A $5 shake in 1994 is $10.73 now. The place down the road I order shakes from charges $6.50 I believe.

Noah is correct. The “China cycle” was widely denied because believing it was real was associated with racism, partly due a very successful Chinese propaganda operation focused on PMC liberals that equated believing in the cycle with such. That influence operation worked and was fairly brilliantly done by the CCP in that it got a lot of bang for the buck renminbi.

Those days are mostly over now, so you no longer roundly get accused of racism when the Chinese do something harmful or at least not very nice and get called out on it.

Though they don’t usually complain about this specifically, the one bit of NIMBY griping I agree with is construction noise. It is terrible, long-lasting, and hugely disruptive. Especially since I sleep at odd hours, it is particularly disturbing to me and my oddball non-schedule.

There is not likely to be any nearby construction in the neighborhood where we bought anytime soon but I’d sure dread it if that ever came to pass. No, I would not oppose it, but if it were something that was going to last years as much construction does I’d strongly consider just moving.

That was mostly due to WFH and will not look so rosy as RTO becomes more entrenched. Most of the gain is due to people being more productive working from home, both in absolute terms and because they work longer hours. MBA types don’t care about productivity, though; they are concerned with power.

How NAFTA Broke American Politics. Since its passage in 1993, the trade agreement has played an outsize role in presidential elections — which now often hinge on the three Rust Belt states it helped to hollow out.

“Hollow out” is a good way to put it. Economists tell us that NAFTA was a net benefit to everyone. They have pretty little charts and graphs to “prove” it. However, those do not take into account much of the actual economic effects, the political follow-on impacts, the foreign policy implications, international competitiveness effects, or the necessity of domestic production and supply chains in the case of war.

Economics, therefore, captures maybe 10-20% of what’s important about trade agreements like NAFTA while lying about it in the name of the plutocrats the entire time. Good work.

Most NIMBYs are liberals, so that makes sense. Though some of the worst NIMBYs are on the right, absolute numbers matter; that 80%+ of NIMBYs lean left means that in blue cities, not a damn thing gets built.

Which might have an actual positive effect (not overall) in this way: the non-affluent are forced out and into swing states. And these people are more likely to vote Democrat.

Coupons are a time tax on the less affluent that allows companies to price differentiate based on ability to pay — with plausible deniability as anyone can use a coupon.

Want to see pure evil? Well here you go:

No, this is not correct. There is very much a tradeoff, definitionally. “Allocative efficiency” refers to producing goods and services that meet consumer demand, e.g. producing the colors of cars that people want to buy. It is future-oriented, generally. However, Pareto efficiency (rather, optimality) is where a person cannot be made better off without making someone else worse off. The two concepts are related (sometimes) but not the same thing at all. To expand that thought a bit, Pareto efficiency is about finding the correct balance between allocative and productive efficiency, not just concentrating on allocative efficiency alone¹.

The person who wrote that is confused and should read their textbooks again, but more closely this time.

1. It is trivial to run a thought experiment where one could crash the entire economy by concentrating on allocative efficiency exclusively. Not very Pareto optimal then, really.

As recently as five years ago, this was widely said to be impossible. But it turned out to not even be that hard, considering. (This is per capita, but still very positive.)

The real cost of groceries is back to the start of Covid, and going down.

This is crazy cracksmoking crap. Does anyone believe this? My income did not double since the start of Covid, but grocery prices certainly have. I guess the econs figure if they flood the zone with propaganda and their preachy proselytism of absolute lies they can convince enough people. And I suppose that does work.

We elected George W. Bush and Barack Obama twice, after all.