Recent thoughts on N.Y. couched as economic analysis
1. It’s the most perfect market for street foods I’ve ever seen. The density of the city makes pricing super responsive. You want to raise the prices on your falafel to $3.50? Fine, but there are three other places on the same block that sell the same falafel for $3.00, so screw you. And yet each shop can afford to sell its falafel at $3.00, because the population is dense enough to create security in profits despite razor thin margins. Amazing.
2. The most valuable commodity is access to restrooms. I have to use the restroom, like, all the time, and as a non-New-Yorker I have no idea how to find one. It’s terrifying. When I asked an employee of the New York Public Library (the fourth largest in the country by number of books) if they had restrooms, her dismissal was kind of condescending.
Peeing is a basic human right, and Congress should nationalize all of New York’s restrooms.
The Deficit, Simpson-Bowles, Inflation, Wealth
Probably what we should be doing right now is increasing the deficit, but that’s heresy in today’s political discourse. From a Felix Salmon review of a Krugman book:
And then there’s the whole class-based undertone to the discussion, which I think if anything Krugman doesn’t make forcefully enough. The thing that Serious liberals and Serious conservatives have in common — the thing which in large part makes them “widely respected” in the first place — is that they’re rich. Usually, very rich. And rich people, as I said in my own review of Krugman’s book, don’t actually worry much about unemployment: it doesn’t really hurt them, even if they lose their jobs. What they do worry about is inflation, since that erodes the value of their dollars. And so when Krugman calls for a nice dose of inflation to help cure the economy’s ills, what he’s really calling for is for a significant chunk of the fixed-income portfolios of the rich to be devalued in real terms.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/06/18/bishop-vs-krugman/
My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court
I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible. There’s a general understanding that says, “insurance companies— oh they’re awful,” but since Progressive turned their shit hose on my late sister and my parents, I’ve learned some things that really surprised me.
I’ll try to cleave to the facts. On June 19, 2010, my sister was driving in Baltimore when her car was struck by another car and she was killed. The other driver had run a red light and hit my sister as she crossed the intersection on the green light.
This advertisement seems to be directed at people who fundamentally misunderstand what “life insurance” is about.
GIRLS ARE PRETTY: Driving Lesson Day!
“Takin’ a different route,” he tells you, directing you to turn right and head onto the freeway.
You ask if you’re ready for the freeway and he grabs you by the shoulder. “Don’t waste your time!” he shouts. “Do what you need done. Say what you need said. Make sure you get it all out before the…
Bendwalsh: This Wall Street intern has it exactly backwards:But eventually, you...
This Wall Street intern has it exactly backwards:
But eventually, you start to expect more. You’re definitely seduced. You think, If I did this for two years, went to private equity, did the stair-step that everyone does, I’d never have to think about money again.”If he spends a career in…
Bad Things
Only happen to good people. Tautologically this is so. Otherwise they wouldn’t be bad things.
Concerns about Capitalism in a Globalized, Underperforming, Maladjusted Economy
Hello! This essay summarizes some of my recent concerns regarding capitalism, and the direction of American economic policy.
Capitalism is an economic framework grounded in the law that creates wealth through efficient incentive structures. Capitalism, in its purer form, has been a driving force in the generation of industrial revolutions the world over, and in the generation of a base economic structure for many countries. In the United States in the early 20th century, there arrived a point at which capitalism had generated substantive wealth for our country, but had not distributed that wealth evenly, leading to something of an aristocratic capitalist ruling class, plenty of class conflict, and state-sanctioned oppressive living conditions for the majority.
The Problem with Hazing
On January 25th, Andrew Lohse took a major detour from the winning streak he’d been on for most of his life when, breaking with the Dartmouth code of omertà, he detailed some of the choicest bits of his college experience in an op-ed for the student paper The Dartmouth. “I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks… among other abuses,” he wrote. He accused Dartmouth’s storied Greek system – 17 fraternities, 11 sororities and three coed houses, to which roughly half of the student body belongs – of perpetuating a culture of “pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault,” as well as an “intoxicating nihilism” that dominates campus social life. “One of the things I’ve learned at Dartmouth – one thing that sets a psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men – is that good people can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason,” he said. “Fraternity life is at the core of the college’s human and cultural dysfunctions.” Lohse concluded by recommending that Dartmouth overhaul its Greek system, and perhaps get rid of fraternities entirely.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328#ixzz1qdOvN4qJ
