Pun Salad

And that time is when The Dave Barry 2025 Holiday Gift Guide is published. It is on Dave's substack, and I have not checked how much, if any, of it is behind a paywall. (I am a paid subscriber, and you should be too, sourpuss.)

My Eye Candy du Jour is available at Amazon, but Dave got his from the somewhat more authentic source, Norsland Lefse. They are based in Minnesota (of course), but it appears the fish balls are authentically imported from Norway.

However, they also sell lefse, and they are offering a free joke book if you buy a 3-pack. And lefse is actually good! With enough butter and sugar.

Also of note:

• Us Me too. Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: Hollis Robbins proposes A We-free December.

  I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media posts, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.

  No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”

  Why am I calling a halt? First, to see if it is possible. Second, because of the excellent new Apple TV show Pluribus, about a virus that turns almost everyone on Earth into one collective “we.” The hero is one of eleven individuals who seem to be immune. The show is all about I versus we. Watch if you can.

  A we-free December would make these New York Times sentences impossible: “We need to change how we build housing.” “We’re not warriors clashing, we’re sojourners exploring.” “Each of us longs to grow, to become better versions of ourselves.” “How far we have fallen!”

  I have been guilty a lot of gussying up my posts with the "royal we", but it's a habit I'm trying to break. (This item's headline is meant to be amusingly ironic.)

  And I've also been watching Plur1bus.

  So I'll see how December goes.

• 

  Happy Anniversary! Just kidding. Because 'twas 96 years (and, um, one month) ago today, October 29, 1929, that common wisdom says the "Black Friday" stock market crash triggered the Great Depression.

  But Amity Shlaes rebuts that common wisdom, specifically that expressed in a recent book (Amazon link at your right): Sorkin Rounds Up the Usual Suspects . (NR gifted link) She notes that Sorkin's book is "an artful reprise" of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929. And:

  In that 1955 book, Galbraith argued that unregulated speculation, exacerbated by lazy statesmen and the greed of the rich, caused the Great Crash. Galbraith’s choice of a narrow time frame — one short year, 1929 — helped him to capture the drama of the crash.

  According to Galbraith, quoted approvingly as “seminal” by Sorkin, the worst day of the Great Crash — Tuesday, October 29 — was “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market,” and “may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets.”

  The stunning story of the market’s plummet, however, also emboldened Galbraith to moot, without seeing any necessity of proving, a second thesis relating to years outside the scope of his title: that the 1930s policy applied by President Roosevelt, the New Deal, somehow made matters better, or could have, had the crash not been so violent.

  Amity does a fine job of debunking both Galbraith and Sorkin. If you need to read a book about the Great Depression, I recommend her 2007 history, The Forgotten Man, on which I reported here.

• Also debunking economic bullshit… is Michael R. Strain: No, the Poverty Threshold Is Not $140,000 (Good Grief). (archive.today link)

  Portfolio manager Michael W. Green begins his much-discussed essay in the Free Press:

  For my whole career in finance, I have distrusted the obvious. And yet, for many years there was one number I assumed was an actuarial fact: the U.S. poverty line. Yes, I saw Americans feeling poorer every year, despite economic growth and low unemployment. But ultimately, I trusted the official statistics. Until I saw a simple statement buried in a research paper.

  And I realized that number—created more than 60 years ago, with good intentions—was a lie.

  Well. Where to start? Herewith, six points of response.

  1. Green engages in a series of calculations that would earn a D in my master’s class. He concludes: “So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative.” Of course, poverty thresholds are inherently arbitrary. You’re free to argue that three-quarters of households are living in poverty — but that argument is absurd on its face.

  Why? Because any poverty threshold that finds most households living in poverty is not analytically serious or practicable. The economist Ernie Tedeschi computes that around 75 percent of households earn less than $140,000. Moreover, as Tedeschi shows, if that’s your threshold, then you should be feeling good about the nation’s progress!

  $140,000 is not a useful poverty threshold to be clear, but the long-run story it tells is pretty unambiguously positive.
  [Edited to adjust for household size and to add a slightly clearer methodology] pic.twitter.com/q6mZ4KKw4c

  — Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) November 26, 2025

  And Michael, as noted, provides 5 more points of contention.

  If you prefer a more liberal take that Michael's, Noah Smith is also not buying it: The "$140,000 poverty line" is very silly. (archive.today link) He includes a telling graphic from Our World in Data, something like this:

  Note that Norway's food insecurity rate is nearly double the US's. I blame fish balls.

  More at the link, quite a bit before you hit the paywall. I was reminded of my own minor detective work when I read (three Thanksgivings ago) in the student newspaper at the University near here:

  More than half of college students suffer from malnutrition, according to Medical Daily

  Does that sound reasonable to you?

• And debunking literary bullshit… Neal Stephenson couldn't help but respond to A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z.

  A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read. Some of my books are listed. Since this is the season of Thanksgiving, I’ll start by saying that I genuinely appreciate the plug! However, I was taken aback by the statement highlighted in the screen grab below:

  [… screen grab elided, but the claim is that, of the five books recommended…]

  “…most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence).”

  I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.

  Neal does a bit of detective work, and his best guess is: AI slop. Perhaps he'll work it into his next book.