Harvard economist Roland Fryer has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, How to Make Up the Covid Learning Loss: Paying students for attendance, behavior and homework can boost achievement. I wasn’t excited about the op-ed specifically, as opposed to what you see at the bottom:

Mr. Fryer is the John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and professor of economics at Harvard University, and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.

John Paulson is the conservative billionaire who made his fortune off the financial crisis of 2008. If he wants to back Fryer, he has the resources, and backing Fryer is a good thing.

Three years ago Fryer was defenestrated: Harvard Suspends Roland Fryer, Star Economist, After Sexual Harassment Claims – The move sidelines the researcher without pay for two years, and closes his lab, in a case that has roiled the profession. After he returned Fryer couldn’t be an adviser or supervisor, have graduate students, or teach graduate workshops at Harvard.

You can read about the allegations against him, but even before watching the video, Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why?, I concluded that there was something going on beyond sexual harassment.

But first, let’s understand what kind of scholar he is. Fryer won the John Bates Clark Medal. A friend who is a tenured professor at a top research university in social science asserted offhand that Fryer is as smart as he is (my friend is very smart), but works much harder and is more creative. Fryer’s scholarship is the product of a brilliant academic mind whose results have policy and cultural relevance. For many people, that was the problem. In a world of “moral clarity” and ideologically informed publications, Fryer’s work remained within a positivist tradition that went where the data led him and sometimes to unexpected and unwelcome results. This is very bad from the perspective of those who “know the truth,” and whose scholarship aims to justify it.

In relation to he said/she said aspect of the allegations against Fryer, the economist Karl Smith once suggested the big problem with Fryer was “cultural.” Fryer is not from the “Jack of Jill” class of African Americans. He grew up in the black underclass and working class. The implication is that his banter and repartee reflect his cultural background, and was sharply out of step with the more polished and Puritan norms of a place like Harvard. Additionally, though I haven’t ever spoken to Fryer, everyone who has tells me that he has no filter. This sort of personality used to be common among economists, but the cultural changes impacting the rest of academia have also started to creep into that discipline, and that was always going to cause problems.

Also, I have to admit I’ve heard Fryer does not suffer fools gladly and he was apparently unpopular among many black Harvard faculty. If they had gone to bat for Fryer, he would have come out of this relatively unscathed. In fact, several black faculty were instrumental in Fryer’s defenestration. Dean Claudine Gay, a professor of government, wanted to revoke Fryer’s tenure!

I’ll leave you with two things to mull over in relation to this:

– Compare Gay’s publication record with Fryer’s. Fryer is orders of magnitude more a scholar than she is. In a just world, we should admire excellence, but envy is often a more common response.

– It is an open secret in some fields that there are people (usually men) who engage in routine and egregious sexual harassment and even rape. For various reasons, they are not investigated by the university or institute. I always think about this when you see a scholar being targeted on pretty flimsy grounds.

Finally, let’s give it up to the Manhattan Institute, what they did here was a mitzvah that redressed an injustice. Fryer is 44 years old. He has decades of active scholarship ahead of him. He’s not the only person unfairly targeted (and there are many people who are skating by and will never be punished for what they’ve done to their subordinates)

In the late 2000s Dan Ariely was huge. This was the era of the post-2008 financial crisis when heterodox and behavioral economics came into vogue. I really enjoyed reading Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, and Ariely was all over the media for several years. Eventually, the behavioral economics (“nudge”) fad faded, and I didn’t hear much about Ariely.

Unfortunately, it turns out that he is at the center of possible scientific fraud. I stopped paying deep attention to a lot of the sexier behavioral economics because I thought the reproducibility crisis entailed more skepticism, but there might be other reasons.

There are those instances when you see a plot that resonates with your experience so much that you don’t need to say anything. You just share it. Those who know, know. Those who don’t know, won’t know until they are in a position to know.

Median household income in the United States today is $59,000. “Household” is a broad category. All families are households, but not all households are families. The median family income is $72,000. If the plot above is correct households in the bottom 25% and somewhere in the top 1% are above demographic replacement. The 1% cut-off is $430,000, and from what I can tell poking around the households making $1,000,000 per year are probably the 0.1%. In other words, between the 75th percentile and 0.10% percentile Americans are below replacement in total fertility.

There is a particular trough between $50,000 and $250,000. From the core of the middle class into the heart of the upper middle class.

From $50,000 a year household income of $250,000 a year may look comfortable, but these are the children of Epictetus. The modern world is filled with those who lack freedom but live with some modicum of comfort, as well as avenues for leisure and self-cultivation. But freedom is reserved for capital, in particular, those with a lot of liquid capital.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a slave with a substantial income remains but a slave at the end of their days. Their comforts persist only at the sufferance of those who have inherited or grasped their freedom.

On this week’s Slate Money the author of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, was a guest. I’m not going to be reading this book, but it seemed interesting. Basically, he suggested that the reason franchise movies, and in particular comic book films, were taking over is that television has taken over niches such as period dramas. The comparative advantage of the movie theater is in big-budget action & special effects spectacles, and audiences enjoy revisiting “shared universes” so much that they’re far less risky than singletons.

This shouldn’t be surprising, there’s a reason that standalone fantasy books are not notable.

An issue that is discussed on the podcast is the fact that international blockbusters tend to be American. China tried to produce something that would be exportable to the USA with The Great Wall, but it was a bust.

It strikes me that when American movies no longer dominate internationally, that’ll be a good sign that true dusk is coming to our time as the global hegemon.

The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a fascinating human interest piece on Dollar General which is dense with insight, How Dollar General Became Rural America’s Store of Choice:

The local Dollar General store, built on a rural highway and surrounded by farmland, sells no fresh meat, greens or fruit. Yet the 7,400-square-foot steel-sided store has most of what Eddie Watson needs.

…

Dollar General Corp.’s 14,000 stores yielded more than double the profit of Macy’s Inc. on less revenue during its most recent fiscal year. And its $22 billion market value eclipses the largest U.S. grocery chain, Kroger Co., which has five times the revenue.

…

The more the rural U.S. struggles, company officials said, the more places Dollar General has found to prosper. “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” Chief Executive Todd Vasos said in an interview at the company’s Goodlettsville, Tenn., headquarters.

…

Dollar General’s typical shopper “doesn’t look at her pantry or her refrigerator and say, ‘You know, I’m going to be out of ketchup in the next few days. I’m going to order a few bottles,’” said Mr. Vasos, the company’s chief executive. “The core customer uses the last bit of ketchup at the table the night prior, and either on her way to work or on her way home picks up one bottle.”

Camouflage is a proven winner. This year, Dollar General became the exclusive seller of dog food from the camouflage-gear brand Mossy Oak. “Even off-brand camo does well here,” said the Evensville store manager Justin Ray, who has a display of camouflage merchandise, including pacifiers and pet toys.

Remember video stores? Probably not.

Andrew Charles from Cowen cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. The technology upgrades, part of what McDonald’s calls “Experience of the Future,” includes digital ordering kiosks that will be offered in 2,500 restaurants by the end of the year and table delivery.

There are 14,500 locations. Right now 500 stores have kiosks.