Economics plays a role in why people move to San Antonio

See Why move to San Antonio? Transplants point to costs, culture, comida: Come for the affordability, stay for the Tex-Mex by Emma Weidmann of MYSA. Excerpt:

"unemployment in San Antonio and New Braunfels fell to 4.2 percent in September 2025, down from 4.4 percent the month before. That's just a smidge below the national unemployment rate in November 2025, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports was 4.6 percent. 

Meanwhile, the average rent in San Antonio is 18 percent lower than the national average, according to Zillow. The average home value in the Alamo City is $245,985 compared to the national average of $359,241, Zillow reports. And of course, Texas is attractive overall for its lack of state income and state property tax."

Also mentioned are the food & culture. San Antonio is often called a big city with a small town feel. 

But if more people move here things could get more congested (the article mentions heavy traffic). Housing prices could rise if the demand keeps increasing. Then San Antonio becomes less desirable.

The economist Steven Landsburg gave this definition for the "Indifference Principle." "Except when people have unusual tastes or unusual talents, all activities must be equally desirable"  (from his book "The Armchair Economist").

We could also say that all places to live will be equally desirable. If a city has a high quality of life, then more people want to move there. But that raises prices (like housing, for instance). Then it costs more to get those extra benefits from the quality of life. As more people move there, prices keep rising and eventually all the extra benefits are completely offset by the higher cost of living).

It would work in reverse. If a city is really bad, then some people leave and then congestion and prices fall so that it is not so bad anymore.

Related posts:

The Indifference Principle Comes To Columbus, Ohio (2025)

Is Spokane really one of the best places to live? (2023)

Real estate agents on YouTube have called San Antonio the 'worst city in the U.S.' (Acase of the Indifference Principle?) (2022)

The Indifference Principle Comes To San Antonio (2021)

San Antonio cracks top 25 on U.S. News and World Report's "Best Places to Live" (2017)

What Is Is the Richest City in America? (2015)

North Dakota Is Number One!  (2011)

Can Some Places Really Be The "Best" Places To Retire To?  (2011)

The Top Budget Vacation Spot Is...Austin, Texas!? (2009)

There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (Or A Free Concert)
(2008)

America's Most Affordable Places to Retire  (2008)

The 10 Most Affordable Housing Markets (2008) 

Economists Love Fables And Parables (Or, The Essence Of Economic Analysis)

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote the following in Slate magazine back in the 1990s:

“Economic theory is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought experiments--parables, if you like--that are intended to capture the logic of economic processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in hypothetical settings.”

Here is the link to the article the quote is from: The Accidental Theorist. He has a brilliant example of how labor saving technology does not increase unemployment.

University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg wrote the following in his book The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life:

“But as Aesop discovered some time ago, the details of reality can disguise essential truths that are best revealed through simple fictions. Aesop called them fables and economists call them models." (p. 34)

And

"Economists love fables. A fable need not be true or even realistic to have an important moral. No tortoise ever really raced against a hare, yet “Slow but steady wins the race” remains an insightful lesson.” (p. 40)

So when you see an economics professor draw PPFs on the board which show the tradeoff between houses and cars or when we draw supply and demand curves, we know that these are "simple fictions." But, by assuming, for example, that there is a society that makes only two goods and has one resource (labor, say), we can learn something important, like the The Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost. 

Also see my blog called Dollars and Dragons: A look at the intersection of economics and mythology. It has many posts on economics and storytelling.

Related posts: 

London School of Economics Professor Mary Morgan says storytelling continues to play a key role in economic analysis today (2023)

Is good business as much about storytelling as the stock market? (2023)

Is Storytelling Important For The Economy?  (2021)

More risk-averse and less entrepreneurial people grew up listening to stories wherein competitions and challenges are more likely to be harmful than beneficial (2024) 

Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’: Brands trying to wrest greater control of their narratives are asking for ‘storytelling’ skill sets—without a campfire in sight (2025) 

The % of 25-54 year-olds employed was 80.7% in Dec. after being 80.6% in Nov.; Average hours worked decreased

One weakness of the unemployment rate is that if people drop out of the labor force they cannot be counted as an unemployed person and the unemployment rate goes down. They are no longer actively seeking work and it might be because they are discouraged workers. The lower unemployment rate can be misleading in this case. People dropping out of the labor force might indicate a weak labor market.

We could look at the employment to population ratio instead, since that includes those not in the labor force. But that includes everyone over 16 and that means that senior citizens are in the group but many of them have retired. The more that retire, the lower this ratio would be and that might be misleading. It would not necessarily mean the labor market is weak.

But we have this ratio for people age 25-54 (which also eliminates many college age people who might not be looking for work).

It was 80.6% in Jan. 2020 and 69.6% in April 2020.  Click here to see the BLS data. Here is what it was for each of the last 4 years

2022) 79.883% 

2023) 80.683%

2024) 80.717%

2025) 80.600% (just an 11 month average due to no data for October instead of 12)

 

The unemployment rate was 4.4% in Dec. after being 4.5% in Nov. Click here to go to that data. Here is what it was for each of the last 4 years

 

2022) 3.6%

2023) 3.6%

2024) 4.0%

2025) 4.3%

 

Labor Force participation fell to 62.404% from 62.462%. Here is what it was for each of the last 4 years 

 

2022) 62.2%

2023) 62.6%

2024) 62.6%

2025) 62.4% 

 

The % of the adult population employed rose to 59.67% from 59.63% (that is people 16 years old and older).  Here is what it was for each of the last 4 years 

 

2022) 60.0%

2023) 60.3%

2024) 60.1%

2025) 59.7%

 

Here is the timeline graph of the percentage of 25-54 year olds employed since 2015.

 

 

Now since 1948.

 

 

Now hours worked. This comes from the St. Louis FED. See Average Weekly Hours of All Employees, Total Private. It was 34.3 in Nov. and 34.2 in Dec. Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions.  

 

 

 

Related posts:

This one has to do with the difference between two employment surveys. See The economy added 339,000 jobs in May according to the establishment survey but the household survey showed a loss of 310,000 and a rise in the unemployment rate from 2023. 

"The reason for the discrepancy is that there are two surveys. The establishment survey is used for the Labor Department's monthly jobs report. They contact businesses for this survey. The household survey is used to put together the unemployment rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics contacts households for this one."

See also Comparing employment from the BLS household and payroll surveys from the BLS.

Click here to see a good Twitter thread on the jobs report (including wages) from Harvard economist Jason Furman.  

See also U.S. payrolls rose 50,000 in December, less than expected; unemployment rate falls to 4.4% by Jeff Cox of CNBC.

On every continent, food supplies have grown faster than the population

By Pablo Rosado & Max Roser. 

"We just lived through the period with the fastest population growth in human history. Six decades ago, there were three billion people on our planet. Since 2022, there have been more than eight billion people — an increase of five billion over this period.

It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace with population growth. But as the chart above shows, they grew even faster. On every continent, food supplies — measured by calories — grew faster than the population. This rise in food production per person was a major reason for the decline of extreme poverty and hunger.

To us, this chart documents one of humanity’s most extraordinary achievements."

 

 

If 2025 was not the best year in human history it was still very good.

See In Which I Try Valiantly to Cheer You Up by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Excerpts:

"While 2025 wasn’t the best year in human history, measured by child mortality, it was one of the five best years ever. Fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000."

"Until around 1970, a majority of adults had always been illiterate. Now we’re at 88 percent adult literacy, in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school"

"roughly 30 percent fewer Americans will have died of overdoses in 2025 than in 2023" 

"A drug called lenacapavir is emerging as a more potent weapon to prevent H.I.V./AIDS; it can be taken by injection once every six months and virtually eliminates the risk of getting H.I.V."

"measured by child mortality, education, nutrition or women’s rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300,000 years"

Related posts:

Even This Year (2024) Is the Best Time Ever to Be Alive (2025) 

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History (2018)

The World Is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better (2019)

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it (2018)

How Much Has Life Expectancy Improved?  (2018)

This Has Been the Best Year Ever (2019)

Some Good Economic News (2013)

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2020) 

We are privileged to live in an age of medical miracles that increase human welfare (as the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has fallen) (2023) 

Buyer Beware: Star Ratings Actually Steer Us Away From the Best Shopping Deals

When reviewers consider prices while rating products, there’s a tendency to downgrade the highest-quality yet pricier items

By Christopher Mims of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"People are harsher critics of more expensive items."

"the high price tag alone drags down the rating." 

"The less we pay for an item, the more generous our assessment of it tends to be."

"Ying Zeng . . . assistant professor of marketing at the Leeds School of Business at University of Colorado, Boulder . . . says when we read reviews online, we succumb to what psychologists call “shallow thinking”—that is, we aren’t considering the biases of those who write online reviews."

Ben Donovan's [of Marketplace Pulse] "research suggests that Amazon’s algorithm bumps up cheaper items that are selling in higher volumes, as opposed to more expensive ones that sell more slowly."

"Our penchant for shopping on our phones is accelerating our impulse buying."

"Limited-time discounts and livestreaming sales also push us toward impulse purchases, says Zeng. Tactics like these trigger “System 1” thinking, she adds, the fast, emotional, intuitive thinking that usually handles everyday tasks, first described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman."

"Slow down, take your time. Then the more deliberative System 2 thinking will kick in, where we consider more variables, including our own biases and those of others."

"Groceries and other items are purchased more automatically, while shoppers use AI chatbots and other new tools to go deeper when researching other, bigger-ticket items," says Adobe’s director of digital insights, Vivek Pandya.

Related post:

How Does Caffeine Shape the Way We Spend Money? (2023) 

Creative destruction and mysterious new types of occupations & professions

See You Say You’re a Knowledge Architect? Why Modern Careers Are So Hard to Explain: More Americans have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago, and even well-known professions are changing by Callum Borchers of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"LinkedIn estimates one in five Americans has a job that didn’t exist in 2000. Many of the new titles aren’t exactly self-explanatory.

Knowledge architects don’t draw blueprints, conversation designers don’t foster dialogue between people, and orchestration engineers don’t work with musical instruments. 

What do these people do? Their jobs all involve work with artificial-intelligence models."

"Jobs are getting more niche, and the fruits of our labor more abstract."

"“Roles may get more specialized as companies continue to invest in AI,” says Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief. “We’re already seeing new specialized leadership roles emerge, like workforce development manager and chief growth officer.”"

An "AI toxicology analyst . . . uses artificial intelligence to help assess threat levels after chemical spills and advises on cleanup efforts."

Related posts: 

Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that) (2016)

New Profession Of "Wedding Hashtag Helper" Might Be An Example Of Creative Destruction At Work (2022)

Are dating coaches who help you with texting modern Cyrano de Bergeracs? (2023)

Do You Need a Fixer for Your Disney Vacation? Third-party companies tout advanced knowledge for private tours of complex amusement parks that can cost $1,000 and up (2023)

Parents Hire $4,000 Sorority Consultants to Help Daughters Dress and Impress During Rush (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

"Wedding content creators" curate the perfect social-media-ready images of the nuptials and celebration (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

 

"Independent education consultants" help high school students and their parents navigate the competitive college-admissions process (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

"Robot Wranglers" help lost and confused automatons (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

Professional Bridesmaids (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

 

Handbag authenticators (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

 

App reviewers (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2025)

 

Video Clippers (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2025)  

 

Creative Destruction

See Creative Destruction by Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox. Excerpt:

"Joseph Schumpeter
(1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve."

But also see this link which suggests that the idea goes back even before Schumpeter to other scholars: Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter by Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert.

"Abstract

This paper argues that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative."  

The student bodies of selective universities end up including more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than would happen if the schools just admitted students purely by SAT scores

From Timothy Taylor. Excerpts:

"Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores"

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment." (these "three factors . . . are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes") 

"attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%"

Using only test scores "would increase the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution by 8.8 percentage points"

"when these selective schools tell potential applicants that they don’t just look at test scores, but instead use a variety of nonacademic criteria like being “well-rounded” or “authentic” for admissions, the actual result of their process is that applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted at a higher rate than others with the same test scores."

Related posts:

As more people choose to marry someone with a similar income, inequality increases (2020) 

The preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals (2017)

"Among students in the bottom socioeconomic quartile, 15 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree within eight years of their expected high school graduation, compared with 22 percent in the second quartile, 37 percent in the third quartile, and 60 percent in the top quartile."

Do we exchange gifts because we desire, as Adam Smith said, not only to be loved, but to be lovely?

See Adam Smith and Loveliness from Liberty Fund, Inc. Here is the full quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and on the Origins of Languages (Stewart ed.): 

"Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame." 

I thought of Adam Smith's theory on this while reading A Perfect Christmas Is Suboptimal: Gift giving is inefficient from an economic point of view. It’s an example of ‘expensive signaling’ by Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer. It seems that the aim of this "expensive signaling" might be not only to be loved, but to be lovely. Excerpts:

"In buying gifts, Americans also spend time—hours browsing, guessing, wrapping and returning. Valued at something like the average hourly wage and added to typical holiday spending, the implied resource cost of Christmas gift-giving, by my estimate, is roughly $1,500 to $2,300 per shopper."

"Gifts aren’t primarily about consumption. They are about relationships. A gift is a signal: evidence that someone noticed you, thought of you, took time and tried."

"Economists call this “costly signaling.” When signals are cheap, they are easy to fake and quickly lose informational content. “I care about you” is cheap talk. Cash can be cheap talk too: It requires little information and little effort. It is efficient, yes—but efficiency isn’t always what the recipient wants to maximize. Often the real question is simpler and more human: Do you know me? Did you try?"

"A slightly “wasteful” gift can be a more credible signal than cash precisely because it reveals effort."

"The worst gifts aren’t the ones that miss; they are the ones that reveal no attempt at all—generic, last-minute, indistinguishable from what you would give a coworker in an office Secret Santa."

"We are purchasing something other than objects: reassurance, attention, belonging—a ritualized way of saying you matter to me and I am willing to incur a cost to prove it."

Incurring a cost might be a clear and believable signal that you love someone. And you might be able to tell yourself that you are lovely because you did so.

Related post:

Adam Smith said that people want not only to be loved, but to be lovely (but how much does it cost to achieve that?) (2025) 

This post is featured in an economics textbook

The post is below. It is featured in Introduction to Microeconomics by Luís Cabral. He is chair of the economics department at New York University.

Here is an excerpt from the book followed by the post from May 27, 2019:

"Once you get into the mechanics of comparative statics, it should come naturally to interpret real-world events as shocks to demand and supply curves, which in turn lead to adjustments in price and transaction volumes. Consider some recent events in the honey industry, as described in Box 7.1 (source: Cyril Morong). The left column includes a series of quotes from a Wall Street Journal article on the honey industry. The right column, in turn, includes a series of comments on how to interpret these events in terms of the model of supply and demand." (see pages 274-75 of Dr. Cabral's book) 

Why honey prices have climbed about 25% since 2013

See You’ll Need a Lot More Money to Buy That Jar of Honey: Beekeepers are in a sweet spot as consumer trends shift away from cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup by Lucy Craymer of The WSJ. Excerpts, with my comments in brackets:

"Honey prices are starting to sting.

Global honey prices are at their highest levels in years, due to a new wave of consumer demand for natural sweeteners [demand increases because tastes or preferences increased with the opposite happening for sugar] and declining bee populations that are hampering mass production [supply decreases]."

"In addition, it is being used more as an ingredient in shampoos, moisturizers and other personal-care products that companies market as naturally made [another increase in demand due to tastes]."

"Retail honey prices world-wide recently averaged $4.69 a pound, according to market research firm Euromonitor International. Prices have climbed about 25% since 2013, while the cost of sugar has fallen around 30% over the same time frame."

"U.S. retail prices averaged $7.66 a pound in May, up 9% from a year earlier"

"Those prices have risen by about two-thirds in the last decade"

"Americans consumed 596 million pounds of honey in 2017, or an average of nearly two pounds per person—up 65% since 2009 [if demand shifts right, we expect both price and quantity to increase]."

"It has been touted by celebrities—including tennis star Novak Djokovic—for its health benefits and numerous scientific studies have shown it can help heal wounds, ulcers and burns [maybe this is part of the reason tastes increased]."

"Global honey production has been relatively stable over the past five years [but if supply shifted left that could cancel out the demand increase and leave quantity the same]."

"In the U.S., honey production peaked in 2014 and has fallen 15% since then [if supply shifted more to the left than demand shifted to the right, total Q falls-maybe the increased American quantity means less for consumers elsewhere]."