I wore the same suit, same tie, same shirt, and same shoes (resoled!) that I had worn in the photo of Juliana and I at the father-daughter dance years ago, that she had transformed into a painting for me last father’s day.

Below this collage you’ll find the text of my remarks with a few annotations.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice1

Thus reads the epitaph, in St. Paul’s cathedral, London, of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who designed it.2 Although he’s buried there, you’ll find no statue of Christopher Wren, no obelisk, no grand sarcophagus.3 If you’re looking for the monument, reads his epitaph, look around you. You’re right in the middle of it. The building is monument to the man.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice4

Juliana Vigdor, even as a young child, harbored a quiet ambition. We were out walking one day in her elementary school years. A propos of nothing, she raised her index finger and announced “I have lived on this earth for eight years and the only thing I have changed is the population.”5

The only thing I have changed is the population. As if to say, I want to change much more than just that, but the only thing I’ve changed is the population. And for the record, Juliana, you’ve now changed it twice.

Pero te equivocaste, mija querida.6 You were wrong that day and you’re wrong now. For you had changed, and you have changed, much more than the population. From where I stand I’m looking right at the change you wrought. Anyone here can see it. You didn’t design a “Church,” a building, a 501-c-3 tax exempt religious organization,7 you designed what the ancient Greeks would have call an ekklesia,8 los españoles una iglesia. You designed an assembly of people. It’s right here. So I say to each of you, welcome to the assembly Juliana created. The living monument to Juliana Vigdor is you, and everyone around you.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice

Look around you. Look within you. If you knew Juliana you are the living monument to her. Just as you’re the living monument to everyone else you’ve known. Just as the people who know you are and will be the living monument to you. Will there be some trace of you that remains on this earth when you’re gone? Will there be a monument to you? Look around you and know. You’re right in the middle of it.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

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2

I think maybe we went inside St. Paul’s with the kids? We all went to London in March 2014, I distinctly recall seeing the view of the dome from Richmond Park. And I’ve got a photo of Juliana at the Tower of London.

5

I don’t remember exactly what age she was when she said this. She might have been nine, or seven. Still.

The “a propos” here was a late addition to gratuitously add a 5th language to the text. In Paris, on the same trip we went to London, two women approached us on the platform at the Alma-Marceau metro station seeking directions to the Louvre. They began in French, which I can speak maybe five words of, but quickly devolved to Spanish which was more familiar territory. Juliana would tell the story of that conversation after we returned.

In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine quoted Warren “Pete” Moore, of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, describing the experience of being on stage performing “The Tracks of My Tears” before an audience. We may go to a concert with others, but when the music is loud enough to drown out conversation we listen alone. The audience faces the performers, people they may idolize, people they don’t really know. And to hear the song, the story of a sadness that lies within, they let their guard down. “It tapped into their emotions,” Moore described. And the tracks of thousands of tears would appear, known but to the performers.

In the autumn of 2019 I played “Tracks of My Tears” and told that story in my elective quantitative methods course. I was teaching an Alan Krueger paper that day, the first such paper following his death by suicide at the age of 58. My students listened as I interpreted Krueger’s death and Moore’s anecdote, that no matter how successful or happy we might perceive someone, they too would relate to this universal song.

A student wrote to me not long ago, having read some of my earlier posts, reminding me of that moment six-and-a-half years ago, a moment I had honestly forgotten. Describing how meaningful it had been for them, how in later years listening to that song would bring comfort. It brought a smile to my face. How many times, I wonder, do the small actions we take have a profound impact, for good or for ill, that we will never know about. “Between thought and expression/lies a lifetime.”

It has been three months. More than half of that time has passed since my last entry in this diary. Two days after that post I boarded a plane at José María Cordova airport, custom-built Colombian guitar in hand, to begin the long journey home. Fifteen days after that post I was back in the classroom, starting the spring quarter at the University of Washington, my sabbatical time over.

I have had the time to write. There’s one post here. There are two more at least partly drafted, waiting for finishing touches. I signed a book contract — not for a tome about grief, but a “how-to” guide to legislative advocacy, with the University of Chicago Press. I returned a second under-contract manuscript, on the long-run impact of the Civil Rights Movement, to Harvard University Press where it will now go through peer review. I’ve taught five weeks’ worth of classes, graded assignments, been to faculty meetings. I’ve attended two conferences, one of which just ended here in Denver. I’ve shared time with family, who gathered in Seattle last month to celebrate my late mother’s life.

Somehow describing events retrospectively makes life seem busier than it felt like as I was living it. Certainly there were busy days, hectic weeks. But there was plenty of downtime. In collecting photos for a slideshow for my mother’s memorial luncheon, I came across many long-forgotten pictures of Juliana. As a baby, a young child, a teenager, a young adult.

My forty-seven day hiatus from this diary doesn’t reflect a lack of thought about Juliana so much as a lack of the time and space to sift through those thoughts, to try to do a little bit better than rambling. It’s difficult. I appreciate the good fortune I had to be at a moment in life where I did have time and space, when I was in South America. It boggles my mind to know how meager official supports for bereaved parents are even in the most developed nations. No Federal support in the United States, unsurprisingly. But also no national policy in the Scandinavian countries. Two days in Spain. At best two or three weeks in some European countries.

Many readers have written to describe how useful a return to routine was. I’m sure that works for some, though I wonder whether “working” means “burying without processing.” I don’t know how helpful the return to routine has been in my case. It’s certainly made it more difficult to record thoughts here. Seeing the cast of usual suspects everyday makes it difficult to maintain the paradox of writing — I am sharing, but when committing the act of sharing I am alone.

I’ve heard the same message from many of you with your own experiences of loss, that you think of your lost loved one every day, years or decades later. I have a better appreciation of what that means now. For most hours of most days, lives after loss resemble other lives. We focus on other things, do the things we used to do. But there are moments. Like waves, sometimes they resemble a predictable, periodic lapping at the shore. Sometimes, like a tsunami, they knock you over without much warning. Unlike a tsunami, they aren’t fatal. You just have to remind yourself that the wave will recede like any other.

As I go about life the people I encounter can be sorted into types. There are the people who I know have read, or who otherwise know about the loss of Juliana. There are people I wasn’t aware have the knowledge but let me know they do, express condolences or a gratitude for the things I’ve written. And then there are two types I can’t distinguish between. Those who haven’t heard, and those who know but don’t know how to let me know they know, or just don’t know what to say about it.

It’s ok to talk to me about it. It’s ok to not know what to say. Nobody does. If I see you, it means I’m feeling generally fine and won’t dissolve into a puddle of mush by talking about Juliana. Waiting for a moment where we can have even a brief one-on-one chat is ideal… in a mixed group where there may be people who haven’t heard, I probably don’t want to get into breaking the news. Breaking the news is still tough. If we are chatting one-on-one and someone joins in, as often happens, don’t worry. I have ways of telling you how I’m doing that just sound like generic anecdotes to the uninitiated.

Honestly, it’s ok if you just want to talk as though nothing has happened, have the usual chitchat about work or how my sabbatical went. Better that than have you avoid me.

It’s ok to talk about your own problems, to share your own story. We aren’t playing a game of who-has-the-most-profound problems. I got into this line of business to help people solve problems.

If you see me, the odds are I’m living through an hour much like when I last saw you. If you bring up Juliana, it will almost certainly be one of those predictable, peaceful waves. If not, it means you are as important to me as Smokey Robinson was to all those people who saw him in concert.

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According to state administrative records, full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment in 2024/25 was only half what it had been in 2010/2011. Like most public regional universities, the institution is heavily dependent on tuition revenue, so when headcount drops something’s got to give. Akron has eliminated departments and degree programs. The workforce, both faculty and staff, is smaller than it once was. Despite these cuts, the university still faces budget deficits and will need to take more action to stop draining its financial reserves.

Meanwhile, the state of Ohio operates another four-year university just ten miles away. Kent State has faced its own financial woes, but it hasn’t had enrollment declines as severe as Akron. Within 40 miles of Kent State there are two more public four-year institutions, Youngstown State and Cleveland State.

What would have motivated the state of Ohio to operate four universities within commuting distance of one another? It was mostly accidental. The University of Akron was founded as a private college and the state basically inherited it through receivership. Youngstown State similarly began as a private institution. Kent State was founded as a public normal school (for teacher training) in 1910, the first public institution in northeast Ohio, more than a half-century before either Akron or Youngstown State joined the system.

Only Cleveland State was consciously established as a public campus with close neighbors, in 1964, a result of then-governor James Rhodes’ pledge to place a college within 30 miles of every Ohioan. There were concerns expressed about the plan at the time, namely by other institutions who worried about being drained of students and resources. Concerns that have now come home to roost.

The four institutions found ways to peaceably coexist and even collaborate for a half-century. But times have gotten tough in American higher education. Student enrollments have been declining for more than a decade nationwide, and demographic projections suggest the trend will continue. Collectively, the four public institutions of northeast Ohio posted 2024/25 enrollments nearly 22,000 FTE students below their peaks. There’s enough unused capacity at these institutions that the state could easily shut one of them down and find space for the displaced students at the remaining three.

Now a gubernatorial candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has proposed something along these lines. Is this a smart idea that will save taxpayer resources? A terrible idea that will erode educational opportunity in the Buckeye state? Regardless of your knee-jerk reaction, it’s an idea that has already come to pass in some states and will no doubt be considered by many more.

Tom Ahn and I set out to quantify the trade-offs involved in potentially shutting down colleges — a question that researchers haven’t had to think about much in the history of American higher education, which with rare exceptions only saw enrollment growth between World War II and the Great Recession. Here’s a link to our paper.

On the one hand, universities exhibit economies of scale. At a larger institution, it’s possible to offer a wider array of programs and degrees. There are enough interested students to support hiring faculty to teach in niche subject areas. A given quality of education can be provided at lower per-student cost. If enrollment declines, as it has at all four northeast Ohio public institutions, administrators either need to find more dollars or cut back the quality of education. From this perspective, the question of system consolidation is a matter of having a large number of weak institutions or a smaller set of stronger ones.

On the other hand, as James Rhodes articulated to Ohioans in the 1960s, proximity matters. Presciently, Rhodes’ call to have a college within 30 miles of every resident jives with recent research by Riley Acton, Kalena Cortes, Lois Miller, and Camila Morales documenting that high school graduates become significantly less likely to enroll in college if they are more than 30 minutes’ drive time from the nearest campus.

So clearly there’s a tradeoff. If a state were most concerned about cost efficiency in higher education, they might choose to operate a single “mega-campus” serving the entire state. If a state were most concerned about access, they’d operate a system of smaller geographically dispersed colleges.

Ahn and I produced the figure below, documenting how different states approach this problem. The vertical axis measures the proportion of the state’s population with access to a public college (2- or 4-year) in their county of residence. The horizontal axis measures institution size, around 2008 when overall enrollment was around its peak.

Some states, like New Hampshire, operate a system of relatively small colleges that reach nearly all the population. Others, like Virginia and Indiana, operate larger institutions that leave much of the population without one in close proximity. Arizona achieves both gigantic scale and wide coverage in part because its population is concentrated in a small number of very large counties. Mississippi operates small institutions in a small number of places.

Were Ohio to consolidate campuses, its dot (located above Indiana and Virginia) would move toward the southeast — larger campuses in proximity to a smaller fraction of the population.

How much money would they save? How much educational opportunity would be lost? Ahn and I estimated the magnitude of economies of scale by comparing public higher education expenses not covered by tuition and fees to average campus size across states. We estimated the magnitude of educational opportunity losses by comparing enrollment and degree attainment rates as a function of proximity — obtaining estimates larger in magnitude than Acton, Cortes, Miller, and Morales, but in line with the existing literature.

The bottom line? By preserving a system of smaller campuses serving more communities, states spend something on the order of $300,000 for every 4-year degree they preserve.

How should we think about this number? We can compare it to the cost-per-degree-preserved from other higher ed interventions. The City University of New York introduced a program called ACE (Accelerate, Complete, and Engage) in 2015. The program offered a variety of supports to students, both in terms of human resources and help with mundane costs like commuting to campus. The program was subjected to a rigorous analysis reported in a 2015 paper by an all-star team of Columbia University researchers. The ACE program devoted roughly $12,000 to supporting students and these supports raised their probability of completing a bachelor’s degree by about 12%. Divide the 12,000 by 0.12 and you get a number around $100,000. In other words, for the same amount of money a state could shepherd three times as many students toward degrees with an ACE-style assistance program as by keeping under-enrolled colleges open.

Shepherding students toward degrees is not the only possible benefit of keeping colleges open. In small college towns, these institutions may be the largest employer. Setting aside the concern that jobs shouldn’t be counted as a benefit in a traditional benefit-cost analysis, in Ohio as most states the system includes a mix of bucolic campuses in small college towns and urban commuter institutions. Concerns about re-employment could be mitigated by focusing on institutions in larger cities with more diversified labor markets. Where, incidentally, there might be a better market for the real estate freed up by shutting down a campus. In our analysis, Ahn and I assumed states could make no money at all by selling off real estate at a shuttered campus. If you put in a number other than zero than the cost to preserve each degree would increase further.

Public postsecondary system reorganizations will be perhaps the most politically controversial issue in state politics over the next decade. Vivek Ramaswamy is only slightly ahead of the curve. One can imagine commissions analogous to those that made decisions about military base closures between 1988 and 2005.

For those states that choose the route of preserving existing campuses at all costs, most of those campuses can look forward to a future along the lines of what Akron has experienced. Enrollment declines necessitating deep cuts. It’s a pick-your-poison situation.

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Six weeks ago today, Groundhog Day, my daughter Juliana took her own life, a week short of her 22nd birthday. For five of those six weeks I’ve been in South America, finishing a long-planned six month sabbatical. It will be ending very soon. I am due to fly back to the United States Wednesday and I’ll be back in the classroom two weeks later.

The messages I’ve received from readers, some people I’ve known most of my life, some complete strangers, have been spiritually nourishing. I did refer to them as emotional toast, nourishment that leaves you hungry after a short while, but they have had a cumulative effect. I’m grateful to everyone that has reached out.

There’s one message I’ve heard a few times now, and I’ve thought a lot about it.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

I think you can, actually. You may not think you can. You may not want to. But let me tell you why it’s both easy and important.

For the six weeks between Groundhog Day and today, I had no intention of seeing Juliana, or coming within 3,000 miles of her. I had figured we’d text back and forth most days, but she was never intended to be a physical presence in this time. In spite of this, I’ve felt her absence very acutely. A person whom I did not interact with for maybe 99% of every day came to dominate my waking thoughts.

In my mind, this resembled an experience I imagine you’ve also had. When your stomach is upset, or your head aches, or your shoes don’t quite fit, all of a sudden you find yourself obsessed with a part of your body you usually ignore. If you’re like me, you gain a new appreciation for how nice it is not to have an upset stomach, or a headache, or a blister on your toe. You realize you’ve taken this body part for granted, and perhaps you resolve to live with a greater gratitude for all the parts of you that are working just fine today.

The unexpected loss of a loved one places you in a similar state of mind. The difference being that life teaches us that little aches and pains usually go away. A loss is irreversible. But my focus on Juliana’s life, and my efforts to make it worth living, remind me of the focus I’ve had on more ephemeral pains.

So if you’ve ever experienced anything like that, if you have the capacity to imagine physical discomfort, you have the capacity to imagine loss. Think of a loved one who isn’t in the room with you right now, who you aren’t chatting with in any medium. Now imagine that you’re never going to see them again. After all, there’s never a guarantee that you will. Your life will, in some sense, continue much as it is in this moment. You will be without the person you are imagining. So in that sense there is no special effort required. Just think, for a moment, that they are gone.

If you find yourself needing to snap out of the funk that ensues, send them a little note, tell them that you’re thinking of them.

That little exercise may be painful. Let me tell you why it’s important.

There may be no better definition of a cliché than “a phrase that a 1980s hair band used as the title of a power ballad.” In this case I’m thinking of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Till It’s Gone).” Like most clichés, it persists because there is some truth to it. It is the absence of something or someone that informs us of its value. Whether that be a pain-free elbow or a loved one.

To figure out your priorities in life you’ve got to attach value to things. (It seems crass to use the word “things” to mean “people among other things” but let’s just do that.) Understand the value of things, knowing what you’ve got, is an exercise best informed by imagining your life without them. The harder life would be without someone, something, or some activity, the greater its value to you. Set your priorities accordingly.

I spent the past week with my younger daughter, Juliana’s sister Evie, on her spring break from college. We went to São Paulo together. Yesterday we went to Guarulhos airport together with tickets on different flights, her back to the USA and me to Colombia. Her flight left first, so I waved as she scanned her boarding pass and disappeared down the jetbridge. Not long after a little panic hit me, that this could be the last time I see her. Probably not, but nothing is guaranteed. In the long run, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, we lose everything. But in reflecting on this momentary panic I understood how it reflects how very much Evie means to me.

So take time to imagine what you might go through if you lost someone. And the time to tell the people you just imagined life without how much you value their presence in your life.

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I have a lot of photographs of Juliana’s back. It’s not that this was the most photogenic side of her. I just spent a lot of time following her. On hike after hike, close to home or far away, she liked to be out in front. This was sometimes a source of consternation, for Juliana was generally not the person in our hiking party who “knew where we were going.” We’d have to plead with her to hang back a little bit, wait if she ever got to a point where two paths diverged.

I have spent the past week in Argentina, 7,000 miles from home. I stopped at one point to ask myself “how did I get here?” And the story is a chain with many links, there were several points where paths diverged and I could have ended up somewhere else today. But I would not be here without Juliana.

By several tricks of good fortune and a vast quantity of frequent-flyer miles, we had taken Juliana and her siblings to all the populated continents between 2009 and 2019. Australia first, then Japan, then Europe, then Africa. After the Africa trip in 2016 it seemed a shame to skip the continent closest to us, so our last grand family vacation before sending Juliana’s older brother off to college took us to Ecuador and Peru.

For me, Latin America was a revelation. A place practically under my nose that I had managed to ignore for 47 years but immediately got under my skin. I returned with Juliana and her sister, to Oaxaca in February 2020. Just before the world shut down.

The year 2020 was also when Juliana’s struggles took a darker turn. As we were housebound, we came up with ways to keep her occupied. I asked if we might watch a telenovela together, knowing that her Spanish would be up to the task.

I figured it would be a Mexican telenovela, because I associated the genre with that nation specifically. But when I perused the titles available on Netflix, a different one caught my eye. La Reina del Flow, Colombian, not Mexican. The story of a singer-songwriter who languished for seventeen years in an American prison, returning to Medellín to seek revenge against those who framed her and stole her songs. Unfolding over eighty-two episodes.

Like most Americans, I had thought of Medellín as someplace dangerous, a cartel city, the murder capital of the world. Which indeed it was at one time. But La Reina del Flow depicted the City of Eternal Spring in a different light, a place still marked by narcotrafficking and violence but also a stylish and musical city in a dramatic physical setting. I had thought of Colombia as a country one flew over to get to the safer parts of South America. I began to think differently.

In February 2022, during those days of masked air travel when you needed a negative COVID test to re-enter the United States, I took Juliana and her sister to Bogotá. I returned in March 2023 with my son, for his last spring break of college, to Cartagena, Santa Marta, and Ciudad Perdida.

It was in the course of these visits, brought about by the decision to watch that telenovela, that the dream of a year without winter emerged. When? Well, I had become eligible for a sabbatical leave from the University of Washington in the midst of the pandemic. Perhaps I would take it in 2025/26, after Juliana’s sister graduated from high school.

The fact that we lost Juliana during my time away is perhaps the deepest part of the unsolvable mystery I’ve been navigating for four weeks now. Was it wrong to be away from her? Would my presence have made a difference? How will I think about this beautiful place knowing what happened while I was here? I find I can escape from this unending cycle of unanswerable questions with a simple thought: it was my effort to spend time with Juilana that placed me on this path.

She did not choose the destination, any more than she chose the destination on any of the hikes where she nobly led the way. The telenovela was my idea. It was, instead, her act of accompanying me on the path that caused me to take it.

And so perhaps that is the message in all my photos of Juliana’s back. Even though you chose the trail, you chose the destination, you would not be here without me. By following you, I led you.

And so here I am, seven thousand miles from home, in what local boosters like to call la ciudad más linda del mundo on a gorgeous summer day in early March, four weeks after losing my daughter. In a place I would not be without her.

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Have you ever tallied up the leaderboard for who you’ve spent the most time with? The most nights under one roof, as a shortcut? I did this just the other day. The top four people on my list represent the family I helped raise. My wife of almost 27 years, Elizabeth, and our three children. Of whom Juliana, by virtue of the fact that she did not leave home for college, possesses a more-than-thousand-day lead over her siblings.

My mother, Mary, occupies fifth place on the list.

In the past six months, I’ve lost two people on my top-five list. Mom died on August 24th, 2025.

They had a lot in common, the two of them. The same brown hair and brown eyes, the same round face, that’s apparent by looking at them. They both had a real competitive streak in them. Mom played a weekly Scrabble game at a Seattle senior center and her companions have made many remarks about the ferocity of her letter-tile deployment. I’ve attended countless youth soccer games in my years of parenting; Juliana is the only under-12 player I ever saw receive a yellow card (for what her coach and many parents immediately described as a perfectly clean slide tackle). And they both had a tendency to be off in their own little world from time to time. Mom had lived alone for most of the past 37 years.

Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer in Spring 2021. At the time she was given a few months to live. She had expressed a relatively serene attitude toward the diagnosis. I remember my first conversation with her oncologist, who told me “there are five stages of grief but your mother seems to have gone straight to acceptance.” Mom believed firmly in life after death, she even wrote and self-published a book on the subject. I was somewhat surprised, then, to hear mom’s decision to move forward with chemotherapy and immunotherapy. As unafraid of death as she was, she wasn’t ready to go just yet.

She responded well to treatment. A few months became a few years, and they were good years. She made it to four more family Thanksgiving dinners, spent many days with her long-distance companion Yehuda, traveled to Europe with her sister, and got to see her oldest grandchild (my son!) graduate from college. She had plans to come visit me here in Colombia and would in fact have her bags packed for that trip months in advance.

Early this past August she was admitted to a local hospital suffering a complication from continued cancer treatment. After being medically stabilized she was transferred to a rehabilitation center. The idea, we had to keep reminding her, was she would make progress. She needed to work with the physical and occupational therapists who visited her every day to build up the strength she needed to find the pathway back to her independent lifestyle. But mom clearly had a different idea about where she was and what her path would be. After several days of failing to make progress, days where she simply wouldn’t respond to the therapists who diligently showed up to work with her, she had one last video appointment with her oncology team. I held mom’s phone up to facilitate the visit. The oncologist introduced herself and said “I just wanted to see if there’s anything more we can do for you.” Mom replied, quietly but firmly, “nope.”

From that moment, mom would have less than 72 hours to go. Time enough for local family to visit and say goodbye. I spent hours with her, playing music for her, doing my best to tempt her with whatever looked good on her daily meal trays. She died as she had lived, on her own terms, not without suffering, but with dignity.

With these two experiences of loss so fresh in my memory, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing and contrasting them over the past three weeks. Losing Juliana has been so much harder. My days with Juliana outnumbered those with mom by a ratio of roughly 4:3 but the ratio of grief is astronomical, the ratio of the sun to planet Mercury, perhaps. Why? I mean the obvious knee-jerk response is that mom died at the age of 78 whereas Juliana was only 21. But why does the age of the decedent matter? Both were people who figured prominently in my life over the years, I shared many memories with both of them, I had future plans involving both of them.

We think of death as an event. A death certificate memorializes that the event occurred at a specific time in a specific place. But really death is a long process, a process of loss. As children we possess boundless potential, the capability to do much more than we will ever actually have the time to do. As we grow, most of that potential ends up lying along paths not taken. The dreams we might have once harbored are the first things to go. Loss begins with the departure of what might have been.

We age further and we lose more. Our eyesight gets worse, our hearing. We slow down, we tire more easily. Memories fade. The light that goes out on the date of our death certificate was already dimmed, sometimes too faint to see.

When we die at an advanced age, there’s typically nobody left who can speak to the boundless potential we had as children. Maybe there are siblings or childhood friends still around, but they saw us as fellow children, lacking the life experience to forecast how a child might grow up. There are few if any who can lament what might have been, but many who can speak to what was.

A death at a young age short-circuits the long process. Instead of having decades to acclimate to the reality of a loved one who is inevitably advancing in the slow process of loss, everything happens at once. And those left behind — parents, grandparents, former teachers, even babysitters — possess vivid ideas of what might have been, thoughts that come with much more difficulty for loved ones born before us.

Juliana did go through a process of loss. She had fallen behind her own childhood ambitions. She struggled. For those who knew and loved her, that makes the experience different, perhaps a bit easier, than if she had died suddenly. I’ve heard from many readers who have gone through their own losses, of children or siblings, and I can imagine how much more difficult the process can be under different circumstances. The sun is not the largest star.

Maybe they are together again, the two of them. They both believed they would be. It’s a comforting thought.

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Nearly nine months ago, I reserved a room at the Howard Johnson in Barranquilla for the weekend of Carnaval. I’m now writing from the room I reserved. It faces east, toward the Magdalena River. There is a parallelogram of morning sun on the tile floor.

I chose the Howard Johnson in large part because it offered refundable rates for the weekend. Most hotels in town do not. And for a time it appeared we might take advantage of that refund, as our 21-year-old daughter Juliana was not doing well back home.

And then, not two weeks before the first parade, Juliana decided to end her life. A decision that caused all manner of disorientation, but one specific element involved these plans to attend Carnaval. It is, as one attendee described to us, Colombia’s biggest party. In a nation that knows how to party. Should we, a mother and father en luto, in mourning, take part?

We did. And we do not regret it. For sure, it was a weekend marked by difficult moments. In my travels through Colombia I have photographed nearly every street cat — gato callejero — to send to Juliana. We happened upon one just down the street from the Howard Johnson, lying in front of a hospital of all places. I did not take a picture. There were many such moments where a sight reminded us of her.

But Carnaval also served as a reminder that we are still alive, that we are not done transforming experiences into memories. We will carry that feeling of loss everywhere we go, but we can pack it up with our sunscreen and garishly colored garments and take it places we’ve never been. Accumulate the kind of stories that might at one point in our lives included Juliana as a character, and at other points would be tales we’d tell her. They will still be stories worth telling.

Our tickets to the main Carnaval parades indicated a list of prohibited items. This being Colombia, one can infer that said items are in fact ubiquitous. One of them was espuma. A mild soapy foam. Sold in skinny spray cans for 10,000 pesos (about $2.75). I had no intention of buying a spray can but a Venezuelan refugee came along and recounted his life story to me, a story involving displacement and prison and losing everything he had. So I bought a can. And I proceeded to use it. Spraying my neighbors as they sprayed me.

It was all quite ridiculous. It was fun. And you should see the other guy.

“What more could you have done?”

So asked a well-meaning colleague. We were fortunate to have been in a position to do a lot for Juliana. We had insurance that covered most of the treatments she tried, the medications, the medications to treat the side effects of other medications, inpatient care, outpatient care. We had family resources to enable Juliana to try things that insurance wouldn’t cover. We flew her across the country twice to be treated in Massachusetts. Beyond the mere facilitation and paying the bills, we had been there for her, she had been living at home at an age when most of her peers were off at college. We went to her beer-league hockey games. We did her laundry. We encouraged her, when she began to lament falling behind her peers, that there are many paths to a meaningful life.

But ask that question — what more could you have done — and a list begins that might never end. For unless you’ve devoted your entire waking life to a person, there is always something more you could have done. Last week my mind returned to an article David Frum wrote about the loss of his own daughter, about his own unease with the thoughts of things that he might have done. Frum’s daughter Miranda succumbed to complications arising from a brain tumor discovered in 2018.

I pondered the “moments of self-reproach” that Frum described as part of his grief process. And I thought, Frum had it easy. It wasn’t David Frum who planted the tumor in Miranda’s brain. But when it is thoughts and feelings, rather than a tumor, that have taken root in a brain, that have directly or indirectly led to unbearable physical symptoms, you can’t help but think did I put those there? Could I have taken them out?

More fundamental than the question “what more could you have done” is “could anything you possibly might have done have made a difference in the outcome?” And with this second question the thought process is a little easier to stomach.

Last father’s day, Juliana had given me a water-color, derived from a portrait we had taken at a father-daughter dance thirteen years before. Today, it’s one of my most prized possessions. What haunts me, though, is where I found it when I was back home last week. It was in a file drawer, alongside many other handmade cards the kids had given me over the years. A picture that deserves to be framed and hung on the wall, in a file drawer. And I thought to myself, now what kind of message did that send, that your daughter would put such time and effort into something so lovely and you just filed it away?

So there, an easy example of something more I could have done. Of course, had I framed it and hung it — perhaps on my office wall — it would have joined three more original Juliana artworks already there, that she had seen there. Would the fourth have been the charm? I could have done more, but it is far less certain that what I might have done would have made a difference.

The answer to these questions is simply not knowable. They cannot be resolved with a simple “yes” or “no.” The resolution, I suspect, comes from an understanding that there are still other beloved people in one’s life, people for whom one can indeed still make a difference, and should.

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I am back in Medellín.

Back on Day 1, as I packed to return home in the wake of devastating news, I had to decide whether I was coming back. At the time, I had about six weeks left on my lease here. It felt like the wrong place to be that night. Would it become the right place to be again? It was a night of disorientation, a night where forecasting how I’d feel in a few days or weeks seemed impossible. If I left things behind, either I’d be committing to coming back or to abandoning those things. In the end I left things behind.

It was the next day that a week started to seem like a proper amount of time back home. The rest of the family would be in Seattle through the weekend. We would have an event for Juliana that weekend. Coming back after a week would leave later plans intact. My wife Elizabeth and I had plans to go to Carnaval in Barranquilla over American President’s Day weekend. My younger daughter, a first-year student in college, had plans to visit me over her Spring Break. We planned to spend a few days in Medellín before heading to São Paulo, because it was there. And appreciating the insight that it’s these one-off experiences that stand out in memory, the stars in a night sky, it seemed appropriate to commit to making more.

Juliana and I interacted most days when I was down here, but for the vast majority of my time she — and everyone else back in the states — was basically an abstraction to me. A person I knew existed, a presence I welcomed and valued in my life, but a creature of my mind in practice. So she remains today.

I continue to think of her most waking moments. But the thoughts do not invoke despair or a profound sense of loss, for the most part. More like gratitude for the times we shared, for the impact she had on me. The things my rational self thought early in the process — that she left us after depositing what was essentially a full complement of memories a parent might have of a child, that she also left us art worthy of framing that we’d always have with us — are becoming the foundation of acceptance.

A reader suggested that the blue dragonfly I saw on day 1, the one I photographed and sent to Juliana as part of the series we exchanged, might have been her. It turns out, after more carefully reviewing the timeline of that day, her life had left her body by the time I snapped and sent that photo. I’m agnostic about the concept of reincarnation. I certainly don’t claim any expertise on the timeline, or whether time need proceed linearly at all. But as with many beliefs, the thought was comforting regardless of whether it could possibly be true.

Today, only a few moments after returning to my writing loft for the first time since Day 1, a blue dragonfly once again alighted on my windowsill. It sat there for some time. I began to speak to it. Called it Jannie, the name she had called herself. Told it to keep an eye on her brother and sister. And to say hello to grandma, my mother, who passed away not six months ago. And that I loved her, I was proud of her.

There are swallows and flycatchers and other insectivores all around my apartment. I figured it would be just my luck to see the dragonfly devoured. Such is the circle of life.

Relearning to see a child as a child

Over the past ten days I’ve spent a lot of time looking at old photos of Juliana, finding it difficult to escape the thought this is a child who was destined to pass away before reaching her 22nd birthday. There was one birthday video, in particular, where Juliana left one candle after blowing out the rest. “That means,” she said, “I will have one child when I grow up.”

Plans. An artifact from the days when she still had plans, every intention of growing up. The luxury that became too much to afford as time went by.

And I’ve found myself looking at other children, sometimes children I know, more often complete strangers, and imagining their destiny lying on a spectrum, with tragedy on one end and a long healthy life on the other. For the children destined for tragedy, I mourn. For those destined to enjoy a long life, I mourn instead for the sweet child of mine who once held out that possibility too.

The trouble with this mindset is that it recasts the entirety of almost 22 years into one long tragedy. And it wasn’t that. There were hard times in those years, but there were moments of pure joy too. Ranging from the way Juliana used to kick her legs in excitement when, as a baby, she saw me return home to the expression on her face when she ice skated outdoors.

To think of destiny, or what a child was destined for later in life, is to be outside the moment. When I see a child, I am not looking at a person destined for tragedy, or happiness, or any particular fate. I am just looking at a child who is in that moment a child. That child’s past and future are abstractions, the child’s present is real. And so by extension, when I review old photos I am not looking at a person with a destiny, I have a window to a single moment, a moment when the future that came to pass was an abstraction, its import paling in comparison to what was going on right then.

Reclaiming “My Girl”

I listened to this standard from the Temptations on Saturday evening, day 6, with tears welling, recalling the times I would sing it to Juliana at father-daughter dances years ago, a row of other dads doing the same for a parallel row of other girls. I took a moment to think carefully about the song, though, and find that I can play it on the little jukebox I carry in my head with contentment now.

The lyrics offer a compendium of things the singer has “got.” Sunshine on a cloudy day. The month of May when it’s cold outside. So much honey the bees envy him. A sweeter song than the birds in the trees. All the riches one man can claim.

What does the singer never, not once, say that he’s “got?” My girl. It is not the possession of his girl that makes him feel this way, nor the companionship, nor anything in particular that the girl does or says or provides. It is the mere thought of her. And you can always think of your girl, no matter where she is. No matter when or for how long she is, or was, or will be, part of your life.

And with that perspective, I can listen happily to the song again. Hey hey hey.

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Back when I was a grad student, learning to be an urban economist in the 1990s, there was rampant speculation regarding the effect the internet would have on cities. Urban agglomerations, the leading theories posited, existed to facilitate human interaction. Whether the transit of an automobile chassis on an assembly line or a draft contract among attorneys, physical proximity made the work easier. The internet promised to similarly facilitate some forms of human interaction without the need for proximity. Perhaps it would lead us all away from the congestion, pollution, and high living costs of large cities toward smaller towns.

The internet did something else, though. It made city living easier and more fun. User reviews helped us figure out what restaurants we needed to try. Websites made it easier to comparison shop for an apartment. Real-time data guides us around traffic jams, and in many cities tells us not only how to get from point A to point B by transit, but whether the trains or buses are running on time. Cities didn’t wither in the information age. They flourished.

Things are a little different in Medellín. The real-time data revolution is behind the times. It’s hard enough getting a decent weather forecast here, let alone figure out whether your bus is running on time. I found it hard enough to gather transit information in the City of Eternal Spring that I vowed to write a user’s guide, something that would pop up when a future would-be rider performed the same Google search I did. Without further ado, let’s go over the basic steps.

1. Plan your route. In most of the civilized world, this means getting transit directions from Google Maps or Apple Maps. As of early 2026, these won’t work in Medellín. You might instead try the Moovit app, but here I must invoke what I’d term the first rule of living in Colombia: any information you receive has better than even odds of being wrong. I learned this the hard way in a hotel lobby in Santa Marta a couple of years ago, when the front desk clerk assured me that I didn’t need to go out to the street as the airport shuttle driver had instructed me by WhatsApp. That the driver would come inside to retrieve me. The clerk only relented upon seeing the follow-up message I received from the driver, which roughly translates to “you’re not here, I’m outta here.” Since that day, I have found no rule more reliable than the rule of not relying on anything you hear.
   
   So, Moovit has kind of accurate information about the routes buses follow, and plausible but not necessarily reliable information about how frequently the buses run or when they are supposed to arrive at specific stops. But Moovit does not integrate traffic information and tends to ignore the option of traveling by metro or cable car, options that keep you off the congested streets. So if you ever long for the good ol’ days before the internet, selecting your mode of transportation offers you just that sort of experience here.
   
   If you’re planning a round trip, bear in mind that many bus routes in Medellín travel in loops, not out-and-back sorties. If you’re headed from Parque Poblado to Terminal del Sur to catch an intercity bus, for example, the 304 will get you there in a few minutes but it’ll only get you back via a circuitous excursion through Laureles, Candelaria, and the southeastern corner of the city.
   

2. Find your stop. In much of the city, you can adopt the Zen-like perspective that a bus stop is wherever you want it to be. Find a place to stand along the route, or what you have been told is the route. When you see a bus, extend your arm. The driver may stop 20 meters in front of you, or 20 meters behind, but be assured that the driver is stopping for you.
   
   If this seems too stressful, there are subtle clues that a spot on the side of a street may in fact be a bus stop. Is there someone there selling avocados, or mangoes, or even chontaduro? That’s a good place to wait, although you’ll still need to do the arm-extending exercise. On some major streets, such as Avenida El Poblado (or as the street signs call it, Carrera 43A), there are glass and steel structures resembling traditional bus shelters. Again, you’ll have to raise your arm. If a bus stop is busy enough to warrant a shelter there are probably multiple routes passing by. If a driver doesn’t see you signal, they will assume you’re waiting on a different route.
   
   The one place I’ve been where waiting at an official stop matters is in Candelaria, what we would call “downtown,” where buses to and from the far-flung corners of the city disgorge passengers in close proximity along Avenida Oriental and the nearby blocks. Here, Moovit can be helpful in making sure you’re standing in the right place. You might not even need to raise your arm, as buses will almost always be stopping anyway to let riders off.
   
   If you stand at what you think is a bus stop for an extended period of time and no bus arrives, several things may be possible.

   1. You are not, in fact, standing along a bus route.

   2. The bus is severely delayed in traffic.

   3. You’ve been misled regarding exactly how late the bus runs.

   4. If there are cyclists and joggers clogging the roadway where you thought the bus would be, it’s Ciclovía, the festive Sunday-and-public-holiday-exercise-promotion event, implying that your bus will arrive in mid-afternoon after the street is reopened to vehicular traffic. The good news in this case is that there’s probably a vendor nearby who can sell you a refreshing glass of guarapo while you wait.
      
      If you give up, as you depart the alleged bus stop to pursue your plan B, be sure to look over your shoulder as for whatever cosmic reason buses tend to arrive here shortly after you give up on them.
      
      Finally, while Moovit will likely inform you of about 3 different routes that will all follow more or less the same path to your destination it will not warn you of the pretenders, the buses that seem like maybe will also do the trick but in fact will deviate and deliver you to some remote barrio where no gringo dare tread. The differences can be subtle, The 135, for example, should never be mistaken for the 135ii. When in doubt, note that buses often display a signboard on the front window describing some of the major places it stops along its route. As in the photo above. It is recommended that you memorize the location of the city’s various centros commerciales before playing this game.
      

3. Board and pay. There are a few routes that accept the tap-to-pay Civica card that also works on the metro and cable cars. On other routes you pay the driver in cash. On routes that take Civica you can also pay the driver in cash. Typically this involves grabbing a Civica card that is dangling somewhere near the reader and using it to unlock the turnstile.
   
   Yes, every bus in Medellín has a turnstile aboard, at the top of the stairs by the front door. Some turnstiles require a large amount of force to move. If it will not budge, keep trying. The turnstile also means you’ll have to exit by the rear door. We’ll get there when the time comes.
   
   Whether you tap to pay or use cash, it is customary to heartily greet the driver. Before noon, this would be “buenos días” or the singular “buen día.” After noon and before dark, “buenas tardes.” After dark, “buenas noches.” You can also use “buenas” as an all-purpose abbreviation. Expect a response heartier than the one you started with.
   
   In 2026, cash fare on most routes is either 3,800 or 3,900 pesos. That’s just over one US dollar. (Fun fact: at the time of Colombian independence in the early 19th century the dollar and the peso were at par.) There is usually a round orange sticker on the windshield with current fare information.
   
   It is unusual to carry this amount in exact change. There is no bill-eater or coin swallower on the bus. Whatever you have you give to the driver. The driver will make change as needed (more begrudgingly the larger the bill you hand over). The driver will make this change while starting to drive the bus again. The driver will be able to tell the denomination of coins you provide, despite the challenge that two coins of differing diameter and weight may in fact have the exact same value (the 50 peso and 200 peso coins feature this duality). And despite the need to keep eyes on the road, steer, and shift the manual transmission. Paisa bus drivers appear to have superhuman qualities in this manner.
   

4. Find your space. Sometimes the bus will be packed, standing room only. So join the throng of standees and brace yourself for more to come. Sometimes the bus will be empty, or nearly so. I would advise you to gravitate toward the rear of the bus if you have a choice, for reasons that will soon become clear.
   
   Expect an exciting ride. Medellín is a city of speed bumps, on everything from cul-de-sacs to major arterials. Though your bus driver has traveled this route thousands of times, he (it’s usually a he) will treat each speed bump as though it were a woodland creature that only decided to cross the road as the conveyance hurtled toward it, braking heavily and traversing gently before flooring the accelerator anew.
   
   Horns are used early and often in Colombian traffic. Many can be mistaken for onrushing freight trains. The notion that right turns should be executed from the rightmost lane and left turns analogously is regarded as a quaint anachronism, like knowing which is the minute hand and which the hour hand. Motos, the most affordable and hence prominent personal vehicle in Colombia, will flow around cars, trucks, and your bus like coca-cola around the ice cubes in a glass. You may find yourself fearing for the lives of moto drivers, which is entirely appropriate.
   

5. Signal your stop. Unless you already know Medallo like the back of your hand, you may wish to track the bus’s progress in your favorite maps app to make sure you don’t miss your stop. You may look around the bus, looking for a cord to pull or a tape strip to press to alert the driver you’d like to alight. You won’t find one. There is a single location on board with this functionality. It’s a red or orange button affixed to a pole, somewhere between waist and eye level, to the left of the bus’s rear door. And where you may be used to thinking of the signal you send to the driver as a “next stop” message, pushing the button in Medellín is more accurately translated as “stop NOW!” This following from the general principle that anywhere can be a bus stop if you want it to be.
   
   Put all this together and you’ll understand the suggestion to favor the rear of the bus. Especially on a crowded vehicle, it eases the process of making your way to the magic button as the bus continues in motion. Be prepared for a significant deceleration the instant you press.
   

6. Thank your driver and alight. The bus may be crowded. The air may be thick with the reverberations of horns, or the cumbia and reggaeton emanating from nearby vehicles, restaurants, and shops. You may utter “gracias” in little more than a whisper. But in another display of superhuman power, the driver will hear you. And you will likewise hear the driver’s response as you descend the steep steps to the curb, or in most cases the street itself.
   
   ”Con gusto!”

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Ordinary time

Growing up Catholic, it amused me that the majority of the liturgical year was called “ordinary time.” Lent, Advent, and high holy days were the special times of year, the memorable times. Ordinary time… I must have been to mass hundreds of Sundays in ordinary time. They have all congealed into a single memory. There is a similar congealing process underway now.

It’s my fifth full day back in Seattle. Where the first two days bore distinct, time-stamped, location-identified memories, it requires more effort here to sort out what has happened on what day, or even how many days it has been.

These have been days of deliveries to the front door. Food. Flowers. Cards. We had to call the local florist to request that lilies be omitted from any future deliveries, for the sake of our cats. Walks and outing with friends and colleagues, one or two at a time. Juliana’s younger sister came home from the east coast Thursday night. She’s on her way back today.

Every morning of these five days I have put on running shoes and gone out to exercise. It clears out a morning malaise, awakening to remember that today is different from the last eight thousand days for the saddest of reasons. I witnessed a glorious pink sunrise one morning. I think about what I might write that day. I return, and with decent odds a member of the family will ask me how the weather is out there. It just feels cold. This is not the City of Eternal Spring.

I return, I wash up, get dressed, have breakfast, and I write. And then for a good part of the afternoon I read responses.

Today would have been her 22nd birthday. Birthdays of the recently departed are supposed to be hard. Coming as it does on day 7, so soon after we lost her, it’s not clear that today is any different from the day before. It feels like ordinary time. Maybe that was a conscious choice on her part.

Pins

In the family room there is a map of the world, with color-coded pins. A white pin marks a place one member of the family has visited. Red means more than one but not all of us. Black means all of us. Without much thought, I went to the map to place some new pins, having returned from a journey that took me to new cities. White pins in Panama City, San José de Costa Rica, Cali. A red pin for Leticia in the Colombian Amazon, which both my son and I had visited separately within the past two months.

It occurred to me that there was now ambiguity in the meaning of a black pin. What is the meaning of “all of us?” It took only a few seconds of consultation to render the definitive interpretation. All means five. We briefly contemplated the possibility that there would be no more black pins placed in the map. But indeed this was not true, for there were places Juliana visited that another family member had not. Until 2019 or so, we traveled as a family. Afterwards, with the onset of college, school trips, international soccer tournaments, work obligations, and so forth we had often traveled in groups of two or three. There were red pins in Copenhagen, Bogotá, Oaxaca de Juarez, and the little town of Mazunte on the Oaxacan coast. All places Juliana had visited but at least one family member had not, yet. Somehow this offered a little glimmer of hope.

Toast

There’s no shortage of food around the house. Copious amounts of bread, in particular. We’ve had a lot of toast. One morning featured conversation about how toast fills you up, but then you feel hungry again twenty minutes later.

The cards, the hugs, the messages of sympathy, the sharing of anecdotes about similar experiences, even stories of Juliana’s impact on others’ lives have a similar effect. They are emotional toast. And the givers of these ephemeral gifts understand them as such. I do not want to downplay the value of these gifts, there isn’t a single one I would return or exchange. But whereas a hug warms you on the surface, the problem is you have coldness radiating from within.

I have found one thing that feels like a more substantial meal. A hearty bandeja paisa, you might say. A song I first remember hearing while running down Avenida El Poblado on a Sunday morning, a ciclovía where the street is closed to traffic and the sidewalks fill with musicians and vendors. A song I remember hearing as a took my seat on a buseta in Barbosa, on the Boyacá/Santander border, while en route from Villa de Leyva to Barichara.

The first eight bars are bombastic, festive, an assault on ordinary time. It then resolves into a peculiar genre. The basic rhythm a Colombian cumbia. The syncopation of the horns contributes a Caribbean lilt. And then there’s… accordion? Just wait, there’s yodeling too. But not until after the verse.

Vamos mi amorcito
Que te llevaré
Al decimo-quinto
Festival en Guararé

“Let’s go my dear, I’ll take you to the 15th annual Festival in Guararé.” Guararé being a small town in Panamá. The “15th annual” being an amusing bit of superfluous specificity that dates the song, akin to the details that help make Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s realism magical. Last September Guararé hosted the 73rd annual festival. Anyway, that’s it, that’s the entirety of the lyrics, repeated off and on for a couple of minutes. With a modicum of yodeling thrown in for good measure. And there is laughter and carrying-on in the background.

I put this song on in the car as I drove to pick up my younger daughter at the airport Thursday night and I could not sit still. I had to sing along, though the cadence is a little quick for my middling Spanish skills. And after the song was over I stayed full for quite a while. I’ve listened a couple more times since then.

Saturday evening good friends of ours hosted a get-together in Juliana’s honor at a women’s sports bar they own in Ballard, our Seattle neighborhood. Family, friends, former soccer and hockey teammates and coaches, co-workers, and co-volunteers all showed up to honor her life. It was heartwarming, loaf upon loaf of emotional toast. There were occasional gut punches from the classic rock soundtrack, though. James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” hit hard. “I always thought that I’d see you again.” I spoke the other day of how you don’t necessarily have a lot of plans with a person who is living one day at a time. But there had been, at the very least, that plan. I thought that I would see her again. Seven hours after arriving, we exited to the strains of the Temptation’s “My Girl.” A song they had played every year at a father-daughter dance Juliana and I attended back in North Carolina.

Returned home, lying in bed, these songs came back to me. I found that “Festival en Guararé” had the power to banish them from my mind. As though the Temptations or James Taylor had been abruptly forced off the stage by a vallenato-playing mob. I suspect it is a medicine that applied too liberally can impede the healing process, but sometimes you just want to get to sleep.

The walls at Rough & Tumble are populated by jerseys worn by Seattle women’s sports luminaries, among them Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird. As of last night there is a new addition to the collection.

I find, today, that the urge to write is receding. Perhaps I am ready to devote my daily word count to other projects. I suspect I’ll post more updates to this series, maybe weeks, months, or years down the line.

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Madrugada

It’s one of my favorite words in the Spanish language. It has no direct analogue in English. “The wee hours of the morning,” we might say. That time after midnight but before dawn. Before there was a word for this dark daily interval, there was a word for the action of waking up during it. Madrugar. Literally, to wake before sunrise. Figuratively, to put in extra effort, to do whatever it takes to accomplish something.

Madrugué.

I thought a lot about Groundhog Day, the 1993 Harold Ramis film with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. How the film’s happy ending (oops, spoiler alert) was heralded by a radio alarm clock finally playing something other than Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe,” the song Murray’s character heard repeatedly as he was doomed to repeat February 2nd perhaps thousands of times. The indication that it was finally the morning of February 3rd.

Murray’s character, when awaking to live the same day yet again, retained the knowledge of all his previous iterations. No one else in his orbit did. I thought about how many times I’d have to repeat my own February 2nd before I would be graced with the alarm announcing the arrival of a happy February 3rd. Just once, I thought. With the time difference I’d have a head start on all the other characters in my drama. Even from four thousand miles away, I could set events in motion to stop what had actually happened on February 2nd, 2026.

Alas, even in the land of magical realism time had marched irrepressibly forward. I would be traveling those four thousand miles today. A day late.

By 4:38 AM, I had shoved my luggage, a guitar, and my weary self into the back seat of a minuscule yellow taxi. I had a friendly driver, and we chatted a bit. He could tell I was not colombiano (though he complimented me on my Spanish) and asked me how I liked Medellín. It was perhaps the most complicated question he could have possibly asked at that moment. I’d fielded it before, and it had been easy. Me gusta mucho. It had felt like home, I felt as though I had accumulated an entire lifetime’s worth of memories in those few months. That was before I knew it was the place where I’d spend the last five months of my daughter’s life. Now no place felt like home.

José María Córdova International Airport sits on an Andean altiplano to the east of the city. To reach it one traverses a tunnel, a tube 8,400 meters long with one lane of traffic in each direction. Especially if you end up behind a volqueta or other slow-moving vehicle, it can take 20 minutes to transit. The passage seemed extra long this morning. My conversation with the driver petered out amid the monotony of white tile and electronic signs urging drivers to accelerate in order to maintain the minimum speed, the traffic in front of them notwithstanding. The small talk had not been difficult. If people don’t know, you can just act as though nothing has happened. If the conversation is particularly engaging, it can even make you forget, if only for a few seconds, that anything has happened.

I stepped onto the curb, segundo piso, departures level, at 5:07 AM. Check-in, security, immigration, the obligatory duty-free walk through. More interactions with people who didn’t know. Routine, easy. Fast. I sat in a departure lounge with dozens of people who didn’t know. We all mostly kept to ourselves. Habiamos madrugadado.

Mañana

The word that means both “morning,” at least that portion of morning after sunrise, and “tomorrow.” Today it only meant “morning.” Tomorrow was too abstract a concept.

It is roughly three hours in the air from Medellín to Miami. Across the Caribbean. If the weather’s clear you can spot Jamaica, Cuba, and then some of the Bahamas on approach. I sat in the window seat. On a northbound morning flight such as this, I habitually choose the A seat, the seat without blinding sun streaming in the window. These were the flights I used to take out of Raleigh-Durham for day trips to DC or New York or Boston. Having booked the ticket the night before, an A seat wasn’t an option. I sat in 8F, warmed by the light even with the shade drawn.

I had a copy of that morning’s El Colombiano, having learned only today that it arrived to my doorstep before 4:38 AM. I sat beside an American, from Nashville Tennessee, and his Paisa wife. He saw the newspaper in my lap and made me an offer. When I was done with it, he would buy it from me. I told him he could just have it. He insisted on paying me for it, even though I would have partially completed the crucigrama and at least one of the six daily sudoku puzzles in its pages. In the end I managed to give the paper away, but my seatmate’s intervention forced me to focus on reading so I could honestly claim I was done.

As we made our way north, I received a WhatsApp message from the woman who comes each Tuesday to clean the apartment. We often miss each other with our comings and goings, but we had been there at the same time last week. When she left, she had said “hasta próximo Martes” and I had responded “estaré acá.” (I had learned long ago that the word for “here” is aquí, but Paisas substitute acá.) But I was not there. Hence the message, which said nothing more than “buenos días.” It posed my first real dilemma of the day.

We were friendly, the two of us, she had met my wife and knew I had three children. She’d ask after them. But were we friendly enough to share this information, right now? Sharing the information is hard. Everytime you share your heart breaks again. Was it worth breaking my heart once more for the benefit of informing someone I barely knew?

I hedged. I told her there had been a family emergency, that I was on my way back to the states. Maybe we could just leave it at that. But she followed up. Qué pasó con su familia? I stalled for time. I told her my daughter was not well and I had to get home as soon as possible. She would message me a bit later in the day to ask for an update. I put off responding until the next day, when I finally broke the news.

Tarde

On the day’s long flight, from Miami to Phoenix, I occupied a middle seat. At some point during the five-hour journey I began to feel some mild chest pain. It hurt a little bit when I took a deep breath, or when I leaned over to take something from my personal item stored under the seat in front of me.

One perk of being a faculty member at a University with a medical school is quick access to friendly care. I messaged a physician friend. A friend who had already received the news. She asked if I knew my heart rate. I have a watch that tracks such things. It gave readings in the upper 40s. Running has long been a hobby, and I’d been training at altitude for several months, my more typical resting heart rate was in the lower 40s. We quickly ruled out the most emergent possible concern for a person in my position, a pulmonary embolism.

She told me that there is something called “broken heart syndrome.” It’s a stress reaction. Certainly, being cooped up on a plane after at most an hour’s sleep so that you can join your family at a moment of immense loss is no day at the beach.

Noche

The western horizon glowed orange as my last flight departed Phoenix. Our approach into Seattle took us north to the tip of Lake Washington, making a U-turn to return South to the airport. I could see some of the parks where I had taken Juliana to soccer practices and games. We would have flown directly over one of the hospitals where I had taken her on an evening years before, when the possibility of losing her was very real. I didn’t really think of these things in the moment. I was struck by how flat Seattle was. Undoubtedly an unusual reaction. But it is certainly no taco metropolitano.

Before long I had returned to the drop-off lanes, the last place I had seen Juliana, the last place I had hugged her. This didn’t occur to me at the time. My wife embraced me quickly and we made the last leg of the journey. And I re-entered the home I had shared with Juliana. It looked very lived-in. Her sketch pads and other possessions sat on the family room coffee table. Dishes she had dirtied were in the dishwasher. There was clean laundry stacked up right outside her room, where we had always left it for her.

This, I imagine, is one of the things that makes it hard for things to sink in right away. The artifacts of a life do not magically vanish. To the casual observer, it would not be obvious that the number of occupants had been reduced yesterday.

It had been a day focused on logistics, a day where I spent close to zero time spreading the news, re-opening fresh wounds. While I had flown, a car had been retrieved, along with a few possessions. A note, a photo of which I had received in flight. It was a lovely note, a masterpiece. A note offering absolution, consolation, the recognition of gifts received and cherished. A parting gift to us.

I was exhausted. I slept.

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Note to the reader: I’m an economist, policy school faculty member, and sometime legislative advocate. This content, as yesterday’s, is a departure from the ordinary dull commentary breaking down social problems and policy responses thereto. I am writing to “work through the unimaginable,” and whereas I could keep these writings entirely to myself I know from responses to my last post that there are many of you out there working through your own unimaginable, or living with the worry that the unimaginable might one day happen to you. I imagine days or years from now there will be those who arrive at this post after a google search along the lines of the ones I made this day. If you’re hoping I just get back to the dull commentary, don’t worry, I believe I will in due time. And the first part of this essay offers something for you. There’s no obligation to read the rest. If you haven’t seen yesterday’s post, you’ll get more out of this one if you start there.

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Medellín, Colombia, February 2nd 2026

The city lies in a high and narrow mountain valley. A party of conquistadors passed through around 1540, thought little of it, and moved on. They would found a provincial capital, Santa Fe de Antioquia, at much lower elevation near the banks of the Cauca river, the waterway leading from the established Andean towns of Cali and Popayán to the key strategic port at Cartagena. It would be more than a century before colonists established a permanent settlement at what is now Medellín.

The city grew in spite of its remote location in a dead-end valley, not because of it. Why? The weather. Santa Fe was more strategically located, but it was hot. The incidence of tropical disease was higher. Medellín, today known as “The City of Eternal Spring,” drew the provincial capital away from Santa Fe around the time of Colombian independence. If you’re going to do the banal work of governing a province, might as well do it someplace nice. It remained ridiculously difficult to reach into the 20th century. Imported goods could be sailed up the Magdalena river, but from Puerto Berrio those goods would need to travel up and over the central cordillera by mule. There was not so much a wagon road, let alone rail, until the 1920s.

The high cost of mule-borne imported goods led the city to develop its own manufacturing base. When the rail link to Puerto Berrio was finally completed, the city began to manufacture for a broader national market—the goods were too expensive and low-quality to export, with the exception of local coffee.

Like many North American cities, the second half of the 20th century would bring the decline of manufacturing in Medellín. But whereas “rust belt” cities declined in population, Medellín kept growing. There was violence and armed conflict in the hinterlands, and migrants arrived not for economic opportunity but to save their own lives. Arriving with virtually nothing, they built the most rudimentary shacks wherever they could find open land, on the hillsides, even on the city’s trash dump.

In the 1980s, the city became the headquarters for Pablo Escobar’s cartel. He did not process coca leaves into cocaine there, at the scale of Escobar’s operation that activity was better suited for remote areas under heavy vegetative cover. But the money flowed into the city. And the violence. Medellín would attain perhaps the highest murder rate of any city in history in this time period, several times higher than anything ever recorded in the USA.

Escobar was killed, the cartel disassembled. Medellín continued to suffer urban violence for years, but sometime in the first decade of the 21st century a renaissance began. Today, Medellín and its environs are home to some four million people, celebrated in song, a travel destination. What had been notorious slums have been transformed into tourist traps. It recently surpassed Bogotá to become the most expensive city in Colombia. Imagine a Cleveland or Milwaukee rising to become more expensive than the Bay Area. That’s what happened in Medello.

And that’s why I was there. Not so much to check out the party scene, but to study the underbelly of this urban success story. I was educated in an era of urban decline, assigned books chronicling and diagnosing the crises that swept American cities through the 1970s and 1980s. But from the ‘90s forward cities worldwide were making a comeback. In some cases these cities became victims of their own success. Medellín was a great example. Throughout the city I heard concerns of gentrificación. Housing prices were escalating. The cost of everything was going up. The city’s transportation grid often buckled under the load of traffic. Many in the city expressed the wish that Medellín could be a ciudad por todos, a city for all, the rich and the poor. Is that possible? What does it even mean? That there could be room for ten million people in the narrow valley some called “el taco metropolitano?” A hundred million? Could you put a hundred pounds of meat in a taco? I was there to gather data, gather observations, to support a book on the topic.

-

Monday was a writing day. My objective was to move an entirely separate book project closer to completion. A book which I often describe to casual acquaintances as “lobbying for dummies,” but with a more erudite title. Based on my five years’ experience as faculty legislative representative for the University of Washington. Ironically enough, I was in the middle of writing a chapter about resilience and persistence, how to keep something you are fighting for moving as you encounter obstacles.

I wrote in the loft of an apartment in El Poblado, the heavily gentrified foreigner-dominated neighborhood at the city’s South End. The loft had a picture window at treetop level. I would often pause to admire the urban wildlife that gathered there. Orange-chinned parakeets and scarlet macaws. Hummingbirds and woodpeckers. Squirrels that would sneak into the kitchen and eat your mangoes if you gave them half a chance. There was a birdbath on the windowsill. Palm tanagers would plop themselves down in it and splash noisily. Kiskadees would come and take long leisurely drinks. Shy doves and bananaquits would partake too, if they were sure I wasn’t looking.

Most days I’d take a photo of something going on outside my window and send it to my older daughter, Juliana, back home in Seattle. I often expressed to her the wish that she’d come visit me, and she’d respond saying how much she’d love to, but she just didn’t think she was up to it.

On this day, shortly before noon local time, I took a photo of a blue dragonfly that had landed on my windowsill. I texted the photo to her. It arrived to her phone a little before 9 AM Seattle time. She was likely still alive at that moment.

About three hours later I received a call from home. My wife, Elizabeth, had returned home after teaching a class at UW. She had expected Juliana to be there, but she was gone. Moreover, she had silenced notifications on her phone and stopped sharing location, which I could also verify on my own device.

Juliana was twenty-one years old. Legally an adult. She had no obligation to keep us apprised of her whereabouts. So it wasn’t clear that we could just call 911 and have them leap into action. Elizabeth set out driving to places around town where she might have gone. I logged in to our family cell phone account to glean whatever information I could, had she called someone? Texted? Was her phone still using data?

In the end, we weren’t in suspense for very long. Elizabeth was back home when a police officer came to the door to share sad news. Juliana had been lost, but now she was found. As what the newspaper in Medellín would call a cuerpo sin vida.

Many of you will be familiar with the “five stages of grief,” attributable to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. It’s a framework more suitable for people who have been informed of an impending loss, like the announcement that they only have a few weeks to live. Grief regarding what is to come, not what has just happened. When you’ve just been informed that your daughter, who has struggled for years, who has worried you for years, has finally done the thing that you most worried she might do, I’d say three of those stages were pretty much irrelevant in my case. Denial? I mean, the evidence was awfully hard to contradict. Bargaining? I suppose if you believe in a deity with the power to raise the dead you might offer to make a deal, but I certainly didn’t. Anger? OK maybe I did experience a little bit of anger, but for a time best measured in seconds.

We’re left with depression, and acceptance. That first day there was an awful lot of depression, with maybe hints of acceptance to come. But there were other things that aren’t really captured in the Kübler-Ross model. So let me posit that in place of denial, anger, and bargaining there are three modes of grief I experienced, and that might apply to others in a similar situation.

Numbness/paralysis. This occupied a large share of those first hours. An inability to do anything, an inability to say anything. I got the news in the late afternoon. I eventually determined that I should eat something, I had at least some appetite. I must have wandered into the kitchen a half-dozen times, only to lose my sense of purpose and end up wandering out again. You could argue that this is a manifestation of depression. I’d say the distinction is between having a mind that is truly blank and one that is actively thinking glum thoughts.

Logistics. This may seem like an odd stage of grief, but there’s a lot of shit to be dealt with immediately. Between waves of paralysis I looked into and bought a plane ticket home. Leaving at 7AM the next morning. I packed. Elizabeth had another set of immediate considerations. Where is the now-impounded car that Juliana had driven to her final destination? Where is her cuerpo sin vida? How long can these remain where they are? Who needs to know immediately? Who else needs to know before the information starts to be beyond our control to contain? It might seem like these questions would be impossible to contemplate in the immediate aftermath of a tragic event, but they weren’t. It hadn’t sunk in yet.

Sharing the news. Again, this may seem like an odd stage of grief, but we quickly learned that telling the people who needed to be told was incredibly painful. Absolutely necessary, but devastating. For these people would experience their own instantaneous grief, have immediate needs for consolation, and providing that support for them could only compound our own need for support. I volunteered to share the news with Juliana’s two siblings.

In this day and age, when the phone rings and you see that a certain person has called, you know it must be bad news before you pick up. Not necessarily so when it comes to parent-child calls, although I am much more likely to text than call. I don’t think anybody I called was prepared for the news I had to share.

There is this poignant moment at the beginning of such a phone call. You are about to deliver what may be the most devastating news the recipient will ever receive in their lifetime, but we are conditioned to open our phone conversations with a rote question that occasions a rote response. “How are you?” “I’m good, thanks!” Does one just go ahead and give the rote response? Ignore the question? Tell the truth, and break the news that way?

Both my children had the good fortune to be with company when they heard the news. It brought me solace to hear those other voices on the line. Solace in the context of conversations that broke my heart anew.

I eventually did cook and eat dinner. I set an alarm for 4 AM and lay down to sleep about 11 PM. I figured it would be hard to sleep, and it was. I just kept lying down, following the advice I used to give to the kids when they couldn’t sleep. Just rest, it’s still good for you. There were waves of depression, thoughts along the lines of how could I possibly ever experience joy again? And following months where I had sought out beauty in order to photograph it and share it with Juliana, can there be any point to continuing this search for beauty if I can no longer share it?

It was not, to be sure, five straight hours of lying there repeating these thoughts over and over. There were periods of numbness, one of which transitioned to a brief period of actual slumber. And occasionally the silhouette of acceptance. Perhaps a memory that brought a little spark of joy, proving that yes indeed my mind was capable of registering that reaction. Perhaps a thought for the other people I loved who remained in my life, whom I could indeed continue to share beauty with.

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If you have a daughter, you probably worry about her from time to time. From an early point in Juliana’s lifetime, I would have premonitions about something happening to her. I feared that another person would harm her. I had visions of something, something vaguely involving bushes or vegetation. The vision didn’t feature her at all.

It was not on day one, but today, day five, the day I am writing, that I thought of my beloved loft, the place I loved to go write. The place that, on day 1, I thought I might forever hate because it was the place I received the news. But, now, the place I plan to return to, to reclaim. For it was surrounded by vegetation, but Juliana was never physically there.

Now think of people who mean something to you but are not in your physical presence. In your mind, at this moment, they exist only in the form of memories or plans. The longer you have known them, or the older they are, the more the balance tilts toward memories. You may feel a sense of happiness at what they have accomplished or at the potential you perceive in them, but at root these are emotions grounded in memories or plans.

Should any one of these people who mean something to you pass away, the plans are gone, the possibility that you might once again enjoy their physical presence is erased. The memories remain.

You may have memories of Juliana, my older daughter, from her early childhood in Durham, North Carolina. You may have met her after our family moved to Seattle when she was ten years old. If you’ve ever been skating at the Kraken Community Iceplex, perhaps it was Juliana that checked you in, rented you skates, or sharpened your blades. If you slipped and fell in the rink, it might have been Juliana that gave you first aid. For many of you though, these words will be your first opportunity to know her. I can only hope that they do her justice.

Juliana was a spirited and gifted child, with more than a few quirks. She drew and hand-lettered a “no smoking” sign for her pre-school classroom. She was drawn to music. When practicing piano she would experiment, moving her fingers up a step, transforming a major-key piece into a minor variation. She was drawn to soccer, exhibiting creativity on the pitch that itself seemed a variation on what she expressed at the keyboard. She pursued these passions with an infectious enthusiasm. As Juliana developed a fascination with European soccer, so did the rest of us. It was irresistible.

As childhood gave way to adolescence, as the pines of North Carolina gave way to the firs of the Pacific Northwest, Juliana’s passions evolved. Her sports obsession turned to hockey, a sport she began by watching but would learn to play. Her artistic expression focused on visual media, painting and sketching and digital art. It was fascinating to watch her draw, lines emerging intuitively from her brush or pencil, visions — sometimes fanciful, sometimes realistic — gradually emerging on the page or screen.

Difficulties emerged for Juliana as well. The move was hard for her. It’s not easy to be the new girl in a 5th grade classroom. Earlier than the move, though, she had been flagged as a relative loner as early as preschool. She had occasional negative social experiences that would leave a lasting impact on her.

The COVID pandemic arrived right around the time Juliana turned 16. Mental health concerns — for adolescent girls in particular — escalated. Maybe Juliana’s experience is best understood as part of that broad trend. We could never really see it as a trend, though. A trend is a story of numbers. Juliana was our daughter, not a number.

She made a serious attempt at self-harm in September 2020 and was hospitalized for the first time. At that point in time, we still had a traditional set of upper-middle-class aspirations for Juliana. A junior at a prestigious high school, she would go on to a prestigious college and from there to a promising professional career. Plans. There were plans.

And we would cling to these plans. She did apply to a prestigious college, she was admitted. She asked to defer her admission a year and that request was granted. But after a year she was not ready to go.

Plans are luxuries. When a person is going through hard times, the thought that these hard times might go on forever is a source of despair. And so we say “one day at a time.” Today is bad. Tomorrow may also be bad, but all you have to do today is live through one day. And so in Juliana’s darkest times, the times that would lead her back to the hospital, there was less emphasis on plans. We would speak to her sometimes of visions, of a happy future that was attainable and something that would make it all worthwhile, but not of the specific steps and paths to that future.

In 2021, Seattle’s NHL franchise began play. The Kraken became a bright spot, a source of joy. Juliana applied for a job at the team’s practice facility, which also served as a community rink in north Seattle. She loved her job, sometimes eagerly leaving the house before dawn, opening the facility for the figure skaters and other diligent clients who wanted to use a relatively empty rink. Anyone who has worked a customer service job knows it isn’t all fun and games. Customers can be downright nasty to frontline workers. Juliana would bring these stories home, but also stories of interactions with kind professional hockey players, stories of her helping others. It was a source of meaning for her. Juliana worked part-time, often taking a community college class or two to keep her academic options open.

There was a time, in this post-pandemic period, when things seemed stable for Juliana. She had found a treatment regimen that worked reasonably well. She expressed hope. It was ok to plan again. We went fly-fishing in Montana. I took her to play in two hockey tournaments at the outdoor rink in Winthrop, Washington. It is these memories, the moments where we transcended the quotidian and did something out of the ordinary together, that mean the most to me now. Oh to have a thousand more.

There was a side effect to the stability though. Juliana had developed disordered eating habits. In part these were rooted in physical symptoms she reported, but partly this was a form of compulsive behavior indicating she still had mental work to do. Eventually she took a leave of absence from the iceplex and entered a day program to do this work. After a few months, she emerged ready to go back to her routine.

It was at this relatively hopeful time, the late summer of 2025, that I would last see Juliana. I left Seattle to take a long-planned six month sabbatical in Medellín, Colombia. The last hug I ever gave her occurred in the drop-off lanes at the SeaTac airport. I was conscious, at the time, that this might be the last time I ever saw her. But I was full of hope for her. I had plans.

I would send her pictures, almost every day, of creatures and things I encountered in my day-to-day life in South America. I would seek out beauty to share with her. Sometimes these photos would come back to me in the form of drawings.

As my months in Colombia passed, however, Juliana’s pendulum was swinging in a negative direction again. She experienced increasing levels of anxiety and debilitating physical symptoms. The outlook reverted to one day at a time. I would ask her if today was better or worse than yesterday. I remember her responding, on one occasion, “I don’t know” (no sé, actually, mi hija y yo siempre comunicabamos en el castellano). And I said “that is better than knowing with certainty that today is worse than yesterday.”

My sabbatical was to come to an end in March. On the first day of February, we interacted just a bit. I told her we should make plans to watch Colombia play Croatia, a friendly tune up match for the World Cup, on my birthday in late March. She expressed enthusiasm for that.

That same day, she wrote a note, addressed to the whole family, professing her undying love for us all and thanking us for her “wonderful life.” Juliana had made her final plan.

The morning of the second, Groundhog Day, I sent her a photograph of a blue dragonfly that had landed on my windowsill in Medellín. I don’t know if she ever saw it.

It is easy to fall into the trap of “what-ifs.” When I heard the news, four thousand miles from home, I was instantly devastated by the thought I would never see her again. I longed to have one more chance to be with her, though all the things I might have wanted to tell her before she died I had repeated opportunities to say to her in the course of prior near-death experiences, driving her back to the hospital, waiting with her in the ER. And it’s not as though that one more chance would have ever been enough. Maybe my presence would have made the difference, would have kept her alive at least a little longer. I’ll never know. I’ll have to live with that.

Juliana’s note made clear that she felt, appreciated, and reciprocated the love we had for her. It was just not enough, not enough to overcome the mental and physical suffering she had experienced with rising intensity in her final months. Love does not, in the final analysis, conquer all.

Juliana was a week shy of her 22nd birthday. An article popped up in my feed just today documenting that by the time a child turns 22 they will have spent somewhere close to 95% of the time with their parents that they will ever spend. And so one could look at these wonderful memories I am left with and say I got pretty much the full complement. More than many fathers will ever have of one daughter, though she might live five times longer. The plans are lost, but when you’ve had a child who has struggled for years, who has lived one day at a time that many days, there weren’t many plans left to speak of.

They say that parents should not bury their children, but for most of human history it has been commonplace. Little more than a century ago, one in five American children died before age 5.

I should mention, too, that I have two other lovely children, with each of whom I share an additional set of memories where we transcended the quotidian, just the two of us, both of whom I continue to make plans with.

It’s not that these rational sentiments are a cold comfort. They are no comfort at all. It only makes me marvel at the greater grief of those parents who lose a child with no warning whatsoever, who didn’t get anything close to their full complement of memories, who didn’t have those near-death experiences to draw out the words the ones we love should hear us say, who had a more complete set of plans only to see them come to naught.

People die. The love we have for them, tragically limited though its power may be, does not. The influence they have on our lives continues to grow and evolve. The lessons of Juliana’s life for me, and for everyone, will be better understood with time. It was a blessing to know her, and it continues to be a blessing to be surrounded by what she created, the legacy she left, in her eight thousand and thirty days on Earth.

I love you, Juliana. And though you’re gone I can still feel your love for me.

For the past four months I’ve been living in Medellín, Colombia, which counts some 240,000 Venezuelans among its inhabitants. The local media is following the Trump administration’s extraction of Nicolás Maduro closely. Today’s print edition of El Colombiano dedicated its first seven pages to the story today, plus a full-page editorial. Two of the regular Sunday op-ed columnists scrapped their pieces to write about the late-breaking development.

In all, there’s not much there that you wouldn’t know already by reading the American press. The venezolano disapora in Medellín took to the streets in celebration. A reporter stationed at the border noted only a few crossings by Venezuelans looking to flee. Tellingly, though, there were tales of ordinary citizens within Venezuela reacting to the news by heading to the grocery store. They are girding for civilian life during wartime. Supply chains may well be disrupted, the necessities of life may become hard to acquire.

Colombian president Gustav Petro denounced the American action, but Medellín is a conservative town whose patience for the left-wing leader has long run out. The editors of El Colombiano hope to see Petro’s party ousted in elections this year. They are happy to see Maduro go, and most likely wouldn’t complain if Trump made good on his threats to go after Petro next. There is not a lot of hand-wringing about the constitutionality, or lack thereof, of Trump’s action. Colombia being, of course, a nation that has thrown out its own constitution repeatedly through the years.

There is, instead, a repeated question. ¿Qué sigue? What next?

There are four scenarios. I’ll present them in order of how likely they seem to be.

1. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

The Trump administration seems to have got it in their heads that the Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodriguez would take over the country and do exactly what the United States wanted. That would be a wonderful turn of events. More than a quarter-century of dictatorial rule has left Venezuela without the apparatus to implement any form of lawful regime change absent external oversight. Rodriguez could just assume the reins of dictatorial power and use them to steer at Washington’s bidding. Without a single American boot on the ground.

Apparently somebody forgot to tell Delcy Rodriguez this was the plan. She is quoted, in today’s El Colombiano, as saying “we will defend the dignity of a people that will not deliver themselves up, that will not surrender. We are not going to be anybody’s colony.”

So much for that. If the structures of power that propped up Maduro transfer over to Rodriguez, it’s going to be status quo for the USA. Yeah, we got one guy, but it turns out that the power structure was more than just the one guy.

2. The Venezuelan Civil War

Maduro was not popular within his own country. By widely accepted estimates he was defeated soundly in a 2024 election. Rodriguez might be adopting tough language to keep a lid on dissent from within, but that might not hold. Reports indicate that dissenters within the Venezuelan military were key to the Maduro extraction.

Armed conflict between Maduro loyalists and rebels would be a complicated affair. There might be a “hot” phase of such a civil war that would end quickly, depending on exactly what fraction of the existing armed forces fall within each camp. But the countries of northern South America have a lot of places to hide. Simón Bolívar himself fled to the llanos east of the Andes and south of the Caribbean coast when Spanish forces re-took their former colonies in 1816, mustering forces to drive the colonizers out once and for all three years later. Modern-day Colombia deals with near-daily attacks from dissident groups in rural areas, and some of those same dissident groups align with the Maduro regime.

So, even if forces friendly to the United States take putative control of the country without American “boots on the ground,” guerrilla conflict could wind on for years, targeting in particular any foreign oil firms that come in to try to recapture the infrastructure that was nationalized decades ago.

3. The boots go marching in

Yesterday Donald Trump spoke of a plan for the administration of Venezuela. It must be in a file cabinet right next to his health plan. Had the goal been to shepherd the nation through a transition period, it probably would have made sense to leave some American military personnel behind. But we didn’t.

Today, the administration is making angry noises at Delcy Rodriguez, warning her that if she doesn’t cooperate she’ll face a fate worse than Maduro’s. Well okay suppose that happens. And suppose that the administration keeps on playing “whac-a-mole” with whoever is next in the chain of command, until we get to either the Civil War outcome above (because the chain of command ends up being a bit sketchy) or the blissful-but-naïve outcome to be discussed below.

At some point there will be a temptation to just go ahead and leave troops there. If so, all the things that might happen in the civil war scenario would almost certainly happen anyway, except this time with the added spectacle of American soldiers coming home in flag-draped coffins. Days, weeks, months, years, or decades later, when the last US troops withdraw, we might leave behind a relatively stable nation like Iraq is today. Or we might leave behind another Afghanistan.

4. Democracy flourishes!

On June 28, 2024, millions of Venezuelans turned out to vote in a presidential election, and by widely accepted estimates Edmundo González won in a landslide. Instead of being swept into the Palacio de Miraflores in Caracas, González now lives in exile. In theory, there’s a window for González to return, much as Bolívar did two centuries before, to claim the presidency and govern with an electoral mandate.

Stop, for a moment, and think about all the institutional infrastructure that made the disputed American presidential transition of 2020 work out, in the end. We had a vice president who held loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to the president. We had a system of courts that considered and ultimately dismissed dozens of challenges to the results. We had a decentralized system of state officials that faced pressure to change the results but held firm. And we had a Congress that, at the end of the day, let the result stand.

Imagine trying to claim the presidency in a nation that has none of those things. Where every aspect of government, from the court system to the province level, is a creature of the existing regime. You’d need to imagine a scenario where every bureaucrat and every soldier recruited into that regime lays down their arms to allow you to assume power, and stands down while you rebuild the nation’s institution in a more democratic image.

Outside of that scenario? We’re back in Civil War.

Bear in mind that a Venezuelan Civil War, even if the United States decides to sit it out, will be painful on the north side of the Caribbean. Oil will not flow. Refugees will.

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It was a minimum weekly wage.

Several of the states that experimented with minimum wage policies in the progressive era established weekly standards. And the concept of a weekly minimum entered Congressional debate in the New Deal era. But among the political compromises required to pass the law was an agreement to make the minimum wage hourly.

And that’s problematic. A weekly wage can be set at a level to ensure that the recipient has a decent chance of covering their cost of living — and indeed, Oregon’s weekly minimum was set by a commission that evaluated the cost of living and set the wage accordingly. An hourly wage can’t, unless it’s paired with a regulation specifying a minimum number of hours per week. Which it never has.

An hourly wage creates incentives for business owners and managers to tailor their staffing levels to demand. Is your cafe really only busy for two or three hours each weekday morning? No problem, you can hire employees for just 10-15 hours per week. Does your bookstore really only do significant business on the weekends? No problem, you can hire employees just to work two 8-hour shifts each week.

And this is great for business. It’s fantastic. The only problem is that a significant fraction of the workforce is really looking for more income than what a 15-to-20-hour-a-week job can supply.

The analysis the Seattle Minimum Wage Study team performed confirmed that the vast majority of low-wage workers in Washington state aren’t getting anywhere close to full-time hours. The figure below is drawn from administrative employment records for Washington state. It tallies up the total number of hours low-wage employees worked over a 9-month period. If the workers had put in reliable full-time effort over this time period, their number of hours should be about 40 (hours per week) times 39 (weeks in 9 months), or 1,560. Hardly any of the thousands of workers in our sample reached that threshold. The typical worker put in closer to 600 hours over nine months, or an average of just over 15 hours a week.

Now one reaction to this image would be to say “well that just shows most low-wage earners don’t really want to work that many hours.” As it happens, at the same time I was working with a team studying Seattle’s minimum wage I was working on another research team preparing a report for the City of Seattle regarding worker scheduling, in the leadup to the city’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance, which took effect in 2017. That work involved a worker survey that asked, among other questions, whether workers were satisfied with the number of hours they received on their current job. And about three in ten responded that they would prefer more hours.

So, to summarize, the predominance of hourly wage setting puts us in a situation where someone trying to support themselves on the basis of work can only succeed if they can get enough hours, and a significant fraction report that they aren’t getting enough.

Seattle’s scheduling ordinance tried to accomplish several things at once. It sought to make schedules more predictable, requiring greater advance notice and disincentivizing last-minute changes to worker schedules. It aimed to ensure workers received adequate rest between shifts. It also hoped to encourage employers to offer more hours to their existing workers before hiring more.

A published evaluation by Kristin Harknett, Danny Schneider, and Veronique Irwin concluded that the scheduling ordinance did improve predictability, and that this in turn improved worker well-being. But there hasn’t been evidence that scheduling ordinances actually lead to workers being given more hours. In the work my team did before Seattle’s ordinance, many employers and employees predicted that the ordinance might lead to fewer hours rather than more — as the penalties against last-minute changes might reduce the likelihood that they could pick up shifts on short notice.

A model minimum wage to address the hours problem

We’ve gotten to the point where the cities and states that made headlines for raising the minimum wage as high as $15 a decade ago are debating going higher still, in large part because of living costs. So let me inject an old idea into this new debate, and suggest that we ought to go back to the original progressive idea of having minimum weekly wages.

The obvious attack on this idea goes back to the notion that as a society we’ve evolved to have many businesses with a small number of “peak” hours per week. Paying a weekly wage to an employee who puts in 5 hours per week at an NFL concession stand doesn’t make sense. So the policy would be tiered in a way that encourages employers to use weekly contracts to the extent possible — by setting the hourly wage at a premium over the weekly wage.

Consider Seattle. At present, the city’s minimum wage is $20.76 per hour. At 40 hours per week that would be $830.40 per week, but of course most low-wage employees don’t get that kind of hours. So imagine a wage-and-hours ordinance that required employers to select a minimum from the following menu:

• $830.40 per week for up to 40 hours ($31.14/hour beyond 40).

• $25 per hour ($37.50/hour beyond 40).

Noting that the overtime premiums listed in parentheses are the standard 50% in Federal law.

So the deal would be this. Either offer your employees a contract that eliminates their worries about whether they’ll get close to full-time hours, or a contract that pays them a 20% premium per hour. With this structure, the break-even point from the business’s perspective is around 32 hours per week — they’re better off hiring at the weekly wage even if they think the employee will only average 32 hours per week.

If you’re managing that concession stand at Lumen Field, yeah the hourly wage is going to be what works for you. But at the cafe? Or the bookstore? You’ve got an incentive here to try to structure your staffing so that you’re providing a reasonably steady weekly income to as many employees as possible, and just use your hourlies to fill in at the peak. Another way to think about this plan: it’s offering a break on the minimum wage regulation to those businesses that have the capacity or ingenuity to create jobs with more stable, predictable weekly incomes.

There’s no reason you’d have to have just two tiers. Here’s a three-tier example:

• $830.40 per week for up to 40 hours ($31.14/hour beyond 40).

• $460 per week for up to 20 hours ($25/hour for hours 21-40, $37.50/hour beyond 40).

• $25 per hour ($37.50/hour beyond 40).

This provides an intermediate step where business can hire half-time workers at the equivalent of $23/hour, rather than $25, if they can guarantee 20 hours per week. You could sweeten that middle tier still further by adjusting the rates for hours beyond 20. But the structure here gives businesses an incentive to go full-time if they can; by hiring a full-time employee instead of two half-time employees they save about $90/week.

Now, there’s a question of whether $830.40 per week is really enough to get by in the Seattle area. That works out to an average of $3,600/month. If you ask your favorite chatbot to put together a budget for a person living in Seattle on $3,600/month, you’ll see that it can be done but it’s not a very extravagant lifestyle. Studio apartment in an outlying area, relying exclusively on public transit, eating out only once or twice a month. And this is all assuming no dependents. But it’s definitely more feasible on a guaranteed $830.40 per week than on a part-time job with potentially variable hours.

One more thing worth emphasizing: this is a policy specifically tailored to helping adults trying to support themselves. Minimum wage opponents will argue, with basis in evidence, that the structure of this proposal would be particularly damaging to teenage workers looking for their first job. The employers we spoke with a decade ago were reluctant to hire an inexperienced worker at $15/hour, that hesitation would only amplify at $25. But many teens can be available to work full-time hours during the summer; employers would retain the option to let a teen worker go if they prove unreliable or a poor fit for the job. The wage policy could be written to allow employer deductions from pay for missed shifts in a probationary period at the start of employment, or otherwise address the oft-repeated concern that teen workers lose their interest in showing up as soon as their schedule conflicts with their social plans.

But when you get right down to it, the minimum wage addresses a disconnect between what society wants and what businesses want. Society wants people to be able to support themselves through work. That’s at best a secondary concern for businesses, which need to focus on the bottom line. The tiered minimum wage would make providing living-income jobs more compatible with attending to the bottom line.

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What inspired this memory? The news that Governor Bob Ferguson is nervous about the latest Democratic tax increase proposals because they are “too risky.” Risky because, and get this… the Trump administration is threatening to pull the plug on Federal support to cover education and health care costs.

Translation: in this environment where we are worried the state won’t have enough money to fund essential services, it is too risky to raise money. To be against tax increases you must be in favor of spending cuts. In a state where the budget must be balanced by law, there are no two ways around it.

The more logical response to the threat of Federal budget cuts would be to prepare the state to pick up the slack. But apparently we’ve got to leave the state’s college students and Medicaid recipients in the lurch because raising taxes is somehow “risky.”

(Regarding this lurch: the Washington state Senate budget proposal, which relied on new revenues Governor Ferguson opposes, would force public colleges to hike tuition and slash financial aid. Without new revenues, the cuts would have to be even worse. And the state House budget is even more damaging to higher education. So yes, we are at risk of balancing the budget on the backs of low-income college students.)

What is this “risk” of raising taxes in an economy that by most current measures still looks ok? One could argue that businesses, who would bear the brunt of new taxes only because Governor Ferguson has rebuffed efforts to spread the burden elsewhere, face a lot of uncertainty from tariffs and other Trump administration follies. To which there’s a straightforward response. If business revenues decline because they aren’t selling as many goods in the crazy Trump II economy, their tax bills would automatically decline. That’s how taxes work. That does mean the state is a partner in the risk presented by the Trump administration, but there just isn’t really a way around that.

Other arguments I’ve heard are along the lines of “if Washington raises taxes all the job-creating and/or rich people will move away.” To which there is a quite trivial one-word response. California.

California levies state and local taxes at rates 35% higher than Washington state, yet rates as more entrepreneurial, as measured by what percent of residents start businesses, what percent of those start-ups persist for at least a year, how many small businesses exist per capita, and the growth rate of new business applications. Clearly California demonstrates that, at least under the right circumstances, a high-tax state can be a very healthy place to start and grow a business. So what are those right circumstances?

Support for higher education has to be up there. Would Silicon Valley exist without Stanford? In addition to having world-class powerhouse private institutions such as Stanford, Cal Tech, and USC (institutions that have no peer in Washington), California invests in higher education. State and local government taxes amount to about $135 for every $1,000 of income in the golden state. About $20 of those go to funding higher education.

It used to be that way in the evergreen state. Between 2002 and 2011, Washington consistently devoted between $19 and $20 of every $1,000 of income to public support for higher education. These numbers put us above the national average. Now we’re down to $13.59, below the national average, per this chart from… the Governor’s office.

And those killer startups that have powered our economy? Microsoft and Amazon? It’s been 30 years since we had one. So where do we want to place our bets? Do we think low taxes and an anemic higher education sector constitute the right formula for innovation? Flying in the face of California? Or do we need to get ourselves back where we used to be?

The University of Washington (whose faculty I represent before the state legislature) faces a true existential threat, as reliant as it is on Federal funding to make up the difference between our limited state support and what other state flagship institutions have to work with. Institutions with deeper pockets are reaching into them to ensure that their research mission is not permanently destroyed by Trumpian budget cuts. UW doesn’t have that luxury.

So you have to ask yourself what is really riskier? Moving Washington away from being a tax haven for the rich, or leaving the state’s biggest publicly-funded innovation at the whim of the nation’s most anti-education president?

If you’re ready to buckle in and dive into the weeds, read on. If you just want the bottom line, the ad pushes a false narrative. Washington’s state government has consistently lived within its means, was forced to raise spending on K-12 because of a court decision, and once you account for that, inflation, and population growth state government is actually leaner than it was a decade ago.

This ad attempts to tell a story with three numbers. Washington’s projected budget deficit isn’t because there’s a recession (that part is true! No recession!) but because over a decade the state has jacked up taxes 99%, jacked up spending even higher than that (114%), while “household income grew by less than half.” (55%) The ad doesn’t come right out and say the budget deficit needs to be closed by cutting spending instead of raising taxes, but it’s clearly promoting that conclusion.

In this post I’m going to dive into those three numbers but first, let me note what this ad says nothing about. What, in particular, are we spending this money on? There’s no mention of this because anti-tax advocates want you to think of taxes as money the government steals from you and then throws away. If they start to admit that yes, in fact, the revenue led to higher teacher pay, new investments in roads and ferries, better health care, or any other good thing they are weakening their argument.

All right, then, let’s get back to fact-checking business:

Tax revenue has risen 99% over ten years: it’s actually 108%

Where does this number come from? Go to the website named in the video, scroll down to where the three numbers in question, click on “sources,” and follow the two middle links. One for tax collections as reported by the state in 2013, the second for 2023.

So, Enterprise Washington made one mistake here, using the 2014 tax collection number when they meant to use 2013. But that’s an error that actually understates their case. In fact, tax collections went up 108% between 2013 and 2023.

How do we explain this? Two factors account for just about half the increase: population growth and inflation. Washington counted more than a million extra residents in 2023 compared to 2013, growing by 16%. And the consumer price index rose 31% from July 2013 to July 2023. Multiply 1.31 by 1.16 and you get 1.52, meaning that we’d expect 52% tax growth purely as a function of a growing state and rising prices.

Washington collects two-thirds of its tax revenue from two sources: retail sales and the business & occupation (B&O) tax. The sales tax rate did not change between 2013 and 2023, but sales tax revenue increased 106%. Why? Inflation, population growth, and as we’ll note later on, growing incomes. Revenue from the B&O tax likewise doubled. The state property tax, tied to both the value of homes and the number of homes, grew 136%.

Spending has grown 114%: it’s actually 106%

Click the link to the primary source for this claim and once again Enterprise Washington gets points off for an arithmetic error. According to the state’s own numbers, projected spending for the 2023-25 biennium will be 106% higher than in 2013-15, not 114%. While this may seem like a minor error, take the two errors we’ve uncovered in combination and you undermine one of Enterprise Washington’s core claims. We’re not spending beyond our means. Revenue has grown faster than expenses.

And again, Enterprise Washington has made no effort to adjust for inflation or population growth. So a big chunk of what’s going on here is just a state government reacting to a growing population and rising prices. But here it’s instructive to ask… just exactly what are we spending more money on?

If you dive into the details, the top drivers of higher spending are K-12 education ($18.3 billion additional spending over ten years) and health care ($16 billion).

Enterprise Washington conveniently starts the ten-year clock in 2013, just after the state’s Supreme Court ruled the state’s K-12 educational spending to be unconstitutionally low in the McCleary decision. As you can see in this chart drawn from the work of my UW colleagues David Knight, Pooya Almasi, and JoLynn Berge, the state responded by raising per-pupil spending by about $5,000 in 2015 dollars — more like $6,400 today. Considering the state has about a million public school students, that’s $6.4 billion extra the state is spending every year, over and above what it needs to account for inflation and population growth.

Incomes are up only 55%: Actually the state’s capacity to afford taxes rose 97%

Washington Enterprise doesn’t go to a primary source here. They go to Statista, which in turn claims to get their information from the American Community Survey, which is administered by the U.S. Census. Go straight to the source and you see the numbers are off a bit, the median household income listed in 2023 is fine, but the 2013 median household income number is off. Use the correct number and you get median household income growth — not adjusting for inflation — of 62%.

The median household income reflects the amount of money that the “average” Washington household earns. And here Washington Enterprise is really trying to bring home the point that “the state budget has grown a lot but your family’s hasn’t.” Which is misleading because of population growth. If population doubles but incomes stay the same, we would never expect government revenue or spending to stay the same.

A different tack on household incomes is “what’s happened to the ability to afford taxes over time?” And there you don’t want median income, you want mean, or per capita income. And here, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, income growth is stronger, more like 70% over ten years without adjusting for inflation. The mean grew more than the median because, to put it bluntly, the rich got richer. If rich people enjoy higher incomes but middle-income families don’t, the mean will grow but not the median.

Couple the 70% growth in per capita income with the fact that we got 16% more “capitas” over this decade, and the result is the state’s capacity to afford taxes grew 97%.

Had state government simply grown in lock-step with the amount of income generated in Washington state, we’d have expected annual revenues about $3.5 billion lower than what they actually ended up being right now. Recalling that we had to raise spending by about $6.4 billion per year to meet our constitutional requirement to provide an adequate K-12 education, the remainder of government has actually shrunk relative to the state’s total income level.

Bottom line: these numbers were chosen specifically to promote a narrative. And that narrative completely falls apart on closer inspection.

Seattle’s boom, beginning with the arrival of Microsoft in 1979, has a different origin story. Sure we have a world-class research university here, Bill Gates and Paul Allen famously used its computing infrastructure as high school studentns nearby, but its presence is almost accidental. Gates and Allen followed one another to Harvard, and then to Albuquerque. Their move back to Seattle was not necessarily because that’s where the talent was, but it was where the talent could be recruited to relocate to.

The boom would shift into a higher gear fifteen years later with the founding of amazon.com in a suburban garage. Jeff Bezos had been raised nowhere near the Pacific Northwest and drove across the country to found the company. In deciding where to base an online mail-order retailer that could, in theory, be based anywhere it wasn’t proximity to great universities or the talent they produced that drove the decision. In a 1996 interview, Bezos admitted that Silicon Valley was the place to be for talent. California posed a challenge to the amazon business strategy, however. At a time where mail-order retailers were required to collect sales taxes only in states where they had a physical presence, Bezos angled for a smaller state so that a higher percentage of customers could enjoy a lower price by evading taxes.

Tech boomed in Seattle despite the relative shortage of locally-trained professionals. Entrepreneurs overcame this disadvantage by recruiting talent to the region. Recent American Community Survey data show that Washington is exceptionally reliant on college-educated workers born out of state, trailing only Colorado and the District of Columbia.

Washington needs to import highly educated talent because it’s not a state with the infrastructure to produce much of its own. Massachusetts, home to thriving knowledge industries, has 11 “R1” research-intensive universities in a state of 7.1 million people. California, which like other western states developed later and lacks the dense network of private colleges found further east, has 14 “R1” institutions serving 40 million people.

These statistics give you a sense of the norm across the larger United States. Generally speaking you can expect to see one research-intensive university for every two-or-so-million people. Massachusetts, a higher-education dense environment, has one for every 600,000. California, the highest-population state, is near the other end of the spectrum with an “R1” institution for every 2.86 million residents. New Jersey is a bit lower, with a ratio of one institution per 3.1 million residents. Among the 21 most populous states, all but one have a ratio somewhere in the range between Massachusetts and New Jersey.

The exception is Washington, with just 2 “R1” institutions serving 8 million people. Tennessee, a slightly smaller state by population, has twice as many research-intensive universities. To find a state with a more sparse higher education ecosystem, you’ve got to go to number 22 on the population list, Minnesota, where there is just one institution serving 5.8 million people. And needless to say Minnesota has not enjoyed the sort of tech-driven population boom the Evergreen State witnessed. The two states were the same size in 1980; Washington now counts about 38% more residents.

If only the lack of major research universities were the true extent of Washington’s education problem.

What’s the matter with Washington’s education system?

When you get right down to it, the answer is money. Washington has subsisted for years on a “red state” no-income-tax revenue model that manages to barely provide adequate services because the state is relatively wealthy. The state’s status as a relative tax haven may be one reason why companies like amazon have found it easy to recruit highly-paid workers here. One could think of Washington State of the Microsoft-amazon boom years as the very model of trickle-down economics.

To establish that yes indeed Washington has a less-than-stellar public education system let’s just look at a few outcomes. In Federally-administered standardized tests, just 31% of 8th graders met the standard for proficiency in reading — only 30% in mathematics. In a state that ranks among the top 10 in terms of income, these results rank as indistinguishable from the (quite mediocre) national average.

The middle-school test performance of our economically advantaged student body may disappoint, but things only get worse as our students age. In the most recent cohort studied, Washington students posted a high school graduation rate three points below the national average.

The news gets worse still. Even if they graduate from high school, Washington students show remarkably little interest in continuing on to higher education. Among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Washington ranks 40th in terms of FAFSA-completion rates.

In recent years Washington’s high school graduates have had only a 50/50 chance of enrolling in any postsecondary institution the next year, more than 10 points below the national average.

This is all bad, right? It gets even worse. Even if they make it to postsecondary, which is a relative long shot given our lower-than-average HS graduation rates and lower-than-average direct enrollment rates, Washington’s students perform worse than the national average in terms of actually completing a degree program. This is a new development over the past few years; the college of entrants of 2012 kept pace with their national peers. The most recent cohort falls 5.5 points below the national average, and 15 points below the completion rate in Massachusetts.

So if you came into this newsletter thinking that Washington was doing ok, hopefully you are completely flabbergasted by now. You should be. How is it possible that a state with a tech-driven high-income economy can be doing this incredibly badly at educating its students?

Any time you have a systemic failure like this it’s hard to pin things down on any one cause, but it should be stated that Washington is by no means spending lavishly on its education system. In a state with a cost of living among the highest in the nation, we’re nowhere near the highest in terms of per-pupil funding in our K-12 system.

And particularly given our state’s wealth, we aren’t investing a lot of public dollars in our higher education system either. Now, to be clear, money is certainly not the only determinant of education success. It’s not as though New Mexico’s higher education system is the envy of the world. But clearly California well outpaces Washington. Massachusetts doesn’t, necessarily, but the Bay State has a rich network of private higher education institutions that the Evergreen State just doesn’t.

We don’t spend very much because, in the grand scheme of things, we don’t tax very much. In a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Washington ranked 48th in terms of the net state and local tax rate, ahead of only Alask, Wyoming, and South Dakota. None of those being states that have ever enjoyed any kind of tech boom.

Whither the boom?

Most economic booms are a product of happenstance. A region happens to be sitting on top of a natural resource that is highly valued at the time. An inventor makes a discovery in one place that could have been made any place. The forty year boom in Washington state was driven by entrepreneurs with idiosyncratic reasons for wanting to be here, who realized that the region’s natural amenities would help them globally source a workforce. One of these amenities, assuredly, was the state’s wealth-friendly tax regime.

The problem with recruiting people to a region based on amenities is that eventually the amenities get counteracted by disamenities. People move to an area with a reputation for a good quality of life and things start to change. The housing gets more expensive. The traffic gets worse. The quick and easy access to mountains and water becomes tangled in a web of suburban sprawl. In recent years, the Seattle region has been a net loser of domestic population, with sustained growth possible only because of immigration and an excess of births over deaths. The birth rate is declining all over the world. Immigration will decline with it, regardless of whether an isolationist regime continues to control national policy.

Some time ago Ed Glaeser wrote a history of Boston that emphasized the city’s ability to reinvent itself, from port town to industrial city to post-industrial tech hub. The key, in Glaeser’s argument, was education. A strong education infrastructure allowed the city to reinvent itself, to come up with something new to do when it was no longer profitable to continue with its existing industries.

Boom towns that lack this education infrastructure are at risk of becoming ghost towns. When the boom is over, people move away. Some years after Glaeser profiled Boston I wrote a history of New Orleans, describing how a lack of education infrastructure allowed the winds of economic change to pass the city by. A port town it once was, but it never significantly industrialized, and never became a tech hub. Today it exists in no small part as a tourist attraction.

Clearly Seattle is in no imminent danger of becoming a ghost town. But without an adequate educational infrastructure the city continues to be dependent on happenstance. The city waits, 30 years after the arrival of its most recent multi-billionaire-to-be, for another outsider to gift it a growth industry. It waits, with a system of tax revenue that depends critically on population growth. This growth is already subsiding, government already threatening to make cuts to the sector that offers the best hope of making the boom sustainable.

The Evergreen State sits at a crossroads.

Seattle’s proposal would have used the same exemption level, and taxed gains above that amount at the rate of 2%. A modest little tax, really. Estimates suggested that only about 800 residents would pay it each year, in a city of over 750,000. We often refer to taxes that hit the wealthy at higher rates as progressive. That is maybe too mild a term for a tax paid by only the top 0.1% of the population. Let’s say that this tax proposal would be hyperprogressive.

The hyperprogressive tax would ask a few hundred of the city’s wealthiest residents to pay an average of between $20,000 and $60,000 per year, according to estimates, for the privilege of maintaining a domicile in the city. On top of what they might already be paying in property taxes, sales taxes, and so forth.

What’s wrong with a hyperprogressive tax? Why not stick it to the top 0.1% (while letting the other 9/10 of the top 1%, not to mention everybody else, completely off the hook)? There’s just one problem, really. It’s that this tax would be too easy not to pay.

This is a concern with the state capital gains tax as well, and might help explain why the state’s capital gains tax collections dropped 45% from the first to second year of its existence.

There are two easy tax avoidance strategies. First, if you’ve got a million bucks worth of gains to cash in, instead of doing it all at once just space it out over four years and you get an extra return on your investment.

This is maybe a less viable strategy if you’ve got a billion dollars to cash in. That would take four thousand years to space out, and who can wait that long. This is when you lean back on tax avoidance strategy #2, which is just to skip town. You might laugh and say “who would abandon their Seattle abode just to save $20,000,000 in taxes?” (See Bezos, Jeff).

The bigger the taxing jurisdiction, the greater the sacrifice involved in tax avoidance strategy number 2. When we’re talking about a state-level tax, the mogul you’re trying to hit with your hyperprogressive tax needs to move their domicile to one of their out-of-state homes. But the City of Seattle? That little 84-square-mile postage stamp squeezed between Puget Sound and Lake Washington? A mogul need only sail their yacht to the other side of either body of water and their capital gains are safely out of harm’s way.

Half a century ago, New York City found itself in the midst of a fiscal crisis. This was the event precipitating the infamous headline in the New York Daily News, conveying the Federal reaction to Gotham’s request for a fiscal bailout:

Why am I bringing this up now? Bear with me. In the aftermath of the NYC fiscal crisis a series of books popped up to explain what happened. One of the more influential of them was Paul Peterson’s 1981 City Limits.

In Peterson’s telling, New York traveled the road to fiscal perdition because it had attempted to operate a municipal welfare state, using progressive taxation to take from the rich and operating a variety of programs to benefit the poor. (Which is kind of what Seattle is trying to do these days).

Peterson made a simple argument against this approach to municipal governance. When a small jurisdiction with porous borders taxes the rich to fund benefits for the poor, the rich move out and the poor move in. Which results in escalating demand for services alongside dwindling capacity to fund them.

One could quibble with Peterson’s argument, even more so with the evidence he marshaled to support it. There was a lot of other stuff going on in New York in the 1970s. Among other things, a city historically populated by immigrants who tended to move out as they moved up economically suffered the long effects of immigration restrictions between the 1920s and the 1960s. The turnaround in the City’s fortunes coincided with the resurgence of immigration.

But the cautionary tale here seems particularly germane to the question of hyperprogressive taxation. Tax a city’s richest 800 people a lot and you’re giving them an awfully good reason to leave. But what if you instead taxed the city’s 80,000 richest people, at one-hundredth the rate? To join the city’s top 80,000 earning households you’ve got to clear more than $200,000 per year, according to the Census Bureau. A forty thousand dollar price tag for living in the city is hard to ignore. A four hundred dollar price tag, even if paid by 100 times as many people, just over a dollar a day? Much easier.

So why doesn’t Seattle scale back the progressive taxation ambitions? Instead of soaking the very rich a lot, soak the merely affluent a little. It’s still progressive! Just not so progressive as to result in earning no revenue because the tiny number of people you’re trying to soak have easy ways to evade you.

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There’s room for political debate in a world of boring but competent government. Technological or demographic changes make some laws or regulations obsolete while introducing the need for new ones. And there’s a lot of potential debate as to whether government has maintained a level playing field. Should the nation’s interests in preventing inflation take precedence over interests in raising wages? Should the nation’s interest in allowing success to carry rewards take precedent over the nation’s interest in having the cost of government born by those who can most afford to pay? Should the nation’s interest in promoting peace and democracy abroad take precedent over the nation’s interest in keeping its resources at home?

These, and countless more, are all debates where reasonable people can disagree, where evidence has its place alongside principles and rhetoric, and where the nation’s sentiment can and does naturally evolve over time.

There’s one problem with competent government punctuated by civil reasoned debates over prioritizing the nation’s interests. It makes for dreadfully dull television. And social media content.

Politics are at risk for disruption by those who make astonishing statements, regardless of whether those statements happen to be true. The astonishing statement attracts attention exactly because it is different, because it defies the decorum of ordinary political time. The media, particularly in an era where traditional sources of revenue have waned, finds the astonishing statement irresistible. If the astonishing statement attracts condemnation, so much the better. It becomes a story with legs.

This is not a particularly new phenomenon, one could date it to the time of McCarthy if not earlier. Ross Perot made astonishing statements in 1992. But it took Donald Trump to make the art of the astonishing statement the centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

Trump found an eager audience. An audience that wouldn’t make it through an extended discourse on the earned income tax credit, or the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, without changing the channel or scrolling to the next video in their feed. Trump was made for digital media, delivering pithy statements about building walls and repealing and replacing that were never really followed up with any sort of plan, or even the concept of a plan. The country had terrible problems, the worst problems, but Trump had the solutions, the best solutions. He’d tell you all the details but that would just bore you.

It was a fine recipe for getting elected, if not for actually governing the country. Presidencies are tested by unforeseen circumstances. Politicians are chided for failing to keep promises, but every leader must sooner or later face the inexorable impact of forces beyond their control. Dealing with the unforeseen, whether that be a natural disaster, war, economic calamity, or global pandemic, requires quick yet principled thinking and the work of many competent advisors.

Today I cast my vote for Kamala Harris. This may be one of the least newsworthy declarations you’ll read this week, especially as it’s buried at the end of this post. A college professor who lives in Seattle, Washington of all places voting for the Democratic candidate. I voted with a sense of nostalgia, an ironic sense given the repeated calls to “Make America Great Again.” Nostalgia for a time when debates were dull and wonky, when candidates conceded with grace, when decorum reigned. It made for boring television, but good government. May it be so again.

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