Author: Joy Buchanan

EWED Recommends Gifts 2023

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This is the 4th year in a row that the crew has put together some recommendations on products or books that we actually use, for your consideration in holiday gift buying. I’m going to put things into categories of Stuff for Adults, Kid’s Toys, Books for Adults, and Kid’s Books

Stuff for Adults (Men can be hard to shop for, so this might save Christmas!)

Scott says these scissors are amazing: “Fiskars 9 Inch Serrated Titanium Nitride Shop Shears”, available from Amazon here. Unlike some thick, heavy, or stubby heavy-duty shears, these have the feel of regular scissors, with fairly long, narrow blades. The handles are fairly substantial, and very comfortably contoured to the hand/thumb. The real magic is in the blades. They are sharp, with a very hard titanium nitride coating. Also, they have fine serrations in the cutting edge, that tend to grip the material in place as you are cutting. 

Zachary recommends 5 things that he really uses at home

#1: High Lumen Candelabra Bulbs (for lighting up rooms that require candelabra bulbs)

#2 Worm-Gear Clamp (It’s great for any project that needs a quick and secure solution. Probably would fit nicely in a giftwrapped box.)

#3 Hitch Rack (seems aimed at car trips with kids)

#4 Lawn-Mower Blade Sharpener (he says it’s worth it)

#5 Transplanting Spade (if you move plants in the yard, it’s worth it over a standard shovel)

The ever-practical Jeremy just wants to make sure you are Finding Deals on Food

Food makes great presents for adults. Just give me Doritos, thanks.

Kid’s Toys

A wonderful game that you might not already have is Protect the Penguin. It’s high-energy but much less work than something like Twister. I actually enjoy playing it, too.

I’ll re-up from last year that Spot It is incredible and fits in your coat pocket. Fun for all ages. Several versions of the game. Not everyone has to know how to read or add to play so good for events with lots of ages represented. LEGO sets are always fun. If you keep the difficulty level age-appropriate than your kid should be able to play independently for an hour. I’ll put up one link but of course there are many thousands to choose from that can be tailored to any interest. My son likes Minecraft-themed sets.

Books for Adults

If you want to see all the books we have read and reviewed, just click on the Books category or go to

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/category/books/

Not all of those posts are going to give you quick gift ideas, so if I had to pick out one from the last year it would be:

Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale is a great book in my summer stack on fast fashion. I have always been interested in the combination problem-blessing of too much stuff. Adam Minter explains perfectly what many of us have been curious about.

You might have a relative who is very environmentally conscious or works hard to reuse and recycle. They might think it’s interesting to learn about the secondhand markets in America and beyond.

Kid’s Books

I’m reading The Hobbit aloud to my son right now and I highly recommend the experience. It’s going to take us months to get through it by reading a few pages at a time around bedtime.

Camp Out!: A Graphix Chapters Book (Bug Scouts #2) Funny graphic novel series about a group of friends in a scout troop. Probably especially fun for a kid who is in some kind of scouts program.  Calvin and Hobbes is another comic series that my kid genuinely looks forward to reading.

Joke books can lead to great conversations. If the kid wants to know why something is funny, you can end up talking for a long time about the complex world.

See what we recommended in previous years. We have always had a mix of kid and adult items.

EWED Recommends Gifts 2022

EWED Recommends Gifts 2021

EWED Recommends Gifts for 2020 Holidays

What We Are Learning about Paper Books

Joy Buchanan11 Comments

I suppose books were, for a time, the cheapest way to convey bits of information, before anyone had heard of “bits”. I asked ChatGPT to do my boring work and rehearse the history of the term “bits” so I could get my facts straight for this post.

Based on my other research, I was not confident that this paper called “The Binary System” exists. I could find no evidence of it from 5 minutes of googling. When I asked ChatGPT about it, ChatGPT apologized and said it probably isn’t real.

That kind of error would have been less likely with paper books that had human editors and authors. We hardly thought about this benefit of the old system, until it was gone. Because books had some cost to write and print, it made economic sense to employ an editor to ensure quality. For a while, no one would have thought of spewing out this ocean of associated terms that we get from ChatGPT, because it was too expensive. So, the first underappreciated benefit of printed books was that they were relatively more accurate.

Tyler Cowen released his latest book GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? online. You can download the PDF or query an AI Chatbot about the book.

This is the first “generative book” that I had ever accessed. I did the worst thing, right away. I asked the Chatbot to give away the ending, and it did.

I wish I could have bought the paper book and read until the end, using the suspense as a device to get me to learn new details about famous economists. Books and movies used to be able to use suspense to keep the audience engaged. Before generative books, that just seemed like the only way.

I didn’t think of books as special until I used a phone to (try to) learn. Now I put more value on the hours I spent reading paper books when I was younger. Authors were manipulating me through that rigid medium. I was forced to wade through pages and pages to get to the point. But what value is the “point” without the context? Getting to the point through arguments and examples, instead of just seeing a tweet, made us smarter. The second benefit of books was that we were forced to work harder.

Generative books are a further step toward poastmodernism.

A middle ground I can imagine is asking the chatbot to play coach instead of search engine. What if the Chatbot could write you a shorter version of the book that cuts out the parts you would have skimmed in a paper book? Still, just knowing that you were skimming certain parts actually created context. I took that for granted, until now.

Something has happened in the world outside of our screens that feels both “full circle” and “anti-Network State”. The BBC announced that an American tech billionaire bought the English pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis famously met to talk with a group of friends.

We could just see pictures of that place on the internet. You can see my 2014 pilgrimage to it pictured below. But people want to go in person, if they can afford it. That used to just be the only way to do things. Now that we can see what it is like to live through digital media, we are discovering the value that existed all along in 3-D doings.

Speaking of Tolkien, I’m reading The Hobbit aloud to my son right now and I highly recommend the experience. I’m glad that he is capable of enjoying it, since the pacing is so different from the media and games on screens. To get an elementary-aged boy reading from paper, I also recommend Calvin and Hobbes.

We like to put up recommendations for holiday gifting at this time of year. That paperback of Calvin and Hobbes would make a great gift for a kid (or adult!).

Zachary told us that he has printed out our own blogs for the week to read at home on paper. That’s “full circle.” Maybe print has something for us, even if it is more expensive than scrolling screens.

Buying new hardcover books at a bookshop regularly can be prohibitively expensive. But if you look at used books, you can easily walk out of a rummage sale with 10 quality books for $10.

Also, sometimes ordering older print paperback books or DVDs on Amazon is extremely cheap. Here are some of the cheap Amazon media purchases I made in 2023. I might have found them even cheaper at a local garage sale, but getting it delivered to my house saves a lot of time. I recommend all of these items over scrolling mobile screens.

Where’s Waldo Now? Paperback (for kids)

Camp Out!: A Graphix Chapters Book (Bug Scouts #2) Paperback (for kids)

Apollo 13 on DVD

A Canticle for Leibowitz Paperback (don’t be afraid to go for the “Used” options that are much cheaper and perfectly readable)

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics Paperback by Vernon Smith

Some people might prefer Kindle to paperback because it allows them to maintain a larger “library”. If you have very limited space to store books, then I can understand that advantage. However, I know that I learn better from paper. Printed media might still be worth paying for.

Afterword: I printed out two chapters of Tyler’s new book and it’s excellent.

It’s mostly very smart and serious, but this paragraph made me laugh out loud.

Podcast on Engineer’s Mindset and Soft Skills

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Roger Forsgren recorded “Professional Skills To Rewire the Engineer’s Mindset” on the ContraMinds podcast (Released July 29, 2023)

Roger Forsgren is a retired Chief Knowledge Officer of NASA. He was a director of Academy of Program, Project and Engineering Leadership at NASA. Roger is also an undergraduate with a liberal arts degree, a mechanical engineering degree… the author of … “When Graduation is Over, Learning Begins – Lessons for STEM Students and Professionals”.

In this episode, Swami & Roger discuss the importance of having a liberal arts background for an engineer, foundational skills needed for successful engineers, how communication skills, decision-making skills, and working with people are as important as number crunching, and where empathy can help achieve efficiency in an imperfect world filled with vulnerable people.

  • Forsgren does not see education as primarily a signaling exercise. Engineers need to know math and they learn much of it in school. Forsgren thinks of communication as a skill that can be learned, although I don’t think he would say that a traditional classroom is the only place to do that learning. Extra curricular activities probably play a role in developing social skills, and traditional school can be a good place to get that practice.
  • Forsgren: “I’d be wasting my time if I tried to train NASA engineers in calculus… they know it already… In the past it’s always been called soft skills [and that turns people off]… what we do is we change that to ‘professional skills’ and this is something I think is ideal for an engineer because an engineer has a choice in their career… [you can just do the analytics and math] but if you want to move ahead in your career, if you want to become a manager… you really have to develop the post-professional skills of leadership and communication…”
  • He has a section on former president Herbert Hoover. Forsgren said Herbert Hoover was the Elon Musk of his day. Hoover was extremely successful as an engineer, and even in some government positions relating to war and logistics. Then Hoover was a bad American president because of his poor communication skills. “He couldn’t lie… he had a hard time talking to people…”
  • I have looked into the skills gap and computer engineering. Resources include my blog on Andrew Weaver who has a great survey on soft skills and IT, my CGO policy paper on The Slow Adjustment in Tech Labor: Why Do High-Paying Tech Jobs Go Unfilled?, and my experiment Willingness to be paid: Who trains for tech jobs?
  • Forsgren has a lot of patience and compassion for people who don’t have naturally good social skills. If you don’t think you are great with people, then I recommend this short blog on Lucidity (HT: Tyler) by Leber. Leber’s portrait of a husband and wife misunderstanding each other could apply to people on either side of the Israel-Palestinian conflict right now.

We Should Pay for Good Journalism

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

This week the NYT likely misreported a geopolitical event and ran a misleading photo to go with it.

NYT Uses Photo of Wrong Location for Hospital Story by David Zweig on Substack

U.S., Experts Say Evidence Suggests Palestinian Militants’ Rocket Hit Gaza Hospital (WSJ)

The NYT has run a kind of response.

This makes me think of Putin’s failed assault on Kyiv. Putin has succeeded in getting many thousands of people killed, but his initial goal of the invasion was not achieved. Putin was 70 years old when he thought he could take Kyiv in 2022. He had photos in mind, but probably with the old kind of newspaper reporting and Soviet-style control over media. Now every villager holds up an iPhone and livestreams marauding soldiers. However, if you go to the Wikipedia timeline of events, you can see how important “traditional” journalism still is. Sources include the New York Times and Al Jazeera (based in Doha, Qatar). Paying for journalism affects the world. Saying what journalists “should” be doing without paying for any newspaper subscriptions has less of an effect I would think.

Can anyone be an entrepreneur?

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Hardly the most important thing going on this week, but Matt Yglesias said something I have some evidence against. Yglesias claimed that, “basically anyone could massively increase the value of a large plot of land in the United States if he were exempted from land use rules.”

What percent of people do you think could massively increase the value of a barren plot of land, even with no land use rules?

When I ran an experiment about intellectual property protection with Bart Wilson, we created a space for people to mine valuable “creative” goods, analogous to writing a hit song. The goods could be distributed to the rest of the subjects in the experiment to create a surplus for everyone.

This screenshot shows time spent in the “studio” for groups that did have intellectual property protection. Group 1 (IP1) spent less time in the studio even than any of the groups who were not offered intellectual property protection. We concluded that Group 1 did not have any people with entrepreneurial tendencies. We had not expected this to happen, so we highlighted the role of entrepreneurs in our conclusion from this experiment. Institutions interact with entrepreneurship. We found that more “entrepreneurship” emerged under the IP institution.

Is the repair revolution coming?

Joy Buchanan4 Comments

Every sentence in this article is fascinating, since I have been writing about fast fashion.* Anything I put in quote form comes from The Guardian.

The word “revolution” in the title of this article is minor clickbait. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say: “Clothes repaired in workshop, 19 people employed” That wouldn’t get any clicks. However, I am an idealist, and I am going to stay a bit on board with the revolution. I, too, have pondered and grieved over the amount of waste heading into landfills. There could be some kind of revolution ahead, whether it is of the repair type or not.

The communal garden and bespoke textile art lend a creative startup feel, and the slogan “repair is the new cool” appears everywhere. But what’s happening here is far from ordinary startup stuff. At United Repair Centre (URC), newcomers to the Netherlands from across the world, many of them former refugees, are using their tailoring skills to mend clothes on behalf of some of the world’s biggest brands. 

Immigrants are sewing, but no Dickensian horrors here. This place “has a laid-back Dutch vibe.”

Ambrose, who greets me, mans the front desk. He’s a 20-year-old Palestinian fashion fan, who was born in Syria and lived in Abu Dhabi before moving to the Netherlands in May; he is working in parallel with studying for a fashion and design diploma. Ambrose started at URC in May and loves it: the way he gets to work in collaboration with the tailors, giving advice and learning from their years of experience. “It’s really easy, fun, chill … “

The verdict is in. Work is fun.

Repair might be cool, but is it new? Consider Jo March from “Little Women” who was an American bouncing around between rich and poor status in the 1860s. American GPD per capita in 1860s was less than $3,000. That would be considered very poor today. Since manufactured goods were expensive and Jo March had a low opportunity cost of time, she spent lots of time mending clothes. Her passion was writing but she had no choice – that was how she contributed to her household production. Very few families at that time, even in the upper class, could afford to regularly buy new clothes from a shop.

Don Boudreaux explained that even modern rich people “recycle” clothes when it’s in one’s selfish interest. Washing and “re-use” of clothes, typically, is beneficial enough to outweigh the cost of maintaining and storing them. Sometimes we go above and beyond by donating them or maintaining them specifically because we are trying not to “waste” something, but that comes at an individual cost to us.

The author of the article writes:

I take a taxi from the station to URC because I’m running late, but I’m taken aback when en route the driver points out the many conveniently located stations and tram stops I could use for my return journey.

This is a perfect encapsulation of why rich people do not repair clothes. They are zipping around to high-productivity work meetings. The opportunity cost of time has gone up. Taking the bus is costly in terms of time, the scarcest resource of the rich.

Where I see hope for the repair “revolution” is in artificial intelligence (AI). AI can make up for our scarce time and attention. If AI can make repairs less costly in terms of time, then rich people might do it. If it doesn’t make economic sense, then it won’t scale the way the author is hoping.

Currently, the “revolution” is employing 19 people full-time. By the year 2027, all they are hoping for is to expand to 140 tailors. Hardly a revolution on the jobs front. But that’s the hopeful scenario. If it’s labor-intensive, then it won’t work. (See my ADAMSMITHWORKS post on cloth production and labor.)

Is repair reaching a tipping point?

There’s one unlikely scenario in which expensive repairs will get paid for. What rich people resoundingly want is kitchen renovations and new clothes, partly because it confers status. Could it become cool to live with those outdated cabinets and wear that repaired Patagonia vest for the next two decades? … could it? Vision: “Wow. I see that you guys have outdated ugly countertops. Nice. You resisted the desire to renovate your kitchen even though it’s within your budget.”

Even changing status markers are unlikely to tip the scale in the case of broken equipment or torn clothes. AI might allow us to repair a refrigerator instead of trash it.

URC tracks repairs using software initially developed by Patagonia, which it has built on and uses for the other brands involved.

There it is. Software makes the dream work.

Shein and the like are out there, churning out, in dizzying volumes, fast fashion that can’t be repaired.

In my conversations with Americans, many do not know what “fast fashion” is. That’s fast fashion. The 19-140 tailors are currently no match for Shein.

There isn’t always much common language – operational manager Hans says they resort to Google Translate quite a bit – but there’s plenty of laughter.

The AI, again! We are living in the globalized AI-powered future.

Lastly, the article was brought to my attention on Twitter (X) by Bronwyn Williams and Anna Gat.

* I’m going to have a fashion article coming soon in this series: https://www.cato.org/defending-globalization

Video for new ChatGPT users

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Have you not gotten around to trying ChatGPT for yourself yet?

Ethan and Lilach Mollick have released a series of YouTube videos that encapsulate some current insights, aimed at beginners, posted on Aug. 1, 2023. It covers ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard. Everyday free users are using these tools.

Practical AI for Instructors and Students Part 2: Large Language Models (LLMs)

If you are already using ChatGPT, then this video will probably feel too slow. However, they do have some tips that amateurs could learn from even if they have already experimented. E. Mollick says of LLMs “they are not sentient,” but it might be helpful to treat them as if they are. He also recommends thinking of ChatGPT like an “intern” which is also how Mike formulated his suggestion back in April.

  • I used GPT-3.5 a few times this week for routine work tasks. I am not a heavy user, but if any of our readers are still on the fence, I’d encourage you to watch this video and give it a try. Be a “complement” to ChatGPT.
  • I’ll be posting new updates about my own ChatGPT research soon – the errors paper and also a new survey on trust in AI.
  • I hear regular complaints from my colleagues all over the country about poor attempts by college students to get GPT to do their course work. The experiment is being run.
  • Ethan Mollick has been a good Twitter(X) follow for the past year, if you want to keep up with the evolution and study of Large Language Models. https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1709379365883019525
  • Scott wrote this great recent tutorial on the theory behind the tools: Generative AI Nano-Tutorial
  • It was only back in December 2023 that I did a live ChatGPT demonstration in class, and figured that I was giving my students there first ever look at LLMs. Today, I’d assume that all my students have tried it for themselves.
  • In my paper on who will train for tech jobs, I conclude that the labor supply of programmers would increase if more people enjoyed the work. LLMs might make tech jobs less tedious and therefore more fun. If labor supply shifts out, then quantity should increase and wages should fall – good news for innovative businesses.

Solving the Participation Pickle with Pick.al

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

Joy: This post was written by my friend and fellow econ professor Cameron Hardwick.

One of my biggest ongoing teaching challenges is keeping students engaged during lectures.

Sure, there are ways to add interactivity here and there, but sometimes there’s just no way around an old-fashioned lecture.

There are a few ways of dealing with this, and I haven’t been satisfied with any.

  1. It’s their grade, if they zone out that’s on them. In terms of the incentives, sure, the externalities are all internalized. But as a macroeconomist, I also know: if time-inconsistency problems are hard for policymakers, how much more for students! We shouldn’t be surprised when students do poorly if the main feedback they get from paying attention or not comes a week later with the homework grade.
  2. Posing questions and waiting for answers. Either you get a minute of awkward silence, or you get the same two engaged students answering everything while everyone else keeps zoning out.
  3. Cold calling. I started doing this a few years into teaching. The advantage is that it keeps students on their toes and paying attention. But a few problems left me unsatisfied:
    1. “How about you in the red shirt”. Hard to catch a student’s attention that way, and in a class of 40 or more, learning names takes a good chunk of the semester.
    1. I had no systematic way of keeping track of participation. Every semester I’d look at the roster and still have a few names I couldn’t put a face to.
    1. Humans are really bad at making random choices! Much as I tried, I couldn’t guarantee I wasn’t biased toward or against (say) the corners of the room, or students whose names I knew.
  4. LMS software. These can offer a lot of great student participation tools. But students have to pay for them – which isn’t worth it if you’re just looking for one feature. On top of that, then you’re locked into an ecosystem.

So, I made an app myself. It does one thing and does it well.

Pick.al (pronounced Pickle) picks students at random from a roster and keeps track of participation points. I can now pose a question in class, ask “what do you think…”, pull out my phone and hit a button, and have a name.

I can also record the quality of their answers:

  • ✓: 1 point, good attempt! (Since this is for participation points, I record ✓ whether right or wrong, as long as they give it a good shot)
  • ?: 0.5 points, if they ask “wait, what was the question?”
  • ×: 0 points, if they’re not there or don’t respond at all.

There’s also a 1-5 scale option, for those who want a more fine-grained evaluation.

This has a lot of benefits in the classroom:

  • Since I can call on students by name, I learn names more quickly.
  • Pick.al chooses randomly from the pool of students who have been called on the least so far. So, I know my participation points are as fair as possible.
  • Students know they can get called on at any time, so they pay attention more in class, and then do better on the homeworks and tests.
  • Students appreciate being brought in more frequently. One noted on the evaluations the first semester I piloted it: “something specific I like is he got the class involved by calling people out which forced them to test their knowledge which is something teachers need to do more of.”

Using Pick.al is as simple as registering (with an email address or an OrcID), uploading a roster, and then hitting a button during class. You can also swipe through the history and edit or undo participation events, and go back in the admin interface and add, edit, and remove participation events after the fact if necessary.

Pick.al is secure and password-protected, and has a number of handy features:

  • You can set excused absences if a student lets you know beforehand, so their name doesn’t come up until a certain date.
  • You can select specific students from the roster in a sidebar, if you want to give credit to – say – a student who raises his hand unbidden.
  • If you’d like to use the classroom computer instead of pulling out a phone, you can use it with full keyboard navigation.
  • Scores can be downloaded as a CSV to be put in your own gradebook.
  • Private notes can be added to students to show up when their names are selected, e.g. “sits in the back corner”

If you use it and find a bug or have an idea that would make it more useful to you, feel free to let me know. It’s been a great tool in my own classes, and I hope it’ll be useful for other teachers to keep students engaged too.

Review of Cowen Tabarrok Econ Textbook

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

It’s been almost a decade since I taught principles of economics classes. One major allocation of my time this semester is course prep, since I am teaching 3 different classes.

For my Principles of Microeconomics course, I chose Modern Principles of Economics, because I figured Tyler and Alex had done a good job and I have heard good reviews from others.

I’m writing a short review of their instructor resources, and then I’ll have to get back to course prep.

  • Like most textbooks, they provide you with slides that you can modify. Not having to start from scratch on lecture slides is great.
  • They also have teacher guides for each chapter. I find these helpful, because I have not taught this class in many years. Even though “I’m an economist,” there is still a technique to presenting these ideas for the first time to undergraduates. No need to re-invent that wheel completely.
  • They have suggestions for in-class activities. For example, to illustrate demand shifts, ask the students about a recent celebrity scandal and how that created a fall in the demand for concert tickets. It works. Everyone loves talking about celebrity scandals. It will be an evergreen idea. There are always new scandals for each semester – the students know more about it than the professors. My students (Fall 2023) informed me that Lizzo got in hot water for fat-shaming.
  • Their online learning platform called Achieve within MacMillan works well. It integrates really well with Canvas, our LMS. One warning I would give you is to make sure that students buy Achieve through an account on their .edu email address. I have headaches over students signing up with a personal email address and then not having their data integrate with Canvas.
  • You can sign up for EconInbox, which will email you topical relevant news stories right before you would want to present them in class. You’ll have to tell them ahead of time what your schedule of topics is, but that is something you ought to have worked out in your syllabus at the beginning of the semester. Obviously, you can’t cover every chapter in one semester. There are far more resources, generally, than you can use. But picking and choosing from a great library is easier than trying to build something from scratch yourself.
  • Lastly, the Cowen Tabarrok textbook integrates nicely with the free Marginal Revolution University video library. MRU is free to all. So, as an instructor you could still use it heavily even if you are not assigning their textbook or even if you are not doing Achieve. Still, I think that making use of the MRU resource is easiest if you are using their textbook. A fun video that might even be worth using class time for is Avengers: The Story of Globalization

Pilates Works and Free Videos Make It Easier to Commit

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

One of today’s best econbloggers, Matt Yglesias, just wrote “What I learned losing 70 pounds: Medical interventions work, among other things”

This is not about lemon juice or cutting out dessert. Matt wrote about getting surgery that he paid for out of pocket. No one wants to talk about medical stuff publicly. No one wants to admit that they have a hard time doing obvious correct things like eating less and exercising. Matt did this to help people. He’s inspired me to share something about health, too.

Around the time my second child was 6 months old, I decided it would be nice to get back into some kind of “shape.” So, it was time to head out the door and try to run around the block. Ouch. My knee was wrong.

To keep this short, so I’ll just say that I already knew what a doctor would tell me to do. I knew that I should do targeted exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee. There are very boring ways to do that, such as counting reps by yourself in a quiet room.

Likewise, Matt Y knew that he could lose weight by simply eating less. It’s easier said than done. Matt took advantage of money and new technology to get results. In a less extreme way, so did I. Instead of doing “physical therapy,” I joined a friend’s Pilates studio. I paid someone to talk to me and count my reps and play music. I paid for accountability. It worked.

There is even better news. If you have Youtube access, you can get almost the full benefit of Pilates classes for free by following along with videos. Or, you can pay a little bit for even better videos with no ads. This is just one way that economic growth and technological innovation have made our lives much better.

A lot of our readers are men. You might think this only applies to women in yoga pants. Not so.

There is a certain stigma surrounding Pilates due to its vast popularity amongst women owing to its numerous health benefits and its versatility (suitable to all age groups and ability levels). However, Pilates was actually developed by a man named Joseph Pilates to help rehabilitate injured soldiers imprisoned during World War 1.

https://www.thephysiocompany.com/blog/2020/6/8/10-reasons-men-should-do-pilates-too

Soldiers! World Wars! Dude stuff!