There has been a large and decades-long decline in U.S. construction sector productivity. Value added per worker in 2020 was roughly 40 percent below its 1970 level, a remarkably poor record for a major sector.Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson, “The...
I read in preparation for two significant trips this year: one to Japan and another to India. I had never been to either country before (nor indeed anywhere in Asia). To my surprise, I found that novels tended to be...
Revisiting Oates After Five Decades
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
33rd Symposium on Time Organization Among Earth-Dwellers (Agna, Galactic Year 917)
What Deserves to be Written?
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.