Re: baseball, I agree *completely* on getting away from the 3 outcome situation.
And I agree that the advantage for winning your division should be greater. Note that this has improved some with the more recent changes in playoff participants, but I agree more would be better.
But going to 4 team “leagues” is an obviously terrible idea, BOTH because it means some deserving teams miss the playoffs while undeserving teams get in, AND because it will kill interest in many more cities even earlier.
Because of my second reason, of course, the chances of it happening are zero.
Arnold takes off his economist hat and forgets for a moment that what matters with baseball is revenue. Reducing the post-season would reduce revenue for teams and for players both in the foregone playoff games and in games beginning no later than Labor Day. My Giants and my Reds (and even the stupid Cardinals) are still in the hunt for a playoff spot despite barely winning more games than they lose. Under Arnold’s plan who would go to Oracle or Great American in August and September or watch TV to see games that don’t matter. I don’t like the playoffs either (almost half the teams make the playoffs), but all the owners, all the management, all the players, and most of the fans like it. Arnold is proposing that a lot of people take big pay cuts. I predict it will not happen.
“My Giants and my Reds (and even the stupid Cardinals) are still in the hunt for a playoff spot despite barely winning more games than they lose. Under Arnold’s plan who would go to Oracle or Great American in August and September or watch TV to see games that don’t matter.”
IMO this is the much bigger deal than the direct revenue from the playoff games.
Even traditionalist Bob Costas has acknowledged that getting to 5 teams per league (2 wild cards, 1 game playoff) was a good balance of regular season interest, winning the division being meaningful.
I think they should go back to that 2012-2021 format, rather than the 6 teams per they have now. But I wouldn’t do as Arnold suggests and go back to the 1970s and 1980s.
You are absolutely right about the regular season in baseball. This is one of those cases where a change leads to counterintuitive effects. Pennant races must be winner. Take all to create the kind of tension that made baseball popular as a six month pastime. There was nothing in sports like the daily drama of a pennant race because the stakes were so high.
By introducing the wild card, the stakes are automatically lowered. “But,” some say, “now we have that drama for many more teams!”
But it’s not the same drama. “Will my mediocre team sneak into the playoffs on the final day” is not the same thing as “Will my favorite team with 101 wins, which has provided the best summer of my 12-year-old life, be able to get past that damnable other team with 101 wins by winning two of three this weekend in September?”
Unfortunately I don’t think it will ever go back. No one is going to believe that having fewer playoff teams makes the season more enjoyable, not less.
I have never understood why James Heckman's work does not drive Chetty out of business. One thing Chetty never explains (and will not respond to if questions are asked) is why Asian Americans from poor backgrounds (or cherry picked zip codes) are so much more successful than anyone else. It's the parents, stupid.
Similarly, the work of Claudia Goldin on gender discrimination is ignored even though she won the Nobel Prize and is a woman herself. If I understand her correctly, she proves that gender discrimination is grossly exaggerated or perhaps non-existent.
I disagree about baseball. The game was a lot more exciting when Sal Maglie and Bob Gibson were humming that chin music at 100 mph.
Arnold says Social Desirability Bias, which is true in a sense, but it's only 'social' for the particular sub-population that is biased towards The anti-null-hypothesis Narrative that says, "Smart and small childhood interventions can work wonders and close the big gaps because disparities aren't due to genetics but are instead mostly environmental, i.e., "nurture, not nature", and these are largely a consequence of discrimination and other socially unjust treatment."
I would say Chetty gets to command high prices for flattering these influential people's ideological prejudices and preferred sociological narratives in "The Market for Confirmation Bias".
I agree, but I think that we don't fully understand the role of genetics. In my opinion, a poor family that is healthy, stable, caring and encouraging will confer an epigenetic advantage that overwhelms most genetic differences. I think smart and small interventions might help, but not much.
Whatever one believes about the role of human biology and the state of knowledge about it, it's pretty clear in 2025 that a hypothesis that the impact of epigenetics overwhelms that of genetics is on much shakier ground than vice versa.
You may well be right. I'm not a geneticist. I always thought that epigenetic changes to the genome resulted from environmental changes to the child in utero and after birth. Things like the mother's health and nutrition and stress on the mother and the young child. Where am I wrong?
"Epigenetics" seems to have different meanings to different people. At one extreme is "something that changes the expression of a gene and sticks to the gene through all future generations". At the other is "anything that changes where a person ends up that isn't a change in the A-C-G-T of the genome", e.g., prenatal nutrition.
As far as I know, most people in the field don't think there is much of the first.
Thanks. It is my understanding that very little epigenetic change is passed on to future generations although some certainly is (see the Netherlands famine in WWII.) In my opinion every time our bodies or our minds adapt to our environment there is a chemical change somewhere, whether it is a change to the genome or some other mechanism. What I don't understand is whether this change affects only the relevant cells, or all the DNA throughout the body's trillions of cells. The latter would seem impossible, but our bodies are miraculous things. As the great physiologist Walt Whitman said, "I contain multitudes."
Unfortunately, you’re wrong 😃. The peak year is 1989. Not even an earthquake could stop Rickey, an Oakland native, from doing his thing. RIP to the greatest lead off hitter of all time.
I suppose that my point is that we all have nostalgia for a certain time period, probably corresponding to our most formative years . I wasn’t alive in 1965, but the late 80s and early 90s were magical for me. Everything was “objectively” better back then for me as I’m sure 1965 was to you.
Gee, I am sorry to disagree. Well, actually, I am glad you enjoyed the late 80's and early 90's . . . but the late 50's and early 60's were just plain better, way better. And I think maybe we need to rethink the definition of "objectively" vs "subjectively."
Bari Weiss has earned, thru her work’s success, the big audience that The Free Press has. Had the NYT been better, this wouldn’t have happened—but they don’t have much down there. Great humor in the truths that Taibbi writes.
I was glad then, and pat myself on the back for picking Weiss on my FIT, tho she didn’t score so many points.
The baseball needs more hits.
Chetty is over rated, but studying interesting issues more deeply than others, perhaps mostly due to his exclusive access to so much IRS data that others aren’t allowed to see. The IRS should be publishing more aggregations (tho maybe I and others should try to use what they do publish more?).
This whole notion of “moving to opportunity” seems to be an outgrowth of court-ordered school desegregation and that milieu. Perhaps the Bob Gibson and Cardinals links provide an excuse to also observe that the voluntary school desegregation plan that has been in effect in the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County is finally drawing to a close with no new students being admitted into it since the 2023-2024 school year and the last cohort scheduled to graduate by 2035-2036. Enrollment in the program peaked at about 14,000 in the late 1990s with about 2,000 students currently enrolled. Interestingly, although per a Google Scholar scan, many studies confirm that poor kids continue to under perform their better off peers, there is no lack of mobility between schools. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042085916682571
Since we are speaking of “social desirability bias,” might one reasonably and in good conscious ask whether so-called “white flight” fall under the “moving to opportunity” umbrella? And how
would it have showed up in and influenced Chetty and Hendren’s results? Has anyone every studied the outcomes for children in the southern states who moved to private schools versus those who remained in newly desegregated schools?
What effect did desegregation have on “neighborhoods?” I use the scare quotes on “neighborhood” because from what I can tell from glancing through the Chetty and Hendren findings are with respect to counties and “commuter zones,’ neither of which would conform to anyone’s notion of a neighborhood. A commuting zone is a geographic designation that apparently is intended to correspond to local economies and labor markets. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03829-5 ). I am unable to find anything on how many square miles the typical commuting zone covers, but wikipedia states there were 741 of them in 1990 and and 709 in 2000. As for the use of “zip code” in the WSJ article’s title, the only use I can see that Chetty and Hendren made us of that was for identifying people who moved from one to another: the results do not compare zip code to zip code differences, but even if I got that wrong, zip codes, with an average geographic area of 82.25 square, would hardly seem to square with anyone’s idea of a neighborhood either.
For those who want to check me, the WSJ article does not link to but refers to “2018 paper by economists Raj Chetty of Harvard and Nathaniel Hendren.” That paper seems to have been published in two parts:
Chetty, Raj, and Nathaniel Hendren. 2018. “The Impact of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates”. Quarterly Journal of Economics 113 (3).
The first paper makes the claim that “Exploiting variation in the age of children when families move, we find that neighborhoods have significant childhood exposure effects: the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood—as measured by the outcomes of children already living there—improve linearly in proportion to the amount of time they spend growing up in that area, at a rate of approximately 4% per year of exposure.”
The WSJ article mentions the Move to Opportunity program and that:
“21 cities had begun to develop programs designed to move low-income families to high-opportunity neighborhoods, based on the claims of the Harvard researchers. Similarly, a $50 million project authorized by Congress that began in August 2022 and will run until 2028 moves families to ‘opportunity’ in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Tenn., New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh and Rochester, N.Y. In Los Angeles alone, officials are using $4 million from the project to relocate 1,950 families.”
I haven’t been able to figure out or find anything on the new $50 million project, but one wonders if the millions should be billions? Can Los Angeles really locate 1,950 families at $2051.28 a family?
Again, Google Scholar scanning “Move to Opportunity” leaves one a bit underwhelmed. One would not be surprised to find Chetty and Hendren having published on it, “We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates.” https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150572
In this case “neighborhood” apparently means “census tract.” A census tract “is a small, relatively permanent statistical subdivision of a county or statistically equivalent entity, designed to be relatively homogeneous with respect to population characteristics, economic status, and living conditions.
These tracts are established by the U.S. Census Bureau for the collection and presentation of census data, generally containing a population between 1,200 and 8,000 people, with an optimum size of 4,000 inhabitants.” So, it is probably much closer to what most people conceive of as a “neighborhood.” This paper tends to directly rebut the WSJ claims. Apparently giving people in public housing section 8 vouchers to move into upper income census tracts produces some favorable outcomes:
“We conclude that the Moving to Opportunity experiment generated substantial gains for children who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods when they were young. We estimate that moving a child out of public housing to a low-poverty area when young (at age eight on average) using an MTO-type experimental voucher will increase the child’s total lifetime earnings by about $302,000. This is equivalent to a gain of $99,000 per child moved in present value at age eight, discounting future earnings at a 3 percent interest rate.”
No benefit to adults though. So, snatch kids and transplant them in the burbs? Nor does Chetty have much to say in response to critics like James Bovard who emphatically does not appear to suffer from social desirability bias: “Federal rental subsidies should be abolished. Giving subsidies to allow selected welfare recipients to live the high life is an insult and an injustice to all working Americans.”
So, it seems as if not only is there not a lot of good evidence one way or another on which to base a conclusion, nor is there any persuasive reason to endorse any particular policy intervention. One suspects we can and probably will do much worse than to honor Lao Tzu’s ancient injunction that if the ruler will “keep from meddling, the people will grow rich.”
"because abundance, the policy project, aims to alleviate scarcities that matter to conservatives and liberals — like our insufficient production of housing and energy — it presents a great opportunity for conservatives and liberals to work together."
Really?
Do liberals and conservatives agree on including units for low income in new construction? Reducing zoning restrictions and other supply-limiting regulations?
Are liberals going to start supporting fossil fuel energy projects? Pipelines? Nuclear? Are conservatives, especially Trump, going to start supporting more renewables?
I'm not saying there is zero common ground but it seems pretty limited.
I do not think things in the mid-60s, when I also was 11, were so great. Oswald shot Kennedy and we were afflicted by "The Best & The Brightest." 1990s were far better.
I came here looking for a libertarian theory of property rights for home runs and foul balls. Unfortunately, I just got remembrances from a time long ago.
Was baseball Karen right to be outraged? Were her property rights violated by a conniving father that would do anything to get a home run ball for his son? What would Locke say?
In terms of the current playoff structure in baseball, I am more than happy with it. I don’t start watching actual games until October anyways since I refuse to pay for the RSN in my area. Baseball has a RSN problem more than anything else. The drawn out playoff brackets overcome this problem to attract more casual viewers like myself. Same goes for the NBA where I don’t need to tune in until April.
I think expanding the league has and will inevitably lead to pressure to expand the playoffs. Too many meaningless games that no one watches in August and September hurts the owners' bottom lines.
The average 18 hole round of golf takes approximately 4.5 hours. There is 30 minutes of actual play time intermixed with 4 hours for other items. For me, what I decide to do in those 4 hours of downtime is what makes all of the difference for me. Stoicism mostly got it right in this regard.
Re the baseball: as a little girl who played softball (40-plus years ago, so I suspect the ball has changed) it was so much more fun to play catch with a baseball than a softball.
I assume this baseball size change wouldn’t be so great as to negatively effect fielding?
Re: baseball, I agree *completely* on getting away from the 3 outcome situation.
And I agree that the advantage for winning your division should be greater. Note that this has improved some with the more recent changes in playoff participants, but I agree more would be better.
But going to 4 team “leagues” is an obviously terrible idea, BOTH because it means some deserving teams miss the playoffs while undeserving teams get in, AND because it will kill interest in many more cities even earlier.
Because of my second reason, of course, the chances of it happening are zero.
On Chetty, Steve Sailer said it best: "Magic Dirt vs. Tragic Dirt".
Arnold takes off his economist hat and forgets for a moment that what matters with baseball is revenue. Reducing the post-season would reduce revenue for teams and for players both in the foregone playoff games and in games beginning no later than Labor Day. My Giants and my Reds (and even the stupid Cardinals) are still in the hunt for a playoff spot despite barely winning more games than they lose. Under Arnold’s plan who would go to Oracle or Great American in August and September or watch TV to see games that don’t matter. I don’t like the playoffs either (almost half the teams make the playoffs), but all the owners, all the management, all the players, and most of the fans like it. Arnold is proposing that a lot of people take big pay cuts. I predict it will not happen.
“My Giants and my Reds (and even the stupid Cardinals) are still in the hunt for a playoff spot despite barely winning more games than they lose. Under Arnold’s plan who would go to Oracle or Great American in August and September or watch TV to see games that don’t matter.”
IMO this is the much bigger deal than the direct revenue from the playoff games.
Even traditionalist Bob Costas has acknowledged that getting to 5 teams per league (2 wild cards, 1 game playoff) was a good balance of regular season interest, winning the division being meaningful.
I think they should go back to that 2012-2021 format, rather than the 6 teams per they have now. But I wouldn’t do as Arnold suggests and go back to the 1970s and 1980s.
You are absolutely right about the regular season in baseball. This is one of those cases where a change leads to counterintuitive effects. Pennant races must be winner. Take all to create the kind of tension that made baseball popular as a six month pastime. There was nothing in sports like the daily drama of a pennant race because the stakes were so high.
By introducing the wild card, the stakes are automatically lowered. “But,” some say, “now we have that drama for many more teams!”
But it’s not the same drama. “Will my mediocre team sneak into the playoffs on the final day” is not the same thing as “Will my favorite team with 101 wins, which has provided the best summer of my 12-year-old life, be able to get past that damnable other team with 101 wins by winning two of three this weekend in September?”
They play 162 games for a reason. And that reason is not so that a 14-team playoff yields an 83-win world series champ.
Unfortunately I don’t think it will ever go back. No one is going to believe that having fewer playoff teams makes the season more enjoyable, not less.
Unfortunate indeed.
I have never understood why James Heckman's work does not drive Chetty out of business. One thing Chetty never explains (and will not respond to if questions are asked) is why Asian Americans from poor backgrounds (or cherry picked zip codes) are so much more successful than anyone else. It's the parents, stupid.
Similarly, the work of Claudia Goldin on gender discrimination is ignored even though she won the Nobel Prize and is a woman herself. If I understand her correctly, she proves that gender discrimination is grossly exaggerated or perhaps non-existent.
I disagree about baseball. The game was a lot more exciting when Sal Maglie and Bob Gibson were humming that chin music at 100 mph.
Arnold says Social Desirability Bias, which is true in a sense, but it's only 'social' for the particular sub-population that is biased towards The anti-null-hypothesis Narrative that says, "Smart and small childhood interventions can work wonders and close the big gaps because disparities aren't due to genetics but are instead mostly environmental, i.e., "nurture, not nature", and these are largely a consequence of discrimination and other socially unjust treatment."
I would say Chetty gets to command high prices for flattering these influential people's ideological prejudices and preferred sociological narratives in "The Market for Confirmation Bias".
I agree, but I think that we don't fully understand the role of genetics. In my opinion, a poor family that is healthy, stable, caring and encouraging will confer an epigenetic advantage that overwhelms most genetic differences. I think smart and small interventions might help, but not much.
Whatever one believes about the role of human biology and the state of knowledge about it, it's pretty clear in 2025 that a hypothesis that the impact of epigenetics overwhelms that of genetics is on much shakier ground than vice versa.
Epigenetics simply does not work that way
You may well be right. I'm not a geneticist. I always thought that epigenetic changes to the genome resulted from environmental changes to the child in utero and after birth. Things like the mother's health and nutrition and stress on the mother and the young child. Where am I wrong?
"Epigenetics" seems to have different meanings to different people. At one extreme is "something that changes the expression of a gene and sticks to the gene through all future generations". At the other is "anything that changes where a person ends up that isn't a change in the A-C-G-T of the genome", e.g., prenatal nutrition.
As far as I know, most people in the field don't think there is much of the first.
Thanks. It is my understanding that very little epigenetic change is passed on to future generations although some certainly is (see the Netherlands famine in WWII.) In my opinion every time our bodies or our minds adapt to our environment there is a chemical change somewhere, whether it is a change to the genome or some other mechanism. What I don't understand is whether this change affects only the relevant cells, or all the DNA throughout the body's trillions of cells. The latter would seem impossible, but our bodies are miraculous things. As the great physiologist Walt Whitman said, "I contain multitudes."
"And you tend to look back at things when you were 11 and say they were better than they are now." In the case of 1965, that is absolutely true!
Unfortunately, you’re wrong 😃. The peak year is 1989. Not even an earthquake could stop Rickey, an Oakland native, from doing his thing. RIP to the greatest lead off hitter of all time.
https://youtu.be/1KEvCAlqPtk?si=RG0P9jRNiRXr1EW0
Perhaps true, but not being a baseball guy, I was referring to life as a whole in 1965 America.
I suppose that my point is that we all have nostalgia for a certain time period, probably corresponding to our most formative years . I wasn’t alive in 1965, but the late 80s and early 90s were magical for me. Everything was “objectively” better back then for me as I’m sure 1965 was to you.
Gee, I am sorry to disagree. Well, actually, I am glad you enjoyed the late 80's and early 90's . . . but the late 50's and early 60's were just plain better, way better. And I think maybe we need to rethink the definition of "objectively" vs "subjectively."
“I was referring to life as a whole in 1965 America.”
While Arnold agrees with you on baseball, he has published many pieces showing he disagrees with you profoundly re: life as a whole.
And for 97%+ of the population it ain’t even close.
And he is correct.
I still remember watching on our 13-inch TV and the screen went green right before first pitch.
Bari Weiss has earned, thru her work’s success, the big audience that The Free Press has. Had the NYT been better, this wouldn’t have happened—but they don’t have much down there. Great humor in the truths that Taibbi writes.
I was glad then, and pat myself on the back for picking Weiss on my FIT, tho she didn’t score so many points.
The baseball needs more hits.
Chetty is over rated, but studying interesting issues more deeply than others, perhaps mostly due to his exclusive access to so much IRS data that others aren’t allowed to see. The IRS should be publishing more aggregations (tho maybe I and others should try to use what they do publish more?).
FWIW, non-subscribers can read the whole Heckman vs. Chetty
WSJ article at RCP: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2025/09/06/zip_code_is_destiny_turns_out_thats_bunk_652921.html
This whole notion of “moving to opportunity” seems to be an outgrowth of court-ordered school desegregation and that milieu. Perhaps the Bob Gibson and Cardinals links provide an excuse to also observe that the voluntary school desegregation plan that has been in effect in the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County is finally drawing to a close with no new students being admitted into it since the 2023-2024 school year and the last cohort scheduled to graduate by 2035-2036. Enrollment in the program peaked at about 14,000 in the late 1990s with about 2,000 students currently enrolled. Interestingly, although per a Google Scholar scan, many studies confirm that poor kids continue to under perform their better off peers, there is no lack of mobility between schools. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042085916682571
Since we are speaking of “social desirability bias,” might one reasonably and in good conscious ask whether so-called “white flight” fall under the “moving to opportunity” umbrella? And how
would it have showed up in and influenced Chetty and Hendren’s results? Has anyone every studied the outcomes for children in the southern states who moved to private schools versus those who remained in newly desegregated schools?
What effect did desegregation have on “neighborhoods?” I use the scare quotes on “neighborhood” because from what I can tell from glancing through the Chetty and Hendren findings are with respect to counties and “commuter zones,’ neither of which would conform to anyone’s notion of a neighborhood. A commuting zone is a geographic designation that apparently is intended to correspond to local economies and labor markets. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03829-5 ). I am unable to find anything on how many square miles the typical commuting zone covers, but wikipedia states there were 741 of them in 1990 and and 709 in 2000. As for the use of “zip code” in the WSJ article’s title, the only use I can see that Chetty and Hendren made us of that was for identifying people who moved from one to another: the results do not compare zip code to zip code differences, but even if I got that wrong, zip codes, with an average geographic area of 82.25 square, would hardly seem to square with anyone’s idea of a neighborhood either.
For those who want to check me, the WSJ article does not link to but refers to “2018 paper by economists Raj Chetty of Harvard and Nathaniel Hendren.” That paper seems to have been published in two parts:
Chetty, Raj, and Nathaniel Hendren. 2018. “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects”. Quarterly Journal of Economics 113 (3). https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/133/3/1107/4850660.
Chetty, Raj, and Nathaniel Hendren. 2018. “The Impact of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates”. Quarterly Journal of Economics 113 (3).
The first paper makes the claim that “Exploiting variation in the age of children when families move, we find that neighborhoods have significant childhood exposure effects: the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood—as measured by the outcomes of children already living there—improve linearly in proportion to the amount of time they spend growing up in that area, at a rate of approximately 4% per year of exposure.”
The WSJ article mentions the Move to Opportunity program and that:
“21 cities had begun to develop programs designed to move low-income families to high-opportunity neighborhoods, based on the claims of the Harvard researchers. Similarly, a $50 million project authorized by Congress that began in August 2022 and will run until 2028 moves families to ‘opportunity’ in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Tenn., New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh and Rochester, N.Y. In Los Angeles alone, officials are using $4 million from the project to relocate 1,950 families.”
I haven’t been able to figure out or find anything on the new $50 million project, but one wonders if the millions should be billions? Can Los Angeles really locate 1,950 families at $2051.28 a family?
Again, Google Scholar scanning “Move to Opportunity” leaves one a bit underwhelmed. One would not be surprised to find Chetty and Hendren having published on it, “We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates.” https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150572
In this case “neighborhood” apparently means “census tract.” A census tract “is a small, relatively permanent statistical subdivision of a county or statistically equivalent entity, designed to be relatively homogeneous with respect to population characteristics, economic status, and living conditions.
These tracts are established by the U.S. Census Bureau for the collection and presentation of census data, generally containing a population between 1,200 and 8,000 people, with an optimum size of 4,000 inhabitants.” So, it is probably much closer to what most people conceive of as a “neighborhood.” This paper tends to directly rebut the WSJ claims. Apparently giving people in public housing section 8 vouchers to move into upper income census tracts produces some favorable outcomes:
“We conclude that the Moving to Opportunity experiment generated substantial gains for children who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods when they were young. We estimate that moving a child out of public housing to a low-poverty area when young (at age eight on average) using an MTO-type experimental voucher will increase the child’s total lifetime earnings by about $302,000. This is equivalent to a gain of $99,000 per child moved in present value at age eight, discounting future earnings at a 3 percent interest rate.”
No benefit to adults though. So, snatch kids and transplant them in the burbs? Nor does Chetty have much to say in response to critics like James Bovard who emphatically does not appear to suffer from social desirability bias: “Federal rental subsidies should be abolished. Giving subsidies to allow selected welfare recipients to live the high life is an insult and an injustice to all working Americans.”
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/section-8-wrecking-ball-neighborhood/
So, it seems as if not only is there not a lot of good evidence one way or another on which to base a conclusion, nor is there any persuasive reason to endorse any particular policy intervention. One suspects we can and probably will do much worse than to honor Lao Tzu’s ancient injunction that if the ruler will “keep from meddling, the people will grow rich.”
Any chance you have a non-subscription link to Chetty's response?
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-benefits-of-a-good-zip-code-arent-bunk-policy-chetty-mobility-41cee748?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1
Unfortunately not
"because abundance, the policy project, aims to alleviate scarcities that matter to conservatives and liberals — like our insufficient production of housing and energy — it presents a great opportunity for conservatives and liberals to work together."
Really?
Do liberals and conservatives agree on including units for low income in new construction? Reducing zoning restrictions and other supply-limiting regulations?
Are liberals going to start supporting fossil fuel energy projects? Pipelines? Nuclear? Are conservatives, especially Trump, going to start supporting more renewables?
I'm not saying there is zero common ground but it seems pretty limited.
I do not think things in the mid-60s, when I also was 11, were so great. Oswald shot Kennedy and we were afflicted by "The Best & The Brightest." 1990s were far better.
And today is better than the 90s.
Re: baseball
I came here looking for a libertarian theory of property rights for home runs and foul balls. Unfortunately, I just got remembrances from a time long ago.
Was baseball Karen right to be outraged? Were her property rights violated by a conniving father that would do anything to get a home run ball for his son? What would Locke say?
https://youtu.be/fiCnrPleU3k?si=NZb9-KNUhfFXCO48
In terms of the current playoff structure in baseball, I am more than happy with it. I don’t start watching actual games until October anyways since I refuse to pay for the RSN in my area. Baseball has a RSN problem more than anything else. The drawn out playoff brackets overcome this problem to attract more casual viewers like myself. Same goes for the NBA where I don’t need to tune in until April.
I think expanding the league has and will inevitably lead to pressure to expand the playoffs. Too many meaningless games that no one watches in August and September hurts the owners' bottom lines.
The average 18 hole round of golf takes approximately 4.5 hours. There is 30 minutes of actual play time intermixed with 4 hours for other items. For me, what I decide to do in those 4 hours of downtime is what makes all of the difference for me. Stoicism mostly got it right in this regard.
Iryna Zarutska. Say her name, BLM. Say her name.
“I got that white girl. I got that white girl.”
https://youtu.be/Cgc5xC9uMWs?si=qIVDER3iAHloIRsv
"Those who move to better neighborhoods early on tend to be more affluent, more educated and more likely to have intact families."
From what I know about Chetty, I'd be stunned if he made such a stupid mistake.
I thought he followed people who were randomly given or not given money contingent on them moving to better neighborhoods. Was that not the case?
Re the baseball: as a little girl who played softball (40-plus years ago, so I suspect the ball has changed) it was so much more fun to play catch with a baseball than a softball.
I assume this baseball size change wouldn’t be so great as to negatively effect fielding?