Economist Writing Every Day

These are notable posts from 2025, roughly presented in descending order, starting with the post that got the most views.

1. Is there a competitive threat to the NBA?  Mike Makowsky wrote, “… let’s put it this way. Why *wouldn’t* the Saudi Arabian PIF invest $5 billion in creating a rival basketball league?”

2. Perspective: This Stock Correction Fear, Too, Will Pass  In March, Scott Buchanan presented “an optimistic take on the current stock market pullback.”   Indeed, the market came back, despite the tariff doomerism of 2025 Spring.

3. The Middle/Working Class Has Not Been “Hollowed Out” Jeremy Horpedahl, corrector of common myths, corrects a common myth.

4. Montana’s New Property Tax System  Jeremy explains “interesting changes to residential property taxes in Montana.”

5. How Scott Bessent Outfoxed Peter Navarro to Get the 90 Day Tariff Pause from Scott: “As Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent would be particularly sensitized to the interest rate issue…”

6. Spending on Necessities Has Declined Dramatically in the United States Jeremy reminding us that Americans are richer today.

7. Was the US at Our Richest in the 1890s? If you don’t believe Jeremy, consider one of the American Girl Doll historical books I was just reading to my kid. In our book, a little girl sends a letter to Samantha (the 1904 doll) reporting that both of her parents just died from the flu.

8. The Wild Market of July 8th, 2025 James Bailey on the topic that we are all trying to keep up with this year: “Yesterday the S&P 500 shot up 9% on the news that most of Trump’s new tariffs were paused.”

Special mention to Joey Politano who has been trying to follow the news all year and might go insane according to his Twitter/X.

9. No Tech Workers or No Tech Jobs? I (Joy) wish I had more time to write about the market for tech jobs this year. There is some indication that hiring is slowing. Some people still call it a correction from the Covid tech over-hiring spree. Other people take this as a sign that AI reduces the need for human programmers and otherwise “high-skill” humans, while some refute that claim.

10. Other “I, Pencils”  It was fun for several dozen of us economists when everyone else in the world suddenly re-discovered the value of international exchange.

11. The Best Investments of the 1970s James considers “what were the best investments of the 1970’s?”  Interesting to consider the performance of gold in retrospect considering stagflation.

12. Women Have Always Worked More Than Men: Hours of Work Since 1900 I feel seen.

13. Shocked 2025 is shocking, as Mike pointed out in February.

14. Trump’s Economic Policy Uncertainty Along those lines, Zachary Bartsch examines how people are shocked and confused.

15. Salty SALT in the OBBB Zachary explains. “Economically, the SALT makes it cheaper for individuals to live in high-tax jurisdictions. That’s distortionary.” 

16. Illusions of Illusions of Reasoning I wrote, “evaluating AI reasoning is difficult…”

Reflections: We’ve been doing this for 5 years now, as of August 2025. From the analytics I can see, our posts have been the answer to a stranger’s Google query hundreds of thousands of times. Having been the beneficiary of so many other posts from strangers online, I’m happy about that.

Reminder: You can subscribe to our WordPress site to get posts sent to your email. The widget for putting your email in should be on the right side of your screen on a computer, or you can find it by scrolling to the bottom of the home page on a mobile device. WordPress will let you customize your preferences so that you get emails batched once a week if you prefer that to Every Day.

Based on my crude analytics from WordPress, “traffic” to our site from LLMs is low but increasing. It appears that readers occasionally click over from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai  What we can’t see is if and when our writing is re-molded as part of an LLM answer without attribution. In one sense, writing online is more important than ever, to feed the beast and help get good quality answers to LLM users. On the other hand, old systems in place like upvotes and view counts that used to motivate people to write for free might crumble in the new world.

From me in 2024: “AI companies have money. Could we be headed toward a world where OpenAI has some paid writers on staff? Replenishing the commons is relatively cheap if done strategically, in relation to the money being raised for AI companies.” 

If anyone knows Mark Zuckerberg, please tell him that I’ll write for a fraction of what he’s paying these new engineers. What if he gave out a writing fellowship on the understanding the person never publishes (else the other bots would scrape it) and just exclusively lets Llama train off of original work?

In our case, anyway, we enjoy writing and learn from the process, so we are looking forward to being here every day.

To find prior year “top post” lists, start with: Updated List of Top Posts for 2024