Memes communicate a lot of information, yet they are rarely preserved and explained.

It is February 2024. A friend of mine who works in tech just posted a fleet of funny memes about his job.

I have written a research paper and a policy paper about job selection into tech.

Research paper: “Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?“

I found that enjoyment or subjective preferences are underrated in the policy literature on the skills gap and promoting STEM in America. In a presentation in the Spring of ’23, I speculated that ChatGPT or other AI-assisted coding tools would make coding less tedious and therefore more fun.

I observe in this set of memes (posted in February 2024) that ChatGPT is already embedded in coding life, and yet it does not feel like anything fundamental has changed. Workers still Google their own way to solutions (although surely that has diminished somewhat due to LLMs). The work still feels hard and the workers still feel undervalued.

With my interest in personal finance, the headline

Robert Kiyosaki, ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ Author, Says, ‘I Am a Billionaire in Debt’ — And Calls Dave Ramsey An Idiot For Encouraging People To Live Debt-Free

got my attention. I happen to know many people who have been helped by Dave Ramsey‘s sensible courses and books on managing personal finances. But I don’t know a single person who has gotten rich by following Kiyosaki’s advice. So, I decided to do a little fact checking here.

Richard Kiyosaki published his financial self-help book Rich Dad Poor Dad in 1997. The book purports to be non-fiction, and dispenses financial advice through a supposed autobiographical narrative which contrasts his well-educated, hard-working but not-rich father (“poor dad”) with the father of his next-door neighbor Mike. Mike’s father (“rich dad”) was an eight-grade dropout who owned “convenient stores, restaurants, and a construction company. “

According to the narrative, Kiyosaki learned financial business secrets from this rich dad, which Kiyosaki applied to quickly build a vast real estate empire, using the magic of borrowed money.
Rich Dad Poor Dad became a runaway success, selling over 32 million copies, and remaining on the New York Times best seller list for over six years. Kiyosaki has parlayed its success into a series of further books and related products. Kiyosaki’s narrative has fired the imaginations of millions, and made him rich through the sales of his books and other products.

I read his book back around 2000, and came away with mixed impressions. On the one hand, there was sensible advice to put your resources into money-generating assets rather than frittering it away on consumer goods. The narrative of how easy it is to make big money in rental real estate was alluring, and motivated me to delve further into the subject. On the other hand, the book was pretty short on specifics of how to actually do this, beyond recommending expensive courses offered by Mr. Kiyosaki. It seemed too good to be true, but hey, how could I argue with such apparent success?

It turns out that that skeptical intuition of mine was justified: the promises offered in Rich Dad Poor Dad are too good to be true, and in fact the whole narrative of the book appears to have been made up in order to appeal to gullible readers.

Various people have probed into the Kiyosaki story. The most extensive treatment I know of is “John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, but see also “ Shocking Revelation: Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad” Is Not Real, but a Myth Like Harry Potter “, by KSCHANG at Tough Nickel, and others.

As best anybody can tell, there never was this “rich dad” character as described by Kiyosaki. Also, there’s no evidence that Kiyosaki actually made significant money by real estate dealings, prior to making millions of dollars with his book sales (and presumably putting some of that into real estate.)

As a person who values personal integrity, I tend to be peeved when authors or screenwriters present a book or a movie as fact, when key parts of it are actually fictional.  The usual “Based on a true story“ disclaimer doesn’t cut it, since readers/viewers can’t help coming away with the impression that this is what happened, when really it didn’t (Think: Roots, A Beautiful Mind, etc., etc.).

So the dishonesty at the core of Rich Dad Poor Dad annoys me. What is more significant is that much of the advice is actually counterproductive, harmful, or even illegal. For instance, Kiyosaki recommends trading stocks based on private tips from friends in corporations; this is called “insider trading”, and people like Martha Stewart have gone to jail in connection with it. He also tells of how he can back out of contracts by inserting a clause “subject to the approval of my partner”, where said partner was actually his cat. That is called “fraud”.

Richard Emert at The Motley Fool opines, “Kiyosaki’s material is almost completely devoid of specific financial advice. Further, his material on making money in real estate appears to be little more than repackaged hype from the “no money down” real estate hucksters of the late ’80s.”
In deference to his exhaustive investigation, I’ll give John Reed the last words here (tell us how you really feel, John):

Rich Dad, Poor Dad is one of the dumbest financial advice books I have ever read. It contains many factual errors and numerous extremely unlikely accounts of events that supposedly occurred.

Kiyosaki is a salesman and a motivational speaker. He has no financial expertise and won’t disclose his supposed real estate or other investment success.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice.

[emphases in the original]

…the book goes on to deliver a pack of lies that make getting rich seem much easier than it really is and make education sound much less valuable than it really is. Basically, people want to get rich quick without effort or risk. Kiyosaki is just the latest in a long line of con men who pander to that fantasy.

… [But] to members of Kiyosaki’s cult, it matters not how many false or probably-false statements I find in Kiyosaki’s writings. They just like the guy. Personality is an appropriate criterion for selecting someone to hang around with. But it is a highly inappropriate criterion for evaluating Kiyosaki’s advice, because he’s not going to let you hang around with him and your family’s finances are serious business.

Darthmouth men’s basketball took the next step in forming the first union of NCAA athletes. What does that mean? First, some background. The NCAA is divided into Division 1, 2, and 3 schools. Division 1 schools earns roughly $16 billion per year, the lion share of the revenue. The organizing institution, the NCAA earns about a $1 billion per year, and while their website reports that they return 75% of that to member schools, $250 million dollars per year is nothing to sneeze at for doing little more than managing and enforcing a cartel. Until 2 years ago, the NCAA prohibited any compensation for athletes beyond scholarships, room, and board. Now they can earn incomes from their image rights. In the Ivy League, athletes aren’t even allowed to receive scholarships (though I’ve been told by many personal friends that financial aid packages are unusually large for athletic recruits).

Cards on the table, I’ve long felt this was the most egregious abuse of labor currently active in our country. We scream at each other over whether the minimum wage should be higher while ignoring a group of workers upon whom a cartel is enforcing a maximum pecuniary wage of zero? Is there a side of the political spectrum currently arguing for ceilings on wages for anyone? How bans on athlete compensation survived this long is beyond me, though when left to speculate upon it my mind inevitably wanders to our worst cultural sins.

Let’s assume that the union eventually comes to be. Let’s further assume that the unions of teams and sports federate, eventually forming an umbrella union of all NCAA athletes across all divisions and sports. What will happen? When economists talk about unions, they typically focus on two channels through which they can have positive effects for their members. The first is they can close shop, restricting the supply of labor, driving up wages. This is Econ 101, not a lot of controversy. The second is that they can solve a collective action problem, enabling cooperation amoung members when bargaining for wages against employers. The size of this benefit depends largely on how organized employers are. The more cartelized employers, the more effectively they can collude, the larger the expected gain from collective action on behalf of labor. As such, we can expect the largest positive effect for labor when the union is negotiating against a monopsonistic employer (i.e. the employer constitutes the entire labor market) or a perfectly organized cartel of employers.

As such, when economists argue about (private sector) unions, any disagreement typically comes down to an empirical question: how concentrated is the labor market? How much power does the employer have in the labor market? With long-standing unions, political economy and bigger picture policy cost come into play, but we let’s put that aside for now (NB: we won’t even touch public sector unions. Those are a completely different bag).

What makes the NCAA context interesting is that there is no debate as to whether the NCAA is a cartel or sufficiently well-organized to impose significant costs on labor. It’s a >$16 billion dollar industry and the mission-critical employees haven’t been getting paid any pecuniary income at all. My suspicion is that even amongst the most union critical economists you could fine, most would agree that, conditional on the continuing existence of the NCAA, athletes would benefit from unionizing.

Ok, great, but what’s going to happen?

1. Athletes will incrementally unionize.
2. Compensation will increase, even beyond Name, Image, and Licensing (NIL) compensation.
3. Scholarships will appear, in some form, at Ivy League schools.
4. Sports will remain nearly everywhere, but I expect some schools will find that costs now exceed benefits, exiting Division 1 and 2.
5. The model of compensating with “exposure” to professional scouts will continue to dissipate. You don’t need to be on national television anymore to have a scouting profile. Data and YouTube have changed the value-add of playing for a top 10 versus top 200 school, which means that compensation will become an even more critical deciding factor in recruitment.
6. Athletes will frequently exit college with savings but also having already peaked in terms of lifetime yearly earnings. Which is fine – there is no shame in never making $200k/year again.
7. The competive advantage of the the top schools in “big roster” sports i.e. football will grow. This will make already lopsided football matchups less tenable and, quite frankly, too dangerous. The formation of a collegiate football “super conference” is inevitable. It will make big money and so will the athletes. The NFL will have a true minor league, albeit one with a rabid fan base. It’s the rare win-win-win.
8. Alumni donations will create “upstart schools” in sports overnight. A single $5 million dollar donation can make you the best gymnastics program in the country overnight. University hospitals have long been funded by saving the lives of very grateful, very rich people. Don’t be surprised when a walk-on who wrestled at 149 pounds and invented the next killer app writes a check that creates a dynasty.
9. Coaches salaries will decline, often enormously. Head coach salaries will recover to some degree, assistant coach salaries will not. Coaches will become the labor class being most paid in “exposure” and “opportunity”.
10. My guess is the only losers in this entire story will be a) Division 1 football and basketball coaches and b) officials at the NCAA. I will shed no tears for them.
11. Enterprising athletes will start making money on Twitch playing the video game version of their sports, possibly themselves, against fans on their nights off. It will be awesome until 19 year olds start getting canceled for saying bad things in the heat of competitive video game competition.
12. Athletes will negotiate more favorable practice and travel schedules. Graduation rates will go up.
13. Schools won’t want to pay salaries for unused players. Red shirt rates will go down.
14. Athlete influencers. There’s going to be so many college athlete influencers.

Please, no selfies and livestreams in my class. Please. I’m just trying to get through my day.

I had some fun with my favorite editor Christy Horpedahl.

WOULD ADAM SMITH TELL TAYLOR SWIFT TO ATTEND THE SUPER BOWL?

Have you been told that economists only care about money? If anyone would tell Taylor Swift to focus on her own career, you might think it would be the most famous economist of all, Adam Smith. But AdamSmithWorks fans already know that Adam Smith was concerned with the whole person. So, would Adam Smith advise Taylor Swift to rush back to America after an exhausting concert just to cheer on a man in a football game? 

Click the link and find out!

Inter- and intratstate migration has collapsed within the United States over the last 60 years.

This observation has been lurking in the not-completely-the-background of labor economics for 20 years. The best summary of the literature, by Jia et al, came out in the JEL last year. It’s a very useful and relatively complete treatment. I think a lot about migration these days, mostly asking about the determinants of our reservation wage of migration i.e. how much of a wage increase would someone have to offer you to pick up and move to an entirely new community.

If we take the above figure at face value, it would appear the reservation wage of migraton has increased for Americans. Quite a bit, actually. Of course, it is also possible that American’s no longer have to migrate to find a better job or wage, but that seems a hardly universal phenomenon over that last 50 years. Work from home has only had traction for a decade now at best. Labor markets aren’t as concentrated as they perhaps once were, loosening the monopsonistic lid a bit in a lot of markets, but at the same time the labor share of revenues hasn’t increased, in fact it’s decreased on average. So why aren’t people moving? I have some narrow, testable, answers that I am pursuing as research projects, but I also have a broad hypothesis that seems supremely untestable for the moment, sitting as it were in that thinkpiece uncanny valley between narrow research and podcast cheaptalk.

The concept of diminishing returns is an easy intuition to adopt. We all know the first bite of dessert is the best, the last the one most encumbered with regret. Economic growth remains a miracle, but it’s still true that nothing gained at the margin of the modern developed world will ever compete with those first steps out of subsistence. Very nearly every form of household capital and consumption in the modern work is characterized by some amount of diminishing returns, but that doesn’t mean they are diminishing at the same rate.

There are some goods for which there are few, if any substitutes. Demand for these special goods can be quite inelastic – we’re willing to sacrifice a lot to maintain a certain level of consumption. There are also goods that are quite complementary with one another, their value to us increasing as they are bundled together. Complements are powerful, putting together the right mix of consumption is quite literally the recipe for a better life. Complements, however, are often part and parcel to a cautionary tale. If something is a powerful complement to everything else in your life, we might find ourselves saying things like “I can’t live without it.” No amount of wealth in the world can survive being multiplied by zero.

There are few, if any, substitutes for friends, family, and our broader social network. Some goods cannot be consumed alone. If the sociological literature is to be believed, Americans are lonelier than ever. Both our deepest and most casual friendships have diminished in number. Relationships with neighbors are nonexistent, our ties to communities at a premium. That might, at first blush, make it sound like moving should be less costly– why stick around to maintain relationships that you don’t have. But on the other hand, if new relationships are harder to form than previously, then the relationships you already have are worth more than ever, to be protected jealously. Your only friend is, by definition, your best friend. No one wants to move away from their best friend.

Putting it all together, if personal relationships are an inelastic demand good that is complementary with a large chunk of our consumption bundle, then the price, the shadow price, we are willing to pay for it is going to go through the roof in the face of a negative supply shock. In a world where relationships are sudenly at a premium, you will be willing to forego a lot of additional income in order to preserve a small network in which you have a lot of social capital.

In two weeks half the country is going to be watching the Superbowl with a 3 or 4 friends, maybe 10 or 20. Thanks to innovation and economic growth, most people will be watching it on a 55 inch high definititon television with decent food and beverages. What about game would change if the host got a 20% raise? The TV might get a a little bigger, the snacks less fried, the beer more imported. What if the host moved two years ago? Would they have friends close enough to invite over? $15,000 worth of catering is a poor substitute for having someone to high-five.

The more I think about our lives and how little economic pressure, survival pressure, there is to find a 10% higher wage in the modern developed world, I’m surprised anyone migrates at all.

Folks are dunking on a tweet and, indirectly, the underlying research connecting mosquito nets to the degredation of seagrass meadows.

I’ll be honest, the implication that free mosquito nets are net negative for poverty and health sent me into that special kind of rage that can only be fomented by someone on the internet being both condescending and egregiously wrong at the same time. Do I even need to go over why this is bad? Why malaria prevention at a continental level outweighs hypothesized marginal seagress loss? I didn’t think so.

What I want to talk about is is subfield tunnel vision. A common piece of advice passed on to each generation of PhD students is to become a genuine expert in something. If you write a dissertation on the effect of malaria nets on elementary school attenance in Uganda, then you should become an expert, on the bleeding edge of all related-research, on mosquitos, nets, and primary education in Africa. As you career takes shape, the both the questions that strike you as important and the opportunities presented to you by institutions and administrators will shape your research. Bit my bit you will be shaped (and occasionally sanded down) into an ever-narrower expert. And that’s fine, that’s the story of incentives to specialize that comes for us all (NB: if your mind went to one of the public intellectual generalists you admire, do note that being a generalist in the modern world is very much its own niche specialty).

Specialization is good, but do take care that while your expertise becomes narrower that your view of world remains wide. We all know the relevant cliche about all the world becoming a nail whilst holding a hammer, but this is about about the rationalizing of tools and techniques. This is about how your specialization fits within the world and, more specifically, how the consquences of choices you might advise stand in the grand utilitarian calculus.

The authors of the paper in question are the Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Conservation Officer of Project Seagrass. These are people who have dedicated their lives to the preservation of seagrass meadows and, in turn, ocean health and the global stock of fish. Should we be surprised that their paper’s abstract closes with “We conclude that the use of mosquito nets for fishing may contribute to food insecurity, greater poverty and the loss of ecosystem functioning”? No, we should not. First, you could argue that they are just putting, in words, the implied signs of their analysis, and not the relative magnitudes. Maybe they aren’t implying mosquito nets are a net negative. You could be generous and argue that all they are trying to say is “Mosquito nets are great, but as soon as the malaria vaccine is universally distributed we should ditch all these nets because the costs will outweigh the benefits.

I don’t think they are, though. They lean heavily on Short et al (2018) and their claim that fishing nets are the primary use of freely provided mosquito netting. That Short et a result appears to be based almost entirely on an online survey with 113 respondents. The implication is that the massive reduction in malaria specifically attributed to the distribution of free mosquito nets is in fact a mirage, that these nets are instead finding their way into the ocean as improvised capital for small scale fishing operations (“artisanal fishing”, in the parlance of the paper), with the resulting consequence of catching additional juvenile fish at the margin, harming the future stock of fish.

The second part of that equation seems entirely feasible! Unintended costs happen. What I want to emphasize is that the authors are narrowly focused on establishing the cost of future fish in seagrass meadows while also being overly credulous of what is, I’m sorry, a ridiculously crappy survey that dismisses the enormous benefits of those nets to save human lives, especially children under the age of 5.

I don’t think the authors are being selfish, have ill-motivations, or have been bought off by a global conspiracy of wealthy fishery magnates. I just think they have succumbed to a bias that afflicts every scholar at one time or another, myself included. Gatekeepers won’t publish your paper in top journals, fund your research with needed grants, or invite you to prestigious conferences unless you hype your work to the absolute maximum of feasible importance. Spend a couple years as the conductor on your subfield’s hypetrain and maybe you start to believe it just a wee bit too much. Your subject of concern remains concrete, the questions imperative, while everything else increasingly fades into the realm of the abstract, the consequences negotiable.

As for the twitter commenter being dunked on, I just think it’s classic overeagerness to denigrate everything touched by someone you find odious. SBF is a bad person, did bad things, has bad hair. Sure, but maybe don’t? Maybe leave the most successful malaria prevention endeavor in the history of the world out of your public disgust for a <checks notes> young cryptocurrency embezzler? Don’t let your deserved anger for a genuinely bad person make you dumber at the margin. Bad people already impose costs on us all. Letting them skew your view of everything they touch just makes their societal footprint bigger.

There is no shortage of advice that falls along the lines of “If you aren’t eating at least one disappointing meal a weak/month/etc, then you aren’t trying enough new recipes or restaurants.” It all falls along the lines of increasing your risk of experiences that are subpar relative to what you already know you like so that you can increase your probability of adding something new to your portfolio of “likes” while also getting that one-time dopamine hit that comes from personal discovery.

It’s a good framing and broad set of advice. I endorse it.

What’s interesting though is that there’s a greater breadth to the foundational concept. Our lives are sufficiently short that we really don’t have that great of an idea of what we like and don’t like, especially for forking decisions that don’t allow for easy exploration of the counterfactual. At the same time, dedicating your life to the repeated pure act of discovery carries a certain…shallowness. To perpetually be on the lookout for the new and better is to never invest in the experiences that fill us with satisfication and joy. To get really good at doing what makes us happy. To get really good at being happy.

So where’s the balance? I don’t know and I am reasonably certain that’s at the core of the human condition, so I don’t think I going to come up with the answer in a blog post. But it strikes me that cultivating a certain taste for disappointment, not unlike a particularly peaty Scotch, is an incredible adaptation towards a better overall lived experience.

Which is to say that, after 30 years of telling anyone who would listen that I would never want a cat, that I refuse to get a cat, that a cat would offer no value to me, I absolutely love having a cat. My cat rules and it’s left me wondering what other things am I absolutely convinced I have no interest in that would fill my life with greater joy. What are things that I think I can’t stand, that other people love, that I might actually find incredibly-well suited to my tastes. A random list of things that, at the moment, I have no interest in:

1. Motorcycles
2. Cricket (the sport)
3. Lasik
4. Traveling to (actually) dangerous countries
5. Committing crimes
6. Running for office
7. Eating any dish that includes raw chicken

That’s in no particular order, but I can’t help but wonder if there is something on that list I should give a go. City council? Visiting the Middle East? Larceny? To be clear, I’m not going to do any of those things, but that doesn’t me I shouldn’t. But there is a balance to having experiences you might not like, you probably won’t like, and, every few years, you think you definitely won’t like. Just in case.

The anecdotes in Hedrick Smith’s “The Power Game” may be 40 years out of date, but the core insight into the US system of governance remains the same: power is fluid, fleeting, and indeterminant. A shocking variety of people can, for a given moment, find themselves to be the most powerful person in the US. Sometimes it is in fact the president, but it can just as easily be a block of senators, or a particularly flush and motivated donor. It can be losing candidate in a three-way race who, simply by considering dropping out, finds a moment of irresistible political leverage. Power in our republic is a constantly changing and uncertain mantle, almost as much projection as reality. I would also argue that it is the central selling point of our system: people think twice about how to go about swinging a sword if they’re not sure who’ll be swinging it tomorrow and what end they’re actually holding on to today.

Which brings me to plagiarism.

Bill Ackman wants use AI to investigate academics for plagiarism at scale. The scale here is key, the implication that AI will allow a wide net to be cast. Plagiarism never struck me as a particularly widespread problem in high level research, but I could at least feasibly be wrong and I’m in no position to tell him how to spend his time. What is fairly clear to me, however, is that there is amongst some the perception that academics have too much power. The ambition behind, or at least the gleeful anticipation for, these hypothesized plagiarism purges is to reduce that power and influence.

But where does this perception come from and why plagiarism? Power is fluid, based as much on perception as reality. In an age when the quantity of information is never in question and the price is approaching zero, the short-side of the market will always be quality, credibility, and context. Maybe we’re entering into a golden age of power and influence for academic scribblers, and that’s a reality some would like to head off at the pass. An accusation of plagiarism could stunt a career. A mass accusation of “rampant” plagiarism could diminish the broad credibility of scholars, reducing the perceived quality of the information relayed and the context they provide for policy and social discussions.

The US has three branches of federal government, four military branches, and 50 states, all sitting on top of thousands of municipal governments. As far as spreading power goes, that’s a pretty good start. If the 3,982 degree-granting institutions in the US have to be added to the registry of power, that’s fine, but I’ll have to admit that my students don’t seem all that awed by any power I’m currently wielding. Going by the focus of the media and Ackman, maybe we only need to add institutions in Cambridge, MA to the registry of power, but that doesn’t make power any less fluid and fleeting. It’s just political whack-a-mole, which I would remind everyone is a game where you can smack one source of power down, but you can’t control where power pops up next. Maybe power shifts to Silicon Valley. Maybe a cluster of TikTok influencers whose politics makes the median MIT professor look like Barry Goldwater. Be careful what you wish for…