Adam Ozimek makes a strong case for why liberals should be skeptical of occupational licensing.
This essay made me miss my barista days, describing perfectly those early morning hours listening to good music and prepping the shop, and taking the morning subways with the workers who get the city ready for later-rising professionals:
On the streets, and in the subway station, there are only a few other people around. As I see it, there is an unspoken code. Some kind of mutual 5 a.m. understanding: we are invisible. There is no eye contact, no acknowledgment of one other. Some of the subway riders are still out from the night before, and some are heading off to work (mostly fast food and construction jobs, some nurses). You can tell the difference by their fresh-from-the-shower wet hair versus just-partied sweaty hair, and sad eyes longing to get back into bed versus expectant eyes longing to get into bed.
In Virginia, two bartenders have been charged with felonies for doing fire tricks. It’s an absurd overreaction, but these tricks can go very, very wrong.
This Freakonomics profile of Randal O’Toole is specifically about rail transit, but this point about cognitive bias has more general application:
So why would rail lovers at home be rail detractors at work? O’Toole’s reasoning: “I don’t expect taxpayers to subsidize these preferences any more than if I liked hot-air balloons or midget submarines.” [...]
Is supporting policies that go completely counter to one’s own personal preferences to be admired or abhorred? Some might find it eccentric, and it certainly is a minority trait. My experience has been that most people in this world assume that others share their likes, and if they don’t, they will do so with just a little persuasion. In some cases this may be true. But regardless, this is certainly a convenient outlook because it means there is a happy coincidence: the best path to doing selfless good for others just happens to be promoting public policies that cater to one’s own self-interest.
One virtue of economics is that it encourages one to see markets as a discovery process for revealing people’s actual preferences, rather than allowing one to assume that one’s own are superior are widely held.
Can we date? A handy flowchart.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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