from taxi drivers. They launched protests across the country, blocking access to various airports and harassing Uber drivers. At the time, many left-of-center Americans took their side. This never made any sense to me. Taxi drivers were the worst. Despite enormous restrictions keeping out competitors, taxi drivers around the country (and the world) were arguably the most dishonest profession. Taxi drivers were known for deliberately taking took a circuitous route to a destination or futzed with the meter. I remember trying to get a taxi to New Jersey from the Lower East Side in Manhattan late one night. The bars were letting out, and the streets were packed. Taxi drivers, in flagrant violation of their agreement with the city, would roll down their window and would only accept passengers going to a destination in an area where a lot of other people would be looking for cabs. It took forever to find a cabbie willing to drive us to Jersey City, and even then, he turned off the meter and we had to pay him an inflated rate in cash.

Yet despite the constant hassle and corruption, many supported the taxi drivers. They were against Uber, a model proven to be indisputably better, if for no other reason than its skyrocketing popularity. It made no sense. Protesting that Uber drivers will hasten the demise of taxi drivers is like protesting that Airbnb will end the market for time shares. These are good things! The reality was, of course, people are reflexively against all change and wanted to use the government to enforce the status quo.

Today, those very Uber drivers are trying to throw roadblocks in the way of AVs. In a mere decade, they have gone from the scrappy upstart trying to overthrow vested and corrupt interests to a corrupt interest themselves. What a turnaround. Of course AVs are bad for Uber drivers. Uber drivers were bad for taxi drivers. Taxi drivers were bad for the horse and carriage. If we ever get around to building highly walkable cities, those will be bad for AVs. This is how the system should work.

Instead, an instrument for change has become an instrument of stagnation. The disrupters have become the blockaders. It is likely they will lose in the end. But millions of dollars and countless years will be wasted in the process.

When the NCAA announced in 2021 that athletes would be able to benefit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL), it sent shockwaves through college athletics. For years this was the most controversial issue in college sports. Despite earning millions for their schools, athletes had been prohibited from signing endorsement deals or profiting from their success. No other college student, from aspiring actors who performed in school plays to aspiring physical trainers who assisted with the gymnastics team, faced the same restrictions. Now those restrictions were lifted. All of a sudden, college athletes could be on commercials and Wheaties boxes.

One of the arguments against allowing NIL deals was that it would ruin athletic competitions like the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, known as “March Madness”. One of America’s premier sporting events, every year 68 teams compete to be crowned the king of college basketball. The concern was that allowing athletes to make money would ruin “Cinderellas”, teams from small schools most have never heard of that beat famous athletic programs.

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Every college basketball fan can name their favorite Cinderella school. One of the most famous is little-known George Mason University, which in 2006 went on one of the most astonishing runs of all time. As a low-ranked 11-seed, this school named for a secondary founding father beat powerhouses Michigan State, North Carolina, and Connecticut before falling to Florida in the semi-finals, also known as the Final Four. In 2018, UMBC became the first 16-seed (the worst seed) to defeat a 1-seed (the best seed) in the first round, dominating Virginia 74-54. What does UMBC stand for, you ask? Exactly, I reply. In 2022, Saint Peter’s became the first 15-seed to make the Elite 8, or quarter-finals, beating powerhouses Kentucky and Purdue before losing to North Carolina. Speaking of Purdue, who could ever forget what many have deemed the greatest upset in college basketball history? The Boilermakers, as a 1-seed, lost to 16-seed and yes-this-is-a-real-college Fairleigh Dickinson in the first round, a team that only made it into the tournament through an odd quirk in qualification rules. That year, Purdue had the tallest average height in the entire tournament. Fairleigh Dickinson was the shortest. David beat Goliath and entered college basketball history.

Those against NIL deals pointed out that with a profit motive, these Cinderellas would cease to exist. Before the NIL, second-tier players would often prefer to attend smaller programs because it meant they would get a chance to start rather than ride the bench. With NIL, if even bench players at the big schools are being paid six-figures to sit on the sidelines, that’s going to be a powerful motivator for a teenager when picking a school. Students who would have formerly attended Saint Peter’s with the goal of being a regular player may now choose to attend Kentucky and sit all the way to the bank.

Over the last few years, it’s begun to look like the naysayers were right. College basketball is divided into two informal groups: schools that play for the power conferences (the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC, Big East, and before it imploded, the Pac-12) and mid-major conferences (all the other conferences with Division I basketball programs). Historically, there was usually one mid-major conference that would make it to the Elite Eight. Often, one would make it to the Final Four. These were usually deemed Cinderellas, especially if they had a seed outside of the top five.

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Over the past three tournaments, however, no team has been putting on a glass slipper. In 2024, all eight teams in the Elite 8 were from the power conferences. Clemson was an underdog as a 6-seed, but is from the SEC. 2025 was even worse, with 3-seed Texas Tech the biggest Elite 8 underdog. 2026 was a bit better, with 9-seed Iowa and 6-seed Tennessee making it to the quarterfinals, but again, both these schools are from power conferences. Not many fans are pulling up Wikipedia when they see “Texas Tech” on the bracket. The only hope for a low seed to make a deep run in 2026 was 11-seed Texas, hardly an anonymous institution.

Those critical of NIL have been taking a victory lap, pointing out that, lo and behold, paying players has doomed mid-major teams from making a run, just as they said. While the evidence is beginning to accumulate, it’s a bit premature.

First, NIL deals are not the only change that college basketball has undergone in recent years. In fact, opponents of NIL often omit that another massive change happened at the same time - a rewriting of transfer rules. Before Covid, most college basketball players had to sit out a year if they transferred. This was a high cost. Almost all basketball players would stay on the same team they originally signed with. Few wanted to spend a year watching from the sidelines. Today, however, players can transfer as much as they want and never have to sit out. This has led to some absurd situations, with some high-profile athletes playing for four different schools over their four years of eligibility.

The change of the transfer rules may be contributing more to the lack of Cinderellas than the NIL rules. Previously, a mid-major program could find an overlooked player or develop a good player into a great player and keep him on the team. This is how Steph Curry, the future NBA all-star, wound up at little Davidson College in North Carolina for his entire college career. The son of an NBA player and a star high school player himself, Curry was overlooked because he was only six foot two and weighed 160 pounds.

In 2007, Curry set the NCAA record for freshman three-pointers and was named his conference’s freshman of the year. If that happened today, power schools would be banging down his door trying to get him to transfer. At the time, however, that would mean sitting out a year, so he stayed at Davidson. He exploded onto the national scene in 2008, when he took 10-seed Davidson all the way to the Elite 8. In today’s world, Curry probably wouldn’t have stayed at Davidson to make such a run.

This is a great example of multi-causality. It could be true that allowing NIL deals doomed Cinderellas. But it also could be true that allowing unlimited transfers did the same. Since they happened at the same time, it’s likely impossible to decipher which is mostly responsible. Perhaps Cinderellas were doomed from either. Maybe even without NIL, the transfer rules would have ended Cinderella runs.

It’s also possible writing an obituary to Cinderella teams is premature. Three data points are the beginning of a trend, but just the beginning. Perhaps the next few seasons will see a return of mid-major teams making deep runs in the tournament. After all, the NIL and transfer rules went into effect in 2021, and the 2023 tournament saw 5-seed San Diego State and 9-seed Florida Atlantic make it all the way to the Final Four, with the former losing to UConn in the National Championship game.

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Finally, it’s important to consider the effects this had on the players. Much has been written about whether NIL deals and the transfer portal are good for college sports. Much less about whether it’s good for college athletes. There will certainly be both good and bad outcomes from letting players transfer at will, but in this tournament, we saw a clear example of a positive outcome. 9-seed Iowa made it to the Elite 8 this year, upsetting 1-seed and defending champion Florida in the second round. Leading the way for the Hawkeyes was Bennet Stirtz, one of the best shooters in college basketball.

Stirtz was not highly recruited out of high school. He played his first year at Division II Northwest Missouri State and was named his conference’s freshman of the year. He then transferred to Division I Drake and was named their conference’s player of the year. He then transferred to Iowa for his junior year and was named to the All-Big Ten team. He’s currently projected to be a first-round NBA draft pick. One could pooh-pooh this as the professionalization of colleges sports. Three schools in there years? Has he ever stepped foot in a classroom?

At the same time, what an amazing story. A kid who got no attention from any college program proves himself and excels at every level. With the previous transfer rules, it’s likely Stirtz spends his entire college career under the radar. He certainly isn’t getting drafted in the first round. The new rules allowed him to develop his talent and maximize his potential, which, of course, is what college is all about.

A loyal Econ Soapbox reader recently sent me the following article from the New York Times, “How a Family of 3 Lives on $500,000 on the Upper West Side,” part of their recent “Affording New York” series, which features individuals living in the Big Apple on vastly different incomes. Now, most people know that a family with two adults and one child and an annual income of $500,000 in Manhattan is going to be significantly different from anywhere else in the world. The amount of money New Yorkers often spend on necessities is in the stratosphere compared to the rest of the nation. The couple interviewed in the article, Anala Gossai and Brendon O’Leary, spend $3,900 a month for their one-bedroom rented apartment and $4,200 a month on childcare. That would be extreme in Middle America, but seems reasonable for Manhattan. It certainly isn’t unusual. The kicker, though, comes about halfway down the article, where Mr. O’Leary claims, “I think we’re middle class for this area. We’re doing OK.” As the Econ Soapbox reader put it, “This has to be trolling.”

I promise you, it is not.

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As I’ve written about before, people have lost complete sight of what it means to be middle class. Families living on $140,000 are not poor. Families making $500,000 are not middle class. Not even close. First, the whole idea, as the NYT article says, that “In New York City, wealth is often viewed in relation to your neighbors, and many of theirs make more money,” is totally bogus. Under this definition, anyone can move to a wealthier neighborhood and then define themselves as lower or middle class. Make $1,000,000 a year? Move to a private community in Malibu. All of a sudden you’re poor! This is clearly nonsense. No one has the right to live in one of the nicest neighborhoods (the Upper West Side) on one of the most sought-after islands in the world (Manhattan). What an insane framing.

The double-whammy is that even with this framing, Ms. Gossai and Mr. O’Leary are wrong. They may feel like all their neighbors make more money, but that’s inaccurate. According to the N.Y.U. Furman Center, the median household income on the Upper West Side is $155,710. So even if we using the most cherry-picked statistic possible, this family is still upper class. They make over triple the median household income. This makes sense, given that a different article in the “Affording New York” series highlights Gaya Palmer, a 76-year-old artist who also lives on the Upper West Side on only $36,000 a year. She seems to be doing just fine.

The point is that saying, “We’re middle class conditional on only comparing ourselves to the insanely rich,” is not only meaningless, but it’s deceitful.

There is a difference between upper class and rich, just as there is a difference between lower class and poor. A family making $500,000 a year is definitely upper class, and plausibly rich. Claiming to be middle class because you chose to live in a super exclusive building is no different from claiming to be middle class because you spend $1,000 on Kobe beef every night for dinner. Both housing and food are human needs. Living in an incredibly expensive one-bedroom apartment and dining on steak every night are not. If the apartment in question isn’t all that nice, maybe it’s a bad financial decision. It certainly doesn’t change your income class.

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Beyond living in one of the most desirable places on planet Earth, the Gossai-O’Leary family exhibits all the trappings of an upper-class lifestyle. They somehow spent $9,000 on baby supplies last year. Their dog costs another $4,440 a year. A drop-off laundry service is another $1,800 a year, which is used despite having laundry in the building. The family used to take trips to Switzerland, but now trips are “mainly” to visit family - destination unspecified. Most of these are individually defensible as an extreme splurge by a barely-plausibly middle class household. Taken together, however, it paints the picture of a family that is living well beyond the median.

The kicker is that the family is putting their excess cash into long-term savings, to the tune of $10,000 per month! Which is a great thing. Good for them. It should go without saying, however, that middle-class families do not save anywhere close to $120,000 a year. That’s just about equal to the median household wealth of $124,041 across the United States. In one year, this family is saving up the typical amount a household accumulates over its entire life. While paying $46,800 on rent. In fact, having a salary of $120,000 alone would put this family well within the middle class. They could literally support an entire additional household with their income. Again, this family is not rich by Upper West Side standards, but nor are they typical. Even in the rarified air near Central Park, they are upper class. People who live in Iowa, make $300,000 a year, and live in a two-bedroom cabin are not middle class just because they live in a two-bedroom cabin. The same applies to New Yorkers.

This matters because at some point push is going to turn to shove. The United States is going to have to make some tough financial decisions. The Federal government cannot run a multi-trillion-dollar deficit forever. That means either cutting the big welfare programs or increasing spending. The odds of Congress ever slashing Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid are low. There’s no support for it from either party. Thus, it’s going to come to tax increases. Those tax increases cannot only come from the super-rich. Even if you somehow took all of Elon Musk’s wealth and somehow put it towards the budget deficit, it would only keep the government above water for about six months. Not only is the upper class going to have to pay more taxes, but the middle class as well. That means recognizing who is in the upper class, and not credulously listening to people in the top 1% who claim not to be.

The United States has undergone several distinct phases of immigration throughout its history. These include migration from Europe to the US, which began in the 16th century and continued through the 20th century. Then there was the westward migration, which began in the 18th century and arguably continues to this day. Finally, over the last half-century, there has been a mass migration of people from Central and South America to the United States. Then there was the Great Migration, the movement of Black Americans from the South to the North in the 20th century.

Over the last few years, however, a new migration trend has begun, a movement south. The above map, provided by HireAHelper, tells the story of 2025. States that are red have more people moving out than moving in. States that are green have more people moving in than moving out. The Northeast is seeing outmigration at a prodigious rate. Massachusetts, despite being home to the world’s best universities and one of America’s most popular cities, is losing people at a faster rate than any other state. The Midwest is treading water, with states like Illinois losing people while Minnesota is gaining. Then there’s the West Coast. Washington, Oregon, and California used to add people at a fast clip. From the days of the Oregon Trail, Americans would head westward looking for a better life. Today, however, the trend has reversed. Fewer people are moving in than moving out in all three states.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Southeast. The part of the country traditionally seen as somewhat of a backwater outside of a few cities like Atlanta has suddenly become a magnet for Americans on the move. Consider the traditional Southeast: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. All nine of these states had a net migration gain in 2025. No other region has such consistency over so many states. Even in the aforementioned Northeast, in which most states had a net migration loss, New Hampshire and Maine bucked the trend and gained residents. In the Southeast, however, there isn’t a single exception to the rule. And not only did all gain residents, but most did at a significant rate. North Carolina gained about 29 residents per 10,000. Tennessee, 43.6. The biggest winner, however, was South Carolina, which gained a massive 79.7 residents per 10,000 in 2025, more than any other state. Only sparsely populated Idaho, which gained 63.2 residents per 10,000 people, comes close.

It’s worth noting that geographic trends in the US population have been remarkably consistent since World War II. One of my favorite stats is the “Mean Center of Population for the United States”, that is, the point around which an equal amount of Americans live. This has been tracked since 1790, and is displayed on the below map:

Every single census, from 1790 to 2020, has shown a population that is moving west. In the 19th century, Americans flocked westward as fast as they could. Then, during the World Wars and Great Depression, the westward drift slowed markedly. Since World War II, the population of America has continued its westward movement, but has also begun to move steadily south. Now, this is not just because of people moving. Births and deaths play a greater role than migration when determining the mean center of population. Still, given that southern states generally have higher birth rates than states on the West Coast and in the Northeast, it is possible that for the first time in US history, there is no westward trend to the population. The 2030 census could be a watershed moment.

So, what is behind the migration to the southeastern United States? There are likely a few reasons.

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The first, as those on conservative social media like to constantly mention, is government. The top 10 states for net migration gain on a per capita basis are South Carolina, Idaho, Delaware, Tennessee, Alabama, Maine, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Eight of those 10 have Republican control in both houses of the state legislature, and the same eight voted for Trump in 2024. Eleven and twelve on the list are Montana and Texas, so this isn’t a cherry-picked stat. The 10 biggest net migration losers are Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, California, Kansas, New Jersey, Alaska, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Eight of those 10 states have Democratic control across both houses of the state legislature, and the same eight voted for Harris in 2024. Looking across states, it’s striking that regardless of region, people are leaving Democratic states and moving to Republican ones. Virginia, for example, is the one traditional southern state that is still blue. It is also the only southern state that had a net migration loss in 2025. New Hampshire and Maine, meanwhile, are the only states in New England that are gaining population. They are also the two most conservative. Idaho has the second-largest net migration gains and is one of the most right-leaning states in the US, having voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since the 1964 trouncing of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson.

The more interesting question, however, is what policies are Democrats enacting that drive people away? The primary one is housing. This is beginning to shift as more and more people move south, but housing in blue states costs more than housing in red states. Entire regions of the country had effectively priced out middle-class Americans. California and New York, the two biggest engines of American growth, have become unsustainably expensive. People can moan all they want about geographic restrictions caused by the ocean and mountains and national parks, but the reality this is a political decision. Manhattan has a population density of roughly 70,000 people per square mile, and it’s one of the most sought-after places to live in the world. Contrast the Big Apple with San Francisco, which has a population density of roughly 17,000 people per square mile. Clearly, far more housing could be built in the Golden State, but the government has made it functionally illegal to do so. As a result, people have moved south. Today, however, the housing gap has narrowed. Now that some southern cities like Charleston, SC, have become as expensive as their northern peers, it will be interesting to see if the southern migration trend lessens.

Another factor is climate. It may seem odd, but the full effects of air conditioning are still being adjusted for in housing decisions. Even in the 1990s, a significant portion of homes and businesses in the South did not have air conditioning. The air conditioning they had was often substandard. For northerners, this alone was enough to make living in the deep south untenable. Today, however, almost all homes and businesses have AC, and the AC they have is frequently Arctic. The presence of near-universal air conditioning has removed one of the biggest downsides of living in the American South. People are responding and beginning to move there.

It will be interesting to see what the next decade holds. If housing prices continue to stay elevated in the north and remote work continues to be a viable option for many white-collar workers, it is likely the popularity of the Southeast will continue. If the trend accelerates, we could see the end of the longest migration trend in the country’s history: westward migration.

On February 28, Israeli and American forces launched an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran. Israel and Iran have angrily circled each other for decades, with Iran often fighting through proxies. Yet, until recently, there hadn’t been much direct aggression between the two nations. The lack of direct conflict until last year’s joint Israeli-American bombing campaign could be attributed to several factors, not least of all the tremendous risk of a large-scale Middle Eastern conflict, but one economic factor always loomed large: the price of oil.

Iran is located, depending on your point of view, either conveniently or inconveniently, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which is named the Strait of Hormuz. About 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through this narrow channel before it is refined and processed around the globe. This gives Iran tremendous leverage. Even if the country is crippled militarily, it can effectively close the strait by threatening to sink any ship that tries to sail through. This happened on March 2nd, when a senior Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) official stated, “If anyone tries to ​pass, the heroes of the Revolutionary Guards and the regular navy will set ​those ships ablaze.” The strait has effectively been blocked, with only a trickle of tankers wanting to risk passing through. This, until last month, partially protected Iran from attack. No longer.

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The price of oil has soared. In under 10 days, the price of Brent crude oil increased from $73 to $99 a barrel. Prices have since fallen to $85 a barrel, but everyone is nervously looking to see what the next few weeks hold. Much of the developed world is in the economic doldrums. A sustained increase in oil prices could trigger a recession. President Trump has tried to calm markets by claiming the war will be over soon, but people are justifiably nervous.

Prices at the pump have already begun to rise. According to AAA, the price of a gallon of gas has increased from $3.11 to $3.54 in just the last week. This may seem odd, as it takes some time, at least two weeks, for crude oil to work its way through the supply chain. The gas being sold at the pump today is made from oil that was sold before the attacks even started. How is it that prices have risen so quickly? This is because gas prices suffer from asymmetric price transmission, more colorfully known as “rockets and feathers”. When oil prices increase, gas prices tend to increase sharply and immediately, like a rocket. When oil prices decrease, however, gas prices tend to fall gradually and with a delay, like a feather. The exact causes aren’t fully understood, but the theory is that gas station owners can tell upset consumers that gas prices had to be increased because oil prices increased, even though the gas station owner hasn’t had to pay more for gas yet. When oil prices fall, the same gas station owner can claim gas prices can’t come down until the cheaper oil is refined and resold as gas.

It may also seem odd that gas prices in the United States are increasing when the supply issue is in the Middle East. Contrary to the narratives of the 20th century, the US is not dependent on foreign oil. America is now the world’s largest producer of oil and is a net exporter of petroleum products. More oil is produced each year in the US than is consumed. The fracking revolution of the 2000s now means the US produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. So why are we affected by a war halfway around the world? Because oil is traded on a world market. When there is a supply issue in the Middle East, some refineries are willing to pay more for oil from elsewhere. Sellers of oil then raise their prices to meet this increased willingness to pay.

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An interesting additional wrinkle to the US oil industry is that although the US is a net exporter of petroleum products, we still are a net importer of crude oil. A lot of the oil pumped from North Dakota is high-quality, while the refineries in Louisiana are designed to refine low-quality oil. Thus, a lot of American oil is exported abroad to be refined, while foreign oil is refined in the US. As long as international shipping is functioning well this isn’t a problem. To the contrary, it allows different countries to specialize in different types of refineries and avoids unnecessary duplication of refinery capacity. When something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz occurs, however, it causes problems.

If oil prices stay high, the political pressure to end the war will certainly rise. Even those who support the war in Iran will not want to pay $3.50 or $4.00 for a gallon of gas. If this comes to pass, it will be interesting to see how the administration responds. They could end the war preemptively.

Another option would be to revisit the Jones Act, an absurd rule that mandates that ships that travel between two US ports be American vessels. US ship construction is in dire straits, and there aren’t nearly enough ships to transport oil between various American ports. Thus, American refineries are often forced to source oil from abroad rather than buy American oil. This paradoxically increases our reliance on foreign oil and increases prices. One study found that in 2018-2019, gas prices on the East Coast would be a full $0.60 a gallon cheaper if the Jones Act were repealed, and gas could be transported from the Gulf Coast to New England on a foreign vessel.1 So if gas prices stay high, the Trump Administration has a few levers to bring prices back down.