Newmark's Door

A lot of things are just different in New York City.

This is a good news/bad news history. Good news: people in the past proved to be more capable of adapting to environmental changes than you might have thought. Bad news: to so adapt, they required flexibility, flexibility that modern Big Government likely will dampen, maybe severely.

Astutely observed:

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more affordable than before. And people are less likely to receive validation for the material items they display. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs. . . .

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. Only academics educated at elite institutions could have conjured up a coherent and reasonable-sounding argument for why parents should not be allowed to raise their kids, and should hold baby lotteries instead. When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or anti-vaccination policies, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or uses the term “white privilege,” they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.” 

Could well be another panic that was misdirected.

This is so very true:

What bothers the opponents of environmental activism is not the environmentally conscious goals or even facts presented, but the activists’ blatant hypocrisy and aura of sanctimonious religiosity. 

Read the piece for details.

A terrific piece in Harper's(!) by Lionel Shriver. It was an introduction to Ms. Shriver's work for me, so I expect to read more. (According to Wikipedia she wrote a novel that features "an economics autodidact".)

It may well be unconstitutional: "Unconstitutional Medicare-For-All".

Think of the time people will have to spend documenting they're not required to pay the tax: "You may have to fill out a wealth tax return".

I'll second this.

From last month. Another popular panic apparently debunked.

Speaking of pot, this is s thought-provoking short piece: "Big dope: how marijuana benefited from one of the slickest PR campaigns in history".

A key question is whether people with problems tend to smoke pot or whether smoking pot tends to cause problems. And while it's at least plausible causality runs in both directions, the widespread approval of modern pot should be researched a bit more than it has.

A Los Angeleno discovers flyover America.