Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 422: Consumer Blackouts

Transcript

Episode 422: Consumer Blackouts · Words & Numbers

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Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony. And this is words and Numbers
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brought to you by the good people at Khaki Center for
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American Culture and Ideas and what's new and exciting in your
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world this week. I ran across an article that
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reminded me of something I used to talk about when I taught game
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theory. The thing I used to talk about
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was an economic paper written and I should have the name
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Becker. Gary Becker, Nobel Prize winner,
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he took the process of finding a mate, someone to marry, and
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applied game theory analytics to it and came to the conclusion,
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and this was the paper. Look, here's what you need to do
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is you go out and you start dating people and you're dating
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somebody, look for somebody else.
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You find somebody who's better. Ditch the first person, start
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dating the second and keep on doing that.
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Keep looking you find someone better, ditch the old guy, go
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with the new one and keep doing that until you reach and what
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was it he said some I'm going to do this off the top of my head
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at the outset you say I want to be married no later than age X
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and he says keep on doing this process till you get 1/3 the way
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to age X. Then whoever you're dating at
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that point, that's it. Marry that person.
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This games are thing. Now I bring this up because I
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ran across just a couple days ago an article saying, are you
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struggling over a big life decision?
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Math says you should use the 37% rule and the 37% rule is that
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same thing. So he's talking here.
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One of the examples is hiring someone.
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You're interviewing people. So you interview, you find
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somebody who's good, put them top of the list, and then find
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someone who's better, put him on top of that guy and keep on
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going to you've gone through 37% of the applicants.
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Whoever you end up with, that's the person you're done.
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Is it my turn now? Can I tell you all the reasons?
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Well, the one reason why that's completely misguided and wrong.
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You tell me. People lie all the time.
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All the time. That's all they do.
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They lie and lie and lie and lie.
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And when you're dating someone, you haven't met that person yet.
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You've met their representative. You meet that person after you
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get married. Yeah, but that's going to be
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true of all of the people. So in that sense, they're the
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same. Nope.
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The representation is radically different.
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Some representatives are really good, some are very close to the
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actual person, some are very widely from the actual person.
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And there's no way to know unless you can peer into a
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person's soul. So I think you know who's got it
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right, the arranged marriage people.
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Just yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to be said
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for that. Considering that they divorce at
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a lower rate than the chosen marriage people do, it's not a
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bad idea. But all of this falls under a
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larger heading of there are, we know this in nature, things,
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phenomena that follow known statistical distributions.
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So distribution of heights and Iqs and on and on and on.
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But in the social sciences, things also follow known
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distributions. For example, someone was talking
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to me the other day and getting all bent out of shape that 50%
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of consumption spending in this country is due to the top 10% of
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people in terms of how much they spend.
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And I'm thinking about this and I'm thinking that sounds about
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right. And I started looking to other
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things and sure enough, you find the same phenomenon.
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If you look not at individuals, but states, the top 10%, a
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little bit more in top 10%, maybe top 15% of states account
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for 50% of GDP. If you look at greenhouse gas
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emissions, it's the same thing. The top 10% emitters account for
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about 50%. And my reaction to all of that
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is here, like with the marriage, the 37% rule, it's a phenomenon
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that follows this known distribution.
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And there's no point in getting bent out of shape about the top
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10% having 50% of the consumption.
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That's just the way it falls. It's got nothing to do with
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inequality or policy or anything else.
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It's just the phenomenon. This week, maybe you'd be the
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one getting the hate mail. Anyway, do you remember the good
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old days, Aunt, when you and I used to look at each other on
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Skype? I heard Skype is going away.
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It's going away. It's about time.
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It should have gone away 20 years ago.
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Why did we stop using Skype? Well, because Microsoft bought
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it and ruined it. And now Microsoft is finally
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putting it out to pasture. I heard that it's putting it out
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to pasture, but it's coming up with some alternative.
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Oh, it's teams. It's trying to push teams.
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Teams, yeah, that other thing that nobody wants to use.
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I use Teams a lot, and I have to tell you, in terms of
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communication, I would say it's as good as Zoom.
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But what Microsoft pushes is that it integrates with Word and
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PowerPoint and Excel and all of that stuff.
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If that were true, Teams would be really cool.
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In fact, it integrates kind of. So if you're a power user of any
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of those pieces of software, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, you'll
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find that the Teams version doesn't do all the things, which
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is astounding to me because the entire suite, all of that are
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Microsoft products. If you can't get your own
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software to talk to your own software, you've got a serious
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problem. Well, this is just, I don't even
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know where to begin on the category of serious problems for
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Microsoft, so I guess we'll just leave it there.
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But rest in peace, Skype on to Zoom like we all were what, 7-8
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years ago now? And to hell with all of.
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It, well, for me it was the biggest plus of COVID is that it
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forced everybody to use Zoom. But you know what angers me?
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And Skype was a great thing because everybody had their
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contact list, which they would text to, and then they would go
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ahead and click the video meeting when they wanted to make
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a call. Zoom has exactly that
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capability. And yet no one will text on
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Zoom. I have no idea why the
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resistance, but there we go. It was sitting right there for
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all of us to use and then we decided not to.
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So we have to go through this idiocy of sending links to
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people so we can have a video chat.
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Do you use WhatsApp? Not really, no.
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I discovered this when we were in Spain.
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Apparently it's a thing that all the Europeans use it.
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What's currently the college age and high school age generations
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in this country are using it. Yeah, all the scammers love it
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too, which is why I bailed out of it.
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Yeah, but it does that. It does the text in the video
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thing, yeah. I bailed out 20 minutes after I
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started because of all the scammers that just for some
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reason were able to find me the needle in the proverbial
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haystack. But so it goes.
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Which of course, it brings us to the foolishness of the week,
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which is going to get, I think, to something you really like to
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talk about a lot. In my home state of Connecticut,
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the it's great state of Connecticut.
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A young woman, her name is Alicia Ortiz, managed to
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graduate high school and get herself a scholarship to
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college. Now that, let's not lose our
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minds. The scholarship was to the
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University of Connecticut, Hartford, which, you know, all
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right, we're not all going to do a dance around the maypole over
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that. But what makes this an
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interesting case is that Miss Ortiz is illiterate.
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She can neither read nor write, and yet she graduated high
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school with honors and got herself a scholarship to the
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State University in Connecticut. My God.
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Yeah, go ahead, take a guess how she pulled this off.
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I hate to say it, but she's got to be a member of a favored
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class. Yeah, I don't think that really
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matters. Don't tell me it can't be AI.
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If she can't read and write, she can't interact with an AI.
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Text to speech and. Wow.
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My mind went immediately to my old math teachers saying things
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like, well, you're not going to be able to carry a calculator
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with you everywhere you go. Meanwhile, now we all do well,
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what are we going to tell people like this?
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You can't just carry text to speech everywhere you go.
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Of course you can. You can, but it raises the
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question, if we were going to accept that, why would any of us
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write? I mean, why do text to speech if
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everybody can't read and write if other people can't read and
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write, I should say. Why go to school at all?
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Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I mean, bring it right down to the love of brass tacks.
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For the love of God, this is the foolishness of all time.
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Wow, yeah, wow. I was right.
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Think about what she had to outdo to become the foolishness
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of the week. See, now, just before we start
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recording, I said we need to do an episode on what's going on in
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higher education. You said that's not very
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interesting, but look at this. And now we're done with this,
9:25
because what more can be said? For One Stop shopping for all
9:31
things James and Aunt, visit our website wordsandnumbers.org.
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We give a special shout out to our Patreon sponsors who help us
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keep the lights on. If you'd like to contribute, go
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to patreon.com/words and Numbers.
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Before we get started on the main episode this week though,
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and I have a quick question for you that I suspect any number of
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our listeners might have as well.
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Do you remember the good old days when we said things like
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the Social Security trustees say that Social Security will be
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bankrupt or will run out of funds by 20?
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Well, that's not even right either.
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How did they put it? Funds will be depleted by 2026.
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Do you remember when they used to say that?
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Well, that's next year, and lo and behold, they don't say that
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anymore. Now they say 20-30.
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Five, No, it's been, I don't ever recall them saying 2026.
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I think 2035 has always been the number plus or minus a little
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bit. I mean, unless you're going back
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20 years and I'm not recalling. I just seem to remember that you
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and I were working with a number in 2026.
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I have to go back and look at what they were saying 20 years
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ago. Let's go back and take a look,
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it might be worth it. But anyway, enough for my random
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questions for one day. Well, but hang on, this is a
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point worth making because you and I have said this before and
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other people have taken issues saying this is incorrect because
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Social Security says they'll be able to pay $0.75 out of every
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dollar that they owe. And we said no, That's by
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definition what happens when you're insolvent.
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You can't make your full commitment.
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The fact that you can make 75% of it is irrelevant.
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You can't make your full commitment, therefore you are
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insolvent. And indeed, that's what Social
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Security says. And well, the number of these
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days, they say they can make 83% really as of 2035.
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But let's take a deep breath and remember this thing, inflation,
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because that erodes the value of those dollars.
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You're not going to get 83% of the purchasing power even if you
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get 83% of the dollars. Yeah, this is a train wreck
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waiting to happen. And it will.
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Happen. Well, you know that it's every
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May that Social Security board of trustees comes out with their
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annual report. So that's just a couple months
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off. We should keep our eye out for
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it and give it a serious treatment come May.
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Are they going to have anybody left there to do the work?
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That's a very good question. They may not come out with it
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this year. I've been watching, what is it?
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The weatherman are all worried now because they don't know
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where they'll get their weather alerts from because everybody at
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the federal level and the government's been fired.
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The federal parks are all in various stages of disrepair
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because all the Park Rangers have been fired.
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Who else is going to get fired? Well, it's interesting.
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I'm here in the outskirts of Washington, DC and there's
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apparently record number of houses up for sale as people are
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looking to move out. And I have to say, you know, I
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would not wish job loss on anyone.
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So understand that going in. However, it is the case, and I
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have observed this going back a couple of decades, that the
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Washington, DC area has been recession proof in the height of
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the 2008 housing crisis, when the rest of the country, it took
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us about 10 years to come out of that.
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The rest of the country's in serious recession.
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There's a housing boom going on here in DC.
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Why? Because you're guaranteed your
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income. The federal workers, they're
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never fired. They're guaranteed the paycheck,
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the whole business. And again, I don't wish I'll on
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anyone, but for the first time, they're feeling what the rest of
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America lives with all the time. Yeah, well, when seven of the
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top 10 counties in terms of affluence are within a spitting
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distance of Washington, DC, you can see the problem.
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If you've got a brain in your head and eyes, you can see the
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problem. And people often say, or they
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say now, well, you can't be heartless.
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All these people are going to be out of jobs.
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I get it. But where was the concern when
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they were being paid out of my pocket?
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Right. Yeah.
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Nobody took any great concern for the level of taxation which
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led to this problem, and here we are.
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I've got no dog in the hunt. I think everybody's guilty, but
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you and I are going to be talking about this for the next
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two years. I would.
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Did you see a number? I could have sworn that recently
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I ran across something that said even if DOGE gets its pie in the
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sky results in terms of layoffs, that it's only something like 6%
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of the federal workforce. I don't see a way in hell that
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anybody can balance the budget as things now stood.
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I'm taking bets on it. As you all know.
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You probably saw this on Facebook.
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If you think the budget will be balanced next year, bring your
14:38
money over here. Ant will hold the cash when we
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wait for the results. Yep, because that dirtbag Mike
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Schneider never paid up on the election.
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I'm going. To keep you are.
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Still salty about that. I am so salty about it.
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I will be talking about this as they take the IV out of my arm
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when they finally give up. But anyway.
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So this week we're going to talk about the consumer blackout.
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I didn't even know this was a thing until it inundated my
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Facebook feed. Everybody's saying, well, don't
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buy from these places. And I was talking to my wife.
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Apparently there's a blacklist of it's specifically businesses
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that have taken down their DEI policies off their websites.
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Well, you know, now I want to go spend more money at those
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places, but we'll get to that later.
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For now, I didn't even find out about this until the day after
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it allegedly happened. Oh did it happen in the PAL?
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I thought it was happening like this week or something.
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No, I believe it was yesterday. I should tell the nice people we
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are recording on March 1 and I believe this was on February
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28th. I became convinced it was on
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February 28th so they could point to January and say look
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how much sales were down. Yeah, yeah.
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Because there's 10% fewer sales days in February than there are
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in January. But then I thought to myself,
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these morons can't read data. Well, The thing is, in this
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whole business reminded me of the Cash for Clunkers.
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Remember that back in Good Lord, whenever.
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I do. Wow, that would have been like
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2001, 2002. I think it was a response.
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Yes, it was response to 911 because it was under George
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Bush. After 911 there was a recession.
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It was short lived and they did this cash for clunkers thing.
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The government would subsidized your if you traded in your older
16:34
car for a new car, and there was some government subsidization
16:37
going on there. This is incorrect.
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We're going to get a lot of mail on this.
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It was 2009. Oh, was it OK?
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It was in response to the housing, to the housing, and
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everybody's OK, everybody's underwater on everything, so
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let's get everybody buying more cars.
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OK, well I've got it associated my mind with George Bush, so it
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must have been the tail end of his presidency.
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Was. It really OK, wow, I'm
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completely off base in the whole thing there.
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Well, here's what happened. The government said you trade in
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your old car for a new car and they made some noise about,
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well, this is good for the environment because the older
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cars are less environmentally friendly.
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All this stuff, but you trade it in and the government will kick
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in some cash as well. There was a window for this.
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It was like several months time as I recall.
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It was in the fall of whatever year that was.
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And I said at the time you watch what happens, this is not going
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to have any effect on the total number of cars sold long term.
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All that's going to happen is people who were planning on
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buying a car six months in the future are going to buy it now
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instead to take care of Cash for Clunkers.
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And sure enough, if you look at the data during Cash for
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Clunkers, huge uptick in car sales when Cash for Clunkers was
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done, huge down tick in car sales and when you put it all
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together, the total sales no different than the year before.
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Yeah, that sounds exactly right though, doesn't it?
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Because if you can't afford a car, you're not going to buy a
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car. Right.
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They can fiddle around at the margins all they want, but
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unless they're going to come up with like 80% of the value of a
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car, I'm not buying. Yeah, yeah, throwing a couple
18:16
thousand on the table isn't going to change anything,
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especially when you're talking about a new car.
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You know you're looking at roughly 30 to $40,000 of an
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outlay. Well, a couple grand is going to
18:26
really make that much of a difference.
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If you're going to buy one in August, you'll sure as hell buy
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one in June. That's right.
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You'd be a crazy person not to. But, you know, I want to get
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back to this idea that people can make some sort of grand
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gesture with a day of boycotting.
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And, you know, you start to think about this, and I want you
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to really think about this and name for me the boycotts that
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have ever worked. And let's stick with America.
18:55
Let's stick with the. US.
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Yeah, I don't know of any. That's not to say there aren't.
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I just don't know of any. Only two came to mind off the
19:03
top of my head, the Montgomery Bus Boycott back in the 1950s
19:07
before we were born right in the Civil rights era, and the Bud
19:12
Light fiasco. I don't recall the Bud Light
19:16
fiasco. When Bud Light hired Dylan
19:18
Mulvaney, who was either a man or a woman depending on how you
19:22
look at things, to be their spokesman, and all the good old
19:26
boys who drank various Anheuser Busch products decided they
19:30
weren't good buy that anymore. No, I wasn't aware of that.
19:35
And sometime later, Anheuser Busch started hiring country
19:39
music singers to, you know, support the brand again.
19:42
So those are the only two things that I came up with.
19:45
Now, apparently, in 1988, there was a tuna boycott that was
19:50
pretty successful. And I remembered this, but only
19:52
after I read about it. Remember back in the late 80s
19:56
when everybody lost their minds because porpoises were being
19:59
caught in the tuna Next, For some reason we could eat tuna
20:05
but not porpoises. I never really understood the
20:09
differentiation there. For whatever the reason, that
20:12
was what people decided and a boycott on tuna really got off
20:17
the ground until they came up with new ways of catching tuna.
20:21
Right. Yeah.
20:21
And now that they advertised it as porpoise safer, dolphin
20:25
safer, whatever it was, yeah. Yep, that's right.
20:28
Dolphin Safe Tuna. You can buy it in the store and
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apparently people still do care about that.
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And that boycott actually did accomplish something.
20:36
So I don't want to say that boycotts never accomplish
20:39
anything because we have a few counter examples right here.
20:43
And there were one or two more that I read about when I was
20:46
thinking about this that I thought, OK, that's interesting.
20:48
It was a meat boycott in the 1970s and you know, these sorts
20:52
of things. You really think Target's going
20:56
to feel the heat because a bunch of people decided not to go
21:00
there on February? 28th Yeah, See, I think that's
21:03
the thing. There are a couple of things
21:05
that make the boycott work in the case of Bud Light and tuna,
21:09
neither one of which were at play here.
21:11
One of them is that it's an ongoing thing.
21:14
So you say, look, we're not going to buy tuna until.
21:17
That's right, it has to be prolonged.
21:19
It has to be prolonged and there has to be an alternative.
21:23
So you can't say, for example, we're going to boycott the gas
21:26
stations. I'm sorry, most people don't
21:28
have an alternative to that. You got to buy gas.
21:31
The question is where? So there's got to be
21:33
alternatives. To do a boycott for one day is
21:36
ridiculous. All that's going to happen is
21:39
people are going to shift their spending.
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So the stuff they were going to buy on Monday, they can't
21:43
because it's a boycott. Fine, I'll buy it on Tuesday.
21:46
I'm just astonished that anybody thinks this is going to work at
21:51
all. I don't even think that you're
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going to have a dip on the sales that one day.
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And here we get, I think, to the larger issue of people who live
22:00
in ideological bubbles. I think, yeah, you can tune into
22:04
Facebook and Twitter and see a bunch of crackpots saying, oh, I
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don't like this policy from Target.
22:10
I'm not going there on February 28th.
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I don't care if I need to buy something at Target.
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That's where I'm going. I don't care what your cause is,
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I don't care about the pro DEI people any more than I cared
22:24
about the anti-gay people who pulled the same nonsense with
22:27
Target and other places not too terribly long ago.
22:31
Let me say something in defense of this because as a free
22:35
marketer, I say this is exactly the way it's supposed to work.
22:39
If you're dissatisfied with company for whatever reason,
22:42
stop buying from it. You know, we say this all the
22:44
time. My complaint is the way they're
22:46
going about it isn't going to achieve anything.
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But listen to what you just said because you're exactly right.
22:53
If you're dissatisfied then you shouldn't shop, and if enough
22:59
people are dissatisfied then something will give.
23:02
Yep. So with the moral preening and
23:04
the grandstanding, it's just ridiculous.
23:08
Right. Yeah.
23:09
Everybody wants to be on the right side of whatever today's
23:12
idiotic cause du jour is. Five years from now it's going
23:16
to look back and say what was the problem again, because they
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won't remember because there wasn't one.
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I'll give you an example about the preening.
23:23
So apparently how your company gets on this list to be banned
23:29
or boycotted rather, is that you remove your DEI policy from your
23:35
web page. That's how people are
23:36
identifying these. And ALDI, one of my wife's
23:39
favorite stores was on this list and people saying, oh, boycott
23:43
ALDI until somebody pointed out wait a minute, ALDI redesigned
23:47
its entire website. It's DEI policy is still there,
23:51
it's just not where it was before.
23:53
But somebody went along and looked and said, well, I don't
23:56
see it. Therefore, put all the on the
23:57
list. You know, I remember back in the
24:00
good old days when I was working at the group homes.
24:03
You may find this hard to believe that, but there's not a
24:04
lot of reactionary conservatives working in the group homes.
24:07
And I was out with a Co worker who had just moved into the
24:10
state and I was showing them around.
24:12
Stopped at a gas station because I was parched as I often AM and
24:15
I bought a Snapple and he said oh you can't buy Snapple.
24:20
I'm like no I'm pretty sure I just did but they support
24:23
pro-life causes. I said, who gives a?
24:27
They make great tea. Right.
24:29
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he looked at me and I said,
24:32
I buy Ben and Jerry's ice cream, even though those commies do all
24:35
kinds of things with the money that I would prefer they not do.
24:39
But my love of the ice cream outweighs my distaste with what
24:42
they're going to do with the cash.
24:45
So too, the Snapple, right? I buy what I buy because I like
24:47
what I like, and I can imagine a case in which I wouldn't buy a
24:53
product. But those two don't even come
24:57
close. My favorite example of this?
25:01
It worked so well, the boycott wasn't even necessary.
25:05
And I forget the woman's name. You may well do.
25:08
This was back in the days of Rush Limbaugh's whatever it was
25:12
radio program. TV program.
25:13
I guess it was radio. Oh God, I, I, I can't remember
25:16
her name. Rush.
25:17
Limbaugh called out some woman and called her a horrible name
25:21
on his program. And there was a huge outcry of
25:26
people, you know, saying, no, you can't say this.
25:28
I forget all the details of of the thing.
25:30
But, you know, people were incensed.
25:32
And what happened was within 24 hours, Rush Limbaugh issued an
25:37
apology. So he back stepped on the whole
25:39
thing. And what was fascinating is how
25:42
it happened that nobody boycotted.
25:46
It was simply the threat, what might come to be a boycott.
25:50
His advertisers were afraid of this.
25:52
They contacted him and said look, you either have to walk
25:56
this back or else we're withdrawing our advertising
25:59
money. And look, I wouldn't advertise
26:03
on his show if he was offending on a regular basis half or so of
26:08
the people in the United States. Why on earth, as a business,
26:12
would I want to do that? As a matter of fact, as a
26:14
business, I want to remain as politically neutral as is
26:18
humanly possible, right? I want to be neither for nor
26:22
against any political thing. What I want is for lots and lots
26:26
of people to come to my store and buy things, just as many as
26:31
I can get. And I don't care if you're a
26:33
Trump person or a Kamala Biden person.
26:36
Are you a dollar owning person? That's right.
26:40
Are you bringing dollars? That's the important part if
26:43
you're running a business. But, you know, we've gotten to
26:47
the point now where people have to infuse everything with their
26:52
goofy ideology. I mean, no matter what.
26:55
And, you know, we've got all kinds of silly words that we use
26:59
to describe all of this, but let's just call it what it is.
27:02
This is idiocy and and people should just knock it off.
27:08
And as you said, if you don't like that they removed DEI
27:12
policies from their websites. And here I am saying hip, hip,
27:16
Hooray, let's get rid of all, and I mean all the other DEI
27:20
policies across the fruited plain because this is a
27:23
pernicious thing, right? And we could do a future episode
27:27
on all the reasons why this is just a terrible idea.
27:32
But hey, finally people are saying OK enough and they're
27:35
getting rid of these things. Well, let's get back to business
27:38
as usual. But should business have ever
27:42
involved itself with this nonsense in the 1st place?
27:45
And the reason why businesses did was because they feared
27:49
losing the business of the American life.
27:53
What you're going to end up with here is a pendulum that keeps
27:57
swinging. So it's probably going to swing
28:00
too far to the other side right now.
28:03
How about that? Just a few months after the
28:05
inauguration, and then it's probably going to swing a little
28:08
too far back the other way when I'm here to tell you it's going
28:12
to happen about 3 months before the midterm elections.
28:16
You think so? Put it in the bank, that's when
28:18
it's going to happen. And so on and so forth until the
28:22
end of all time. Well, the only way to win this
28:25
game, getting all the way back to a movie we both loved, I'm
28:28
quite sure, is not to play. Don't play this game with people
28:33
because really, you can be a decent human being.
28:37
It doesn't take much. It really doesn't just go do the
28:41
right thing. And that doesn't mean you have
28:43
to lean all over everybody else all the time because you're not
28:47
quite sure they're 100% pure on your issue.
28:52
And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
28:54
numbers. Until next time.
28:56
Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
28:59
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
29:03
week. Can't take it easy.
29:04
See you next week, James.