economics

I’ve been keeping a journal on and off for over 30 years. It has never been a literary work, merely a recounting of what was going on that day, what was good, what wasn’t. A few years back, I started to make sure I wrote what I was thankful for each day. There is always something to be thankful for, even if it is just being alive. I’m glad I’ve kept with it because it’s fun to look back sometimes and see what I was doing and thinking about all those years ago.

An article in Governing highlighted some of the benefits of sidewalks to an area’s social life and interconnectedness. I remember when we bought our house in Roanoke over 20 years ago, I wouldn’t even consider neighborhoods without sidewalks. I grew up with sidewalks everywhere and they were great for us kids to be able to play on and for the adults to get around to see each other and maybe even walk over to the grocery or community pool.

The French government is spending €200 million to destroy wine due to lack of demand. That is interesting in and of itself but the most astounding figure in the article is the drop in European wine consumption: European Commission data for the year to June shows that wine consumption has fallen 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal… That’s a big year over year drop.

This article on alcohol consumption trends is really interesting. My take away from it is that people used to be drunk all the time. According to some of the data cited in the article, people in Northern Europe used to drink about a liter of beer a day and about a liter of wine a day in Southern Europe. That is a ton of drinking. Of course, water was basically poison, so it makes sense.

The FTC has proposed a rule to ban non-compete agreements. This is great. A employer shouldn’t be able to prohibit people from pursuing their career wherever they want. Non-competes give employers way too much leverage over their employees. The evidence is clear that it suppresses wages and working conditions. Trade secrets and the like can still be protected. That’s company property and should not be abused by ex-employees. But, it’s un-American to deprive someone of their pursue Happiness and switch to any other job they might prefer for any reason.

I always wondered why when you use a card for a purchase you are asked on the screen “Debit or Credit?” Doesn’t the machine know? Isn’t it encoded in the card? This nifty article by Patrick McKenzie explains that and more about how ATMs work. It’s much more complex than I had thought but makes a lot of sense. Essentially debit and credit use two different networks for payment so the question is really about which network you want to use.

The Register has an interesting article on the underlying economics of big tech. The Amazons and Googles of the world have grown huge by offering “free” products like Alexa and Gmail. As we all know by now, if it’s free, you are the product. Has this model run out of steam at huge scale? These huge free services are expensive to run. The most recent results from Amazon show how difficult it can be to make money on a free service.

An interesting casualty of the pandemic supply chain issues is the availability of trained dogs for bomb-sniffing. I would have thought that we would raise our own dogs for this but only 7% are from the US and we have a chronic shortage. The US Government pays about $8k for a “green” dog (a year old dog that has basic assistance dog training but isn’t specialized yet) This seems like a really good business opportunity for someone who likes dogs and can do basic training.

Back in the day, I wanted to be an economics professor. The subject is interesting and varied. One thing that economics has at it’s core is the study of what people do in the face of scarcity. What decisions do they make? How do they react when something they need suddenly becomes more scarce? What are universities going to do in the face of a scarcity of college-age students in the next few years?

The Economist has brought back the Big Mac Index. It’s a fun way to understand relative values of currencies with everyone’s favorite burger (although it’s honestly been years since I’ve had one). It looks like a great time to go to the Czech Republic for vacation. The raw data and code behind how the index is calculated is available for download. They also provide instructions to reproduce it from the data which is nice.