Ted Gioia on human connection; Peter Wallison on privatizing bank regulation; Russ Roberts and me on misinformation; The Psmiths on the fertility decline
I have Arnold down for 18 Econtalk appearances. Mike Munger is at 48 appearances and Tyler Cowen 17 appearances. Links to all 18 of Arnold’s are below.
On family size: My mother had 8 siblings, my father had 7. They were poor, rural Catholic families who regularly attended Mass. I have 54 first cousins across both families.
My parents were frequent but not regular church goers. I have 3 siblings and 1 child, my sisters have 2, 1 and 0. We are all infrequent church goers at best. My wife has 2 sibs, my son has a total of 8 cousins across both families. 54 to 8 in a single generation.
Variable water bills are usually bureaucratic incompetency and lazy employees of monopoly institutions. If they don't bother reading the flow meter, they estimate the usage. This can go on for many months then they get the real number and it appears like a leak. The customer only notices the big upward corrections but downward corrections are also possible, but customers don't notice. An institution with poor internal controls can sometimes forget about those and keeps the money by reseting the base number. Who ever checks or records the meter readings?
Accurate data will detect leaks, but we are talking about monopoly institutions and reasonably small amounts of money where accuracy is not critical to institutional survival in the public sector.
However, I am bothered by assumptions about leaks of the critics of LNG (liquid natural gas) exports used by the administration to justify banning new planned export terminals. Contained in their "so-called-science" is an assumption of a 3 to 5% leak rate on methane between the natural gas wells and the LNG export from leaks in the transportation system as the gas flows from owner to owner through the system. With billions of dollars and major safety issues depending the accuracy of these flow measurements they tend to be very accurate and can easily detect leaks when 0.1% of the flow can be millions of dollars and an explosion hazard. These large assumed leaks give the administration the answers they want and so they goes along with the "research" findings.
When I lived in France the electricity usage was estimated based on past usage and then every year someone came to read the meter and occasionally their estimates would have been way off and you'd either get a huge bill the next month or zero bills for a few months and then smaller bills in the future.
Gioia - I have to wonder about cause and effect. Does the type of person who develops those connections live longer because of their personality type or because they developed the connections? Would a loner who tries to do those things be miserable and die even sooner? Is our evidence scientific, correlation stats, or anectotal?
I had the same problem with Waldinger' an Schulz's The Good Life. They bang you over the head with the fact that good relationships are associated with happiness, and then act as if the causation is all relationships to happiness. But, of course, happy people are more likely to have good relationships. And there may be third and fourth and fifth causes to both.
“This is Arnold's 19th appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in December of 2022, talking about Twitter, FTX, and ChatGPT. And boy, that seems like a long time ago. Arnold, welcome back to EconTalk.”
“Arnold has a very nice Substack account called In My Tribe. This is his 18th appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in October of 2021 talking about reforming government. Arnold, welcome back to EconTalk.
Arnold Kling: Thanks. I'm chasing Mike Munger, I think.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. We all are, by definition. You're definitely in the top five. You might be two or three. I don't know exactly where you are.”
“Today is September 4th, 2024, and my guest is Mike Munger of Duke University. This is Mike's 48th appearance on EconTalk. Forty-eight. That's 12 times four. That's amazing. He was last here in June of 2024, talking about government failure and market failure.”
“Today is April 19th, 2023, and my guest is Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. With Alex Tabarrok, he blogs at Marginal Revolution. His podcast is Conversations with Tyler. This is his 17th appearance on the program. He was last here in August of 2022, talking about his book with Daniel Gross titled Talent.”
REl Ted Goia's writing, this is something I'm seeing more and more: a push to get back to natural and biological behaviors for happiness and health, and a skepticism of technological and pharmaceutical (other than psychedelic) solutions.
I am a big fan of Peter Wallison and agree with most of his opinions. In my opinion, we should set up a public / private corporation owned and managed by the banking industry. Really, this would just be a formalization of the system we now have. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/law-and-order-fdic
Readers might be interested in my editorial which appeared in the American Banker. It argues that we should insure 100% of bank deposits. I was unable to copy the PDF file, so I copied the entire thing below.
Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since the untimely 2023 demise of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic and Signature Bank, there has been much gnashing of teeth among bank "experts" — regulators and their academic enablers — over how to best inoculate banks from the twin scourges of runs and bailouts.
To me, the solution is both obvious and simple; we should explicitly extend Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. coverage to all deposits, including those exceeding $250,000. This solution is almost uniformly rejected by those previously mentioned experts, but their arguments are deeply flawed.
Objections to full deposit insurance center on the problem of "moral hazard." Many experts allege that if all deposits are insured, depositors will make no effort to differentiate sound banks from troubled ones. This, they contend, will enable troubled banks to assume more risk, knowing that if they win, shareholders will profit; but if they lose, it is taxpayers who will pay for a government bailout.
At first, this might sound logical. It appeals to our sense of fair play; those who make bad financial decisions should suffer the consequences and taxpayers should never pay for private mistakes. But to me, this view is mistaken on at least two fronts.
First, to my knowledge, taxpayers have never paid for the bailout of a U.S. commercial bank. It is the banks themselves who have always (eventually) paid for bank bailouts, mainly through FDIC assessments. To be sure, the Federal Reserve does often lend to banks needing liquidity. But this is not a bailout. This is just the Fed doing its job.
As MIT economist Deborah Lucas observes, "prospective costs to taxpayers are small, even during a severe financial crisis. The direct costs fall largely on strong banks, which through the system subsidize weaker ones."
In its recent final report, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the commercial bank rescue programs (TARP, etc.) undertaken in the financial crisis eked out a profit for taxpayers although losses were sustained on some mortgage programs and aid to AIG, General Motors and Chrysler.
In fact, the whole "heads I win, tails you lose" argument is a big canard, at least when applied to U.S. banks. In a typical bailout, equity holders are wiped out — mainly through dilution — so the risk-takers don't really "win."
A second, and far more important flaw in the "moral hazard" argument is the false premise that private depositors — even sophisticated ones — are capable of effectively differentiating between those banks that will fail and those that won't. After all, Silicon Valley's depositors were the definition of "sophisticated."
Think about it for a minute. How could any depositor have been expected to foresee the run at Silicon Valley when an army of so-called experts whiffed? Wall Street equity analysts missed it. Moody's and S&P, always reliable lagging indicators of credit problems, missed it too.
And, of course, regulators missed it. As is recounted in the Fed's admirably candid postmortem of Silicon Valley's demise, more than a dozen examiners were embedded full time at the bank with access to all of its confidential information. If these ostensibly competent professionals could not see a freight train barreling toward them, how could any depositor on the outside have been expected to spot it and jump aside?
It is very much to the point that many of these experts had identified fundamental weaknesses at Silicon Valley prior to the run. The bank's imprudently long bond portfolio was staring everyone in the face. But it is easy to identify deficiencies in a bank. It is another thing entirely to predict that a particular bank is doomed to imminent failure. After all, many banks had imprudently long bond portfolios.
The point is that despite Silicon Valley's many deficiencies, it was virtually impossible for anyone to predict a fatal run. In other words, while we can explain in retrospect why Silicon Valley suffered its run, it could not have been foreseen. Runs are irrational, and unforeseeable by definition.
For the unfortunate First Republic, there is no rational explanation for its run, not even in retrospect. Its run was pure panic and contagion.
A compelling case in favor of full deposit insurance is that it would help balance the immense regulatory advantage held by our biggest banks over our smaller ones. As things stand now, every corporate treasurer knows that our government would never let depositors incur a loss at a systemically important financial institution. It is an easy decision to bank with these giants rather than take a risk with smaller banks whose large deposits do not have the same de facto guarantee.
I will admit to a strong bias in favor of our diverse banking system. Though difficult to prove, I believe that America's endowment of small- and medium-size banks has been an immense benefit to us compared to other nations in financing small entrepreneurial businesses and serving local communities. Even though technology may be driving banks inexorably toward consolidation, I believe that we should do what we can to encourage smaller banks by providing them with at least a level regulatory playing field. Full FDIC insurance would help them survive and, hopefully, prosper.
It is ironic, to say the least, that our policymakers delight in disparaging our "too big to fail" banks and the concentration of the banking industry while at the same time driving business away from small banks and into the giants
I'm thinking one way to fix the meter reading problem is for the meter readers to be a separate organization from the service provider. Meter readers get a fee for each read and get charged for the time and effort needed to resolve a mistake. That gives them an incentive to be right. Since they are separate they don't benefit (as the utility does) from a large overcharge or (as the consumer does) from an undercharge
Miracles can never be proven true afterwards, and few folk would be able to prove they ate what they had for breakfast last week. Most things we ourselves truly experience, cannot be proven to have happened the way they did happen. It’s good to usually believe your own fallible memory, but not always.
A dead body, or a 16,000 meter reading, may exist as a fact, a true fact, but how it happened is thru a series of events, often including human actions, often unknown to others.
Usually we aren’t sure of the truth. Like, was it H Biden’s laptop or Russian mis-information? Most folk, and the FBI and H Biden now claim it was his, after the truth was censored so as to steal the 2020 election. (I wish Trump would focus more on this aspect of the election being stolen.) I say that such 51 Dem Deep State liars, supporting illegal election interference by censoring the truth, does constitute stealing the election, as Clinton was claiming the 2016 election was stolen. Others, like Kling, say lies and censorship of the truth don’t make the election unfair or stolen.
Then the T-truth depends on definitions, which might not be agreed to while facts, laptop lies or meter readings, might be agreed to as “facts”.
On the oppressor/oppressed axis, there’s a huge issue that everyone has ancestors who were oppressed and were oppressors, and very often oppressed people become oppressors when they gain the power to do so. Prague was a big, 9th century slave market, before Christianizing. “Slavs”and Slavic people, linguistically came from “slave”.
Hm. If I'm not mistaken, Donald Trump mouthed some untruths prior to the 2020 election. And he continues to, in case you haven't noticed. Look at Deere & Company's most recent press release. I assume that the 51 Deep State liars you refer to consist mainly of Trump's entire senior staff who have denounced him as incompetent and dangerous. Including the former Vice President. Or maybe, as Trump argues, they are all just resentful at being fired.
a while back and it seems that Tik-Tok’s user profile differs from other platforms. In general, Pew found that social media use increased with income on most platforms, but Tik-Tok stands out as having a greater share of the less than $30,000 income per year group (36%) than did the +$100,000 group (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabItem=64e32376-5a21-4b1d-8f8b-5f92406db984 ). Tik-Tok seems light on text and heavy on video, perhaps that combination is particularly pernicious?
And given that there is a strong correlation between reading ability and income, might social media use have different consequences for users with different levels of reading ability? Gallup did a study for the Barbara Bush Foundation on illiteracy that found that 54% of U.S. adults (ages 16-74) lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. This translates to approximately 130 million people. And over 20% of adult Americans have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1, defined as “unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms.” These low levels of adult literacy might decrease the achievement of the full potential for the U.S. economy by up to $2.2 trillion annually. (https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf )
One possible way that this situation might possibly be improved reflects #5 on Gioia’s list of happiness factors is “Connection via charitable acts, and giving (material and emotional) support.” Having participated for several years in the Reading is Fundamental program as a tutor, I can confirm that helping kids learn to read was not psychologically disadvantageous, at least for me. However, there now appears to be interesting new opportunities to engage in such activity. For example, https://www.learntobe.org/apply , might be a good fit for someone, maybe even me.
I don't much agree with the Wallison quote. I started reading his piece and found it even worse. Maybe I'll get back to it and read the whole thing at some point but I find it too absurd.
Is banking regulation perfect? Of course not. Far from it but I don't agree current regulation and monetary policy is the cause of our financial disruptions. And in my lifetime it seems like the Fed in particular has gotten better at reading the tea leaves. Does anyone really think Volker (and Friedman?) didn't usher in vast improvements that have continued?
( I'm sympathetic to the argument the Fed should have done more to tighten monetary policy in the face of inflationary covid stimulus spending but this mistake is small compared to what could have happened if they tightened too much.)
In his piece he talks about financial crisis of the last 100 years. I would argue in these years we have gotten much better at handling financial crises. And what about before that? Here I would argue they were much worse.
He says 3,000 banks failed from 1978 to 1992 but only 516 from 2009 to 2023. How does this support his argument?
I'm not saying this is you but there are at least two places a plumbing "leak" can go without damage.
I have a sump pump backup pump that works off of water pressure. A rainstorm that cuts power can result in a lot of water use. If the primary pump has failed, the backup will run after every rain.
Appliances, especially toilets, can leak into the sewer line. On that note, continuously running toilets are more likely while one is gone.
An acquaintance of mine discovered, via his water bill, that his cat amused himself when left alone and bored, by flushing the toilet and watching the water swirl down the drain. "Clearly a mystical experience for the cat" he joked. But while he was living in an apartment building, which had a swimming pool for the residents, the cat's water addiction was undetected. He moved to the suburbs and all was discovered.
I have Arnold down for 18 Econtalk appearances. Mike Munger is at 48 appearances and Tyler Cowen 17 appearances. Links to all 18 of Arnold’s are below.
Arnold Kling on Twitter, FTX, and ChatGPT
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-twitter-ftx-and-chatgpt/
Arnold Kling on Education and the Internet
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-education-and-the-internet/
Arnold Kling on Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-patterns-of-sustainable-specialization-and-trade/
Arnold Kling on the Unseen World of Banking, Mortgages, and Government
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-the-unseen-world-of-banking-mortgages-and-government/
Arnold Kling on Knowledge, Power, and Unchecked and Unbalanced
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-knowledge-power-and-unchecked-and-unbalanced/
Arnold Kling on Prosperity, Poverty, and Economics 2.0
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-prosperity-poverty-and-economics-2-0/
Arnold Kling on Freddie and Fannie and the Recent History of the U.S. Housing Market
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-freddie-and-fannie-and-the-recent-history-of-the-u-s-housing-market/
Russ Roberts on the Price of Everything
https://www.econtalk.org/roberts-on-the-price-of-everything/
Arnold Kling on Hospitals and Health Care
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-hospitals-and-health-care/
Arnold Kling on Credit Default Swaps, Counterparty Risk, and the Political Economy of Financial Regulation
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-credit-default-swaps-counterparty-risk-and-the-political-economy-of-financial-regulation/
Arnold Kling on the Three Languages of Politics
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-the-three-languages-of-politics/
Arnold Kling on Economics for the 21st Century
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-economics-for-the-21st-century/
Arnold Kling on the Economics of Health Care and the Crisis of Abundance
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-the-economics-of-health-care-and-the-crisis-of-abundance/
Arnold Kling on Morality, Culture, and Tribalism
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-morality-culture-and-tribalism/
Arnold Kling on the Three Languages of Politics, Revisited
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-the-three-languages-of-politics-revisited/
Lee Ohanian, Arnold Kling, and John Cochrane on the Future of Freedom, Democracy, and Prosperity
https://www.econtalk.org/lee-ohanian-arnold-kling-and-john-cochrane-on-the-future-of-freedom-democracy-and-prosperity/
Arnold Kling on Reforming Government and Expertise
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-reforming-government-and-expertise/
Arnold Kling on Specialization and Trade
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-specialization-and-trade/
On family size: My mother had 8 siblings, my father had 7. They were poor, rural Catholic families who regularly attended Mass. I have 54 first cousins across both families.
My parents were frequent but not regular church goers. I have 3 siblings and 1 child, my sisters have 2, 1 and 0. We are all infrequent church goers at best. My wife has 2 sibs, my son has a total of 8 cousins across both families. 54 to 8 in a single generation.
Variable water bills are usually bureaucratic incompetency and lazy employees of monopoly institutions. If they don't bother reading the flow meter, they estimate the usage. This can go on for many months then they get the real number and it appears like a leak. The customer only notices the big upward corrections but downward corrections are also possible, but customers don't notice. An institution with poor internal controls can sometimes forget about those and keeps the money by reseting the base number. Who ever checks or records the meter readings?
Accurate data will detect leaks, but we are talking about monopoly institutions and reasonably small amounts of money where accuracy is not critical to institutional survival in the public sector.
However, I am bothered by assumptions about leaks of the critics of LNG (liquid natural gas) exports used by the administration to justify banning new planned export terminals. Contained in their "so-called-science" is an assumption of a 3 to 5% leak rate on methane between the natural gas wells and the LNG export from leaks in the transportation system as the gas flows from owner to owner through the system. With billions of dollars and major safety issues depending the accuracy of these flow measurements they tend to be very accurate and can easily detect leaks when 0.1% of the flow can be millions of dollars and an explosion hazard. These large assumed leaks give the administration the answers they want and so they goes along with the "research" findings.
When I lived in France the electricity usage was estimated based on past usage and then every year someone came to read the meter and occasionally their estimates would have been way off and you'd either get a huge bill the next month or zero bills for a few months and then smaller bills in the future.
Gioia - I have to wonder about cause and effect. Does the type of person who develops those connections live longer because of their personality type or because they developed the connections? Would a loner who tries to do those things be miserable and die even sooner? Is our evidence scientific, correlation stats, or anectotal?
I had the same problem with Waldinger' an Schulz's The Good Life. They bang you over the head with the fact that good relationships are associated with happiness, and then act as if the causation is all relationships to happiness. But, of course, happy people are more likely to have good relationships. And there may be third and fourth and fifth causes to both.
“This is Arnold's 19th appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in December of 2022, talking about Twitter, FTX, and ChatGPT. And boy, that seems like a long time ago. Arnold, welcome back to EconTalk.”
“Arnold has a very nice Substack account called In My Tribe. This is his 18th appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in October of 2021 talking about reforming government. Arnold, welcome back to EconTalk.
Arnold Kling: Thanks. I'm chasing Mike Munger, I think.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. We all are, by definition. You're definitely in the top five. You might be two or three. I don't know exactly where you are.”
“Today is September 4th, 2024, and my guest is Mike Munger of Duke University. This is Mike's 48th appearance on EconTalk. Forty-eight. That's 12 times four. That's amazing. He was last here in June of 2024, talking about government failure and market failure.”
“Today is April 19th, 2023, and my guest is Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. With Alex Tabarrok, he blogs at Marginal Revolution. His podcast is Conversations with Tyler. This is his 17th appearance on the program. He was last here in August of 2022, talking about his book with Daniel Gross titled Talent.”
https://www.econlib.org/search/
REl Ted Goia's writing, this is something I'm seeing more and more: a push to get back to natural and biological behaviors for happiness and health, and a skepticism of technological and pharmaceutical (other than psychedelic) solutions.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-treating-symptoms-of-mental
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-treating-symptoms-of-mental-48d
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-treating-symptoms-of-mental-a0b
I am a big fan of Peter Wallison and agree with most of his opinions. In my opinion, we should set up a public / private corporation owned and managed by the banking industry. Really, this would just be a formalization of the system we now have. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/law-and-order-fdic
Readers might be interested in my editorial which appeared in the American Banker. It argues that we should insure 100% of bank deposits. I was unable to copy the PDF file, so I copied the entire thing below.
Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since the untimely 2023 demise of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic and Signature Bank, there has been much gnashing of teeth among bank "experts" — regulators and their academic enablers — over how to best inoculate banks from the twin scourges of runs and bailouts.
To me, the solution is both obvious and simple; we should explicitly extend Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. coverage to all deposits, including those exceeding $250,000. This solution is almost uniformly rejected by those previously mentioned experts, but their arguments are deeply flawed.
Objections to full deposit insurance center on the problem of "moral hazard." Many experts allege that if all deposits are insured, depositors will make no effort to differentiate sound banks from troubled ones. This, they contend, will enable troubled banks to assume more risk, knowing that if they win, shareholders will profit; but if they lose, it is taxpayers who will pay for a government bailout.
At first, this might sound logical. It appeals to our sense of fair play; those who make bad financial decisions should suffer the consequences and taxpayers should never pay for private mistakes. But to me, this view is mistaken on at least two fronts.
First, to my knowledge, taxpayers have never paid for the bailout of a U.S. commercial bank. It is the banks themselves who have always (eventually) paid for bank bailouts, mainly through FDIC assessments. To be sure, the Federal Reserve does often lend to banks needing liquidity. But this is not a bailout. This is just the Fed doing its job.
As MIT economist Deborah Lucas observes, "prospective costs to taxpayers are small, even during a severe financial crisis. The direct costs fall largely on strong banks, which through the system subsidize weaker ones."
In its recent final report, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the commercial bank rescue programs (TARP, etc.) undertaken in the financial crisis eked out a profit for taxpayers although losses were sustained on some mortgage programs and aid to AIG, General Motors and Chrysler.
In fact, the whole "heads I win, tails you lose" argument is a big canard, at least when applied to U.S. banks. In a typical bailout, equity holders are wiped out — mainly through dilution — so the risk-takers don't really "win."
A second, and far more important flaw in the "moral hazard" argument is the false premise that private depositors — even sophisticated ones — are capable of effectively differentiating between those banks that will fail and those that won't. After all, Silicon Valley's depositors were the definition of "sophisticated."
Think about it for a minute. How could any depositor have been expected to foresee the run at Silicon Valley when an army of so-called experts whiffed? Wall Street equity analysts missed it. Moody's and S&P, always reliable lagging indicators of credit problems, missed it too.
And, of course, regulators missed it. As is recounted in the Fed's admirably candid postmortem of Silicon Valley's demise, more than a dozen examiners were embedded full time at the bank with access to all of its confidential information. If these ostensibly competent professionals could not see a freight train barreling toward them, how could any depositor on the outside have been expected to spot it and jump aside?
It is very much to the point that many of these experts had identified fundamental weaknesses at Silicon Valley prior to the run. The bank's imprudently long bond portfolio was staring everyone in the face. But it is easy to identify deficiencies in a bank. It is another thing entirely to predict that a particular bank is doomed to imminent failure. After all, many banks had imprudently long bond portfolios.
The point is that despite Silicon Valley's many deficiencies, it was virtually impossible for anyone to predict a fatal run. In other words, while we can explain in retrospect why Silicon Valley suffered its run, it could not have been foreseen. Runs are irrational, and unforeseeable by definition.
For the unfortunate First Republic, there is no rational explanation for its run, not even in retrospect. Its run was pure panic and contagion.
A compelling case in favor of full deposit insurance is that it would help balance the immense regulatory advantage held by our biggest banks over our smaller ones. As things stand now, every corporate treasurer knows that our government would never let depositors incur a loss at a systemically important financial institution. It is an easy decision to bank with these giants rather than take a risk with smaller banks whose large deposits do not have the same de facto guarantee.
I will admit to a strong bias in favor of our diverse banking system. Though difficult to prove, I believe that America's endowment of small- and medium-size banks has been an immense benefit to us compared to other nations in financing small entrepreneurial businesses and serving local communities. Even though technology may be driving banks inexorably toward consolidation, I believe that we should do what we can to encourage smaller banks by providing them with at least a level regulatory playing field. Full FDIC insurance would help them survive and, hopefully, prosper.
It is ironic, to say the least, that our policymakers delight in disparaging our "too big to fail" banks and the concentration of the banking industry while at the same time driving business away from small banks and into the giants
I'm thinking one way to fix the meter reading problem is for the meter readers to be a separate organization from the service provider. Meter readers get a fee for each read and get charged for the time and effort needed to resolve a mistake. That gives them an incentive to be right. Since they are separate they don't benefit (as the utility does) from a large overcharge or (as the consumer does) from an undercharge
Financial crises arise outside of the banking system
1994: Interest rate risk
1998: Huge bet on RUS bonds by a hedge fund
2008: Derivatives of MBS
Miracles can never be proven true afterwards, and few folk would be able to prove they ate what they had for breakfast last week. Most things we ourselves truly experience, cannot be proven to have happened the way they did happen. It’s good to usually believe your own fallible memory, but not always.
A dead body, or a 16,000 meter reading, may exist as a fact, a true fact, but how it happened is thru a series of events, often including human actions, often unknown to others.
Usually we aren’t sure of the truth. Like, was it H Biden’s laptop or Russian mis-information? Most folk, and the FBI and H Biden now claim it was his, after the truth was censored so as to steal the 2020 election. (I wish Trump would focus more on this aspect of the election being stolen.) I say that such 51 Dem Deep State liars, supporting illegal election interference by censoring the truth, does constitute stealing the election, as Clinton was claiming the 2016 election was stolen. Others, like Kling, say lies and censorship of the truth don’t make the election unfair or stolen.
Then the T-truth depends on definitions, which might not be agreed to while facts, laptop lies or meter readings, might be agreed to as “facts”.
On the oppressor/oppressed axis, there’s a huge issue that everyone has ancestors who were oppressed and were oppressors, and very often oppressed people become oppressors when they gain the power to do so. Prague was a big, 9th century slave market, before Christianizing. “Slavs”and Slavic people, linguistically came from “slave”.
Hm. If I'm not mistaken, Donald Trump mouthed some untruths prior to the 2020 election. And he continues to, in case you haven't noticed. Look at Deere & Company's most recent press release. I assume that the 51 Deep State liars you refer to consist mainly of Trump's entire senior staff who have denounced him as incompetent and dangerous. Including the former Vice President. Or maybe, as Trump argues, they are all just resentful at being fired.
Good Mr. Gioia’s wise and interesting post might be appreciated in light of some other data.
For example, Pew did a social media user demographics piece (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/ )
a while back and it seems that Tik-Tok’s user profile differs from other platforms. In general, Pew found that social media use increased with income on most platforms, but Tik-Tok stands out as having a greater share of the less than $30,000 income per year group (36%) than did the +$100,000 group (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabItem=64e32376-5a21-4b1d-8f8b-5f92406db984 ). Tik-Tok seems light on text and heavy on video, perhaps that combination is particularly pernicious?
And given that there is a strong correlation between reading ability and income, might social media use have different consequences for users with different levels of reading ability? Gallup did a study for the Barbara Bush Foundation on illiteracy that found that 54% of U.S. adults (ages 16-74) lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. This translates to approximately 130 million people. And over 20% of adult Americans have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1, defined as “unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms.” These low levels of adult literacy might decrease the achievement of the full potential for the U.S. economy by up to $2.2 trillion annually. (https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf )
One possible way that this situation might possibly be improved reflects #5 on Gioia’s list of happiness factors is “Connection via charitable acts, and giving (material and emotional) support.” Having participated for several years in the Reading is Fundamental program as a tutor, I can confirm that helping kids learn to read was not psychologically disadvantageous, at least for me. However, there now appears to be interesting new opportunities to engage in such activity. For example, https://www.learntobe.org/apply , might be a good fit for someone, maybe even me.
I don't much agree with the Wallison quote. I started reading his piece and found it even worse. Maybe I'll get back to it and read the whole thing at some point but I find it too absurd.
Is banking regulation perfect? Of course not. Far from it but I don't agree current regulation and monetary policy is the cause of our financial disruptions. And in my lifetime it seems like the Fed in particular has gotten better at reading the tea leaves. Does anyone really think Volker (and Friedman?) didn't usher in vast improvements that have continued?
( I'm sympathetic to the argument the Fed should have done more to tighten monetary policy in the face of inflationary covid stimulus spending but this mistake is small compared to what could have happened if they tightened too much.)
In his piece he talks about financial crisis of the last 100 years. I would argue in these years we have gotten much better at handling financial crises. And what about before that? Here I would argue they were much worse.
He says 3,000 banks failed from 1978 to 1992 but only 516 from 2009 to 2023. How does this support his argument?
I disagree with your comment that regulation has not been profoundly destructive to the banking industry and our economy. For instance, bad regulation caused the 2007-8 financial crisis. https://charles72f.substack.com/p/basel-faulty-the-financial-crisis
Family size - maybe that explanation works for the middle three quintiles. Maybe just the middle one. I'm more skeptical for the top and bottom ones.
I'm not saying this is you but there are at least two places a plumbing "leak" can go without damage.
I have a sump pump backup pump that works off of water pressure. A rainstorm that cuts power can result in a lot of water use. If the primary pump has failed, the backup will run after every rain.
Appliances, especially toilets, can leak into the sewer line. On that note, continuously running toilets are more likely while one is gone.
An acquaintance of mine discovered, via his water bill, that his cat amused himself when left alone and bored, by flushing the toilet and watching the water swirl down the drain. "Clearly a mystical experience for the cat" he joked. But while he was living in an apartment building, which had a swimming pool for the residents, the cat's water addiction was undetected. He moved to the suburbs and all was discovered.
Always appreciate the interesting and informative comments and links.
The root of your dispute with the utilities company is a classic accountability sink: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
Discussion at Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694
I regret that the first link used Fox vs Dominion as an example because after reading the Halderman report regarding Dominion's machines in Georgia (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.240678/gov.uscourts.gand.240678.1681.0.pdf ) I'm fairly sure Fox should have fought and not settled.