My understanding is that inflation is created by the expectation of inflation, so we need to ban Critical Economic Theory, and all this treasonous talk about inflation.

I have no idea, but if wages for the bottom quarter of the income distribution keep going up like they have been, I'm not really worried about anything except the very real problems caused because of old, nervous, white people deciding how to vote based on prices at the County Kitchen Buffet.

Other serious question: did I recently post this exact question and just forget the answer?

Yes.

Interesting. What did I think of the other thread?

Maybe I make a good FPP because I can't remember any answers. I'm the poster that discovers the new part of the fishbowl every day.

2: Old people going back for 6ths and 7ths at the Country Kitchen Buffet should be living in the moment.

That's how they drive.

5: Yes. Forgetting everything you've written is also the most important skill for sustaining a long career as a pundit.

Surly tighter monetary policy can resolve production delays in the silicon chip industry. Surely higher interest rates will get more trucks moving at the Port of Long Beach.

None of this would even be a problem if everybody used Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is massively deflationary, which is why it would be a disaster even if it weren't a disaster for environmental reasons.

I'd like it if they described monetary policy with terms like surly.

Obviously what we really need is the gold standard.

Speaking seriously, I think a healthy bout of inflation that resets a lot of price and cost relationships in the wake of a global disruptive event is, to some extent, a good thing.

My amateur sense is that some inflation is long overdue, it's generally kept lower than ideal for regular folk because the wealthy folk like it that way.

The current spike seems induced by the economic fallout from abrupt changes due to pandemic and some opportunistic manipulations by oil producers. It may also look worse than it is because year over year comparisons are particularly nonsensical right now.

It also feels worse than it is because the usual media and political suspects perceive a useful club with which to bash Democrats. Kinda gives away the game when the cost of buying 12 gallons of milk a week is a crisis but decades-long rises in the costs of child care, health care, and homes are just the way things are.

Why buy the cow when the milk isn't getting more expensive?

You are all convincingly not panicked.

I sold out but still live in a house that a middling university employee can afford.

I'm more worried about the political implications. Its another thing Republicans are going to shit on Biden for, and a lot of centrists Dems will be happy to accept the premise.

"Look, we simply can't fund a childcare system that would allow more employees to return to work, because that would be bad for inflation."

Yes.

Inflation is very bad if you're a fixed rate lender, and very excellent if you're a fixed rate borrower. That is, bad for banks, good for almost everyone who makes house or car payments. (My parents got a mortgage in 1971, and their payments were ridiculously tiny after 20 years) Even variable rate borrowers benefit from inflation a bit, since the rates vary at a time lag and are somewhat constrained. So a bit more inflation would be a wealth transfer from the banks to most of the rest of us. I'm in favor.

It's not entirely a coincidence that the 30 year trends of lower inflation and increasing inequality started at the same time, in the Reagan years.

Note that inflation has no effect at all on the poorest Americans. If you spend what you earn within a few days of earning, income and outgo are equally inflated.

Note that inflation has no effect at all on the poorest Americans. If you spend what you earn within a few days of earning, income and outgo are equally inflated.

I hadn't put my finger on it, but this is exactly what I was wondering: if wages and prices tend to be inflated equally, and so this isn't a day-to-day matter. So when we talk about problems (or benefits!) of inflation, we're really talking about how lending and borrowing larger sums of money over a longer timespan affects people and businesses.

Note that inflation has no effect at all on the poorest Americans. If you spend what you earn within a few days of earning, income and outgo are equally inflated.

This is a theoretical long-term perspective. In reality, prices can change a lot faster than wages and fixed-income payments.

Yes. So the school bus driver leaves for more money and you have to drive your kid to school.

I think, in general, 23 is an important consideration, but it does it seem like there is a genuine and robust increase in wages going on right now. There will be some lag and not everyone benefits equally, but the theoretical, long-term perspective is mostly holding its own right now.

I'd want to see evidence that prices and wages go up in tandem, not just that they go up significantly at the same time. They certainly haven't balanced out in the long term.

Annualized growth figures for: hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory workers / CPI Urban all goods.

Nov. 2013-Oct. 2019: wages +2.7%, inflation +1.6%.
Nov. 2020-Oct. 2021: wages +5.3%, inflation +6.1%.

Not going to lie, this does make me feel smug (and oh, so privileged) about having refinanced the house to a stupidly cheap number back in the spring.

I wonder how well the CPI reflects post-pandemic changes in consumer behavior. Like, what does more takeout/fewer restaurant meals do to CPI?

New cars are more expensive but nobody can find a new car to buy anyway. What does that do to CPI?

It's a political disaster for the Democrats if they allow it to justify not acting further on their agenda, which is all but certain, and if they can't agree on and advertise a consistent counter-message, which is absolutely certain.

Its like that time the actor who plays Mr. Belvedere sat on his own balls.

My apologies for violating the analogy ban.

I mean, who doesn't love Mr. Belvedere? Still, not a good move and causes real damage.

I bet Bob Uecker never sat on his balls, but nobody thinks of him as a great actor.

29: It looks like they update weights based on expenditures, but on a bit of a lag. "Starting in January 2022, weights for the Consumer Price Index will be calculated based on consumer expenditure data from 2019-2020. The BLS considered interventions, but decided to maintain normal procedures."

The index for "food at home" is up 9.6% over October 2019. "Food away from home": 9.3%.

My son just started eating everything, so I hadn't really noticed food at home was getting more expensive. We just buy so much more of it.

The index for "food at home" is up 9.6% over October 2019. "Food away from home": 9.3%.

Is "food at home" takeout or its it groceries?

"is it"

I find my typing has been atrocious lately.

"Food at home" is takeout. Groceries are "Ingredients at Home."

Apparently Christmas trees will be scarce in Canada this year. I just don't even get that: I could cut down a tree in my own back garden, or in my front yard, or in the Protestant churchyard across the street from me...I'm just not seeing a dearth of evergreens, is what I'm saying, though no doubt I am missing something....

41: shortage of the artificial ones because of the Chinese container ship issues and the supply chain So people are switching;g to real spiking demand. An additional driver of demand is that more people are at home and want trees. It take a few years to grow them as well.

Christmas trees don't grow on trees.

I think we are planning on scoring one from the woods on Cool Uncle Dave's farm this year.

I wish I had a Cool Uncle Dave. I only had a Lukewarm Uncle Dominic.

Highway banks get overgrown with lovely evergreens in Western Washington, and have to be cut back every decade or so (chain flails usually) and I have long thought it was a pity those trees couldn't be cut for holiday trees and the money used either for whatever nonprofit stumps up the labor, or the schools.

Surprisingly many years we get a decent tree because something coniferous falls across a road and we clear it and take away the top 8'.

In college, a roommate of mine went out into the pasture and cut down a scrub cedar. We put it in a pot of water and leaned it in the corner and decorated it with empty beer cans. We baked a turkey and made mashed potatoes (because we had two pots). Then we all went home and had real Christmas.

The Sierra Nevadas are so choked with small trees (making the fuel load too high) that the forest service will issue a permit to anyone who wants to come get one.

18: I'm more worried about the political implications.

Same. Krugman had a short piece arguing that 1946-47 is the better analogue. And points out that overreaction to it then led to a downturn in 1949.

And it's the perfect story for out-of-touch pundits and assorted other media fuckwads to showcase their authenticity by "getting it" and failing in ways that create a sense of crisis.

Exhibit A was the ludicrous CNN 12 gallons of milk debacle which this comment box is to small to list. And which they then defended with even more condescending wrongness.

Exhibit B is Wolf Blitzer posting gas prices from a gas station near Capitol Hill which is nearly a dollar more expensive than those generally in the DC area.

But those examples kind of trivialize what is the real issues which is just a relentless undercurrent of "bad... this is bad... bad for Biden... 70s* ... inflation bad badness ...oooga booga."

Tim Alberta (who to be fair, for a "conservative" reporter is generally better than most) sums it with one of the wrongest , most hackneyed takes you'll ever see:

'd argue the inflation crisis is a blind spot for much of the national media, because much of the national media is insulated from it. This isn't an attack; just a reality check on the financial conditions & economic habits of the people (myself included) who bring you the news.

The insulation and their natural biases in fact lead them to be suckers. (I also like who he assumes it is a crisis.)

*which per above were not that bad n many ways.

2: I'm not really worried about anything except the very real problems caused because of old, nervous, white people deciding how to vote based on prices at the County Kitchen Buffet

Moby has this right. The demented oldsters with their net worth spreadsheets from hell (which have continued to go through the roof*) are pissed that they are paying 10% more for stuff at Home Depot.

*I understand why the admin does not tout it, but boy has everyone gone quiet on the stock market.

The theories people have about what economists think are always so odd, and I have no idea where they come from. If anything, economists as a group are among the people least worried about inflation. You only heard economists start to worry about inflation in the spring.

What is clear is that people hate inflation. I suspect the causality of 21 is backwards. People hate inflation so much that they will flee to political reaction.

The theories people have about what economists believe are what journalists tell us economists believe.

You can't expect normal people to be willing to talk to an economist.

But really, "Professional Libertarian Tool"sounds bad on a business card so they tend to put "Economist" even if most economists have a more diverse range of opinions.

Also, if what you really want is young people, mostly young women, to be nice to you while you are an asshole to them because they need 20% instead of 10%, this year is looking like your annus horribilis.

We have to replace our washer dryer set. Front lines of the global supply chain crisis, I'm guessing.

Maybe don't wait for the post-Thanksgiving sales so you can be sure to get one and not get put on a waiting list? Ours are over ten years old, but so far have been fine.

We do a lot of laundry because it makes us feel better about never vacuuming.

38: Groceries. Categories are cereals and bakery products, meats/poultry/fish/eggs, dairy and related, fruits and vegetables, nonalcoholic beverages and beverage materials, and "other" which includes sugar, fats, baby food, soups, and frozen prepared foods.

Does it include persimmons?

Legally, they are a fruit but biologically they are a berry.

54: Touche.

57: Quite so.

When Amy Studholme visited The Brick shortly after Boxing Day last year, she wouldn't have imagined that nearly one year later, she'd still be without the appliances she ordered. Studholme had ordered a fridge, a stove and a dishwasher. The stove arrived within a few weeks, she said, but turned out to be defective; she had to pay several hundred dollars more for another that was in stock. Her dishwasher only recently arrived at the store, but now she's waiting on her fridge, so she can bring both of the appliances home at once.

OT: Why does it take less time to recover between sets when Eye of the Tiger is playing?

I actually bookmarked the comments on the last inflation thread, noting in particular Walt's take ("people fucking hate high inflation, and given the choice between inflation and brutality, they will choose brutality").

I do wonder how much of that is just the traditional willingness to use brutality to enforce the social hierarchy because inflation can play against that. Plus, there's clearly people who would choose brutality over cheesecake

In the 70s, people (including economists) spent a lot of time trying to talk themselves into the idea that people don't really, in their heart-of-hearts, hate inflation. I think the fatal flaw in these ideas is that various abstract ideas of how society can and should work are viscerally less real than seeing the price of gasoline double in a year.

I guess, but I don't get it. Gas is pretty trivial in terms of what I spend money on, which is mostly shelter, health care, education, and wool outdoor clothing. Those have all been getting more expensive the whole time.

I saw it pointed out someplace that the price of gas is unusually memorable and affecting (I mean, not for me, but for other people) because you have no choice about buying it -- you can't substitute something cheaper in the moment -- and you buy it by itself as opposed to one item in a basket of things you buy on a trip.

Moby: I remember a long time ago, Krugthulhu and Delong coined the term "Professional Conservative Economist". They noted that there are "professional economists" and there are "liberal professional economists": they are liberal-leaning, but they are professional economists. They noted that once upon a time, there were "conservative professional economists", too. Both kinds were, first, professional economists. But the latter species died-out, to be replaced by "professional conservative economists": the hacks we see on TV and in print, who are paid to produce reliably conservative opinions -- that is their profession.

Of course, all of this skipped past that the fact that even most liberal professional economists were hopelessly and helplessly in thrall to Capitalism As Currently Constructed. But at least they weren't a bunch of shameless hacks.

If you don't want to pay for gas, you can just take the bus.

71: That happened in lots of areas.

Eat shit, Chetan.

72:. You might as well tell people that if they can't afford a house they can sleep in the park.

74:. Is that your advice for dealing with the high price of groceries?

Actually I am kinda curious about how much of your life has been so car-independent, Moby. Our car battery died yesterday, I think for avoidable reasons, but it was kind of a calamity and left me feeling bitter about collective action failures. I can confirm that those emergency jump start battery kits work, though.

Walt Someguy: I read lots of economists. It was from an economist (Delong) that I learned that another economist had noted the obvious fact that the Free Market (blessed be the name of the market) optimizes the sum of the utilities of all participants, but first divides the utility of each participant by their marginal utility of money.

That is to say, the more dear your last dollar is to you, the less the market cares about your needs, wants, preferences, utility.

Most economists skip right past this basic evidence of the bestiality of all of Market Capitalism.

Can also confirm that a) you can put one in a large backpack and transport it by bike; b) one of the two nearby auto supply stores was out of stock despite the claims of its website; and I guess c) it's nice to have a cluster of similar stores in close proximity if your clientele has no car.

I've lived in this house for 18 years now, so a good chunk of it. Though it took the collapse of the global economy for me to say "fuck this, I'll just take the bus."

I have never transported a car battery by bike though. I do have a bike, but it's too small for me and I get a headache when I ride it.

Going from a bike to an e-bike has changed my world. I can now zip around at 20mph and not have to pedal my ass off to get there. It turns out this makes a huge difference in the calculation of whether to make a given trip by bike vs. car.

78: It's not an obvious fact. It's an actual theorem, with a proof and everything. Anyway, marginal utility isn't a physical fact about the world -- I could replace my utility with my utility squared, and my marginal utility changes.

What is more meaningful is that the market optimizes for the well-being of the rich more than the poor. Which really is an obvious fact, and it's why inequality is bad.

82: i seem to be heading fastly in the other direction! lol the simplicity & less faff of a nice twitchy road bike is calling & calling my heart ...

82: You are now about the third person I know to have said that about e-bikes, and I'm sort of tempted. But I'm also sort of terrified about 20mph accidents at bicycle levels of protection (basically none).

85: you're not obliged to rocket along at 20mph! find a bike with variable boost, and don't go hell bent when it's not safe to do so. really it's awesome for errands, taking the hill calc off the table, literally no sweat. highly recommend!

I wiped out one time this summer and hurt my leg pretty bad, but I shouldn't have been trying to do bunny hops at speed with a load of cargo in the back.

85: you're not obliged to rocket along at 20mph!

And indeed are not able to in Europe. The assist cuts out at 25km/h (15.5mph) unless you have a special model that needs to be licensed and insured like a moped. Given how heavy my e-bike is, the only time I get up to 20mph is going down a fairly steep hill.

Did you think you were obligated?

89 to 87 and not refreshing.

81: The only thing worse than riding a bike that's too small is riding a bike with chronic gear issues. Might actually be a tie: you can at least enjoy riding the broken-gear bike when you're not trying to shift. A too-small bike is just relentlessly lowkey unpleasant and there's almost no upside to riding it at all. Blow your REI dividend on one that fits!

Now I'm daydreaming about the $3200 full-suspension mountain bike I test rode two years ago. This is the economics thread?

84: I love my road bike but I live in great fear of flat tires. How's your area for debris and potholes? If it's nice, can I visit sometime?

My REI dividend is like $50 or less.

Bikes really aren't my thing. I have one because someone gave me an old one they have. I made my son learn to ride one and then figured that was enough.

am currently renting a canondale with drop bars & medium ish tires from sports basement as my ebike in the shop & am v v v seriously considering moving to a slender & comely steel frame with mudguards medium ish tires & handlebars more appropriate to around town cycling alongside traffic. my most commonly traveled route is from nopa along arguello, down thru the presidio & along crissy-marina green & over black point to aquatic park, then back. am finding this surprisingly doable on the rental bike - back and forth to office a couple of days a week would involve faaar less elevation loss-gain, although yes the pavement on market is appalling. nonetheless really enjoying the reg bike riding experience, love not having to remember to charge. if had a kid or more though would def stick to ebike.

I am wanting an ebike more and more (I had, and got rid of, one in the past when the tech wasn't as mature) but it is great to know you're out almost nothing if it gets stolen.

Yeah the fact that poor people have no way to credibly signal their preferences with money is a huge strike against capitalism as a resource-allocation scheme tbh.

The counterargument is "they implicitly signaled their preferences by not working harder to get money", but that only partially works because people get born with different endowments.

There are only so many courtside seats at a basketball game. Do rich people get more enjoyment out of them than poorer people would? Definitely not always and everywhere. But some rich people did work really hard to get rich precisely so they could afford expensive things.

I've on my fourth version of an ebike and they've gotten so much better. The first two were regular bikes where I put on an electric front wheel. My current one is a single speed fat tire step through with integrated head, tail, and brake lights. It's low maintenance because there's no gear system and it only cost $1300. Makes a 6.5 mile city commute super easy and the throttle assist is really useful for staying out of dangerous situations like double parked delivery trucks. If I have to run to the supermarket 3/4 mile away the bike is a better choice because of traffic and limited parking. We also use it to take younger kids to sports at the nearby fields because of parking. I've used it to get to the golf course several times which the course staff find amusing.

re: 88

That may well be the legal situation. However, a lot of people in London ride non-compliant e-bikes (or fucking e-scooters). I've been overtaken by e-bike riders (Deliveroo riders, etc) fairly regularly when I've been going flat out on my bike which is 10+ mph or so more than that theoretical cut-off. And I don't mean "fit Deliveroo rider propelling their e-bike with pedal power", I mean "Guy on mobile phone, riding one handed, not pedalling at all, in the dark, with no lights on."

Generally speaking, I am very pro-e-bike, for exactly the reasons given by SP above. But ... there are a lot of riders in London who are able to maintain Tour de France rider speeds with the bike-handling skills of an enthusiastic but hyperactive 7 year old on their first bike. Their bikes can write cheques that their bike-handling and traffic experience simply can't cash. Someone able to thrash through busy traffic at 15-20mph has normally--most of the time--spent a bit of time on a bike and built up a decent amount of road-sense and experience. People buy an e-bike and they are out doing that when they can, literally, barely ride a bike. It's the low-cost analogue of the retired boomer who passes his motorbike test on a 125cc and goes out and buys a 1000CC Ducati the next day, and kills their self.

I don't know what the solution is. It'll probably calm down over time and things like licensing are going to be a barrier to entry that we don't want if we want to reduce car use and pollution. But I think cracking down on the unregulated e-bikes might be a good idea.

re: 92

If your wheelset will take it, going tubeless is amazing.

I've ridden at least 4 - 6 hours a week, every week, in London for the past 18 months. In that time, I've had exactly one puncture that I even noticed on the road, and I was still able to get home, pumping it up every mile or two, as the sealant was able to plug the hole enough to slow the leak down. My tyres are covered in scars and small cuts, and when I replaced one a while ago (I wore the tread off it), the tyre had so many small bits of metal and glass embedded in it, it was amazing. The tyres had just self-sealed and I hadn't even noticed.

95: Can you use the ebike as a regular bike if it's not charged?

I have a teenager who used to not eat eggs. 5 years ago he was having stomach problems and the doctor did an elimination diet to look for allergies. He's vegetarian so there was a period where they were the only thing he could eat. But this month he decided he likes them for breakfast every day, and his brother decided he wants them too, so it's like a goddamn chicken genocide around here. Can I get on CNN to talk about the cost of buying five dozen eggs a week?

101: yes, if you don't mind riding a super heavy bike. like really really heavy.

102: One of us is Anderson Cooper carrying out an elaborate lie.

It's low maintenance because there's no gear system and it only cost $1300.

Can I ask the model?

If you buy her and you a drink.

Radrunner although when I got it fenders were included in the base price, now extra.
https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radrunner-electric-utility-bike

re 100: can I also recommend tubeless, perhaps on a gravel bike as well if you want drops. It won't be as twitchy as a full-on racebike, but still pretty sprightly and will go over any urban surface. I have a Cannondale Topstone and love it to death.

Like that one guy with the bunnies.

Anyway, I think the Whole Foods here has decided to pay enough to staff the place fully for the holidays. I've never seen so many people working there at once before.

I have the Radrunner Plus, which is the delux version of the link in 107. It has a lot of the upgrades (fenders, for sure) that I wanted as a package deal. The one thing that is probably unnecessary is the derailer... I would have preferred the one speed.

My 15 year old fits on the back seat and tolerates me driving him around on it.

Is it legal to ride one of those on the sidewalk with a BAC over .08%. Asking for a friend.

I'm enticed by the tubeless tires and SP's e-bike, thank you all. I wonder if I could possibly do the school run with Elke by bike... it's ~3 miles each way, mostly on a dedicated bike path where we could travel at "normal" bike speeds, but the whole run would probably be safer with the two of us on one vehicle, especially if we could take hills easily. The timing is always so tight that mornings might not work, but maybe the pickup? I loathe the car routine so very much. (I can share the whole dumb story of "why not the neighborhood school?" if anyone is curious, but I may have done so already.)

wholeheartedly encourage you to give the school run on an ebike a try! see if you can rent frim rei for a week. so so so much fun.

I wonder what the average effective speed is when you're going up to 20mph on a bike. My commute is 12 miles, so if I could average 15mph, it would be just 48 minutes along many pleasant shorelines. (Google says 63 for bikes in general.)

Just curious if there is anything better than Google for bike routing in the states -- it is the worst available method here, with things like cycle.travel and komoot or cycle streets all much better at avoiding traffic. Goggle's bike routes appear to have been designed by sociopathic petrolheads who think everyone should travel on the widest, fastest roads.

6.5 mile commute through the city is 35 minutes. There's one half mile stretch over the river at top speed but otherwise 10-15 mph.

113.last: I'm curious -- nothing's as interesting as school decisions -- and I don't think you've talked about it.

116: it's pretty great in sf bc the bike coalition gave them their map. have no idea elsewhere.

is anything better than Google for bike routing in the states

Bikemap has seemed reasonable locally, in my limited experience.

For enjoyable routes, rather than directions, Strava--which is an amalgam of workout tracking and social media--can be a good source of info.

torque: "The counterargument is "they implicitly signaled their preferences by not working harder to get money", but that only partially works because people get born with different endowments."

Delong has pointed out that the gravest market failure is this "endowment effect": that people randomly receive massive endowments that make them more listened-to by Teh [sic] Market, and for no good reason whatsoever. He also points out that no mainstream economist will touch with a ten-foot pole, for the obvious reason.

Here's one of his ShakeShack posts about it: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/why-do-economists-ignore-the-greatest

Why isn't the unequal distribution of ex ante expected lifetime income--inequality of opportunity--conceptualized by us economists as the greatest of all market failures? And why isn't the distribution of political power that creates & preserves a property order of unequal wealth seen as the greatest of all "regulatory capture by a special interest group" flaws in the working of society, economy, and the state?"

Just had to bike to a busy part of town 1.7 miles away where it would be insane to park. Could take bus or Uber or get dropped off, instead electric bike it was 7 minutes each way, park right at my destination.

re: 115

I can do about 16 miles in an hour, but it's really hard work. Stopping and starting and traffic means that you have to be speeding up and slowing down a lot, and sitting in the high teens or low 20s whenever you are moving freely. I'd expect the same sort of miles covered in an hour would be perfectly achievable on an e-bike, as you can stop/start quicker and hold a higher speed with less effort.

I'd expect your commute to be easily do-able in that sort of time.

My actual commute to work is about 13 miles. I can do it in 50 minutes on a non e-bike if not carrying bags. On an e-bike, it would be easy.

Re: 108

Yeah, mine is also a gravel setup. Decathlon do one bike (RC520) available in gravel and non-gravel versions. Only difference is the paint and the tyres. I bought the road one (as it was in stock and the gravel wasn't) and put gravel tyres on it.

Now and again I take it round Richmond Park on the off-road Tamsin Trail, and except on some rougher descending bits, where my cowardice* slows me down, I pass people on mountain bikes all the time.** Gravel bikes are in that Goldilocks zone for me. Fast on the road, won't break if the road is either terrible, or not a road at all.

* not a joke, I am really embarrassingly tentative on anything downhill and steep or downhill with a loose surface.
** although some guy on a MTB passed me the other day and as he passed I saw he had. 20kg toddler in a bike seat on the back, and he passed me easily, too.

Back when I was bike commuting, I noticed guys with kids in bike seats were reliably very fast. My theory was that it doesn't occur to a man to use a bike to transport a kid around unless he's already a very serious cyclist.

OP: Goldman believes that the increase in inflation is entirely due to durable goods with supply chain problems, and that it will drop to lowish levels after spring when those problems are resolved.

If you don't want to futz around with tubeless, you can get tubes that have the sealant in them, or get Gatorskin tires. They ride like erasers but they are pretty bulletproof (and I imagine they're not quite as harsh a ride above 23mm.)

I'm of two minds about ebikes. I don't own one. They would make my commute easier, but I take a perverse amount of pride in making the moderate climb to our house while hauling Pebbles. (At least these days she's on a Towwhee instead of a full on trailer.) It's awesome that my colleague nearby commutes via ebike. I think they'd be great if people used them to cut down commute time. But where I see them mostly is on mountain bikes, and again: two minds. It's awesome that my 50yo riding buddy can coach the junior high team on her eBike and that she can ride every day with her kid. It's great when people get outdoors and can go farther than they would otherwise. ON THE OTHER HAND, I am so damned sick of ebikers bragging on forums that it's exactly the SAME exercise as pedaling a non-ebike because they BARELY use the assist. Sure bro, you spent $7000 on a 65lb ebike when you could have spent thousands less for exactly the SAME experience.

The Calabat noted that much of Moab is very anti-ebike, and informed me that I'd better ride Slickrock before 'you get old and you need an ebike to keep up with me.'

115: My usual route takes me through a lot of traffic, and I'm a decent cyclist, but I'd say that averaging anything more than 13mph is pretty hard if there's lots of stops and starts.

having spent a couple of years biking all around san francisco on a mildly boosted ebike, and then the last 3 weeks on a regular bike oh my fucking god it is not not not the same thing people!!!

swimming a mile-1.5 mile in the bay and then biking up through the presidio to the arguello gate with boost assist = generally warm innards, small toes and fingers still numb, no desire to rip off scarf, puffy vest or wool hat under bike helmet.

same exact swim on a regular bike = skip the wool hat and puffy vest, have to take off gloves and scarf before i head up the hill as well as completely unzip windbreaker. and i get home in a lovely pelting heat with zero numbness. absolutely love it. we'll see how it goes once the water is 50f and below! wooo hoooo!

The Negishi theorem makes me feel a lot better about the neoclassical framework. It turns out that all this time economists were gaslighting us about how great market economies are they just forgot to mention that their arguments and intuitions would only apply in the relative absence or inequality. They were selling oligarchy as if it were democracy.

Most of the online criticism of the economic community is, like, a decade or two out of date, and the younger economists seem much better.

It's too bad for them that I'm a practical man who is quite exempt from any intellectual influence except for some defunct economist.

130: Finding it very difficult to find an accessible summary of it online.

130: Dude, don't be as stupid as Chetan. Econ 101 literally says that markets don't do anything about inequality, and you have to redistribute if you do care about it. Nobody was gaslighting you. You were just completely ignorant about the subject.

Okay, maybe I'm being unusually grouchy, but somehow in the last couple of weeks I've reached my lifetime limit on "here's my uninformed opinion of economists and what they think". The relative balance between liberal and conservative has seesawed back-and-forth over the years, but there has never been any point in the postwar era in which conservatives have been completely dominant. When Samuelson put out his textbook in 1948 (the standard textbook for the next 50 years), the President of MIT had to answer questions from the media on whether Samuelson was secretly a communist.

The gaslighting was about the effects of inequality, not the causes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but economists treated inequality as, perhaps, regrettable but not something that influences the development of an economy. Negishi showed that in competitive equilibrium the economy is effectively minimizing an objective function that is weighted as Chetan describes, and with our level of inequality it's a function that exclusively responds to the preferences of the wealthiest. So, when economists would argue that, say, markets are great because there is no central planner, not mentioning low inequality as a precondition was inexcuseable.

133: Economists don't seem to have spent much time discussing it. I think it got shoved into the same drawer as the inconvenient lack of unique equilibria.

Every equilibrium is special to someone.

It wasn't shoved into any drawer. It's basic welfare economics. It's probably being taught in a thousand classrooms as I write this. A perfectly competitive market (assuming blah, blah, blah) is efficient, in that you can't make anyone better off without making someone worse off (which redistribution does). There's nothing that makes it fair. The case for markets is that you redistribute, and then you let the market take care of the rest. This is why Milton Friedman, of all people, advocated a negative income tax.

Negishi's precise mathematical result is that you can get every efficient outcome by optimizing a weighted sum of the individual utility functions. But this is ordinal utility -- you can take utility squared, or utility cubed, or e^utility, and get an equivalent utility function. Each time you make marginal utility higher, and the weight lower. You can take log log log log utility and make the marginal utility really small, and the weights really big.

The only non-trivial consequence of this is that in a market economy the rich get more. Which, uh, duh.

118: Basically, she's going to our old neighborhood school, which is a block away from our old rental. When we bought the new house, we called the new neighborhood school to try to enroll her, but they said they were extremely overenrolled; we could put her on a waiting list to get in, but there was a chance that she would end up in a lottery and get sent to a random school in the district. So I called her old school and begged them to take her back, and they said a) of course they would, and b) in fact all families can keep their kids in whichever school they'd been attending even if they move. (This seems like a very humane policy given how many people get pushed around by landlords.) We figured she could stay at the old school for a year and maybe transfer after that, if we could get our name on the list earlier. But predictably enough, she didn't want to switch schools, and during the year-and-a-half of distance learning the commute didn't matter anyway. So we're in the weird position of sending our kid to the very slightly less posh public school three miles away after moving into the hills. She spends every day with a beloved and very shy friend who would apparently be crushed if she left.

139: Part of why conservative economists get such a bad rap in the public sphere, at least the left portions thereof, is because when they are in a position to effect policy changes, they curiously find that it's more important and urgent to argue for cutting capital gains taxes or deregulating speculation than negative income taxes and other erstwhile conservative mechanisms to redress the imbalance of wealth.

but somehow in the last couple of weeks I've reached my lifetime limit on "here's my uninformed opinion of economists and what they think".

Be mad at journalists, no?

I think it suffices for each person here who is not a trained economist, to ask themselves the following question:

"Did I know about this result of Negishi before Delong started publicizing it? Heck, did I know about it before I read this thread?"

If doctors regularly appeared on TV to argue that licking doorknobs was healthy and promoted it as a life-extending therapy, we'd all have good reason to be angry, even if in private doctors laughed to each other about "those doorknob-lickers".

The trick is to avoid directly claiming that licking the door knob treats anything while implying just that.

115: I timed my ride home this evening, which had two reasonably long red lights, which is about normal. It was 23 minutes for a 4.9 mile journey, so about 13 mph on average. But it's mostly cycle paths or back streets without lights until you get within a mile or so of the office. If you had lights the whole way it would probably add several minutes.

141: Conservative economists probably deserve their bad reputation.

142: It's just so endless, and so relentless, and to run into it even here, the least stupid comment section on the Internet, is depressing.

143: But the result doesn't say what you think it says. If you understood what it said, you would see that. Marginal utility is not a real thing (unless you are Jeremy Bentham). I can make your marginal utility be anything, by a monotonic transformation of your utility function. The only significance of it is that rich people get more stuff. Did you think anyone thought otherwise?

Someone blew by me on one of these today, clearly in Class 3/28mph mode. 8mph was quite a difference on city streets.

She spends every day with a beloved and very shy friend who would apparently be crushed if she left.

That's really sweet.

the bike in 147 is going to disrupt the last mile delivery system for illegal drugs everywhere. Buy shares now!

ah, that already happened. see this piece from 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-machines-drug-money-laundering-bookies

"Smart dealers don't drive around here. You are more likely to be stopped by police driving around late at night doing deliveries than if you are taking a bus somewhere into town."

Round my way, the dealers all seem to use e-scooters or those stupid e-bikes that look like Bromptons with 5-inch wide tyres (20" wheels).

Although I did see a proper "The Wire" style street handover a few months back opposite a local park. A car (the prospective buyer) being followed by another car. Front car pulled in opposite the park, pretty obviously being directed by the follow car. A few minutes after they stopped a big black Mercedes came tearing down the road, did a handbrake style U-turn in the road and opened the window. A girl jumped out of the front car and took a brown paper bag that was handed out of the window. Black Merc drove off at speed, followed by the rear car, leaving just the car that had made the purchase.

Wasn't much later than 8 pm, and while it's a quiet area, this was on a main road.

People in Pittsburgh suck at u-turns and they own their sucking such that no place is too congested or dangerous for them to not do a three-point turn at. Except if they can fuck it up and do a four-point turn.

They'll always add an extra step if they can back up toward a pedestrian crossing legally.

I had to do a dangerous N point turn yesterday as I drove down Guru Nanak Road which is narrow and one way to encounter a broken down bus blocking it. Took about 20 minutes for the queue of cars, all of whom had entered when they thought it was clear to laboriously turn and drive back down, with honking furious idiots driving the other way wondering why there was a queue of cars coming towards them.

I'm talking about people who take the turn on a four lane road to get a parking place or something.

re: 155

Happens here, too, although I think a lot less. Doing it on a standard 2 lane, though, all the time.

146: Regarding criticism of economists, I feel basically the way I do about the contents of the Steele dossier. Sure, a lot of it is nonsense, but I have a hard time getting worked up about it. There is a lot more pernicious nonsense out there -- a lot of it promoted by economists.

I think the combatants here are close to arriving at an appropriate comity: The science of economics is a thing; the application of that science to politics is often hideous. Emerson used to compare economists to lawyers -- as advocates rather than scientists -- but you can hire an expert from any profession to promote bullshit. There just happens to be a high (and highly visible) demand for economic bullshit.

The pee tape is more real than "GDP" is.

My wife picked up an ebike just last week; an Aventon Level. Her first few rides were amazing for her; she has a commute of about 7 miles that's ~ 12 minutes via highway or 20ish via surface streets. Her commute was 38 minutes the first time, despite having to switch routes because of unmarked gates on her planned route.

It feels like a game changer for her. (The bike is replacing a scooter that was just too heavy for her to feel comfortable handling given her shoulder and back issues of the last couple years.)

Hey Walt, sorry about the comments above. I was an ass. I'm working my way through the math, trying to reconcile yours and Delong's descriptions with my intuition. The point about ordinality is taken.

People always get tripped up on levels of measurement problems.