Lightning Strike Out My Back Door

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

I know the Big News at the moment is how to evacuate people from Kabul who should have been evacuated weeks ago; as with Vietnam fifty years ago, there never was realistic hope that the U.S. backed regime could withstand an utterly determined foe without our military support. I am old enough to remember the frantic Vietnamese trying to cling to the last helicopters leaving the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, because again the American authorities did not evacuate in time. But I have nothing special to offer on this topic except deepest sympathies for all the poor Afghan progressives who will be rounded up, killed or (if they are lucky), “reeducated” by the Islamic fundamentalists. And who knows what the thousands of Al Qaeda aligned operatives, captured at the cost of thousands of American soldiers’ lives, will do now that they have been freed from detention.

So, shamelessly turning inward – – a couple of nights ago during a thunderstorm we heard a loud crack of thunder which was simultaneous with a bright flash of lighting. Either our house or some nearby tree had been struck. I stuck my head out the window to look for fire, but saw none.

Later, we saw long vertical rips in the bark of a pine tree right beside our row of houses. I’ll share photos below. Here is what we see from the house side. There are vertical rips in the bark near the base of the tree, and also visible going up about 30 feet to a fork in the trunk. I could not see any marks or broken branches above that.

On the far side of the trunk at the base there was an even wider gash, with shredded bark on its sides, and also trench in the ground extending away from the tree. Presumably the lighting instantly boiled the moisture in the bark and dirt, and the sudden steam made the bark and soil explode.

Since it does not take much of an electrical jolt to paralyze your diaphragm, these markers of the lightning strike are a good reminder as to why we are advised to NOT stand under a tall tree during a thunderstorm.

When to weigh in on human suffering

mdmakowsky2 Comments

The US began the process of pulling out of Afghanistan. The Taliban has begun rapidly retaking in cities. In doing so, it quickly has become apparent that conditions on the ground are not safe for anyone who aided the US military, journalistic, or perhaps even humanitarian efforts. People are rightfully terrified and the rapid evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Afghani’s is at this moment a global priority.

I am extremely comfortable and confident in the belief that the US should, without question, expedite the emergency accommodation and resettlement of several hundred thousand Afghani families, much in the way we resettled roughly 130,000 Vietnamese after the war in Vietnam (only faster). Yes, I believe it would be a boon to our economy and our society in the long run, but that is largely besides the point. We should welcome these men and women into our society because it is unequivocally the right thing to do, it is a moral responsibility we took on when we put boots on the ground there and left them there for a decade.

But that’s pretty much the limit of any insight I could possibly hope to have and, as such, it’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the egregious smattering of take, hot takes, re-takes, W-taking takes, and L-giving takes that is currently proliferating on social media and the standard outlets at the moment. No, I am not going to link to any. No, I am not going to refer to anyone by name. Yes, this is one big, long-form subtweet.

Unless you are a bona fide expert in military incursions, occupations, or exit strategies, I do not care about what you have to say. Unless you have spent a non-trivial portion of your career covering or studying how to cope with a humanitarian crisis, I don’t value your opinion. Unless you can lend genuine insight into what the best course of action is at this moment, nobody needs to hear from you.

While they may be trivial in effect, you are well within your rights to express sympathy for the victims of this terrible moment and to extoll your leaders to ease and prevent as much suffering as possible. But trying to raise your status in this moment with anything remotely resembling an “I told you so” or claim to “victory” for your political identity du jour is horrifying. Please don’t equate this with pro-gun reprisals of “Now is not the time for politics” every time there is a gun-related tragedy, either. Rather, consider this a reminder that this moment, like nearly everything else, is not about you, your politics, or what you tweeted in 2011. We are all better served when we keep that in mind.

Maybe I’m overreacting. It’s easy to write such things when the crisis of the moment puts you squarely on the sidelines. And it’s not like an 800 word scolding calling out exactly no one is going to help anyone. But there are expert, scholarly, and journalistic voices that are being drowned out by the droning, self-congratulatory thirst for public approbation and status. And if this snotty little post rings in ears and reminds just one person that “this isn’t about you,”, and they choose to leave even one bad tweet in drafts, then it’ll be worth it.

But please, support any and all of your representatives that want to take action to bring as many refugees from Afghanistan to the US as is possible. I don’t know much about Afghanistan or wars, but I am confident it is the right thing to do.

Home for a Millennial

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

We read a children’s book called Home for a Bunny. In springtime, a bunny wants to find “a home of his own. A home for a bunny.” The bunny goes around talking to other forest creatures and considers crashing with them. It keeps not working out. Finally, the bunny finds another bunny to pair off with and they live happily ever after in a hole. (The implication is that the interloper is male and he finds a woman who already has her own place.)

Judging by the current housing market, the country’s currently largest generation has decided it’s time to find a home.

According to Jerusalem Demsas on the Macro Musings podcast last month, part of the reason houses are selling so fast today is that many millennials want to buy their first home now. They are competing against each other, especially for starter homes near growing cities.

The problem with making blanket statements about millennials is that we are a diverse group. For example, we are majority-white like Boomers, but only 56% are white. We went to college at higher rates than previous generations, but still less than half of American millennials graduated from college.

Millennials who could afford to consume wanted experiences, not stuff. I never saw peers brag about owning a pricey watch, but I have seen many photos posted of soul-searching adventure trips to Thailand. As I said, one should not generalize because it’s only the wealthiest millennials who could afford such things. But the wealthiest millennials are the ones who could have become homeowners. Instead they sought out the next avocado toast served with a view of a hip city core. Covid restrictions forced a set of people who had always been on the run to evaluate their home lives, or lack thereof.

Where had the largest generation been living prior to summer 2021?

Here’s a link to an SNL skit “The Millennials Skit” that sums up the complaints I was hearing about my own generation when I was in my early 20’s. If you can believe this, I did something stupid in my early 20’s. With so much hyperbole surrounding us, many don’t have a good sense of the facts.

In 2000, most millennials were in their parents’ houses, right where everyone expected them to be. The US population overall grew substantially since 2000. Many local zoning restrictions didn’t allow for concurrent rapid growth in the housing stock in the places with job growth.*

As millennials aged into adulthood, they were not buying houses or forming families at the rate previous generations had. PEW reports, based on Census data, that millennials are more likely to live with their parents than previous generations.

The group of millennials who were most likely to be living with their parents were men without a college degree. Most millennials were not living in their childhood bedrooms pre-Covid. Once again, it’s hard to generalize. Almost half already owned a home. Many were renting along with a friend or romantic partner. Whereas a majority of Boomers were married as young adults, less than half of millennials currently are. College-educated millennials are more likely to be married.

Millennials have kids later, so that would normally be associated with not buying houses before the age of 30. Some of the causality runs from the high cost of housing to the decision to put off having children. There is a long-running debate over whether millennials are different because they have different preferences from Boomers or because they are relatively economically disadvantaged. The combination of low wages for some and high home prices for many is an economic explanation for the initial hesitancy to purchase a house. Despite what the SNL skit said about us, most millennials are working now. Slower household formation is not due to chronic unemployment.

The highest rates of living-with-parents were in expensive cities like New York and Miami. If you can live close to a good jobs hub without having to pay the high rent, then you can save money. With that personal savings, now that we are older, many millennials would like to jump into home ownership. 

This week I went into a local restaurant that is patronized by adults like me. On the chalk board was a poll “Backstreet Boys or NSYNC?” People were gleefully making chalk tick marks to vote for their preferred band. That’s just one of the subtle signs I have seen in the past year that millennials are in charge of the places I visit.

*Read Jeremy on zoning and the Horpedahl Zone of Affordability. Also see The Complacent Class on how America didn’t make it easy for a diverse set of millennials to thrive.

Penny-Pinchers Gonna Pinch

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Text books say that there are two major problems with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). First, accounting for changes in quality is difficult. Second, the CPI is calculated by assuming a fixed basket of goods is consumed over time. For both of these reasons, the rate of inflation that is implied by CPI is typically considered to be about 1% overestimated.

Imperfectly accounting for quality improvements causes higher measured inflation because the stream of services that a product creates for the consumer has increased – even though the product is nominally the same product. For example, the camera on my smart-phone is now good enough to record a high-quality Youtube video, whereas it was of mediocre quality on my previous phone.  My life is better-off with the better camera. But the increase in my quality of life isn’t measured by the CPI. The CPI does, however, make note that I paid a higher price for a phone.

Further, people don’t consume a fixed basket of goods over time. Even if we stopped the introduction of all new products and maintained the quality of all current products, people would still change the composition of their consumption due to price changes among related goods.

When people get hot and bothered by inflation, they often appeal to people who are of less means and who would find higher prices more burdensome. For that reason, below is a graph of some calorically dense and roughly comparable food staple prices (from the PPI).  You can put a protein on top of any one of these and call it a meal: pasta, flour, potatoes, & rice.

Let’s say that a consumer consumed equal parts of these in January of 2020. The CPI assumes that the consumption basket remains constant and plots a weighted average. In such a case, price rose 2.3% through July 2021. But in real life, penny-pinchers gonna pinch. If our consumer is particularly Spartan, then he will always consume the cheapest option – he treats the different foods as perfect substitutes. The Spartan price of consuming *fell* 22.3%. To be clear, the CPI assumes that the consumption composition remains unchanged, while the consumer’s actual basket is responsive to price changes.  Even if a consumer considers these goods to be imperfect substitutes and is willing to cut any particular type of consumption in half in favor of the cheapest alternative, then the price fell by 10%. In fact, a consumer who is at all responsive to prices will always have a cheaper basket than the headline CPI, all else constant.

In conclusion, be careful with your money. Spend it well and seek out alternatives. Your flexibility determines how much money you’ll have at the end of the month. The headline CPI number impacts only the most passive consumer – and even then, budget constraints gonna constrain.

Generous Health Insurance Makes Employees Stay

James Bailey1 Comment

The idea of “job lock” is well established in the academic literature- employees leave firms that don’t offer health insurance more often than they leave firms that do. But this literature has always measured employer-provided health insurance as a simple binary: either they offer it or they don’t. In fact employers vary widely in the generosity of their plans, both in the quality of the insurance and in how much of the cost is paid by the employer. Some employers pay all of the premiums, some pay none, and most pay part:

Data are from the Current Population Survey, which uses top-coding to protect privacy (values greater than 9997 are reported as 9997)

In an article published last week in Applied Economics Letters, my colleague Michael Mathes and I combine two supplements of the Current Population Survey to test whether employers who contribute more towards health insurance see their employees stay longer. Perhaps not surprisingly, we find that they do. We run lots of regressions to establish this, but this simple fit plot tells the story best:

What we found more surprising was the magnitude of this effect: a thousand dollar increase in employer contributions to health insurance is associated with at least 83 additional days of job tenure, compared to less than 10 additional days for a thousand dollar increase in wages. We conclude that:

For employers trying to increase retention, increasing contributions to health insurance appears to lengthen employee tenure far more than increasing wages by a similar amount.

Why the difference? Probably employees rationally valuing $1000 in untaxed contributions to health insurance above $1000 in taxable wages. Why don’t employers shift more compensation away from wages and toward health insurance, given that employees seem to prefer it? Here I’m less sure, and they could simply be making a mistake, but one possibility is that they worry about increasing their costs as couples whose employers both offer insurance choose the more generous one for a family plan. Another is that while generous health insurance plans are better for retention, higher wages could be better for attracting new employees, who tend to be younger and for whom the salary number could be more salient.

Beer, Hot Dogs, and Inflation

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

The latest inflation data for the US has been released, and the headline CPI-U annual increase of 5.4% is once again raising worries that high inflation could be a permanent part of the landscape for the near future.

My personal opinion is that the picture is much too muddled now, between temporary supply issues and low bases for 2020 prices, to say much about the medium-term picture. I think we’ll have a better picture by the end of the year. Still, it’s worth drilling down into the data, as we have done in the past on this blog, to understand some things about economics, prices, and how price changes are impacting real people.

Certainly the prices of some goods are rising at alarming rates. Many of these are related to automobiles and transportation generally, but some categories of food have rose a lot in the past year too (though groceries overall are only up 2.6%).

But I want to talk about two categories of consumption: beer and hot dogs.

Actually, my co-blogger Zachary has already written about beer. And using the producer price index, he found that canned beer is actually cheaper than it was a year ago. If you like canned beer, rejoice! And for all beer at home, the CPI shows only a 1.8% increase since last year, after a similar small 1.6% increase last July (not much of a base effect… a clue for later!).

But not all Americans consumer alcohol. So let’s talk about that most American food product: the hot dog.

Why should we care about hot dogs? Read on.

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Liquid Smoke Flavorings Give Less Carcinogens Than Smoked Meat and Fish

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

Someone forwarded me this article by Superfoodly, Is Liquid Smoke Flavor Safe or Cancer in a Bottle? This article seems to have useful health information. I will unpack the physical basis for this below, but the key takeaway is:  smoked foods (i.e., have been exposed to actual smoke) like smoked turkey, and especially fatty meat/fish like salmon, have appreciably more carcinogens than food flavored by “liquid smoke” type flavorings.

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Age ___ Do you smoke Y/N Will you get vaccinated Y/N

mdmakowsky3 Comments

Jonathan Meer wrinkled my brain:

“Hospitalizations for COVID are almost entirely confined to those who are not vaccinated, often at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars…why should the vaccinated bear those financial costs? Insurers, led by government programs, should declare that medically-able, eligible people who choose not to be vaccinated are responsible for the full financial cost of COVID-related hospitalizations, effective in six weeks….Standing up for your beliefs means being willing to bear the consequences. Otherwise, it’s just cheap talk.”

In summary, anti-vaccination positions are effectively being subsidized by taxpayers, members of insurance pools, and the vaccinated. It’s an expressive form of moral hazard. It’s selfishness, signaling, and group identity as club good. It’s cheap talk. It’s at least 5 different chapters of your microeconomics textbook. It’s a great article and I want to talk about it.

  1. “Cheap talk” doesn’t mean “costless.”

“Cheap talk” means you don’t have sufficient costs or benefits committing you to follow through on the future behavior you are promising. But I think a lot of people have painted themselves in a very public corner. If you spend 6 months telling everyone who will listen that Covid is just the flu, that the vaccines are dangerous or don’t work, then you’ve got a lot of social capital within your peer network (or audience) that will be destroyed if you publicly change your mind or are observed getting vaccinated. For most private citizens, the answer may be found in a hat and fake moustache. Nonetheless, the talk isn’t that cheap. Only a 1/3 of unvaccinated people claimed they’d be more likely to get vaccinated for $100. What Meer proposes is to “uncheapen” their talk at a far greater level, where $25k to $100k price tags are not out of the question. I think such a policy would work specifically because it creates an expected incentive greater than either peer stigma or any feasible reward policy for vaccination, and at levels large enough where loss aversion may likely kick in. Funny thing about people – we don’t plan for low probability events very well, often treating ~1% negative events as an impossibility. I know it may sound crazy, but a 10% chance of being impoverished may actually be a more powerful incentive than a 0.5% chance of dying.

2. It’s really hard to write complete contracts i.e. your health insurance company desperately wishes it could have included vaccination in your premium calculus.

“Knightian Uncertainty” i.e. when you don’t know what you don’t know remains one of the all-time “obviously important, but hard to operationalize” concepts in an economic analysis. If you write an economic model where people are purely backward looking you will get a lot of pushback for making your agents too myopic, too stupid. At the same time, if anyone out there has started a museum of apartment leasing contracts, I have no doubt they have grown at a near perfectly linear rate over time, as tenants forever explore the space for unanticipated holes and landlords continue to supplement their contracts in response. Every new paragraph in a lease tells the story of a previously unanticipated cost. Your health insurance is the same. For decades you’ve had to tell them if you smoke. Here’s a prediction: In the future you’ll have to tell them if you’ll receive FDA-approved vaccines.

3. Given the state of modern democracy, even for problems where government mandates are the first-best solution, we may have little choice but to rely on market- and community-based solutions going forward.

One of the big advantages of government mandated solutions over market alternatives is completeness i.e. you can make everyone do it (with concomitant provision, monitoring, and punishment). What the pandemic has made clear is that simply isn’t the case anymore, for the simple reason that our politics are so polarized and, more importantly, so efficient in polarizing any policy. Any issue where a universal mandate is the optimal policy will immediately be polarized into for/against constituencies, which will slow down and eventually weaken any possible mandate.

I’m honestly not sure we could pull off the small pox vaccination program today, and it is arguably the greatest government program in world history. That was the first-best means to eradicating small pox. So what’s the second-best means to coping with Covid? If health insurance wrote separate premium contracts for vaccinated and unvaccinated customers, maybe that could get us to herd immunity. Medicare and Medicaid could have similar contingencies for reimbursement, but I suspect it’s hospitals that would end up on the hook. If hospitals refused care to unvaccinated Covid patients, I don’t think it would go down very well politically.

What this leaves are the smaller groups within our nesting doll of associations (state, local… church, synagogue, university, Rotary club, hockey league, pub trivia, the eight people you always see on the bus). It may be within these smaller, more voluntary groups, with their easier entry and exit, that we may observe that necessary accepted coercion to produce club immunity. And while vaccination mandates as a series of parallel club goods is clearly inferior to its provision as a monolithic national public good, its still superior to purely independent production.

4. Could HMO’s have their moment?

Health Management Organizations (HMOs) have been pretty stagnant for a while. Skepticism over management incentives to provide optimal healthcare has always lingered, combined with the fact that health insurance does seem to work pretty well for the people that have it (it’s the 28 million Americans that don’t have health insurance where the bulk of problems lie). Given limits on in-network care and the difficulties assuring prospective members that physician and patient interests are aligned, HMOs have always had a hard time presenting a compelling sales pitch relative to traditional insurance.

The club nature of HMO’s, however, may give them a new structural advantage in the post-Covid world. They can exclude people from membership, from taking up limited resources and sharing space with potentially vulnerable members. Would I at this very moment prefer being sent to a hospital that only allowed vaccinated people to work or receive care in it? Yes, I would. If Covid variants become seasonal, if we’re entering an age of pandemics, or if we’re simply watching the emergence of costly medical luddites as a significant portion of the population, then a lot of us might give HMO’s a second look. (NB: This ability of HMOs to “exclude” is, of course, also their potential downfall. The power to exclude is, historically, almost always abused. The idea that healthcare would become a domain not just characterized, but driven, by the power to exclude should cause trepidation. If you thought there were going to be solutions without tradeoffs to the problem of vaccine refusal, get used to disappointment.)

5. Would universal healthcare (or “Medicare for All”) mandate vaccinations? Can they?

I’m genuinely curious about where policy proponents sit on this. If vaccinations are required to receive care, then it requires denying sick people care. Healthcare policy is a great topic to argue about on twitter, but it’s all cheap talk until orderlies are shoving dying patients out the door.

I’m not the kind of person that reads a lot of philosophy, but that’s really what this boils down to– moral philosophy. It’s easy to call yourself a “libertarian” until your personal freedom not to get a shot in your arm is literally killing millions. It’s easy to call yourself a “socialist” until the newly created levers of power to coerce hundreds of millions into receiving a drug today will set the precedent for the “next Trump” to use those same levers for their own nefarious ambitions. There’s always a risk, a trade-off, no matter how many capital letters you use to yell at me.

It’s all cheap talk, but that doesn’t mean it’s costless.

Reading The Family Firm

Joy Buchanan7 Comments

Emily Oster’s newest book on parenting dropped to my Kindle this week. I recommend it to parents if your oldest child is between 2 and 8 years old.*

Her first book in this genre (she invented this genre) was Expecting Better. In that book, pregnant women could get clear answers. Oster could put a precise estimate on the risk of, for example, eating sushi while pregnant. Then it was fairly easy to decide, for yourself, if you would eat sushi.

Right now, I have decisions like this: My 6-year-old says sushi is “yucky”. If I force him to eat it, will he get into a better college? Should I send him to bed without any food if he won’t eat the sushi I made for family dinner?

These are the questions that us, the original Expecting Better crew, now have. The answers are usually vague. That might bother you, if you’d like exact instructions for parenting. Still, I found this book helpful for thinking about parenting. Oster is not going to give you an absolute yes or no on video games for kids. She will summarize all of the relevant studies. Then you have help to set your own boundaries for your own kids based on your Big Picture family goals.

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