Parenting

Reviews from Joy

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Lately I’ve been experiencing personal advertising barrages. Sometimes, I actually buy a product online before realizing that I had been living in a fake information environment complete with fake AI-generated product reviews. What I want for myself right now is to hear more product reviews from real people. I’m not against earning money from affiliate links, but I will earn nothing from this post. Here’s what I’m using right now.

Sourdough Bread Baking gear kit – I got a kit with “bannetons” (if you’re not interested, don’t ask) back when I decided to get into sourdough baking. The appeal was the savings from buying it all in a bundle (i.e. “dough whisk,” etc.). The investment is worthwhile if you are going to make your own sourdough bread. As I wrote earlier, this is a big investment of time. I do not recommend starting the process at all if you will make homemade bread less than 5 times a year.

Homemade Driveway Pickleball Court – if you have a paved level driveway or large patio, you might be able to create a non-regulation-sized Pickleball court. It used to be that billionaires could have their own tennis court and the rest of us could have ping pong tables. Now there is a Third Thing. You will likely need to rig up nets as a backstop by piecing together sports gear meant for baseball backstops. The actual mid-court net can come cheap from Amazon (I went with 14 feet wide). A small Pickleball court is fun for children/teens, but adults will prefer going to a real court where you can hit the ball much harder. Pickleball facilities are appearing all over the country and many cities now provide free courts in parks and gyms.

Canvas LMS and New Quizzes – Samford University uses Canvas, and I have always liked the interface. Finally, in the year 2026, I have decided to build a new course using “New Quizzes” instead of Classic Quizzes. The rollout of this product has been so awkward, but if you are starting from scratch, Item Banks and “New Quizzes” works well now.

The book Misbehaving by Richard Thaler is about his career and the field of Behavioral Economics. I think anyone could learn from how the field evolves in the face of new evidence. It’s been helpful for me with my project on LLMs and financial decision making.

Codex – Thanks to Codex, I can finally do something teaching-related that ChatGPT had failed to do for me in summer of 2025. Codex can write straight to a subfolder on my computer, with coaching. For technical details, follow Aniket. What I used to say to people who wanted to “learn computer programming” is that it’s impossible to learn from reading books. Build something that you care about, even if it is just a tiny website. I would say the same for Codex. Use it to build something, even if that’s something for your personal life like a sourdough bread baking scheduling assistant.

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Breakfast Pudding

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

When I was a kid, my family didn’t get JELLO puddings – or any puddings for that matter. As an adult, I realized that a lot of those are just sugar, cornstarch, and stabilizers. So, they became less appetizing.

You’re going to laugh at me.

A few years ago my wife and I went to a nice little breakfast restaurant for brunch in old town Fredericksburg, VA. I got this coconut milk chia seed parfait. I was blown away. That seems silly to say, but it was really nice.

For years we spoke longingly of that chia parfait and we’d speculate about when we might go there again. It was one of those conversations that married people have.

“Hey, remember that really good thing?”

“Yeah, it was really good.”

“We should try that again sometime.”

Then one day, while visiting Virginia, we noticed that the restaurant had closed. It wasn’t surprising because the restaurant had only been ‘fine’, except for the healthy and delectable layered treat from years past.

Now we have a handful of kids and we try different things periodically to make the morning routines go more smoothly. Having a responsible treat to entice juveniles from their room isn’t the worst thing that we’ve tried.

My wife, in her laudable creativity, refined a new creation that’s inspired by our now frustrated longing for a nice chia parfait.

Below is a recipe for peanut butter chocolate chia seed pudding. Basically, you mix it the night before and stir it again in the morning and it’s ready to go. It’s a crowd pleaser.

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The Arithmetic of Family Punctuality

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

My children are getting more capable. They get more responsibility that comes with the independence that capability implies. Specifically, when getting ready in the morning they like to leave so that they arrive at school just barely on time. Except, when something comes up, they are rushed, flustered, short-tempered, and tardy. They lament that “if only the unforeseeable event X hadn’t happened, I would have been on time”.

It doesn’t matter what X is. Maybe they forgot to pack a lunch, or set out their clothes, or they have a flat tire on their bikes, or… whatever. The specific time-consuming event is unforeseeable. But, that *any* time-consuming event will occur is very foreseeable. What’s a Bayesian to do?

Before we even start the analysis, let’s acknowledge that being perfectly on time for some event usually involves stress and a lack of preparedness. Yes, you were ‘on time’, but given the probability of heavier traffic, difficulty finding a parking spot, or whatever, we know that tardiness is just one unforeseen event away.

Individual Punctuality

How long does it take to get somewhere? It takes both travel time and time preparing to depart. Let’s just generally call this ‘preparation’ time. Let’s assume that you complete everything that you would complete. That means that you aren’t forgoing a shower or breakfast or whatever lower priority you might choose to forgo to arrive at some obligation punctually.

Random events can occur either as you travel to work or as you prepare to depart, but let’s place the random travel events to the side and focus on what one can do to get out of the house ‘on time’. In my personal case, my children have a 30min interval during which they can arrive at school. They almost never arrive in the first 15min of that interval. That’s more of a policy choice than an accident. They don’t want to sit in a cold gymnasium for 20min if it’s avoidable. So, their planned arrival time has an effective 15min window.

Here is the problem. A time-consuming random event, X, is a right-skewed random variable. Discretely, the modal day includes X=0min. Though the most common delays are greater than 0min. See the distribution below. A 0min random event occurs 35% of the time. But, a time-consuming event happens 65% of the time. So, if you try to arrive exactly on time to your obligation, then you will be punctual 35% of the time and you will be tardy 65% of the time. That’s not a good look and not a good reputation to build – and that’s apart from building a habit of imprudence and the material consequence of not being ready for the task at hand.

Someone with just enough insight to be dangerous might say ‘Ah! Instead, leave with enough time to accommodate the expected unforeseen event’. Mathematically, that’s the weighted average. In this case, that’s six minutes. So, if you plan to arrive 6min early, then you will be punctual – on average. But even that’s not really what we’re after. We’d like to be on time for a preponderance of the days. Building in a 6-minute buffer does two things. 1) Every time that there is a 0min or 5min unforeseen event, you get to your destination 6min or 1min early. That’s good for your nerves, performance, and reputation. But, that also means that you’re late whenever there is a 10min, 15min, or 20min unforeseen event – and those occur 35% of the time!

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Take Your Kids to the Movies

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Economists talk about the ‘Covid Shock’ in 2020 because it was a mostly unpredictable event that had big, measurable effects. People spent a lot less time being in close quarters. Especially hit hard were movie theaters, and other events spaces.

In the several years prior to Covid, “Recreational Service” industry sales had been chugging along, growing at healthy annual rate of 3.4% (inflation adjusted). This category of services includes clubs, sports centers, theaters, and museums. In the blink of an eye, the covid shock drastically reduced spending in that category by more than 60%. See the graph below.

Unfortunately, we don’t have disaggregated series for the components of “Recreational Services”. But we do know that movie theaters were already well past their hay-day. Theaters had been closing and consolidating for more than a decade and ticket sales were down. Many give credit to the popularity of streaming video services and other digital media alternatives. Covid added insult to injury.

Now, going to a movie theater is exceptional. As a teenager in the early naughts, I’d go to the theater easily half a dozen times per year. Now, I don’t think that I’ve gone six times in the last five years. Real growth in the entire recreational service category has grown annually by an anemic 1.8% since 2019. It’s not dead, but that’s also the total industry. I’ve heard the news stories of sports events making a big comeback. I’ve not heard anything like that for movie theaters.

I went to the movies recently and it is not what you remember.

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A Rant about Long Run Problems and Passe Solutions

Zachary Bartsch5 Comments

If you listen to or read major economists discussing what they think are big-picture problems, then their list usually includes three topics: Fertility, Culture, & the Fiscal Health.  On the wonkier side, you’ll also hear that housing scarcity and affordability is a problem, but let’s stick with the first three.

Fertility

People are deciding to have fewer children for a variety of reasons. In no particular order, the reasons include greater access to financial institutions, more popular female education, higher female wages, lower infant mortality, and falling religiosity. Some also speculate that housing affordability, safety regulations, and social safety nets contribute too.

What’s wrong with lower fertility? In an objective sense, there is nothing wrong. But, in the sense that people value similar things, we are in somewhat uncharted territory. Realized fertility is dropping across the globe. We know that economies of scale increase productivity and real wages. We also know that technological innovation comes from having more minds engaged with economic problems. It’s possible that labor productivity rises faster than the productivity that we lose with smaller scale, but it’s an open question. What happens to the liberal societies and polities when the liberals fail to persist? These are big geopolitical concerns.

Culture

People seem to be more fragmented religiously and culturally. Social scientists used to discuss Judeo-Christian norms more often. Sometimes you’d hear about English or Roman legal tradition or enlightenment values. But now, there seems to be very little in terms of common social cohesion. In the USA, the general common culture seems to be ‘smile and be nice’. That’s not the worst common rule, but it’s not enough to hang our hat on for a capable liberal state.

The lack of cultural cohesion isn’t my own particular concern – public intellectuals in economics and elsewhere feel like there is a problem. There is a mix of reasoning behind the concern. Some people are worried about transmitting values to the next generation, some are worried about how people behave when no one’s watching, and still others are worried about simply lacking a Schelling  point that coordinates large scale economic cooperation.

Fiscal Health

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The Economic Story of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton, is a classic 1939 children’s book about a man, Mike Mulligan, and his beloved steam shovel, Mary Anne, who are replaced by modern machinery. They get one last chance to demonstrate their worth by digging the cellar for a new town hall in a single day.

This book is more than just a nostalgic children’s story with a happy ending. This is a tale about economic history, comparative advantage, non-pecuniary benefits, labor and capital heterogeneity, and, of course, transaction costs.

Here’s some background. Historically, excavating or earth-moving equipment was powered by steam. Much like a steam engine locomotive (train), a steam shovel burns coal to heat water in a boiler, creating steam that can drive pistons that operate the mechanics. The result is machinery that can move a greater volume of soil at a faster speed than humans with simple hand shovels. Advancements in oil extraction and refining and internal combustion made the steam methods obsolete. Diesel or gasoline made earth movers safer, faster, and larger all because there was no need to build high pressures from boiling water. Steam pressure in the field takes a lot of time and is dangerous. 

Here is how the story goes. Mike enjoys his earth-moving work with his steam-shovel and is proud to be more productive than hand-shovels. One day, diesel, electric, and gasoline-powered shovels arrive. They’re bigger and better than Mary Anne. She is now obsolete. It’s unclear whether Mike’s skills are transferable to the newer equipment, but he implicitly prefers working with Mary Anne.  Together, they can’t compete in the urban areas where the value placed on quick excavation is high. So, they flee to the countryside.

The text doesn’t say why the newer shovels aren’t in the countryside. Let’s address that first. The new shovels haven’t spread to the rural areas because the opportunity cost is too high. Diesel Shovels are expensive and the owners/operators need revenue from many jobs in order to pay for their equipment in a reasonable amount of time and earn a positive return. Rural areas don’t have the same willingness to pay for as many projects, so less specialized capital is limited by the smaller extent of the market. Clearly, a higher cost of capital – the cost of the loan that pays for the diesel shovels or the alternative uses of the resources – accentuate the necessity for project volume.

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Vaccine Variety

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

The flu and covid-19 vaccines don’t work super well. Both vaccines permit infection and transmission at quite high rates. The benefit from these vaccines come largely from reductions in mortality or severe symptoms conditional on infection. The covid-19 vaccine is itself especially risky or ineffective depending on the age and health of the individual. Plenty of people eschew vaccines.

I live in Collier County, Florida where there have been 61 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. I have since learned that Measles is EXTREMELY contagious. It floats around the air and on items and just sort of hangs out and waits for a place to replicate. I’ve also learned that symptoms include a fever, eye irritation, possible brain swelling, severe dehydration, and a characteristic rash. The severe dehydration easily puts people in the hospital, the eye irritation can lead to permanent vision loss, and the brain swelling can be acute, or a symptom delayed by 5-6 years, which can also be fatal. I’ve also learned that having the vaccine, which is usually administered in two doses, provides about 97% immunity. The vaccine works so well, that the department of health recommends no behavioral change among the vaccinated population when there is a measles outbreak. Barring unique circumstances, measles immunity can persist for a lifetime.

Unfortunately, a large segment of the anti-vaccine mood affiliation retains the salience of the covid-19 vaccine characteristics. Other vaccines and diseases in the typical pediatric schedule are not similar. Most of these prevent infection >90% of the time (TDAP is low at 73%), prevent transmission, reduce mortality when there are breakthrough infections, are effective for years or decades, and are extremely safe for all age groups.

The risks of disease versus the corresponding vaccine are orders of magnitude away from each other. The tables below summarize the data (with sources). I did not double check the source on every single figure. If you glance below, then you’ll see why: Even if the numbers are closer by 10 or 100 times, vaccines still look really good.

First, mortality: The data is divided by disease and age group, and provides mortality rates for both the disease and for the vaccine. The numbers are proportions, conditional on infection or vaccination. There are a lot of zeros in the vaccine mortality rates and certainly more than for the diseases. For example, a measles infection is 10,000 more lethal than the MMR vaccine which prevents it. In fact, all of those zeros in the vaccine rates reflect mortality that is so uncommon, that the estimated one out of every 10 million is just rounded up because researchers don’t think that the risk is zero.

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Update on School Valentines

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I have principles. One of them is that school Valentines are indulgent and bad for the environment.

I have written Markets in Everything for school Valentine’s

And here are some quotes from Do Less for Preschool

Just fail, people. Don’t even put “crazy sock day” on your work Outlook calendar…

Oh no. If AI lifts the constraint of time, then what we are going to get is more crazy sock days. To stay ahead in the status competition, families will have to do Bluey-Crazy Sock Day every week. The ocean will become a thick soup of polyester Bluey-crazy-socks, size 3T, worn only once.

On principle, I did low-effort Valentine’s last year. I spent as little of my own time and money as I could. My kids wrote their friends’ names on the paper things.  Smugly, I imagined that I’d saved the dolphins in the tuna nets and helped some other mom feel like she was doing okay.

Who do you imagine is upset? Not the other moms. My kids. The older one especially feels in his body that failing this test in February of 2026 will result in expulsion from the tribe and death in the outer darkness beyond the reach of the campfire.

Guess what I care about more than dolphins? We will do more this year.

Preschool kids do not care and should not be asked to care. I still believe that parents and daycare directors should do less for preschool. Truly, I see no reason, at all, for a preschool dress up day or Valentine’s Day party. Can someone think of the dolphins before it’s too late and the kid grows up and starts caring about the status wars?