Economics

Top EWED Posts of 2026

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

These are notable posts from 2026, roughly presented in descending order, starting with the post that got the most views.

  1. The US Has One of the Highest Fertility Rates Among Peer Countries

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.

3. What is an AI Skill?

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

How to Escape the Productivity Slump

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

I have a new essay up at Human Progress today. Here’s a slice of it:

The productivity slowdown is not an immutable law of nature. It is, at least in part, the consequence of policy choices. Human ingenuity remains as powerful as ever. We have more scientists, more capital, and better tools than any previous generation. The challenge is not generating ideas; it is allowing those ideas to spread.

…

An additional one or two percentage points of annual productivity growth may sound insignificant. Yet when compounded over decades, the effects are transformative. Higher productivity means higher incomes, better health outcomes, more abundant energy, and greater opportunities for future generations. The ideas already exist. The question is whether we will allow them to flourish.

Read the full piece.

Uncertainty Increases Profits?

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Most people have an intuition that uncertainty can harm economic outcomes. Baker, Bloom, & Davis (2016) and Bloom (2009) demonstrated that industrial production and manufacturing decline in the face of policy uncertainty. The typical mechanism that people suggest is that uncertainty about the future causes people to engage in precautionary saving, resulting in fewer sales.

The theory continues that firms consequently decrease production as demand for their output declines. Firms aren’t interested in causing the quantities supplied and demanded to be equal. Rather, they don’t want to produce too many goods that don’t get sold or don’t get sold at an adequate markup. Production is costly.  A related theory is that more persistent or longer-run uncertainty can also depress investment, since the riskier future increases the tail risk of losses.

Rather than make a risky investment, one could instead just hold off and wait for some of that uncertainty to get resolved. There’s tradeoffs to this, of course. As future costs and benefits become clearer, they also get priced-in to asset values. So, there is an optimization problem. The possible downside outcome is big and uncertain. If the risk of the investment gets resolved and the downside outcome is still too likely or harmful, then a project manager did the ex-post ‘right thing’ by waiting.

But, if the downside risk disappears or is found to be very small, then waiting to invest in the project incurs an economic cost. Either 1) the profitable project and its associated profits will occur later and less valuably, or 2) other firms also resolve their uncertainty and bid up the price of the project’s inputs. Invest too early, and the downside is large and uncertain. Invest too late, and you may lose the potential upside partially or entirely.

But can uncertainty systematically increase profits?

Walter Oi said yes.

Continue reading →

The Journal of Healthcare Finance Is Back

James Bailey1 Comment

Most academic journals are run by big for-profit publishing companies, and most of the rest are run by universities or big academic societies. The Journal of Healthcare Finance was an extreme outlier from this norm, run single-handedly by Editor-In-Chief James Unland since 1994. It was the rare journal that was free both for readers and authors.

I loved the idea of having a single person truly in charge and accountable without being slowed by a complex bureaucracy. But eventually a single person will want to, or have to, move on. Having an institution run a journal can ease this process, though an individual can still try to find their own successor.

In this case, The Journal of Healthcare Finance had been on hiatus since its Editor-In-Chief stepped back, with its last issue published in 2023. Their old website domain had expired- not a great look for anyone who published there and was going up for a job or tenure.

But now it is officially back at a new domain, with the single Editor-In-Chief replaced by a full editorial team, and accepting submissions again with the hope of releasing a new issue this year.

Selfishly, I’m happy to see this both because it means they will continue hosting my past publication, and to have a potential outlet for my future work. I recommend that other health economists and health services researchers give it a try, though as of now I have no personal experience with the new editorial team.

By the Numbers: Florida’s Property Tax Amendment (2026)

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

Voters this November will face a proposed amendment to the Florida state constitution on property tax reform. Currently, Florida has what’s called a ‘homestead’ exemption of $50,000. If a residential property is your primary residence, then your home’s assessed value is $50k less before taxes are calculated. There is no exemption for rental property or 2nd homes or vacation homes. The proposed amendment increases the exemption to $250k by 2028 and then indexes it to inflation.

First, let’s get an idea of the magnitudes. The median home in Florida is priced at about $400k and the average property tax rate is around 0.8%. Below compares the current consolidated tax bill against that of the proposed amendment. Given current home prices and local tax rates, the new exemption would have a huge impact on municipal governments who get the bulk of their revenue from property tax. In fact, there is no Florida state property tax, so the proposed amendment would adopt a new rule for municipalities and not the state government.

What Motivates the Amendment?

The current homestead exemption of $50k was established in 2008. A subsequent amendment in 2024 allowed half of that to be indexed to CPI-U. The average home price in Florida has risen 114% since 2008 and 84% since 2020. That’s a lot faster than inflation, but the tax burden is partially offset by a maximum of 3% annual increase in assessed value. Regardless, many individuals face a larger tax bill over time even independent of whether their income or use of public services has changed. Plenty people are feeling the squeeze.

What’s the Purpose of the Homestead Exemption?

The exemption is available for primary residences only. That means that rentals and vacation homes do not qualify. It’s important to keep in mind that, given some total revenue, every tax break for one group or activity implies a higher tax rate for others. So, clearly, the effect is to tax residents less and tax seasonal residents and visitors more. Florida doesn’t have an income tax, but it does have a sales tax, gasoline tax, and others that are disproportionately borne by non-residents. Given that higher income individuals tend to have higher home values, the homestead exemption is a way to lower the tax burden of lower income households. Obviously, the lowest income individuals are renters, but so are non-residents who Florida prefers to tax.

The Economics

Homeowners

The exemption is enjoyed by all primary residences, but helps low income owners the most. And, given a stable amount of municipal tax revenue, a higher homestead exemption requires that municipalities replace that revenue. This might take the form of higher local fees and taxes, making life harder for lower income people to, say, own a car or make purchase if taxes on those activities rise. Revenue stability might also be helped by higher property tax rates. The higher the property value is above $250k, the greater the average tax burden that is borne. So, someone with a very high property value may find themselves with an even higher property tax bill after municipalities adjust to the proposed statewide rule. In this sense, the new amendment would be a step in the direction of tax progressivity (a higher proportion taxed from those with higher income/wealth).

Indexing

Normally, I am in favor of indexing nominal values to CPI. In this case, we need to think about what the goal is. Let’s assume that the goals is to provide relief to lower income homeowners specifically and all primary residence homeowners generally. Does indexing to the CPI help? It depends!

Continue reading →

Do NBA Teams Play Worse In Back-To-Back Games?

James BaileyLeave a comment

The conventional wisdom is that the NBA regular season has too many games. Teams play worse because they are tired, or injured, or resting their stars so they can be ready to actually play hard in the playoffs.

New research shows that the conventional wisdom is…. probably right. In particular, teams play worse by many measures when they have to play two days in a row. That’s what Max Aicardi and I found in a paper published today, “Running on Empty: How Back-to-Backs Impact Pace and the Four Factors of Basketball Success“:

Teams on the second night of a back-to-back shoot less efficiently (lower eFG%), grab fewer offensive rebounds, and play at a slower pace. On defense, they allow opponents to shoot more efficiently, force fewer turnovers, and give up more free throw attempts and second-chance opportunities. Turnover percentage and offensive free throw rate did not change significantly, consistent with our conceptual framework’s distinction between effort-dependent and execution-dependent metrics. While not every metric changed significantly, the overall pattern is clear: second-night back-to-back scheduling is associated with a measurable decline in team performance

The effect sizes here tend to be small, around 0.5-2%, but they are statistically significant given that we studied over 20,000 games, and practically significant given how close NBA games are.

Max had the idea for this paper and wrote the first draft as a student in my Economics Senior Capstone class in 2025. After he graduated, I joined the paper as a coauthor to get it ready for journals. We share the data and code for the paper here.

Yes, Americans Probably Are About 46 (or Maybe 65) Times Richer Than in 1776

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

My post and chart from last week showed the phenomenal growth of average income in the US since the Founding. Using GDP per capita historical estimates and adjusting for inflation, this figure is about 46 times greater today than right around the time we declared independence.

It will probably not surprise you that some folks were skeptical. Could this really be true? Two major objections were raised to using GDP per capita. First, wouldn’t it be better to use a median income value rather than a mean (simple average)? Second, wouldn’t a measure of wages be better than GDP per capita?

I really would like to show you an annual series of median income data back to 1776, but unfortunately it just doesn’t exist. Good median income data are hard to find much before the 1950s, much less the 1770s. However, while median values are often better for showing levels, the growth rates of median wages and mean wages aren’t that different for periods when we have comparable data. Consider the following chart, which compares median wages (as calculated by EPI using CPS data) and mean wages (from BLS’s series for non-supervisory workers) since 1973. I have stated these in nominal terms, so don’t take this as real growth rates, but rather it is a raw comparison of two series (we could apply the same inflation adjustment to both, but that won’t change the picture, only the numbers).

Median wages increased by 667% and mean wages increased by 657%, almost identical. Again, these aren’t inflation adjusted, but that’s not the point of this exercise. The point is that whether you use mean or median wages, at least since 1973, the growth rates are the same. Was this true if we went back another 200 years? We can’t say for sure. But many people have this same skepticism about mean wages in recent decades. I think it is better to use median values when you have them, but we shouldn’t throw up our hands and claim we know nothing if all we have is mean wages.

Next, consider the following chart. It begins in 1790, but instead of using GDP per capita, as I did last week, it uses a measure of average wages from economic historian Lawrence Officer. This measure is for “production workers in manufacturing,” and it is a total compensation measure, meaning that it will include the value of fringe benefits as well — though these aren’t noticeable in the data until the 1930s. This is still an average value, but because it is for manufacturing laborers, it won’t be distorted by the wages of managers and owners in that industry, and it won’t be affected by the growth of new industries that might require more years of education (indeed, manufacturing wages are lowering than overall average wages today, so this is taking the hard case). I have also included a second line, which only includes manufacturing wages (not benefits) that I have blended with Officer’s compensation series starting in the 1930s, in case you think including benefits is somehow “cheating.” (Note the log scale again, as in last week’s chart.)

The trends here are very much in the ballpark from the GDP per capita chart I created last week. Using total compensation, wages are 65 times higher than in 1790. Using only wages, they are 49 times higher. Notice that these are both better than the 46 times multiplier using GDP per capita. How is that possible, since I am using the same price deflator in both cases? First, average hours of work have fallen significantly since the 18th century, so incomes haven’t risen quite as much as wages. Second, there was a bit of a decline in GDP per capita during the Revolutionary War, and if we use 1790 as the baseline for GDP per capita, the multiplier is 63. But again, these numbers are all in the ballpark: whether the true figure for a typical American is 46x, 49x, 63x, or 65x, this is a tremendous amount of economic growth.

If you want to look at that chart pessimistically, you will see that there is some reduction in growth rates in the past few decades. That’s true whether we use wages or compensation. This is a well known issue, and has been discussed endlessly in academic papers and on social media. I don’t want to glaze over it here, but I mostly will: the long-run trend of growth in the US is amazing. That’s true whether you use GDP per capita, or wages or compensation for production workers.

So once again, Happy 250th Birthday to the USA and all of you living in the wake of that amazing 250 years of economic growth!

Fiscal Trends: USA’s 250th (And the Government’s 237th)

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

We celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776. That’s the day that we celebrate our country’s birth. So, it’s very American of us to celebrate the day that we merely declared independence (not the day that the revolutionary war ended). We simply said we were independent from the crown. Regardless, we celebrate 250 years as a people. BUT, our government is only 237 years old.  The current constitution replaced the articles of confederation in 1789.  So there are some caveats to the whole semiquincentennial thing.

An important distinction that is baked into the American pie is that we are not our government. Our government is younger than we are. Our government has a piggy bank called ‘US Treasury’. It can spend and borrow for the US national government. It can also impose tax liabilities on the population in order to service those outlays. Now that it’s the government’s 237th birthday, what’s its basic financial track record?

I like to think in the long run, for better or for worse, and I don’t like to get hysterical. So, let’s look at the full span of the 237 years – well – 235 years. The oldest annual data that we have is from Bicentennial Historical Statistics, which goes back to 1792. Below are the series for Federal Receipts and Outlays (revenue and spending).

The blue line is in nominal dollars and the orange line is the natural log so that we can see the changes in growth rates more easily. These aren’t inflation adjusted numbers, so we should expect to see some inflationary patterns. Long-run inflation was pretty stable prior to the 1913 Federal Reserve act and wee can see that reflected in both series. There was some drift upward in terms of revenue and expenditures. But the primary pattern was one of punctuated rises followed by plateaus. That’s a pretty standard ratcheting leviathan pattern. There’s a bump up for the big events in the first half of our history: the War of 1812, Civil War in 1861, and World War I in 1917.

Then, after the great depression and leaving the gold standard (mostly), in about 1933 a new and positive trend in cash flows began. In fact, it’s amazing how consistent the raw nominal series is.  We can see where World War II is in the series, but after that we appear to have traded punctuated increases for steady increases. Even the higher inflation rates of the 1970s look pretty muted and on trend (Btw, the blip in 1976 is a record-keeping artifact. There was a 3 month gap-period when the US government changed its fiscal year start/end). Even the new growth in total cashflows seems to be slightly bending downward and growing a little more slowly.

But rest assured, spending has exceeded revenues. Below is the long run deficit. I don’t take the log for this one since there are negative numbers. It’s hard to tell from the line graph, but the first big and persist swing in the deficit arrived after the Fed was established and the onset of WWI. The deficit hit $9 billion in 1918, which was 10x the prior peak of $0.9 billion at the end of the civil war in 1865. Notice that the above government revenues stayed flat or fell after 1920, but the outlays began trending upward before the revenues. The deficit doesn’t really start its long, steady march until 1932. Of course, for the past quarter century, the national government has been in a deficit mess (even if you measure the proportion of GDP).

Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, USA

Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

For America’s 250th birthday, my present to all of you is this chart showing our economic history. Average income in the US has increased dramatically since the country was founded. This chart attempts to provide one, continuous series, using the best available income data and inflation adjustments (well, mostly continuous — before 1790 there are just a few estimates). Sources are listed at the bottom of the chart. The y-axis is a log scale.