These are notable posts from 2026, roughly presented in descending order, starting with the post that got the most views.
By Jeremy Horpedahl (https://x.com/jmhorp)
“Does the US face a falling birth rate? Yes. Is this as dramatic as most other countries? No.”
Another good follow for issues of the family is Melissa Kearney (https://x.com/kearney_melissa)
2. Claude Mythos Is Such a Dangerous Hacker Engine That Anthropic Has Withheld Broad Release
Scott Buchanan released a timely post in April.
Zachary Bartsch: “A skill can be just plain text written conversationally, it can be a list of rules, mathematical expressions, or even the foundational code that you want your AI to readily modify and apply. Essentially, saying ‘skill’ is the same as saying ‘pre-prompting’ with various degrees of specificity. Rather than writing a prompt each time, you can recycle a set of prompts that you’ve stored in a file. That’s all that a skill is.”
Plus, Zachary provided some useful history of “Explainer text files”
4. Although published in a prior year, this post from Zachary has also done well in 2026: The Mythology of Rice and Beans
“Not a single one of these foods is an ‘incomplete protein’. Yes, the mass that you’d need to eat differs, but there is not much that is exciting about legumes and grains as a combination.”
Anyone who has gone grocery shopping in 2026 knows this is the year of protein.
5. Scott Buchanan considered the price trajectory of silver: Is the Silver Bubble Bursting?
Out of curiosity, I checked the price. Within a week of this post, the price of silver had actually gone up. But after a final peak in late January, the price has declined. As of today, it is down from any of the prices posted in January of 2026.
6. Another bubble post from Scott: Chipmaker Stock Prices Explode: The Latest Bubble?
In addition to financial speculation, these chip prices also affect consumers trying to buy a high-performance laptop.
7. Scott on AI news: Oops: Anthropic Accidently Leaked the Entire Code for Its “Claude Code” Program
“Gleeful researchers, competitors, and hackers promptly downloaded zillions of copies. Anthropic issued broad copyright takedown requests, but the damage was done.”
8. James Bailey considered: Is a US Oil Export Ban Coming? in light of the conflict with Iran
9. Mike Makowsky wrote this haunting poem “Oh, what shall all the candlemakers do now that the sun has risen?”
The actual AI problem in academic economics
He talks about the referee process, since that is where the main decisions happen, as much as the “writing process.” No one has all the answers, but Mike is doing us all a favor by getting some of this real talk out in the open. Please comment if you have more ideas on where to go from here.
I’ve seen chatter about this topic on Twitter/X, but I’d love to see some more blog posts from tenured folk because it helps with the hidden curriculum problem.
10. Even though it was posted in 2025, this post by Jeremy got more attention: Spending on Necessities Has Declined Dramatically in the United States
“Would you have guessed that in the “good old days” of the 1950s and 1960s, the average US family was spending 30-40% of their income on food and clothing, something that today we spend barely over 10% on? To understand the challenges we face today, it’s important to have the context of how bad the past was.”
Jeremy has been telling this story for years. Interestingly, world cup tourist discourse seemed to push a few more people over the fence (why hadn’t they just read our blog?). Most Americans are rich.
11. Humanity’s Last Exam in Nature by James.
“We start asking it questions we don’t know the answer to.” is reminiscent of my recent post Fable on Legibility
12. Scott: SaaSmageddon: Will AI Eat the Software Business?
Since the ChatGPT launch, I have heard conflicting stories on the impact of AI on white collar jobs such as software engineering. There have been layoffs and, for example, ex-Meta employees who struggle rematch in at their old salary. I have also heard claims that the demand for software engineers is actually increasing, perhaps because AI makes them more productive.
13. One of the first posts of 2026, from Zachary Bartsch: Tariffs Are Not Smart Industrial Policy
14. From Scott, to file under things you didn’t expect (and yet should have seen coming): Allbirds, Inc. Attempts Pivot from Making Wool Sneakers to AI Computing
15. Jeremy is still right, as the foreign tourists saw this summer: Average Wealth for Younger Generations Continues To Exceed Past Generations
16. Joy Buchanan: arXiv will ban authors who submit papers with LLM mistakes
The problem echos Makowsky’s post, which ultimately rests on readers and the referee process. I like to say “readers are that which is scarce,” meaning that it’s not difficult to produce writing.
17. Sometimes I just like to highlight a Jeremy post that made me laugh, even if it did not get top views: Berries Are Probably Not Making Parents Go Broke (Probably)
We’ve been cited in most of the major news outlets at this point, but this year was a first with: EWED cited in Top Demography Journal
Blogs are not niche anymore. More people than ever, including many researchers at top schools, have decided to start a Substack. Of course, peer-reviewed and prestige-published research still has a primary place in the discourse. Many of the blog posts are ABOUT the primary objects of research.
I saw something called InTheWeights in 2026 that made me think folks at research schools might be strategic in starting to blog now. ChatGPT reads our blog. One reason I think that to be true is that some of our reader traffic comes from ChatGPT.com and Claude. I think our work is getting repackaged as LLM answers to millions of people, some small percentage of those answers provide attribution to us, and then a small sliver of those answers results in users clicking over to us as the primary source for an answer.
It will be a long time before tenure decisions are based on where you are In the Weights. But our crew would do well on that metric. Our work is legible to AI because we have been blogging ungated here for years.
And me
To find prior year “top post” lists, start with: Updated List of Top Posts for 2025
Economist Writing Every Day 