In freer rather than less free societies, even if not truly free as Western societies stand, people get used to debates and criticism, which tend to push them in the path of truth and thus, at least in the long run, economic efficiency. This is a major advantage over less free and unfree societies. This observation must also be valid in war, at least ceteris paribus—for example, given an equal public support for a war. An information revealed by the Wall Street Journal about a classified report being prepared by the Pentagon illustrates this point. The subject matter is the military causes and circumstances of the disastrous American retreat from Afghanistan last summer (“Report on Pentagon Role in Afghanistan Is Under Review,” July 18, 2022): An initial draft of the Pentagon’s assessment, completed by authors affiliated with National Defense University, was submitted in March. … The problem with the report submitted in March wasn’t that it was too critical, [an anonymous senior defense official] said. “A draft document would not have been returned because the belief was that it was too critical; you get nothing out of an after-action analysis if it is not critical enough,” the official said [my emphasis]. Defense secretary Lloyd Austin previously declared: We want to make sure that we learn every lesson that can be learned from this experience. The information, of course, could be false or embellished, but there is a good probability that it is correct because of the general quality of fact reporting by the Wall Street Journal. The information is not surprising anyway: the freer a society, the more criticism is valued and expected; and the more officialdom has problems hiding the truth, if only because it is likely to be leaked. A free press plays an important role—and it should be noted that a free press is not one that says what you think it should say, but a set of medias not barred from Power from saying what they want). Nothing is perfect, of course, but most things are more imperfect in an unfree society. (0 COMMENTS)

Teamwork is pretty important in determining success in competitive team sports. Eight 90 pound weaklings can beat an equal number of rowers with the power of a Mike Tyson in a regatta, if the former work together and the latter row at cross purposes. Even an excellent 3-point shooter such as Stephen Curry will not take that shot if there is an uncovered team mate hanging around the basket. Why not? By passing the ball, he can increase the expected value of the shot. I don’t care what middle name his parents gave him; his real basketball name is Stephen Teamwork Curry. It is the same in football. If there is an end standing by the goal line, all alone, and the quarterback sees him but runs with the ball anyway … why even talk about that? This would never happen, if there is even a modicum of teamwork instilled by the coach. Suppose one runner in a mile relay race refuses to pass the baton on to the next runner; what happens to its chance of winning? That is pretty obvious. But this sort of teamwork is really underwhelming, compared to that which is exhibited in markets every day. How many athletes does it take to row that boat? A lousy eight. How many basketball players on one team can be running up and down the floor at any given time? A mere five. Football? A pitiful eleven. The members of a relay race? A trivial number: four. In very sharp contrast, how many people can cooperate with each other in an economy? Pretty much as many as the population size. In the world, a bit over seven billion! That’s billion, in case you’re not paying attention. How about in the United States? Somewhere in the neighborhood of virtually all of us, some 350 million. Take one more example of teamwork: the symphony orchestra. It has typically 100 or more members. When they play those sixty-fourth notes, all together, with not one musician out of tune or not exactly on time, it is almost a miracle. But, again, even this pales into insignificance when compared to what occurs in the economy. As it does in the operating room, when almost a dozen doctors and nurses work together in unison on a patient. It is not just in sheer numbers that economics has it all over any of these other cooperative endeavors. In addition, the business world, at least under a regime of economic freedom, has no leader, no central authority, no organizer. In contrast, the orchestra has a conductor, all sports teams have a coach or manager,  the operating room has a chief physician, the head chef runs the commercial kitchen, etc. Yes, it cannot be denied, the business firm has a chief executive officer, and there is of course cooperation within the company (or it would soon go bankrupt), but that is not the type of teamwork we are now discussing. Here, we are focusing on cooperation between businesses, not within each of them. How does this work? It is simple: prices and profit and loss. Let us suppose that the ideal allocation of resources in the production of peas and carrots is 50% each. But right now, an economy features 60% of the former and only 40% of the latter. There are too many peas; there is a surplus of them. So their prices will fall, and profits earned from producing them will decrease. There are too few carrots; the opposite will occur in that market. The price of Bugs Bunny’s favorite foodstuff will rise, and with that change, profits in that field will also increase. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will now kick in. Farmers, importers, will be led by it to bring to market more carrots and fewer peas. If there are 90% of peas and only 10% of carrots, instead of slight price and profit alterations, these will be far more radical. Investors will be far more heavily motivated to coordinate with consumer desires than before. The trouble is, this process is widely condemned as profiteering, price gouging, dog-eat-dog capitalism. However, this institution is responsible for allocating peas and carrots, and everything else under the sun, in rough conformity to consumer desires. This is teamwork at its best, with millions, nay, billions, of team members, and without any central direction at all. It truly deserves the honorific bestowed upon it by Ronald Reagan: “the magic of the market.” It is why advanced relatively free economies enjoy a level of prosperity which would be unobtainable from any other economic system. It is the rare non-economist who can appreciate the level of collaboration that occurs under free enterprise. Rather, they wallow in economic illiteracy, blaming profiteering, price changes, the very market signals that allow for economic teamwork.   Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans and is co-author of An Austro-Libertarian Critique of Public Choice (with Thomas DiLorenzo). (0 COMMENTS)

David Beckworth recently asked former Fed governor Randal Quarles why the Fed didn’t move last fall to stop inflation. Here’s how Quarles responded: Quarles: This is maybe an eccentric belief. I don’t think that it’s universally shared or even widely shared on the FOMC. But my belief is that it’s a separate element of the Fed religion that resulted in not moving in the fall, and it became clear that it was time to pivot to withdrawing accommodation, and it’s a long-standing kind of Fed principle that you shouldn’t step on the gas and the brake at the same time; meaning that you shouldn’t be raising interest rates at the same time as you are still increasing the size of the balance sheet. And so we had decided that we needed to taper the balance sheet purchases. The lesson of the taper tantrum under Bernanke was that you’ve got to telegraph that well in advance. You’ve got to do that gradually, in order to avoid disrupting markets. And you have to have completed that before you can start raising interest rates so that you’re not doing two conflicting things. So that was the sequencing. Macroeconomics is full of myths.  There’s a widely held (false) belief that the US ran unusually big budget deficits during the 1960s, and that the high inflation of the 1970s was due to supply shocks.  The idea that there was a “taper tantrum” in 2013 that “disrupted markets” seems to be another popular myth.  Where is the evidence for that claim? FWIW, here is the S&P500 in the year after Bernanke’s May 22, 2013, speech on the need to eventually taper bond purchases (a rather obvious point, BTW): Notice that the speech did not cause any stock market turmoil, either immediately or over the next 12 months.  Nor was there any major market reaction to Bernanke’s speech in the bond market, although long-term rates did trend upwards due to a stronger than expected economy in late 2013.   (The policy was unwise, but that’s because inflation was too low at the time.) Quarles suggests that in the fall of 2021, the Fed responded to this phony “lesson” by doing nothing to restrain inflation.  Today, frustrated stock and bond market participants must be grumbling “thanks for nothing”, as the Fed’s inaction ended up causing a market tantrum in 2022, with the economy surging to high inflation and as stock and bond prices falling sharply: As I keep saying, the Fed should not focus on stabilizing financial markets; they should focus on stabilizing expected NGDP growth.  Stable financial markets cannot be engineered artificially; they result from stability in the broader economy. The Fed needs to keep its eye on the ball: (0 COMMENTS)

In the original Star Wars film, later dubbed A New Hope, Luke Skywalker was initially reluctant to join the rebellion against the Empire. As he told Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Look, I can’t get involved. I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the Empire; I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now… It’s all such a long way from here.” Luke notes that joining the rebellion would be costly. Joining the rebellion would mean failing to engage in work he has committed to do, work that helps his family. He perceives this cost as so high that he believes he “can’t get involved.” In the real world, joining a revolutionary movement is costly too. Time and resources that someone puts towards a movement could have otherwise been used for other purposes. In addition to expending time and resources, participants may face violence from the state or rival factions. At the same time, these movements are often striving for political changes that are ultimately non-excludable. If a rebellion overthrows an unwanted government, those who stood on the sidelines are also freed from that unwanted government. This creates a collective action problem. There is an incentive to free ride on the efforts of others, rather than making the costly move of joining the fight. And yet, despite these collective action problems, revolutions and other social movements do happen. How does this happen? Why don’t all the prospective revolutionaries choose to free ride, as The Logic of Collective Action leads us into the logic of collective inaction? Part of the answer is that rebels create selective incentives for people to participate in their movement. A selective incentive is an excludable good provided to those who contribute to the production or provision of a collective good. While being free from a hated despot or empire is not easily excludable, plenty of other things are. For instance, a medal or some other form of accolade is excludable. So too are food and drinks offered at revolutionary gatherings. Camaraderie with and esteem from others who share your values is less tangible, but it’s still excludable and it’s still something people value. The strategies available to address collective action problems are diverse, and often these solutions will play mutually reinforcing roles. Mark Lichbach explores the diversity of these solutions in his book The Rebel’s Dilemma. Dennis Chong explores some of the ways civil rights activists addressed similar problems in his book Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. This literature has had a big influence on my work with Chris Coyne on polycentric defense. The diversity of real-world social movements and rebellions shows that people can address collective action problems and defend themselves from both external invaders and their own domestic governments. Too many economists see free rider problems and tacitly presume that only some intervention like taxation or conscription can address it. But sometimes people address these problems from the bottom up. Social dilemmas are real. Contributing to a collective goal is costly, and often it may be tempting to say “I can’t get involved.” Yet in Star Wars, and in our world, that’s just the start of the story. People are capable of devising strategies from the bottom-up that convince their fellows to join them in collective action.   Nathan P. Goodman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics at New York University. His research interests include defense and peace economics, self-governance, public choice, institutional analysis, and Austrian economics. (1 COMMENTS)

Behavioral economists have proven that humans are irrational.  All market economics is predicated on two assumptions that are false: Humans are rational economic actors Market pricing accurately reflects the values people place on goods and services First, the inability to replicate behavioral economists’ findings has largely discredited the field. Second, trying to decide what’s “rational” is tricky.  We tend to think that someone is acting rationally if their actions help them achieve their goals, and that they’re acting irrationally if their actions cause them to fail.  But the observer may not know or completely understand the actor’s goals.  Or the observer may have information that the actor doesn’t have.  If the actor has mistaken beliefs, he may be acting in ways that – if his beliefs were true – would be logical. I’m skeptical of claims that people are generally irrational.  If that were true, then humanity could not have survived.  Assuming the theory of evolution is correct, people must have acted rationally more often than not.  And “more often than not” is good enough for progress to occur and for the two assumptions of market economics to work more often than not.   Capitalist economies are subject to bank runs, panics, and recessions. From early in the 19th Century through the 1990s, many U.S. states prohibited branch banking. The result was thousands of small banks with undiversified loan portfolios at the mercy of local economies. Banks routinely collapsed when crops failed, produce prices fell, or large companies went bankrupt. This was not a failure of the free market but of government regulation. Virtually every recession and depression in history was preceded by an inflationary boom. Governments cause inflation by debasing the currency – either by mixing base metals with the gold and silver in the nation’s coinage or by resorting to the printing press. The injection of new money into an economy creates a temporary boom, which inevitably turns into a bust when the flow of new money stops or slows.   Capitalism puts economics ahead of a clean environment. An improving economy and a cleaner environment go hand in hand. A clean environment is a “luxury good” that poor people typically can’t afford. The United States and Western Europe have restored the environment over the last half century as they became wealthier. The Thames River, for example, is no longer the open sewer that it was in Shakespeare’s time. London’s “fog” and Pittsburgh’s smoke-filled skies are things of the past. By contrast, pollution in places like Venezuela, China, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea is far worse than in the west. A key difference between capitalist and socialist countries is respect for property rights. As far back as Aristotle, people recognized that, “men pay most attention to what is their own; they care less for what is common; or at any rate they care for it only to the extent to which each is individually concerned.” The phrase “tragedy of the commons” refers to the tendency for unowned or communally owned resources to be overused and abused. The whole point of socialism is to turn everything into a “commons.” The results have been horrific.   Capitalism is racist. Free enterprise makes discrimination costly. For example, southern bus companies opposed Jim Crow laws that required blacks to sit in the back of their vehicles. Angering customers is bad for business as is having to leave seats unfilled when there are too few customers of the “right” color.   Child labor is a feature of Capitalism. Throughout most of human history, child labor wasn’t a “problem,” it was simply what children had to do to survive. Only when capitalism magnified the ability of one person to produce enough to support a family was child labor no longer a necessity. Child labor laws weren’t enacted in the United States until they were largely unnecessary because relatively few children worked. When similar laws were passed in countries where productivity had not yet risen sufficiently, children continued to work because the only other option was starvation. Unfortunately, with no recourse to the law, they were exploited far worse than before.   Capitalism oppresses women. Capitalism liberated women. Women are “second-class citizens” in societies in which possessing brute strength is a matter of life and death. This reality wasn’t changed by waving banners in street demonstrations. It was changed by the vast gains in productivity brought by the Industrial and Information Ages. Now that free market innovation has made brains more important than brawn, women are more than able to compete with men.   Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource. (0 COMMENTS)

Newfoundland Edition Before he could find that economic wizard, [Joey] Smallwood [first premier of Newfoundland, which became a Canadian province in 1949] made his first investment alone on Christmas Eve 1949 when four “wise men” appeared from the east (or so they appeared to the premier). They were actually Icelandic herring fishermen who promised to move their boats to Newfoundland and establish a giant herring fishery and processing industry. The original eastern travellers with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh could not have been more welcome than these modern-day entrepreneurs. Smallwood gladly gave them a contract to establish the precious herring fishery, some cash to get their boats out of hock, and seed capital for equipment and a processing plant. The next spring, they returned with four herring boats, which experienced Newfoundland fishermen deemed ready for the scrap heap. The Icelanders spent nine months in their dilapidated craft searching for the elusive fish, but after catching just nine barrels of herring and spending $412,000 in government money, they gave up and went home. The provincial government spent three years trying to sell their abandoned boats. When it finally found a buyer the government had to lend him the $55,000 purchase price. So ended Smallwood’s first attempt at developing a new industry. This is from Brian Slemming, “The Mad Mad Schemes of Joey Smallwood,” The Next City, Spring 1999. I found the magazine sitting around in my cottage. The article on Smallwood is long, detailed, persuasive, and depressing. I grew up in Canada memorizing his name as the premier of Canada’s 10th province. People often made fun of him, but I had no idea how corrupt and harebrained he was. Of course, it’s easy to do that with other people’s money. The excerpt above is not the worst example of his industrial policy schemes. As with all industrial policy, the incentives are all wrong: government officials don’t pay for bad decisions and don’t get rewarded for good decisions. Whether it’s done by innumerate people like Smallwood [his innumeracy comes out in another part of the article] or done by relative sophisticates like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg, industrial policy ends up in disaster. One more example that’s stunning but believable: Smallwood hoped the great machinery plant outside St. John’s would become the diamond in his industrialization crown. In a parliamentary statement, he claimed the plant would need 58,000 blueprints of the machinery it would produce. Flour mills, crushing machinery, oil drilling machinery–if you could name it, the new mill would manufacture it. Initially the plant would train and employ 500 people, but Smallwood promised that the workforce would expand to 3,000and then 5,000; its 1952 payroll would be $2 million. He told the House, “It seems likely to become the largest single labor-giving enterprise in Newfoundland, apart from the fishery.” As with the tannery, the province built the plant away from the main railway line and failed to follow through with a link. In 1958, six years after the grand announcement, the St. John’s Evening Telegram reported: “The five million dollar ‘machinery plant’ has been sitting on the shores of Octagon Pond these six years, but has never turned out a machine.” Unfortunately, I can’t find the publication on line: it’s long since gone out of business. But I did find this article in Maclean’s magazine from 1956 that covers some of the same territory. Here’s the entry on Industrial Policy in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. The picture above is of Joey Smallwood. (0 COMMENTS)

This set of twitter comments caught my eye: I agree with all three comments.  Nonetheless, it might be helpful to explain this issue in my own way.  Here are three claims: 1.  There is no such thing as the “true” elasticity of aggregate demand. 2.  It is possible for aggregate demand to be appropriate, even when NGDP growth is unusually high. 3.  In this particularly case, however, the fast growth in NGDP is indicative of excessive AD. Let’s take the three claims one at a time: 1. I prefer to define AD as a rectangular hyperbola, where at each point along the AD curve the total nominal expenditure (i.e., P*Y) is exactly the same.  In that case, the elasticity of aggregate demand is always exactly one.  But many economists define AD in a different fashion, and end up with a different estimate of the elasticity of aggregate demand.  So if someone asked me, “What’s the actual elasticity of AD?”  I’d respond, “How are you defining AD?”  It depends what you are holding constant along a given AD curve. 2.  Suppose Kuwait’s NGDP is 50% oil and 50% other goods and services.  Also assume that 5% of Kuwaiti workers produce oil and 95% of Kuwaiti workers produce other goods and services.  Now assume that global oil prices double almost overnight.  Should Kuwait’s central bank maintain a stable NGDP?  I’d say no, as doing so would require a big reduction in non-oil nominal output.  Because 95% of workers are in the non-oil sector, and because nominal wages are sticky, this would result in much higher unemployment.  It would probably make more sense for Kuwait to target aggregate nominal labor income. 3.  Clearly the Kuwaiti example has some bearing on the recent events in the US.  We produce a lot of oil and the price of oil has recently doubled.  Nonetheless, the recent NGDP data in the US does seem to correctly indicate that there is excessive aggregate demand.  We know this because we also see signs of excessive demand in other indicators such as rapid nominal wage growth and high job vacancies, which are not distorted by oil prices. To conclude, fast growth in NGDP doesn’t always signal excessive AD.  But in the case of the US, fast and above trend NGDP growth is almost always is an accurate signal of overheating. We shouldn’t be wasting time trying to figure out some mythical concept like the “true” elasticity of AD.  Instead, we should focus on what sort of path of nominal spending produces a stable economy. (0 COMMENTS)

Do you really own your smartphone? Michael Heller and James Salzman claim that we are hardwired to bring our physical notions of static ownership to our real and virtual lives. In reality, our increasingly online world involves licensing access to a series of ones and zeros. Our “own” data isn’t even “ours”. In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts engages the authors of Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, in a discussion about their taxonomy of the six characteristics of ownership that may challenge how we think about the topic. The authors propose ownership as a choice, not a given, that law isn’t always the answer to our different claims, and that a common language of ownership might enhance our ability to understand and address ownership debates. Please tell us how this conversation prompts your own thoughts about ownership.      1- Elinor Olstrom identified and described the “closed community with reciprocity of sanction”. Salzman uses the South Boston parking space story of an identifying object (parking chairs) as an example and blames its disintegration on gentrification.  Could this norm be degrading for other reasons? Explain.    2- The authors suggest that all of the stories people use to claim every resource in the world are captured in the six categories of: Attachment, First-in-Time, Possession, Labor, Self-ownership, and Family changes. Can you identify an example of each story in your life? What ownership debates or clashing stories have you experienced?   3- According to Heller and Salzman, the history of American westward expansion went from foraging to “No Trespassing”. How did the invention of barbed wire in the 1860s change the nature of property ownership to the attachment version that is familiar today?   4- How do the tragedy of the commons, fugitive resources, unitization, and the transaction cost of monitoring explain the way that we have engineered ownership in the U.S.?   5- How does Roberts’ point about reciprocal harm clarify the Coasean approach to property rights disputes? Why is the Coase theorem allegedly misconstrued? (0 COMMENTS)

Prominent writers and investors have described today’s economy as being addicted to loose monetary policy, especially the QE variety. There may be something to that analogy. After all, the Fed has barely commenced tapering, and some of the economy’s withdrawal symptoms are acute. Things are especially interesting, or troubling, when we look at how intertwined monetary and fiscal policy have become.     For example, the Fed’s current holdings of Treasuries are more than double their previous highs during World War II. The accompanying chart shows federal debt held by the public as a percent of GDP, split into debt held by the Federal Reserve and debt held by the non-Fed public, from 1940 to the most recent data. As the top line in the chart shows, total debt held by the public has risen sharply since 2001 and now exceeds 100% of GDP. As for the Fed’s share, it exceeded 10% during World War II, yet in the post-WWII period, Fed holdings hovered between 5% and 6% every year up to 2010. Then, in a clean break from the trend, the second half of 2009 saw Quantitative Easing become utilized toward the direct purchase of medium- and long-term U.S. Treasuries. Consequently, as the chart shows, Fed holdings more than doubled in 2011 and have remained historically elevated above 10% of GDP for all years through 2019. In 2020, the Fed’s share more than doubled a second time. By the time of the most recent data available in 2021, the Fed’s share had reached 24.3% of GDP, far exceeding its peak of 10.4% during WWII. The chart might even understate the magnitude of the Fed’s public debt holdings when looking more closely at medium- and long-term Treasuries. According to a May 2022 New York Federal Reserve report of open market operations, as of December 2021, the Fed owned 38% of 10-30 year bonds. From this point forward, there is a long way to go in winding-down to roughly pre-pandemic levels. Some economists say that a ballooning Fed balance sheet is nothing to worry about, and the Fed itself has vowed to sterilize QE from affecting bank reserves. However, George Selgin, John Cochrane, James Dorn, and others have been arguing that very high Fed holdings of public debt compromise the central bank’s independence while risking inflation. Today’s inflation is caused partly by historic expansions of the money supply needed to finance Washington’s spending sprees. As St. Louis Fed economist Fernando M. Martin has shown (see figure Money and Deficits), since 2016 the growth rate of M2 closely tracks the growth rate of budget deficits. Even the floor system of paying interest on excess reserves (IOER) faces exposure. As Thomas Hogan argued recently on Econlib, during the Great Recession the Fed could have met its unemployment target by doing less QE, had it opted to lower IOER. Now, after holding down interest rates for nearly a generation, the shift to quantitative tightening combined with rising yields will squeeze the federal budget. As we recently showed, net interest is projected to exceed 10% of the budget within the next five years. The financial pain of winding down from 24.3% of GDP might be too much to bear, prompting fiscal policymakers to again pressure the Fed. Can Congress quit the Fed’s easy money policy that has allowed them to push debt levels well above 100% of GDP, or will the addiction demand more QE to support Washington’s spending habit?   Peter Calcagno is a Professor of Economics at the College of Charleston and director of the Center for Public Choice & Market Process. A Public Choice and Public Policy Project Fellow with AIER. He is the Treasurer of the Public Choice Society, a Voting Member of AIER, a Board Member of the Classical Liberals in the Carolinas, and has served on the board of APEE. His areas of research are applied microeconomics, public choice, and political economy. He is the author of dozens of journal articles and book chapters, and the editor of Unleashing Capitalism: A Prescription for Economic Prosperity in South Carolina. Edward J. Lopez is Professor of Economics, BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism, and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Free Enterprise at Western Carolina University. He is the Executive Director and Past President of the Public Choice Society, Past President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Public Policy. In 2008-09 he was a Resident Scholar at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

At my cottage in Minaki, Ontario, Canada this last weekend, I came across a November 1956 edition of National Geographic. What I found most interesting was not the articles but the ads. I’ll highlight two. The first is in the picture above. This Copyflex machine makes up to 300 copies per hour. That’s 5 per minute. And the price is “only” $498.50. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $5,430.55 today. Need I say more? The second is an ad for long distance phone calls across the Atlantic. The fine print states that “The daytime rate for the first three minutes from anywhere in the United States is $12, not including the 10% federal excise tax.” $12 then would be $130.73 today. There was one ad that did make me miss the good old days. It was for a beautiful Lincoln. I’m sure it was a substantial worse car than today, so my general point in the title holds. But car companies cannot legally make cars with the graceful lines of the 1957 Lincoln or, if they do, they would have to pay a huge CAFE fine. The regulators are more involved in dictating many aspects of cars than they were then. Without that regulation, our cars would be better than in 1957 and, in many ways, better than the 2022 cars, and there would be much more variety in car shapes. (2 COMMENTS)