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service at the level of employer and boarder, in a social construct that we would today frame as a remnant of an outdated class system.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.

The following are notable posts from 2024, in descending order by the number of views this year.

1. Young People Have a Lot More Wealth Than We Thought Jeremy Horpedahl was first to this scene. American Millennials, on average, have money. Perhaps this is becoming common knowledge now among folks that read The Economist. The US is getting gradually richer, and the average young adult is benefiting. You can see more from Jeremy by following him on Twitter/X.
2. Civil War as radical literalism   Mike Makowsky writes, “There’s a million war movies, most of which have arcs and metaphors strewn throughout. The problem with making a moving about a hypothetical civil war in the modern United States is that the audience will spend so much time looking for the heroes, villains, and associated opportunities to feel morally superior that it seems almost impossible to deliver an effective portrayal of what it might actually feel like to wake up to a US civil war…”  
3. Is “Rich Dad  Poor Dad” a Fraud? Scott explores whether a popular finance book is based on a false premise.    
4. Is the Universe Legible to Intelligence? I (Joy) do philosophy. It also has practical implications. Can machines outsmart us, for better or worse? How smart can anything physical be. Maybe, as @sama says, “intelligence is an emergent property of matter…” However, maybe “intelligence” only goes so far. We have many posts on artificial intelligence this year.
5. How To Drive a Turbocharged Car, Such as a Honda CR-V This is one of those pieces by Scott that people find through search engines when they are looking for help.
6. Grocery Price Nostalgia: 1980 Edition You can use our search function to find everything from this year about the topic of inflation.
7. The US Housing Market Is Very Quickly Becoming Unaffordable
8. Predicting College Closures James reflects on closing universities and what indicators might help stakeholders like parents and faculty anticipate the next event.
9. Counting Jobs (Revisited) Jeremy did something that might have sounded boring at the time. Yet, soon afterwards there was serious interest in the question of : Did 818,000 jobs vanish?
10. Why Avocado on Toast? As an avocado toast person, I loved this. I’m glad many other people found  Zachary’s post interesting.
11. Recovering My Frozen Assets at BlockFi, Part1. How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Fraud Cost Me.
12. Why Don’t Full Daycares Raise Prices? The cost of childcare is an important issue. James wrote this from personal experience, and I pointed out something similar before.
13. This post only got medium traffic in terms of the number of views this summer. Now that we know who the candidate will be, it’s interesting to look back and see a vindication of betting markets. Who Will Be the Democratic Presidential Candidate? Follow the Money (Betting Markets)
14. Honorable mention to Mike’s post from 2022 that continues to get many search hits: Why Agent-Based Modeling Never Happened in Economics

At this point, the EWED authors have each written enough words to constitute a book. Watching this blog grow and flux with the rest of the internet has been fascinating.

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Interpreting policy talking points from people running for office is difficult for a variety reasons, but it essentially boils down to the fact that voters often do not want the outcomes that would be produced by the policies they will in fact vote for. Candidates, in turn, must find a way to promise policies they will either do their best not to deliver or, if they do deliver them, said policies will be bundled with other policies that will mitigate their effect.

Interpreting the true intended policy bundle being signaled by a candidate is fraught with traps, not least of which our personal biases. If I want to like a candidate, for social or identity reasons, I will have a tendency to interpret their policy proposals as part of a broader, unspoken, bundle that I like. If I don’t want to like a candidate, perhaps because they are a petty, boorish lout whose principle aptitude appears to be grifting at the margins of legality and leveraging the high transaction costs of our legal system, then I will subconsciously interpret each policy proposed as part of a more insidious unspoken bundle.

How should voters and pundits navigate an environment where information is limited and bias is largely unavoidable? I don’t know, but here’s how I try anyway.

1. Assume every candidate has basic competency in appealing to their base.
2. Assume every candidate wants to appeal to the median voter.
3. Do not assume anyone knows who the median voter is.
4. Assume both candidates and their advisors have the same capacity to assess how their respective bases will react to a proposal and how it will actually impact them, but do not assume they know how the median voter will react and be affected.

In essence, candidates will always have a deeper familiarity, with greater repeated interactions, with their voter and donor bases. They know how they will react and how they will actually be impacted. Platforms will be designed around navigating contexts where popularity and expected impact are in conflict. What this means is that, in the aggregate,

1. A candidate stands to do the most damage when advocating for policies that will aid their base at the expense of the median
2. A candidate will create the most uncertainty when the desires of their base are at odds with the consequences for their base.

For example, assume both major parties are advocating for trade restrictions. Let’s call them the Plurality party and the Majority parties. Trade restrictions will hurt the median voter, full stop. The Plurality party, whose indentity constitutes a minority of the total population but the largest share of the population of any subgroup, stands to gain the most through policies that extract from others in a negative sum game. It will be easier to take their candidate’s policies at face value because of uncertainty around the median voters preferences, in part due to voter uncertainty about how policies will affect them.

The Majority party, on the other hand, is more fractured in the subgroups that constitute its more numerous whole. They can be thought of an encompassing group coping with the high costs of intragroup bargaining. Their greater numerical advantage in elections is partly, if not wholly, nullified by difficulty solving collective action problems and their need to solve positive sum games whose benefits are spread too thinly to excite their base. Further, the Majority party is inclusive of the median voter, about which there is greater uncertainty. The Majority party, as such, has greater incentive to rely on a form of subtextual deception. To win elections, they will need to propose the policies that the various elements their base wants while also bundling them with other policy elements that will mitigate their consequences in the aggregate and leave options open downstream as consquences for the median are made manifest. Interpreting proposals of the Majority party demands more Straussian reading, which also means that greater care is needed in monitoring your own bias. Because all complex political economy aside, sometimes parties do in fact just have bad ideas.

Good luck.