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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unspeakable tragedy had just befallen this family.

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

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

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

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

It was all for naught.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are not serious people.

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

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

Mamdani has backed himself into a corner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Likely a few things in tandem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, the cruise ship business model is fascinating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, I love the fun facts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was this written by AI?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gets worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A quick Truman timeline:

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

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

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

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

1934: Elected to the US Senate from Missouri.

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

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

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

1948: Truman is reelected president in his own right.

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

1972: Truman dies of pneumonia at age 88.

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Below are some additional facts I found interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ---

  Mr. Truman:

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

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

  ---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 restaurants and 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.