But is there really a “home ice advantage”? Turns out the answer is yes: Carolina Hurricanes objectively have a real benefit to playing at home. I asked Claude to compute an objective measure: W-L home minus W-L away. The result…

The winner, and it’s not particularly close: Lenovo Center in Raleigh, home of the Carolina Hurricanes.

In 2024-25, the Hurricanes went 31-9-1 at home and 16-21-4 on the road — a home-road win differential of +15. In 2025-26, they went 29-10-2 at home and 24-12-5 on the road — a differential of +5. Combined over both seasons: +20 wins at home vs. away. WikipediaWikipedia

The second-place finisher is Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The Kings in 2024-25 went 31-6-4 at home vs. 17-19-5 on the road — a jaw-dropping +14 win differential, though they flipped dramatically in 2025-26, going just 15-17-9 at home vs. 20-10-11 on the road — a reversal of -5. Two-year combined: +9. WikipediaWikipedia

Here’s a ranked summary of the teams with the strongest home ice advantage across the two seasons (home W minus road W):

A few notable observations:

• Carolina is in a class of its own. Their 2024-25 home record of 31-9-1 was one of the best in the league, while they went just 16-21-4 on the road — a historically lopsided split. Lenovo Center (formerly PNC Arena) has been a genuine fortress under Rod Brind’Amour. Wikipedia

• The Kings are a fascinating cautionary tale. They had one of the league’s strongest home records in 2024-25, including a franchise-record home points streak, but those expectations completely collapsed in 2025-26, when they actually performed significantly better on the road than at home. The Hockey Writers

• Colorado’s advantage nearly vanishes when you add in 2025-26 — that season they actually went 27-7 on the road vs. 25-9 at home, suggesting Ball Arena’s “advantage” is more about overall team quality than a genuine home-ice effect. Wikipedia

The Hurricanes stand alone as the clearest case of a rink that consistently confers a measurable structural advantage on its home team over the past two years.

Well, that is the perception of many ‘Canes fans. But it turns out it’s actually true!

Why?

You know I think the answer is transaction costs.

So that’s the new TAITC!

One big problem, of course, is that inbreeding from endogamy produces drooling idiots. But then, elections seem to produce drooling idiots, too, so there you go.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever! My friend Ryan has thoughts:

And this guy pulled a “there I fixed it”:

And finally, you may find it interesting to note that China is literally reporting zero people below the $3.00 / day poverty line!

People, the reduction of extreme poverty in China since Uncle Deng has truly been amazing and real. There’s no need to trivialize it by chart crime. And of course, there’s no reason for the CCP to be reporting zero people in extreme poverty either!

For realz:

Heavy Federation of Planets vibes, no??

People! This is what it should have looked like:

Courtesy of me and ChatGPT obviously. But way way way better.

Meanwhile, the Palpatine / Empire Museum is very close to opening as well:

They should probably seal up the ventilator shafts tho.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2186249/episodes/19269364

And I thought, “THAT is the happiest dog in the world.” But it wasn’t.

Because it saw two teenage girls, and ran over to them joyfully. The dog was pretty big and muscular, 40+kilos, but it was not aggressive. The girls laughed and jumped up off their blanket, and the dog was overjoyed by this. It dove on the blanket, and started wiggling on its back. This caused the blanket pull back, revealing….A STUFFED TOY!

The girls started shrieking, “No, perro, no!” But the dog had seen the stuffed toy, grabbed the toy in its mouth, and started running in circular paroxysms of ecstasy.

I thought, “Okay, I was wrong before. But THAT, now, is the happiest dog in the world.” But it wasn’t, not yet.

The dog ran and ran, and the shrieking girls (maybe 14) chased it. When the girls tired, the dog would come over, sit down in front of them, and wag its tail so hard its whole body was shaking. The girls would then grab for the stuffed toy, and the dog would take off in another fit of joy. It was very cute. That dog was SO happy.

Eventually the girls tired of the whole game, and sat on their blanket. The dog came back, and sat, and wagged, but no reaction. So the dog went about 10 yards away, lay down with the toy between its front paws, an even more joyfully tore the head and pulled out ALL the stuffing, in about three seconds. It was an amazing performance.

I wish I had started filming earlier, but here is what I got:

The girls were upset at first, but it really was quite charming that the dog was so happy. In fact, I thought, “THAT is the happiest dog in the world.” And it was.

First off, as we noted in our Chart Crime post, the kids are actually alright:

Secondly, my generation isn’t much for delivery services. I personally don’t see the appeal of getting lukewarm coffee or congealed noodles left by my door.

But it makes me curious; how do people eat?

Here’s me and Robin’s usual set up: I’m the cook and my specialities are steak and rice, crispy tofu and rice noodles, chicken and pasta (all with spices, fresh veggies, etc). In Lubbock, we usually have Jimenez y Friends tacos and Evie Mae’s BBQ once or twice a week. In Santa Fe, Tune Up Cafe, Santa Fe Bite, and Nath’s noodles with occasional trips to fancier places.

But I cook for us 3-4 times a week. Buy rice, noodles and pasta in bulk over the internet, shop for fresh meat and veggies usually once a week. Shopping takes an hour? And I probably average 25 minutes prep/cook per meal and Robin 20-25 for clean up (I’m messy LOL).

Zero delivery services, so our ratios are like 50% groceries, 50% restaurant.

So stuff like this amazes me:

I use one cutting board, a strainer, a rice cooker, a wok, one kitchen knife and a huge pan for boiling noodles. Have maybe 10 spices and 5 sauces on hand.

Of course a big part of all this is internet moralizing / generational warfare

Youngs: we can’t get ahead, olds are hoarding wealth and houses

Olds: $10 lattes and DoorDash every day, you are just wasting money and don’t deserve nice things

Youngs: Cooking is impossible!!

Olds: When I was your age, I made soup out of a shoe and bought a duplex.

Me: “I have a rice cooker, a wok, and a Costco-sized bag of jasmine rice. Can everyone please calm down?”

And suppose the short run elasticity of demand is -.15.

Then the market clearing price of gas is:

$2.90×(1+(0.15 / 0.17​))=2.90×2.133≈$6.19!

For $4.25 to clear the market, the implied elasticity would be around -.35 or so, which is way too big.

Maybe not at $6 yet due to inventories, releases from strategic reserves etc. Or heaven forbid, my complex structural model is wrong!

Feel free to itemize my errors in the comments!

Two weeks into a class with Hyman P. Minsky, I rethought that plan. But some things have stuck with me.

I am far from the first to make this claim, but Keynes himself was no “Keynesian.” Or so say I, at Civitas, in their Keynes Symposium, in honor of 90 years of TGT.

Some snippets:

“Higher education and professors can differentiate themselves from all this sameness by teaching at the edges of knowledge. My expertise, for example, is in the African American sonnet tradition. There are probably three people on the entire planet who know as much as I do about this tiny little thing, and so I’ve spent a lot of my time experimenting with these large language models to just see what they know about my field, and where the edges are. Specialists are going to be key to selling education as something the A.I. can’t do. When your daughter is going to go to school, in eight years, you are not going to want, for any money, to have her learn standard educational product that A.I. knows—and A.I. will know so much, right?”

So HR believes she is safe from ruthless efficiency of AI because she is the queen of the African-American Sonnet (AAS). Yes, people, that will pack ‘em in at the old state U.

“College, Robbins believes, should be more bespoke; schools should cultivate their own character based on the charisma of professors, the novelty of their inquiries, and the quality of their instruction.”

Yes, I see it now, come to the University of Utah we have AI and HR on AAS.

Alfred Marshall invented the scissors of Supply and Demand. And even if it’s true that HR clowns AI on the AAS, literally no one cares.

By the way, her most cited publication is actually a book by Harriet Beecher Stowe that HR somehow has “edited”. Her second most cited publication is about listening to music while dropping acid (I am not making this up), and I’d advise her that’s a better plan than dropping acid and giving an interview to the New Yorker!

I agree that AI is going to render obsolete the instructional deadwood, phone-it-in, professors. But it is not because, as HR claims, they do not know things that AI does not know. It’s because they are not teaching things! Students aren’t learning when AI can do all their “work”.

The problem is not that professors lack mega-niche expertise. It’s that too many professors have stopped requiring students to do the things humans need to do to learn.

AI disrupts the whole lazy equilibrium where students pretend to write, professors pretend to grade, administrators pretend this is assessment, and everyone calls it education. But esoteric knowledge no matter the subject is not going to fix anything.

So yes, universities need to differentiate themselves. But the sales pitch can’t be that our faculty know obscure things the robot does not know (that’s pretty much impossible anyway). The sales pitch has to be: here, you will actually be made to learn.

In my undergrad classes, you have to write your exams on paper in the classroom. You have to answer questions on the fly. There are online reading quizzes that AI can do, but at least you have to download the reading and interrogate AI about it. And I make you come to class (20% of your grade is attendance). Do I know more about public choice than AI? I know a lot, but probably not. That’s not the point. My job is not to be more encyclopedic than the robot. My job is to make students do the work the robot would otherwise do for them (out figure out how to get them to learn while using the robot).

The future of the university is not professors hiding at the edges of knowledge and hoping AI cannot find them. The future, if there is one, is professors getting students to actually learn.

People, these are mostly wrong!

I do not think you can make a billion from insider trading. The greatest inside trader of all time (you know I’m talking about Nancy P), only has a total net worth of like $200 million or so!

Also hard to get there from political payoffs. Duke Cunningham only got a couple million in bribes. All of the Odebrecht scandal in total to everyone was less than $800 million in bribes.

Same for fraud. At his peak, Madoff claimed billionaire status and lived large but that was part of the scam! He weren’t no billionaire. The status was fake.

And “profiting from a monopoly” is pretty weird. Think about say, James Dyson, and his dual-cyclone patents. Government gives him a monopoly, he builds a huge company and becomes a billionaire. Is this supposed to be bad? Robert Langer and Moderna. Generates patents, builds company, becomes billionaire. Bad? Sure maybe you can argue that prizes are a better way to incentivize innovation than patents, but without some incentives, much less innovation will occur.

And “inheritance” is just silly even for RR. Just pushing the question of where it came from a generation.

It’s just really hard to make a billion dollars without being very good / innovative at producing something that people really want.

I know these schmos like Bobby are mainly in it for the clicks, but I have a hard time understanding how we are going to survive if we deny there is a such a thing as success. Luck? sure. Infrastructure helps? sure. “self-made” is a weird label.

But mega personal wealth comes from creating huge value and capturing some fraction of it for yourself.

Now of course there are fortunes built on regulatory capture, cronyism, protected licensing, and government favoritism. But they are not the dominant story behind most, if any, modern billionaire wealth in advanced capitalist economies.

Let’s break this down a bit. First what in the world is “market power” doing in there with “break rules” and “abuse labor laws”?

If you have to price at marginal cost, then you dang sure ain’t gonna be a billionaire!

I’m not sure she’d really want to live in a world where no firm had any market power.

There are two very different ways to get market power. You can earn it temporarily by doing something better than everyone else. Or you can get it more permanently by getting the government to keep competitors out. The first is capitalism doing its job. The second is not capitalism at all. It is state corporatism, and pretending otherwise is how we end up blaming markets for political failures.

Now let’s consider Airbnb

When it comes to politically created market power, housing is a target-rich environment. The major source of rents in housing is not Airbnb, it’s local governments deciding who can build, where they can build, what they can build, what they can charge, and how easily they can recover their property in the face of broken contracts.

Airbnb is not the disease. It is basically an escape hatch from a governmental nightmare.

Local governments made housing scarce. They made long-term rental less attractive. They made property rights less secure. Then, when owners looked for another margin, politicians blamed the margin for somehow causing the original problem

Also true for “private equity is causing the housing crisis” by the way.

If long-term rental becomes too risky, local owners can sell to private equity. And private equity is much better positioned to live with bad local policy than the local schmo who owns a duplex. It can diversify regulatory risk over various local governments. A small landlord gets one nightmare tenant and is underwater. The institutional landlord treats it as portfolio variance.

This is our big government blueprint for misery: Politicians make normal housing markets miserable. Owners find substitutes. Then politicians denounce the substitutes as the cause of the misery. Lather rinse repeat.

Yes you are reading that right. Gen X and younger!! Get a friggin’ job babies!

It’s pretty insane to compare the wealth of old people to the wealth of young people. Young people take on debt, haven’t had time to accumulate savings, etc. etc.

Better to compare wealth between generations at the same stage in their life cycles. Like this:

Which shows that Gen X is right on track with the boomers, while the hybrid millennial / Gen Z group is doing better than both of the others at age 34 at least.

There’s a weird myth that Boomers have all the wealth and are hoarding it in ways that keep younger generations poorer. Like wealth accumulation is somehow a zero sum game.

But people let me tell you, the kids are alright (even though the WSJ decidedly is not).

But people, the actual root problem isn’t how the districts are drawn at all. The problem is that our system is winner take all / tyranny of the plurality. And what would you say if I told you there’s this one weird trick that fixes all the shit? Well there is and it’s called proportional representation (PR).

You don’t have to tie yourself in knots to create another majority black district (can you imagine the gerrymander required to produce a majority libertarian district?). If a party gets X% of the vote, they get roughly X% of the seats. No need to struggle to create a district for a “protected class”.

Under PR, there would be a viable libertarian party, not just the collection of wing nuts that we currently see out there. Why? Because winner take all makes minority parties essentially worthless. But if 15% of the vote got you 15% of the seats, my god! It would be worth it. Mungowitz IN CONGRESS!!!

And we could learn stuff. How popular is the psuedo-socialist wing of the Democratic Party? Who knows, right? But under PR we would know because they’d be their own party. How popular are libertarian ideas? Who knows, because in winner take all, people are reluctant to “waste” their votes. But under PR, we’d find out!

Now, of course, PR won’t make political disagreements go away (and I don’t want them to go away), but it will definitely give almost infinitely more representation to political minorities than our current system does without having to resort to carveouts and gerrymanders.

And if you absolutely have to have a person in Washington you can yell at about the potholes on your street, we can do a mixed system where there’s geographic districts AND PR. Any non-proportionality from the geographic results can be “corrected” by the PR allocation to give overall proportionality.

So many of our fights arise from the stupidity of single-member, winner-take-all elections. Well, that and having a President, but that’s a topic for another day.

With Anja Shortland, of KCL.

About her terrific new book.

Excerpt:

One important motivation for the founding and spread of public choice economics is to correct for the excesses of the market failure justification for state action. The logic of that justification is that there is literally no way for decentralized private action to provide public goods, or to correct for externalities. Public choice economics challenges that hasty conclusion. And when it considers a question like “Who will build the roads?,” it’s informed by empirical evidence.

“Public goods,” in particular, are defined as those useful goods and services that markets cannot provide, because the item is non-rival—it doesn’t get used up when others use it—and non-excludable—it’s difficult or expensive to charge the average cost price, and the marginal cost of a new consumer is zero.

The term “public goods” doesn’t refer to the public good—that is, all benefits to the general population—it’s about which things meet the technical conditions of being non-rival in production and non-excludable in consumption. The public good is often served by using private commerce, by saying “this is mine,” not “this is ours.” Think of grocery stores, retailers of electronics, restaurants, movie theaters, coffee shops, and many other spaces. All of the thousands of private sources of public good need to be insulated from state direction and control, because no single actor could know enough to act correctly, and they would have no incentive to act correctly if they did. Private action, both in commerce and in voluntary private associations, serves the public good.

But there are still public goods that the state should provide. Are roads among them?

People let me tell you a few things!

First, ADH compare the evolution of employment in places exposed to a lot of Chinese competition compared to places with less exposure. The highly exposed places could have growing employment and if the less exposed are growing even faster, that would enough to produce ADH’s negative results. ADH do report a back-of-the-envelope aggregate number in that range, but it is a counterfactual aggregation of relative local effects, not a literal count of jobs destroyed.

Which leads to a second point. ADH’s results are partial equilibrium results. Their statistical design does not allow for general equilibrium effects which are likely quite important. In other words, it is subject to James Heckman’s critique of using partial equilibrium reduced form results to scale up to some economy-wide effect.

Third ADH’s results are not extremely robust. Borusyak, Kirill, Peter Hull, and Xavier Jaravel. “Quasi-experimental shift-share research designs.” The Review of economic studies 89.1 (2022): 181-213 paper argues that the identifying variation comes from the underlying shocks and not from the commuting zone units used by ADH. In their paper and (probably wisely of them) especially in their appendix, they report much smaller and sometimes insignificant effects. It’s not a refutation of ADH but it is a warning that ADH’s results are not the final word on the subject.

Fourth and finally, If you look at aggregate employment numbers or even manufacturing numbers over a longer horizon, there’s no obvious China-caused 2.4 million job “hole” in the data that needs to be explained. This is because ADH is a “compared to a counterfactual” result not a change in counted jobs effect.

So ADH’s result is counterfactual not accounting, partial equilibrium not general, far from the last word on the subject and not visible to the naked eye in aggregate data.

I hope this post is OK with my Chancellor or I might lose MY jerb!

English is hard but not this hard LOL:

I guess we all know what the braggy fellow meant to say, but he was too busy staring lovingly in the mirror to get it right.

Could you imagine 500 deaths / year climbing Denali?

People, if crap like this can happen, why do we even have a government at all?

(the real ones will remember)

“As an economist, I look at it this way: Every profession produces both private returns — the fruits of labor that a person enjoys — and social returns — those that society enjoys. If I set up a shop on Etsy selling photographs, my private returns may be defined as the revenue I generate. The social returns are the pleasure that my photographs provide to my customers.”

It’s impressive to see a quote where every single part is wrong, but here you go.

First let’s define terms! private returns are the sum of producer and consumer surplus. Social returns are returns that accrue to people who are neither buyers or sellers. We would usually call them externalities.

Let’s count the errors, from mild to super-howlers

Not every profession has “social returns” i.e. externalities.

Private returns are not the “fruits of labor”

Private returns do not equal revenue

Pleasure provided to customers is not a social return

The rest of the article is about how finance is filled with rent seekers. I guess they should set up Etsy shops instead?

And then let’s praise him for this awesomely titled paper:

I don’t know if I can get Mungo to agree, but those first 4 words should be the new KPC slogan!