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The quantity of rent-controlled apartments demanded thus becomes enormous. In New York City, some old rent-controlled units have become family heirlooms. A woman went viral on TikTok in 2021 after showcasing her redecorated $1,300 a month rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, after inheriting the lease from her parents—a unit that would .. MORE
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Economic and Political Philosophy
We should be careful about words, expressions, and catchphrases, especially those political hyperboles that buttress the statist zeitgeist of our time. You are a product of greedy corporations. The author of the May 16 Economist newsletter “The World in Brief” says it in passing: Walmart’s ad operation is much smaller than that of Amazon, which .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
In his book Minority Report, H.L. Mencken writes: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel [sic] to foreign parts.” With a .. MORE
Family Economics
Chicago’s population is down about 25% from its peak back in 1950. That statement might conjure up images of empty blocks of homes, as you see in Detroit. In fact, Chicago remains quite crowded. I cannot find the article, but I recall reading that Chicago now has more households than ever before. Average household size .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Charging extra for specific preferences, such as a seat selection on a flight, enables lower basic prices, increasing access to no-frills options for lower-income customers, while allowing businesses to customize their services to individual customers’ preferences. Airlines unbundle in-flight food and checked bags, for example, leading to more profit opportunities and lower base fares. .. MORE
Adam Smith
Click-a-ty-clack, click-a-ty-clack . . ., click-a-ty-clack. Those were the sounds that regularly echoed down the second-floor hallway of Clemson University’s Sirrine Hall in the 1980s and before. Those sounds of metal-on-metal could be expected by the economists on the floor at 10:00 in the morning, carrying a clear message: “Time for coffee!” The sounds .. MORE
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First, Happy Cinco de Mayo. Now to the content. Backpage: A Blueprint for Squelching Speech by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, April 29, 2024. Excerpt: From the beginning, this prosecution has been premised on a bogus rationale (authorities yammer on about sex trafficking though none of the defendants are charged with sex trafficking), overreaching in its scope (attempting .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
The quantity of rent-controlled apartments demanded thus becomes enormous. In New York City, some old rent-controlled units have become family heirlooms. A woman went viral on TikTok in 2021 after showcasing her redecorated $1,300 a month rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, after inheriting the lease from her parents—a unit that would .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Michael Crichton once highlighted an unusual quirk in human thinking – something he called Gell-Mann Amnesia, after his friend Murray Gell-Mann. Chrichton said: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read .. MORE
… digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. … This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolesced by digital media. —Andrey Mir, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s .. MORE
[t]he idea of decline consists of two distinct traditions. For every Western intellectual who dreads the collapse of his own society (like Henry Adams or Arnold Toynbee or Paul Kennedy or Charles Murray), there is another who has looked forward to the event with glee. —Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History1 In .. MORE
Under a gold standard, government bonds are nearly free of inflation risk but not of default risk. Under a fiat standard, the reverse is true. ——White, Lawrence H. Better Money: Gold Fiat or Bitcoin? (pp. 214-215).1 In his new book, Lawrence H. White compares three possible monetary systems: a gold standard, a fiat money standard, .. MORE
Most students of political philosophy have had some contact with Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (ASU)1—specifically Part II. And for good reasons. Part II is essential, not only because it sets out devastating critiques of competing moral-political doctrines but also because it awakens our deepest intuitions about the coercion required to make those doctrines .. MORE
Populists on both the left and the right continually whine about stagnant living standards. Just imagine the boost to living standards if working class people could buy a high quality electric car for $10,000!
Scott Sumner, May 15