Nature’s way is the best way

On X, @wardaniel47 posts about Katie Hinde’s research:

BREASTMILK
She thought she was studying milk.
What she uncovered was a conversation.

In 2008, evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked ordinary—until one pattern refused to go away.

Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein.
Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances.

It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus.

Colleagues suggested error. Noise. Statistical coincidence.
But Katie trusted the data.

And the data pointed to a radical idea.

Milk is not just nutrition.
It is information.

For decades, biology treated breast milk as simple fuel. Calories in. Growth out. But if milk were only calories, why would it change depending on the sex of the baby?

Katie kept digging.

Across more than 250 mothers and over 700 sampling events, the story grew more complex. Younger, first-time mothers produced milk with fewer calories but significantly higher levels of cortisol—the stress hormone.

The babies who drank it grew faster.
They were also more alert, more cautious, more anxious.

Milk wasn’t just building bodies.
It was shaping behavior.

Then came the discovery that changed everything.

When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it.

Within hours, the milk changes.

White blood cells surge.
Macrophages multiply.
Targeted antibodies appear.

When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline.

This was not coincidence.
It was call and response.

A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible—until someone thought to listen.

As Katie reviewed existing research, she noticed something unsettling. There were twice as many scientific studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition.

The first food every human consumes.
The substance that shaped our species.
Largely ignored.

So she did something bold.

She launched a blog with a deliberately provocative name: Mammals Suck Milk.
It exploded. Over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Scientists. People asking questions research had skipped.

The discoveries kept coming.

Milk changes by time of day.
Foremilk differs from hindmilk.
Human milk contains over 200 oligosaccharides babies can’t digest—because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria.
Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.

In 2017, Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020, it reached a global audience through Netflix’s Babies. Today, at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, she continues reshaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health.

The implications are staggering.

Milk has been evolving for more than 200 million years—longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nourishment is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced.

Katie Hinde didn’t just study milk.
She revealed that nourishment is intelligence.
A living, responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak.

All because one scientist refused to accept that half the story was “measurement error.”

Sometimes the biggest revolutions begin by listening to what everyone else ignores.

Match a category

Although the measure of Gross Domestic Product is very useful, other measures in society can also tip a hand to well being. These life indicators are presented in conjunction with GDP measures in the following graphs.

Posted by Max Roser

Now it would be easiest to lead with the money and say the benefits are a result. But one must wonder if a workforce is more untuned to their work when they are not heart broken by the heartbreak of infant deaths. Or if the mothers would have been stronger in child birth with a more educated birthing team.

So yes, money encourages the doctors to stay instead of venturing their skill off in a foreign country. But this is tied to having a well supported education system in the first place. And without people fighting to coordinate the delivery of clean water, wasted time would be spent on hauling and purifying the liquid over an open flame.

The positive correlation between increasing wage collection and desirable social goals like health, safety, infrastructure and education are true. But I think there’s a lot more to be learned about the multiple interactions in play with money being one category along side vitality, a sound diet, a sense of well being, the ability to live with water and sanitation, generalized provision of utilities like fuel and lighting. It’s a matrix solution.

In short, the level of wages reflects how well the public has sustained educational attainment; a healthier workforce is a more productive one; and the price of land registers the higher demand that a well-infrastructured community can draw.

Appraisals revisited

There are changes in the horizon to the residential appraisal process. Starting in early 2027, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will require a new form for appraisals submitted on loans they buy: UAD 3.6. It is more expansive than the previous format. It allows for more comments, folded into the relevant sections rather than parked in a free-form addendum. It also requests a rating system on the quality of the materials used in the property (along with clearer condition ratings). The process is similar as before, for instance, the core method for evaluating a property’s value is still by using recent sales in nearby areas. But it does expand the amount of space dedicated for commentary and notation by the appraiser on site.

From what I’m hearing from appraisers, there is one other change to the process. Most everything is meant to be entered through technology going forward. She wondered how some of the older appraisers were going to manage, as she had often seen them still with pen and paper in hand at site visits.

Banks are the primary customers for appraisers, or indirectly, their mortgage clients. Perhaps this is a good time to introduce a change while higher rates are keeping demand for money a little sluggish. But when rates dip, they’ll want have those old timers around to help cover the need for appraisers.

Avian Condo

Piciformes palace?

Bloomberg Philanthropies takes aim at regulation costs

This is a good use of money for the common good.

Michael Bloomberg‘s philanthropic organization is bringing funding to 30 cities in hopes of speeding homebuilding reforms.

Bloomberg Philanthropies and nonprofit Accelerator for America will lead a project to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to help cities improve their permitting and approval processes for new housing.

The idea is this.

In a statement, Accelerator for America said they build on ideas developed in three cities—Atlanta, Austin and San Diego—that were effective in improving their building process. The exact donation amount varies from city to city, but each will receive $450,000 to $750,000.

Each of the winners will get help with one of three areas. Some will take aim at using new technology to speed along approvals. Others will work with architects to develop “permit-ready” plans. And others will field a “strike force” to help dislodge stalled housing projects. Within two years, Bloomberg said they expect to see results.

The goal is getting control of this.

A new National Association of Home Builders study this year found regulatory costs have jumped almost 40% in five years and now account for 26.4% of the average sales price of a home. Given the rising median price, that could mean adding $131,000 onto the cost of a new home.

Is there a philanthropy near you that could step in?

Taleb talks

The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.

Ostrom & Harvey on urban common pools

From the perspectives of both (as they meet in the urban-commons literature), cooperation among residents develops and fosters the urban commons—shared, collectively produced and managed resources and social relations that constitute a form of non-commodified urban wealth.

Elinor Ostrom’s lens
Cooperation builds institutional and social capital that allows residents to govern common-pool resources without defaulting to pure privatization or top-down state control. In urban settings this appears as community gardens, shared infrastructure, neighborhood spaces, and other resources managed through clear boundaries, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and nested rules. The result is durable collective benefits: sustainable use, reduced free-riding, trust, and reciprocity—the practical payoff of her design principles applied to the city.

David Harvey’s lens
Cooperation takes the form of commoning: the social practice through which residents collectively produce the city’s shared life, ambiance, public spaces, and use-values. This creates an urban commons that is a product of collective labor. Capital then tends to appropriate or destroy it (extracting monopoly rents, converting it into assets that absorb surplus capital via the spatial fix). The political stake of the “right to the city” is therefore collective democratic control over how that surplus is produced and used, so the commons residents foster is not continually enclosed.

In short, both see resident cooperation as generating a shared urban resource system (the commons). Ostrom emphasizes the institutional mechanisms that make sharing work and deliver benefits; Harvey emphasizes that this commons is continually produced by residents yet remains vulnerable to capital’s surplus-absorption logic, so cooperation must also contest enclosure.

Where do friends from abroad want to buy?

(from Realtor.com)

Sure, sure, everyone wants to be in NY, LA or Miami! If you want to know what you are missing in the North Star State, listen to this political add. It’s the best tourism ad for MN in a long time as it appeals to all one’s senses.

Free Pressers

Dinner club in the North Loop drew another smart group out for a fun conversation.

Markets & Discovery

It’s always uncomfortable when the market shifts. People don’t move houses on a dime. There’s planning involved; sometimes it is months in the works. Even as the main chores are tackled- decluttering, odd jobs that need to be wrapped up, some prep painting- the rest of life also gets juggled around marketing a property. If people have kids leaving for college, it’s simply easier to get them out of the house and start a listing in September.

But the expectations for what will happen in September are derived from the experiences underway in August and before. If, up until that point, homes have been selling within one to two weeks, or basically right away, then sellers will base their plans on having to be out of their home in conjunction with receiving a prompt response from the buyer pool. The conditional scenario runs something like: If we get an interested party right away, how fast can we be out of the house?

The planning done by looking to the past can draw people up short when the interest rates rise mid-September, and the showings are choked off. A few weeks go by before the pattern is confirmed. This wasn’t the plan! And yet it is the present that rules what is to come. Being nimble and responsive applies in every market. But in a slowing market, the adjustments are most uncomfortable.

The MPLS association data shows increasing market time.

Autumn a few years ago

The End of Feminism

Morocco’s traditional patriarchal culture just produced a female prime minister: Fatima Zahra El Mansouri.

Younger people may already treat this as ordinary. They’re not old enough to remember how awkward it felt when Geraldine Ferraro ran for national office in 1984 along side Walter Mondale. She lacked the routine of regular public presentations and debates, so she came across as unprepared. She was the butt of jokes in polite society, and the locker-room talk was worse.

It’s useful to look back and see the distance covered. In recent decades there have been so many firsts that treating this as a singular breakthrough starts to feel like nostalgia rather than news. Let politicians do the work and be judged on the results.

A newer marker of female emancipation is the number of notable crooks reaching the stage. A documentary about one such figure came out this weekend. Years ago, closed doors kept most of this in check; then social norms did the rest. Women were often so pleased simply to reach the rank that they wouldn’t risk it over something as reckless as grand theft.

That’s less true now. The young woman with the pretty smile and lean figure can still lean on the assumption that she won’t be read as a criminal. As is often the case, though, the thieves eventually get caught, tried, and punished.

As disheartening as that is, it is also evidence that the feminist movement has largely done its job. Women demonstrably have access to the same powerful decision-making machinery as men in this country—and the same capacity to misuse it.

A story about Torpo Stave church

In the high valleys of Hallingdal, where the mountains still held the old names and the rivers ran cold from the snows, the people of Torpo had long kept both the new faith and the older habits. By the closing years of the twelfth century, Christianity had reached even this inland district, carried north and west by the memory of King Olaf Haraldsson, who had fallen at Stiklestad more than a century and a half earlier. His death had turned him into a saint, and the white Christ he had forced upon the coastal chiefs and inland farmers had gradually become the God of the valleys as well.

Yet the change had not been swift or clean. In Torpo the first wooden church had been small, raised perhaps in the generation after Olaf’s son Magnus the Good had reclaimed the kingdom. Its posts were set in the earth, its doorposts carved with the interlacing beasts that still remembered the old animal styles. When that earlier building grew weak, the men of the parish decided on something stronger and higher. They sent for Torolf, a master builder known for work in the Sogn valleys and for a steady hand with the axe.

Torolf arrived with a small company of craftsmen in the spring when the timber could be felled and floated down the Hallingdalselva. The local priest, a man who held a canonry at the cathedral in Stavanger, had already secured the right to dedicate the new church to Saint Margaret of Antioch. Margaret’s story—how she had been swallowed by a dragon and had burst free by the power of the cross—was well known among the mountain folk. In a land of wolves and sudden rockfalls, a saint who defeated a monster from within was a practical intercessor.

The men cut tall pines and firs from the slopes above the river. Dendrochronology would later fix the year of the main timbers near 1192, but Torolf and his crew knew only that the wood must season properly and that the great staves must be jointed so the whole structure could rise without iron nails. Fourteen upright posts would form the central chamber, braced by sills and crossed members that stiffened the walls against the winter winds. Around this high nave the builders raised lower aisles, so that the roof climbed in steps, the outer covering of wooden shingles darkening under rain and sun.

While the frame went up, the older men of Torpo told the younger workers what their grandfathers had said of the conversion. In the days of Olaf Tryggvason and then of Olaf Haraldsson, royal agents and English priests had come up the valleys with crosses and with threats of fire and outlawry. Some chieftains accepted baptism for the sake of trade and alliance; others held out until the king’s ships or his local allies made resistance costly. In Hallingdal the last open sacrifices at the old hof had ceased only after word came that Olaf’s body, recovered from the battlefield, had worked miracles. A farmer who had once carved Thor’s hammer on his doorpost now ordered a cross cut in its place, and his sons learned the Latin creed by rote.

Torolf himself carried a runic inscription that would be cut into a plank of the church: “Torolf made this church. Ásgrímr, Hákon, Erlingr, Páll, Eindriði, Sjaundi, Torolf. Thorir carved.” The names mixed the old Norse stock with Christian ones. Páll was Paul; the rest still sounded like the language of the Thing. When the main structure stood, the builders left an apse at the eastern end of the chancel and a narrow opening between nave and sanctuary. Side altars stood in the nave for the lesser saints, while the high altar faced the rising sun.

In the decades that followed, the church would receive a painted canopy over a loft in the eastern part of the nave. On that barrel vault, artists would show Christ in judgment surrounded by the symbols of the evangelists, the twelve apostles, and scenes of Margaret’s martyrdom. But in Torolf’s time the interior was still plain wood, smelling of resin and smoke from the candles the priest lit at mass. The circular openings high in the walls let in thin shafts of light. Beneath the floor, near the chancel opening, someone would later carve the outline of a shrouded figure; tradition would claim it marked the grave of a bishop from Stavanger who had died while visiting his northern parish.

On the day the church was first used for mass, the people of Torpo and the neighboring farms of Ål and Hemsedal gathered outside the west portal. The portals themselves carried carved interlacing that still echoed the older styles, yet the cross stood above them. The priest spoke the words of consecration, and the congregation answered as best they could. Outside, the river ran as it always had, and the mountains kept their old silence. Inside, under the rising wooden roof that Torolf and his men had raised, the white Christ had been given a permanent house in the valley. The stave church at Torpo would remain the oldest building in Hallingdal, standing on its original ground long after many of its sister churches had been replaced, a timber witness to the slow, uneven arrival of the new faith among the last of the inland Norse.

Homeownership rate revisited

Eric Hembre, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, offers a new perspective on counting homeownership. Rather than measuring the percentage of housing structures occupied by an owner versus a renter, Hembre considers how many people in the population being observed are homeowners. This distinguishes households that accommodate multiple adults from those occupied by just one or two owners and their children under eighteen.

He calls this new measure the Homeowners-to-Population Ratio (HPOP). It is based on people, rather than structures.

Here are some slides from a presentation given to the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors this past week that help clarify the concept.

What could be interesting about this measure is observing various community outcomes as the ownership rate drops—which implies a larger number of adult work hours taking place in the home. It’s reasonable to assume there might be some sharing of duties, like mowing the grass or caring for dependent family members. But what else?

Could there be more associational work done informally through neighborhood groups? Are the streets better tended and free of litter? Are the sidewalks more likely to be shoveled? Do people report better health because there are more adults to give rides to medical appointments?

It raises an interesting question about the relationship between homeownership and the less visible work that goes into maintaining a community. Beyond the structures themselves, what changes when the people living in them have different arrangements of ownership, responsibility, and time?

What predicts votes?

Past party affiliation is by far the strongest indicator, followed by influence of friends and family; name recognition is a weaker secondary cue (mainly in low-information races), and debate performance has the least predictive power.

Key context

• Party affiliation is the dominant individual predictor because it functions as a durable identity and information shortcut that summarizes policy positions, group memberships, and past performance.

• Friends and family operate both as a formation mechanism for party ID and as an ongoing reinforcement channel; social homophily means people are surrounded by similar voters.

• The gap between the top two and the bottom two is large. Name recognition and debates can matter at the margins (especially for independents or in low-visibility races), but they are not reliable indicators of how most people will ultimately vote.

• Context matters: in high-profile partisan general elections, party ID dominates; in open primaries or nonpartisan local races, name recognition and social cues gain relative importance.

These rankings rest on consistent findings from voting behavior research, ANES data, social-network studies, and debate impact analyses rather than on any single election.

Friday night under the Lights

For those outside the U.S., the pull of a Friday-night high school football game can be hard to grasp. Under the lights, the stands fill with a cross-section of the community that few other local events still manage to gather.

The players are the obvious center—skill, effort, and the particular intensity of teenagers competing in front of people who know their names. Their parents are usually the most constant presence, turning the game into one of the rare social hours available to people whose calendars are already spoken for by work and younger children. The games themselves are straightforwardly fun, which is a draw.

Grandparents often treat the evening as a reason to get out. Once they’re there, other relatives tend to follow, arriving with extra jackets, mittens, and seat cushions against the cold metal bleachers. Classmates show up in coordinated themes, adding noise and color. Junior-high kids move through the crowd with face paint and beads, largely unsupervised, absorbing the spectacle. Coaches, assistants, and the volunteer photographers are there on duty yet largely unpaid, offering the kind of ordinary advice that accumulates over a season. The marching band supplies its own volume and continuity.

The circles of influence that radiate from the event are wide. That is why a shooting at one of these games—committed by someone with no connection to the school or the people gathered there—registers as an especially broad violation. It doesn’t just interrupt a sporting event; it reaches into the ordinary, overlapping lives of families, volunteers, and kids who had come for something ordinary and communal.

Instead of Think Tanks

What?

COWEN: If old-style think tanks are somewhat obsolete, what should we replace them with?

AHAMED: God, I don’t know. I wish I knew. It’s maybe a model which was less top-down driven. A model that essentially was more allowing a thousand flowers to bloom and create institutions where you allow people, you get great writers and thinkers to write about subjects they’re interested in, and then see what rises to the surface.

Liaquat Ahamed

MN pricing snapshot

The private city that bloomed back to public

Sandy Springs, Georgia incorporated in December 2005 and pioneered a heavily privatized “contract city” or public-private partnership model for municipal services. It later shifted most of those services in-house.

The private model (2005 onward)

When it became Georgia’s first new city in decades (after residents voted overwhelmingly to incorporate and leave Fulton County), Sandy Springs launched with a very small public staff (initially just a few employees, such as the city manager and clerk). Nearly all non-public-safety services—including public works, community development, finance, IT, communications, recreation and parks, municipal court operations, and economic development—were contracted out to private firms. Police and fire remained public (partly for legal and insurance reasons).

The initial main contractor was CH2M Hill; later the work was split among multiple firms for additional savings. This approach was widely cited as an efficient, low-overhead model that avoided large traditional bureaucracies, long-term debt, and pension obligations while delivering services and building reserves without tax increases.

The shift to a more public/hybrid model (2019)

In 2019, during a rebid process, the city determined that private-sector bids had become more expensive (driven by a tight labor market and higher contractor costs/fringe rates). It brought the majority of those services in-house as city-managed operations, projecting roughly $14 million in savings over five years. Later reports put actual savings higher (around $26 million in one five-year comparison).

The city has described this as moving to a hybrid public-private model rather than fully abandoning contracting. It continues to outsource some functions (such as certain street/maintenance field services, call center, 911/ChatComm in partnership with Johns Creek, municipal court solicitor work, and others) where private provision remains advantageous. Police and fire were already public.

In short, Sandy Springs went from a pioneering, largely privatized service-delivery model to a more conventional public municipal structure with selective ongoing contracting—driven primarily by cost comparisons rather than an ideological rejection of privatization. City officials have framed it as pragmatic adaptation to market conditions.

Why do some jobs require a civic ethos? It’s something to ponder. Because when a private enterprise system is tried whether it be paying people to ‘community’ policing or caring for the elderly, the mismatch can create waste.

Poetry snip

This is not geography,

because we cannot foretell

where we are going,

seeing as how we are carried,

and know only where we have come,

recognized if we are lucky

by where we were last.

Judith Stronauch

Amenity dynamics and what they’re worth

Natural amenities are not fixed background conditions. They are produced, maintained, degraded, and sometimes destroyed, and those changes show up directly in real-estate prices.

The paper, Taxing Paradise: Political Capture of Amenity Rents and the Missing Migration to California by Philip E. Graves, treats California’s climate, coastline, and mountains as essentially unchanged and therefore attributes the state’s long-running domestic out-migration to the political capture of the location rents those amenities generate. The distinction between amenity value and its capture is useful, but the premise that the amenities themselves are stable understates how much their effective quality depends on access, density, risk, and private investment.

Beaches illustrate the point. Forty years ago many California beaches were relatively open and lightly used. Over time, shoreline access has narrowed through private development, parking restrictions, and simple crowding. Even where a public beach remains, the same physical strip of sand now serves a much larger population. The amenity that enters a household’s location decision is not the geological feature; it is the experience of using it. That experience has deteriorated for many people even if the coastline itself has not moved.

Amenities can also be destroyed. Homes overlooking western canyons or forested ridges once commanded premiums for the views. Recurrent wildfires have altered both the scenery and the risk profile of ownership. Higher insurance costs, or the simple unwillingness of some buyers to accept the residual risk, reduce the capitalized value of those locations. The natural feature may still exist, but its contribution to property value has changed.

Amenities can likewise be created or amplified. A developer who erects a tall building does not invent the distant mountains or coastline, but the upper-floor units that capture unobstructed views of them sell at large premiums relative to lower floors that look into neighboring windows or a busy street. The view is a natural amenity; the ability to enjoy it at that intensity is an artifact of construction and location within the building. Similar effects appear with landscaping, trail systems, or waterfront improvements that raise the usability of existing natural features.

None of this denies that natural amenities matter for real-estate pricing, or that governments can capture the rents they generate. It does suggest that the stock of effective amenities is endogenous to population pressure, land-use rules, maintenance, environmental change, and private development. A fuller account would therefore need to track how the quality and accessibility of those amenities evolve alongside the tax and regulatory instruments the paper emphasizes. The rents are real; the amenities that produce them are not static.

The German – Series Review

This is one of the best shows I’ve seen in a while. I almost skipped it—WWII seemed like a topic that had been thoroughly exhausted years ago. Instead it finds a fresh angle and keeps the intrigue without relying on violence. Only a couple of episodes in, and I’m recommending it.

It’s over

When the trigger words no longer galvanize a reaction.

In other news

The pumpkin crop was great this year.

MN’s manufacturing prowess

Minnesota’s job mix is less “average American state” than it looks. The state has drifted further from the national pattern over the last thirty years, not toward it, and the distinctive pieces are medical devices, a thick factory base, and headquarters.

Nonfarm employment is about 3.07 million. Education and health is the largest block, roughly 631,000 jobs. Trade, transportation, and utilities is about 526,000; government about 439,000; professional and business services about 376,000; manufacturing about 325,000; leisure and hospitality about 277,000. Finance is smaller than its reputation, about 182,000, and it is one of the sectors actually shrinking.

The interesting part is the concentration.

Manufacturing still holds about one in ten Minnesota jobs, against roughly 7 percent nationally. The state ranks about 22nd in population and 14th in factory jobs, and the Minnesota Chamber counts it in the top five nationally in 44 manufacturing subsectors, first or second in sixteen of them. Those are not the glamorous ones. Medical devices, recreational vehicles, packaging machinery, printed circuit boards, industrial controls, pumps, breakfast cereal, commercial printing, doors and windows. Aerospace and defense manufacturing is only about 13,000 of those 325,000 factory jobs. The real specialty sitting next to it is electromedical instruments, about 27,000 jobs, and medical equipment and supplies, about 19,000. Medtronic and Boston Scientific each employ on the order of 10,000 people in the state. Medical devices are also one of the few factory segments projected to grow through 2034. Printing, paper, and fabricated metals are the ones expected to thin out.

Health care is the employment engine, not just a large sector. Mayo alone has about 57,000 Minnesota employees. More than half of the employers with 10,000-plus workers in the state are health systems. DEED’s 2024–2034 projections have health care and social assistance accounting for well over half of all net job growth. That is an aging-population story more than a productivity story, and it is already visible in the monthly numbers: education and health added about 18,000 jobs over the year through August 2026, more than any other supersector.

The other oddity is headquarters. Cargill, UnitedHealth, Target, General Mills, 3M, and Ecolab give Minnesota an outsized “management of companies” sector. Finance, insurance, professional services, and corporate offices are more than 80 percent metro. Manufacturing is split almost evenly, 54 percent Twin Cities and 46 percent Greater Minnesota. Agriculture and mining are more than 85 percent outstate. It is two labor markets sharing a state name.

DEED’s long-run comparison makes the divergence explicit. Since 1990, Minnesota’s mix has become less like the national mix: relatively more durable and nondurable manufacturing, finance, company headquarters, and health care; relatively less transportation and warehousing, information, professional services, and restaurants. Information and finance are still the weak spots in the current data, down about 5 percent and 3 percent over the year. Manufacturing, unusually, was up about 3 percent.

So the mix is a factory state that never fully deindustrialized, a medical-device cluster that dwarfs its aerospace slice, a headquarters town, and a health-care employer of last resort for net job growth. The thin defense footprint from the last question sits inside that, not on top of it.

Divided they fall

I’m never quite sure how they draw the watersheds off a continental divide. A drop from a storm cloud over Minnesota can end up in one of three basins, hundreds of miles from here: Hudson Bay, the Atlantic by way of the Great Lakes, or straight south on the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. You cannot tag a drop the way you band a migrating waterfowl and wait to see where it lands.

The sign announcing the great divide doesn’t help. Hardly a peak, hardly a break in the land. Just another crest on a meandering country road, grass gone to seed on both shoulders, and a brown board that says the water on one side is bound for Hudson Bay and the water on the other for the Mississippi.

They figure it by elevation. Surveyors follow the high ground — the Laurentian Divide, what the old maps called the height of land — and mark where a raindrop has no choice but to run one way or the other. Near Hibbing the St. Lawrence Divide crosses it, at a place the Ojibwe called the Hill of Three Waters. Same trick of the land. No drama, just a highland plain, and three oceans waiting.

Miss Angelou reflects on ML King

Rev. King continued, chanting, singing his prophetic litany. We were one people, indivisible in the sight of God, responsible to each other and for each other.

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive, must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into Life.

His head was thrown back and his words rolled out with the rumbling of thunder. We had to pray without ceasing and work without tiring. We had to know evil will not forever stay on the throne. That right, dashed to the ground, will rise, rise again and again.

When he finished washing us with his words, caressing our scarred bodies with his optimism, he led us in singing

“Oh, Freedom.”

Today

Pressure- movie review

This movie offers an intriguing new angle on a well known story. Not only compelling, it’s a celebration of all the small crucial roles hundreds of people play on the grand stage. Definitely worthy of your time.

House Dating

The massing is a story-and-a-half front-gable cottage: steep roof, paired windows tucked under the rake, and a full-width porch on simple posts. That combination was a builder’s staple back when streetcars were still a thing, or from about 1910 to 1930. The oval window in the peak is a period flourish rather than a later add-on; it shows up on cottages and small Dutch Colonial variants of those decades, not on Victorian houses and not on postwar ranches. The clapboard, the modest chimney, and the lack of ornate brackets or a deep Craftsman bargeboard point the same way: vernacular, not high-style.

A permit or the original abstract would settle it. From the facade alone, 1915–1930 is the honest range.

Passionate pursuits

In Chapter 14 of East of Eden, Steinbeck gives us a beautiful portrait of his mother, Olive. There is warmth and admiration in his description of her, but there is economics there as well.

In addition to being a schoolteacher, Olive’s goodwill extends primarily to her family, then to her neighbors, and, on special occasions, perhaps as far as the county line. Her social concern moves outward in concentric circles, but eventually it stops.

Until her neighbor, Martin Hopps, is killed in World War I.

His death awakens something different in her. Olive throws herself into the work of selling Liberty Bonds. Her motivation is clearly not greed, even if she may have been compensated for selling the bonds—a detail Steinbeck does not specify. Something in her orientation has changed. The death of a young neighbor has altered the way she sees her relationship to the larger community, and her actions follow from that change.

Her bond-selling becomes almost a personal mission. Eventually, she receives recognition in the form of an airplane ride in an Army plane. But the recognition is almost beside the point. The economic activity came first. The transaction was the vehicle through which her particular concern could be expressed.

This is a useful reminder that economic outcomes do not begin with prices. They begin with people, situated in relationships and institutions, acting from particular orientations. The same market opportunity can produce very different actions depending upon what an individual values, whom they feel connected to, what obligations they recognize, and what has happened in their lives.

Olive’s story is therefore more than an example of altruism. It is an example of institutional clearing: a personal experience, a relationship with a neighbor, a national event, a market mechanism, and a particular individual orientation come together to produce an economic action.

Economic outcomes can be driven by many fuels. Price is one of them. But so are memory, obligation, affection, loyalty, recognition, identity, and a sense of contribution. To understand the outcome, we have to look not only at the transaction, but at the person and the institutional world through which that transaction is being cleared.

This version makes Steinbeck do some of the theoretical work for you rather than turning the passage into a generic “people aren’t motivated by money” argument.

The Wind Shifts

Writer and critic Henry Oliver (@henryoliver) on Substack has started reading poetry from memory. And although this is not from memory, I think a little more poetry in the world is well deserved. So, here’s my effort to promote his ambitions.

About the poet: “Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Stevens’s first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. ” (Wiki)

NY Update

Book History

A 1903 children’s book, printed in Minneapolis for Norwegian church homes, still carries this line:

Entered according to Act of Congress… in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D.C.

That sentence is the whole American trick in miniature. After 1870, if you wanted a U.S. copyright, you sent copies to the Library of Congress. LC did not buy every book in the country. Deposit law poured them in—hymnals, primers, farm almanacs, a pig that waddles into the parsonage on Sunday while everyone else is in church.

The publisher was the Free Church Book Concern, the print shop of the Lutheran Free Church, Norwegian-American, Minneapolis. The book teaches a child to pray—and then tells him that a pig remains a pig even if he tours every parsonage in the world.

By 1901 LC was printing catalog cards and selling them to other libraries. One record in Washington could stand in for the same title from Brooklyn to North Dakota. This Norwegian reader with my great uncle’s name scrawled at the top of the first leaf and the national library were in the same paperwork.

The copyright lapsed long ago. The pig, the prayer, and the Washington stamp did not.

Prayers are not unwanted

On Sunday we’re reminded of church. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what a religious service can actually do. A congregation gathers in a shared space, names people and communities out loud, and for a few minutes the room is organized around care that isn’t only private. Peace and an emotional connection often come from that combination: ritual form, familiar words, and the knowledge that other people are holding the same names at the same time.

People come together in the pews to contemplate and pray. During the week, the notion of holding one in your thoughts is also expressed. “I’ll be thinking of you,” “you’re in my thoughts,” “sending love,” “holding space,” : you are not only on your own. The skeptic’s mockery of “thoughts and prayers” usually targets the version that substitutes for action or feels like a slogan. The everyday version you heard—kind, specific, offered without fanfare—is closer to ordinary human solidarity.

That impulse is very widespread.

Intercessory prayer—asking on behalf of someone else—appears in early tribal and clan settings as an expression of group solidarity, in Vedic hymns, in ancient Near Eastern and Greek sources, in Jewish prayers for healing, in Christian intercessions and the communion of saints, in Islamic dua, in Buddhist loving-kindness practice and the dedication of merit, and in Hindu petitions for family and community. Many cultures also do a related thing without addressing a deity in the same way: ancestor rites, Day of the Dead offerings, Obon, grave-tending, or simply speaking a person’s name so they are not forgotten. The form changes; the gesture of directing attention and goodwill toward another person or group does not.

Secular language maps onto the same need. Phrases that mean “I’m thinking of you” exist across dozens of languages; people use them after illness, loss, distance, or public disaster. The content is not identical to prayer—there is no petition to a God—but the social work is similar: I am keeping you in mind; you matter to me; you are not isolated in this.

Anthropology and psychology tend to treat the practice as doing several things at once, whether or not one accepts a supernatural mechanism. Communal petition can index that someone is present and cared for, socialize people into noticing others’ needs, and thicken support networks. Studies of collective ritual (temple worship, festivals, convent prayer, mourning rites) often find denser ties and reported well-being among people who participate together. Knowing others are thinking of you can reduce isolation even when the “efficacy” studies of distant intercessory prayer for physical outcomes are mixed or null. The comfort is frequently in the relationship, not only in the hoped-for result.

So the church moment and the casual “I’ll be thinking of you” sit on a long continuum. One is framed as an address to God in a liturgical setting; the other is framed as human attention. Both try to answer the same ordinary problem: suffering and distance feel less total when someone else is deliberately holding you in mind. But why not be meaningful about it? Why not choose a congregation and, once a week, be mindful of thinking of others?

Regional voices

Garrison Keillor preserved the Scandinavian immigrant story.

His monologue is rich in norms and customs, mostly revealed through humor.

Winter is coming

The squirrels are busy.

Pay the price in the NE

The US Census has lots of interesting information on what is trending in new construction. It’s fun to compare what buyers expect today versus what your grandparents lived in when they were young.

But the price difference across the country is greater than I expected. Building in the NE costs a little less than twice as much as in the South and the Midwest.

According to the Characteristics of New Housing, 666,000 single-family houses built and sold in the United States in 2023. The median price (half cost less, half more) was $428,600 and the median size was 2,286 square feet with a median price per square foot of $154.70.

What new home buyers got for their money varied by region. The median price and square footage of new single-family homes sold in 2023 in the:

Northeast: $760,700, 2,430 square feet.

Midwest: $396,300, 2,172 square feet.

South: $388,800, 2,335 square feet.

West: $536,200, 2,170 square feet.

Granted, this information is a few years old, but the differences will persist. Given that the inputs are land and labor, it is safe to assume the build out in the NE pushes lot prices higher. And construction trades must command a premium wage.

Times have changed

I just looked up Paul Auster after a video short pushed his writing. His name meant nothing to me. Both of his wives did. I have a penchant for Lydia Davis; a fat book of her short stories held a spot on my nightstand for more than a year. His second wife, Siri Hustvedt, happens to share an alma mater with me, so I already knew her work as well.

It sounds like A New York Trilogy is a good place to start for Paul’s work.

Sam Cooke – happy music

Are there happy tunes these days?

How many election judges

Does Minnesota need to run an election?

30,000

People are signing up now to be election judges in November. The position is temporary. Paid employees of local election officials train to handle all aspects of voting at the polling place. Serving as an election judge is a chance to learn about elections and is a great service to the community.

This work exhibits one indicator of civic engagement. Other jobs in the community which serve to measure it are hours volunteered, neighbors helped, meetings attended, and problems solved together rather than outsourced—the scout leader on Tuesday night, the food-shelf intake shift, the church-basement cook, the park trail crew, the youth-soccer coach who also lines the field, the neighbor who shovels the walk next door or holds a spare key or brings a meal after surgery, the person who sits through a planning-commission variance or a school-board comment line or a watershed hearing, the block that organizes a snow-emergency car shuffle instead of waiting for the tow, the parents who run a crossing rotation when the guard is cut, the street that plants the missing boulevard tree, the small landlord and tenants who fix the porch before it becomes a code case. Those are the countable hours and the uncounted favors; the meetings no one films; the work that stays local instead of being handed to an agency.

Greek foundations to pluralism?

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle lists feelings that involve pleasure or pain—appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hate, longing, jealousy, pity—and says virtue is not the raw feeling. Virtue is a stable disposition (hexis) to feel and act toward the right people, at the right time, in the right degree, for the right reason.

Working with sweeping claims

I asked grok how to manage a conversant who takes a particular event and extrapolates a generalized assertion. For instance, Chernobyl showed us the nuclear energy is workable. Here’s the response,

That move works as a stopper because it treats one visible harm as a verdict on the whole arrangement. It collapses “people get hurt” into “the system is therefore illegitimate,” and it leaves little room to talk about rates, alternatives, or what happens if the new ideas never arrive.

Ways to keep the conversation open without sounding like a debate-club rebuttal:

1. Separate the particular from the claim.
Ask what the example is supposed to prove. “Is the point that this person was harmed, or that harm of this kind is typical, or that no better arrangement exists?” That forces the speaker to choose a level of generality instead of letting one story stand in for the whole.

2. Ask for the comparison class.
“Hurt relative to what?” Stagnation, a different property regime, a planned allocation of the same invention, or yesterday’s technology. Creative destruction always has a local loser; the interesting question is whether the alternative leaves more people worse off, or the same people worse off for longer.

3. Distinguish seen harm from unseen gain.
The displaced worker, the closed shop, the obsolete skill are easy to point at. The cheaper good, the new job that did not exist, the person who can now afford the thing—are harder to photograph. You do not have to deny the first to ask whether the second is being counted.

4. Treat “people get hurt” as a fact, not a conclusion.
Agree that particular people are harmed by particular advances, then ask what rule would prevent that harm without also preventing the advance. That turns the stopper into a design question: which institutions handle displacement, and which ones just freeze the present.

5. Use a parallel that is not capitalism.
Medicine, literacy, sanitation, and crop yields all produced losers in their time. If the same logic would have blocked those, the speaker has to say why this case is different. If they will not, the conversation has at least named the inconsistency.

6. Offer a narrower claim they can accept.
“Some innovations impose concentrated costs and diffuse benefits” is usually true and not a conversation ender. “Therefore the process that generates those innovations should be treated as illegitimate” is the leap. Naming the leap often reopens the floor.

A compact reply you can actually say:

“That person was hurt; that part is not in dispute. The question is whether we are talking about a typical outcome, an unavoidable cost of any change, or a reason to prefer a different system—and if the last, which one, and for whom.”

That keeps the particular example in view without letting it close the subject.

These are helpful only if accompanied by tack and subtlety. In my experience you can only present possible assertions if the respondent is open to considering them.

The Free Press party

Last night I went to one of the Free Press supper conversation groups. It was fun. A table for six, except someone chickened out, so there were five of us: two from the metro and three who had driven more than an hour.

What glared at me was how bad I still am as a conversation companion.

Flaw one: I interrupt far too readily. Even when the word I offer is the one they were reaching for, it is rude. Patience. I need patience.

Second: not at the start, but toward the end of the evening I found myself making declarative statements. I grew up surrounded by schoolteachers, so an authoritative tone is my default. Questions and inquiry advance a conversation. End statements close it. Patience.

Last: I struggled when a tablemate declared that the buffalo population was decimated and we are all on the hook for their return to the Great Plains of South Dakota. Where do you start with that? Isn’t Theodore Roosevelt National Park already a federal contribution toward that goal? Are there interested parties driving the return of bison that can be supported? What questions would let the structure of renewal be explored and possibly proven out?

I need more practice and more patience. Good thing the Free Press is organizing the chance for further improvement.

Destinations and paths

In Living Together: Inventing Moral Science (2023), Chapter 3 is titled “Justice as Traffic Management.” Schmidtz treats traffic lights and related rules as a working model of justice and of the social infrastructure that makes living together possible.

He applies the same picture to property, convention, and other institutions: they function as traffic management. They get in the way just enough to keep people out of one another’s way, so individuals can pursue their own projects and a better life together.

Part of the traffic management might be universally agreed upon so that at a particular intersection the autonomous actor must stop, not even turn right on red. Some other directionals may allow for private discretion within the greater framework. If the left hand turn arrow is flashing yellow. The driver can make a judgement call about the distance between the on-coming cars and decide when to go forward with their plan.

Think of people as drivers. Each has a destination of their own. Some want the coast, some a quiet town, some a high ridge. Justice, on Schmidtz’ account, is not the destination. It is the traffic system that lets them move without wrecking one another: lanes, lights, turn-taking, settled expectations. A good system does not rank destinations. It does not need to know where you are going. It only needs everyone to know whose turn it is at the intersection.

Now add some landscape. There are knolls and dips and mountain ridges and valleys.

Utopians treat justice itself as a summit. They imagine one peak so high that, once you are on it, nothing more can be asked. From there they look down at ordinary roads and call them incomplete. The climb is treated as a detail: if the peak is perfect, difficulty is a practical inconvenience, not a reason to doubt the map. The temptation is to treat other people’s destinations as detours from the peak, and to use the traffic system as a convoy that must all go the same way.

Realists refuse that picture. They say the shared landscape is not a single mountain we are all climbing. What we can actually see are pits: slavery, famine, persecution, gridlock, institutions that stop people from moving at all. Those are real. The perfect peak is a drawing. A society that works does not drag everyone toward one imaginary summit. It keeps the roads open so that each person can climb a mountain of their own choosing—or stay in the valley if that is their life.

Political Wind Shift

The races appear to be tightening— if you can believe polls.

Governor

Senate

Gems from The Sea The Sea

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)

And finally, for this post any way.

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.

Interesting items about Household Studies

Back a hundred years or so, back when home economics was considered a valued topic of study, the household featured as a unit of analysis.

This is shown in the book authored by R. G. D. Allen and A. L. Bowley, Family Expenditure: A Study of Its Variation (London: P. S. King, 1935; LSE Studies in Statistics and Scientific Method, no. 2). It is a short monograph—about 145 pages—not a U.S. government survey volume, though 1935–36 is also the fieldwork year of the huge American Study of Consumer Purchases, which later produced many BLS bulletins titled Family Expenditures in Selected Cities, 1935–36. Those are different works.

Allen was then a young mathematical economist at the London School of Economics (soon famous for the Hicks–Allen theory of demand). Bowley was the senior statistician who had spent decades on cost-of-living and working-class budgets. Together they tried to do something new: treat family budget data as econometrics—measurement of economic behavior—rather than only as social description. Bowley called it an attempt “to apply measurement to economic actions.”

Allen and Bowley’s regressions do not discover a single grocery percentage that every household owes. They show that households, grouped by income, settle food at a regular share of total outlay, and that this share is stable enough, within a tier, to be measured.

Treat the household as a spending unit facing prices. Income arrives; alternative uses of that income are compared—food against rent, clothing, fuel, and the rest. That comparison is a market process in miniature: not a committee allocating “needs,” but a sequence of purchases that rations a limited sum across priced goods. Groceries win a large claim where the budget is tight and a smaller claim where the budget is larger. The level of food spending still rises with income; the portion falls. That is the regularity their Engel lines recover.

What the statistics ferret out is that portion. Fit expenditure on food to income (or to total outlay) across budgets in a reasonably homogeneous group and the slope and intercept give the typical grocery claim at each tier. Scatter around the line is taste, habit, and household composition. The line itself is the market settlement: how much of the budget, at that income, households in that class consistently assign to food after comparing it with everything else they might buy.

So the finding is not that groceries are a fixed tax on family life. It is that, tier by tier, the grocery share is an equilibrium result of priced alternatives, and the regression is the instrument that reads that result off the books.

O-level Analysis

Often, it seems like conversations about societal ambitions and expenses slip and slide between various levels of organization. Sentence fragment personalizes a victim into a single person, the next snippet villainizes a whole profession, and then the next dooms a bureaucracy to nothing but drag on the whole project. Wouldn’t it be useful to stick to a certain level and develop a feel for the actors and outcomes within this space?

For instance, all this abrupt distancing from data centers doesn’t feel like action from the bottom up. It feels like action from the top down. And not from actors in and around the industry but a professional class of people interested in pushing power to show they can. A group of people that need to perpetuate their employment and have picked this to be their topic du jour.

A bottom-up activity might start with individual actors, such as coal miner families objecting to dangerous working conditions. After unsuccessfully petitioning employers, they enlist politicians to engage at the top. Meryl Streep played this role in the 1983 movie silkwood. But I haven’t heard of residents filling all the seats in a city council meeting to talk about data centers. Individual actors are not showing their hand. The action decision is not at the individual level.

Being at the right organizational level of analysis is helpful, not because societies reach solutions in only one way, but because the conversation can remain consistent. Residents are not saying no to data centers. There is no evidence they have picked through the pros and cons and come to a decision. What is transpiring in the public sphere is at a different level.

Perhaps the objections will emerge to no more fruition than gas stoves. Remember when they were to be banned? And then cooks said, absolutely not! I like my gas stove. It’s just that if we keep the analysis at the right O-level, then the actual action-takers can be encouraged or squashed.

Saturday at the Farmers Market

Person of Interest – Series Review

When Person of Interest arrived in the fall of 2011 (its first season stretching into 2012), CBS tagged it as science fiction. That label was both accurate and slightly misleading. The show looked like a sleek New York crime procedural. Underneath, it was already asking what happens when a machine learns to see people.

After 9/11, a reclusive billionaire software engineer named Harold Finch built The Machine for the government. Its job was to ingest every camera feed, phone call, and electronic trail and flag imminent terrorist attacks. Finch soon realized the system did more than that. Using facial recognition and pattern analysis, it also identified ordinary people about to be involved in violent crime—victims or perpetrators, the Machine would not say. Those cases were labeled “irrelevant” and discarded. Finch kept a back door.

He recruits John Reese, a highly trained former government operative who has been hollowed out by personal loss and is living off the grid. Together they take the numbers the government ignores and try to stop the wrongs before they happen. The first episode plants 9/11 as the origin point: the attack that justified building the system, and the moral remainder it left behind.

What felt like speculative sci-fi in 2012 now reads as early warning. The show understood, before most of us did, that a surveillance apparatus built to prevent catastrophe would not stay confined to catastrophe. It would keep looking. And someone would have to decide which lives counted.

A massive raid on two motels

Started with violations from the health department.

https://www.limitless-news.com/local/250-law-enforcement-personnel-target-brooklyn-center-hotels-human-trafficking-drug-investigation

Renewal of old ways?

With the return to handwritten tests in blue books, a method of matching the words to the writer, I wonder if other old ways will resurface.

Globes spinning on axels have been out of fashion, so old school. But there’s something tactile about them.

L’ete Indien

On ira ou tu voudras, quand tu voudras

Paid labor— it’s a new thing

Today is Labor Day! So I asked Grok—how many years or generations have most households obtained currency through daily employment, what is called labor by economists?

Most households have obtained most of their currency by selling labor only for a short stretch of history.

For the great majority of the human past—hunter-gatherer bands, then settled farming societies—people produced food and goods directly. Currency existed in some places for millennia, but most families did not live by daily paid employment. They lived by what they grew, herded, crafted, or extracted, supplemented by occasional market sales, tribute, or corvée. Even in late medieval and early-modern Europe, a large share of households still combined small plots, cottage production, and irregular hired work

The change that made wage employment the typical household strategy is recent and geographically uneven. In Britain the share of families classified as “workers” (plus cottagers) was already high by the late 17th century and kept rising through the 19th. In the United States the agricultural share of the labor force was still about three-quarters in 1800 and only fell below half around 1880–1890. By the time Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894, industrial and service wage work had just become the majority pattern in the United States.

That is roughly 130–150 years, or five to six generations if a generation is taken as 25–30 years. In much of the world the same transition is still incomplete; self-employment and small-scale farming remain large.

So the arrangement Labor Day commemorates—most households depending on regular paid employment for their money—is not an ancient human default. It is a product of the last two centuries of industrialization, enclosure, urbanization, and the decline of family-based production.

People assume labor is money motivated. But is it always? In East of Eden, Steinbeck gives us a variety of reasons people invest their time and capital and labor. Samuel Hamilton works just enough to invest in his own inventions, have them patented and never sees them through to a profitable endeavor. Adam Trask is wealthy and invests in the idea of using new refrigeration techniques to ship vegitables across the counrty. He works just to see if it can work. And then Kathy Trask pursues work with a bent toward the darker side of life. Only Will Hamilton, seems to be a tradional labor for money guy.

Working for a wage gives a job structure and a reason to show up. But aren’t most jobs pursued with a mix of incentives rather than just the money motive?

Truth seen in translation

In East of Eden, Mr. Lee explains to Samuel Hamilton:

“After two years we felt that we could approach your sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of Genesis. My old gentlemen felt that these words were very important too’Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: “Thou mayest.’ “Thou mayest rule over sin? The old gentlemen smiled and nodded and felt the years were well spent. It brought them out of their Chinese shells too, and right now they are studying Greek.”

Samuel said, “It’s a fantastic story. And I’ve tried to follow and maybe I’ve missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?”

Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—”Thou mayest’-that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man.

For if “Thou mayest’—it is also true that “Thou mayest not’ Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see. I do see.

Social mixing allows for seeing through the eyes of a translator.

Get in the game

When I was a young loan officer, just out of college, a couple came into the bank to apply for a car loan. They were only a few years older than me, and already homeowners with some equity in a starter home. Their employment history showed they hadn’t gone on to higher education — instead, they’d entered the workforce and bought a house.

At first, I was taken aback by how much further along the path of building net worth those few years had put this couple. But it was the fact that they had acted — taken a risk, made a purchase, and settled in — that gave them their financial edge. This was all in a working-class neighborhood in a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. Split-entry homes built in the late seventies: two bedrooms up, two down, double slider windows, a double attached garage. Nothing fancy.

When I hear today that people are struggling to get into housing, that the cause is price, that people are locked out, I can’t help but think of this couple. They did what they needed to do. They picked the best option available and stuck with it. That put them a step ahead of their age cohort who’d gone to college. They were ready to move up to the next level of housing before they’d even had time to think they could get what they really wanted.

Time and again, I’ve watched people delay or postpone a purchase because they feel they’re not getting enough for their money. The whole idea of a starter home is to get in the game — start building equity, learn a little about being a homeowner and doing renovations. Whether it’s an inability to envision interior improvements to a house or to imagine influencing positive outcomes across a neighborhood, some people won’t get where they want to be, because they won’t put in the effort to find the path.

Is this a crime show?

There’s been an unusual number of bodies floating up, literally, from waterbeds in the last five weeks. Here’s today’s headline.

Link

But in August four bodies were recovered, in various stages of, shall we say aging.

Link

It’s getting a bit spooky!

To no one’s surprise, crime causes one of the more significant impacts on the price of homes. Most people show a consistent preference for spaces which preserve personal safety especially when it comes to violent crimes.

Jung

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and seek you.”

– Carl Jung

My parent’s library was full of Carl Jung books. You don’t hear about him as much anymore.

High buck or low buck-

Housing subsidies hit barely 2% of households, at least as federal dollars transfers to residents.

Llms are amazing. In seconds you can get a breakdown of federal money flows into a city. It will distinguish from those who are simply getting their SSI back and those receiving funds by means testing or needs.

Here’s the prompt:

“Say you wanted to get a feel for how many federal dollars are flowing into a suburb to individual. There’s section 8 assistance, there’s snap good help— what else is there??”

Why should you care? All sorts of reasons. For me it is to better evaluate claims for the public’s interests and dollars.

Here’s Groks response:

I’ll pull city-level ACS, HUD, and Minnesota program data for Plymouth and Brooklyn Center so the entitlement vs. means-tested split is based on actual local numbers, not county averages.City profiles have the income and poverty numbers; next I’ll pull the ACS household tables that actually show Social Security, SSI, SNAP, and cash assistance.The two cities sit in the same county and the same metro housing market. The mix of federal money is still very different. Most of the difference is age structure plus means-tested take-up, not a hidden third category of programs.

Numbers below are household-level ACS figures where they exist, plus age-based estimates for Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid is the weakest city-level series; those shares are inferred from poverty, kids, disability, and uninsured rates, not a published city enrollment file.

Snapshot

Plymouth Brooklyn Center Population ~78,500–79,200 ~32,500 Households ~32,250 ~11,160 Median household income ~$127k–$137k ~$72,500 Poverty ~4–5% ~12% Age 65+ 17% of people 12% of people Households with someone 65+ ~29% lower (younger city) Kids under 18 ~25% ~29% Foreign-born ~14% ~22%

Share of households receiving each type

These are the cleanest published city numbers. “Public assistance or food stamps” is the ACS combined SNAP + cash-welfare flag. SSI is listed separately and overlaps with that group. Household receipt Plymouth Brooklyn Center SSI 2.1% (663 HH) 7.6% (850 HH) Cash public assistance 1.7%5.9% SNAP and/or cash assistance 3.9% (1,249 HH) 19.1% (2,127 HH) HUD housing (public housing + vouchers + project-based), rough ~1–2% of HH (Plymouth HRA has 230 public-housing units plus a modest voucher book) several times higher than Plymouth; inner-ring cities absorb more portable vouchers Social Security (not published as a city table) high among the 29% of HH that contain a 65+ person lower, because the city is younger

Statewide context: about 8% of Minnesota households report SNAP. Plymouth is half that. Brooklyn Center is more than double.

Entitlement vs means-tested, as a share of people

Split the programs the way the budget does.

Entitlements (work history / age, not a poverty test): Social Security (OASDI) and Medicare. Roughly 90% of Minnesotans 65+ receive OASDI; almost everyone 65+ is on Medicare. A smaller slice of working-age adults is on SSDI.

Means-tested: Medicaid/Medical Assistance, SNAP, SSI, TANF/MFIP cash, Section 8 / public housing, WIC, LIHEAP, EITC (tax refund, not in ACS “public assistance”). People Plymouth Brooklyn Center On Social Security + Medicare because they are 65+ ~15–16% of residents (17% are 65+; most collect) ~11% of residents Working-age SSDI (entitlement, disability) small, on the order of 2% of residents higher than Plymouth, still single digits Any entitlement (SS / Medicare / SSDI)~20–25% of residents ~15–20% of residents SNAP / cash / SSI household members low-single-digits of people on the order of 20–25% of people (19% of HH, and HH size is 2.87) Medicaid (biggest means-tested program, estimated) low teens of people, concentrated in kids and a thin low-income tail substantially higher — poverty 12%, kids 29%, uninsured-under-65 9.6% vs Plymouth’s 2.8% Housing subsidy well under 2% of people higher, still a minority Any means-tested programroughly 8–15% of residents roughly 30–40% of residents

Medicaid is why “means-tested” is larger than SNAP alone in both places. SNAP is the visible grocery card; Medicaid is the larger dollar flow.

Population split: some federal help vs none

“Help” here means living in a household that receives at least one of: Social Security, Medicare, SSDI, Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, cash welfare, or HUD rental aid. EITC is extra and not in the ACS flags.

These are rounded ranges, not a census count. People stack programs (a senior can be on SS + Medicare + Medicaid + SNAP), so you cannot add the rows above. Plymouth Brooklyn Center Some federal transfer (entitlement or means-tested) about 25–35% of residents about 45–55% of residents No federal transfer in the household about 65–75%about 45–55% Of those who get something, the dominant type entitlements (retirement) mix: means-tested is much larger; entitlements still matter for the smaller senior population

Read that carefully. In Plymouth a large minority “on federal dollars” is mostly retired homeowners collecting Social Security and Medicare they paid into. In Brooklyn Center a similar or larger minority is on need-tested programs, and a smaller senior cohort is still on SS/Medicare.

What the two suburbs actually look like

Plymouth’s federal inflow is an aging-in-place suburb: nearly one in six residents is 65+, almost all of them on Social Security and Medicare, while SNAP/SSI/cash sit under 4% of households and subsidized housing is a thin slice (the HRA’s 230 public-housing units are real, just small relative to 32,000 households).

Brooklyn Center is younger, poorer, more renter and immigrant. SSI is 3–4× Plymouth’s household rate. SNAP/cash is about 5×. Poverty is about 2.5×. That is the means-tested gap. The entitlement gap runs the other way because Plymouth is older.

If you only count Section 8 and SNAP, you understate both cities and you miss the biggest pipes: Medicare and Medicaid in dollar terms, Social Security in people terms. If you want this tightened to one city block or one school attendance area, ACS tract tables and HUD Picture of Subsidized Households will do that; city averages still hide pockets inside each suburb.

Reminder

Not all recipients are poor. Many are not. They’re just old and have donated to a contractual system of benefits as they age.

Housing help, when provided, seems to be channeled through the choice of the actors about 40% of the time. This split between wealthy Plymouth and youthful Brooklyn Center doesn’t spread in the same way as the food programs.

Housing help is still anchored by government more than portable by recipient.

Tracking geographies

Headlines like this have been crawling over my X feed since an article, Who Gets the Money? Federal Spending by County in 2025-26, was posted on Smart Assets on Friday.

What is thus study actually about?

“Who Gets the Money?” aggregates ~18 months of prime-award obligations (Jan. 1, 2025–June 30, 2026) from USAspending.gov across 3,132 counties. It uses place of performance (where the work or activity is recorded as occurring), includes contracts, grants, and direct payments, and excludes loans, certain indefinite-delivery vehicles, and federal payroll. Per-capita figures use Census July 2025 population estimates. The methodology section is published on the page.

USAspending.gov is the official DATA Act source. Using it is standard.

The biggest limitation (they disclose it)

Place-of-performance tagging for Medicare is often the insurer’s or claims processor’s headquarters, not where beneficiaries live or receive care. That is why Hennepin County, Minnesota (UnitedHealth HQ in Eden Prairie) shows ~$286 billion—about 4.7% of the study’s tracked. Those headline totals do not mean all that cash landed on local residents.

Still- the idea of a geographic accounting of money flow is a useful one, especially at the municipal level. A large shift in federal dollars could be a substantial liability. If many if your vulnerable residents were receiving section 8 payments, the future of the program is of interest to the community. It seems tracking the flow of federal dollars would also serve as a useful indicator of possible misappropriation.

It’s Sunday

Keep the flood victims in your prayers.

The city thinks in households

From the City of Plymouth’s financial insert. Money taken in per household from property taxes is $1,375. What it buys is spelt out for consumers to see.

It seems the most sensible unit of analysis when considering urban questions.

Lessons via Steinbeck

IN HUMAN AFFAIRS OF DANGER and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.

Chapter 21, East of Eden.

Up until now, In Dubious Battle was my favorite Steinbeck creation. But this one might bump it down a peg,

Social Mixing

A useful concept. Grok:

In Barza, Glaeser, Hidalgo, and Viarengo’s Economic Integration and Upward Mobility in Brazil (PNAS 2026; earlier NBER version Cities as Engines of Opportunities), social mixing is not residential mixing. It is workplace mixing of low-wage and higher-wage workers—how often initially poor formal-sector workers share an establishment with people who are not poor.

That is the construct they use to interpret why some Brazilian cities raise the earnings of the initially poor and others do not.

What they mean by it

The paper asks whether developing-world cities are poverty traps or engines of opportunity. Using RAIS linked employer–employee records (the universe of Brazil’s formal workforce), they follow workers who enter formal work earning less than 1.5 times the minimum wage and estimate city-level initial wage premia and medium-term premia (about 7–8 years later), following De la Roca and Puga.

City size alone does not explain the north–south gap. Southern cities look more like European learning cities; northern cities give an immediate wage bump but little subsequent growth. The authors’ preferred mechanism is Marshallian on-the-job learning: the unskilled gain when they work with the skilled, not merely in the same metro area.

Social mixing (Hidalgo’s label for the same object) is the city-level measure of that exposure.

How it is constructed

From the CEPR write-up of the same project and the NBER text:

Identify the “poor” as workers below a wage threshold (in the cohort analysis, first-year earnings below 1.5× the minimum wage).
For each metro area, compute the average share of non-poor coworkers in the typical poor worker’s establishment.
Subtract the city’s overall non-poor share. That residual is mixing beyond what the city’s poverty rate would mechanically produce—i.e., whether poor workers are isolated inside firms or sit next to higher-wage colleagues.

They also report isolation at occupation and industry levels. Controlling for isolation of the initially poor at establishment, occupation, or industry shrinks the north–south premium gap by about 60% in the working-paper results. Hidalgo reports that workplace-mixing models account for roughly 77% of variation in initial city premia for the initially poor and 83% of variation in medium-term premia.

So the constructs that “paint it out” are:

Establishment-level exposure of low-wage to high-wage workers (the core mixing variable)
Industry composition and economic complexity (ECI): more complex southern industries combine a wider skill range in the same workplace
Public-sector concentration of the skilled in the north, which pulls high-wage workers out of mixed private establishments
Contrast with residential segregation and with city average schooling, which they find do not explain the mobility gap the same way

They are explicit that this is associational, not a causal experiment: workers and firms are not randomly assigned. The claim is that agglomeration effects run through who works with whom, and that industrial structure (complexity vs. public-sector/simple resource processing) shapes that mixing.

In short: social mixing here = excess workplace co-presence of poor and non-poor workers, used as the operational stand-in for skill integration and on-the-job learning.

Me again: Social mixing in neighborhoods also promotes a type of associational capital. It is why people want to buy in neighborhoods where CEOs live. It’s how the elderly get their sidewalks shoveled. It’s how the kids whose parents work still get to Little League practice.

Live your life

Like a butterfly

TY Emma Camp w the WSJ

3.3 million views and counting.

I hope people are listening.

https://x.com/emmma_camp_/status/2091911609648128451?s=46&t=nh2cZMiuXcPdCF7GLICKlA

Homeless Crisis?

Source: 2025 point-in-time estimates from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Census Bureau population estimates.

That means in Minnesota there are 714 non homeless per homeless. To make that per household, it’s 238 households per homeless. Or in dollars, it is $5/household to cover a one bedroom for someone without.

This does not seem unmanageable from a financial standpoint. Hence it’s easy to wonder if the problem lies elsewhere.

Crime talk no longer taboo

According to HUD, it is not longer taboo for Realtors to talk about crime. HUD Empowers Real Estate Agents to Better Support American Homebuyers:

Washington, DC – The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.

“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”

In the letter, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Craig Trainor explains that unlawful steering under the Fair Housing Act requires intentional discrimination based on protected characteristics. Providing prospective homebuyers with information about school quality and crime data is not a violation when it is shared consistently without discriminatory intent.

Accordingly, Fair Housing Assistance Programs (FHAPs) should not issue discrimination findings solely because real estate professionals provide such information or answer nonracial questions on these topics in a consistent and unbiased manner. Likewise, Fair Housing Initiatives Programs (FHIPs) should not use federal funds to pursue complaints based on these same practices.

This overturns a long held practice of doing nothing more than pointing clients in the direction of police states as issued by local municipalities.

The Odyssey- movie review

I’m most surely one of the last people to see this epic film. It really comes through with a fantastic performance on so many levels. The interpretation of an ancient and well known tale is at the top of my list for its best feature. My top pick for scene, although there are many in the running, is the closing scene with Penelope and Odysseus.

I went to a local suburban theater and I have to say that seeing a film in a theater is an undervalued activity. The crowds are low, the large recliner armchairs are fabulous, and of course a film with big characters plays out that much better on a big screen.

I’ll be going to the theater more often, even going solo doesn’t feel that odd.

Businesses are property tax payers

I went to listen to a few city council people at a nice get toegether in a local Brew Pub. It’s a nice way to hear about what’s on people’s mind and where the direction of their interests are going. This was no different. The two pictured here, one from an urban area and one from a suburban area, seemed well intune and genuinly interested in their residents. Those are the folks who voted them in, afterall.

But in the hour plus conversation there was not one mention of the business base in their neighborhoods, neither retail, restaurant or employer. That’s a bit perplexing to me as businesses pay between 22-35% of the property taxes, the money used to pay the bills of public good provision. And as council members they are in fact the managers of the pipeline that keeps those public services in motion. So why don’t they care about those dollars?

Here are some local breakdowns property taxes paid by business.

Although elected by residents, if councilmembers only listen to residential voices, they will miss the math that keeps their property taxes lower. In Minnesota, commercial and industrial properties are taxed at higher class rates than homes. That means a stronger business tax base directly reduces the share of the levy that falls on homeowners.

Here’s the local reality:

Brooklyn Park businesses carry about 36% of the local tax capacity.

Plymouth ~28%.

Minneapolis ~25%.

Eden Prairie ~23%.

The more businesses pay, the less residents do. Supporting policies that attract and retain employers is not “pro-business.” It is pro-homeowner.

Ignore the commercial tax base and you are choosing higher residential tax bills. Higher tax bills and some of those consistutents that voted for you will exit to more affordable cities.

Mary Oliver declaims

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

How towns get their cash

Main sources of revenue (cash income) for US municipalities (cities and towns), with approximate shares of total general revenue.

Figures are national averages drawn primarily from US Census Bureau data via analyses by the Tax Policy Center (around 2021), GFOA, and related sources. Shares vary substantially by state, city size, and local tax authority. “Local governments” in Census data include cities, counties, townships, school districts, and special districts; pure municipal (city) figures are similar but often show somewhat lower property-tax reliance and higher charges/sales-tax reliance than the broader local total.

Approximate national composition for local/municipal general revenue

Source Approximate share Notes Property taxes 24–30% Dominant own-source tax for most cities; typically the single largest local tax. Higher in many Northeast/Midwest places; lower in some Sun Belt cities. Of pure local tax collections, property taxes are often ~70%+. Intergovernmental transfers (state + federal) 24–37% Mostly state aid (often 20–30%+), with smaller direct federal grants (~5–7%). Much state aid supports schools or is passed through; highly important for many cities. Charges and fees (user charges, service fees) 16–22% Includes water/sewer, parking, recreation, solid waste, hospital/clinic fees where applicable, permits, etc. Often one of the largest categories for pure city governments. Sales and gross receipts / selective sales (excise) taxes 7–14% General sales tax is the bigger piece where authorized; selective taxes (hotels, meals, utilities, tobacco, etc.) add more. Much more important in some Southern and Western cities. Income / wage / payroll taxes 2–6% (national average; much higher where used) Levied by only a minority of localities (notable in parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New York City, etc.). Can be 15–40%+ of revenue in those specific cities. Other taxes + miscellaneous 5–11% Licenses, franchise/business taxes, interest earnings, fines, asset sales, special assessments, etc.

Key points and context

Own-source vs. intergovernmental: Taxes + charges/fees typically make up the majority of “own-source” revenue. Intergovernmental aid is critical and often the largest single category in broader local-government aggregates (especially because of school funding).
Taxes specifically: When looking only at local tax dollars (not total revenue), property taxes commonly account for ~70–75%, sales/excise ~15–18%, and income taxes ~5–6%, with the rest from other taxes.
Big variation:
- Some Texas/Oklahoma-style cities lean heavily on sales taxes and charges.
- Many Northeastern cities lean more on property taxes (and sometimes local income taxes).
- Cities with major utility systems or enterprise funds show higher “charges.”
- School districts (often separate from city governments) pull the broader “local” averages toward higher property taxes and state aid.
Utilities and enterprise funds: Revenue from water, electric, gas, or transit systems is frequently accounted for separately (or as charges) and can be substantial, though not always fully fungible for general-fund purposes.
Data notes: Shares shift modestly over time with economic cycles, federal stimulus (e.g., COVID-era transfers), property-value changes, and state policy. The most recent comprehensive Census of Governments and annual surveys remain the standard national source; city-level mixes differ from county or school-district mixes.

In short, the core pillars for most US municipalities are property taxes, charges/fees for services, state (and some federal) aid, and sales taxes, with local income taxes mattering a great deal in the subset of places that use them. Exact percentages for any given city require looking at that city’s budget or ACFR.

Beatles on Progress

Lyrics without the refrain:

There’s nothin’ you can do that can’t be done
Nothin’ you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothin’ you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy

Nothin’ you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothin’ you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy

There’s nothin’ you can know that isn’t known
Nothin’ you can see that isn’t shown
There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy

Golf

Golf has always been a popular sport in Minnesota. Perhaps it’s the nature loving side of people that the sport entices as a full eighteen holes takes four hours or more of your leisure time on a pleasant summer day. Perhaps it’s because we have traditionally offered a large variety of courses which helps keep the green fees and cart rentals reasonable. Also there are many levels of difficulty so players of all ages and abilities can find a set of links where they’ll fit right in.

Minnesota punches far above its weight in golf. Roughly 90% of its 460–480 courses are public—the highest share in the U.S.—making the game unusually accessible. Participation ranks among the nation’s strongest per capita, with nearly 580,000 golfers and millions of rounds logged each year despite a short northern season. The state’s golf economy generates about $3 billion in impact. Minnesota is also the only state to have hosted every major USGA championship plus the Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup, and PGA Championship. Compared with sunbelt destinations, green fees stay moderate (weekday public averages near $45), while municipal tracks often open for far less. In short: abundant public access, avid players, big economic footprint, and championship pedigree packed into a cold-climate state.

But every once in a while a course now surrounded by urban living is put up for sale. That’s the situation for Les Bolstad, a course owned by the University of Minnesota has been sold to a developer, Rachel Development. Here is a preliminary conceptual plan as presented to the Falcon Heights City Council.

The city covers an area of 2.4 square miles smack dab between the two urban centers. And only boasts a population of 5700.

Predictably, a municipality once overlooked or ignored is the target of reels of advice from housing and planning types. Those who are stimulated by power are right there to suggest controlling features or beat the drum for greater state control and less local control.

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What do you think? Should city councils as representatives of the residents manage and guide development? Is this an endorsement of the classical liberal project?

Identifying Houses

Grok- tell me about this house:

This is a classic early-20th-century American bungalow (Craftsman-influenced), most likely built between about 1910 and 1925.

Key visible features that point to that period:

Broad hip roof with a centered dormer (here a small gabled/shed-style dormer with paired windows and dark trim).
Full-width front porch supported by sturdy square/tapered white columns resting on brick piers, with simple white railing.
Red brick main walls (common running or common-bond brickwork typical of the era) with lighter horizontal siding or trim in the upper wall/eave areas.
Symmetrical façade: central front door (six-lite over panel, currently painted blue) flanked by large double-hung windows with screens.
Overall low, horizontal massing with deep eaves—hallmarks of the bungalow form that dominated U.S. residential construction (especially in Midwestern streetcar suburbs) from roughly 1905–1930, peaking in the 1910s–early 1920s.

These houses were built in large numbers during that window as neighborhoods expanded. The brick lower story, porch detailing, and roof form are very consistent with that era; later mid-century or postwar houses rarely look like this.

Maternal Thoughts Times Two

Two prominent women have been in the news lately for decisions that circle the same maternal questions from opposite directions.

Karoline Leavitt, still young and living at the intersection of ambition and proximity to real political power, is stepping away from her high-profile job to stay home with her two young children. On the other edge of the ideological map, AOC has been in the headlines for ending an engagement and freezing her eggs. Single at 37 is a real predicament if you still want children. Both women reached a peak level of political employment. The interesting question is which one has family life more nearly figured out.

In years gone by, Leavitt’s choice would have been read as throwing in the towel. I’m not so sure anymore. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has managed to weave political life and maternal instincts together without obvious collapse. AOC has poured everything into her career and it has worked for her. She still has years left to build a family if she wants one, but it will require more deliberate attention to finding a partner who actually wants the same things.

The final word is simple enough: there is not one correct way to live a life. But you do have to put in the effort—and that almost always includes some real sacrifices—if you want the particular package that brings you fulfillment in all parts of life.

A Controversial Question

Are wealthy areas obliged to provide for the poor and desolate?

And, perhaps more importantly, is this the best result for the housing receivers?

This might be one of those: It depends …

NOAH- an affordable housing friend

It was in the early 2000s or even 2010 that an acronym NOAH was adopted as a means of denoting rental units provided in the private market. Natural Occurring Affordable Housing refers to unsubsidized rental housing that remains relatively affordable to lower- and moderate-income households because of factors such as age, condition, location, or local market dynamics—rather than because of government subsidies, rent restrictions, or dedicated affordable-housing programs.

Policy groups, cities, and housing advocates began tracking NOAH stock once people in the business realized that it often represents a large share of a region’s affordable units. And since the low pricing is often, at least partly, due to aging structures it can be a product which attracts renovation, triggering a reset of rents to a higher rate.

Here is an example of a proposal to maintain NOAH properties as it appears in the city of Plymouth (MN) Housing Plan (Page 12 of 15 Chapter 4 Plymouth Housing Plan – 2040):

To that end, the City and HRA will carry out the following actions:

Create and maintain a list of NOAH properties located in the city;

Consider the establishment of a dedicated funding source to assist NOAH properties that are being considered for purchase in order to maintain their affordability:

Create and maintain a list of all publically subsidized properties in the city along with relevant information about the property:

Continue to have conversations with owners of publically subsidized and
NOAH properties to stay abreast of their future plans;

Consider amending the City’s Rental Licensing Ordinance to provide for a 90 day notification to the City and residents of the pending sale of NOAH
property;

Consider a policy that would allow tenants in “good standing” who reside at a NOAH property that has been sold to remain at the property for up to 12 months even if rental criteria for tenancy has changed that makes them no longer eligible to rent at the property; and

Research potential programs that may provide a benefit to the Sun Valley mobile home park residents.

Conceptually, this policy piece starts from a fundamental mispositioning of what housing actually is.

Housing is not an accumulation of physical buildings. A rental agreement is a month-to-month or year-to-year transaction between an owner and a renter, shaped by the circumstances of both parties and the condition of the property at that particular moment. Time alone changes a property. Each party may improve upon or fall short of their obligations. People move when a property no longer meets their needs or expectations. Landlords may change their expectations about renting based on their investment, their circumstances, or simply their willingness to take on the task.

Rental housing within a community is therefore not a fixed inventory of units. It is the general availability, at any given time, of properties and of people willing to act as landlords, meeting the expectations and needs of people who, for whatever reason, prefer to rent rather than own.

Once you try to isolate and count each NOAH property, you begin to remove the market concept of voluntary exchange. You turn a fluid market into a forced obligation: one designated unit for one designated purpose. And when subsidies come with obligations and continuing commitments, you are creating a different market—not one that emerges naturally through the decisions of owners and renters.

The same problem arises when we impose demands on renters. We begin to interfere with the very decision-making process through which people ordinarily adjust their housing choices to their circumstances.

It is like taking one story out of an entire market and then trying to contort the market around that story.

But naturally occurring affordable housing was already being created before anyone gave it the name NOAH. The market process was doing what it is supposed to do: constantly adjusting as owners, renters, properties, prices, expectations, and circumstances changed.

There will always be individuals who temporarily find themselves caught in a housing squeeze because their circumstances change unexpectedly. That is where targeted, temporary relief makes sense—helping the individual through the squeeze until their situation sorts itself out.

The mistake is turning that temporary condition into a permanent category of housing and then attempting to redesign the market around it.

As old as Epictetus

I didn’t know this thought was from the Stoic.

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.

Right to Repair update- St Paul edition

The city isn’t the only place to live

To Hear it Told

To hear it told, the hand that placed the last piece of the puzzle completed the picture.

The Reach of Carnegie Library Grants

The Carnegie Corporation of New York accepted Eagle Grove’s application of a grant for $10,000 to build a library building on April 26, 1902. The library was designed by the Des Moines architect firm Smith and Gage in the Beux Arts style. Dedicated on September 15, 1903. It is a brick structure with a conical-roofed entrance pavilion with four engaged columns in the logic flanking the main entryway. The public library has subsequently moved to a larger facility during 1976 and the old library building was turned over to the Local Historical Society as a museum. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

Eagle Grove is a town of 3600 located in deep agriculture country in central Iowa.

Say What?

“Renters’ rights” has become a rallying cry among a growing class of people who have appointed themselves advocates for the renter community. It is worth noticing what that means. Many of these advocates neither own the properties in question nor rent them. They do not maintain the units, pay the mortgages, make the repair decisions, or bear the consequences when those decisions turn out to be wrong. They are observers, giving political voice to their interpretation of a relationship between two parties who are actually making the decisions.

So let’s start at the level where the rental market works reasonably well for, say, 90 percent of landlords and tenants.

There is no such thing as “the rental property” or “the renter.” There are properties in varying conditions, in different locations, with different amenities and different levels of maintenance. There are tenants with different incomes, preferences, standards, and expectations. And there are landlords ranging from meticulous owner-occupants to large property managers. Some are excellent. Some are indifferent. Some are terrible.

That is precisely what we should expect in a voluntary market.

A landlord offers a particular product at a particular price. A tenant decides whether that product is worth the price. If it isn’t, the tenant can leave. Maybe they move next door. Maybe they move across town. Maybe they find a better unit for the same rent.

That ability to leave is not a trivial feature of the arrangement. It is one of the mechanisms through which the market disciplines both sides.

Landlords, meanwhile, have an obvious reason to keep good tenants. They have an equally obvious reason to maintain the property. Maintenance preserves the capital they own. A neglected property loses value. Poor maintenance drives away good tenants. Deferred repairs become more expensive repairs. Eventually, the owner pays for the neglect through lower rents, higher turnover, larger repair bills, or a lower sale price.

This is ownership.

Yet you would rarely know it from much of the renter-rights conversation. The landlord is routinely cast as a wealthy, absentee, quasi-parasitic figure who owns an inexhaustible supply of appreciating property and needs to be forced to spend money on it. What gets left out is the rather important fact that buying, financing, maintaining, and eventually selling property can produce losses. The owner takes the capital risk. The tenant does not.

Now we have a new proposal for inserting renters into the ownership relationship: the “Right to Repair.”

Thankfully, this week the St. Paul City Council denied the request for Right to Repair to appear on the ballots this fall:

Citing a critical last-minute memo from the city attorney’s office, the St. Paul City Council voted Wednesday to block a proposed “Right to Repair” tenants’ rights ordinance from proceeding to the November ballot. Organizers, who spent Thursday morning meeting with attorneys, said they are reviewing their legal options.

The ballot question, proposed by the Safe Homes St. Paul campaign, would have asked voters to approve a new city ordinance that would allow residential tenants to devote up to $500, or half their rent, whichever is greater, toward completing their own home repairs.

The problem is not that repairs are unimportant. Of course they are.

The problem is who gets to decide what constitutes a repair, what the repair should be, who should perform it, and who should pay for it.

There are legitimate circumstances in which one property owner’s decisions affect others. A sewer system is a good example. It functions because everyone connected to it is constrained from dumping solvents or other toxins into the system. Some aspects of property necessarily involve obligations to other property owners.

But imagine extending this logic.

Suppose my neighbor has an ugly driveway full of weeds and cracked pavement. I believe it is an eyesore. I also believe it is hurting my home’s resale value. Why shouldn’t I invoke my “right to repair,” have the driveway fixed, and send my neighbor the bill?

Obviously, that wouldn’t be neighborly.

Yet the principle becomes considerably less absurd only because we have decided that the person who owns the property should generally retain the authority to decide what happens to it.

Some parts of housing are shared. Many are not.

And that distinction matters.

Tenant-rights advocates may sincerely believe they are improving the housing stock through political organizing. But there is a fundamental mistake in confusing an interest in a property with an ownership interest in that property.

A tenant has an interest in having a decent place to live. That does not give the tenant an ownership claim over the decisions involved in maintaining someone else’s capital.

If the tenant is dissatisfied with the property, the market already provides an answer.

If the tenant cannot afford to leave, then there is a legitimate policy question about whether that person should receive assistance. Subsidize the person who needs help. Don’t confiscate the decision-making authority of the person who owns the property.

That distinction is crucial.

The alternative is essentially this: I don’t have enough money to move, so I should have the power to make you spend money on your property according to my judgment.

That is not a renters’ right. It is a transfer of ownership authority without a transfer of ownership responsibility.

And that is where the “Right to Repair” becomes something more than a maintenance policy. It becomes a power struggle over who gets to control property.

The socialist instinct is often to separate ownership from control—to leave the title with one person while progressively transferring the decisions to everyone else. But this creates a problem that is often ignored: if you separate responsibility from authority, you weaken the incentive to preserve the asset.

The owner pays for the roof. The owner pays for the furnace. The owner absorbs the loss when the property deteriorates. The owner ultimately bears the consequences of bad capital decisions.

So why should someone who bears none of those costs have the authority to make those decisions?

Ownership is not simply a right to collect rent. It is a bundle of risks, responsibilities, costs, and decision-making authority.

Take away the authority while leaving the responsibility, and you haven’t made the system more just. You have simply made ownership less meaningful.

And when ownership becomes less meaningful, don’t be surprised when people become less interested in owning, maintaining, and improving the property in the first place.

The goods that come before shape the goods that come later

This cool interactive map of Hennepin county shows the networks of roads set out by 1958.

Every red line is a route organized and maintained by the Feds.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, also known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, Pub. L. 84–627 was enacted on June 29, 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law. With an original authorization of $25 billion (equivalent to $220 billion in 2025)^[1] for the construction of 41,000 miles (66,000 km) of the Interstate Highway System over a 10-year period, it was the largest public works project in American history through that time.^[2] (wiki)

Riding the externalities

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the spill over in positive externalities when people pursue something they love?

Moody in the Midwest

Corn dominates rail grain volume. Union Pacific is a major Midwest player in this traffic, alongside BNSF and others. Rail’s advantages are cost and capacity over distance, plus lower emissions per ton-mile than trucks—critical when production is concentrated in the Plains and demand is scattered or overseas.

This is a classic grain terminal scene: large cylindrical elevators (silos) with headhouses, leg conveyors, and loading infrastructure feeding a long string of covered hoppers. The cars are the standard dry-bulk type used for corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. UP markings and “Building America” slogan are clear; the CMO car is another common reporting mark in the mix. Graffiti is routine on freight equipment. Power lines, weeds, and the roadside vantage point give it that everyday rural industrial feel under flat Midwestern skies. These facilities are the nodes where local harvest volume concentrates for efficient rail outbound.

Rail is a backbone for moving U.S. crops, especially longer-haul grain. Roughly 24–26% of total U.S. grain (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) moves by rail in recent years, with trucks handling the majority (~60–62%, mostly shorter hauls from farm to elevator).

County Seat

Local courthouses in county seats across the country stand as reassuring symbols of property documentation and the enforcement of law. These imposing buildings often anchor towns with populations as small as 2,700.

This, the third and present courthouse, was built for about $50,000 and completed in 1893. Three stories high except for the clock tower, which rises well above the multi-gabled roof, it underwent extensive renovation in 1974.

Housing as a three legged stool

If I had to divvy up how I think of actions in housing into three, how would that go?

The first leg is the actions of the people who live in the homes—what they like for their comfort or their physical needs. Their actions in the care and maintenance of the home. It might be their actions in demanding that builders create for them, like whether a granny suite in the lower level is thought into the plan.

The second leg of the stool would entail actions on the physical structures. And yes, there’s overlap here with leg number one. But much more as the structure must bend to the demands of the infrastructure hooking the building into services—electricity, natural gas lines, and water mains. The building must stand up to the expectations of insurance companies and building codes. And the homes must not trouble the earth by being too close to natural habitats or in the paths of wildfires.

The last leg of the stool are the actions taken by all the group work mulling around in the vicinity of the property. Actions taken to support the school district or prevent massage parlors. Actions that plan for shopping malls and means of getting to the airport. The third section that impacts housing are all the formal and informally organized groups offering services to the people in the homes.

Those are my three legs to the housing stool.

Spy/Master- series review

Spy/Master is a solid Cold War thriller.

It delivers some classic types done well: the optimistic American CIA agent Frank Jackson, the coolly controlled spy Victor Godeanu, and the erratic dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu paired with his equally driven, obsessive wife.

Filming in Romania itself is a genuine bonus—locations this rarely seen on screen give the series an extra edge.

The Bee- by Emily

Dickinson, of course

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry

Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.

His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!

Distortions

And of course, as I wrote on July 6, while the American housing market is extremely capitalistic in the sense that the key decision-makers are profit-seeking investors, it is very much not a free market. If you own a parcel of land and would like to build a mid-rise apartment on it, the odds are very high that this is illegal. And it will continue to be illegal no matter how many bona fide safety or environmental externality rules you comply with. It’s just normally the case in the United States that you cannot build a four-story, eight-unit building on a plot of land that you own and then rent it out to willing customers.

The above excerpt is from Matt Yglesias’s newsletter today. It reflects perfectly how most public intellectuals define the “housing market.” They treat houses as widgets that are manufactured and sold. In their telling, developers are the primary producers, the main influencers, and the principal profit-takers. Different product “flavors”—most notably “affordable housing”—are then imagined as responses to market prices, even though this notion itself contradicts the idea of freely floating prices.

What they are actually describing is a relatively small slice of the activity that houses people and their families—perhaps 13–15 percent of the relevant transactions. The other 85 percent of household-related exchanges do not involve the new-structure market they fixate on. Because these commentators are widely regarded as authoritative, their narrow and distorted framing circulates as if it were a comprehensive understanding of the housing market.

The reality is that 85–90 percent of the housing market consists of ordinary home buyers and sellers. There is no greedy developer to vilify. Each side of the transaction is simply weighing its own interests—timing, finances, life stage, and personal priorities—when deciding what to offer or accept. People at different points in life bring different advantages and constraints, but the exchange remains primarily between private individuals, not between households and some distant mega-corporation. Corporate or institutional buyers account for only about 6 percent of total sales.

A housing market is the aggregate of these countless private interactions. The prices that emerge reflect what large numbers of people value or dislike about the physical structures themselves, the quality of municipal services, the schools that educate children, the transportation infrastructure, and a host of other local conditions.

So let’s keep the conversation more nuanced and richer in detail. Let’s stop fixating on the small minority of developers who either make a profit or lose their shirts. If we want to talk seriously about housing, we should start by talking about ourselves.

Please make it stop

https://x.com/chrisegertkstp/status/2082246202376998969?s=46&t=nh2cZMiuXcPdCF7GLICKlA

The man in the tree

A new flavor

Ice cream is one of the few things that still works exactly as advertised.

No app. No subscription. No “optimized experience.” Just cold, sweet, slightly messy proof that summer still exists.

In Minnesota we don’t take it for granted. We wait all year for the stretch of days when the only decision that matters is soft-serve or scoop, and whether you’re eating it before it melts or racing the melt itself.

Some people treat ice cream like a reward. My go to reward is McDonald’s soft serve. I can find a small treat on a wafer cone as close as the next franchise drive-up.

Sometimes what you need is a destination ice cream, a shop located walking distance from the restaurant you just ate at. Not ready to let go of the company or conversation, off you go to a place like Bebe Zito ice cream. Located across from the Wedge Coop at 22nd an Lyndale, it offered a delicious treat and enabled an already enjoyable evening to be extended a bit longer.

Remembrances and Renewals

Lakewood Cemetery has been the final resting place for a century and a half of Minnesotans whose names still carry weight—Hubert Humphrey, Paul Wellstone—and for many others whose histories remain quieter, known mainly to the families who return.

The markers meander across gently rolling ground on the east side of an iconic city lake. From one slope you can watch cyclists, walkers, and rollerbladers of every age circle the sky-blue water below.

I was there today for a service held in the chapel just inside the entrance gates. Tile covers the walls and ceiling in a splendid array of images and colors. Seated under the dome, as if gathered inside an apse, the space is neither too large to lose intimacy nor too small to hold a dignified gathering.

The family spoke poetry and psalms. They spoke of family history and of the deeds their loved one had performed in life. They spoke of love, endurance, support, and caring. They reinforced their faith in the belief that they would all be reunited once again.

In death there is renewal.

Arendt talks about the public

“To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.“

The last quote is from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chapter 2 (“The Public and the Private Realm”), specifically the section titled “The Public Realm: The Common.”

A simple example of the public and the private

I assert here at home economics that there is a private and public side to every transaction; that the course through which the action travels varies if it is primarily tapping private concerns or public concerns.

In this vignette, Professor List asks his audience for their reaction to whether he should pay a student to review his work. The underlying question is whether the student ought to donate his time or treat the request as a paid position—List proposes $50 an hour. The answers that follow are revealing: they disclose the kind of relationship people assume exists between professor and student.

The student is no longer enrolled in the professor’s class, yet one can reasonably infer they still occupy a mentor–mentee relationship. The mentor’s role is to educate and guide. The mentee’s corresponding duty is not to waste the mentor’s time and to make good use of the guidance offered. In this framing the flow of value is unidirectional: a gift of a private good to a private recipient.

An alternative reading treats them as equal members of the college. As participants in the same intellectual community they both benefit by reviewing each other’s work; the knowledge that results is a kind of public good produced by reciprocal sharing. No money changes hands, and the intellectual capital remains with both parties.

A third possibility is the one the student himself seems to have inferred: that the request is private and transactional. Once the exchange is framed that way, the student may collect his fee and then find himself quietly excluded from future opportunities for genuine intellectual exchange. Silent exclusion can be the most costly outcome of all.

But to answer John List’s question one must first set up the problem and identify the groups.

Round about we go!

The 2020s have brought a boom of roundabouts across Minnesota’s cities and greater metropolitan area. The Minnesota Department of Transportation reports more than 530 on roads statewide, noting that they “have become an increasingly popular intersection type by traffic engineers.”

It’s common to experience a bit of the “No, you go first” effect as unfamiliar drivers hesitate before entering the circle. Before long, a backup forms on one of the approaches while people figure out the new system.

The reason given for the widespread adoption is safety. MnDOT cites an 86 percent decrease in fatal crashes, an 83 percent decrease in life-altering injury crashes, and a 42 percent overall decrease in the injury crash rate at intersections converted to roundabouts.

They have changed the driving landscape—and provided some comedy relief in the process.

Minnesotans don’t move much

Top reasons for staying or returning;

to care for seniors

to raise children close to family.

to be by family

It’s all about the economical and social benefits of mingling with a network of kin on an ongoing basis.

Cool Voice

That was Then

My daughter says Martha Stewart was the first influencer.

I thought it was pretty cool she knew who Martha Stewart was.

Note: Chat says Martha was a prototype but not quite the first woman to promote her lifestyle. Elsie de Wolff was also a lifestyle influencer in the early 1900s.

Miscasting- helpful?

The reviews for the new Odysseus movie have been largely favorable, with many enthusiastic reactions praising its fresh take on the classic tale. Yet some viewers feel the actors have been miscast, arguing that the persistent “woke” trend in casting choices continues to undermine the story’s authenticity.

This isn’t entirely new. In the 1990s, shows like Murphy Brown deliberately pushed audiences to see working women in different roles, reshaping cultural expectations through entertainment. Hollywood has long viewed itself as a vehicle for guiding society toward new visions—of gender, power, heroism, and identity. It’s a pattern of using symbolic recasting to nudge collective imagination forward.

As a big fan of spy thrillers, I’ve been watching the recent adaptation of The Day of the Jackal. I find myself feeling a bit guilty about my mixed feelings. The storyline is compelling, the global city settings are vivid and immersive, and the action sequences are expertly executed. Yet I struggle to buy the lead actress as a believable athletic MI6 agent. She comes across as deeply sympathetic, which may be part of the problem—her performance elicits warmth rather than the cold competence the role demands.

There are too many soft glances and fleeting looks of concern between the characters during violent moments. These humanizing touches clash with the ruthless, high-stakes world the story inhabits. I’m not sure whether recasting outwardly symbolic character types in unexpected ways ultimately helps or hinders storytelling, but it’s the direction we’re in for now. Time will tell how audiences respond in the long run.

Insurance data of the day

There was an apartment fire in a nearby suburb, destroying most of the building. The Salvation Army showed up to help the displaced tenants, or so reported the local news. It still surprises me when buildings burn given all the fire protection methods in place.

Here are some of the main sources of property damage as reported by insurance claims. Fire is not in first place for frequency but it is for size of claim.

Top Homeowners Insurance Claims for Property Damage Nationwide

Property damage makes up ~96-97% of all homeowners insurance claims in the US. Roughly 1 in 18 insured homes files a claim each year (about 5.6% annually). Here are the leading causes based on recent data from the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) and other industry reports (primarily 2019–2023/2025 figures):

1. Wind and Hail Damage (Most Frequent)

~40–42.5% of claims.
About 1 in 36 homes affected annually.
Average claim: ~$13,500–$14,700.
Driven by severe convective storms, hurricanes, and hail — a major issue in the Midwest and Plains states.

2. Water Damage and Freezing

~20–27% of claims (second most common).
About 1 in 67 homes.
Average claim: ~$13,900–$15,400.
Includes burst pipes, leaks, flooding, and ice dams. In Minnesota’s freeze-thaw climate, this is especially prevalent.

3. Fire and Lightning

~21–22% of claims.
Much rarer frequency (about 1 in 430 homes) but by far the costliest.
Average claim: ~$83,000–$88,000 (can exceed this in major events).
Lightning claims alone caused $1.65 billion in payouts in 2025, with rising severity due to home electronics and rebuild costs.

Other Notable Mentions

Other property damage (vandalism, etc.): Smaller share but still significant.
Theft: Lower frequency and cost (~$5,000 average).
Catastrophic events (hurricanes, wildfires, severe storms) are driving overall severity higher, with repair times lengthening and costs inflating.

Key Takeaway: Wind/hail and water are the volume drivers, but fire claims hurt the most financially.

MN Realtor offerings

I love the segmentation analysis:

Lots of fine new graphics are available and data friendly.

A general observation may be that boomers are transferring wealth to their soon-to-be or newly retired children, making Lake Country, like Otter Tail County, Brainerd Lakes, and the North Shore, as expensive as the metro.

Smoke is sneaky

The wildfire smoke is back.

It wasn’t here earlier when we grilled dinner on the deck. Now it drifts between the branches, sifting low over the summer garden like a slow, unwelcome ghost.

I finally understand why smoky scenes are a staple in creepy shows. You can’t trust it. It seeps silently into your surroundings, then slips down into your lungs. The grit of it lingers in your nostrils, a stubborn reminder that the air itself has turned treacherous.

The Boundary Waters are burning again, along with fresh fires across Canada. We can always hope for a brisk north wind to sweep it clean. But more likely, we’ll spend the rest of the summer cloaked in this thickened haze—on again, off again—while the garden keeps reaching for sun that isn’t quite there.

Lily blooms

Echos of today’s AI debates?

Gordon Wood captures a telling anxiety in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Even ardent republicans worried that widening access to learning might destabilize the social order. As he notes, some “enthusiastic republican gentlemen, when they saw the lengths to which such attacks on liberal learning could be carried, eventually backed away.” Benjamin Rush, for instance, retained religious objections to the classics but by 1810 argued that “a learned education” ought once again to “become a luxury in our country.” He feared that rising wealth would let “too many ordinary people, particularly plain farmers,” afford college for their sons—something that had once been largely confined to cities and the learned professions. Basic skills like “reading, writing, and arithmetic” should be “as common and as cheap as air” and form a kind of “sixth or civic sense” for every citizen in a republic, but higher learning needed guarding.

This hesitation feels strikingly modern—much like today’s debates over AI, where critics warn that democratizing powerful tools could backfire, erode expertise, or unleash unintended social disruption. Yet history shows the opposite dynamic fueled America’s revolutionary success. The broad push for literacy and practical education, combined with the dismantling of old monarchical hierarchies and social restrictions, created a powerful “mega-push.” Newly educated (or semi-educated) ordinary people encountered opened avenues for ambition, mobility, and association. They could form committees and interest groups for the greater cause of independence while pursuing private property, commerce, and self-defined dreams—without the old deference or birth-based barriers holding them back.

In this way, the American Revolution demonstrated the power of pairing wider knowledge with freer social pathways. Atomistic individuals didn’t lose their capacity for personal striving; they channeled it into both private gain and collective republican achievement. The result was transformative.

How to spot failure

How do you know there’s failure? After all, that’s precisely when government rules want to intervene—when markets or support systems break down.

One way is to listen to what people are talking about, complaining about, or disgusted by. But that’s too vague. Talk is cheap, as they say. Some people even make a living out of using their voice to advocate for a proclaimed cause. That’s often the case. Yet it can be unclear whether the professed crisis is real—and, if so, how significant it is in relation to other problems.

One potential indicator of the relative importance of a systemic breakdown is the number of people willing to jump in and give their time to fix it. I’m not talking about those willing to talk about it, but those actually willing to do the necessary work.

What is the volunteerism turnout for that cause, measured in labor hours?

But sometimes people in the greater group aren’t able to jump in and help out. For instance, if a homeowner is struggling to keep up the exterior appearance of their home, a neighbor might step in and mow their lawn. Once saplings are growing along the side of the garage and the window shutters are missing slats, the help needed goes beyond volunteerism.

Here it might be noted that failure is shown in an inability to meet social norms or standards.

Lastly, a sign of failure can be picked up in migration away from the problem. Crime is always an easy example. Once people feel unsafe, they no longer visit the park, eat at the take-out stand, or drive along a road well known for accidents. They simply leave.

These are the three ways to spot failure: people devote their time to correct it, norms left unmet, and exit.

Paul Revere- artist

In the minutia

Gordon Wood is so captivating. His vivid depictions in The Radicalism of the American Revolution deliver an extraordinary level of detail—one that anyone drawn to the complexities of human choice and decision-making will find impossible to resist.

And what I love most is how Wood moves fluidly through every level of society. He refuses to tell the story as if only a handful of prominent figures pull the levers of history while everyone else sits as passive spectators. Instead, he gives us a comprehensive, richly textured view of the social positions, finely tuned choices, and densely interconnected relationships of ordinary Americans as they lived through the Revolution and helped shape the nation’s creation story.

It might be fun to model out the way he frames all these actors.

In the meantime he treats us to things we never knew before. Like the control mechanisms for limiting a societal obligation of care.

All of this movement in New England put unbearable pressure on the region’s old warning-out laws. These laws had been part of the older culture of paternal dependency in which everyone was supposed to belong somewhere. If vagrants stayed in a town for a given period-three months in Connecticut and New Hampshire, one year in Massachu-setts-they were then considered members of the community, which became responsible for their welfare. Warning-out was designed to absolve the community of this responsibility: men and women warned out could not claim legal inhabitancy. From mid-century the numbers of persons formally warned out in this way by various towns increased remarkably, so much so that town clerks began making lists of those warned out instead of writing separate warrants for each one. By the late 176os Massachusetts and Connecticut began shifting responsibility for identifying transients from the communities to the individual transients themselves. In 1771 the movement of people became so much greater that Connecticut and New Hampshire could no longer maintain their short three-month period for legal residency; they extended it to one year and brought their laws into line with Massachusetts.

Wise Words

To become truly great, one must stand with people, not above them.

Montesquieu

Or, to understand, one must look to the people and not interpret for them.

Crime is down, now what?

Yesterday’s post highlighted the welcome and somewhat serendipitous drop in violent crime across major U.S. cities. This is genuinely good news.

Broadcast segments trot out police chiefs praising gang violence interruption programs and community involvement. Politicians step forward to claim credit. But how many people find these explanations fully convincing?

A better model may be worth considering—one that looks beneath the headlines.

Aggregating progress across large geographic areas tends to mute the finer signals: where exactly the improvements are taking root, how they’re spreading, and why. A more granular approach could reveal the real drivers.

We should also examine the individuals and groups who invest their time, energy, and sometimes personal safety in the unglamorous work of public safety—neighbors, volunteers, local organizers, and informal networks performing the daily labor of civic order. Their contributions rarely make the evening news, yet they may be central to sustained gains.

Finally, the constant churn of residents moving into and out of neighborhoods offers another revealing lens. Demographic turnover, new arrivals, and shifting housing patterns can reshape the social fabric of a place in ways that affect crime more powerfully than top-down initiatives. Understanding which kinds of neighborhood dynamics correlate with falling crime—and which don’t—could teach us far more than another round of victory laps.

The question isn’t just “Why has crime dropped?” It’s “What conditions made the drop possible, and how do we protect and extend them?” A model built on local signals, bottom-up contributors, and residential dynamism would give us better answers than the usual narratives.

US Crime facts of the day

The United States is currently experiencing the largest single-year percentage drop in the national homicide rate on record, with big city murder rates plummeting to their lowest levels since 1900. Following a severe pandemic-era spike, data compiled by the Council on Criminal Justice and the Major Cities Chiefs Association reveals a historic turnaround in public safety across major urban hubs. [1, 2, 3]

The Biggest City Turnarounds

Several of America’s largest cities have posted unprecedented, double-digit drops in violent crime and homicides. The most dramatic turnarounds include: [4, 5]

Washington, D.C.: Achieved a massive 64.7% drop in homicides during the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, reversing a multi-year streak of escalating violence. [6]

Richmond, Virginia: Cut its homicide rates by a staggering 59% from its recent peak. [7]

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Logged a 54% drop in first-quarter homicides. The city closed out the previous year with 220 total murders, marking its lowest homicide count since 1966. [6, 8]

Houston, Texas: Slashed homicides by 36.4% in early 2026, alongside a sharp drop in aggravated assaults. [6, 9]

Chicago, Illinois: Documented a 30% year-over-year plummet in homicides, representing one of the largest numeric drops in the nation. [8, 10]

New York City, New York: Reached its fewest number of shooting victims and incidents in recorded history, alongside a 31.7% drop in homicides in early 2026. [6, 9]

Baltimore, Maryland: Cut overall homicides by 60% since its 2019 peak, shaking off its long-standing reputation as one of the country’s most dangerous areas. [7]

Broad Trends Across Major Crime Categories

The turnaround is not limited to homicides. Cities nationwide are seeing a sweeping reduction in almost every major felony category: [2, 11] Crime Category [1, 7] Recent Trend ChangeHomicidesDown 21% nationwideCarjackingsDown 43% nationwideRobberiesDown 23% nationwideGun AssaultsDown 22% nationwideMotor Vehicle TheftDown 27% (reversing a massive 2020–2023 spike)

Why is Crime Plummeting?

Criminologists and policymakers attribute this dramatic shift to a combination of factors. These include the post-pandemic stabilization of daily routines, an influx of federal funding for focused community violence interventions, and modernized police investigation tactics. Additionally, federal crackdowns and shifts in immigration enforcement operations in major metro areas have heavily influenced these municipal drops. [7, 12, 13, 14, 15]

[1] https://counciloncj.org

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov

[3] https://www.axios.com

[4] https://www.youtube.com

[5] https://thehill.com

[6] https://www.reddit.com

[7] https://www.facebook.com

[8] https://www.foxnews.com

[9] https://www.wkow.com

[10] https://www.facebook.com

[11] https://www.youtube.com

[12] https://www.cbsnews.com

[13] https://www.youtube.com

[14] https://www.facebook.com

15] https://journals.openedition.org

Blankets or bundles- Is this the way?

Is it sensible to blanket a whole suburb with a density goal? Or would it be better to think in terms of bundles of high density nodes in all areas spanning out to lower density over and over again. The more nodes, the more interlinking of a variety of housing accommodating a variety of households.

AI at home

In What Capacity Will AI Be Helpful in Typical Residential Real Estate Transactions?

Here are some practical thoughts from the trenches:

Areas where AI will deliver real value:

Document review and analysis
LLMs excel at quickly processing long, dense documents. Buyers and sellers will be able to ask an AI to check condo association rules for pet policies, skim leases for unusual clauses, flag unusual language in disclosures, or summarize HOA financials. This gives consumers faster, more accurate access to critical information that used to require hours of tedious reading or expensive professional review.
Navigating permitting, codes, and improvement projects
Homeowners considering major renovations will use AI to scan city permitting requirements, building codes, or zoning rules. While the quality still depends heavily on good prompting (and follow-up verification is essential), it provides a helpful starting point and direction. Markets thrive on certainty; even partial clarity here can reduce hesitation and help projects move forward.

Areas where AI hype seems overstated:

Home pricing and valuation
Sophisticated pricing models already exist (Zillow Zestimates, Redfin Estimates, local MLS-based AVMs, etc.). They all produce a range, not a single price, because the true market value emerges only from negotiation and the final accepted offer. I don’t see AI fundamentally changing this dynamic. File under: “It’s been done.”
AI agents replacing or sourcing real estate agents
The idea that AI agents will simply find you the perfect real estate agent (or replace the need for one) strikes me as unlikely. People will continue to choose agents based on personal connections—friends, family referrals, or the professional they meet and click with in the marketplace. Trust, local market intuition, and human negotiation skills remain hard to automate.

Wishing you

The very happiest Fourth of July from middle America

Don’t hate us!

If you hadn’t heard, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are getting married today at Madison Square Garden. Apparently they liked the venue because there are no windows for the prying lenses of the paparazzi cameras. Needless to say, the stars will be out. Not only are those in attendance most likely famous—they’re most likely ultra-wealthy.

Interestingly, the couple decided to do a give-to-the-max day in the days leading up to the big event.

What did the 26 million buy? Let’s think of it as a social puzzle.

Both Travis and Taylor are super rich. And their careers are supported by a mass audience. In effect their lives and metiers and audience are entertained with millions of people of all walks of life. And so they care about what these folks think. Matrix part 1: the group is large and diverse.

Matrix part 2. A showy public wedding is a pronouncement. Not only of their vows to each other, but of marriage itself. It asks people to come and look upon them and acknowledge the commitment to bonds of matrimony. This is the transaction.

The audience is part of the deal. They matter. And since the millions of followers do not live amongst the lucratively rich, some may judge the amount of money spent on such a showy affair. If they judge it harshly enough, they may choose to exit the group.

There are people who exploit the knowledge that people can be divided by tangible material differences. These people are everywhere. They are amongst the audience members in the realm of Travis and Taylor’s fan base. Their boots on the ground location with peers gives them instant access to gauge sentiments. And they thrive at exploiting this and breaking off subgroups. Matrix part 4: motivating factors.

On the face of it, the 26 million in donations buy support for all sorts of social services. But more important to the couple, it eases any potential dissent amongst their friend group.

The Agency- Series Review

I think this is a worthy recommendation for spy-thriller enthusiasts. The cast is diverse in a really good way, because you don’t know why it’s special until it hits you. Being of a certain age, it’s fun to see Richard Gere come through with a strong performance. And the variety of women in the series showcases the possibilities of the fairer gender. Adieu to the days of the two-women role- Miss Moneypenny and the latest femme fatale– and that’s coming from a serious James Bond fan.

The storyline offers enough intrigue without being deliberately confusing. It’s entertaining with enough puzzling to maintain engagement. The international settings, a staple of spy film, are well represented here and do the job of taking the audience elsewhere across the globe. All in all, this has been a strong string of 50 minutes of fun distraction.

Puzzling

It’s a holiday long weekend, which makes for gatherings of family and friends. It’s a time to relax and enjoy each other’s company. And often that can include collaborating on a 1000-piece puzzle.

What is it that makes puzzling enjoyable?

Is it the systematic sorting that soothes the randomness and starts to pull disparate pieces into groups? The patterns emerge as the colors are gathered side by side. Slowly the eye catches the lines that thread the image together. Pictures emerge—first in fragments, then in quiet revelation, as chaos yields to coherence.

Or is it the search for the edge pieces that is rewarding? At first it’s difficult to tell what’s up and what’s down and what runs along a side. Piece by piece, the framing of the picture gives it boundaries, turning an overwhelming scatter into something contained and possible. The straight lines become a quiet promise: order is achievable, one deliberate fit at a time.

Perhaps it’s the satisfaction of fitting the jagged edges into a smooth coupling. Or training your eye to look only at what clasps what, since the fogginess of the color gives no guidance with gradations or pattern. Each successful connection carries a small, tactile triumph—the soft click of belonging, the momentary alignment of form and purpose.

It’s hard to tell. But puzzles are fun. They mirror the holiday itself: a shared endeavor where individual efforts interlock, randomness finds rhythm, and the whole slowly comes into view amid laughter, conversation, and the steady companionship of those around the table. In the end, what matters isn’t solving it fastest, but the gentle, collaborative journey—the way disparate lives and pieces find their place together.

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The private model (2005 onward)

The shift to a more public/hybrid model (2019)

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30,000

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Snapshot

Share of households receiving each type

Entitlement vs means-tested, as a share of people

Population split: some federal help vs none

What the two suburbs actually look like

Reminder

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What they mean by it

How it is constructed

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