Grab Bag December 2025

(In addition to some travel, I am currently dealing with arthritis in my thumbs, perhaps from years of typing, mousing, and phone use.  My typing is limited this week, excuse the terseness.)

Affordability

Often I see politicians spouting about the price of eggs or the price of hamburger.  This chart from the FT helped me to really understand affordability:

It is not eggs and hamburger that are dragging people down.   It is housing, healthcare, childcare, education.   We need new policies and innovation in these areas.  

Inspiration

Rules for gaining an unfair advantage from Daniel Emell — I particularly like Kidlin’s law, which my friend Sam has often patiently tutored me on:

If you write the problem down clearly, then the matter is half solved.

And often the best answers to problems come from a fundamental reframing of the problem – Mike Maples Jr on heresy:

Here’s how I think about it: Contrarians say everyone thinks A, so I’ll say B. That’s still playing the same game, and just taking the opposite position. Heretics are saying something different. They’re saying the whole A/B way of thinking about the problem is broken. Usually it’s because they’ve seen an anomaly that the old pattern can’t explain.

Solutions to our big economic problems probably are going to require some heresy, some breaking of our current systems.  Fighting over how much we extend current subsidies is not fixing the system.

Fairness

Meritocratic systems are not fair — Matt Yglesias — luck has played a huge part in all of our lives.  Which is the argument for having a strong safety net in our society and progressive taxation — we should moderate the impacts of luck at the top and bottom of the system.

It is not an argument for eliminating our meritocratic systems. For instance, fighting inequality by dumbing down education is a stupid policy — Noah Smith:

The educational approach of watering down K-12 quality while watering down college selectivity isn’t just bad for America — it’s self-defeating. It will hurt exactly the students it’s supposed to help, while weakening and defunding the progressive colleges that embrace it. Americans need to leave this crazy educational approach behind, and return to the tried-and-true approach of tough grading in public schools and selectivity at good colleges. We should be treating this like a national emergency.

Books

The Best Books of 2025 from Foreign Affairs.   I’ve read just two of these — Apple in China was very good.   I’ve added four more to my list.