There’s probably nothing more dangerous to an already successful business than giving customers what they say they want. This is not to say you can give customers something they don’t want, quite the opposite in fact. Rather, it’s to never deny the preeminence of revealed preferences.

People want things. They don’t always, however, enjoy how those preferences might be perceived by others (or by themselves). Customizing your consumption to fit the preferences that you would prefer to signal is not a luxury that we can often indulge, however. Basic instrumental needs have to come first. Once a good is already in a household’s portfolio of consumption, however, it is relatively low cost to signal alternative preferencs to peers, surveyers, or focus group organizers. If a producer were to take these signals as earnest, however, they could end up undermining the good already previously purchased and consumed, leading to a business catastrophe. “Trust people’s actions over words” is at least a cliche, if not an outright proverb. I’ll leave it to you to find its most archaic analogue.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and no, not in the context of political polling and the recent election, though I will grant the relevance. I’ve been thinking about it more when watching sports and consuming the news.

Soccer in the top leagues, particularly the English Premiere League (currently the best in the world) is in year 5 of a growing injury crisis. Most seasons the winner can be predicted based on total salary outlays. Not because of superior top line talent, however, but because they can afford 11 second string players of top quality to play when the starters are inevitably injured. This is largely because of a tragedy of the commons in international soccer, but it’s been massively exacerbated because the EPL responded to the perceived request from consumers that the sport become “more physical”. This amorphous physicality has been granted in the form of more lenient refereeing. The result of this has not been to increase the “fight in the game”, but to grant less talented players greater license in kicking and sliding through the legs of more talented players. I don’t know the full economics of modern sports, but I’m pretty sure fans don’t pay large ticket prices to see the best players in the world on the sidelines in high-end athleisure wear draped discreetly over a walking boot.

As for the news, I see a related, but not identical phenomena. Being a GenX-er, I spent a lot of time in heavy conversation during college bemoaning the impact of advertisers on media content. The “news as propaganda” bit is not a new concept, I assure you. What very, very few us would have guessed, however, is that Craigslist destroying the ad revenue of newspapers and the internet walking off with the customer base most interested in news as information source would lead television program producers untethered to the desires of their advertising sponsors, leaving them to create bespoke content for their new overlords: the consumer. As it turns out, what the remaining subset of customers most wants isn’t information or insight, it’s reaffirmation. We wanted advertisers out of content, but it turns out you got better news when the true customers were corporate overlords hawking sugar water and baggy clothes. People signaled that they wanted deep reporting, uncompromised integrity, and uncomfortable truths. And hey, more people than ever subscribe to The Economist. But it turns out most people just wanted confirmation bias.

Sure, by clicking on the link to this post you’ve signaled to me that you want a depth of insight you just can’t get anywhere on the internet. But I, enwisened scribe, know that what you really want is cliched aphorisms.

Be careful what you wish for.

A recent conversation with Sadhika Bagga and her research on labor reallocation got me thinking about remote work, about which there is no shortage of forecasts and opinions. Working from home has taken off. Working from home is failing. Working from home is here to stay. Working from home is already over.

Can they all be true? No, but also yes. At least, that’s where my thinking is at the moment. What all of the preceding pieces seem to do is acknowledge the benefits and costs of remote work while also emphasizing any one particular cost or benefit that generates their preferred lede.

Remote workforces bring lower labor efficiency (e.g. more distractions, less monitoring, more shirking) and greater labor flexibility (e.g. larger labor pools to select from, faster labor turnover) to a firm or industry. It gives firms the ability to pay employees in something other than money, such as schedule flexibility and locational choice, capturing some of the rents from those compensating wage differentials for themselves in the form of lower labor costs. It also means firing and hiring people with greater efficiency and lower costs when each subsequent wave of technological obsolescence hits, more effectively curating your labor force to fit the newest technological opportunities and needs.

How this story plays out will be bespoke to every firm, industry, and sector, but one broad trend I’m looking for is how industries separate by technological turnover. Industries differentiate by the historical rate of technological upheaval. Construction is different today than it was 25 years ago, but that amount of change is almost trivial compared to the televison entertainment industry. I expect that firms industries that reward “nimbleness” in the adoption of and adaption to new technologies will embrace work from home in far greater numbers. This will, in turn, shrink the “periodicity” of industry business cycles. Industires with high remote work labor forces will both more quickly collapse to a dominant set of firms when excludable technology gives them and advantage. They will also, however, more quickly reinflate to a more competitive landscape from new firm entry enter as remote work allows rivals to rapidly update their labor force to match the newest technological landscape. I expect applied micro work on remote work preferences and theoretic work on the consequences of search costs for competition to find each other atop the empire state building and yield the kind of policy recommendations that would make Nora Ephron proud.

This is just one of many broad trends to look for as remote work evolves. The complexity of interacting forces makes forecasting both a fool’s errand and palm reading. All of the forecasts will be internally logical, collectively incompatible, partially correct, and completely wrong.

If you’re trying to understand the US election outcome, this is the only graph you need:

I’m not saying “anti-incumbency” is everything. There are a lot of forces wrapped up within this graph. My unnuanced take is that that the pandemic hens came home to roost for incumbent parties. Every single bundle of pandemic policies, from the heaviest handed to the most laissez-faire, were characterized by inevitable trade-offs. People don’t like tradeoffs regardless of whether the bill is paid with a year of doubled fatalities, two years of tripled unemployment, or three years of quadrupled inflation. And that’s why I think incumbent parties, be it US Democrats or UK Tories, lost significant ground. If you want to parse it farther, you could argue US Republicans should be disappointed they didn’t win more given how well opposition parties performed elsewhere.

None of that will change the Take Economy, of course. Thousands of pundits, published or barstool, are all describing in exquisite detail exactly the manner in which this election is a referendum on how the Democrats handled exactly the issue they personally happen to care the most about. It doesn’t mean any one of their opinions is narrowly wrong. I’m sure there was a more perfect campaign to be run, if only because there always is and was.

National politics is rarely a referendum and it’s never just the will of the people. It’s a chaotic system. It’s the weather. We forecast the weather. We makes plans. We accomodate, mitigate, and celebrate. And yes, sometimes we just try to survive it. But we can’t control it.

It’s chaos, be kind.

Voting costs time and attention, arguably the only resources everyone is short on. The compensation is implicit, ephemeral, and uncertain. Never make the mistake of thinking you can predict exactly how much other people will behave when the price is subjective and wrapped in uncertainty.

A democracy is an endless cascade of institutions designed to pick winners. Those winners are themselves a product of the rules as much, if not more, than the preferences of voters. Rules will inevitably be gamed, sometimes in manners that seem unfair at best, antithetical to the ambitions of democracy at their worst. A good rule of thumb, however, is that the more unfair an outcome seems, the more fragile it is. A minority party that has gerrymandered voting districts to the hilt might have disproportionate power one day, but they are exactly one exogenous shock away from a electoral cascade event. Any political party is never more than one election away from the dustbin of history.

Polling is increasingly challenging and it’s hard not to feel like they are always fighting the last war. How do you find out what people want in a world where, as previously mentioned, time and attention are scarce? How do you poll people who won’t answer the phone and, even worse, those who do answer phone are decidedly different from those who do? Same thing for people on Facebook. Same thing for people at the mall. Same thing for anyone who uses one tool or media instead of another. It’s never been easier to learn about an exact subset of people, while never harder to learn about everyone.

The electoral college is an extremely dumb peculiar institution. Tuesday could be a tie or a two point differential, but the most likely outcome is a roughly 80 point blowout. The catch being that the blowout could go either way.

I voted (early) for Harris/Walz. I hope they win, but not sure I can say much else for sure. Democracy is hard.

It’s spooky season and I just received perhaps the spookiest of student emails. We all know that students never read the syllabus, only want to know what’s on the exam, and can’t be bothered to pay attention. But, and hear me out…what if they are listening?

I got this email yesterday. It might be my favorite student email ever, even if it is direct evidence that my stream of consciousness while lecturing, from the students’ perspectives, must border on surreal at times. I don’t know that much of it is actually funny, but it’s interesting to see what actually sticks in a student’s mind. Notes in curly brackets { } are edits and additions from me, with a few small redactions to ensure the anonymity of the student:

---

From: {NAME REDACTED}

Halloween is the time to celebrate the spooky things in life, and what is scarier than being perceived? I have taken it upon myself to write down some of the silly things you say in class throughout the month of October to celebrate the scariest time of the year. I have compiled them all here and I think you should be proud of your wit. I think they are funnier without context, so in the spirit of politics, I will be leaving it out. 

“I’m just a decomposing corpse here on stage.”

“The good thing about a recession is it’s not a vibes-based measure.”

“[Imagine] You’re wearing a suit, mens or pant….”

“We’re not making assumptions about shapes… yet.”

“Can you imagine the ad campaigns for the eight year old vote?!”

“[In reference to Jesse Ventura, one might even imagine little hearts scribbled in the margins] He’s perfect” {Note: This was not said in admiration of his politics, but rather his existence as Jesse Ventura}

“{Irrelevant 3rd party candidate} is the antichrist, that’s all I know. They kicked my dog and I want to throw them into the 4th layer of hell.” 

(with the most deadpan tone and expression) “Yippee, we’re fine, we’re free, we’re great.”

“There’s crooks, and then there’s crooks”

“What I’m saying is, we’re all becoming monsters.” (very on theme to be honest)

“I cannot tell the difference between parody and reality.” (uh oh)

“White gets 1, grey gets 0, and professor Makowsky goes into a quiet rage.” 

“Get an amish pretzel with amish butter on it, ya know. Love yourself.”

“Stay away from the swamps, there’s luggage there that wants to eat you.”

I am part of the exodus from Twitter to Bluesky. I still maintain my Twitter account, but do not post there. I do, however, still scroll both of my feeds on occasion. I am more optimistic for the future of Bluesky for a variety of reasons, not least of which is simply that it is improving with each week. The mechanics are excellent, there is far less garbage/noise/bots, and I never feel like I am party to anything with nefarious ambitions in the long or short run. There is a problem though.

It’s still kind of… boring. The echo chamber feeling at Bluesky is stronger, born almost exclusively of the selection effects of first and second movers from Twitter. I am rarely surprised on Bluesky, I never feel terribly challenged in an exciting way, unless you count the more frequent posting of squishy academic policy affirmations. There’s plenty of (warranted) election anxiety, but there’s no oppositional forces. There’s no tension.

Which is not to say Twitter is providing any of that in spades. Quite to the contrary, it’s a shell of its former self. The heaviest posters with the biggest followings have found plenty of reasons to stay, but for every big follower account, there were hundreds of medium sized accounts that pushed and pulled the conversation in interesting directions, providing both traction and the occasional surprise. A large share of medium accounts have abandoned ship, some moving to Bluesky, but far more have just dropped out of the medium entirely (apologies for the homonyms). There are interesting people left on Twitter, but they are inundated with bots, trolls, and milquetoast careerists only hanging around because they fell ass backwards into a couple thousand followers and feel too capital committed to move elsewhere. A once rich and diverse intellectual stew has been watered down into a thin broth of increasingly questionable nutritional value. And like a lot of spicy foods, I know I used to complain about the heat while I was eating it, but damned if I don’t miss it all the same.

Bluesky has passed the proof of concept. It works. It has value. Now we just need that final cohort to make the leap and bring the heat.

UPDATE ADDENDUM (10/22/24)

So THAT happened. Most people who are going to read it have already read it, but I did want to add two notes for future reference, both of which I tacked onto bluesky threads.

1. What I actually miss is the policy/econ/metrics nerds having esoteric discussion full of rivalry and verve. Yes, it was parallel to all kinds of trash, but it was sufficiently insulated. I have quite purposely come to Bluesky because Twitter is now full of nazis, bots, and nazi bots. I promise I don’t miss the nazis
2. I’ll admit I didn’t expect the word “tension” to get parsed as “negative approbation” , trauma, horrific violence, or hate. I could blame this on the internet, but this is my fault. I’ve been around long enough I should have know better. There is a reason why I tend to write things that come off pre-emptively defensive or as if they are equivocating. I try to prevent misinterpretation, willful or earnest, of my words. I should have done a better job here.
3. People are rightfully protective of Bluesky as a space separate from Twitter. That said, there are definitely a lot of trolls and bots already in place trying to turning any discourse into a hatefest.

We’re on day 4 without electricity, so this will be a brief post. Things I’ve learned or had reinforced:

1. Prepping for the apocalypse is silly but prepping for a disaster is not. This time has been inefficient and uncomfortable, but not especially problematic. Compared to Asheville, we got off quite easy, a fact made all the clearer by our fortune to maintain a fairly normal life thanks to the most modest of preparations: a couple charged phone banks, LED lamps, batteries, a propane tank and grill, and coolers pre-filled with ice.
2. Price controls during a disaster, formal and informal, remain problematic. More than few people saw their esteem of Clemson drop as fans descended on the region for the football game and grab up every bag of ice they laid eyes on to facilitate their tailgating, a problem that probably could have been averted by simply letting the price of ice quadruple.
3. Public goods matter and government remains a superior way of providing and coordinating large swaths of them. Not to get all Nozick and Rawls on you, but think of it this way: disaster response and coordination requires scale. Any institution that emerges that is superior in providing such responses will have the scale of government, will be a de facto government, regardless of whether you call it a government or not.
4. Power lines. Bury the damn power lines. God how I miss living where the bulk of power lines were underground. I never knew how good I had it.
5. Hank was right. Propane and propane accessories are where it is at.

Stay safe everyone.

I’ve been hearing more grumbling about bad service in restaurants than usual, bundled with a growing nostalgia for when service was “better”. This could, of course, be simply a sign that my cohort and I continue to rise in age, but let’s put aside healthy skepticism for a moment and accept this observation at face value. What if service in restaurants, hospitality, etc is, in fact, lower in quality than it was one or two decades ago? I would like to suggest that this is a good sign of improving times.

In 1930, 1 in 20 households had servants in their home. “If the poorest households are excluded from the statistics, the percentage of homes with servants increases dramatically, as indicated by 1930–1931 studies of urban, college-educated homemakers, or middle-class families, from 20 to 25 percent of which had a servant” (Palmer 2010). By 1950 these numbers were cut in half and they’ve plummeted since. Imagine a elderly couple who had raised children with full-time, possibly live-in, servants have since grown to watch their children marry and have children of their own. They go out to enjoy a family meal in 1975, doting over their grandchildren while oh-so-subtly critiquing the parenting technique of their sons- and daughter-in-laws. When you see them in your mind’s eye, are they happy with the restaurant’s service? Is there anything a server or manager can do that can possibily compete with the level of service they enjoyed in their parenting and prime earning years?

I suspect that you are envisioning something similar to myself: a Karen, indefatiguable in her complaining, a gray-haired husband encouraged to leave an outrageously low tip. They enjoyed service at the level of employer and boarder, in a social construct that we would today frame as a remnant of an outdated class system. You may be annoyed that no one has refilled your water glass in 10 minutes, that the menu is a QR code, that you are expected to exceed 20% in your tip. Your disappointment, however, is positively quaint when compared to the dropoff relative to what a significant portion of the population was wholly accustomed to even 2 generations ago.

These entitled complainers that you absolutely cannot empathize with? The mechanism behind their comtemptible behavior is the same that leads you to tip 18% before leaving the Cheesecake Factory in a huff. The world has moved on, gotten better, and brought Baumol’s inescapable cost disease with it. The time and attention of humans is more expensive than ever. The pandemic brought with it a shock to the hospitality labor market that is still rippling today. A lot of people learned about the market value of their labor and those that got out first have reported that life is often better on the other side, that the pay was better than expected and their work involved immeasurably fewer misogynistic sad dads and spiraling white wine Karens. Wages have of course adjusted, but so has employment. I don’t have the data in front me, but anecdotally I’m seeing fewer hosts and table bussers, more tops per server, more lunch shifts stretched across an assistant manager and server duo. That means less service on average with a higher variance in quality.

Which is fantastic. The world is getter better and people’s time and energy are more valuable for it. Should restaurants find that the balance of profit margins increases faster with quality of food rather than service, all the better. Temporary parasocial relationships are right up there with big houses and fast cars for me: overrated traps that siphon away household resources from the things that actually matter. The ribeye served with a smile over clean linen is fine, but it’s got nothing on tacos uncermoniously dropped on a plastic table you can afford to share with someone you love.