Moneybox

Fly The Friendly Skies

I did a column today arguing that people should stop whining about air travel which is actually pretty excellent.

David Dayen on Twitter asked if I’m going to be renaming this blog Consumer Pangloss. I’d say no, but I do think this is an excellent issue. My basic framework is that the United States of America in 2013 is one of the richest countries that has ever existed and that despite inequality and all the rest middle class Americans circa 2013 enjoy some of the highest living standards of anyone at any point in world history. All that said, it’s clear that we have some very serious dysfunctions in the health care sector of the economy and real problems with financial regulation and higher education as well. Those are three really prominent and important parts of the economy. To my mind, it follows from this that everything else is probably pretty damn good. This isn’t Mozambique, after all, we can’t be doing everything wrong.