A Canadian friend recently asked if I was ever worried about the epidemic of mass shootings in schools. It is heavily reported on but isn’t something Canadians have to think about. On the other hand, my daughter is 10 months old but one day, teary eyed, I will have to walk her to grade one.

Every death is a tragedy but school mass shootings isn’t something I spend time thinking about. I’m certain there are far more dangerous activities my daughter will engage in every day. But truth be told, without data, this line of argument isn’t particularly convincing. So I looked it up.

K-12 School Shooting Database is a website that keeps track of school shootings. It is run by The Violence Project, a non-profit research center dedicated to reducing mass shooting and violence in society. They don’t strike me as gun totting fanatics but you can judge for yourselves. However, if I had any doubts after the conversation with my friend, this organization has unintentionally put me at ease.

They do not define the term “mass shooting” because there is no widely accepted definition. The most common characterization I have seen is incidents with 4 or more victims, either injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.

According to their own data, in the last 50 years, when the country grew by 50%, and we’ve had anywhere from 40 to 60 million children among us, we’ve had a total of 47 school mass shooting events. After crunching some numbers, it works out to an average of 12 victims per year. I cannot remember my high school statistics too well so please accept my apologies. However, the chances of your kid being involved in a school mass shooting is well below 1 in a million.

As a comparison, the 6th most common cause of death for kids is what CDC refers to as “intentional self harm”. It is sadly 50 times more likely.

If you suspect these numbers, you should - because I played a trick. As far as accuracy goes, it is accurate aside from unintentional math blunders. These numbers are this low because I limited the analysis to a very specific set of crimes - School. Mass. Shooting. All three words are carefully chosen.

If I wanted to tell you a completely different story I could as well. Take a look at this study from the New England Journal of Medicine - a very prestigious publication. It also happens to be the first result when Googling “kids causes of death”. It shows that firearms are the number one cause of death for children. That’s alarming.

However, once you dig in, you find important details.

1. About a third of deaths are categorized as suicides rather than homicides. Though troubling on its own, this isn’t what we mean by “gun violence”; or what we target with “gun control”.

2. The age range is chosen carefully. They include kids and adolescents all the way up to 19. A prime age for adult males to join gangs and commit crimes.

3. The data includes 2020 - a time of government imposed national lockdowns - a policy that will likely keep on paying dividends in the form of disrupted supply chains, inflation, decline in mental health, lost school years and further deterioration in trust of our institutions.

Subtracting the suicides and looking at pre-pandemic numbers cuts the rate in half. Restricting it to 14 instead of 19 cuts the rate further by a factor of 7 - making swimming in a pool more dangerous. Which one is the right number? It depends.

I’m sure you could slice and dice the numbers further - adjust it by race, income, or location. Maybe you could show that states governed a certain way are better or worse for gun violence - depending on your agenda. At the same time, when reading other people’s work on the subject, be careful you aren’t just confirming your biases - because the first principal is you must not fool yourself and you’re the easiest person to fool.

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My monthly spending has been out of control. Yesterday I walked out of my favorite coffee shop with a latte that cost me $7.50. Admittedly it was a 16oz cup. But it felt outlandish. When did coffee become so expensive? I swear I paid 5 bucks for it back in university - around 2008.

Back then I had hope for financial independence. When doing my spreadsheets with all my retirement numbers, I always made sure to include an estimate for the rate of inflation. 3% seemed reasonable. After all, I heard the federal reserve had some mandate to hit a 2% inflation. I thought I was being conservative.

Since then we’ve hit the highest inflation in 40 years. That, and a few other changes, are forcing me to rethink some important assumptions. One of them is the validity of the consumer price index (CPI) - our official measure of inflation. How accurate is it really? It’s suppose to measure the price level for an average basket of goods. Is this basket the same across the country? Is my basket the same as the grandma across the street? No and no.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the faceless bureaucracy tasked with calculating the CPI does have a solution. They’ve introduced all kinds of variations to the CPI measurement - CPI-U for urban dwellers, CPI-W for hourly workers and even a special one for grandma called R-CPI-E. Fair enough even if the names are lacking.

Back to my coffee. I was shaken by this extravagant charge. I needed answers. While digging through my DuckDuckGo, I found there’s a lot of tin-foilers out there who believe the CPI isn’t quite that accurate. Interestingly enough, you can find solid arguments in both directions.

But I did stumble on an elegant alternative to the CPI. It’s called the Big Mac index - and it’s brilliant. Rather than assembling a huge and representative basket of good from a bunch of stores, and dealing with all the biases that it brings, The Economist collects the prices of Big Macs across the world and uses those as a proxy for inflation.

The elegant part is that Big Macs are more or less constant across both time and space. Comparing the price of a Big Mac from 2000 and 2010 in Nashville is sensible. On the other hand, comparing the price of a Motorola flip phone to an iPhone 6s brings a whole host of problems outside of price: the quality, the abilities, the speed. How do you put a price on mobile internet access?

So I plotted the data published by The Economist against the official CPI-U to see how the official inflation data compares to the price of Big Macs. One thing definitely stood out.

There is an odd divergence between the CPI and the Big Mac index right around the global financial crisis. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I graduated university. Or, it could just be a coincidence.

What I found more concerning is the magnitude of the gap between the two lines. The Big Mac index indicates that your dollars have lost 20% more value over this period than what the BLS is disclosing. In other words, if your salary kept up with inflation since the global financial crisis, you’re actually 20% poorer than you were in 2008. Coincidentally, based on the CPI, my $5 coffee should be around $6.66. Based on the Big Mac index it should be $7.85.

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My sister in law is visiting from the Great White North this week. She and her husband are eyeing ‘Murika as a potential new home. They wanted to know which country I prefer. Given that I am immensely qualified to answer this question - I am a dual citizen of both the United States and Canada - I figured I should share my wisdom with the world.

Before I answer, allow me to set some ground rules. When you are considering this question, we have to make some assumptions. First, you are choosing to move to a new country. You don’t know anyone there. Second, your friends and parents are all staying behind. Third, you are somewhere between the ages of 20 - 45. In other words, reasonably far from retirement. This gives us a level playing field.

The conversation went along a familiar path. First, everyone complained about the weather on the Canadian side. Admittedly, Canadian winters aren’t for the faint of heart. Next, we talked about crime. Here, the U.S. is in a tougher spot - though lately Canada is giving it a run for its money. Then, we moved to the good stuff: child care, parental benefits, elder care, taxes, and of course health care. In short, who gets more freebies from the government.

Now, I could tell you how Canadian health care isn’t living up to its promise. How it is slow, rationed and bankrupting the government. But Canadians are real proud of it. God help you if you even mention thinking of considering privatizing a single ounce of it.

Or I could tell you that parental leave only pays out 33% of your salary up to about $400 per week. Considering the cost of living in major Canadian cities, this might be enough for a dozen eggs.

At the same time, parental leave is 18 months long. Health care isn’t forcing anyone into bankruptcy. There’s a mishmash of programs to care for your aging parents. Sure, taxes are high, but comparable to high tax states like New York and California.

But is the greatness of a country really determined by how many goodies it hands out? Do we really want to measure how much Joe can take from Jill? I think there’s a lot more to it. What about opportunities? What place will allow you to reach your highest potential? Where can you live your life’s purpose? Where will your children have the most freedom to succeed. These are the important questions. The rest is just accounting.

As for me, I believe in looking at what we do, not what we say. It’s the only way to know what we truly believe deep down inside. I am living in the United States. It offers me, my spouse and my children unparalleled opportunities. I get compensated fairly well. I pay more taxes than I would like. And most importantly, I even have that precious, dearest, elusive, health care.

There’s no one right answer here. Both Canada and the United States offers amazing opportunities. If you get to choose between the two, consider yourself extremely lucky. Millions of people around the world would (and do) sacrifice everything to allow their children to have a chance at the same opportunities as you.

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I remember the global financial crisis quite vividly. I was 21 at the time starting my first real job. One controversial moment for me was the bailout of the major banks. The government was trying pass a massive stimulus package to avoid a “complete collapse” of the financial system. At the the time it was the biggest bailout package the world has ever seen. An unimaginable sum of money to hand out to banksters.

That was 2008. Today it’s different. The same sum of money would amount to just a starter package - something you can begin negotiating over. Before all the pork has managed to work itself in. That’s not because we have more money to throw around. It’s because we keep on borrowing and financing it though debt.

If you add up all government debt today - that is federal, state and local, you end up with an unimaginable sum. As of this writing, it stands at 35 trillion. The number is of course meaningless. It’s just not comprehensible to our puny human brains. To bring it down to earth, we can think of it in more familiar terms.

First, let’s look at it on per capita basis (per person). The U.S. has about 335 million people. The debt per individual works out to roughly $100,000 - rounding down of course. That’s a model S in every driveway. But wait …

Not every person pays taxes. We have the retirees, kids, illegal immigrants with no SSN’s and people below the income threshold. If we were to take just the tax payers, this number balloons to an unbelievable $300,000 per tax payer.

Another interesting observation. An average house in the United States, would run you about $380,000 in 2023. Yes, this is average across the entire country. No, you cannot afford anything for that price in San Francisco, New York, or Seattle. I don’t think you could even buy a parcel of land - maybe a parking spot. But if you put 20% down, your mortgage would be roughly $300,000.

Coincidence? Yes. But it’s almost like the government has managed to hang another mortgage on your neck. Except this time, instead of mortgaging a house, they are mortgaging your kids’ future.

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For more fun facts, check out U.S. debt clock.

The governor of the sunshine state and our future president, Ronald, is known for his knack to pick culture fights. He is great at cooking them up as battles for freedom with a side of liberty. One recurring theme is to rid the state’s colleges of “indoctrination”. The latest manifestation of that is to challenge the advanced placement African American studies curriculum being piloted in his state.

To his credit, the college board caved and adapted the course work. They’ve removed studies of Black Lives Matter movement and other contemporary, but controversial subjects and added “black conservatism” as an optional area of study. This is a big win in some books. However, even if you agree with him, is this the best way to go about it?

I brought up this question to my good friend Liam. He had a very rational and easy solution. He believes that rather than fighting over what to teach, we should focus on facts. He suggested that for controversial topics, we should have experts from both sides debate and settle on a common curriculum.

Unfortunately, this is a fantasy. There are the obvious, practical issues like who are the experts? Who gets to pick them? What if there are more than two opinions? And when do we decide that it’s settled?

History in particular has added complexity. History is the study of the past. But the past has near infinite number of events. The key to studying history is figuring out which events are relevant. At its core, this is a subjective decision.

Pretend for a moment we can agree on the events. Next, we have to construct a narrative around them. That’s a problem too. Everyone can use the same facts but emphasize different aspects. Take Thomas Jefferson. He was a founding father, the third president of the United States, and a slave owner who fathered multiple children with one of his slaves. All of these statements are true, but what is emphasized is important.

Instead of fighting over facts, we should accept that history isn’t a science. There is no right answer, no single story. Everyone has their version and their own interpretation. Instead of fighting over what to teach, we should offer a plurality of options - the antithesis of one-size-fits-all approach we use today. Would you like to focus on the history of slavery, black lives matter and reparations? There could be a school for that. Would you prefer to focus on the history of the abolitionists, and black American success stories? There could be a school for that too.

My last post has gone a bit viral. It led to a lot of great conversations (debates) with critics. I appreciate everyone who questioned me instead of accepting things at face value. I thought I’ll dedicate this week to address the top three criticism flung my way.

I’ll start with the easy one. I can’t tell you how many times I heard a variation of this: “The tech companies are making billions of dollars in profits. They shouldn’t be laying off people. They are so greedy”. Here’s an example with thousands of thumbs up on LinkedIn.

The standout quote really exemplifies this train of thought:

Did a new economic reality require this painful cut? If you think $17.3B in quarterly profit isn’t good enough, then yes. Clearly the market does as Google stock is up 4%.

What principal is the author arguing? Is a company morally obligated to keep every employee on payroll as long as they make a profit? What if a certain line of business is deprioritized? What if you have employees thumb twiddling for enormous salaries? What if you have 10 employees to do the job of 2?

And where do you stop? If you’re profitable, should you keep on hiring until profits drop?

This argument doesn’t hold water. But it gets worse. The real blame shifting is happening in that same LinkedIn post. Instead of blaming the real culprit: the FED, the money printing, and other the economic distortions created by government policy, he blames the corporations that played by the rules and followed the incentives set up by the same central planners that caused the problem in the first place.

A harder criticism to address is the following: If it’s the distortions in the economy, why hasn’t it affected other industries?

My original post dealt with big tech specifically because of the magnitude of the layoffs and the clustering of all the announcements. But that doesn’t mean other industries are immune. Hasbaro, 3M, Dow, Impossible Foods, Wayfair and many others have announced layoffs. Fun fact: you can track the layoffs at layoffs.fyi if so you please.

When inflation rears its ugly head, we hear the headline number - say 6%. Most people think that prices have gone up by 6% across the board. But that’s not how inflation works. Some things could have gone up by 100%. Others could have gone down. The weighted average of some theoretical basket of all these changes is 6%.

This is because newly printed money doesn’t flow equaly across the entire economy. Some sectors get a bigger share of the (inflating) pie. Naturally, those same sectors are the ones to hurt the most when the tide goes out and we see who is swimming naked. In this last round, I believe it was tech.

Finally, If this was so obvious, why have the companies been fooled? Didn’t they know inflation was coming?

This is admitedly tricky for me to address. I am tempted to use my go to source of all bad things in the world - the government - to lay blame. They said it was different this time. They said the inflation was transient. They said rates will stay low for a long time. They said quantitative easing will stimulate the economy.

The truth is that they should have seen it coming. When I say “they”, I’m talking about the CEOs, CFOs and executive teams - the people in charge. The people who should have the company’s best interests at heart. But we are all human. It’s easy to get caught up in the temporary boom and pretend it is a permanent change in the economy and the gravy train will never end. So what if during the deepest economic downturn in recent memory, we had American’s savings go from 8% to 33%? Where did the money come from? Who cares? My competitors are all doing the same.

However, when Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, announces that thousands of employees are being laid off and he takes full responsibility, there should be consequences. Maybe a few tens of millions of dollars in a pay cut could clear up his vision.

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I recently wrote about irrational exuberance in the markets as general commentary on the state of our economy. It was a timely article as several big tech companies announced mass layoffs this week. Unfortunately some of my friends have been affected.

How could this happen? Have markets failed us? Is our economy broken? The answer to the last one is yes. But probably not why you think.

Anyone who was raised in a market economy understands that borrowing money requires paying interest. It seems reasonable. Borrowing money is using someone else’s savings. The lender could spend those savings on something else. How do you incentivize them to lend it to you? You need to compensate them.

What happens if there are a lot more borrowers than lenders? Or more demand than supply? The interest rates go up. In other words, interest rate is just the price of borrowing.

What do interest rates have to do with layoffs? Simple. Imagine an institution that has the power to control these interest rates. They can drive the interest rates down by creating unlimited money out of thin air and lending it out to banks, pension funds, hedge funds, and the federal government - anyone who is close enough to that institution.

The money doesn’t just sit there. It gets spent. Maybe it’s lent out to entrepreneurs to start a new business. Maybe it goes straight into the stock market or the housing market. Maybe it buys tanks and rockets for the military. There’s many ways to spend a trillion dollars.

Eventually, this money makes its way to the regular consumer - you and I. We start feeling good so we spend it. Shopping more on Amazon; buying that big house; speculating a little bit more on the ever rising stock market. Maybe even buying a second Tesla.

In turn, the corporations notice the consumers appetite and increase production. That requires more workers; more warehouses; more trucks; more forklifts. It’s an economic boom.

Unfortunately, the money spigot eventually runs dry. Turns out that printing money causes inflation. Our favourite institution has to reverse course. Interest rates go up. The money runs out. And reality starts sinking in. The land, labour and capital that was accumulated during the boom was just malinvestment. It wasn’t real prosperity. The house with the mountain view isn’t worth the billion dollars you paid for it. The warehouse Amazon built isn’t necessary. The workers that were hired unfortunately are not needed. The whole thing was a sham.

Well, I got news for you. We have that institution. It’s called the federal reserve. What was conveyed is the Austrian business cycle. It was described 100 years ago by Ludwig von Mises. And we’ve learned nothing in that time.

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The United States has a budgeting problem. I’m not talking about the debt ceiling - that’s just a distraction. Every couple of years congress will get together and vote to raise it. If the party controlling the legislative branch differs from the executive branch, one will extort the other to get low impact, high visibility laws passed. At the end no one wants to see the U.S. default on their debts.

No, what I’m talking about is the depletion of Medicare’s trust fund. The program is about to go bust. The official projection forecast it won’t be able to cover it’s expenses by 2026. That’s just 3 years from now. On top of it, these projects are notorious for unrealistic assumptions about economic growth and various cost-reductions.

If that wasn’t enough, social security is heading there too - though with a bit more breathing room. It is projected to be insolvent by 2034 - still 11 years from now. If you are under 50, expect the program to be significantly different from what your grandma has.

What can be done? There are four things I can think of. I will list them in the order of best to worst for society.

First, get healthcare and retirement out of the incompetent hands of the bureaucrats and central planners in the federal government - never gonna happen.

Second, reduce the benefits that are being offered. It is possible and will happen in one form or another. I don’t expect it to be a major change though as the politicians responsible for enacting such laws have little chance of reelection.

Third, raise taxes. I suspect that is even harder to do than benefit reduction. Medicare and social security are for retirees. They would naturally resist any changes. Tax payers on the other hand are unlikely to support additional transfers from the young and productive to the old and (on average) more wealthy.

Fourth and final, print the money. Bingo. Of course, thats’s inflationary. It’s an unelected, unaccountable and gradual wealth tax. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

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Imagine you’re in the market for a house. You found the perfect one. What is the one factor that will determine if you buy it? Is it the price? No. At least, not exactly. In an interesting exception to other markets, the price of the house is not what you’re paying.

What you really care about is your monthly carrying costs - your mortgage, property tax, insurance etc. More specifically, it’s the monthly payments relative to your monthly income. My claim is this relationship should gravitate towards some constant. To explore that further, I used official data from FRED to create the following chart:

The red line, with the y-axis on the right, represents the relationship between average mortgage payments and average household incomes. In 1984, with a 13% mortgage rates (yes, really), the average house, financed, would have run you about 40% of your household income. On the other hand, in 2019, with mortages averaging around 4%, an average house would have taken up just 21% of a households income - A 50% discount over 1984. That helps explain why houses seemed so expensive - but they weren’t.

The blue line represents the relationship between the cost of an average house and average household incomes. In 1984, a house cost $65,000 and the household income clocked in at around $22,500. That translates to an average house being a 3x multiplier of the average household income. In 2006, the average house shot up to $210,000 while incomes grew to $48,000. That is a multiplier of 4.5x. From that perspective, houses were 50% more expensive to buy in 2006 compared to 1984.

With these two pespectives in mind, you can start to understand what happened to the housing market. The key is when financing a mortgage is expensive, houses are cheap. When mortgages are cheap, houses are expensive. There’s one important exception to this - the 2008 global financial crisis - but we all know how that ended.

Now let’s take a look at this relationship with data post Covid.

I think you can draw your own conclusions.

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I first heard of the expression “irrational exuberance” used to refer to Robert Shiller’s book by the same name. Shiller is a Nobel prize winning economist who wrote about bubbles and predicted the housing crash and the global financial crisis. That’s an impressive resume.

I do not have a Nobel prize under my belt; nor am I timing the market but I like to do this mental exercise occasionally. I ask myself, if the market tanked tomorrow, and we entered a significant financial correction, what would the books written about this period list as likely signs of irrational exuberance that we missed.

I can certainly think of a few. The most obvious ones to me are NFTs. There was a period of time where everyone seemed to be buying them and flipping them for profit. The market for these has now collapsed but it felt like a canary in the coalmine.

Shortly after, we had the GME experience where a failing company managed to skyrocket 1500% to stick it to the man. It’s certainly a noble cause. We ended up with a similar experience with Blackberry, Bed Bath and Beyond and a few other companies. The whole meme trend peaked with the launch of a meme ETF where main street traders with money to burn can bet on companies with declining revenues, no profit and no prospects in the hopes that reddit users will boost it up.

Recently, there’s the whole saga with FTX and crypto. A lot of the crypto world is built on top of shitcoins, staking, yield farming and defi. All seemingly easy ways to make money out of nothing. I want to explicitly exclude the OG here. I am agnostic to Bitcoin. Though that wasn’t always the case.

Further we have startups that are valued at billions without ever making a penny in profit. In fact, I’m skeptical of the entire gig economy business model. It doesn’t seem sustainable. Unless we automate the people out of it.

Big tech too. The FAANG companies have stratospheric valuations completely detached from reality. Venture capital flowing to anything with the words blockchain or AI in it. Tesla valued at a trillion dollars (before the recent correction).

And how about that housing market. It’s been a money printing machine through the entire pandemic. You couldn’t save fast enough as a renter to keep up with home owners. What lesson would you draw from that? You should obviously own two.

Finally, the zombie companies that can’t meet their debt obligations unless rates stay low mascarading as legitimate businesses are increasingly common.

All it is to say that no one will be surprised in 2030.

I am sure by now you went with a fine tooth comb through my 2022 resolution results. If not, I will summarize it here as below expectations. I could spend the next few paragraphs explaining that I had a baby, and overcommited but the truth is I blew it. That’s life. Sometimes you trip up. But you have to get back on the metaphorical horse and keep riding. New years offer fresh starts. Therefore; I present to you my 2023 plan.

Health

1. No food before 12pm - I’m usually done eating dinner by 8pm. That creates a 16 hour window of intermittent fasting. I will usually have a black coffee (or two) in the morning but since it is calorie free, it does not count.

2. Work out 108 times this year - That works out to exactly 2 times a week. It’s a concrete, actionable and measurable way to include exercise in my resolutions. I keep track of this number in my Oura ring app.

3. Eat out less than once a week - This will be a challenging one. We like to eat out quite frequently. I think I will give myself a break and count only full meals. Buying coffee does not count.

4. Weigh in once a week - I’d like to keep track of my health metrics. Weight is an easy one with a smart scale. I just need to replace those batteries.

5. Measure blood pressure once a week - Should be easy to do as well. I have a smart cuff that records the measurement in an app.

6. Try hot yoga - I added this one last minute. It’s not a continuous action like the other goals so it is hard to rate. I will likely change it to something more specific during the year.

Mindfulness

1. Read a book before browsing the net at night - This is a habit I’ve been struggling with for a long time. I cannot figure out how to break it. I’ve tried this action last year and failed. Maybe this year will be different. For some reason I keep doing the same thing expecting different results.

2. Don’t use the phone around other people - I do reasonably well here but slip up sometimes. I also find it extremely rude when people do it in front of me. I should have higher expectations of myself.

3. Take short walks during work - We recently moved to a nice suburban neighborhood with great parks around the house. I’d really like to take short walks there during lunch.

4. Avoid using the phone in the bathroom - I know everyone does it. I’d like to stop. I think I can just be with myself for a few minutes without distractions.

Learning

1. Read 18 books this year - That’s roughly a book every 3 weeks. That’s just 12 pages a day for a book of 250 pages. Doesn’t seem too hard.

2. Listen to podcasts in another language when feeding my daughter - I’ve started doing this last year and it has worked quite well for me. It’s an easy and fun opportunity to work on my language skills. Hopefully this trend continues in 2023.

3. Complete a Udacity course - This action is similar to hot yoga in the sense that it isn’t continuous so it isn’t gradeable. I will need to rethink the details of these actions but I wanted to capture the spirit here.

Personal

1. Every night write the top things I want to accomplish the next day - I cannot emphasize how powerful this one small habit is. It’s just incredible. I started doing this a few weeks ago and love how intentional each day is.

2. Get ready for bed by 9:30 - I’ve wanted to be an early riser for a round a decade now. I would always go to sleep far too late. The day never felt long enough - especially after a day in the office. Thankfully, my daughter fixed that for me. Her wake up is 6:30am no matter when I go to sleep. I go to sleep early now.

3. Target being 10 minutes early - I hate being late. Why am I always late? I want to be on time.

4. Do a monthly review of my goals - This is my lowest priority goal because missing a review (or two) isn’t a big deal. But it’s incredibly important to review your actions and resolutions occasionally to remind yourself what you set out to do.

Connection

1. Call parents 3 times a week - Easy and important. Keeping good relationship with my parents has always been a top priority. They won’t be around forever.

2. Call 2 friends a week to chat - I’m still working out how this goal will be tracked. But the true goal here is to create a habit of calling people. Texting is just so superficial.

3. Reach out to acquaintances once every 3 months - As I’ve written before, all good friends started as distant friends. Having more good friends can’t hurt.

4. Look people in the eye when you say thanks - That sounds like an easy one. But I’m always in a rush. I grab my coffee from the barista or the receipt from the cashier, say thanks and run out. I’d like to slow down and look people in the eye when I say thanks. I want it to be meaningful.

That’s it for me for 2023. Happy new year everyone!

As I’ve written before, each year I write down my new year resolutions. This year I’m doing something different. I’m putting them online for your viewing pleasure. I’m hoping this can provide inspirations for others to pick up this habit as well.

The system is simple. I have four overarching goals: health, mindfulness, learning, and personal. Each goal has actions I plan to take throughout the year. They are concrete and measurable. Once every two months I will rank myself out of 10. At the end of the year I average out the scores to get an overall score of how I did.

Health

1. Bring a non alcoholic beverage to social gatherings - This is my attempt to reduce my alcohol consumption. I was hoping if I bring some LaCroix or Spindrift with me, I will drink less Heineken and Corona. 2/10 I fell off that bandwagon real fast.

2. Come up with meals that involve essential foods and consume them every 3 weeks - That was my attempt to improve my diet. I have a list of foods I believe are good for you. I wanted to build out a set of recipes and eat them on regular basis. 1/10 Failed terribly. I don’t have a single recipe.

3. Have 120 workout sessions - In 2021 I managed to average 2 workouts a week. I wanted to push myself with 2.3 workouts a week. 6/10 I did OK. I stumbled mid year but got back into the groove towards the end.

4. Complete 52 16-hour fasts - 10/10. I stopped keeping track of this one since it got so easy.

5. Weigh in and measure blood pressure 52 times - I have a smart scale and smart blood pressure monitor that keeps track of my metrics. I’ve been doing this for years but quite irregularly. Little has changed this year. 5/10.

I’d say those are poor results for supposedly such an important part of my life.

Mindfulness

1. Keep your phone away from the table during social gatherings - I hate it when people browse their phones in front of others. It’s so rude. I’ve slipped up myself though so I can’t be too harsh. 7/10

2. 5 min meditation every day - never happened. 1/10.

3. Mindless browse only on the phone - the idea here is to avoid wasting time on the laptop - especially before bad. I want to read books. If I limit myself to my phone, maybe I would browse less. Didn’t work. 3/10.

4. Put laptop away after work - That was another technique for the same problem. Didn’t work. 3/10.

Learning

1. Listen to podcasts in another language on my walks - This morphed into listening to podcasts in another language while feeding my baby daughter. Worked quite well. 9/10.

2. Talk to someone in another language once a month - Never happened. I am far too self conscious for that. 1/10.

3. Read 19 non-tech books - I read 13 in total. Not too bad considering our daughter was born in May and I failed to take that into account. 6/10.

4. Read 3 tech books - I haven’t read a single one. Once again, I failed to account for how much time a baby takes. 1/10.

Personal

1. Target being 10 minutes early - I don’t need to be early. But I’m tired of constantly being late - 20, 30, sometimes 40 minutes. It’s something between lack of respect for other people’s time and a bad cultural norm. I did well in the beginning but started slipping in the second half the year. 5/10.

2. Ping distant friends once every 2 months - All good friends started as distant friends at some point. My goal for 2022 was to keep some friendships from dying out. In 2023 I will be more ambitious. 7/10.

3. Call parents every other day - Pretty easy. I have good relationship with my parents. Ever since I became a father, I also have a lot more appreciation for what my mom had to go through. 9/10.

4. Go to bed at 10:30 - After my daughter was born, I was in bed by 9pm. This was mandatory to get any decent amount of sleep. Prior to her birth I was going to bed past midnight every single night. Am I cheating? Maybe. But it’s still a win in my books. 7/10.

5. Join an activity - Didn’t really join anything. 1/10. I think this action needs to be more specific in 2023 to be useful.

2022 has been rough on the resolutions front. I can’t help but feel disappointed with how many action items were complete failures. Sometime mid-year I stopped tracking my resolutions. With no accountability, I got no results.

At the same time, there’s a lot of good learnings to apply to 2023. But that will have to wait for another post.

As each year comes to a close, I like to take a few days to plan out my goals for the next 365 days. I follow a template, with categories and action items. I rank them bi-monthly on a spreadsheet and give myself an average at the end of each year. I’ve been doing this since 2017 and find it helpful to live an allegedly more purposeful life.

I get asked all time what the point of all of this is. Why wait for the end of the year? Just start now. That’s a fair criticism. In an ideal world where you are focused, intentional, resilient and determined, you don’t need this. But you probably don’t need much motivation to begin with. Us commoners though need a starting point - a clean slate from which we can grow towards our best self.

January 1st is that day. It’s where all the sins of yesteryear get erased and a new begining begins. It’s where you can leave all your failed attempts to read more, lose weight and be better to yourself and try again - this time better, with more clear purpose and clarity.

Let the new year begin.

Beginnings are hard.

If you know me, you know I have a lot of opinions. I have an opinion about almost everything. If I don’t have an opinion now, ask me about it and I’ll formulate it on the fly. Sometimes that is counter productive. This Substack is an attempt to think through my views more carefully.

I have made several attempts in the past to start a blog. They always fail. Life gets in the way. School; work; kids; YouTube - honestly, it’s a miracle anyone ever completes anything.

However, part of my 2023 resolutions is blogging but with a twist: rather than writing brilliant, long form posts with nuance and detail that no one reads, I’ll challenge myself to keep these short. No more than 3 or 4 paragraphs. I’m applying the concept of Twitter to my blog.

All credit for this idea belongs to my wonderful wife.

This is effai.me, a newsletter about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness tightly bound with economic lessons from the Austrian school. I am restarting my blog from the pre-pandemic days over here on Substack. Let’s go!

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I have a close friend who is a mother of a preschooler and a strong supporter of good, free public education. A few days ago we were talking about the city and the school budget and she said something that struck me as odd. She said we should spend more money on education. Obviously that part isn’t unusual. Lot’s of people are under that impression. What followed though was the unusual part. She said it didn’t matter how much it cost. “The future of our children was too important” according to her.

In a world with no constraints or trade-offs that certainly seems reasonable. I would not want my kids to go to school with drugs and gangs. The schools my kids attend should be clean and conducive to learning with an athletic center and a big library. My hypothetical child should get world class education, be inspired every day and do their linear algebra homework on time.

This is not the world we live in though. The world we live in has limited resources. We have a fixed amount of land, steel, concrete and hours in a day. Over time we figure out more efficient uses for these resources. We allocate them to more productive uses that let us do more with less. We refer to that as economic growth. But that takes years. The concrete that we have today is more than likely to be poured just as efficiently today as it will tomorrow — not withstanding some overnight innovation I haven’t heard of.

So what does that have to do with schools?

Think of schools — or education — as a consumer product. In many aspects not all that different from Yoga pants or La Croix. If I want to drink more La Croix, I must trade my money in exchange for additional cans. That same money could have been spent at lululemon. What I’m describing here is a trade off.

What happens with education? Each dollar we spend on education is a dollar we didn’t spend on healthcare, or police, or libraries or one of the other myriad of things governments do these days. We cannot keep spending on schools indefinitely because we will run out of money (some would say we already have) for much more basic needs. Therefore; the statement “it doesn’t matter how much it costs” is simply false. The real question should be this: am I getting a good deal? But how do you figure that out?

Let’s do a couple of fun exercises.

Since we are on the topic of education, what do you think is the school budget for the city of Seattle? Take a guess. Don’t cheat.

Whatever you thought, it’s meaningless unless you know the size of the city or the number of students enrolled in the system. It’s exactly the same as asking someone to buy shares of a company for $18 a share. You just don’t have enough information. At the very least, you have to know how many shares are outstanding and what the profit of the company is.

With that in mind, what if I told you the budget is a little over a billion dollars. Your next question should be, how many students does it serve?

Seattle Public Schools (SPS) serves around 50,000 students. Now you have enough information to answer “am I getting a good deal?”. And the answer is unequivocally no. At a billion dollars a year spent over 50,000 students, we spend roughly $20,000 per student. That’s an absurd amount. Think about it this way: [if] I could open a school tomorrow, I could have a single class of 15 students, paying a total of $300,000. I would get the very best teacher by paying them a very generous $120,000 a year salary. I would pay a very philanthropic $65,000 a year for rent and utilities. And I would even give each student $1000 allowance for books and kindles and other educational supplies.

I would still be left with a massive $100,000 profit.

Where is all the money going? Why is the education board always short on money?

Let’s do another one. How about the homeless emergency we are experiencing in Seattle? How much do you think we should spend on that? If you said it depends on the number of people currently homeless, you are right. There are roughly 7000 people living without shelter in Seattle. That’s shockingly high at 1 in 100 residents. How much should we spend on it?

Seattle’s latest budget proposal pegs it at around 100 million dollars. That’s roughly $14,000 per person experiencing homelessness. In other words, the city could eliminate all homelessness over night by renting out units for them at market price. I have friends who pay less than that for rent. And yet, here we are, still with thousands of people on the street.

I don’t want you to think this is some Seattle problem and your city is a benevolent entity making spending decision in a calculated, focused and rigorous manner. This problem is endemic to most government spending. And if citizens are not vigilant, it is bound to grow out of control.

As a final example let’s take New York. The union responsible for administering public transportation in the city is planning on building wheelchair accessible elevators in 70 of the subway stations. How much do you think it should cost?

Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about elevators and I couldn’t tell you how to build one. But I have a strong suspicion it shouldn’t be 80 million dollars. That’s per elevator.

There’s a common theme here on how to think about government spending. A billion dollars is a lot. It is hard to fathom. But so is a million people. Thinking about government spending in those terms becomes abstract and disconnected. That’s why the first thing you should do is think about it on a cost per unit. It usually brings the number down to earth.

But it still may not tell you the whole story. The next thing you should do — if possible — is examine how you could solve these problems through other means. Could you brute force the problem — like I proposed? Could you let the private sector handle it? That should establish and absolute top on how much we should spend.

Finally, compare the costs you came up with to what is being spent right now. In many cases you will find the amount of money being spent is unreasonable. The examples I selected were used to demonstrate relatively extreme cases. Although I didn’t have to venture very far to find them.

You may disagree with me about limiting the role of the government and that’s fine. But what I do ask from my fellow voters is to be more vigilant when it comes to government spending. Watch what they do. It’s your money after all. Make sure you’re getting a good deal.

If you’ve been following financial news lately or religiously tracking your net worth on Mint like I do, you probably noticed last week’s hiccup in the market’s relentless march upwards. The Dow dropped 800 points in a single day — the worst performance of 2019 (so far).

Financial news media was all over this story. I woke up to dozens of articles about the 2/10 inverted yield curve and pictures of grown men sobbing in front of their computer screens gracing Yahoo Finance. I felt like we traveled back in time and Lehman Brothers just collapsed.

Naturally, the first thing I did was to Google “what is an inverted yield curve?”.

Despite it’s sophisticated name, it is a relatively intuitive concept to understand. Let’s break it down.

Our government occasionally spends our tax money irresponsibly and has a shortfall between its obligations and the cash it has on hand*. To make up the difference, the government sells treasury notes (T-notes for short) to investors that are looking for a safe place to keep their money.

All notes have a maturity date — the date the investor can expect to have their money back, and an interest rate — an incentive for the investor to lend money in the first place.

That incentive is also the “yield” in “inverted yield curve”.

The maturity date can vary between two and ten years. In general, lending money for shorter duration is less risky. There is less opportunity for your borrower to become a deadbeat and there is less risk for the interest rates to shift dramatically. Therefore; investors in general expect higher return from longer term investments.

That’s the “curve” in “inverted yield curve”.

Finally, what happens if investors become pessimistic about the future? First, they will start demanding higher interest rates to lend money in the short term driving 2 year T-notes’ interest rates up. Second, they will flee with their money for safety buying up long term T-notes and in turn driving those interest rates down. If this continues for long enough, the 2 year T-note can exceed the 10 year — creating an a-typical inversion. Thus; we have the “inverted yield curve”.

We’ve witnessed inverted yield curves before in 1980, 1989, 2000, and 2006 — all years that preceded a recession by a year or two.

The discerning reader may have also noticed the gray bars in the chart above. Those signify economic recessions in the United States. As of this writing, we haven’t had a recession since 2009 — a full decade and longest bull market in history. Things aren’t looking good.

Before you speed dial your broker and put in that sell all order, let me offer some advice.

First, though 800 points drop for the Dow sounds like a lot, it is roughly 3%. It happens over a two or three day span all the time and no one really notices. Don’t let that part scare you.

Second, the inversions, even if truly predictive, occur one to two years prior to the recession. Therefore; you should wait until August 2020 before selling anything at the very earliest — at least if you believe in these indicators.

Third, and this may surprise you, most recessions end after about one year. In fact, the great recession lasted only 18 months officially ending in June of 2009. In other words, the margin of error of this indicator is larger than the recession itself.

Fourth, it tells us nothing about when to re-enter the market. Once fear takes over, the human tendency is to wait out the financial storm until things calm down. Unfortunately by then it’s too late and the financial rewards are gone.

So what should you do? I don’t know. But I’m sticking to spending less than I make, dollar cost averaging, and ignoring Yahoo Finance.

*Not to worry! Our children will pay it all back.

One advantage of hiking with friends is the inevitability of bringing up interesting topics of conversation. You can certainly come up with interesting topics on your own. But the conversation tends to be dull if you are the only one talking.

This America day, I ventured out on a hike with my good friend Nick from the The Tohidian. He was passionately telling me how sixty percent of Americans support a particular position on a controversial policy. And yet, there are states in the union that are actively trying to implement a contradictory policy. “It should be a human right”, he told me.

Long time readers should be familiar with my skepticism on majority rule arguments (if not you can read about it here). But this was not what spurred this blog. Instead, it was the part about the “human right” that was the true inspiration. My question to him was this: what makes something a “human right”?

Now, you’re probably wondering what is this controversial policy I so elegantly obfuscated. It turns out that it doesn’t really matter because the policy is irrelevant to this discussion. What I am interested in is what makes something a “right” in the first place.

As it turns out, rights come in two flavours:

1. Legal rights — human invention based on a variety of institutions.

2. Natural rights — fundamental human rights based on natural law.

Legal rights can be complicated and full of lawyer talk. You’ve probably all seen the two thousand page credit card agreement you get in the mail every time JPMorgan decides to update a sentence. Other legal rights are very familiar to us:

• You have the right to an attorney in the event of an arrest.

• You have the right of way when you are first at a stop sign.

Legal rights are created and enforced by the government to regulate criminal activity and civil matters. They also tend to be “positive rights” — rights that say what you can do or what someone ought to do for you.

Natural rights, on the other hand, are not created by anyone. They are universal and granted to all people at birth.

The astute reader may question the previous statement and wonder how rights can be granted if no one is granting them; or what makes them universal. That argument is conveniently outside the scope of this post.

What are some examples of natural rights?

• You don’t have the right to take my house unless I agree to it.

• You don’t have the right to beat me up.

Natural rights tend to be “negative rights” — right that impose on others to not do something. Intuitively, most people agree with these rights even without justifying their source.

One way to paraphrase natural rights is by using the following “loose axiom”:

Live life the way you want to live as long as you don’t infringe on other people’s right to live life the way they want to live.

This is also loosely known as the non-aggression principal.

Some criticize this principal as selfish. “It’s all about ME”; “I want to live the way I want to live”. This is not true. The only way for this principle to hold; the only way to protect your rights, is by respecting everyone else’s rights.

What does any of this have to do with Nick and his controversial policy stance? Let’s work it out.

Here’s phrases I hear uttered from time to time:

Health care is a human right.

Education is a human right.

Housing is a human right

Are these really human rights?

Human rights sure sound like natural rights. Are these natural rights? Let’s take “education is a human right” and use our “loose axiom”.

If I am a teacher and you are in need of schooling, I am obligated to provide you with education. This is your right after all.

What if I refuse? Can you fine me? And what if I keep refusing? Can you jail me? Jail may not be an appropriate life style choice for me. You would be infringing on my right to live life the way I want to live.

In other words, positive rights can only be achieved at the expense of someone else.

Back to “education is a human (natural) right”. Education cannot be a natural right because it violates the axiom of natural rights. If education is a right, it must be a legal right — a right afforded to you by the government.

Your next question is probably, “Is that so bad?”

I was careful to use the term “loose axiom” when referring to the non-aggression principal. It is not because I have doubts in its value. On the contrary. I think it’s an invaluable tool to start thinking about rights, policy, and morality. But there can be times when you need to bend the rules a bit for a greater purpose.

Take the court system for example. If you are accused of committing a crime, you probably want a fair and impartial court to hear your case. A private court system that offers a deluxe package to its wealthiest customers may guarantee a lawyer and 2 non guilty verdicts per year. But that’s not impartial. Instead We end up outsourcing the process of justice to the government. Of course, the government needs to collect tax revenue to pay all the police and judges it hires. Taxes must come from you and I. And indeed, if you refuse to pay the tax you’ll end up in jail.

However, there are very few cases where the government’s participation is absolutely necessary. A voluntary transaction between two individuals is almost always the better solution; and with the right incentives would lead to a healthier, wealthier and happier society.

What I ask of you is this: whenever a question of policy comes up, start with the non-aggression principal first. Can you figure out a way to solve the problem through voluntarily transactions? You’ll be amazed by what can be done. And yes, it does include education, healthcare and housing.

I picked up Robert Reich’s “Saving Capitalism — For the many, not the few” at a semi-annual book sale run by the Seattle Public Library. I didn’t think capitalism needed saving but I couldn’t resist the bright orange cover and the provocative title. And who knows? Maybe the former secretary of labour has something interesting to say.

I read the book on my patio, cover to cover, in about a week — a personal best for a full length book. I couldn’t put it down for one simple reason. I thought he was wrong and it made me angry. At the end of every chapter I would barge in to the house and pronounce to my wife that “this guy is an idiot”.

Take for instance the chapter titled “The Meritocratic Myth” where Mr. Reich talks about the nation’s blue-collar laborers and how they could potentially earn thirty dollars an hour in today’s dollars working a factory job — and that’s without a high school degree. We commonly refer to those days as the golden age of America - when a high school teacher could provide their families with a solid middle class life.

Or how about the chapter “The declining bargaining power of the middle”? Mr. Reich provides us with a handy graph demonstrating how starting in 1970, the real hourly compensation completely stagnated.

This is a common and often regurgitated discourse we hear when it comes to income inequality and the constantly disappearing middle class. But is it actually that simple? Allow me to contribute my two cents.

I will address the wage difference first. It’s true that the factory jobs are long gone but we have plenty of other entry level jobs available to compare. McDonald’s and Walmart are common targets for workers demanding higher wages so I will use these companies.

Take a look at McDonald’s income statement. This evil corporation made four billion dollars last year in profit. Why won’t they raise wages?

Because there is no way McDonald’s or Walmart could ever afford to pay their workers thirty dollars an hour. If McDonald’s went up to twenty dollars an hour, their two hundred thousand U.S. workers would cost the company an additional four billion dollars — that’s every penny they made this year. Walmart wouldn’t even survive at fifteen dollars an hour with their two million workers. And this is during an economic boom. Imagine what would happen during a recession.

What about the indisputable maxim that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer ?— something Mr. Reich himself mentioned towards the end of the book.

First, who are the rich? Is it the one percent? Is it the five percent?

Second, what does the data actually say?

I pulled some numbers from census.gov because I don’t trust pre-compiled charts online and plotted it. This is what I got:

Turns out the bottom three quantiles haven’t been doing all that great since 1967 — their household income has been mostly flat. But notice that no one got poorer. The incomes of the bottom three quantiles have been solidly within the same range (with a very slight uptrend).

What about the top two quantiles. They are certainly getting richer. Way richer. This is good news for about 40 percent of all households in America — that’s a lot of households. This is not to excuse the state of the bottom 60 percent — things are still rough if you’re in the bottom half. However, they aren’t necessarily worse off than during the “Golden Age”.

My original plan was to go through the book, page by page and point out all the half truths Mr. Reich used to make his case. Half way through writing this, I decided to take a different approach. I’ve decided to focus my wrath on a single recurring idea.

But first, let me digress for a moment.

This may surprise you but Mr. Reich is one hundred percent right on the central theme of the book — crony capitalism is the root cause of all our problems in the economy.

Rules must be broad, simple and just. Unfortunately, Mr. Reich has many examples when the rules are exactly the opposite — narrow, complex and unjust. Things like CEO pay and lobbyists tilt the system in favour of the rich and well connected.

This problem with power asymmetry can be addressed in two ways. First, the government can set up (more) rules that would limit the influence of corporations and other groups with vested interests in the political process. This is something that we see day to day. Calls for regulating A or banning B is the standard approach. I can understand why. It is easy to set up rules and let someone else deal with the unintended consequences.

Second, you can limit the power of the government to enact narrow, complex and unjust rules. Lobbying would immediately lose its power as the payoff to these activities would disappear.

Mr. Reich focused the book on the first solution but completely neglected the second. His suggestions would encourage the government to limit the power of select groups through rules and regulations. This in turn makes lobbying for exception and campaigning for exclusions by corporations and well connected individuals that much more lucrative —exactly what he was trying to avoid.

Despite my criticism of the book, I would highly recommend reading it. It is well written and thought provoking. There is also a convenient accompanying documentary on Netflix for the visual learners. Exposing yourself to ideas that don’t line up with your own biases is extremely important. It’s the only way to avoid echo chambering yourself into conviction of your own ideas.

For instance, while writing this article, I discovered that the bottom three fifths of American households aren’t doing significantly better than 50 years ago — at least when it comes to household income. That was a surprise to me. I honestly thought everyone were strictly better off. Armed with this new knowledge, I must admit that Mr. Reich turned out to be “not a complete idiot”.

Regarding the reasons for this lack of growth, I have some theories about that but I’ll save that for another article.

Saving Capitalism — For the many, not the few

In the 80’s my neighbourhood was poor and crime ridden. Since then, things have drastically changed. The recent economic boom has brought massive development in the area. New, million dollar houses are popping up in every street. One intersection in particular has a new condo building on every corner. There’s even a Whole Foods scheduled as a tenant for one of the buildings.

With this kind of quick and massive change, some people are occasionally left behind. Their houses go up in value but so do their property taxes. Once their fixed incomes cannot cover those semi-annual payments to the city, they are foreclosed and forced out. We call this process gentrification.

To fight gentrification, some of my community is protesting the arrival of Whole Foods. The community argues that people cannot afford to shop at Whole Foods (also known as Whole Paycheque). Second, they are demanding good, unionized jobs for the community.

To achieve their goals, they are exercising their democratic rights and protesting.

Allow me to go off on a tangent for a moment about democracy.

Democracy is the best tool we have to elect a government. It is a strictly better system than a monarchy that passes the crown down to their inbred children. It is also better than a mad dictator seizing power and waging war on his own constituents.

Democracy isn’t perfect. In the past, you had to be a literate male, of European descent, with significant property to have a vote. Over the years we’ve abolished the property, literacy, gender and race restriction to end up in the system most of us are familiar and enjoy today.

The natural human tendency is to assume that if something is good, more must be better. If democracy is good for election of governments, democracy must be also good for election of building tenants. Here, as a happiness pursuing, liberty loving individual, I have to disagree.

In fact, I disagree with the entire premise of community involvement in this decision. There is no room for democracy here.

How could this be? How could the fairest, most just system humanity has ever invented be wrong?

The most fundamental problem is the issue of property rights. Since it’s easy to vilify corporations, let’s pretend for a moment it wasn’t Whole Foods that was coming but a small, family owned co-op looking to open up shop in their detached accessory dwelling unit (or DADU).

Let’s also pretend there’s no negative externalities on the neighbours (no additional traffic, parking or noise issues). Why should the neighbours have any say in what this entrepreneur does? What business do they have in the entrepreneurs business?

The idea behind private property is that you own it. No one else does. What is ownership if not the right to make decisions about utilization of your own property. The entrepreneur bought the land and rights to run a business. She now has every right to run this business as she sees fit — even if it goes against all her neighbours wishes (although this might not be a good business model).

Second, it isn’t clear at all who this community is and where it ends. For example, how far away should one live from the contentious site before we prevent them from having a voice on the issue. I don’t think anyone would propose that I should have any say about a dispute in a neighbouring city (or Mexico for that matter).

There must be a line where the house to the left is included but the house to the right is not. This is unfair and arbitrary.

One could argue that the community can decide that too. The community could come together and vote on each house’s membership into that community. That feels pretty good right?

What if you’re openly dissenting from the majority view? The community can equally decide to vote you out; or better yet, not vote you in in the first place. It is also suspiciously reminiscent of past policies designed to suppress minorities’ voices.

Another solution is to introduce a “marginal vote” The further you are away from the site, the lesser your vote counts — very similar to our current tax system. It is an improvement over the above but we have effectively introduced classes for people. That might be acceptable for some but it isn’t democracy any more. The people that live just a few blocks away from the major development would have little to no say.

Third, there’s the majority rule problem. If we have a vote on an issue and the majority votes in a certain direction, we consider the direction as the winning direction. Majority is defined as more than 50% of the votes.

Let’s take a hypothetical town of 99 people. There’s a controversial Whole Foods coming to town so the town decided to vote. The outcome of the vote is a 49/50 split in favour of banning Whole Foods. In other words, 50 people decided over the 49 where they can and cannot shop. That doesn’t strike me as fair.

Also, prior to the elections, the vote may have been split right down the middle — 49 on each side plus 1 person undecided. In that case, this one person gets to decide for 98 other people the fate of Whole Foods. That’s a lot of power to give to a single individual. It is also very tempting to influence that individual’s vote (with money).

This may seem like a contrived example but it is simplified on purpose. Multiply all those numbers by 100 and it becomes very realistic. 100 people dictate the fate for 9800. Buying off 51 of those 100 people with backdoor deals and promises can be very profitable.

Then there’s the dissenter problem. It’s a mirror image of the majority rule problem. Let’s reuse our hypothetical town. The state government noticed an uptick in overdose deaths and decided to introduce a safe injection site in your town. And best of all, the town gets to vote on the placement. Presumably, few people want a safe injection site next to their house. We may want them in general because we believe they improve society as a whole but we’d prefer if they were a couple of tens of blocks down from our houses.

In this town, you are a particularly unpopular individual. You have blue hair and you like to shop at organic stores like some kind of a hippie. 50 people dislike you because of that. If it came down to a vote, they would elect your property as the site for the safe injection site. If you object, force will be used against you.

Finally, there’s the voter disinterest problem. Most people cannot be bothered to follow every trivial detail about their neighbourhood. For instance, most people are unlikely to follow every proposed development project in their vicinity. And they are definitely not going to take the time to call their elected representatives to voice their support or opposition. Unless, of course, there’s a direct impact on them or their property values.

It’s tempting to blame this lack of engagement on people. “If only they showed up to the hearing”, community supports say, “they would get what they wanted”. Yes, that’s true. In fact, that’s exactly how the vocal, unemployed and bored minority gets what they wanted.

The people my “community” is allegedly trying to protect are too busy working during the week and relaxing during the weekend to be bothered protesting and bickering about the paint job of the condominium coming up — that was last week’s agenda.

Regarding Whole Foods, the disinterest to the issue is completely rational. Most people are neutral-positive towards Whole Foods’ arrival. It’s just not that big of a deal for them. It is nice to have another place to shop and they look forward to occasionally indulging in an organic avocado toast.

On the other hand, take the Safeway owner from down the street. His bottom line rests on his ability to persuade the rest of us Whole Foods is a bad idea. Of course he’s going to show up to every hearing. Of course he’s going to bring up the underprivileged who need union jobs.

What is the end result? We get a handful of loud mouths with vested interests deciding what is best for the rest of us. It isn’t uncommon to have a few tens of people decide on a project that would impact 25,000 people.

If you think I sound like a massive complainypants then let me offer some solutions as well.

First of all, the argument over the affordability of Whole Foods is just plain silly. If my neighbours cannot afford Whole Foods, they will not shop there. Whole Foods will be out of business faster than the “community” can organize their next protest. If, on the other hand, Whole Foods is deemed affordable and valuable, my fellow neighbours would have another option to purchase organic food.

Sure, the owner of the Safeway down the street will have to live with thinner profit margins. But his misfortune is an acceptable downside to my community’s upside. When he opened his Safeway 20 years earlier, his fortune was someone else’s misfortune.

There’s also a risk that his Safeway could go completely out of business. In that case, the poor residents of my neighbourhood will have to travel a bit further to get groceries. This is a risk most people should be fine with. A Safeway that goes out of business due to competition from Whole Foods signals that there aren’t nearly that many poor people in the first place.

Some people may even suggest we should still care about the few poor people that are left over. They have the right to shop too. It follows then that we should shut down all Whole Foods all across the country. After all, every neighbourhood contains at least one or two families that can’t afford to shop there. What about them?

Bottom line is that we can all vote all the time and directly influence the direction of our neighbourhoods. We don’t have to worry about the mob forcing us to do things against our will; we don’t have to stay on top of every issue; we don’t have to worry if we think differently; and most importantly we don’t have to have our property rights abused. We just need to embrace a different system. We need to vote with our dollars.