So many things are happening that it’s hard to decide which to write about. So I’ll briefly cover several that would each deserve a full post on a normal week: 1. The Fed voted unanimou…

Before recording and broadcasting technologies, there was no way for people all over the world to hear the same music performance- you had to be in the same room as the performer. Even when I was g…

Mike is concerned that US stocks could be a bubble, as are many others: if we take parallels to the past seriously, there arises the question of whether a 40 year old with a 100% index fund portfol…

“There are two things you are better off not watching in the making: sausages and econometric estimates. This is a sad and decidedly unscientific state of affairs we find ourselves in. Hardly anyone t...

Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten shares writing advice for aspiring bloggers here. He is very much worth listening to on this- he earns more from Substack subscriptions than he does as a doctor,…

Next week the Fed will almost certainly hold interest rates steady. Stephen Miran will probably dissent saying the Fed should be cutting rates. Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee for Fed Chair, wou…

Trust literatures over single papers Common sense and Bayes’ Rule agree: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence Trust more when papers publicly share their data and code Trust hi…

SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

In 2014 India required banks to offer no-cost accounts. This led hundreds of millions of people to open bank accounts for the first time, and more than doubled the number of Indian women who had a …

The Iran regime’s military strategy seems to be that by bombing the oil infrastructure of their neighbors and neutral shipping, US gasoline prices will go so high that Americans will demand a…

If you wanted to bet on the Super Bowl this past weekend, you had options. You may have bet with a friend. If you live in a state where it’s legal, you could have gone to a casino or used a casino’s a...

May you live in interesting times – apocryphal Chinese curse In early 2025 I shared forecasts about the economy that turned out to be pretty good. This year, economic forecasts center around …

So says the Wall Street Journal. They have data to back it up: Plus quotes from yours truly: Even before Elon Musk gutted X’s content moderation, James Bailey was tired of the shouting. “It’s like …

Last January I shared a roundup of forecasts for the year from markets and professional economists. Were they any good? Here was their prediction for the US economy: WSJ’s survey of econo…

I said years ago on my Ideas Page that we need data and research on Benefit Cliffs: Benefits Cliffs: Implicit marginal tax rates sometimes go over 100% when you consider lost subsidies as well as h…

Bryan Caplan explains why blogging is his favorite way to write, even as someone who has published many articles and books. It’s because of the readers: The blog posts, finally, are the most …

That’s the title of a talk I’ll be giving Saturday at the Financial Capability Conference at Rhode Island College. Registration for the conference, which also features personal finance …

41 states now require students to take a course in economics or personal finance in order to graduate high school: Source: Council for Economic Education 12 states representing 21% of US high schoo…

Abstract In July 2005, the state of Missouri implemented a series of cuts to its Medicaid program. These cuts resulted in the elimination of the Medical Assistance for Workers with Disabilities progra...

The author of The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel, has a new book “The Art of Spending Money” out this month. Its main point is that people tend to be happier spending money on thing…

There are 62 songs called “Better Man” just on Ultimate Guitar (which doesn’t claim to be comprehensive), plus many more slight variations like “A Better Man” or &#822…

Datasets can be pulled offline for all sorts of reasons. As I wrote in February, this shows the value of being a data hoarder- just downloading now any data you think you might want later: Several …

The young have always been more optimistic than the old, but this is no longer the case, at least according to the Michigan consumer sentiment survey: Source: Bloomberg via Joe Weisenthal But as Je…

The government has been measuring food insecurity since the mid-1990s but now says the report has become “overly politicized.”

The Fed has had an official inflation target of 2% since 2012, a commitment they reaffirmed just last month after their policy review: The Committee reaffirms its judgment that inflation at the rat…

The Federal Reserve will probably cut rates next week: I can’t advise them on the complex politics of this, but based on the economics I think cutting would be a mistake. I see one good reaso…

The Center for Open Science (COS) is launching the Replicability Project: Health Behavior (RPHB), which is a large-scale, multi-team effort to help support a transparent and trustworthy foundation in ...

I’ve taught college classes since 2010, but I never graded attendance directly until this year. I thought that students are adults who can make their own choices about where to spend their ti…

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make it easier for American workers to switch jobs by making it easier to get health insurance from sources other than their current employer. Mostly it didn…

I provide a simple, clean panel dataset of the historical demographics of US states here. I made this state-year level dataset from the individual-level responses in the Current Population Survey&#…

Filling the Gap: Issue Areas Related Content Certificate of Need (CON) laws require doctors and hospitals to get special permission from the state to open

Iowa recently joined the growing list of states where midwives or obstetricians can open a freestanding birth center without needing to convince a state board that it is economically necessary. The…

When every frontier AI model can pass your tests, how do you figure out which model is best? You write a harder test. That was the idea behind Humanity’s Last Exam, an effort by Scale AI and …

A black swan is a crisis that comes out of nowhere. A gray rhino, by contrast, is a problem we have known about for a long time, but can’t or won’t stop, that will at some point crash i…

Intro microeconomics classes teach that some goods are “non-excludable”, meaning that people who don’t pay for them can’t be stopped from using them. This can lead to a &#82…

Last year I posted that the Philly Fed had started a new quarterly survey on Labor, Income, Finances, and Expectations (LIFE). I thought it looked promising but had yet to achieve its potential: It…

“One of the closest guarded secrets in American higher education is the average teaching loads of faculty.” -Richard Vedder I saw this quote in a recent piece arguing that US professors should teac…

A reporter recently told me she thought there is a national trend toward hospitals issuing more bonds. I tried to verify this and found it surprising hard to do with publicly available data. But on…

The Mercatus Center has put together a page of “Snapshots of State Regulation” using data from their State RegData project. Their latest data suggests that population is still a big pre…

Many regular Americans and policymakers say they want the US to manufacture more things domestically. But when they ask economists how to accomplish this, I find that our most common response is to…

I like to take existing datasets, clean them up, and share them in easier to use formats. When I started doing this back in 2022, my strategy was to host the datasets with the Open Science Foundati…

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