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.

This speech is still the best advice for anyone in the academic or artistic line of work.

https://thecomicscomic.com/2015/07/23/dana-goulds-just-for-laughs-keynote-address-of-2015-youre-doing-it-now/

If audio doesn’t work for you at the moment, here’s a transcript:

This post might seem lazy. Because it is. But it’s also a measure of my accumulated wisdom. Not so much that I’ve perfectly internalized the wisdom of this piece in my bodhisattva-like personification of enlightenment. Rather, it is a demonstration of my wisdom because I have written and posted it in lieu of an anger-filled rant about the horrors of politicians pandering to their base in which I imply vast swaths of humanity are less-than-perfect people. Nope. Don’t need it. This is better. Listen to what Dana has to say and think about how it applies to your career.

Rather than engage in meaningful labor on this hallowed day, I will instead make a prediction: if a significant tax on unrealized capital gains is introduced, the following markets will enjoy increased prices:

1. Art
2. Accountants

Now, what will define the art in question is beyond me, but I imagine unrealized gains from art will be easier to quantify if the art in question exists as anything more than one of a kind, so I expect definitively “one-of-a-kind” pieces i.e. classics will experience the lion share of increased demand.

As for accountants, the demand for training in how to properly ledger assets to remain outside the bounds of quantifiable equity assets will prove a boon to anyone with an accounting degree. Accounting talent for establishing loan collateral two degrees removed from equity will similarly grow in value.

I have additional predictions, but putting them forth under my name and defending them in a public forum would require a meaningful amount of labor, which I am not willing to provide today.

1. Networking remains underrated, even though people talk about it. I think it’s underrated because when people do a good job with it they don’t notice that they are doing it. Whereas, you don’t, for example, teach a class and not notice that you did it.
2. I’m reading Hillbilly Elegy in paperback. With the new edition in hand, what I noticed first was the pages of breathless reviews from every outlet you could ever want praise from (NYT, WSJ, Vox, Rolling Stone, etc.). How did he do it? Did “they” come to him? Did he go to them? What on earth happened? See above point #1. Halfway in, I agree with the blurb from The Atlantic that it is a “beautiful memoir.” Although I’m sorry not to be supporting independent bookstores more, my strategy these days is to buy used paperbacks through Amazon. The books themselves are nearly free and shipping still costs less than Kindle. (This is how AI can help us reduce trash – get the stuff we have already manufactured to the people who want it.)
3. “Fewer students are benefiting from doing their homework: an eleven-year study” Via LinkedIn post by Ethan Mollick. Students might even learn less from homework if they use ChatGPT. Relatedly, SAT standards might be declining even if scores are not.
4. Shruti Rajagopalan discusses talent in India
5. “The rise of cultural Christianity” (The New Statesman) via Sam Enright

Election season tends to spoil watching sports that have ad breaks, but one positive (for me at least) is that there is constant pedagogical fodder for my public choice & political economy class, particularly with regards to the median voter thereom. The biggest gripe with the MVT that people just insist on bringing up is the minor detail that it is obviously always wrong, which just misses the point entirely. Politics is neither fast nor slow. It’s more geological in that is slow to change until it isn’t. It can be painfully slow to watch coalitions 1. Coalesce 2. Cooperate 3. Fall apart 4. Return to 1. But politics is also opportunistic, which means responses to context can sometimes manifest relatively quickly. I would argue that nothing can provoke a more stark change in a political coalition than when their opposition abandons a position or brand that appeals to the median voter.

I tend to view Trumpology the same way I view Sovietology: it’s interesting to consume out of curiosity but we probably won’t have a deep understanding and know who was right until 20 years after the fact. Warren Nutter was right about the Soviet Union being an industrial ruse, but in his time he was mostly dismissed. My mental model of Trump and his team is that he’s a bad-faith business person who leverages transaction costs to the hilt and whose narcissism makes him effective at assembling imcompetent yes men. But, and I can’t emphasize this enough, we don’t really know what’s happening internally, there’s just too much noise in the information stream. What we can effectively observe, however, is the policy bundle and platform messaging on which he is compaigning.

That bundle is overwhelmingly negative. Beyond traditional scapegoating, the picture being painted of the current United States is bleak. Pessimistic, dystopian imagery appeals to plenty of people from the left and right extremes, but I struggle to think of a time in US history where the median American did not believe in America as both a good idea and a good place to live. A lot of people when discussing the MVT focus on the prediction that both parties will, in a vaccuum, arrive at identical platforms, an idea that seems false on it’s face. This is not unlike the prediction of physics that a feather and a bowling ball will fall at the same velocity in a vacuum – to demostrate that they don’t from the top of your apartment building is to both miss the point and place the people around you in intellectual (if not mortal) danger.

The most important insight in the MVT is the gravity of the median. Or, in the case of the current election, the speed with which one party will reclaim any branding opportunities around said median when the opposition abandons them. I have no doubt there are some veteran leaders within the RNC that are fuming over the long term costs of letting the Democratic party claim the mantle of the more patriotic and optimistic party. These are the kind of brands that are hard to take from the opposition- you pretty much have to wait for them, in a moment of foolishness or chaotic happenstance, to release their grip. Which I suspect the Republicans have.

I have no doubt the Democrats will find a way to do makes similar mistakes with this or other positions in the future. Politics is chaos and the median voter is far easier to find on an abstract two-dimensional curve than in reality. But that doesn’t mean we can pretend the median voter isn’t out there and that they don’t matter. It’s a simple model that may always be wrong, but it will never lead you astray.