The Day The World Stopped Shopping - J.B. MacKinnon

[mountainFrugal]

https://www.jbmackinnon.ca/the-day-the- ... s-shopping

I enjoyed this easy read on consumerism and its costs.

The general content is nothing new to folks around here, but the author tackles a lot of topics that we discuss here at a National Geographic reading level. His main thought experiment is what would happen if consumer demand suddenly dropped 25%? He interviewed a broad number of groups and individuals across many cultures to write this book ranging from hunter gatherers to clothing brand CEOs to Kris De Decker of Low Tech Magazine. He was working on the book before COVID and then some of his thought experiments happened IRL. He touches on materialism and why it is hollow for finding self actualization. The book also touches on unintended consequences of various policies and innovations. For example, lighting becoming more durable with LEDs leading to more lighting rather than the same amount to meet needs (for all the accessories that now have lights). He then ties this back to larger financial and economic simulations for different growth/degrowth scenarios.

I think this might be a good overview book to all the topics we discuss on here. Enjoy.

[jacob]

For example, lighting becoming more durable with LEDs leading to more lighting rather than the same amount to meet needs (for all the accessories that now have lights). He then ties this back to larger financial and economic simulations for different growth/degrowth scenarios.

Twenty five years ago when I first got into this, Jevon's Paradox was the go-to hammer used to shut down any argument or hope that humans would ever change voluntarily. Even after finding/demonstrating solutions for a meaningful life outside consumption (for its own sake or just consuming more than everyone else or more than the previous generation), it seems that these alternatives options are only attractive to a small fraction of humanity.

Why is there a decade(s) or even century long failure to break through to the common man? I still don't get it.

[mountainFrugal]

I figured there was a name for this, but did not know the Jevon's Paradox term. The same thing applies with fuel efficient cars and I am going to guess self-driving cars.
Expectation: "Won't it be great to have all the cars networked together so driving and commuting will be easy".
Reality: "Everyone now sits in even more traffic congestion because more people commute from longer distances in single cars rather than car pooling or taking public transport."

[AxelHeyst]

Ah yes, Jevons Paradox, aka “the jerk who triggered the long arduous dissolution of faith in the purpose and efficacy of my entire career.” I knew I was in trouble when the best argument against Jevons I heard from my colleagues was ‘Jevons. Bah!’ (/dismissive hand wave)

For a modern deep dive on Jevons implications, Giampietro et al have a super juicy paper bringing in emergence, holons, system effects that change the nature of the system etc:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/en ... 00026/full

In conclusion, the Jevons Paradox entails that sustainability problems cannot be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be solved through institutional and behavioral changes.

[zbigi]

Why is there a decade(s) or even century long failure to break through to the common man? I still don't get it.

The idea is just not popularized nearly enough IMO. Look at how "woke" stuff was taught in schools and unis for the past several decades, and how it much of an effect it had on today's young adults. If anti-consumerism was taught in schools with similar intensity, the idea would be widespread by now. Regular people are not interested in fringe ideas and they're not going to learn about anti-consumerism/ERE etc. on their own - it has to be spoonfed to them. Unfortunately, these ideas are a big threat to the powers that rule the world (threat to corporate profits and to government income), so there's little hope of any top-down dissemination happening.

[7Wannabe5]

Why is there a decade(s) or even century long failure to break through to the common man? I still don't get it.

Because it's the common woman who makes most consumption decisions and the solution she has semi-consciously come up with is to stop having babies. Seriously, I just read two of the most recommended novels of 2024 written by young women. The first late 20s protagonist had a PhD in Physics and couldn't afford her Type 1 Diabetes meds, because no health insurance working as adjunct professor at two different schools, and she doesn't have time for a sex life, let alone a baby. The second protagonist was the adopted Manhattanite black daughter of an affluent single white woman, burnt out after teaching kids in the Bronx for a decade, she is working for a billionaire trying to give his money away before he dies, and she spends her weekends looking at apartments she can't afford in Brooklyn; no interest in having children when she can't afford a home.

As Jeremy Grantham noted recently on Nate Hagens podcast, if current demographic trends continue (and there is every indication that they will either continue or accelerate further), economic growth will be down to around 1% within a generation. The refugees of climate change will be the immigrants every halfway developed nation will be welcoming as their top heavy demographic structure teeters towards crash. There are no incentives available within the framework of liberal Capitalism to counter this trend. Marx got it half right, but he didn't realize that the essential unit of the "commune" is not the "worker"; it is the "mother/child." And as Hazel Kyrk noted in her 1923, "Theory of Consumption", this is also the essential unit of "consumption."

Small c "capitalism" and "consumerism" will persist as core human drives, but the 22nd century will dawn either post or pre this dichotomy. The 12 year old kid hustling on the streets of Ibadan will carry the spirit of the small "cap" forward, as the bloated Oligarchs of the West are consumed by their own born and unborn young and the large "C" is melted down to make bullet casings. Focusing on "shopping" as the "curable" core of the problem is quickly becoming an outdated meta-distraction. Like the frugal husband who complains about his wife's spending and packs his own lunch, but doesn't dare rock the boat hard enough to put the covert contract that underpins their continuing relationship at risk, not noticing that his wife's or his teenage child's symmetrically growing discontents of a form less easily spread-sheeted than his own may soon press upon other levers.

Yup, that pretty much sums up my Alternate Prediction of the Month based on which particular trends within the complex model were most emphazised in my most recent reading/viewing.

[zbigi]

Corollary to that is people who FIREd with assumption of 3-4% average real growth will be sorely disappointed in their old age.

[7Wannabe5]

Corollary to that is people who FIREd with assumption of 3-4% average real growth will be sorely disappointed in their old age.

Anybody with a passive strategy based on assumption that the future will be like the past risks disappointment. Fortunately, ERE is not such a strategy*. Also, the baseline is that timber grows at approximately 3%/year even if there is no market for it. In some ways "peak baby" is like "peak oil", because the cost of production renders the drillers idle well prior to the supply thoroughly being depleted. OTOH, babies, unlike oil, are a renewable resource, so current trend could theoretically turn on a dime, if the incentive landscape were to be significantly altered to the extent that it would be a serious stretch to refer to it as liberal Capitalism, and/or if we start to develop next month's alternative scenario based on likelihood of AI monitored artificial wombs and virtual-reality based extremely early worker training campuses.

*Which is why I am being such a pita about not liking ERE to be more narrowly defined based on that which it opposes. It's better than that. It's at a higher level of differentiation -> integration-> differentiation-> integration. I mean, conservation of resources, is more functionally designated as anti-waste than as anti-consumerism, and ultimately waste is that which we do not value, do not care to consume in any manner. So, the skillset desired is that which renders or retains all to our taste, so even "consumerism" and/or "shopping" requires consideration towards loop-closure rather than quick toss into dumpster fire. What is it made of? Is any of it worth keeping as is? What useful purpose did it serve in the past? What tools do I have towards disassembling it? How did I feel about it when I first practiced it? Is it that kid in the toy aisle at the Dollar Tree in the second worst neighborhood in the third worst city in the U.S.? Is it a $250 dinner with a business client in Singapore? Is it the soccer mom shooting up Ozempic? Is it the tick-tock depreciation of my human capital as I type up this post?

[jacob]

In that regard, impact whether it's profit or power or resource consumption can all be described by the original IPAT formula.

Impact = population * affluence * technology

This is done in Dupont style, so it's really a tautology, as in

Impact = Impact/Spending * Spending = Impact/Spending * Spending/Population * Population, where we simply rename Impact/Spending as Technology and Spending/Population as Affluence.

It's clear that impact or power or profit can be grown simply by growing the population. When the other levers aren't strong, this is the most effective tool which is why traditionalists usually call for population increase. If the affluence lever is stronger, people will tend towards fewer children, and this is why people who live in cities typically making materially more money than people living in rural areas have fewer children.

It's perhaps only when the technology lever is strongest that people begin to consider focusing on that instead of increasing offspring or spending. This requires pushing more towards education, knowledge of complexity, operational research, etc.

This suggests that the reason why reducing affluence hasn't been popular is due to the vast majority of people simply not "having arrived" at that point yet. One should note that the transition from women having many children ("the value of a woman was according to how many children she had born") to women making their own money (in the cities) happened very quickly within 1-2 generations.

A generation (or two!!) is still a long time when you're living it, but perhaps one day people will look back at the affluence and waste of 20th century and for the most part consider it as crazy or unusual as the idea of everybody striving to have 8--12 children is currently.

[7Wannabe5]

This suggests that the reason why reducing affluence hasn't been popular is due to the vast majority of people simply not "having arrived" at that point yet.

Yes, I agree and would suggest that this may primarily be due to delay in installing post-modern amenities such as socialized heath care in the unipolar powerful U.S. It seems like if/when the basic middle-class triumvarate of education/housing/healthcare is not reasonably ensured, the tendency is towards increased shopping, other short-termist behaviors, and more extreme risk-taking. OTOH, the first quartile of population density distribution in the U.S. is still only at a level that was often associated with Level Red societies, so value memes across the spectrum remain accessible and likely, although evasion of advanced technology has become increasingly difficult and when combined with affluence renders any distance trivial.

One of the reasons shopping is no longer cool at Level Yellow is that it has become too easy to convey much value. However, prior to this realization, there likely must also be a stage/scene, such as I saw in a fairly recent post-modern-Scandinavian-realm rom-com, in which a guy who is talking about his stock market investments is rejected by the girl in favor of the guy who knows how to dance. Lentil-baby is a Level Yellow post-shopping concept, but it requires previous mastery of Sugar-baby skillz with either dancing or guitar-playing or erotic-knot-tying being the most widely accepted by affluent females who are no longer concerned about whether they might need a spare $40,000 for surgical vacation in Mexico or a father for the child she is having, because her crappy car broke down in the climate event heat before she could get to a pharmacy located over the state line.

A generation (or two!!) is still a long time when you're living it, but perhaps one day people will look back at the affluence and waste of 20th century and for the most part consider it as crazy or unusual as the idea of everybody striving to have 8-12 children is currently.

Yes, this certainly could happen. I wonder if it would also be possible in a very affluent and modularized-network-pattern-languaged-world of the future for a polyamorous female generalist who likes babies to have a total of 8 over 24 years with 5 of her 12 partners contracted over that period being their biological fathers? If you do the math, the relatively few females who want to have a good many babies will likely eventually have to be whimsically supported in alignment with their druthers, if human population is to be maintained at any desired level without utilization of maternity pods. For example, if 4 females choose to have 0 babies, 4 females choose to have 1 baby, 4 females choose to have 2 babies, and 4 females choose to have 3 babies, the 17th female would have to have 10 babies to maintain the population at bare replacement level. The likelihood that some currently long existing human cultural enclave/nations will collapse beyond retrieval if they don't institute more female supportive policy is very high. For example, fewer babies were born in Japan last year than in the year 1880, approximately 6 generations ago.

In many families in the U.S., the Millenials and Gen Z are already beginning to feel the shortly upcoming burden of too many older humans in immediate or extended family. For example, even though my Silent Gen parents had 4 Gen X daughters, we only had a total of 5 children, age 25 to 36, and no grandkids yet, so 50% of us are currently over the age of 50. If I include current partners or primary partners and 50% representation of their children and grandchildren they had with other partners in the mix, the ratio is even worse and the age is skewed even older since all of our male partners but one are older men of Boomer gen, and they only bring in a total of 2.5 more kids and 2 grandkids. This dramatic reduction occurred even though three of the male partners I am including had parents who were immigrants from very traditional cultures. So, very easy to decline from 6 kids/female to 1.5 kids/female in 3 generations or less. And the reality of a population of humans over age 50 is that in course of the same week while attempting to complete or help with a large project, the 60 year old human who is in okay shape may have her back go out while caring for the almost completely decrepit 85 year old human, and be unable to assist the otherwise in very good shape 58 year old with currently detaching retina when the otherwise in great shape 70 year old is unexpectedly hospitalized with heart fibrillation. I am seriously considering shopping for a healthy Nigerian widower with 24 grandkids under the age of 20 for Husband #3.

[mooretrees]

I picked up this book at the library today and am halfway through it. I was predisposed to like it as I had read one of his other books, Plenty. That one was about his year of eating within 100 miles with his girlfriend. Very fun read.

This book answers the question that EVERYONE asks about not shopping; what would happen if everyone did it? The interesting part of that question is that we have had a few examples of everyone stopping shopping (besides Covid) that he illustrates what might happen. There is suffering, recessions and other more positive effects. They include shocking stories of how happy people can be during these crises. For example, during the World War 2, both British and German citizens showed that the cities with the highest amounts of bombing also had the highest amount of morale.
“But other than cases of absolute scarcity, people facing disaster have consistently and rapidly adapted to living with less, often while becoming friendlier, more tolerant, more unified, more generous.”

None of this will be new to any hanging around the forums for awhile, but this is a book to suggest/gift to anyone who is open to these ideas.
I’ll write another post when I finish the book.

[zbigi]

Covid is not a great example, because although people did indeed stop shopping, governments printed buttloads of money to give to companies to replace lost income from customers. So, if anything, it gave us a completely false sense of how stopping consuming would look like.

Regarding high morale in bombed cities in WWII. I think it might have been persistence in the face of a common mortal enemy not simply being poor that made people more united. Tribalism is an extremely strong unifier.

[Jean]

@7w5
Do you realize that female being able to choose to have babies or not was the reallity nearly only in post ww2 western world?
If a society collapses due to a lack of baby, there are plenty of societies ready to fill the vacum.

[7Wannabe5]

Do you realize that female being able to choose to have babies or not was the reallity nearly only in post ww2 western world?
If a society collapses due to a lack of baby, there are plenty of societies ready to fill the vacum.

Yes, I agree, but indications are that every region on the planet except for some countries in sub-saharan Africa are now at or well on way to bare replacement or below fertility rate. Also, it's not even necessarily all that likely that the knowledge and technology associated with reasonably effective birth control will be rapidly lost post collapse of modern Western system. However, having spent my adolescence in a region/era where access to birth control was just a bit more difficult than it is now, I agree that social sanctions or the simple elimination of women's rights, such as legal right to own property, alone could influence birth rate to a moderately large degree. There are also situations in which the right kinds of carrots might increase the birth rate. Giving birth to baby after baby can be a pretty rough ordeal and in collapsed situation would also become significantly more dangerous. One of the reasons why human population stayed stable for so many generations before modern technology was the frequency with which women died in child birth. Many of the situations/societies that would promote higher rate of fertility would also promote higher death rate overall, so population wouldn't boom back after bust until technology was re-instated and cycle was experienced again.

[mooretrees]

Covid is not a great example, because although people did indeed stop shopping, governments printed buttloads of money to give to companies to replace lost income from customers. So, if anything, it gave us a completely false sense of how stopping consuming would look like.

Regarding high morale in bombed cities in WWII. I think it might have been persistence in the face of a common mortal enemy not simply being poor that made people more united. Tribalism is an extremely strong unifier.

Covid was a good example in that, regardless of what governments did in response, people did have to experience some time without shopping. Initially the skies cleared up and cities with terrible smog experienced a reduction in pollution.

The author also researched the Finnish depression for loved experiences of people stopping shopping.

I agree with your point about having a common enemy but feel like that emphasis puts too much importance on the common enemy. Rather, the author talks about how important it is that everyone is experiencing the same problems at the same time. If there was an unequal distribution of disasters, that morale booster would likely not be present.

Not interested in arguing about but would be curious of your opinion after/if you read the book.

[AxelHeyst]

Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell is another look at disaster sociology. https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Built-H ... 0143118072

I haven't read it but the tl;dr's I've picked up from reviews matches my experiences (with very small/localized/boutique 'disasters' )

I'm pretty sure no one ever has claimed that "simply being poor makes people happier".

[Scott 2]

I quite enjoyed this book, thanks for recommending it. It's a very accessible on-ramp, absent the intensity that might put an average consumer off.


Some of my thoughts:


1. The examination of which mindsets reduce consumption was eye opening. Options included frugality, being a tightwad, voluntary simplicity, etc. The winner was voluntary simplicity. Being a tightwad had some effect. Frugality - none at all! The author tied it back to Jevon's paradox, which highlights fault in some of my own frugal behaviors. I've been transitioning towards voluntary simplicity lately. I can see the difference IRL.

As an aside - the Deep Response book chapter title - "Frugality is for Losers" - put me off a little. Having better grokked how consumption raises to meet frugal skills, I get it. I went back and reread that chapter. It connected. I think the framing is a case of the author being steeped in Jevon's paradox for so long, that he takes the implications for granted. I needed more hand holding, it seems.


2. I tend to view the argument to split GDP by the world's population as too simplistic. As a result, it's easy to dismiss. The author makes a strong case that using such a model exaggerates how much we can each responsibly consume. GDP also reflects non-productive activities, like flipping consumer goods or war. He does acknowledge that $100 spent in the US may burn fewer resources than in say India. More environmental controls, greater chance of buying digital products. etc. I've not been convinced to spend less, but the argument feels stronger.


3. I found examination of the rebound impact that comes with reduced consumption enticing, though a bit abbreviated. Going beyond a simple "if A then B" examination was refreshing. He teases at possible extrapolations, but never offers a fully satisfying answer around mitigation. Moving consumption to the digital economy is bounced around a bit, as well as "burning the wealth". I found the latter hard to swallow.


4. The strong recommendation for voluntary simplicity resonated with me. What did not, was couching the specifics in terms of holding an "opposite" identity. Anti-consumer. De-growth. De-consumer. I think that necessarily constrains the new identity, holding it to the old paradigm. Innovation and breadth are discouraged. The author acknowledges the possible limitation, but doesn't provide an answer. He spent far too much energy with the anti-framing, IMO.

For what it's worth - Deep Response did a much better job of handling how the new post-consumer identity is defined. That framing is superior. It implies an evolution, shedding the constraint.


5. I was surprised by the author's enthusiasm around the "doing stuff" shop early in the book. My experience has been activities "open to all" are sucked down to a lowest common denominator. That becomes the ceiling, and it's often not very high or enjoyable. One benefit of status chasing within our consumer culture, is the peering opportunity. Competition is high enough, that one can raise to an exclusive level, ensuring an exciting time. In the extreme - someone like Zuckerburg gets to learn MMA from world champions. When that barrier to entry is absent, quality of experience is lost.


6. While not solved, the community and belonging problems introduced by voluntary simplicity are acknowledged. That's a good first step.

I was put off by the romanticization of non-Western cultures. As though most of those people, when offered the same opportunities to consume fantastically, would comfortably decline. I don't believe it. I wasn't into celebrating the hunter / gather sharing model either. Everyone gets a bite! If the others in your tribe have a "poisoned" culture, the sharing model breaks. When the consumers have unlimited donuts and bagels, you'll get diabetes too.

[7Wannabe5]

For a modern deep dive on Jevons implications, Giampietro et al

Missed this previously. Giampietro also created a Coursera class on systems as related to regional permaculture-ish concerns which I took several years ago. Highly recommend for those who want a deep dive on possible problems like local labor not being down with the wage rate that would make your regional sustainability project practical. IME these kind of problems show up at even the smallest level of top-down management. For example, when I as a micro-business owner considered having my teenage minimum wage employees (half of whom were my own children) construct shipping boxes from dumpster dived cardboard vs. buying shipping envelopes. Amother dichotomy worth considering in relationship to efficiency/optimization would be vertical and horizontal integration, because these can ratchet around a bit as you attempt to become more of a generalist OR a specialist in alignment with frugality. And as Dan Quinn noted in "Discards: Your Way to Wealth" , waste is always produced at the boundary of how a business (or an individual/group taking business perspective) defines itself. And this isn't just a property of waste; it's the definition.

So, although it may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, an individual with a strong defined purpose will create more waste at a faster rate. Pertinant example being that if your purpose is "anti-consumerism" then consumer goods are "waste" relative to your purpose. For example, you may give away your television for the same reason you bury your shit. My point here not being that it's wrong to have a strong defined purpose, but rather that "waste" is relative and waste creation is cyclical. For example, "too much waste" can readily be reframed as "not enough decomposers", but "decomposers" can also be readily reframed as "consumers", and generally this framing will correspond to the level at which competition is encountered. IOW, it makes no sense to be "anti-consumer" at the level in which you are a "producer" or the level at which you are a "decomposer." It only makes sense to be "anti-consumer" at the level at which you are also a consumer in competition for scarce resources. For example, you are the consumer who prefers the good of pristine wilderness and they are the consumer who prefers Monster Car Rallies. The Voluntary Simplicity models sells better than Frugality, because it is somewhat more positive and direct in its simple, elitist, lifestyle aspirations. It's much easier to Vision Board it on Pinterest. Strict minority of the population prefers spreadsheets to vision boards for lifestyle planning and tracking. Even on this forum, look at the bump a thread gets if somebody includes a photo or three. Frugality absolutely is an elitist concept, but it doesn't sell like one. Kind of the same problem that Hanzi Freinacht brings up in terms of the poor aesthetics associated with Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory. Simple is Beautiful. Yes! Frugal is Beautiful. Huh? Even the word "frugal" itself vibes "homely", because it's got "ug" right there in the middle; somebody learning English could easily be convinced that it means something like "fucking ugly" or "cold like a deluxe refrigerator crossed with a divorce lawyer's file cabinet full of pre-nups." or maybe just an pejorative most aptly applied to wide concept of German Engineering , etc. etc.

[AxelHeyst]

I wasn't planning on reading this book because I thought I was too much of 'the choir' for it to be worthwhile, but I saw it at my library and snagged it. I was wrong - this book was a super worthwhile read.

I thought his treatment of the thought experiment (overnight 50% reduction in consumer demand) was light-handed enough for it not to be distracting, but interesting enough to serve to ground and tie together all the disparate perspectives and dimensions of consumerism. It wasn't as explicitly thought-experiment-narrative-driven as Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, for example, but rather a thread of musing that tied the whole thing together.

I liked the chapter on Sado, a japanese island which boomed due to mining but has been depopulating steadily since back in the direction of pre-boom population. The attitudes and experiences of the people who continue to live there as well as the people who chose to move there from the city were nuanced and complex in a way I very much appreciated.

I was put off by the romanticization of non-Western cultures. As though most of those people, when offered the same opportunities to consume fantastically, would comfortably decline. I don't believe it. I wasn't into celebrating the hunter / gather sharing model either. Everyone gets a bite! If the others in your tribe have a "poisoned" culture, the sharing model breaks. When the consumers have unlimited donuts and bagels, you'll get diabetes too.

I have to push back on this. I think he offered a more complex view of not-yet-industrialized non-Western cultures than you imply. (I'll also mention, for those who haven't read it, he doesn't spend a lot of the book on the subject, so don't let your reaction of this sub-topic color your decision to read it or not.) He did write of a few individuals and a few cultures that were in fact offered the opportunities to consume fantastically, and did in fact decline to varying degrees. But the last chapter is about how complex and non-uniform the response of the world's cultures is to consumerism AND about how pernicious and powerful of a force it is, regardless of which culture you come from. He mentions the paper "Why Do the Indians Wear Adidas?" which problematized the then-dominant romantic picture of certain cultures being 'pristine', and writes:

What the research actually showed is that, as the world's kaleidoscope of cultures engaged with the global consumer economy, consumerism was proving to be far from inevitable. Some cultures consumed a great deal, others very little; some consumed collectively, others privately; some put materialism at the heart of their societies, and others on the periphery. What did seem to be the case, however, si that consumer culture as most of us know it is an increasingly powerful force. "It thrives in situations of instability and contradiction, on social disruption and individual mobility," Wilk said. It's hard to miss the fact that these conditions define the current world order. Consumer culture creates the circumstances that create consumer culture.

A few more impressions:

• Voluntary simplicity and post-consumer praxis has so much to recommend it as a personal strategy it remains a no-brainer basis of personal response to what is going on in the world, whether your focus of concern is for the planet, for your region, for you family, or for your own experience of life and personal development.
• Consumerism is indeed a fucking plague, for many reasons but the anecdote about how the sounds of global shipping are driving the whales nuts hit me particularly hard, for some idiosyncratic reason. (I'm imagining being forced to listen to chewing noises 24-7 (I'm misaphonic) and become filled with white rage on the whales' behalf...)
• The sections on long-term companies that have been in business for hundreds of years were fascinating as a portal into institutions that weren't obsessed with growth as prime directive.
• The discussion of perspectives on GDP in the early to mid 20th century also combined to start to paint a picture of a world that wasn't monotropically obsessed with growth and how it might function.

[Scott 2]

I have to push back on this. I think he offered a more complex view of not-yet-industrialized non-Western cultures than you imply.

Fair points. I am admittedly myopic on the topic, lacking direct experience in other cultures. My exposure is limited to those who have migrated to the US, and stories from other's travels. Both suffer from selection bias.