It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

In a free-market economy, the role of government is often debated. On the one hand, business generally prefers to be left alone by government, interpreting the word “free” in free-market as free from regulation. On the other hand, there are any number of business organizations whose principal functions are to extract as many regulatory and tax advantages as possible for their...

There are people who leave high school with their whole lives mapped out in front of them. They have a career plan, and they set about executing it. Then there’s the rest of us. Today, more than ever, many of us regularly find ourselves embarking on new jobs, and, in some cases, whole new careers. Take Shane Mutter for example. Shane is a member of the 4th generation of New Orleans family ow...

If you’re like most people, when you do your taxes once a year you’re genuinely surprised at the numbers staring up at you. You can’t believe how much you spent on various items. Maybe it’s car repair. School supplies. Travel. Eating out. Shoes. Or even groceries. You’re so surprised at how much you spent, compared to how much you earned, that you tell yours...

In business, every decision you make is a risk. Some risks are small. Others have more serious consequences. For example, before you spent millions of dollars designing and building a new car, it would be good to know if it’s the size and shape of car that people want or need.  Before you open a neighborhood po-boy shop, it would be good to know if people in that neighborhood eat poboys...

In the 1960’s, the hippie movement grew up as a rebellion against the intertwining of politics and capitalism, which it called “The Establishment.” The pot-smoking hippies accused The Establishment of putting the pursuit of profit above everything, to the detriment of every aspect of our society, from the environment to our access to recorded music. Flash forward to today. I...

Technology has changed a lot of occupations. And derailed some careers. Perhaps none more than the career of the professional photographer. What used to be a profession that demanded technical skill and artistic talent, and required specialized equipment – cameras, lenses, and lights – is now something that every single person can do, with a phone. Pics Even when there is still a...

There are twin economic and technological shifts taking place in the United States that are changing the geographical demographics of the workforce. That’s a fancy way of saying, folks are on the move and things are changing. The economic element of this change is the increasingly prohibitive cost of living in cities that have been essential to move to if you’ve had ambitions abou...

In 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic created a lockdown that closed almost every business in America, the Federal Government wrote checks to individuals and businesses in the amount of two trillion dollars. Here, on Out to Lunch, we tried to make sense of what was going on with this economic stimulus by talking to a member of the Federal Reserve – the central bank that gave the two trillion do...

When you hear the term “screen time” these days, it’s usually associated with something judgmental and negative. People generally talk about “Screen time” as a measure of how long you can stare at your computer or your phone, before something bad happens to your brain. Your phone has even started giving you unsolicited weekly reports about your screen time, with...

If I told you that on this edition of Out to Lunch we’re talking about two types of alcohol – one that you can make at home, and one that’s made by professionals, and that one of them is wine and the other is beer - you’d naturally assume we’re talking about a winery on the one hand, and home-brew beer on the other. Well, you’re 180 degrees off. We’re talk...

This is the second in our series of shows in which we take a local look at a nationwide problem – the relationship between home ownership and the widening wealth gap. What exactly is the relationship between the wealth gap and home ownership?  Well, it’s pretty simple. The way most of us in the United States accrue wealth is the appreciation of the value of our home. Why this lead...

According to the US Census Bureau, 80% of Americans live in urban environments. One of the interesting aspects of that statistic is that the food we all need to survive is grown mostly in rural America. In other words, 80% of us are dependent on 20% of the population for survival. Given that our very survival depends on it, you’d think we’d make the infrastructure of rural Am...

If you’ve heard anybody talking about the New Orleans economy recently you will have heard about a segment of it that’s come to be called, “the cultural economy.” The bars, clubs, restaurants and festivals that make up the cultural economy are the main reason millions of tourists and conventioneers come to New Orleans. And, as we discovered during the Covid pandemic when vi...

New Orleans is a city built on tradition that is indestructible. We’ve proven this in our own lifetime. In 2005, New Orleans was as close to being totally destroyed as is possible. After the flood waters receded, there were all kinds of plans for how we could re-imagine and rebuild the city. After we vigorously debated the possibilities of green spaces, canals, and many other optio...

New Orleans is often referred to as a “Destination City.” In the world of tourism that’s shorthand for “A place people come to, to enjoy our architecture, food, music, and liberal attitude toward alcohol consumption.” People who organize activities that depend on attracting large crowds – like conventions – capitalize on our reputation as a Destination Cit...

There are simple facts about the economy that we all know. One of them is, the way most people in the United States accrue wealth is through the appreciation of the value of their home. The fatal flaw with this foundational economic principle is easily demonstrated here in New Orleans: over 50% of New Orleanians rent. Not because they’ve made some maverick financial decision about home owner...

In every field of human endeavor, there are people who change the game. You know some of their names – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. But there are many others who change the world and don’t become celebrities.  For example, can you name the person who invented the electric guitar? Or the person who invented traffic lights? You probably can’t, even though both...

There are certain occupations that most of us would agree take a good deal of skill to perform. Neurosurgeon comes to mind. Airline pilot. Cirque du Soleil performer. And then there’s the kind of job that everybody thinks they could do, if only they weren’t too busy doing something more important. For example, hosting a radio show. Or writing a book. Everybody can write. And most...

If you live in New Orleans, you’re hardly going to be surprised to hear that on this edition of Out to Lunch we’re talking about food and music. Even if you don’t live in New Orleans, and you’ve never been here, you probably still know us for our reputation for food and music. Interestingly, even though we often talk about food and music in the same breath, in New Orleans t...

In New Orleans, we’re proud of our local businesses and we try and support them as much as we can. If you own a local business, you have to compete for customers against every online business in the world, and against nationwide businesses who have a brick and mortar presence here. And it’s not enough just to compete on price. You’re also competing on marketing, visibility,...

We like to divide things into categories. We talk about short people and tall people. Black and white. Gay and straight. In business, we talk about big and small. But this kind of categorization isn’t quite as useful as it might be for other hard and fast demographic descriptions. For example, if you’re a short adult, you’re never going to be tall. If you’re white, you...

The United States Declaration of Independence declares that our inalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There’s a school of thought that suggests the word “pursuit” wasn’t intended to be defined as chasing. But, rather, as being. In the same way that stamp collecting is a pursuit, “the pursuit of happiness,” according to...

If somebody was to ask you, “What do you know about brain chemistry?” you’d probably answer “Not much,” or even “Nothing.” well, it turns out you’d be wrong. When you decide you need a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, and you prefer one kind of tea over another, or you avoid a certain type of wine because it gives you a headache, what you’re act...

Although this is a show about business in New Orleans, once in a while we have to admit there’s some pretty interesting things going on an hour or so west of us, in Baton Rouge. There are two impressive institutions in Baton Rouge – not including the legislature. One is the Pennington Biomedical Research Center . It has over 450 employees. They work in 43 laboratories, on a 200-ac...

When you pull up at a red light, and you’re the only car on the road, instead of sitting there waiting, aggravated, do you ever wonder, “Why doesn’t someone invent smart traffic lights that react to real-time traffic conditions?” If that thought has never crossed your mind, you’re like most people. Most of us accept and deal with the world around us as it is. And that...