We welcomed our first child to the world last December. Consequently, I spent more time at home this year than I have since the pandemic, especially during my paternity leave and over the Summer. Only in the last few months have I regularly commuted to the department. Before, I would have looked to my home office for a quiet place to work; now, I am more likely to find it in the drafty offices of Monroe Hall.
In light of recent advances in AI, I spent this year thinking about the future of work and education. These books offer useful perspectives:
It was a good year for reading: I have not read so many pages since my first semesters of college in 2015.
Shortly after arriving in DC, I asked a retired bookseller to recommend books about the city, in any genre. I’ve since added a number of my own finds to this list, which I present in the hopes that other residents of our capital will find it useful in developing an appreciation for the history and beauty of the city of Washington.
What role do public sector unions play in determining the local government spending priorities? I discuss a trio of recent papers that shed light on this question. Each explores a different source of monopoly power that allows organized public employees to extract rents in the form of higher wages.
Many workers’ jobs become somewhat more pleasant during the pandemic. Those who could work from home enjoyed instantaneous commutes, less supervision from their managers, and more flexibility in when and how they worked. While these changes certainly did not fully compensate workers for the hardship of the pandemic, they did partially offset it.
Current residents bear the costs of new development. Those costs take many forms – crowded schools, congested freeways, crime, ugly high-rises, spillover parking on residential streets – but they all decrease property values. Accordingly, homeowners and landlords are often vocal opponents of new development, and seek to impose burdensome or prohibitive costs on developers through zoning regulations.
When does violence end quickly, and when does it escalate into broader conflict? The competition between Native American tribes over bison hunting grounds during the mid-1800s provides an illustrative example. Lakotas, Crows, Omahas, Poncas, and other groups roamed the plains on horseback, seeking food for the winter and hides to sell to American traders.
There’s an old joke about a violist who suffers weekly at the hands of his conductor during rehearsals. The conductor humiliates him by pointing out his every mistake to the rest of the orchestra, and the violist starts to think he can never do anything right.
The demand for epitaphs ought to depend on several conditions: the number of Romans who died, their wealth, and the popularity of inscribed epitaphs relative to other forms of commemoration for the dead. It follows that periods of high mortality will be associated with more epitaphs. When the death rate is high, there will be relatively more subjects for epitaphs, and – in a Malthusian economy – their surviving relatives will have extra cash available for “luxury” purchases that exhibit their wealth, like high quality inscriptions.1
Similarly, the Black Death “concentrated wealth, often substantial family fortunes, in fewer and younger hands…. Even with a reduced population, the gross volume of luxury goods manufactured and sold rose.” See Rout, David. “The Economic Impact of the Black Death”. EH.net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. July 20, 2008. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/ ↩
Try saying that five times fast.
Across the Empire, Romans inscribed the significant events of their lives on stone. A record of deaths, vows to the gods, and public decrees, these inscriptions reached their highest frequency around the year 200 A.D. The map below depicts the density of inscription writing in Italy and the surrounding provinces.
The financial crisis was a difficult time for cereal fans. The number of new products introduced in the breakfast cereal market fell from 60 to 20 in the three years after 2008.
A first look at property transactions in DC suggests that something unusual is happening at $400,000.
My pre-calculus teacher was fond of pointing out that there are many ways to get to the local Dairy Queen. This fact of geography might easily be verified by inspecting a map, but of course there are also many, many ways to create a map. This is one such recipe for mapping roadways in R using ggplot2.
I’m learning to work with data.tables in R. This reference provides a translation between data.table and Stata commands and should be helpful for any moving between the two languages.