Falling obesity; the red-state boom; U.S. housing supply; men avoiding college; China's economic goals; implicit taxes on the poor; Garcia interviews Krugman and Cowen interviews Scanlon
The thing you didn't mention that makes me even more skeptical of the men avoiding women point: men do worse in education at EVERY level. k-10 education has been compulsory for most living Americans lifetimes, yet even when it's genuinely not possible for men to avoid spaces with women in them they still do worse. Lower grades, lower attendance, lower test scores, more disciplinary issues, higher failure and drop-out rates. It's not like men are killing it educationally and then deciding that girls are icky and becoming plumbers.
I honestly find it a bit cruel how dismissive some people are about the failure of men in education relative to women. There's a kind of weird irony to it as well, with progressives at times basically telling men to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and fix their own problems.
This is only my impression, but I think there is a certain degree of quiet schadenfreude among women. Whenever we see women succeed where men are failing, we just can't help but think of the millennia in which women were born 100 yards behind the starting line. We would have to be saints or clueless not to think, "So, how does it feel to struggle buddy?"
Of course, from a rational perspective all of society is harmed when any portion of society struggles and is left behind. It's just really strange to find men among the disadvantaged.
Perhaps men can take a clue from the history of repressed societal groups and realize that their future is primarily in their own hands. Men could focus on setting up research institutions to learn how to best educate themselves, or to suggest new roles where men can excel in society. African Americans, women, and others have pioneered the path to crawling out from under the rock of societal indifference. They have shown that it can be done. In closing I would like to note that 70% of the members of the US Senator are still white men.
The schadenfreude is easy enough to explain, but I think it's important to recognize that the explanation isn't a justification. The boys and young men who are struggling today are not the same men who held women as property 50+ years before they were born. The girls and young women celebrating the reversal have never experienced a world where women didn't have the advantage in general education.
(Unlike many other forms of structural oppression, institutional sexism doesn't leave a generational legacy of inequality; both boys and girls today have grandmothers or great-grandmothers who couldn't open their own checking accounts and grandfathers or great-grandfathers who benefited from the post-WWII GI Bill.)
As someone who used to be perceived as a woman in STEM, I have substantially more sympathy for women celebrating domain-specific victories in areas where they're still underrepresented, like STEM and electoral politics. There's usually a reason for the underrepresentation, and at least the women leading the wave have usually experienced that reason. That said, the sex ratio of the Senate doesn't really tell us anything about the political career prospects of a young woman today, given that the median age of a US Senator is 65.
Has the concentration of well-paid bourgeois jobs in a handful of superstar cities with unaffordable housing helped create the Andrew Tate problem, as such jobs are seen by young men as a scarcely better prospect than other more inherently winner-take-all career paths (such as entertainment, sports or criminal activity)?
And that's before we even get to the possibility that powerful bad actors are supporting Tate for their own purposes: perhaps those supercars that Tate loves to pose with actually belong to Russian oligarchs?
Given the context of the thread I was assuming that you were referring to boys doing worse educationally, and that your argument is they were dreaming of success in winner-take-all fields (such as the kickboxing where Tate apparently won success) rather than being content with the regular middle-class existence that academic success would presumably lead to.
I'm referring to Andrew Tate's engagement metrics, as well as how many of his viewers trend young, especially among school-age boys. They are taking their social cues from Tate, who performs a grotesque masculinity that his audience emulates.
I recall someone arguing that STEM subjects were where men were keeping up with women, and so those were the fields where they become more over-represented as they left subjects women were dominating.
Alongside Ozempic, Covid might also play a role in falling obesity rates after 2020. The correlation between obesity and Covid mortality was widely publicized, and millions of Americans know someone who died. Perhaps a growing proportion of Americans started taking their own weight issues more seriously in the fallout of the pandemic. Obvious counterargument would be no one took the other other health risks of obesity seriously before, but the sweep of Covid through the country was a far more visceral experience for many.
Food and eating out also got a lot more expensive, and sometimes unpleasant.
I am not a huge fast food person, but going to McDonalds could at one time been thought of as a treat or guilty pleasure. Ordering at a kiosk, or going through drive through only to be directed to then park and wait 10 minutes for your cold food is more of an ordeal than any sort of pleasure.
Eating out was sort of an affordable luxury. It is neither affordable nor a luxury
The plausible story was always "there are deeper aspects to fitness than obesity", and I haven't heard any evidence one way or another on how covid affected that. People who don't move their muscles enough to be comfortable walking for 20 minutes are going to have cardiovascular problems. Obese people who get a good amount of exercise often can be comfortable walking for 20 minutes without eliminating their obesity. If you're skinny, it's very easy to be comfortable walking for 20 minutes. It's much easier to report statistics by obesity level than it is to report statistics by comfort walking for 20 minutes, so we got a lot of statistics showing covid was worse on the obese - but it would be more interesting to know if obese people who get exercise did better or worse than skinny people who don't exercise.
That seems unlikely to me - the chart seems to show obese people falling from 42% of the population to 40% of the population, but covid didn't even manage to kill a single percent of the population, and the people it killed weren't all obese. (Given the anti-correlation of obesity with age, and the extremely strong correlation of age with covid death, I would not be surprised if covid deaths were less obese than the general population, even if they were a lot more obese than the people of the same age distribution.)
Sure, but I think you might have misunderstood my point. I wasn't suggesting the decline was solely a factor of deaths in the obese cohort. We know there is a statistically significant positive association between obesity and Covid mortality and serious illness across all age groups. During the height of the pandemic, the two main risk factors pushed daily through media were age and obesity. I'm suggesting a role for behavioural changes spurred on by knowledge of the correlation between obesity and Covid mortality, and compounded by the experience of seeing the death toll rise around you (obese or otherwise). A mix of pressing incentive to lose weight, and doctors more inclined to discuss weight issues with patients. I haven't seen any data one way or the other, so it's just a hypothesis. Only large scale survey I've seen suggested as many people lost weight as gained it during the first year of the pandemic, which in itself might suggest a levelling off in the general population, but I don't recall it segmenting by starting weight.
I would be very skeptical if the media discussions of obesity as a risk factor were more effective than the previous several decades where basically all messaging was about how obesity is bad and fat people are ugly. One more risk factor on top wouldn’t make that much difference.
The much bigger difference was probably the sudden change in dietary and behavioral habits, which likely caused some people to gain weight and some people to lose weight. (I had no need to lose weight but throughout late 2020 and early 2021 I was several pounds lower than I was in earlier or later times.)
Yep. That’s why I was agreeing to the post to which I was responding. But during the pandemic itself obese people also might have been more frightened of going to medical offices or hospitals because of virus presence as well, or marginally less likely as a population to see a physician at any time.
I suspect this strongly drives the result - also note that the survey itself depends on medical visits, which may have been disproportionately lower among obese people because of the pandemic-driven publicity about the greater Covid mortality rate for obese people. I also suspect that covid mortality had significant effects on our economic statistics that we have not yet unpacked.
Yeah this seems like something being missed here as well. Even those who didn’t die lost a lot of weight, because that’s what happens when you get very sick.
You are confusing "not wanting to be around women" (implausible) with "not wanting to be like women" (plausible). You don't see a ton of men signing up to be nurses or elementary school teachers just because they could hang out with more women.
The "red state boom" is really a rural state boom, as it was during the FDR administration with rural electrification and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Except it was a blue state boom then.
The Ozempic comments are so interesting and don’t seem to correlate politically. Far left or far right the scolds are in full force in exactly the same way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an issue like that .
They're everywhere on other platforms like Twitter/Reddit.
Their advice is usually "just diet and exercise" which is highly imperfect (eg because exercise makes you hungry). It also doesn't fit the evidence, which is that obesity appears to happen slowly over time and appears to be genuinely caused by geography - people in lower altitudes in the US are more obese and lose it when they move to higher altitudes.
IIRC there's a theory with good evidence that it's caused by environmental lithium exposure.
How much is geographical variation in obesity historically-driven, in that (for example) a region with a recent tradition of heavy manual labor (which obviously necessitates a high-calorie diet) is likely to experience a surge in obesity if the demand for said manual labor collapses due to economic changes?
In the case of the South, the "heavy manual labor" would be agricultural rather than industrial work.
Good point about the military records providing a decent natural experiment, but are you sure you meant that higher _altitudes_ (as opposed to _latitudes_) are better?
(I suppose if you did mean the former, it would explain why some Latin American capitals -- Quito, Bogotá and Mexico City included -- are in high-altitude inland locations, even though this would make them more difficult to support logistically.)
When you bring up natural experiments it brought up another example to me, this time from British politics. The effect of Rupert Murdoch's "Sun" newspaper on turning Britons against the European Union was demonstrated by the fact that the city of Liverpool is more pro-EU that its demographics would suggest: Liverpool boycotted the "Sun" for a reason (its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster) that is absolutely nothing to do with the EU.
I think the biggest reason more women go to college than men is because men have more reasonably (or high) paying non-college job options in construction, metallurgy, various trades, etc. (I’m not saying women literally can’t enter such professions, but there are definitely factors that make them a lot less likely to.)
Random feedback. I read everything you write on substack, but I realize that I actually dread the 5 things email a bit ... because they're more than 5 things. It's just too much (and in this case, exceeds the gmail link, so I have to do a click and open in web). It's interesting stuff, but just 5 would feel ideal.
<Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued…>
I’m not entirely against this argument; there’s that recognized phenomenon of “pink-collar” jobs that keeps men from entering traditionally feminine-coded professions (nursing, teaching, flight attendants, etc.), although I think that’s mostly due to cultural lag and tends to moderate after a couple generations. Not that it ever goes away completely—some guys just won’t do certain jobs—but it slowly gets better over time.
<Anyway, the obvious solution to this is to make benefits phase out more slowly, so that the implicit tax rate is lower. There are various ways to do that — less means-testing, more unconditional benefits, and so on. But they all cost a lot of money, and they can make the tax system look less “progressive” on paper. So this is a very tough problem.>
Economically, it’s not a tough problem. Means-testing usually doesn’t save much money, especially when you take into consideration the disincentives to work that benefit cliffs inevitably create. Or the class/racial resentment that emerges when the working class is split between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. Therein lies the value of universal benefits, except as you mentioned they’re (A) way more expensive and (B) unpopular among center-left neoliberal types who don’t want to spend taxpayer money on public goods for rich people.
An investor in apartment buildings has a rate of return he needs to earn to make the project viable. When prices are high, as rents are now, you can make money building apartments. When rents are low, you can’t make money building apartments so you don’t build many of them. This is of course, a very city specific phenomenon. The cost of fighting Nimbyism it’s just another input that goes into the calculation.
I feel "a single parent with a single pre-K child" is an unfortunate choice for the welfare cliff study to model, since we probably want such a parent to focus on caring for their pre-K child and not be boggled down too much by their job, and the chart seems to show that this goal is well served (notwithstanding costs related to wading through the system to get the welfares).
“. . . red states just tend to be the places that allow companies to build stuff, while blue states and blue cities have a bunch of rules that prevent construction:”
If this is true, how is it blue states are significantly richer, contributing taxes to Washington, whereas red states are more dependent on government support? The Rustbelt is an even more interesting story because it has a lot of idled manufacturing facilities and infrastructure.
In most cases, this is because blue states built a lot of things several decades ago that are still paying off now, and are thus coasting on the kinds of riches that you get from already being rich (and thus still being the places where you get the benefits of agglomeration).
There's a sub-class of red states that are just idling on government support, and another sub-class of red states that are building. The latter set are going to become rich (and are becoming blue).
Maybe because investment bankers (and the like) tend to live in blue states. They do not manufacturer anything, other than a whole lot of rent collected off everyone else.
Do you really think investment bankers make up that much of blue state economy? Give me a break (regardless of my own similar opinion about investment bankers).
Even the following post by Carty makes an assumption about that.
I would be very curious to see actual data on the economies of the blue states and how much of the economy is based in what areas. I suspect the result will surprise a lot of us.
And remember, the initial comment by John on relative taxes vs government support is based on taxes. Many IP protected corporations have done a great job of eluding taxes for years, so hard for that to be the answer to John's comment
Blue states vary there but they do tend to allow office buildings and single family homes. What they don't like is factories, apartments and nuclear power plants.
"I wonder what other personal problems we could reframe as technological challenges to be solved rather than personal failings to be shamed. How about addiction?"
Katie Herzog has a book coming out about quitting drinking with Naltrexone. The Atlantic had a big article about Naltrexone in...2014? I thought for sure Naltrexone was going to be a major blow to Alcoholics Anonymous, but it just never really took off, despite many success stories. Maybe another burst of publicity for it will help. It's dirt-cheap and very effective if used with operant conditioning, aka the Sinclair Method.
The thing you didn't mention that makes me even more skeptical of the men avoiding women point: men do worse in education at EVERY level. k-10 education has been compulsory for most living Americans lifetimes, yet even when it's genuinely not possible for men to avoid spaces with women in them they still do worse. Lower grades, lower attendance, lower test scores, more disciplinary issues, higher failure and drop-out rates. It's not like men are killing it educationally and then deciding that girls are icky and becoming plumbers.
I honestly find it a bit cruel how dismissive some people are about the failure of men in education relative to women. There's a kind of weird irony to it as well, with progressives at times basically telling men to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and fix their own problems.
This is only my impression, but I think there is a certain degree of quiet schadenfreude among women. Whenever we see women succeed where men are failing, we just can't help but think of the millennia in which women were born 100 yards behind the starting line. We would have to be saints or clueless not to think, "So, how does it feel to struggle buddy?"
Of course, from a rational perspective all of society is harmed when any portion of society struggles and is left behind. It's just really strange to find men among the disadvantaged.
Perhaps men can take a clue from the history of repressed societal groups and realize that their future is primarily in their own hands. Men could focus on setting up research institutions to learn how to best educate themselves, or to suggest new roles where men can excel in society. African Americans, women, and others have pioneered the path to crawling out from under the rock of societal indifference. They have shown that it can be done. In closing I would like to note that 70% of the members of the US Senator are still white men.
The schadenfreude is easy enough to explain, but I think it's important to recognize that the explanation isn't a justification. The boys and young men who are struggling today are not the same men who held women as property 50+ years before they were born. The girls and young women celebrating the reversal have never experienced a world where women didn't have the advantage in general education.
(Unlike many other forms of structural oppression, institutional sexism doesn't leave a generational legacy of inequality; both boys and girls today have grandmothers or great-grandmothers who couldn't open their own checking accounts and grandfathers or great-grandfathers who benefited from the post-WWII GI Bill.)
As someone who used to be perceived as a woman in STEM, I have substantially more sympathy for women celebrating domain-specific victories in areas where they're still underrepresented, like STEM and electoral politics. There's usually a reason for the underrepresentation, and at least the women leading the wave have usually experienced that reason. That said, the sex ratio of the Senate doesn't really tell us anything about the political career prospects of a young woman today, given that the median age of a US Senator is 65.
I blame Andrew Tate.
Has the concentration of well-paid bourgeois jobs in a handful of superstar cities with unaffordable housing helped create the Andrew Tate problem, as such jobs are seen by young men as a scarcely better prospect than other more inherently winner-take-all career paths (such as entertainment, sports or criminal activity)?
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2008/08/tastes-for-tournaments.html
And that's before we even get to the possibility that powerful bad actors are supporting Tate for their own purposes: perhaps those supercars that Tate loves to pose with actually belong to Russian oligarchs?
Yeah, that's a reach.
The Andrew Tate problem has existed all the way back to the speciation of Homo sapiens, specifically the male sex.
Andrew Tate's appeal is to an atavistic sense of masculinity that males feel is real, while women and queers are in a conspiracy to emasculate them.
How are you defining "the Andrew Tate problem"?
Given the context of the thread I was assuming that you were referring to boys doing worse educationally, and that your argument is they were dreaming of success in winner-take-all fields (such as the kickboxing where Tate apparently won success) rather than being content with the regular middle-class existence that academic success would presumably lead to.
I'm referring to Andrew Tate's engagement metrics, as well as how many of his viewers trend young, especially among school-age boys. They are taking their social cues from Tate, who performs a grotesque masculinity that his audience emulates.
OK that explains it: you were looking at misogyny as the issue while I was looking at male anti-intellectualism.
I recall someone arguing that STEM subjects were where men were keeping up with women, and so those were the fields where they become more over-represented as they left subjects women were dominating.
I went to a mostly engineering school back in early 1980s, and men were 85-90% of the students
But there was an all women school right next door ...
Harvey Mudd and Scripps?
correct.
Not to mention the other co-ed schools there. And that undergrads didn't exactly have a lot of reasons to leave Claremont, especially without a car.
I figured there can't be _that_ many examples of that situation. :-D
Alongside Ozempic, Covid might also play a role in falling obesity rates after 2020. The correlation between obesity and Covid mortality was widely publicized, and millions of Americans know someone who died. Perhaps a growing proportion of Americans started taking their own weight issues more seriously in the fallout of the pandemic. Obvious counterargument would be no one took the other other health risks of obesity seriously before, but the sweep of Covid through the country was a far more visceral experience for many.
That's something I hadn't thought of!
Food and eating out also got a lot more expensive, and sometimes unpleasant.
I am not a huge fast food person, but going to McDonalds could at one time been thought of as a treat or guilty pleasure. Ordering at a kiosk, or going through drive through only to be directed to then park and wait 10 minutes for your cold food is more of an ordeal than any sort of pleasure.
Eating out was sort of an affordable luxury. It is neither affordable nor a luxury
Interestingly, people are eating out a lot more than before!
https://www.fticonsulting.com/insights/articles/americans-eating-out-complain-about-inflation-high-rates
If your food is cold, that just means you don't own an air fryer.
Are in-car air fryers common in the United States?
More useful than another half-dozen cup holders ...
This has great merit
I agree. Covid was a fire hose of water blasted at the "obese bodies are healthy bodies" bs ....
The plausible story was always "there are deeper aspects to fitness than obesity", and I haven't heard any evidence one way or another on how covid affected that. People who don't move their muscles enough to be comfortable walking for 20 minutes are going to have cardiovascular problems. Obese people who get a good amount of exercise often can be comfortable walking for 20 minutes without eliminating their obesity. If you're skinny, it's very easy to be comfortable walking for 20 minutes. It's much easier to report statistics by obesity level than it is to report statistics by comfort walking for 20 minutes, so we got a lot of statistics showing covid was worse on the obese - but it would be more interesting to know if obese people who get exercise did better or worse than skinny people who don't exercise.
Yes that myth is pernicious
That seems unlikely to me - the chart seems to show obese people falling from 42% of the population to 40% of the population, but covid didn't even manage to kill a single percent of the population, and the people it killed weren't all obese. (Given the anti-correlation of obesity with age, and the extremely strong correlation of age with covid death, I would not be surprised if covid deaths were less obese than the general population, even if they were a lot more obese than the people of the same age distribution.)
Sure, but I think you might have misunderstood my point. I wasn't suggesting the decline was solely a factor of deaths in the obese cohort. We know there is a statistically significant positive association between obesity and Covid mortality and serious illness across all age groups. During the height of the pandemic, the two main risk factors pushed daily through media were age and obesity. I'm suggesting a role for behavioural changes spurred on by knowledge of the correlation between obesity and Covid mortality, and compounded by the experience of seeing the death toll rise around you (obese or otherwise). A mix of pressing incentive to lose weight, and doctors more inclined to discuss weight issues with patients. I haven't seen any data one way or the other, so it's just a hypothesis. Only large scale survey I've seen suggested as many people lost weight as gained it during the first year of the pandemic, which in itself might suggest a levelling off in the general population, but I don't recall it segmenting by starting weight.
I would be very skeptical if the media discussions of obesity as a risk factor were more effective than the previous several decades where basically all messaging was about how obesity is bad and fat people are ugly. One more risk factor on top wouldn’t make that much difference.
The much bigger difference was probably the sudden change in dietary and behavioral habits, which likely caused some people to gain weight and some people to lose weight. (I had no need to lose weight but throughout late 2020 and early 2021 I was several pounds lower than I was in earlier or later times.)
Yep. That’s why I was agreeing to the post to which I was responding. But during the pandemic itself obese people also might have been more frightened of going to medical offices or hospitals because of virus presence as well, or marginally less likely as a population to see a physician at any time.
I suspect this strongly drives the result - also note that the survey itself depends on medical visits, which may have been disproportionately lower among obese people because of the pandemic-driven publicity about the greater Covid mortality rate for obese people. I also suspect that covid mortality had significant effects on our economic statistics that we have not yet unpacked.
Maybe there are a few less obese people as a percentage of total population for the simple reason that for more of them died off, than non-obese?
Yeah this seems like something being missed here as well. Even those who didn’t die lost a lot of weight, because that’s what happens when you get very sick.
The theory that men don't go to college to avoid women might be the worst take I've read all year.
Maybe you should do a best & worst takes of 2024 at the end of the year. Might be an interesting retrospective.
Might have something to do with the fact that Smith missed the point of the article.
You are confusing "not wanting to be around women" (implausible) with "not wanting to be like women" (plausible). You don't see a ton of men signing up to be nurses or elementary school teachers just because they could hang out with more women.
Can't help but think about Noah every time I see a chart with an arrow in it
The "red state boom" is really a rural state boom, as it was during the FDR administration with rural electrification and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Except it was a blue state boom then.
Most of these booming states are among the most urbanized in the country. Nevada, Florida, Arizona and Utah are top 10, Texas is 14.
If you assume that political parties were static from FDR's time to today and no one ever realigns.
The Ozempic comments are so interesting and don’t seem to correlate politically. Far left or far right the scolds are in full force in exactly the same way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an issue like that .
You mean comments on the star codex article? I scanned a lot of them. Did not see any scolds
They're everywhere on other platforms like Twitter/Reddit.
Their advice is usually "just diet and exercise" which is highly imperfect (eg because exercise makes you hungry). It also doesn't fit the evidence, which is that obesity appears to happen slowly over time and appears to be genuinely caused by geography - people in lower altitudes in the US are more obese and lose it when they move to higher altitudes.
IIRC there's a theory with good evidence that it's caused by environmental lithium exposure.
How much is geographical variation in obesity historically-driven, in that (for example) a region with a recent tradition of heavy manual labor (which obviously necessitates a high-calorie diet) is likely to experience a surge in obesity if the demand for said manual labor collapses due to economic changes?
The geographic variation also occurs in lab animals, not just in humans. And it's mostly in the South more than the rust belt iirc.
That might be evidence for false correlation; pretty much every bad trend in the US is highest in the South.
The part about moving comes from military records so is a decent natural experiment, since the moving is randomly assigned from relocation orders.
In the case of the South, the "heavy manual labor" would be agricultural rather than industrial work.
Good point about the military records providing a decent natural experiment, but are you sure you meant that higher _altitudes_ (as opposed to _latitudes_) are better?
(I suppose if you did mean the former, it would explain why some Latin American capitals -- Quito, Bogotá and Mexico City included -- are in high-altitude inland locations, even though this would make them more difficult to support logistically.)
When you bring up natural experiments it brought up another example to me, this time from British politics. The effect of Rupert Murdoch's "Sun" newspaper on turning Britons against the European Union was demonstrated by the fact that the city of Liverpool is more pro-EU that its demographics would suggest: Liverpool boycotted the "Sun" for a reason (its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster) that is absolutely nothing to do with the EU.
Yeah, higher altitudes. For instance, there's a lot of military in Colorado.
This could be either an effect of lower oxygen or it could be due to fewer environmental contaminants (since the water sources are upstream).
That theory comes from this excellent online scientific article (not exactly a paper I guess, but just as rigorous as any paper and not paywalled): https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-part-iii-environmental-contaminants/
Highly recommend for anyone curious about these things.
I mean any article.
Good roundup, thanks. Great point about construction taking place where it can be done expeditiously.
I think the biggest reason more women go to college than men is because men have more reasonably (or high) paying non-college job options in construction, metallurgy, various trades, etc. (I’m not saying women literally can’t enter such professions, but there are definitely factors that make them a lot less likely to.)
Random feedback. I read everything you write on substack, but I realize that I actually dread the 5 things email a bit ... because they're more than 5 things. It's just too much (and in this case, exceeds the gmail link, so I have to do a click and open in web). It's interesting stuff, but just 5 would feel ideal.
<Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued…>
I’m not entirely against this argument; there’s that recognized phenomenon of “pink-collar” jobs that keeps men from entering traditionally feminine-coded professions (nursing, teaching, flight attendants, etc.), although I think that’s mostly due to cultural lag and tends to moderate after a couple generations. Not that it ever goes away completely—some guys just won’t do certain jobs—but it slowly gets better over time.
<Anyway, the obvious solution to this is to make benefits phase out more slowly, so that the implicit tax rate is lower. There are various ways to do that — less means-testing, more unconditional benefits, and so on. But they all cost a lot of money, and they can make the tax system look less “progressive” on paper. So this is a very tough problem.>
Economically, it’s not a tough problem. Means-testing usually doesn’t save much money, especially when you take into consideration the disincentives to work that benefit cliffs inevitably create. Or the class/racial resentment that emerges when the working class is split between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. Therein lies the value of universal benefits, except as you mentioned they’re (A) way more expensive and (B) unpopular among center-left neoliberal types who don’t want to spend taxpayer money on public goods for rich people.
Exactly. Going to college and majoring in something that isn’t STEM or business as a male is now basically the same as going to nursing school.
An investor in apartment buildings has a rate of return he needs to earn to make the project viable. When prices are high, as rents are now, you can make money building apartments. When rents are low, you can’t make money building apartments so you don’t build many of them. This is of course, a very city specific phenomenon. The cost of fighting Nimbyism it’s just another input that goes into the calculation.
I feel "a single parent with a single pre-K child" is an unfortunate choice for the welfare cliff study to model, since we probably want such a parent to focus on caring for their pre-K child and not be boggled down too much by their job, and the chart seems to show that this goal is well served (notwithstanding costs related to wading through the system to get the welfares).
“. . . red states just tend to be the places that allow companies to build stuff, while blue states and blue cities have a bunch of rules that prevent construction:”
If this is true, how is it blue states are significantly richer, contributing taxes to Washington, whereas red states are more dependent on government support? The Rustbelt is an even more interesting story because it has a lot of idled manufacturing facilities and infrastructure.
In most cases, this is because blue states built a lot of things several decades ago that are still paying off now, and are thus coasting on the kinds of riches that you get from already being rich (and thus still being the places where you get the benefits of agglomeration).
There's a sub-class of red states that are just idling on government support, and another sub-class of red states that are building. The latter set are going to become rich (and are becoming blue).
The highest-margin US corporations are protected from competition by IP laws and are concentrated overwhelmingly in coastal metro areas.
Red-state corporations are much less profitable (more like European or Asian corporations) as they tend to operate in more commodified sectors.
Maybe because investment bankers (and the like) tend to live in blue states. They do not manufacturer anything, other than a whole lot of rent collected off everyone else.
Do you really think investment bankers make up that much of blue state economy? Give me a break (regardless of my own similar opinion about investment bankers).
Even the following post by Carty makes an assumption about that.
I would be very curious to see actual data on the economies of the blue states and how much of the economy is based in what areas. I suspect the result will surprise a lot of us.
And remember, the initial comment by John on relative taxes vs government support is based on taxes. Many IP protected corporations have done a great job of eluding taxes for years, so hard for that to be the answer to John's comment
https://www.statista.com/statistics/304890/texas-real-gdp-by-industry/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-gdp-by-industry/
Blue states vary there but they do tend to allow office buildings and single family homes. What they don't like is factories, apartments and nuclear power plants.
Do you mean "blue states _vary_" there?
Indeed.
"I wonder what other personal problems we could reframe as technological challenges to be solved rather than personal failings to be shamed."
Taxation of net CO2 emissions that allows technology to do its thing. :)
"I wonder what other personal problems we could reframe as technological challenges to be solved rather than personal failings to be shamed. How about addiction?"
Katie Herzog has a book coming out about quitting drinking with Naltrexone. The Atlantic had a big article about Naltrexone in...2014? I thought for sure Naltrexone was going to be a major blow to Alcoholics Anonymous, but it just never really took off, despite many success stories. Maybe another burst of publicity for it will help. It's dirt-cheap and very effective if used with operant conditioning, aka the Sinclair Method.
Ozempic will probably work with alcohol.
Let's hope!