The rich don’t pay taxes.

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

It isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not a true tax rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, this would not be good for workers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I promise you, it is not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After months of waiting, the Supreme Court decision was what most expected: the President of the United States cannot unilaterally impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). This invalidated hundreds of tariffs that President Trump had initiated during his second term, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars worth of revenue that now likely needs to be returned.

Thank God.

Tariffs are bad. Period. They punish Americans and prevent the US economy from leveraging comparative advantage around the globe. One study found that, contrary to Trump’s assertions that foreigners pay for the tariffs, roughly 90 percent of the burden was borne by American companies and consumers. As predicted, the Trump tariffs have been hurting the US economy.

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The legal reasoning, which was decided in a 6-3 vote, was straightforward. IEEPA never mentions tariffs. Tariffs are a tax, and taxes are under the purview of Congress. Unless the legislature specifically delegates taxation authority to the executive branch, it remains with the legislature. IEEPA does give the president the authority to regulate trade with a foreign country, but not impose tariffs. The court did not address the blatant falsehood that there was any kind of emergency to begin with that would warrant IEEPA’s usage.

The three liberal judges, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, joined Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett in the majority. Conservative judges Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Alito were in the dissent. In his dissent, Kavanaugh claimed:

Interpreting IEEPA to exclude tariffs creates nonsensical textual and practical anomalies. The plaintiffs and the Court do not dispute that the President can act in declared emergencies under IEEPA to impose quotas or even total embargoes on all imports from a given country. But the President supposedly cannot take the far more modest step of conditioning those imports on payment of a tariff or duty.

I am not a lawyer, but this type of reasoning never made any sense to me. It may seem odd that IEEPA allows the president to embargo a country entirely, but cannot place even a one percent tariff on a nation. But these inconsistencies are everywhere. The Federal Government can literally execute people, and it does, but is not allowed to parade a convicted felon through the streets while the populace throws old vegetables at him, as was done in the days of old. Granting authority for one course of action does not implicitly grant authority over every lesser course.

The spiciest part of the decision came from Justice Gorsuch, who called out almost every fellow justice for being a hypocrite in his concurrence. Over the last few decades, justices have increasingly relied on the “major questions doctrine”. Not present in any textual document, the major questions doctrine says that any action taken by the executive branch that has major political or economic implications must have explicit authorization from Congress. During the Biden administration, Republican-appointed justices often relied on the major questions doctrine to rein in Biden policies. For example, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s student debt relief plan, in part, because the Department of Education was not given explicit authority to forgive student debt by Congress. During the Biden administration, however, the three Democrat-appointed justices disagreed with the major questions doctrine rationale.

Today the shoe is on the other foot. The liberal justices, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, suddenly decided the major questions doctrine now applied. Meanwhile, former staunch defenders of the major questions doctrine Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas, conveniently found it didn’t apply in this case. As Gorsuch states, “It is an interesting turn of events. Each camp warrants a visit.”

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In a more sane world, this would be the end of the Trump tariffs. They were always a bad idea. The Supreme Court effectively handed Trump a get out of jail free card. He could say, “I wanted the tariffs, but the Supreme Court won’t let me do them.” This is effectively what Biden did with the student debt issue. Letting the Supreme Court allow you to save face is a blessing for presidents who need to backtrack from bad policies but don’t want to be seen as weak.

Trump, of course, has no such trepidations. He truly believes that tariffs are good no matter what, and that any country with a trade surplus with the United States must be “ripping off” the American people. No amount of common sense or simple reasoning will convince him otherwise. It’s an insane shibboleth on par with another Trump totem, “low interest rates good,” or one commonly heard from the left, “billionaires bad”.

Thus, Trump immediately said he would use a different law, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and apply a blanket 10 percent tariff on every country. Then he said the tariff would actually be 15 percent. Then the tariff actually instituted was 10 percent. Wide carveouts have been instituted, but the typical product now has a 10 percent tariff on it, regardless if it’s coming from Canada or China.

These are not serious people.

Section 122 does allow the president to impose such tariffs, but only for 150 days. Things will likely come to a head then, when Trump will undoubtedly try to just restart the clock. It will be up to the courts to determine whether that is allowed. Similar to the endless, and not allowed, extensions of a TikTok ban, Trump will likely just keep restarting the 10 percent tariffs under Section 122 and claim the clock resets until the end of his second term in January of 2029. Companies will undoubtedly sue, and it will be up to the courts to decide how often the clock is allowed to reset.

In the interim, Trump has threatened to actually-for-realsies-this-time institute a 15 percent global tariff, the maximum allowed under Section 122. If this comes to pass, it would reach a new level of stupidity, as it would violate the deals that his own administration negotiated. Countries like Colombia and the United Kingdom already had 10 percent tariff rates under the IEEPA tariffs. If they are increased to 15 percent over Section 122, the deals they made with the Trump administration less than a year ago would be invalidated. Regardless of your feelings on tariffs, this is not the way to conduct trade policy.

Pad Thai. It’s one of the most famous Asian meals in the US. Right up there with the Chinese dish General Tso’s chicken and the Indian chicken tikka masala. Of course, many are aware that General Tso’s chicken isn’t a traditional Chinese meal. There are conflicting claims about who originated the recipe, but it first appeared in Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. Chicken tikka masala is also more modern than some might guess. No maharaja ever enjoyed it. In fact, it was first popularized in Indian restaurants in that most exotic of locations: Glasgow, Scotland.

At first glance, pad Thai seems more authentic than its ersatz counterparts. For starters, pad Thai was invented in Thailand. Americans first discovered it in the 1960s, when American GIs would vacation there during leaves from Vietnam. The ingredients also appear genuine, as opposed to the dairy-heavy and clearly foreign chicken tikka masala. However, just as the emperor of China never polished off a plate of General Tso’s chicken, no king of Siam ever ate pad Thai. The origins of the dish, and its success, is a fascinating story of top-down cultural persuasion.

In the 1930s, Siam and much of Southeast Asia were becoming a nation-state in a 20th-century-sense. After centuries of feudal kingdoms vying for power and various leaders who sometimes ruled vast areas, borders were finally coalescing around ethnic groups. Cambodia became Cambodia, Vietnam became Vietnam, etc. A military officer named Plaek Phibunsongkhram, known as Phibun, in 1938 became the third prime minister of Siam and soon a military dictator. At the time, Thais were the dominant ethnic group in Siam, but there was also a large Chinese minority that was politically and economically powerful.

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Phibun decided his nation needed to be for the Thais, with a strong national identity and a more homogenous culture. Thus, Siam was renamed Thailand. Thai identity was encouraged and promoted. The Chinese were sidelined. To accompany this newfound ethnic pride, Phibun wanted Thailand to have a national dish. Exactly how he settled on pad Thai or where the original recipe came from is unknown. Dishes similar to pad Thai had been eaten around Thailand for centuries, ironically as a Thai-Chinese fusion meal of Thai sauces over Chinese noodles. What we know as pad Thai today, however, appeared in Phibun’s kitchen and quickly spread across the country. Despite being somewhat unusual for Thai cuisine, which is based on rice rather than noodles, it was embraced by locals. The prime minister literally took a niche recipe and made it the national dish overnight.

The giveaway is in the very name: “pad Thai”. Generally, meals that are popular in a country don’t contain the nationality in the name, at least not domestically. You might find “French fries” and “Belgian waffles” on a menu in the United States, but in France, they are “pommes frites,” and in Belgium, it is simply “wafels”. No one calls a Brazilian steakhouse a “Brazilian steakhouse” in Brazil (it’s a churrascaria). The leader of Thailand decided to invent a national dish and literally named it “stir-fried Thai”. And it took. That is amazing.

Phibun’s overall program of “Thai-fication” might be the most successful culture-building program in world history, at least as far as those that don’t also entail massacring a significant portion of the population. Thai culture became paramount. The Thai language was standardized, with dialects falling by the wayside. Today, the results speak for themselves. Thailand, if anything, has too much national spirit, with strict laws banning any criticism of the Thai king and a hair-trigger reaction to any perceived slight by their Cambodian neighbors.

As unusual as pad Thai’s origin is, its second act belies belief. Pad Thai is no longer just one of the most popular meals in Thailand; it’s one of the most popular meals in the world. And that too is no accident. Towards the end of the 20th century, Thai food slowly gained popularity abroad, with the number of Thai restaurants in America growing from an estimated 500 in 1990 to 2,000 in 2002. Then the Thai government began a bold new program to expand the number of Thai restaurants around the world.

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Called “Global Thai,” the government of Thailand would provide loans, technical advice, and access to ingredients to any Thai citizen who wanted to start a Thai restaurant abroad. The idea was to increase the “soft power” of Thailand. By opening Thai restaurants around the world, foreigners would become more familiar with Thai culture. They would be more likely to watch Thai movies, listen to Thai music, and, most importantly, visit Thailand. The program was a smashing success. In the United States alone, there are now over 10,000 Thai restaurants.

This is the face of some serious headwinds. First, although Thailand isn’t an off-the-radar destination, it isn’t popular among Americans. You’ll find far more Europeans than Yankees in Phuket. Second, there isn’t a large Thai diaspora in the US. Depending on the source, there are anywhere from 200,000 to 340,000 Thais living in America. This is nowhere close to the number of individuals needed to create a thriving national restaurant industry. The number of Thais in America is comparable to the number of Hmong and Indonesians. Yet only Thais have created a vast restaurant industry on par with any other ethnic cuisine.

Part of the reason for this stunning success is that Thai food is both delicious and inoffensive. There aren’t many who would label Thai their favorite cuisine, but few hate it. Thai food is palatable to both Midwestern Grandparents and Bushwick polycules. It’s familiar yet exotic. That said, a lot of cuisines fall into this bucket. Most have dishes that will be broadly palatable to Americans. Yet only Thai food punches so far above its weight. Even small towns will often have a Thai restaurant, while those seeking Indonesian food need to visit a major city. That success, at least in part, can be credited to the Global Thai initiative. It’s the most successful government culture program you’ve never heard of, and it would behoove nations around the world looking to elevate their culture to study such a unique achievement.

Note: None of this post deals with the pros and cons of the electoral college. If you’re against the electoral college, resist the urge to viscerally disagree with what’s written below. This post is about the realities of the 2016 election. I’m not making an argument about what should or shouldn’t be. I’m stating what is.

I hear it constantly. “Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016 if America decided presidential elections by popular vote!” I’ve seen it on Reddit. I’ve heard well-informed people say it. Even my beloved CGP Grey has a video about it. Either because of denial or wishcasting, people have convinced themselves that in a just world, Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election if only America had a different way of determining the winner.

It’s not true.

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Fine. I suppose there is one possible world in which it’s true that Hillary Clinton becomes president if the popular vote determined the winner. If, on November 9th, 2016, the day after the election, congress would have come together and voted to add an amendment to the constitution saying that the rules that governed the election the day before were wrong, and that whoever got the most votes would be sworn in that January, then yes, Hillary Clinton would have become president in 2017 instead of Donald Trump. Obviously this was never going to happen for a host of reasons. Most importantly, it would be grossly unethical to change the rules for winning an election after said election.

Of course, people don’t mean that Congress should have changed the Constitution after the 2016 vote to retroactively change the rules. They mean the constitution should have been changed before 2016 so the winner of the popular vote becomes president. Again, the point of this post is not to opine on whether that would be a good idea (I think there are good arguments for both keeping the electoral college and moving to a popular vote). The point is to say that it is objectively incorrect to say that had the 2016 election been determined by the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton would have become president. The reality is there’s no way to know who would have won.

The reasoning is obvious. If the popular vote carried the election, the entire approach to elections would be different. One of the lead questions for any candidate would be “can they win the popular vote?” The Democratic and Republican primaries in 2016 would have a totally different focus. They would have different rules, and party insiders would be pushing for different nominees. Maybe one or both parties removes the winner-take-all approach in many states when choosing a candidate during the primaries. Likability polling would be a key metric for evaluating candidates. It’s quite possible that with a popular vote structure, neither Clinton nor Trump are even their parties’ nominees in 2016.

But fine. Let’s say that with the 2016 election being decided by popular vote, Trump and Clinton are still their respective party’s nominees. Even so, it would still be incorrect to say that Clinton would have won had the rules been different. Currently, the election rests on a handful of swing states. After securing their nominations, presidential candidates spend their time in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. These states are likely to determine the election. Other states are roundly ignored. Trump, for example, spent little time campaigning in California. That may seem odd, given that he secured more votes in California than in all but two states.1 Under the electoral college system, it makes perfect sense. Trump didn’t spend time campaigning in California because he knew there was no way he won the state. Ditto for Clinton in Texas. If the winner was determined by popular vote, this would be far, far, different. Republican candidates would spend a lot of time in California, and Democratic candidates would campaign in Texas because there are millions of voters in those states. That would change the election significantly.

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Crucially, the people who vote would change dramatically if the popular vote carried the day. Republicans in San Francisco and Democrats in Dallas don’t have much of a reason to vote for president these days. For better or worse, the residents of their states have decided they will vote D or R, respectively, even if their party’s candidate is a dead raccoon. If the winner was decided by popular vote, millions of additional Americans would cast their ballot in a close race, knowing that their vote could have an impact. There would be no such thing as a safe state or swing state, because states would no longer decide the election.

Finally, one of the most important aspects of the 2016 election is that no one “won” the popular vote. At least not in the sense that other countries use to determine their president. Not Clinton or Trump or anyone else. No candidate earned a majority of votes in the 2016 election. Clinton won a plurality of votes, but at 48.2 percent, a plurality is not a majority. The same thing happened to Trump in 2024, who won 49.8 percent of the popular vote. A majority of people who voted in 2016 voted against Hillary Clinton and a majority of voters in 2024 voted against Donald Trump. In every country I’m aware of that uses the popular vote to determine their head of government, an election that results in no one having a majority of the votes goes to a runoff election between the top two vote getters. In a runoff between Clinton and Trump in 2016, who would have won? Likely Clinton, but again, that’s not known with certainty.

On one hand, Clinton won a plurality in the initial election, giving her an edge. Winning a plurality in the first round, however, does not guarantee a victory in a runoff between the top two candidates. Just ask Keiko Fujimori of Peru. In the 2016 Peruvian elections, Fujimori dominated the first round, winning 39.86 percent of the vote. In a distant second was Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who won 21.05 percent of the vote. In the second round, Kuczynski pulled off the upset, eking out the vote 50.12 percent to 49.88 percent.2 The same thing happened in Poland in 2025, when the winner of the first round came in second during the runoff.

The same could have happened to Clinton. After coming in second in the first round, Trump could have pulled the upset in the second round. In the 2016 election, Clinton won 65.9 million votes to Trump’s 63.0 a difference of 2.9 million votes. Other candidates received 7.8 million votes. Would those 7.8 million voters have broken towards Clinton or Trump? How many people would have changed their vote? We will never know.

Saying that Donald Trump only became president in 2016 because of the electoral college is like saying Stephen Curry is only a superstar because the NBA values shots made from a long distance at three points while shots made from a short distance are only valued at two points. One could say that Curry wouldn’t be as good of player if there was no such thing as the 3-point line. That his stats would be much worse. This thinking ignores the reality that Curry takes so many long shots because they are valued 50 percent higher. Obviously NBA players would not take nearly as many shots from 3-point range if there was no such thing as the 3-point line. In the same way, if the US didn’t have the electoral college, campaigns would be very different.

Ultimately, the United States has never decided its president by popular vote. That system is not likely to change. Small states have a disproportionate amount of sway in the electoral college, and they will never give that up. Winning the electoral college means winning the presidency. Winning the popular vote by a minute amount signifies little, results in nothing, and people should stop pretending otherwise.

On November 6, 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to vote to legalize recreational marijuana. It was the first time in history a drug had been legalized by referendum. For years, medical marijuana had been legal to different degrees in several states, but no state had ever made it legal to use marijuana for enjoyment. Since 2012, the dam has broken. Today, the majority of Americans can toke without violating state or local law.

The arguments for marijuana legalization are well established. The ethical arguments are that drug use is a victimless crime and people should be allowed to grow whatever plants they want. The legal arguments are that marijuana prohibition consumes limited resources that would be better allocated to fight violent crime, and that by making marijuana illegal, it creates opportunities for organized crime. The economic argument is that people are going to use marijuana either way, so it might as well be taxed. For decades, marijuana advocates used reason and persuasion to advocate for their cause. Over the decades, they slowly won people over. People from across the ideological spectrum began to support marijuana legalization, even if they weren’t users. Mainstream media also began to support legalization. This led to the new status quo.

Today, some of those groups are feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse.

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Simple economics suggests that if a drug is legalized, demand will likely increase. By legalizing a product, the risks of purchasing it have been reduced. Even if the price in dollars stays the same, or even rises, not having to worry about going to jail for using a plant is going to increase demand. However, the demand for drugs is thought to be inelastic. That is, the demand is going to be mostly the same regardless of cost. People who want to do drugs are going to do so. The thinking was that under the old regime, there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to use marijuana but didn’t because it was illegal. By legalizing the drug, the market can be brought out of the shadows, but demand won’t increase much because everyone who wants to use already does.

With hindsight, it looks marijuana is considerably more elastic than originally thought. Over a decade after recreational legalization began, surveys consistently show that marijuana use has gone up dramatically. Anecdotally, Americans have begun to notice the same thing. It is normal to smell marijuana smoke in any major city where the drug is legal. The results from a recent study are striking. First, the rate at which people use marijuana has gone up dramatically over the last 25 years:

A few trends stand out. First, it is clear that the war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, appears to have worked to some degree. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, those using marijuana anywhere from daily to at least once in the past year declined until the early 1990s. Now there may be some measurement error here, especially as the crackdown on drugs incentivizes people to not acknowledge drug use. Still, the trend is interesting. Since the 1990s, however, and especially since 2010, marijuana use has skyrocketed. It’s now higher than at any point since data collection began. Those who have used marijuana in the past month has more than doubled, those reporting daily or near-daily marijuana use has more than tripled. All in less than 15 years.

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Also troubling is that the relative intensities have flipped. From the 1970s until the 2000s, annual users were more common than monthly users and monthly users were more common than daily users. This points to a drug that most users take in moderation, with few addicts. In the 21th century, however, the paradigm flipped. Now there are more daily users than monthly users and more monthly users than daily users. And the gaps are widening at a fast clip. Now, the norm is for a marijuana user to be at least a near-daily user, defined as having used marijuana at least 21 days in the previous month. Translating it into numbers, in 1999, roughly 4 million Americans reported using marijuana 1-3 days in the last month. Now, it is 11 million. About 2.5 million people in 1999 used marijuana at least 21 days a month. It is now 18 million. That’s more than one in every 20 people.

Equally striking is when marijuana is compared to alcohol. In 2005, the ratio was 3:1 in favor of alcohol. For the first time ever, there are now more daily or near-daily users of marijuana:

It turns out those against legalization were correct: it has turbocharged demand. Far from being an inelastic drug with a mostly fixed demand, the demand for marijuana is heavily dependent on external factors. What got overlooked was not the problem of illegality - it still seems unlikely there were many people who wanted to use marijuana but refrained because it was illegal. Rather, legality changed the bigger hurdle: accessibility. Acquiring marijuana used to have significant transaction costs. In an age when millions of items can be ordered to your door with the click of a button, procuring some bud used to be a cumbersome process, involving word of mouth, phone calls, and often a trip to an unsavory part of town. Today, those accessibility issues are largely gone. Allowing people to go to the corner pot store made the drug much more popular than most had envisioned.

As the saying goes, the haters said this would happen. And they were correct. Honestly great call from the haters.

What to do going forward? First, we shouldn’t go back to the old regime. Devoting significant resources to stop people from consuming a plant is still as absurd as it ever was. However, there are options for harm reduction. First, and counterintuitively, marijuana should be legalized at the federal level. The Trump administration has taken steps in the right direction by urging the federal bureaucracy to reschedule marijuana as a Schedule III drug, rather than the most extreme Schedule I. By making marijuana legal entirely, it will remove its status in the grey area. Normally, we would expect to see significant research, public messaging, and standards developed around a legal drug. Because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, that isn’t happening. Grant money is hard to come by, national ad campaigns about the dangers of marijuana are absent, and there aren’t any standards.

Second, the media needs to updates it’s priors. A recent New York Times article does just that, discussing how America has a marijuana problem. A lot of other media outlets, having embraced marijuana legalization and afraid of a return of carceral penalties for users, have been hesitant to do so. Even the NYT article states, “We want to emphasize that occasional marijuana use is no more a problem than drinking a glass of wine with dinner or smoking a celebratory cigar.” This is, frankly, not true. A glass of wine with dinner is nothing like occasional marijuana use. A typical adult can easily have a glass of wine with dinner and drive home without being the least bit impaired. Those who consume marijuana are rarely, if ever, showing such temperance. As Barack Obama famously said when asked if he inhaled when using marijuana as a young man, “That was the point.” As many have remarked, this isn’t your father’s weed. THC levels are much higher, sometimes exponentially higher, than the weed of the 1980s. Using marijuana today means being mentally impaired for hours. That isn’t to say it turns your brain into a fried egg, but the accurate comparison to a joint is a full bottle of wine, not a single glass.

Third, standards are needed. Research is needed. What are the physical and mental health risks of daily marijuana use? What is the best treatment for those suffering from addiction? What should be considered a single THC dose? Answers will not be discovered overnight. Researchers have examined alcohol for decades, and until recently, many thought dehydration was the primary cause of hangovers. Today we know better. Similar research into THC will take years and needs to start now. Marijuana is here to stay. It’s time to decide how it should be governed before too much addiction leads to significant societal problems.

A recent New York Times (NYT) article by Priya Krishna discusses the current state of the food delivery industry. The headline statistic is that three in four restaurant orders are now either carry-out or delivery. Many restaurants have now become caterers with a physical premise. Below are some excerpts from the article, along with my comments.

There’s pasta in the pantry and jarred sauce in the refrigerator. So what compels Kiely Reedy to keep having spaghetti with marinara delivered from the restaurant down the street, for several times the cost of cooking the dish herself?

It’s not that the restaurant dish is particularly good, she said. “It’s the instant gratification.”

From her roughly $50,000 annual salary as a data processor in San Diego, Ms. Reedy, 34, spends at least $200 to $300 a week on food delivery. Ordering in has eaten away at her savings, she said, and led her to socialize less. She tips generously, but worries that the delivery drivers are poorly paid.

Bruh. $250 a week on food delivery is $13,000 a year. After accounting for taxes and welfare programs, that’s roughly 30% of her take-home pay. On food!

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In 2024, almost three of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data from the National Restaurant Association. The number of households using delivery had roughly doubled from 2019, just before the pandemic, the group said. And in a survey last year, about one-third of American adults told the association that they ordered food for delivery at least once a week.

Those are surprising numbers. One caveat - how are orders being calculated? People are more likely to order takeout solo and eat in restaurants in groups. So if four people each ordering out count as four orders, but the same four people sitting at the same table count as one order, that would skew the stats. Regardless, it’s indisputable that takeaway orders have become much more popular.

I find the second stat more surprising. One-third of Americans get food delivered at least once a week? That’s a tremendous shift in how prepared meals are transported and consumed.

We asked New York Times readers to share their feelings about food delivery. Most of the nearly 900 who responded said they prized the extra time and freedom it gives them, but expressed misgivings about the costs for delivery drivers, the environment and their own wallets at a time when affordable living feels increasingly out of reach.

New York Times readers are an interesting bunch. They patronize a company, but then have misgivings about it. What a great example of performative guilt. Obviously, if customers had true misgivings, they would not purchase a superfluous good. It would be like avid golfers complaining about the amount of water a golf course uses. If you don’t like it, stop golfing.

The environmental concerns, which are mentioned several times in the article, are also performative. Eating foods like beef or almonds is more damaging to the environment than a to-go container. While all that plastic isn’t good, it also isn’t meaningfully contributing to global warming or most other environmental problems. Like paper straws, it’s a small issue that ignores the much bigger one: fossil fuels.

That message has a special resonance for the working parents we heard from. Between raising two young boys and putting in long hours at a marketing job in Atlanta, Kevin Caldwell can almost never find the time to make dinner. So he and his husband spend about $700 a week to order in…

…His 4-year-old son doesn’t read yet, “but he can put together an order” on the Chick-fil-A app, said Mr. Caldwell, 39. “I am impressed, but I am also terrified.”

Again, holy cow! That’s $36,400 on delivery. Must be nice to have that much disposable income. There’s no way to say this without sounding snotty, but maybe raising two young boys includes teaching them how to cook, rather than teaching them how to use Uber Eats.

Missy Auge, who recently moved home to Santa Fe from Los Angeles to work as a sommelier, has most of her food delivered. She no longer feels the social pressure she once did to meet friends for dinner.

Food delivery is yet another force pushing our society towards atomization. Even the sommeliers are eating at home by themselves.

Still, such an on-demand lifestyle can keep consumers from developing critical skills like problem solving, planning ahead or making tough decisions, said Huy Do, a research and insights manager at the market research firm Datassential. That’s why so many young people are “choosing to make financial and food-based decisions in the moment that feel good now,” said Mr. Do, even though it can prevent them from making longer-term financial investments.

This is a good point and an underdiscussed downside to new technology: it increases dependence. Now, often the gains outweigh the losses. I’m totally dependent on my washing machine to do my clothes, the electric company to keep the lights on, the plumber to fix my boiler, etc. 100 years ago I would have had a much better understanding of the inner workings that keep my world in orbit. The difference between other conveniences and food delivery is the former save money in the long run, especially when including time costs. A washing machine is expensive, but it automates unskilled labor that would take a person hundreds of hours a year. Food delivery both fosters dependence and costs a pretty penny.

Food delivery services offer convenience, but at a high cost. If used constantly, it also destroys a skill: preparing your own food. Being able find a recipe, buy things from a store, and cook a meal might not sound like much, but being able to regularly do so likely correlates strongly with a lot of other positive attributes. Food preparation requires discipline day in and day out. Unhealthy or expensive alternatives are always readily available. It requires flexibility. When the supermarket doesn’t have an item, one has to audible to a reasonable substitute. And of course cooking itself is a useful skill. It can take years of practice, but being able to look at a pantry and create a meal on the fly is incredibly useful. Having a general sense of how long to cook each ingredient and in what order to cook them, without a recipe, will always be a worthwhile skill.

Austin Layne, 31, who drives for Uber Eats in Los Angeles, said he needs that extra income to supplement his salary as a data analyst…Another reason Mr. Layne stays at it is to pay off his debt from ordering too much food delivery. He has since cut back on the habit.

A good dealer doesn’t use his own product.

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Will Parks, 36, decided to pare back after looking at his annual credit card report in 2024 and realizing that he had spent about a third of his money on ordering in.

“Food delivery is a scam,” he said. “It is incredibly expensive, the quality has gone down precipitously and with costs being so high, I took a hard look at it and was like, ‘This is a waste of my cash and time.’”

“You feel kind of tricked,” added Mr. Parks, who works in strategy for an entertainment company in Los Angeles. “You have reshaped your life based on their business model.”

I disagree that the delivery apps are “tricking” anyone. One can gripe that the fees are added at the end, making something they are getting a meal for $40 when it actually will cost $50, but this is the same as hotel rooms, concert tickets, or even eating at a restaurant. I also don’t think the quality has “gone down precipitously”. It’s still the same delivery service and the same restaurants. Unless the delivery time has increased dramatically or something like that, prices have gone up, but quality has stayed the same.

The prices, however, are astonishing. It’s hard to believe how much people are willing to pay for delivery. How do more not have a basic common sense alarm that goes off when they are paying a massive premium for a burrito taxi:

How much are people paying? Here’s one example. In New Haven, Connecticut, there is a popular chain called Haven Hot Chicken. It’s a counter joint with pretty good hot chicken sandwiches. To have a single hot chicken sandwich delivered to my door, no fries, drink, or anything like that, costs an exorbitant $20.81. And that’s with $1.98 saved via “promotions”, whatever that means. For a hot chicken sandwich! Buying the sandwich at the restaurant would only cost $14.43, which is already quite expensive. $20.81 is a 44% markup. Not including tip. For a chicken sandwich. I don’t want to go full-blown Caleb Hammer, but what are you people thinking? Even going to the restaurant yourself would save quite a bit of money over time.

In weaning himself from delivery, he has discovered a new passion — something that allows him to step away from his phone, focus on a task and feel a sense of accomplishment: cooking.

Preparing a meal takes far more time than ordering dinner with the press of a button. But “it feels good,” he said. “It feels more adult, frankly.”

This is a point that needs to be repeated. Cooking is a great skill. It’s practical. It saves money. It’s useful in building social capital. Plus, cooking after a long day at the office, far from being an additional stressor, can be a great way to wind down, especially if done with a familiar recipe and beer in hand.

Overall, I thought the New York Times article did a good job explaining an important evolution in the industry. However, there were two omissions I would have included.

First, food delivery vs. cooking at home is a false dichotomy. There are other options. Trader Joe’s has dozens of cheap, edible, frozen meals that need a few minutes in the microwave and are ready to go. Costco as well. Now, these aren’t particularly healthy. The sodium content can be off the charts, but then again, restaurant food isn’t exactly the gold standard of nutrition.

Plus, cooking doesn’t have to mean slaving away for hours and making pasta from scratch. There are many meals people can make at home that barely qualify as cooking, if they qualify at all. A rotisserie chicken can be shredded and added to a salad, combined with cheese and mayo to throw in a chicken salad sandwich, dipped directly into BBQ sauce, etc. Cooking noodles and combining with jarred sauce and a baguette takes less than 30 minutes. I suspect most of the people quoted in the interview have made these easy meals at least once, so it isn’t ignorance, but laziness, that’s behind the constant food delivery.

Second, I wish the article would have compared today’s delivery services to the delivery services of yesteryear. It isn’t as if food delivery is a new thing. Every family used to have a stack of menus in a kitchen drawer for just such an occasion. Pizza was the most common delivery option, but plenty of other places delivered as well. Often, for a small flat fee, ordering delivery was cheaper than eating at a restaurant after including the higher tip for a server compared to a delivery driver.

It would be nice to try to get a sense of how many people ordered out once a week in 2005 and to compare those numbers to today. I’m sure the current numbers are higher, but there have always been people who claim to never have any money but are constantly grabbing Chinese takeout or having calzones delivered to their door. Chilis had dedicated spots for pickup in their parking lot in the mid-2000s. Eating restaurant food at home is not new or unprecedented.

The apps, however, have changed things in two ways. As already mentioned, the markup has exploded. No longer is there a small delivery fee. The prices on food delivery apps, before delivery fee, tax, fees, etc., are sometimes significantly higher than what the restaurant lists directly.

The biggest evolution, however, is how the range of delivery options has increased. Delivery food used to be almost exclusively for cheap eats. This is why it shocked Mrs. Doubtfire to learn how much it cost to have a proper meal delivered to her door. Back then, that simply wasn’t done. People paying for good food wanted the restaurant experience, not eating tepid takeout alone from a container. Today, there are many midrange and even upscale restaurants that will happily cook food, throw it in a bag, and leave it on the shelf for DoorDash. As long as people are willing to pay 44% more for it, why not?

AIs are officially acting as healthcare providers. As reported by Politico, AI is not just transcribing doctor-patient interactions or helping to write notes. The state of Utah has initiated a pilot program in which an AI is renewing medical prescriptions. At the beginning, humans reviewed the renewals. Now, however, patients across the state are able to pick up medication from the pharmacy without any human approving the script.

To be sure, these are baby steps. The prescription process is fairly automated anyway. Patients can request medication refills via the internet, phone, or even text message from their pharmacy. The pharmacy then sends a request to a medical provider, who can then approve the request in less than a minute. It’s a fairly streamlined system that technically has oversight, but is more or less people clicking through the same boxes over and over again. The exact type of behavior, in other words, AI can easily take on.

Of course, not everyone is totally keen on this development. Some people are inherently uneasy about having a computer program making healthcare related decisions. This understandable, and nothing new. People, after all, were against the idea of having elevators go up and down without an attendant. It seemed risky, allowing a machine to decide when to open and shut doors while hanging hundreds of feet off the ground. Having an elevator operator manage the doors and movement of the machine seemed safer to most people. Of course, now it seems anachronistic to even have an elevator operator.

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Over the coming decade, similar to elevator automation, people will be uncomfortable with the automation of healthcare. With elevators, people weren’t able to stop the march of progress. After all, companies didn’t want to have to staff elevators 24 hours a day. That gets expensive. Elevator companies recognized what their customers wanted and designed elevators that operated themselves. Everyday people may not have liked it, but the profit motive won out. Today, people don’t think twice about letting a machine whisk them high up into the sky.

What the elevator operators didn’t have was a powerful union. Elevator operators did have a union, which made specious claims about how many people would die if elevators were allowed to operate on their own. About how elevator operators are part of a proud, working tradition, and that automatic elevators will continue to result in the destruction of jobs and destitution of hardworking Americans. About how elevator operators give a personal touch that no machine can ever help to replicate. This wasn’t successful, however, because ultimately there wasn’t the political will to force buildings to have staffed elevators, and the free market is always going to bend towards progress. A weak elevator operators’ union led to technological advancement.

Doctors in the 21st century might not have a powerful union, but they do have one of, if not the most, powerful industry groups in the United States: the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA has successfully fought for decades to keep prices sky-high. They have limited the number of residencies the federal government will pay for, set up an obscene gauntlet for those who want to become doctors, and successfully lobbied the government to ban most foreign competition. Unsurprisingly, the AMA is not keen on handing over some if it’s duties to machines. At least not any duty that would result in less money for doctors:

In a statement, Dr. John Whyte, CEO and executive vice president at the American Medical Association, said: “While AI has limitless opportunity to transform medicine for the better, without physician input it also poses serious risks to patients and physicians alike.”

One concern is misuse or abuse, including the possibility that people struggling with addiction could try to game automated systems to obtain drugs inappropriately. Another concern is missing subtle clinical red flags or drug interactions that a doctor would catch.

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These are serious concerns…when humans are running the system. Automated systems, if designed improperly, can absolutely be gamed. But so too, as we’ve seen to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, human systems. How doctors have avoided almost all blowback from the opioid crisis should be studied by public relations firms. Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were raked over the coals for developing and aggressively marketing OxyContin. Pharmacists were sent to prison. Yet the middle link, the doctors who wrote the prescriptions patients needed to get the drugs in the first place, have largely avoided censure.

If you wanted to make the case for requiring human medical providers, it would be that they will notice addictive tendencies in their patients in a way no robot ever could. The argument would be that without humans, people will figure out how to game the system, and there will be a massive epidemic of overdoses. Lo and behold, that did happen, but not because of computers. The opioid epidemic, the biggest medical scandal in US history, occurred not despite humans, but because of them. The medical professional failed utterly and without qualification. A well-designed automated system never would have allowed millions of Americans to become addicted to opioids. To say otherwise is refuse to learn from an industry’s greatest failure.

It is also ridiculous to argue that “another concern is missing subtle clinical red flags or drug interactions that a doctor would catch.” This is exactly where machines dominate people. It is through AI that we will learn about entirely new negative drug interactions. AI will recognize patterns that no human would ever see. Computers are able to effortlessly sift through millions of patients and drug histories to warn providers of possible pitfalls. No human can come even close.

The AMA is looking out for doctors. As well they should. We shouldn’t expect the AMA to look out for patients any more than we would expect teachers’ unions to look out for students. That’s not the point of the organization. Instead, we need to recognize that the AMA is a special interest group devoted to increasing the incomes of current medical providers. AI poses a threat to those incomes, the same way automatic elevators threatened the livelihoods of elevator operators. Let’s hope progress wins out.

Several years ago, it was Airbnb. Housing prices were skyrocketing while Airbnb’s were proliferating. People concluded, understandably but incorrectly, that the latter was responsible for the former. Various cities decided that short-term rentals were at least partially responsible for the increase in housing prices, and steps were taken to either limit or ban them. New York went the furthest, resulting in around 10,000 short-term rentals disappearing overnight.

Of course, that didn’t solve the problem. Short-term rentals were never the main or even secondary cause of rising housing prices in most US neighborhoods. Because short-term rental bans didn’t do the trick, people began to cast about for a new bogeyman. They soon found one: institutional investors. Large corporations were buying up hundreds of thousands of properties and renting them out. Hardworking Americans were priced out. Soon, members of both parties, as well as President Trump, argued that institutional investors should be banned from buying houses. This will then lower housing prices.

It isn’t going to work.

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First, institutional investors don’t own much of the US housing stock. Real estate investors bought 18.4 percent of the homes in the fourth quarter of 2021. That is a significant chunk, but most of these homes were not bought by “institutional investors”, that is, companies with at least 100 properties. They were bought by individuals who started LLCs and have a portfolio of ten or fewer homes. When it comes to institutional investors, the numbers are much smaller. Estimates vary, but one study found that about three percent of all homes are owned by large corporations. Three percent isn’t nothing, but especially as it’s spread out across hundreds of firms, isn’t enough to generate any significant market power. The biggest villain, according to the narrative at least, is the investment firm Blackstone, which owns around 275,000 rental properties. That might sound like a lot, but it pales in comparison to the 146,770,711 housing units estimated to exist by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The problem, as I’ve written about previously, is the lack of supply. Cities across America have made it impossible to build new housing. The only way, the only way, to make housing affordable is to allow people to build. Banning Airbnbs or institutional investors or foreign owners is bailing water out of the sinking Titanic. Sure prices might decrease a percent or two if institutional investors are banned from buying residential real estate, but it won’t ever solve the problem. It can’t solve the problem.

The truth is that residential real estate investors are a symptom, not a cause. There is a reason that one in every six homes is now being sold to investors: owning homes is a good investment. Over the last 15 years, those who have invested in real estate have made a fortune. In fact, other than 2006-2016, people who have invested in residential real estate have printed money for the last 40 years. It used to be that owning rental properties was hard work. You bought a house, dealt with tenants, and made a bit of money on the side. It wasn’t a way to make significant cash. Now, anyone who bought rental properties before Covid is in the money.

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This is a major problem. Housing cannot be both a high-return investment and affordable. Period. It has to be one or the other. As a society, we have decided that housing should be a high-return investment. We have enacted rules that ensure housing prices go up, and those who buy homes accrue wealth at a rate not dissimilar from picking a good stock. Anyone who bought several rental properties outside of the housing bubble has done very well. Good for them, but this is not good for society, and is only happening because the government has made it so.

Housing should not be a high-return investment. It should be a wise investment, in that it should be a way for middle-class families to slowly build a moderate store of wealth over decades. That’s how the system worked until the 1980s. People bought homes, those homes appreciated at similar rates to inflation, and then families retired with a decent asset in their back pocket. Some unlucky families bought homes that lost value, and stayed underwater for years or even a decade. Some lucky families bought homes in areas that suddenly became more desirable and made a decent chunk of change. The norm, however, was neither. Then, homeowners realized they could use the law to punish those who wanted to build housing, and the whole system unwound. Slowly but surely, homeowners blocked more and more development, forcing up prices.

Don’t blame Airbnb. Don’t blame Blackstone. Certainly don’t blame BlackRock, another investment company that doesn’t own single-family homes but is constantly confused with Blackstone. Blame city hall.

After Christmas but before New Year’s, I decamped from the United States to Spain for two weeks with my wife and two young children. We visited Granada, Sevilla, and Madrid, with day trips to Cordoba and Toledo. I’d been to Barcelona several times, but had not seen any other part of Spain. My wife and kids had never been at all. We decided to go because New England is rather chilly and gloomy in January, and we could use a bit of sun. I’d also wanted to visit Andalusia (southern Spain) for some time. Here are some of my notes on La Piel de Toro.

• Seville or Sevilla? This is one of the few cities that is in transition between its Anglicized and native name. In most cases, hearing the native pronunciation by an English speaker (“I just loved our trip to Roma and Milano last May!”) is a sure sign the person you’re talking to is a tool. Sevilla, however, has become standard in at least millennial American English. Because everyone I know who’s visited or studied abroad there for the last 15 years has called it Sevilla, I’ve fallen into the habit myself. Until recently, I didn’t even realize “The Barber of Seville” and friends who had just visited “Sevilla” were referring to the same place. At the risk of sounding like the pretentious traveler I abhor, I’ll stick with the native spelling and pronunciation.

• Granada, Sevilla, and Madrid are all fantastic places. I could spend a week in any one of them and not be bored. If you’re looking for a new part of Europe to visit, you can’t go wrong here.

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• Granada, which, at half the size of Sevilla, is easily the smallest of the three, is a delightfully unique small city. The urban core is classic Spain - filled with balconies and restaurant-abundant plazas. The Albaicín, the largest and best-preserved Moorish neighborhood in Europe, is a clash of cultures reminiscent of Sarajevo or Istanbul. The Alhambra is one of Europe’s top sites. Granada is also the last redoubt of the Spanish tradition of serving free tapas along with a drink. It’s amazing. You order a beer, and it comes with a free snack! Order another drink, another snack! And the drinks are reasonably priced. What a city.

• I found the Alhambra, the Moorish-cum-Christian fortress and palace complex that overlooks the city, to be underwhelming. I’ve heard people say it’s their favorite building in Europe. ChatGPT put it #1 in its architectural power rankings. And it… just didn’t do it for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a highly worthwhile tourist attraction. The plaster designs on the walls are astoundingly intricate and beautiful. The views from the parapets are lovely. The interplay of water and mortar is exceptional. It’s a cool place, and a must-see while in Granada. But the best building in Europe? It wasn’t even my favorite building in Granada (that goes to the Granada Cathedral). Architecturally, I preferred the Alcazar of Sevilla. The plaster designs on the walls are gorgeous, but that’s all they are: plaster designs put on stucco walls. The views are nice, but every hilly city in Europe has an old building with great views. The Alhambra is also completely empty. I could only read, “Imagine this room filled with lavish carpets, incense, and sumptuous drapery,” so many times. Even if the furniture is all replicas, I prefer classic buildings that aren’t just empty rooms.

• Sevilla is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Block after block after block of wonderful buildings from several different eras. A veritable Instagram factory. The Santa Cruz neighborhood looks like something out of Disney World. And in fact it kind of is - the neighborhood was given a massive overhaul before the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, making it both a somewhat contrived neighborhood, but one that, now almost a century old, has become authentic. The Sevilla Cathedral, although packed, is the pinnacle of Gothic architecture. Las Setas is one of the top monuments of the 21st century. Set pieces like the cathedral aside, Sevilla is just a wonderful city, one I could go back to again and again.

  

• Madrid is a true city. A real, urban area that you don’t often find in Europe. It’s crowded, yes, but at least in January, not crowded with tourists. It’s a city that’s filled with locals, walking with their families or to work or who knows where. There is an energy in Madrid that I hadn’t felt anywhere else in Southern Europe. People seem to have a drive about them one more associates with the Swiss than the Spanish. I loved the feel of Madrid.

• Given its size and importance, I don’t understand why its popularity has lagged so far behind Paris, London, and Rome. To be sure, I’m not claiming Madrid is an “off the beaten path” destination. It isn’t, however, viewed as a top-tier European capital. I don’t know why. The city is beautiful, filled with wide boulevards and Beaux-Arts architecture. The Prado is generally viewed as the second-greatest art museum in the world. The Royal Palace is one of the best in Europe. Yet for whatever reason, Emily in Paris is unlikely to spend half a season in Madrid as she did in Rome.

• The bar scene in Madrid is top tier. The city is filled with gorgeous bars of various types. From Belgian beer bars to traditional Spanish taverns with fancy cocktails, there are beautiful bars throughout the city. Many, in contrast to much of the world, have large windows facing the street. It was great to walk around the city and watch Madrileños enjoying their weekend through the windows. Also, the bartenders in Spain were unbelievably friendly. I had multiple conversations, in English, with several. Even in crowded spots they seemed interested in who I was and what I was doing in Spain. My only complaint is that even the fancy bars premix their cocktails, leaving one to wonder how much whiskey is really in the drink I just ordered. Overall, though, if you want to have a classy night out on the town, it’s hard to think of a better place to do it than Madrid.

• Our day trips to Cordoba (from Sevilla) and Toledo (from Madrid) were very worthwhile. Toledo is a bit rough to navigate with two strollers, but the old town is beautiful, and the cathedral is world-class. In Cordoba, though, there is a real gem of a building: the Mosque-Cathedral, also known as the Mezquita. Built as a mosque over a thousand years ago, it was converted to a Cathedral in 1236. Over the centuries, it has been expanded, renovated, and refurbished countless times. The result is a mishmash of cultures unlike anything I have ever seen. In contrast to the Alhambra in Granada or the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Mezquita wasn’t just added to or rebranded; it is a true combination of Moorish and Christian architecture. It’s trite-but-true: pictures don’t do it justice. Suffice it to say that if you’re ever in Andalusia, a visit to the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba is an absolute must.

• Other than the hustle and bustle of Madrid, we found the stereotype that southern Europeans never work to be hilariously on point. Arriving in Granada on December 30th, I was excited to see the end of the holiday season and then the regular swing of Spanish winter. But the holidays don’t end in Spain. Nor are they what a typical American would expect. New Year’s Eve is more of a family event in Southern Spain, to the point that restaurants, rather than keeping their usual late hours, often close around 8 PM. As is to be expected, much is closed on January 1st. But then, at least in Granada, January 2nd celebrates the victory of Christian forces over the Moors. Another holiday. Then, the Epiphany is also celebrated, with most shut down on January 5th and 6th. But wait! Because many Spaniards do gifts on January 6th, rather than December 25th, January 7th has become a kind of retail holiday, when everyone goes to stores to make returns and spend their newly held cash. I’m still not really sure when the holiday season officially ends in Spain. Madrid was still working on taking down the massive Christmas tree in Puerta del Sol when I walked by on January 12th.

• Speaking of dinners, people do eat late here. Lunch spots often open at 1:30 PM. They close around 4 PM, and then might not reopen until 8 PM. The odd thing is, it isn’t really that much later in the day, at least in the true astronomical sense of the meaning. As I’ve written about previously, Spain is in the wrong time zone. Solar noon isn’t until after 1 PM in the winter, and lags until after 2 PM in the summer. School and work doesn’t start until 9 AM, sometimes later. I asked a waiter when the most desirable dinner reservation time was in Spain. He said 8:30 PM. That’s basically the equivalent of 7 PM on the East Coast from a true “where is the sun time of day perspective”. It would be as if New England back two time zones, but also moved back most aspects of life by two hours as well, canceling out any true change in the time of day. It’s strange to get used to the new numbers on the clock that correspond with various activities, but things aren’t as late as you think.

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• Football may be the national sport of Spain, but Spain’s national pastime is undoubtedly walking. The streets, especially in the evenings, are filled with families and friends strolling. The Spanish call it El Paseo. Even in January, people fill the streets late into the night and walk around.

• You would think this would make the Spanish great at walking through crowded areas. To the contrary, they suck at it. In any city in the world there are inconsiderate people who will spontaneously stop in the middle of a crowded sidewalk or slowly veer into oncoming pedestrians. In Spain, however, this is constant. Walking along a crowded Spanish street is like being on the bunny hill at a popular ski resort. There’s no way to predict at what speed the person next to you is about to go or in what direction they plan on heading. It made traveling with two kids in strollers a bit interesting. On the other hand, I’m envious of a society that has maintained the evening stroll as a crucial part of its culture. What a great way to stay in touch with neighbors and the community. I wish I could happily stroll for hours on Sunday evenings, seemingly not caring about the Monday ahead or how many people I cut off along the way.

• The Spanish love children. My two kids were constantly smiled at, adored, given high-fives, and to my delight, allowed to cut the line at the airport. One waitress gravely told us, “It is dangerous for you to bring your two children to Spain. All the old ladies will come up and pinch their cheeks!” Spanish children are also much more part of the fabric of society. Walking around after 11 PM one night in Sevilla, I saw multiple strollers. Nice restaurants would have young children eating next to their parents well into the night.

• I was also touched by how much people were willing to help us move around. In any country, strangers will offer assistance to a parent trying to get a stroller up or down steps. In Spain, however, it was constant. I once saw an oncoming pedestrian see my wife and I approaching a set of steps with our two strollers from a distance, and he slowed his pace down so that we would arrive at the top of the steps at the same time and he could ask, in English, if we needed assistance, as if it was the most trifling of concerns to lug 50 pounds of stroller and baby down 15 uneven stairs that he had just climbed.

• This was my first trip using a Rick Steves guidebook, in this case, his Best of Spain. I don’t know much about Rick Steves, other than he has a significant following that treats his pronouncements as gospel and a much smaller group of detractors that strongly dislike him for reasons that are unclear. My overall assessment is that his guidebook was excellent, although his list of important attractions sometimes differs from what the TripAdvisor hivemind suggests. I enjoyed his commentary and insights into Spanish life. The book, however, was worth its weight in gold when touring famous sites. Several cathedrals, art museums, and even neighborhoods had detailed guides explaining various chapels, paintings, and streets. The walking tours were especially useful and made our strolls around the city much more enjoyable. I’ve found museum audio guides to generally be of poor quality, but Rick Steves’ explanations were on point. I also liked being able to open a guidebook to look at a map and not always have to pull out my phone.

• The food of Spain is surprisingly mid. Spanish food isn’t bad, but it’s significantly worse than French or Italian. I’d also put it a step below Portuguese cuisine. Oddly, we found that the quality of the food was not proportional to the price. Most of the best meals we had were tapas-based. The few times we went to more expensive meals, it underwhelmed. Meat was dry and overcooked, there was a lack of fresh veggies, etc. We had an excellent meal on our final night in Madrid at a Michelin Bib Gourmand spot, but especially given Spain’s history, the food was weak.

• Spain is at its best with art and architecture. The Cathedrals and churches are on par with Italy as the best in the world. Both the exteriors and interiors are well-preserved and inspiring. The side chapels of Spain’s cathedrals are themselves magnificent. I was constantly in awe at the ornateness and grandiosity of Spain’s churches.

• In Spain, the Catholic church is alive and well. Especially over the holidays, many people would be coming and going to mass. Across the street from my Airbnb in Sevilla, there was a small church. Like many Spanish churches, there was a painting of Mary flanked by two lamps on the outside. One weekday morning, I saw a man around the age of 30 dressed in business casual clothes come around the corner, make purposeful eye contact with the portrait, cross himself while mumbling a religious intonation, all while not breaking stride. It was a meaningful act of devotion that plays out every day across Spain.

• The major downside to Spanish cathedrals is they are expensive to visit. As many predicted, those initial low tourist fees of €5 of a decade ago that were ostensibly charged to help pay for the direct costs of managing thousands of tourists have slowly evolved into standard museum prices. To visit the Granada Cathedral and Royal Chapel is €12. The Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral is €13. The Sevilla Cathedral, €14. Ironically, many of Spain’s top secular attractions offer discounted or free tickets. We went to the Prado, Reina Sofia, and Sevilla Alcazar either for free or steeply discounted. The one thing I had to pay full freight for was every church. This, despite the fact I’m a practicing Catholic. It doesn’t sit well with me.

• The art, too, is simply stupendous. I knew the Prado in Madrid was one of the top museums in Europe, but I wasn’t ready for the sheer number of A-list painters and paintings. Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” and Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” are the top two, but there are countless other masterpieces. I also enjoyed that while the museum was not at all empty, it didn’t have the crushing crowds of the Louvre or the Vatican. Near the Prado, Picasso’s “Guernica” can be seen at the Reina Sofia. Throughout the rest of Spain, one can find lesser-known but still fantastic works of art, such as El Greco’s “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” in a small church in Toledo. I hadn’t realized just how much wonderful art was scattered throughout Spain.

• Finally, a digression. In 2011, I found myself in a small village in Southeastern Laos while on a solo motorbike tour of the landlocked Asian nation. Evening was approaching, and I needed to figure out where I was going to spend the night. I walked into a local restaurant/bar, which was more of a shack than anything else. Thatch roof, walls made of reeds, plastic chairs, and a simple dirt floor. To my surprise, the bar had a fairly sophisticated speaker system. To my astonishment, Katy Perry was playing. This led to my first rule of travel: no matter where you are in the world, you cannot escape American culture. Corollary Rule 1.a: the American culture will usually be Katy Perry. To wit, this poster in Madrid:

  

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In 1955, a young man in Michigan was trying to determine what he should do with his life. After a rough childhood, he had studied at the University of Michigan, first to be a physician, then an actor. While a student, he joined the Army R.O.T.C. and considered a military career after being commissioned as a second lieutenant. Despite the stability of the military and prestige of medicine, he decided his heart lay in acting. This must have surprised his childhood friends, who remember him as a boy who would barely talk, often passing notes rather than speaking due to a stutter. As many thespians will attest, however, once bitten by the acting bug, it’s hard to become anything else. Our young man moved to New York City in 1955 and stayed with his partially estranged father for a short time before finding his own place on the Lower East Side. The rent was $19 a month.

This is the type of housing we have lost in Manhattan and across the United States. Nineteen dollars. A month. To put that into context, in 1955, the minimum wage was $1.00. Those with a full-time job would have their rent covered after working less than a week. Correcting for inflation shows how much things have changed. $19 in 1955 is equivalent to $230 today. Looking at it from a labor perspective, the minimum wage in New York City is about to be $17 an hour. Working for 19 hours yields $323. Think you can find an apartment in Lower Manhattan for $323-a-month? Of course not. There aren’t many apartments available for less than $3,000-a-month.

There used to be an entire class of housing that no longer exists. Places that even minimum wage workers who were trying to break into the acting scene could afford. Now, this $19-a-month apartment in 1955 was not a nice place. It was a “cold-water flat”. That means no hot water. A small kitchen with a stovetop and maybe an icebox. Possibly a shared bathroom down the hall. The stove to heat the unit would require the tenant to provide their own fuel. In the winter, wind would whistle through cracks, and the cold would seep in through the windows. You often had to deal with uninvited roommates of the four, six, and eight-legged variety. Not to mention cold-water flats could be up four or five flights of stairs. It was not pleasant.

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Yet not only did cold-water flats exist, but they were popular. Thousands of people moved to New York every year, hoping to make it as an actor, artist, or just to be somebody. With no money or experience, this type of housing provided that opportunity. It certainly wasn’t easy living, but it was a chance to make it, and to have a room of one’s own. Today, that option is gone.

Now, some of the required changes are good. Some rudimentary fire codes are reasonable. All homes today should have heat. Requiring every housing unit to have a smoke detector, for example, is relatively low-cost and saves lives. The problem is most building codes aren’t for safety or to make sure necessities are met. They are to maintain property values. Keep areas “respectable”. Not only can Bohemian artists not live on their own in Lower Manhattan, they can’t live anywhere in New York. The only options are to rely on government assistance or make a decent income.

Worse, it’s not like today everyone in Manhattan has a great place. The cheapest place I could find on Zillow costs $2,250-a-month. It’s still not nice. The unit is smaller than a Midwestern master bedroom and costs more than a Southeastern luxury studio apartment. So not only have prices skyrocketed, but it hasn’t increased overall quality by a commensurate amount. Sure, the place has central heat and hot water, but it’s still no-frills.

We don’t need cold-water flats. But we do need housing that’s meant to be the bare minimum. A 300 square foot place with a bed, stove, refrigerator, and bathroom at the end of the hall. A place for those striving to make it but currently have nowhere to rest their heads. These types of places not only no longer exist, they are functionally illegal. Between safety codes and stairway codes and elevator codes and environmental reviews and the veto power of anyone from the local Alderman to the wealthy property owners two blocks away, the type of housing readily available in the 1950s for poor Americans is kaput.

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This has real costs. Today, there are thousands of people who would move to New York in a heartbeat if they could rent a miniscule room for $323. Even if there were rooms regularly available for $500 a month, all would be filled. Instead, those who can’t afford to pay New York prices must live elsewhere. For those who dream of acting on stage or becoming a professional artist, this makes success much harder to achieve. There are other cities with plenty of stage acting opportunities, notably Chicago, but New York, along with London, are the two best cities in the world for the theatre.

The art scene works the same way - there’s New York and then there’s everywhere else. In an excellent post titled “The Decline of Deviance,” Adam Mastroianni discusses how little weirdness there is today. He concludes that as life has become safer and longer, people are less willing to gamble with it. I believe that’s part of the answer, but I also think the lack of cheap housing is a big piece. The typical unskilled worker can’t just up sticks and move across the country. Cheap housing has largely disappeared, so people have to save up first. Saving up means finding a steady job and putting down roots, so people don’t leave. People used to be able to nurture their oddities and still make it in New York. A great example of this is Arturo Di Modica, a man who:

ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own studio—including two sub-basements—by hand, becoming an underground artist in the literal sense. He refused to work with an art dealer until 2012, when he was in his 70s. His most famous work, the Charging Bull statue that now lives on Wall Street, was deposited there without permission or payment; it was originally impounded before public outcry caused the city to put it back.

Someone can’t live that life today. Too many rules, regulations, and too much money. There aren’t many dilapidated buildings in lower Manhattan, and no one would get away with tearing one down and building anew without years of permitting. Who knows what actors and artists we will never hear about, who will effectively never exist, because this type of opportunity is gone.

Of course, in the 1950s, that opportunity did exist. A young man could move to the big city with nothing more than a few dollars in his pocket. Work at a diner to pay the bills while seeking out auditions and casting calls. Pay $19 to live in little more than a shack per month. Such a man could get discovered, make it on stage, then on the big screen, and eventually become one of the most recognizable voices in Hollywood. Such a man would make life for everyone else better. Such a man would be named James Earl Jones.

Who gets to be called doctor? Should the term be reserved for physicians? What about those with PhDs, EdDs, and JDs? It’s a culture skirmish that one, randomly pops up every few years, and two, as the proud holder of a PhD, I have a vested interest in.

This is a common conversation in academia. Especially in today’s world, where traditional hierarchies are being broken down, if not subverted entirely, many college students are unsure what to call their instructors. A good instructor should introduce themselves the first day and tell students what title to use. Many don’t, however, and students are likely to forget, creating confusion, and at times, irritation. One common complaint is that students will often address female professors as “Mrs.” but male professors as “Doctor” or “Professor”.

I generally tell undergraduate students to address me as “Professor” and graduate students to call me my first name. I also tell my students that they can always address an instructor by the name they use when signing off emails. Thus, if an instructor signs his emails “Gregory”, students can refer to him as “Gregory”. If Gregory signs his emails as “Dr. Brown”, then students should call him “Dr. Brown,” and so on.

At least in economics, everyone I’ve interacted with professionally goes by their first name when dealing with other PhD holders. Even keynote speakers at premier conferences are generally introduced by their full name only, without any title. When emailing professors I don’t personally know, I generally address them by “Professor”, and every time they respond with their first name. The reverse is also true. Other economists will address me as “Professor” in an email, and I always respond with my first name. It’s simple enough.

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I’ve always defaulted to “Professor” when interacting with undergraduates for two reasons. First, that was the norm at the University of Illinois, where I did my own undergraduate training. Almost all of my professors went by “Professor”. I had a few professors in small, upper-level classes that went by their first name, but that was it. Not a single professor went by “Doctor”. Different universities, however, have different norms. At the University of Colorado, where I did my graduate training, some faculty went by “Doctor,” a title I have never seen used before by an academic.

Second, “Professor” is a more accurate title than “Doctor”. This is now changing due to the new “professor of practice” title for teaching-based faculty at universities, but traditionally, professor was a subset of doctor. Almost all professors had doctorates, while there were many with doctorates who were not professors. By using the title “Professor”, I remove ambiguity about what I do. As one friend put it, “Doctor means you graduated. Professor means you got a job”.

I want to emphasize that I don’t use the title “Professor” (or any other title) socially, which I find to be insufferable behavior regardless of academic credentials or occupation. I don’t really consider myself a doctor either. I don’t have any patients. If there’s a medical emergency on a plane and they call for a doctor, my only contribution as an economics PhD would be to inform the crew that it appears the passenger’s demand for oxygen is exceeding the supply. Of course, flight attendants shouldn’t be asking for a doctor at all - it would make far more sense to ask for a “medical professional” as many flights will be doctor-less, but just about every plane will have at least an EMT or other person with medical training on board. It is interesting that no one ever asks for a “physician”, although that would also be a more exact term than “doctor”.

The “doctor/professor” issue stayed mostly within academia until 2020, when Joseph Epstein, a conservative writer and former editor of The American Scholar, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Jill Biden, then first lady-elect of the United States, should stop using the term “Doctor”. Jill Biden went back to graduate school while Joe Biden was a Senator from Delaware, earning an EdD (a doctorate of education) from the University of Delaware. This immediately prompted a pile-on from liberals accusing Epstein of being misogynist, defenders noting that an EdD is the widely regarded as the weakest of all doctorate degrees, and many making a tempest in a teapot. The issue has since popped up from time to time, most recently when writer Josh Barro got into a Twitter spat with a PhD and posted the following:

Many people immediately entered the debate, some vehemently defending their titles, others saying this just showed Josh was right, etc.

The community note, by the way, reads, “The word doctor comes from words meaning ‘teacher’ or ‘to teach.’” This is one of the arguments generally used by those who want to be called doctor - the term was originally used by teachers, and was later co-opted by physicians. Of course, Barro does have a good point. By and large, the people who put Dr. or PhD in their social media handles are the worst. People who win Nobel Prizes just go by “Bob”, while EdDs seem to universally insist on “Doctor”, despite not even having a research degree.

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Many of those who disagreed with Barro pointed to the amount of hard work they had to put in to earn their doctorate. This, of course, is irrelevant. Yes, you worked hard for your PhD. Congratulations. Lots of people work hard. The difficulty of acquiring a credential does not literally entitle you. There are many PhDs who couldn’t get a bachelor’s from West Point, which, unlike most PhD programs, has a physical fitness component to the degree. Difficulty of work has nothing to do with titling.

Both sides of the argument also used flawed arguments regarding language. Some of the pro-Doctor crowd will mention that other languages use titles more frequently. Most famously, German academics are given the title “Herr/Frau Professor Doktor”. Which is, for one, hilarious, but also irrelevant for anyone who doesn’t live in Germany. The anti-Doctor crowd, including Barro, will claim that the language is settled, and that “Doctor” is only used in today’s America for physicians, and thus is should remain. But of course, that’s not a hard and fast grammatical rule (which also aren’t static), it’s just a cultural norm. Those change all the time. I disagree with people saying “President Obama” or “President Bush” in the present tense, when neither is president of anything. I don’t like it, but if we collectively decide to make “President” a lifelong title, then so be it.

The biggest problem is a lack of consistency from the industry that will ultimately carry the day: the media. Any reputable media outlet has style guidelines. These guidelines are often abandoned, however, based on political preference. For example, the New York Times makes it clear who should and should not be called “Doctor”:

Dr. should be used in all references for physicians, dentists and veterinarians whose practice is their primary current occupation, or who work in a closely related field, like medical writing, research or pharmaceutical manufacturing: Dr. Alex E. Baranek; Dr. Baranek; the doctor. (Those who practice only incidentally, or not at all, should be called Mr., Ms., Miss or Mrs.)

Anyone else with an earned doctorate, like a Ph.D. degree, may request the title, but only if it is germane to the holder’s primary current occupation (academic, for example, or laboratory research). Reporters should confirm the degree holder’s preference. For a Ph.D., the title should appear only in second and later references.

Do not use the title for someone whose doctorate is honorary.

Some PhDs and other degree holders would disagree with this usage, but I think most will find it reasonable. The problem is the New York Times abandons its own rules based on political preference. Jill Biden, for example, will often be called Dr. Jill Biden in an initial reference (see one example here), even though, according to the NYT rules, it should only be used in a second reference. The same goes for Martin Luther King, who is often referred to as “Doctor” in the first usage. King, of course, earned a PhD from Boston University. Media outlets need to be consistent. Always using “Dr. Martin Luther King” is fine, but then that title needs to be extended to all PhDs.

What gets lost in a lot of the debate is that while a lot of PhDs and other degree holders are annoyingly insisting on being called “Doctor”, they are simply following what intractable physicians have done for hundreds of years. These doctors are not only inconsistent, but many are complete hypocrites.

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It is perfectly normal for an attending physician to insist that residents address them as “Doctor”, but that doctor in turn will address residents by their first names. This is unthinkably rude in any other field. Residents and physicians have the same degree! Any tenured professor at a university who insisted on being called “Doctor” while calling an untenured colleague by their first name would be viewed, correctly, as a complete prig. Not only that, but MDs will claim to reserve the “Doctor” mantle for (conveniently) other MDs, but will then use the title for those with doctorates in pharmacology. The PharmD, of course, which doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree and is can be obtained six years out of high school.

The point of all this is there isn’t a straightforward norm to follow. I think it’s fine for degree holders to use their title in professional settings and annoying to use a professional title in a social setting. I view professors as “Professors” and medical doctors as “Doctors”, although I agree that the PhD is the original doctorate, and they should probably get first dibs on the title. Regardless, the only wrong way to approach the topic is to take titles too seriously and make it one of the most important parts of your identity.

Three years of blogging in the books. I hope readers (there are hundreds of you!) enjoyed reading my musings and rants. Two Econ Soapbox posts this year were more popular than the rest. The first one I expected - “This is Bad,” about the Trump Liberation Day tariffs - immediately garnered a lot of views. Thank God many of those tariffs never went into effect, and other countries didn’t retaliate - a response I did not see coming. The second was unexpected. The post “How not to think about wealth inequality in America” started slow but has continued to get clicks since it was published in August. It’s one of my higher-level economics posts, diving into various concepts and analyzing an academic paper, so I’m pleasantly surprised people have found it interesting.

Some of my favorite Econ Soapbox posts of 2025 were “The Sale of Public Land,” where I rebut the commonly held but (in my opinion) incorrect belief that most public land should be set aside for conservation, “Health Economics and ‘The Pitt’”, which gave me a chance to connect economics to a TV show that won five Emmys, and “Why Pope Leo XIV was Elected,” which has nothing to do with economics, but gave me a chance to articulate what most mainstream media missed when covering the new Pontiff.

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Thinking about the year overall, much it was dominated, once again, by Donald Trump. His administration entered January like a bull in a china shop. Contrary to what I expected, many of his supporters and detractors were right: the second Trump administration is much different than the first. For his supporters, Trump 2.0 is much more effective than the initial version. For his detractors, he’s much more destructive. From higher education to immigration to international trade, the White House has had one of the most influential years of all time. Not since George W. Bush in 2001 has a president so dominated the US political system. It’s a pity most pundits and journalists can’t discuss Trump without their own biases overwhelming detached reasoning. I would love to read an objective, amoral essay by a political science expert putting Trumps first year of this term into context. Instead, it’s either all sunshine or the apocalypse.

Outside of the US it’s been an uneven year. The Middle East might be stabilizing. The largest conflict in Europe since World War II trundles on, creating casualties at a tremendous rate. Sudan and Haiti continue to be ignored nightmares.

On the positive side, Argentina may finally be getting back on its feet. Western Europe is (mostly) coming together to support Ukraine. Trade deals are being struck by countries looking to find alternatives to the United States. Renewables continue to improve and expand, allowing countries to rely less and less on coal. GLP-1 drugs do appear to be the miracle drug we’ve hoped for. Sri Lanka is back on it’s feet after a disastrous couple of years. There is good news out there.

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Finally, some holiday reading for everyone. Some of my favorite articles of the year are below:

“All the President’s Enablers” by James Kirchick. As much as I’d like to read Jake Tapper’s book about Joe Biden’s hidden decline, or one of the many other books in that vein, I don’t have the time. Instead, I read this article, which does a fantastic job explaining how Joe Biden kept his condition from the public for so long.

“The End of Children” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Birth rates around the world are declining. Some countries, like South Korea, face a slow-moving existential crisis. In this brilliant essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus examines the whys as well as the consequences of this potentially humanity-changing paradigm.

“The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate” by Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, Lingling Wei. The latest in dystopian reality: Chinese billionaires are having children by the dozen through surrogacy in the United States. One man claims to have had around 100. In direct opposition to the “End of Children” article, this piece looks at those trying to seed the Earth with their progeny, and are willing to spend millions and go around the world to do so.

“Academia is finally learning hard lessons” by Megan McArdle. Much has been written about the Trump administration’s reckoning with higher ed. This succinct article is from the perspective of a journalist who is against what is happening, but recognizes the decisions academia made that got us here.

“On the problem of normative sociology” by Joseph Heath. This short but dense essay is from 2015, but I discovered it this year. “Normative Sociology” is the concept that many study what ought to be the cause of a problem, rather than what is the cause of a problem. The downstream issues this causes are large and far-reaching. Both the left and right of America are guilty of this, and the concept deserves much wider attention.

“How Donald Trump Got NATO to Pay Up” by Joshua Yaffa. People who think of the New Yorker as being reflexively and always anti-Trump should read this essay. My favorite geopolitical article of the year, Yaffa explains what NATO was like before Trump, and how he is changing it. Both positive and negative comments lay out where we are today and how we got here.

“How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost” by Nicholas Confessore. In this article, Nicholas Confessore somehow pushes through heaps of propaganda and gives a well-reasoned accounting of the decisions transgender activists made, their loss in the Supreme Court, and what it means for the future of the movement. Between this and his coverage of campus issues, Confessore has become one of my go-to journalists.

“Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn. The most disturbing article I read all year. Absolutely brilliant reporting by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn reveals there is an open child sex trafficking market in the heart of Los Angeles. Rather than hand-wringing or editorializing, the piece mainly lays out what’s happening in devastating detail to those who slip through the cracks of society. This article bothered me.

“The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen” by Daniel Immerwahr. It’s easy to think of history as a series of pre-ordained events. In this essay, Daniel Immerwahr looks back at the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Far from being a sure thing, a shocking number of lucky breaks went the rebellion’s way, resulting in the surprise downfall of the Shah and current regime still in power today.

“The average college student today” by Hilarius Bookbinder. Professor complains that college students today are worse than when he was a student. I know, nothing revolutionary. That said, in this pseudonymous article, a professor lays out some of the problems universities are having with college students today. I don’t agree with all of his comments, but the general trend is unmistakable. Something broke down during Covid, and we need to get it back.

“Long Drives and Short Homilies: How Father Bob Became Pope Leo” by Jason Horowitz, Julie Bosman, Elizabeth Dias, Ruth Graham, Simon Romero, and Mitra Taj. Usually this type of reporting isn’t done by three journalists, let alone six. This long essay tells the life story of Robert Prevost, now known to the world as Pope Leo XIV. From his childhood in Chicagoland to becoming a Cardinal, a portrait of quiet competence emerges. If you want to understand our current pontiff’s background, you need not look beyond this essay.

Here’s to 2026.

Last May, I wrote a post titled, “Articles about Americans moving to Europe are not on the level.” The gist was that there are countless articles about Americans moving to Europe and loving it. What goes left unsaid, or buried in the middle of the article, is usually one of two things. Either 1) stories about Americans moving abroad cover Americans who have close familial ties to another country, and thus have a reason for moving there other than wanting to leave the US, or 2) the leavers are still dependent on the American economy. They are using an American income but paying European prices to inflate their wealth. People can live where they want, but it’s dishonest and mildly hypocritical to not mention this supposedly bad place you left is funding your adventures abroad, and your lifestyle wouldn’t be possible without said bad place’s economy.

Loyal Econ Soapbox reader Jim Wall had a good comment on that initial post:

Fair call-out, though let’s look at these articles for what they really are: not an actual comparison to use for decision-making, just a cheap way to get your clicks.

Better yet, let’s not look at them at all.

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Fair enough. I linked to outlets like Business Insider, which isn’t exactly the pinnacle of journalism, to make my point. I believe Jim’s argument is that these are just clickbait pieces without any real quality control, so they should be ignored. Probably good advice…

…But then I came across an article in a recent issue of the New Yorker. “How to Leave the U.S.A.” by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. She discusses how, “In the wake of President Trump’s reëlection, the number of aggrieved Americans seeking a new life abroad appears to be rising. The Netherlands offers one way out.” This piqued my interest. The New Yorker, in my opinion, is the top outlet for long-form journalism in the world. The writing is the best. The fact checking, legendary. The magazine does have a strong leftward bias, but its pieces are generally well-reasoned and informative. I knew, unlike many blog posts, the New Yorker wouldn’t talk about how happy all these Americans were living abroad without discussing their income. So, how were all these American expats doing abroad? Below in block quotes are excerpts from the New Yorker article, with my comments below.

On an overcast Saturday in September, a group of travellers gathered for dinner at Jopenkerk, a brewery inside a converted church in the Dutch city of Haarlem. They’d come from Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, and they planned to spend the next week visiting the Netherlands. The purpose of their trip was neither business nor pleasure. These Americans were there because they wanted out of the U.S.A.

Unlike many other articles about Americans moving abroad, which usually focus on those moving to Southern Europe to take advantage of the lower cost of living, this article only looks at those considering the Netherlands. Since the 1950s, Americans have been able to get what’s known as a DAFT (Dutch-American Friendship Treaty) visa. The DAFT visa allows Americans to move their business overseas to the Netherlands, bring along a spouse and children, and even get citizenship after only five years. I’m surprised I’d never heard of this before. What an amazing way to move to Europe.

Inflation had also made it hard to save money, and the couple’s economic prospects seemed uncertain. Even though she was making six figures working for a large bank, things felt tight. Debi and Bane worried about retirement. They sold blood plasma to pad their bank accounts.

“The American Dream is something you’re told about to make you part of a system that clearly doesn’t work anymore,” Bane said during one of our conversations. “I want to be where the government cares about you and takes care of you and is you.” [emphasis in original]

I mean… if you’re making six figures and have no kids at home and money is tight it’s because you are bad with money.

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As for Bane, I think he completely misunderstands what the American dream is. The American dream is that if you work hard, smart, and honestly, you will be successful. We can argue over whether America is living up to that promise, but the American dream is certainly not having a government that “cares about you and takes care of you and is you.” If that’s what you want, I highly recommend not living in the US. The whole approach to life sounds terrible to me. But hey, different strokes for different folks.

Next, Abrahamian (the author of the New Yorker article) raises the same complaint I had: people aren’t enjoying Europe because it’s foreign, they’re enjoying it because it allows them to be wealthier:

This ever-proliferating content often glosses over bureaucracy, crime, and the fact that Westerners tend to sequester themselves in spaces that locals can’t afford. Anywhere must be cheaper—and less stressful—than America is today. A recent survey by the Harris Poll, a research firm, found that nearly half of its respondents had considered leaving the U.S., citing politics and the cost of living as their main factors. There’s a historical irony to these responses. Americans are looking to emigrate for the same reasons that immigrants once came to America—for safety, economic security, better opportunities, and an over-all sense that their families would have a better future.

Yet even this still misses the obvious point. If Americans are relying on the American economy while living abroad, then America is still providing that better future.

The article next discusses Jana Sanchez and Bethany Quinn, two Americans who moved to Europe and started Get The Fuck Out (G.T.F.O.) Tours, a company that helps Americans relocate across the pond:

[Sanchez] describes her role with G.T.F.O. as an “escaping-fascism doula” and seemed a little hurt when I said I wasn’t making plans to leave the States. “Nobody thinks their great-grandparents left Germany too early,” she and Quinn reminded me on several occasions.

I’m sorry, what? Both the owners of this company are seriously comparing the Trump Administration’s policy to the literal Holocaust. I’m glad Abrahamian mentions it, but this needs a follow-up. Is this just a business owner using scare tactics to sell a few more tours, or do these two people really believe the Trump administration is going to systematically torture and murder millions of American citizens?

The other G.T.F.O. employee is also not totally in contact with reality:

An American musician in his fifties named Jeffrey Scott Pearson served as our guide. He’d left the U.S. back in 2017; not long after his move, he had a heart attack. “I was in the hospital for two, three weeks, and as an American I wondered what that would cost me,” he said, rolling up his left sleeve to reveal a long, skinny scar from where his surgeon had taken a blood vessel to graft. “But, when the bill came back, it was three hundred and twelve euros—and all of it was for parking and the pizza I ordered from the commissary.”

He added, “Even with health insurance, in the U.S., it would have cost me thirty-five thousand dollars.”

Actually no. There are a few exceptions that Americans can go out of their way to find, but any ACA-compliant health plan in the US has an out-of-pocket maximum. For an individual, the out-of-pocket max is $9,200. A hefty chunk of change, but nowhere near $35,000.

More on healthcare:

The Americans nodded in sober recognition. They all had conditions to manage—asthma, A.D.H.D., rheumatoid arthritis, various injuries—and had found medical care expensive and hard to navigate. According to a Harris poll, thirty-eight per cent of those surveyed cited health care as a reason for considering a move abroad.

Oh boy. Almost most of the tourists in this article are veterans. They are in for a world of pain (pun intended) if they think Europe is going to offer them better care than their VA benefits. Wait times to see doctors in Europe often reach months, sometimes over a year. There’s a reason you don’t hear much about Americans moving abroad for better healthcare. If you can afford it, and veterans can, it’s some of the best in the world.

Rita and Chris aren’t ideological. They like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s economic positions but would have been O.K. with a Republican such as Mitt Romney or the late John McCain in office. They weren’t planning to leave during Trump’s first term, either. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” this is not. Rather, Rita and Chris have come to understand their experience as U.S. citizens as a form of moral injury, or the distress a person feels after witnessing an event that transgresses one’s deeply held values. Chris already struggled to square his own sense of what was right with the orders he received in Iraq, where the war is estimated to have killed more than two hundred thousand civilians.

Actually, this looks exactly like Trump Derangement Syndrome. You’re talking about an organization that repeatedly insinuates Trump is going to start a second Holocaust.

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There’s also something Abrahamian at least mentions but mostly neglects: the Netherlands is not a friendly place to all immigrants. In fact, some of the discourse surrounding immigrants would be extreme even by American standards. Sure the Dutch welcome Westerners, but that openness does not extend to everyone. Consider the most famous (and infamous) Dutch politician, Geert Wilders. Mr. Wilders is a right-wing populist widely known for his hatred of Islam. He has advocated the banning of the Koran, referred to the Prophet Muhammad as “the devil”, and proposed a “head rag tax” on Muslim women who wear a Hijab. This is all disgusting behavior, and it would be easy to dismiss Geert Wilders as a gadfly or fringe crank. Many Dutch did for years, right up until his party came in first during the 2023 general election.

Amazingly, during the G.T.F.O. tour, a bystander points out to Sanchez, the company owner, that the Netherlands has many of the same problems as the US. Rather than engaging, she engages in a textbook case of whataboutism and says at least the right-wingers in the Netherlands aren’t religious. uh-huh.

G.T.F.O.’s participants are not refugees in the traditional sense—at least, not yet. None were in immediate danger. They could move to Vermont, Massachusetts, or California. They’d all thought about changing states, of course, but had concluded it wasn’t enough. These decisions, I think, say more about the U.S. than they do about the people making them.

No, it says more about the people making the decisions. That’s why millions of Americans move between states every year and this tour group only has five people in it. No American is a refugee in any sense, and it’s insulting to real refugees to make the comparison.

Finally, let’s address my main complaint about articles that pretend Americans moving abroad are doing so either solely or almost solely because of “push” factors (reasons to go) rather than “pull” factors (reasons to come). In reality, most Americans covered in these articles either have a strong pull factor or are using the American economy to fund their stay abroad. This article is no different. Let’s run down the list:

• Debi: Income source not disclosed.

• Bane: Will work remotely for American clients.

• Sanjay: Income source not disclosed.

• Jana Sanchez: Married to a Dutchman. Owns company that gives tours to Americans.

• Bethany Quinn: Owns company that gives tours to Americans.

• Rita: Saved large amounts of money while working in America.

• Chris: Saved large amounts of money while working in America.

• Jeffrey: Works for company that gives tours to Americans.

• Other Chris: Provides transportation for Americans moving to Europe.

• James: Works for psychology practice that treats Americans living abroad.

• Itz Sky (YouTube nom de guerre): Works for an American TV network.

There isn’t a single American in the entire article who isn’t dependent, either currently, formerly, or via customers, on the American economy. Again, I want to stress there isn’t anything wrong with moving abroad and continuing to rely on America to fund your lifestyle. Those with pensions have earned it. I think G.T.F.O.’s Tours is innovative. It just needs to be loud and clear that all these people are still relying on a country so bad they moved 3,000 miles away, and this bad country is continuing to fund their international adventures.

Again, Abrahamian’s central claim:

There’s a historical irony to these responses. Americans are looking to emigrate for the same reasons that immigrants once came to America—for safety, economic security, better opportunities, and an over-all sense that their families would have a better future.

The reality isn’t ironic at all. There’s nothing new about Americans moving to cheaper countries while relying on American incomes. For over a century, Americans have moved to Europe to stretch their dollar further. An entire cohort of American writers moved to Paris in the first half of the 20th century for this reason. They are leveraging America’s economic strength to live a wealthier life abroad. Nothing more.

The provocatively titled article, “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty,” has been rocketing across the internet over the last few weeks. In it, portfolio manager Michael W. Green asserts that “the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function” is roughly $140,000 for a family. Families making less than that are living in poverty. The article quickly went viral, as one might expect. For some reason, telling people they are poor in America is one of the best ways to get clicks. More surprisingly, it’s an easy way to get people to agree with you.

The article itself has already spawned numerous rebuttals. A few of the best ones are from Noah Smith, Tyler Cowen, and Scott Winship. I’m not going to dive into the details, but I should mention I completely agree with the rebuttals. The idea that a family of four with an income of $120,000 is living in poverty is complete and utter bunk. You can read the above posts to see detailed explanations of the flaws Green uses in his calculations, but you can also use common sense. The typical American family makes less than $140,000 a year. Does anyone really think more than half of all American families are living in poverty? It’s total nonsense. The United States is one of the richest countries in the world. To say most are living in poverty is, frankly, an insult to those who are actually poor. Not only that, but the US has made tremendous strides since the “War on Poverty” began in the 1960s. After accounting for government aid and other transfers, the poverty rate has dropped from 19.5% of the population to 1.6%. In other words, from one in every five people to one in every 62 people. That’s a tremendous achievement.

The more interesting question, however, is why Green’s article resonated with so many people. There are plenty who are willing to concede that maybe his $140,000 poverty level is exaggerated, but that there are plenty of Americans around that income level who are barely treading water. That maybe Green’s facts are exaggerated, but the narrative is correct. The typical American family may not be in poverty, but they are definitely struggling.

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This is just a repackaging of a central problem in American society: people have lost track of their status in life. As I wrote about two years ago, almost everyone sees themselves as “middle class”. Lower class has become consubstantial with poor. Upper class has become consubstantial with rich. This is not good. Households making triple the median, or about $250,000 a year are emphatically not part of the middle class. They aren’t rich either. They are, however, firmly in the upper class. They might not feel upper class because they have four children, live in Manhattan, or own a boat that constantly needs maintenance, but welcome to life. Things cost money. If you want to feel rich, get a remote job, buy a small house in the rural Midwest, never travel or eat out, and watch your bank balance soar.

How have so many people convinced themselves their lot in life is worse than it actually is? There are a few causes. One is that a large segment of Americans has spent the last decade-plus extolling victimhood. This leads people to want to see themselves as victims. Another is social media. People used to compare themselves to celebrities and models in beauty magazines. That had its own problems, but at least people recognized they were looking at outliers. Now people see everyone they know on social media supposedly living these fulfilling, abundant lives. Meanwhile their furnace just broke and it’s going to cost $7,000 to replace. A third cause is an incorrect viewing of the past. Many millennials grew up being told they were middle class, or the mysterious “upper middle class,” when they were actually in the true upper class. Again, not rich, but their parents made enough to have a nice house, multiple cars, designer clothes, and take one to two vacations every year. Many of these millennials are now middle-class for the first time, so their consumption ability has declined. Since they incorrectly view their childhoods as also being middle-class, they believe living standards have declined, when in reality, they are downwardly mobile.

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Finally, there is a disconnect between needs and wants. Most Americans recognize that being unable to afford the newest luxury SUV isn’t a big deal. It’s a want. Many of the same Americans, however, don’t understand that being able to afford the nicest anything is a want. A privilege. Those who can’t afford to live in the nicest neighborhoods or send their kids to the nicest schools (or both) often act as if their needs aren’t being met. These are, of course, wants. I think this dovetails with the problems generated by social media. We see some friends traveling the world and some friends with nice cars and some friends with fancy houses and forget that it’s rarely all the same people. Some of my friends with fancy houses take very normal vacations. Other friends are traveling the world but don’t have any kids. We all have tradeoffs.

Beyond the whys and hows of people mistakenly thinking they are middle class or poor, it’s beginning to cause other problems. As Josh Barro recently pointed out on an episode of the “Central Air” podcast, these misjudgments are having real-life policy implications. As Barro points out, in 2015 Barack Obama wanted to reform 529 Savings Accounts. These are tax-advantaged accounts meant to be used for educational expenses, mainly for children to attend college. As such, they mainly benefit the upper class, who are disproportionately likely to send their kids to college. Obama wanted to limit 529s and give more money to low-income students. The proposal went nowhere. The same people who claim to want increased redistribution of wealth don’t understand that to redistribute wealth, those richer than the average have to give to those poorer than average. Not just the rich, but from anyone in the top third of the income distribution. That means giving up tax-advantaged accounts whose benefits mainly accrue to those making $200,000+ a year.

That’s a relatively small potatoes example, but the trend is going to have large implications in the coming decades. The United States is currently running an unsustainable budget deficit. Sooner or later, we are going to have to decide to either lower spending or raise taxes. There is nowhere close to the political will to cut entitlement programs, so that means raising taxes. But who should taxes be raised on? The upper class, of course. The problem is, no one thinks they are upper class. So they always say, “Well, my taxes shouldn’t go up. I’m middle-class. Only those who make 50% more than me should have higher taxes.” When 95% of the population thinks that way, it means taxes don’t go up and we continue to overspend, setting up a tougher reckoning in the future.

Americans need to get their heads on straight. Life here is not Shangri-La. But it also isn’t, as Thomas Hobbes said, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. The typical American family has a roof over its head, a car in the driveway, too much food, and access to technological innovations previous generations could only dream of. The types of poverty that defined the 20th century have almost been eliminated. Most families have all their needs and many of their wants met. Let’s maintain some perspective.