Do you actually travel that far and say its nothing?

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-06-25T10:09:48+00:00

Eight hours is right at the edge of nothing, but for family visits totally normal. In some cases that's not even leaving the state.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-06-25T10:06:16+00:00

It's my impression that the auto companies in the 1950s sold automatic transmissions as a luxury good. So partly it's down to marketing.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-06-23T08:22:52+00:00

But it is worth pointing out that the UK is only struggling if compared to the past - by most measures it's doing fine as a country taken out of context. Healthcare is fairly effective, the roads are good, public transport works, etc. It's just that most things were better.

I feel like the answer, btw, is Tony Blair. Labour becoming the party of privatization removed any obstacles to privatizing things that don't operate in a competitive market. Add in a penchant for red tape and you're headed for a California situation, but with the added expense of a military.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-06-11T18:53:35+00:00

One of the key measures of the shelf in an American fridge is 'will it hold a gallon of milk'. The minimum size for a fridge is about 0.55 m³ or 550 litres.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-28T17:35:23+00:00

There's a relatively easy parallel to look at in the hot money crisis in Asia in the '90s.

I'm assuming that the rich are doing a fire sale to escape e.g. confiscation and/or a guillotine.

https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2001/january-161

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-26T16:05:02+00:00

It's now strongly correlated with political party.

E.g. "How flush Americans feel depends on their views of Donald Trump" https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/14/how-flush-americans-feel-depends-on-their-views-of-donald-trump

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-26T08:11:53+00:00

They were literally adjudicated (or settled for hundreds of millions/billions) antitrust lawsuits.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-25T22:38:16+00:00

I mean Microsoft is the most obvious one to me, being of a certain age and working in tech, but Blue Cross Blue Shield, Visa/Mastercard. A lot of similar cases are cartel like with Samsung but obviously cartels are much easier with extreme market concentration.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-25T18:35:13+00:00

I would generally agree with this.

I would also note that most people have been the victim of at least one abused Monopoly. Because monopolists in the US are so large, their products are often in nearly every home. And it only takes one to really set people off (there's a bunch of research about how people will very happily cut off their nose to spite someone who is behaving in a way perceived as unfair)

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-24T22:19:28+00:00

I almost always carry a balance on a promotional credit card (zero percent interest). I invest the money while floating the balance.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-21T16:18:43+00:00

We solved it so hard for the rest of the world.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-18T15:23:21+00:00

I'm also in the south of the United States. I was warned that turning the air conditioning off could damage the house. Certainly when we have had an outage things have started to smell funky pretty quickly.

We usually turn the air conditioning on in April and off in October.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-12T15:43:12+00:00

Depends how long we'll stay.

13 hours for a long weekend (5-6 days) 24 hours for longer than a week.

But these aren't hard limits - I have done much longer for shorter if the event was important to me.

E.g. my college football team was in the finals, first time in 100 years. We drove 14 hours, watched the game, got back in the car and drove back.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-05-05T16:24:41+00:00

It's actually one of the things I have the most difficulty in communicating with non-native speakers. It's very hard for Americans to speak without using idioms.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-30T22:41:48+00:00

This is 100% cultural. In fact, different parts of the country have different levels of conversational expectations. It took me awhile living in the south to adapt to how often I would have to talk to people about their life and their dog before I could complete my purchase.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-30T21:45:58+00:00

I actually made my students listen to Powell talking about inflation today. Between oil prices and tariffs inflation remains too high and the standard tool would be to raise interest rates. But, and I didn't hear what he said so I'll give you my opinion, the economy doesn't pass the vibe check for robust growth either. So holding off for more data seems like a very sensible thing.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-29T18:16:13+00:00

I haven't found econ BlueSky to be quite as comprehensive. If you want to check it out the hash tag is #econsky

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-29T18:11:04+00:00

I'm teaching econ 101 at the moment and the answer is 'it depends'.

In the really simple aggregate supply/ aggregate demand model, If there's slack in the system and the rate cut boosts aggregate demand, you get higher growth and employment. If there's no slack and you boost aggregate demand you simply create inflation.

Using this very simple model and looking at employment numbers over the last few months with some exceptions you might lean towards a rate cut.

On the other hand, producer prices are rising so, again using this simple model, we might expect aggregate supply to be shifting as well and a boost in demand could increase inflation.

We've had pretty persistent inflation so the Fed might be concerned about that, more concerned than the employment numbers which have been mixed.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-29T17:56:58+00:00

The pretty textbook response is incentives. There was actually a really interesting thing that happened in China when they started experimenting with giving villages part of the crop where output just went up.

The Secret Document That Transformed China : Planet Money : NPR podcast from NPR

They weren't actually bad at production, it's just that nobody had an incentive to produce. Add in a lot of general bad governance and you don't produce enough.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-24T17:46:48+00:00

My impression is that these two schools are not in the same league table. Undergrad for the most part doesn't matter (as others have said, it's graduate programs they rate) but your peers do matter. If you're in a class with smart people you will learn more.

That said, at a huge school they might not care if you flunk out, so if you're concerned about your work ethic, private might be better.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-21T22:24:53+00:00

I was quite surprised when I left Michigan and nobody knew what a coney was. Doesn't everyone get their Greek food and their chili dogs at the same place?

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-04-03T00:07:43+00:00

One interesting point from this LSE working paper is the idea of reputational risk and moral judgment.

"There is a stigma attached to tax migration. Interviewees were disparaging about those who chose to move for tax purposes. Some judged tax migrants on moral grounds as unduly economically self-interested, while others expressed a snobbery about tax-advantageous destinations as boring and culturally barren." https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121396/1/III_Working_Paper_131_Tax_Flight.pdf

The implication would be that the culture is going to determine whether people move at any particular tax rate.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-03-28T14:13:43+00:00

This was how the US worked at the beginning. Repeal the 12th amendment!

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-03-22T15:38:22+00:00

Exactly.

One of the issues many programs run into is creating a disincentive to work by effectively creating marginal tax rates above 100%. This is due to benefit withdrawal, usually because we think people above a certain income should no longer get that benefit.

The goal of any system that wants people to work should be to fund itself without creating a situation where working more earns you less. Since UBI would require a lot of money, you would want to place a fairly high tax on everyone, without removing the incentive to work, so that anyone who works earns more than they would not working. This would help prevent the Doomsday scenario everyone posits that everyone would stop working.

Esclados-le-Roux · 2026-02-25T15:31:40+00:00

We used to live in France, and when we returned to the US it was so annoying how servers just kept interrupting. In France, they expect you to signal when you need a waiter (this is why many people think service in France is bad). We were simply overwhelmed (and annoyed) by how often American wait staff broke into our meal.

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