A captivating advertisement for Chevy sedans just when they stopped making them!

It was a pleasure presenting last week at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at Northwestern. I learned a lot, both from other people's work and their feedback on my paper (on shocks to firm location). A warm and welcoming community as well. It was my first CELS; looking forward to next time.

Of course, the financial disasters could materialize. My point is that that possibility is now part of the reporting in US financial and non-financial media alike, and has been for quite a while. The distinctive voice of FT sceptics is less clear to me at this point.

This thread prompted by OP's thread on labor market strength. It's hard to find anything like this in US non-financial media or UK financial media. It saddens me a bit because I find myself reading the FT less. "Maybe this positive financial indicator is actually bad" is a well-reported story now.

At a minimum, the US financial press is now both a cheerleader and a megaphone of concern. In the non-financial press, negativity about everything consumer and employment dominates, as well as negative AI. Increasingly I wonder where this leaves the distinctiveness of the Sceptical British Take.

This year, however, US media has tilted into bearishness or at least balance, eroding the distinctiveness of the UK press. Even in the WSJ and other financial media, you can read deeply reported skeptical takes on the catalyst of the US boom (AI).

The US economy has a lot of cheerleaders—arguably, all of US financial media—and so many years later, as someone who researches markets in various forms, I continue to find it helpful to have a "devil's advocate" perspective on current events.

When I was in practice, my firm asked me to go to London for "a few weeks, a month maybe." The 6 months I spent there were foundational for my career. One habit I picked up was reading the Financial Times—for reasons of focus, quality, and perspective. Like the broader UK press, they're permabears.

The placement of lots of local govt capital assets (schools, fire stations, etc) assumes that the local development landscape is more or less fixed in time—demand for those services will always exist nearby. However, we know this isn't true. We don't think enough about decline in local govt.

Some of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty also does not age well

"Well, just upzone everything and use a land value tax." Ok, well, that's assuming the politics feasibility of the regime change. Presumably the local homeowners will welcome this change with flowers. There's a reason "LVT will fix this" became a meme.

It's true that municipal assessment bodies already do an imperfect job of assessing value. But that's in a world where their assessments are based on currently existing law. Hard to imagine them building in the possibility of a regime change that would be necessary for a land value tax to work.

Interesting thread. To me the open question is what to do with Georgism today given its (to me, contingent) origin in laissez-faire land use controls. In modern America, where LU regulation is intense in magnitude and layered in source, how to arrive at a "true" valuation as a tax basis?

I'm also 95, spiritually, and my involvement will be limited.

I’ll just need your 875 N. Michigan on that