We already know that economists earn more income on average. But when and how one earns income matters for how you spend your time both now and in the future. Being more productive affords the option to earn more money by working. For that matter, it also affords the option of staying home or pursuing passion projects at work or elsewhere. Earning more money earlier in life also has implications for how you spend your time later in life.
Specifically, given the choice, you may choose to work less as a young adult so that you can spend more time with your family. The tradeoff isn’t just whether to work now or spend more quality time with others. After all, money can be saved for the future. Choosing to work less (or for a lower salary) today means that you may choose to work more in the future in order to achieve your desired standard of living. Personally, assuming I make it to old age, I would very much like to afford spending time with my family.
The more that you earn earlier in life, the more that you can save and invest for the future. The more that you save, the more that you can enjoy the fruits of compound interest. It’s not just a matter of earning more now rather than later. If you work and save now, then your future income can be passive. That is, your future earnings won’t require you to spend your time in an office or otherwise employed. You can still do that if you want, but you wouldn’t *need* to. By having more retirement, investment, and social security income, your future self will earn plenty of income without spending as much time formally working. You can instead spend time with loved ones or on other pursuits.
Below is the stacked bar graph of average income sources over each decadal age cohort. All data is from the 2024 ACS, so it’s just a snapshot in time rather than following individuals over the course of their life. I singled out people with Economics, Finance, and other 4-year college degrees. Economists make the most lifetime income if we count salary and other compensation alone. But if we look at the older cohorts, economics majors also earn more passive income. You’d think that Finance majors would earn more from investments. But among people in their 70s, economics majors earn more investment and retirement account income. Finance majors do earn more social security in that cohort, however.
A chart showing the average income by major was recently making the rounds on social media. So, I tried to replicate it. It turned out that some of the college majors were omitted. That part actually makes sense. The 2024 American Community Survey includes 174 degree fields – which is way too many for a clearly labeled bar chart. So, for local advertisement, I used only the majors and their equivalents that are offered at my university. That chart is below (unweighted).
These are just raw average earnings by college major for employed adults. They all have decent sample sizes. Below is the cumulate distribution of sample size for each major. The smallest sample size is 45 (Military Technologies) and only 3% have sample sizes below 100. Only 34% have sample sizes below 1k.
You better believe that my colleagues and I show this chart to every single one of our classes. Obviously, it’s truncated from the full 174 majors, but it’s the relevant chart for us. If we use the full sample of college majors, Economics ($170k) drops to 3rd highest income, behind “Petroleum Engineering” ($173k) and “Health and Medical Preparatory Programs” ($183k). To be perfectly honest, those latter two sound a lot more difficult and have surprisingly little pay bump in compensation. Being more difficult is also consistent with the smaller sample size Economics=13k, Petroleum Engineering=343, and Health and Medical Preparatory Programs=1,099.
One challenge that I’ve heard about the chart is that top business schools, such as Wharton, have Economics majors and various business concentrations. So, those top performing financiers are getting categorized as Economics in a way that is a bit misleading to young students elsewhere who are trying to decide on a major. If that’s true, then we should see Economics drop in the rankings if we omit the top-most earners. After all, the criticism is that they’re pulling up the average.
UPDATE: I stupidly didn’t realize my co-blogger Mike wrote about this too. My bad! I skimmed last week’s posts, but it didn’t click in my head. Be sure to read his thoughts.
ALSO: lots of the papers by Polson seem to have vanished from SSRN since I wrote this blog post… yesterday. Everything after August 14th has been taken down. That brings his count of papers in 2026 down to a mere 168 papers. Still essentially several lifetimes of output from a typical academic.
CODA: As Andrew Gelman documented in real time, all of the papers appear to have been removed from SSRN for now. No explanation as of yet, but you can still see many of the papers listed (for now) on Polson’s Google Scholar page.
For most academics, writing papers that may be eventually published in peer-reviewed journals is an important part of what we do. For some academics, it is the main thing they do (others have more emphasis on teaching courses at their university). Most academics always have a few projects they are working on, with perhaps a goal of finishing 2 or 3 a year, and thus having a regular pipeline of a few publications every few years. But some academics are much more prolific.
Take Daron Acemoglu for example. He has long been considered extremely prolific. So far in 2026, according to his Google Scholar page, he has had 15 papers that have either been published this year or come out as new working papers (that’s the bulk of them). In the past year (2025 and 2026), he has had publications in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature, among others (the AER paper was his Nobel lecture). For lower tier academics, that’s almost a lifetime of publications in 12 months or so. Acemoglu is extremely productive.
But I just discovered an economist that is, apparently, even more productive than Acemoglu, at least as measured by working papers. Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026. In the month of August 2026, he has written and posted to SSRN a total of 104 papers — and counting, since the month isn’t quite over.
These aren’t just short notes. Most of the papers are of normal academic length: 32 pages, 27 pages, 58 pages. The papers are both theoretical — involving complex math in some cases — or empirical, with regressions. Read any single paper, and it feels like just a normal academic paper, the kind of thing that an academic might work on for a few months. He even has a frequent co-author, which is common for economics papers (and helps to be more productive), a systems engineering professor named Vadim Sokolov, who is a co-author on a little over 100 of the papers this year.
What is going on here? Obviously the research productivity of Polson and his co-author Sokolov is aided by AI. Who isn’t using AI to increase their writing and research productivity these days? But I don’t think I have seen any academic, at least not in economics, that has really pushed it to the limit.
Presumably, many of these papers will get submitted to academic journals. I can imagine the editors of journals have a very hard job these days, as the number of papers submitted has likely increased significantly, while the time that referees have available has not increased much (of course, AI is likely making referees more productive too, though many journals ask you not to upload the paper into an AI program as a referee, since it is unpublished work when you are reviewing it).
I really don’t know where academic publishing goes from here. AI has made us all more productive in terms of output, but are we better at answering important questions in our science than pre-AI? Probably, though it is hard to know. Journals and the peer review process has traditionally been the filter to sort real contributions from gibberish. I don’t know how the peer review process continues in its current form given the massive increase in output (much of it good!) that we are seeing from academics. Dr. Polson is just a leading example of a growing challenge for academia.
So a professor at a major institution wrote 200 papers last year. Unlike other commenters I’ve observed so far, I think this is neither true research nor pure AI fraud. It is likely AI “slop” to varying degrees, but unlike a lot of slop there is probably real value within it. What I have not yet seen ascertained is whether any of it has been vetted, investigated, or curated by the author in a meaningful way. The real question is: what is the actual ambition here? I think the tell is the lack of submission to peer review.
I think this is a form of intellectual squatting. The nice version is it’s putting out a series of half-baked papers in the hopes of establishing a property right to the underlying ideas at an earlier stage of the research process than previously possible. The less generous interpretation is it’s dumping a series of haystacks on the plains and laying claim to the needles probabilistically within each. Imagine you are a person who has highly esoteric, potentially important ideas every day. Many of those ideas you suspect, based on some combination of experience and ego, are new in at least one dimension. You would like to get credit for that newness. For being first. What’s the problem?
The problem is that scholarship remains more perspiration than inspiration. Having a new idea is great, but it takes years to work through the nuance in sufficient detail that you can convince your peers of the coherence and originality of the contribution. During the minutes each day you are not working on this singular project you have the inspiration for other ideas, sometimes multiple within a single day. How frustrating is the proposition that someone else gets credit for the originality of contribution just because they had time to reveal it to the world while you were embroiled in your investigation of what is only one of your many score ideas!?
Ah, but meta-level inspiration has struck you! What if you took each one of those ideas, spent an hour curating a series of prompts around it, and then let Chat GPT (or another LLM) fabricate an entire research paper around it? It might not be good, correct, or even coherent, but it does somethine far more important. It establishes an intellectual property right to the claim of being first. Now, to be clear, you are fully aware of the deficiciency of your paper as an actual scholarly contribution, but if somone else writes a full paper you at least have something to point to and say “I was here first. Cite me. Hell, if I’m close enough you might even have to name it after me. Well, sure, us. But definitely include me. Glory shared via hypenhnation is better than no glory at all.”
Is it a contribution? That’s something that will vary on a case-by-case basis, but I expect far more misses than hits. The work isn’t there. It’s like plopping down a block of marble with a dramatic-ish sketch of a man on an adhered post-it note and claiming that Michaelangelo needs to share credit with you on any subsequent sculptures. It’s like asking people to cite that one cool tweet you did about how DNA is cool but maybe RNA could be useful in vaccines one day. Intellectual property rights trolling via AI blunderbuss.
BTW, I’m not 100% sure this isn’t an AI take on a modern Sokal hoax. An attempt to show how much AI slop is introducing a whole new version of Gresham’s Law to scholarship. But if we treat it as earnest, it’s proof that a very smart person can potentially disrupt the market for scholarship, patents, or any other intellectual property by laying claim to ideas in much the same way that the printing press undermined the market for plenary indulges. Flood the market, leave it to someone else to sort through the ecumenical consequences.
Inflation targeting has been the goal of central banks for decades now, either implicitly or explicitly. Of course, they say that they have multiple goals, but they give most attention to the price level. That’s probably because it is easy to measure and more directly related to their activities than the unemployment rate and private financial activity. Price level targeting and inflation targeting are not quite the same thing – but I’m not in favor of either. This post describes what happens when the central bank targets the price level and offsets other changes in the economy in order to achieve their goal.
Volatile Capital Prices
If consumer prices are constant in the face of productivity shocks, then capital prices adjust instead. Capital is just goods that create other goods. If capital becomes more productive, then that means being able to produce more at given prices or being able to produce given quantities at lower costs. The demand for capital is ultimately determined by how profitable it is. This includes the costs of maintenance, the price of output, and the capital’s productivity. All else constant, changes in the revenue produced by the capital for the firm affect the equilibrium price of capital.
If NGDP is constant and capital productivity improves, then output rises and consumer prices would fall. With unit price elasticity of output demanded, the total revenue of the firm remains constant and the nominal capital price does too. The 19th century gold standards had plenty of problems. But one feature was that long-run consumer prices fell and long-run capital prices were more stable.
If, instead, the Fed stokes NGDP to prop up consumer prices, then the firm’s revenue rises. Demand for the capital rises and so does its price. The opposite occurs when there is a negative productivity shock. So, capital price volatility is the trade-off for consumer price level stability if productivity changes. We can argue about which price volatility is better in regard to inequality, investment planning, financial stability, etc. But my strong low-hanging fruit point is that consumer price volatility just pushes the equilibrating mechanism to a different set of prices.
Volatile Income
As I said above, if the Fed wants stable consumer prices, then it must offset the impacts of productivity shocks with changes in aggregate demand – its only lever. Negative productivity shocks are offset with aggregate demand contractions.
People act like they have adaptive expectations. Of course, people differ by how forward-looking they are. So, on average, their expectations are formed by what happened during the prior period or the last time that they observed a similar circumstance. Why does this matter?
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.
It’s feeling like the late ’90s, with an impressive new technology pushing tech stocks and the broader US market to all-time highs. Retail investors are using new platforms to get in on the action, tech companies are doing more IPOs to take advantage of the higher stock prices, and other companies are trying to boost their stocks by saying they are pivoting to the new technology (though often they aren’t really changing).
The excitement drives valuations to record levels:
Shiller CAPE Ratio
In the ’90s, the internet really was a transformational new technology that would enable lots of profitable new companies. But the market got ahead of itself, a bubble that led to a crash- the S&P fell by almost half, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ fell by over 3/4 and took 15 years to recover.
History rhymes, but it doesn’t repeat exactly. I don’t currently expect a big crash driven by AI stocks; it helps that unlike in the ’90s, many of the big players are currently profitable. But I also don’t expect the NASDAQ to keep posting 20+% returns every year.
If the AI bull market doesn’t end in a dramatic crash, how will it end? It’s already shrugged off a war. A US recession is unlikely this year, though plausible next year.
The end I see slowly approaching comes from crowding out. What Robert Solow said about computers in 1987 is true about AI today: you see the AI age everywhere except the productivity statistics. There’s only so much money to go around in markets when productivity growth is unexceptional and savings rates are falling.
We’re already seeing the war hit certain markets (if not US stocks). Iran’s gulf neighbors are now putting lots of money into missile defense, money they now won’t be spending on data centers or gold (down 16% from pre-war), and everyone else has to spend more on oil.
Interest rates have been rising- partly due to central bank attempts to fight inflation, partly due to ongoing high rates of government borrowing, and partly due to financing the AI buildout itself. Higher rates make it more expensive for companies to invest in the physical AI buildout, and make investors discount future AI revenues more while making bonds a more attractive substitute for stocks today. 10-year TIPS now yield 2% over the inflation rate, a sharp contrast to the 2021 stock boom when they yielded less than inflation. If I were older I’d be loading up on TIPS, and even at 38 I’m starting to get tempted.
Trying to call the top exactly is a fool’s errand, but if I were feeling foolish, I’d point to the big upcoming IPOs. SpaceX just filed for an IPO that would be the biggest ever both for the amount of money raised ($75 billion) and the total company valuation ($1.77 trillion). This shatters the previous records for the biggest overall raise ($29 billion raised by Saudi Aramco when it went public in 2019) and the biggest raise by an American company ($18 billion raised by Visa in 2008). OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to follow with IPOs that would also break the previous records- making 3 companies each trying to raise more than the $45 billion raised by the entire US IPO market in 2025. Even if the process of going public doesn’t reveal any flaws in the companies, that money has to come from somewhere- and it takes up a substantial proportion of all net inflows to US stocks in a typical year (IPOs plus new money into existing stocks).
In short- where will the money come from? What are investors going to sell in order to buy into these IPOs? Technically they could do it all with cash, but I think it’s at least plausible that they start selling other stocks. The selling pressure will continue after the IPOs as employees of the newly-public companies see their stocks vest and other early investors become able to sell off.
I’m not trying to time the market. Even if this is a ’90s re-run, we could easily still be in the 1998 buildup, not the 2000 peak and crash. But I am diversifying. US stocks are currently the world’s most expensive. Investors value US stocks that highly because there’s a real chance that US companies are profitably building the technologies that will drive the future. But there’s also a real chance they aren’t– and if that state of the world comes to pass, I’d prefer to own a significant chunk of bonds, foreign stocks, and real assets.
Somewhere in the vast metropolis that stretches from Boston to Washington lives a friend of ours with a long-term dream. To protect her privacy, I will not give her name or town. For over thirty years she has wanted to do some form of homesteading, where you raise most of your own food, plus some extra to sell for cash. She and her husband contemplate moving someday to a rural area in the South, where they could buy cheaper land in a warmer climate to raise goats or pigs or cattle, and grow more extensive crops.
However, that move just never happened (so far), what with the usual limitations on jobs and finances. She decided a few years ago, though, to not just keep putting food production off forever. She is doing what she can, with considerable help from her husband, on an urban/suburban lot of just over a quarter acre. He constructed numerous raised beds in an area that was formerly just grass, and had many trees taken down to admit more sunlight. She sprouts seeds into plants indoors, to get a head start in the spring.
It started about ten years ago, with just two raised beds. Now the garden area looks like this:
….
Those are pictures I took near the beginning of May. By the end of May, the gardens had exploded:
Plantings there include potatoes, onions, squash, peas, peppers, garlic, tomatoes, strawberries, arugula, and lettuce. The brassicas such as cabbage, broccoli, kale, and cauliflower are covered with a tent; otherwise, cabbage moths can decimate these plants. In a rock bed they have horseradish and comfrey. They have four blueberry bushes. The next big project would be an asparagus bed.
For livestock, they put in chickens about four years ago. In the foreground is a self-contained coop with about 8 birds, and behind it is a second coop with a run behind it, which houses about 18 birds:
They are raising dual-purpose chickens, which are pretty good egg layers, and OK for meat. (There are some breeds that are champs at laying eggs, and others like Cornish Cross whose purpose in life is to grow to eating size in an astonishing 8 weeks). All told, they get some 7-10 dozen eggs a week, spring/summer/fall. This is enough for them to eat and have plenty to sell or give away. In winter, with the cold and shorter daylight, egg production drops to 1-2 dozen/week. To transform a walking, clucking bird with feathers into breasts and drumsticks is a task I will gloss over here, but that is something that homesteaders also must do.
The main ongoing work with their chickens is filling the 7-gallon waterers every couple of days, and throwing a scoop of feed onto the floor of each coop every day. These birds get a “salad” of greens at least once a week, for variety. Here is a shot of the “girls” eagerly pecking away at their dinner; I see at least one egg on the ground in the background:
Chicken poop is pretty nasty, but it is managed by a deep bed system. There are several inches of straw in the bottom of the coops and the run. The birds continually dig around in the straw and mix it. That seems to dilute and dry the poop enough that the “farmers” only need to change out the litter a couple times a year. It just goes on the compost pile, to become fertile planting soil.
Chickens seem to be the most popular animal for budding homesteaders. They are called the “gateway animal”, to get you started/hooked. They tend to require little management, and are versatile eaters, so you don’t need to feed them just purchased grain. Some homesteaders feed them select table scraps, and even raise worms to feed the birds. If you have a large yard or pasture, you can put chickens in a movable “tractor” coop during the day, to forage for insects and greens in the fresh grass under the tractor for that day’s position.
Regulations on selling slaughtered meat are onerous, but it is easy to sell fresh eggs. In their township, chickens are allowed, but no roosters. (No one wants to hear crowing at 3:00 AM). So, our friend’s chicks that hatch out as males end up going to “freezer camp” just before they fully mature. Livestock such as goats and pigs are legal. Our friend wanted to raise a couple of pigs (pigs can also put on weight at an impressive rate, mushrooming from a 50-pound piglet to a harvestable 400-pound hog in 6-7 months). Her husband, however, declined to support that odiferous project.
Growing food is one thing, preserving it for later eating is another. She wrote me:
I can everything. Fruit, jams, veggies, potatoes, meat, fish, and meals. I have chili in jars, along with lamb stew, and onions for Frech onion soup. I make spaghetti sauce too. Yes, I’ve canned our own homegrown chicken.
Since [the storage room] stays cool in the winters (60ish F) I can store hard skin squash and keep fresh potatoes for frying or baking til January or February. I also dehydrate herbs/veggies and meat and fruit. Some veggies don’t can well, they get mushy like zucchini.
“Canning” in this context does not mean sealing into metal cans like you see in stores. It usually means putting the food in special glass “Mason” jars, heating them in a hot water bath (or, better but more work, in a pressure cooker) to sterilize the contents, then sealing them with a lid. Seems like a lot of work, but I am told by friends from the old South that canning your vegetables was a normal household activity there well into the 1960s or so.
Finally, our friends have a beehive on loan from a neighbor. Zoom in to see the bees going in/out at the bottom:
I found it inspiring to see what this couple was able to accomplish in the way of food sufficiency in a quasi-urban setting, and I wish them well in their quest to relocate to where they can grow their own red meat and hear their rooster crow.
According to Claude: Windows 11 includes a built-in “Windows Scan” app (free in the Microsoft Store) that lets you scan documents directly to PDF — simple and reliable for everyday use. “Adobe Scan” offers a free mobile companion but also works via browser. For more features, “NAPS2” (Not Another PDF Scanner 2) is a popular open-source option with batch scanning, OCR, and direct PDF export. “IrfanView” with its scan plugin is another lightweight choice. For advanced control, “VueScan” offers a free version with core functionality. Most modern all-in-one printers also bundle free scanning software compatible with Windows 11.
Why I Chose “Scan Document to PDF”
My HP scanner software seemed pretty snoopy, not localized to my own PC. Not that I have anything dire to hide, but I’d rather not have my private affairs shooting off to a server who knows where. So I tried the built-in Windows “Scan” function for scanning documents on my trusty ink-jet printer/copier/scanner. It would run pages through the feeder, but then freeze up.
I’ve had mixed experiences with free software, often it gratuitously installs crap-ware on your PC. But surely not Microsoft… so I downloaded the free “Windows Fax and Scan” app mentioned by Claude. It did work, but was a bit clunky and limited. You have to first save a file in some graphic image format like PNG or JPEG, then go to Print, and choose “Microsoft Print to PDF”.
But then, I installed another free Microsoft app, “Scan Document to PDF”. That seems like a sweet spot here. It seamlessly scans to PDF, but has a good deal of extra functions that are intuitively accessible. It can save files as images like jpg if that is what you want. You can activate OCR to make a scanned document searchable. You can scan individual pages, and decide which ones to bundle into a pdf file. You can brighten or rotate pages, etc.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR “SCAN DOCUMENT TO PDF” ON WINDOWS 11 PC
( 1 ) Click Start icon, to left of Search bar at bottom of Windows screen. Click on Show All, for a list of all programs. Scroll down to Scan Document to PDF and click.
( 2 ) Check scan settings showing on left hand side. Can adjust them here, or by clicking Profiles button. Paper Source: Glass for one sheet on scanner, or Feeder for auto feeding pages. Resolution: Suggest 300 dpi. Bit Depth: Color for a color scan, or usually Grayscale for a black & white final document (sometimes gives better resolution than the “Black & White” setting).
( 3 ) Click Scan button (top left) to initiate scan. (Note: on the side of that button is a dropdown for options like setting up Batch Scans.)
( 4 ) Scanned pages will show on screen. To save them all as one PDF, click the Save PDF button. Default pdf file destination is /Downloads/ folder. (To save only selected pages into the final PDF, click on the dropdown on side of that button)
MORE OPTIONS
( 5 ) BEFORE SCANNING: (A) You can set up a different Profile of scan settings (scanner device, feeder, resolution, etc.) by clicking on Profiles button. (B) Click on OCR button to make final pdf searchable (not just a static image).
( 6 ) AFTER SCANNING: (A) Click Import to import pages from existing PDF, that you can then add to newly scanned pages. (B) Click Image button and select a page to crop, brighten, rotate, make black&white, etc.
I read Straw Dogs, a critique of modern society by English political philosopher John Gray, shortly after it was published in 2002. (No relation to the movie with the same name). Wikipedia summarizes the author’s view as, “Gray blames humanism, and its central view of humanity, for much of the destruction of the natural world, and sees technology as just a tool by which humans will continue destroying the planet and each other.” I cannot recommend the book as a whole – the reader is left in a state of despairing passivity. My AI justly notes, “Critiques of John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals generally center on its extreme pessimism, logical inconsistencies, and rhetorical excesses.”
All that said, the book did contain many interesting observations. One line of thought that struck me at the time was that, with increasing efficiencies in the production of basic goods and services, more and more human effort will go into simply entertaining or “distracting” each other:
The days when the economy was dominated by agriculture are long gone. Those of industry are nearly over. Economic life is no longer geared chiefly to production. To what then is it geared? To distraction. Contemporary capitalism is prodigiously productive, but the imperative that drives is not productivity. It is to keep boredom at bay. With wants so quickly sated, the economy soon comes to depend on the manufacture of ever more exotic needs.
I was reminded of that line of thought when, at a recent gathering of PhD chemical engineers, I heard that one of our number has become somewhat well-known for a late-career shift. She goes by the name Andrea Hulamyhoop these days. (I happen to know her real last name and approximate age, but she wishes to keep those private).
Her father was a chemical engineering professor, and she earned a PhD in the discipline at Princeton University. She was just going along living a fairly normal sort of life, with a regular job, when without warning, it happened:
Then one day, she saw a girl hula hooping. “She looked really free and happy, and I thought, interesting, maybe I’ll try it.” A few minutes at a time quickly became an obsession. Turns out, there are whole online communities of hula hoopers who share tips and support. Conferences. And many shows and events looking for a pro to dazzle and inspire audiences.
“The hula hoop has changed everything in my life,” she says. “I didn’t know I could become a fit, sporty person. I didn’t know I was one. I love performing, and I love people, and I love parties.
“I always thought my life was a bit OK. My kids were grown up. I was enjoying my job,” she says. “But you know, we kind of think, is this all there is? And then to realize there’s this whole world — it’s been incredible. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
Andrea Hulamyhoop doesn’t just swirl a hoop around her waist. She can twirl multiple hoops around multiple body parts, with style. She is perhaps best known for her appearance on America’s Got Talent in 2025, where she smashed previous records by bending over and twirling a hoop around her rear end for just over an hour and fifteen minutes. The crowd went wild.
The physics of this feat seem almost impossible, but seeing is believing. Andrea gives a gracious tutorial here.
When I asked who is the most famous holder of a Princeton chemical engineering PhD, both ChatGPT and Claude insisted that former GE president Jack Welch is more well-known than Andrea the butt-hooper, but I doubt that is true below a certain audience age bracket. She has some 17,000 Instagram followers. I’d be willing to bet that in a crowd of under-40’s today, if you asked “Have you heard about the guy who was president of GE in the 1980’s and 90’s?” or “Have you heard about the gal who can twirl a hula hoop on her butt?”, Andrea Hulamyhoop would win.
All this brought back to my mind the notion that as a society we are able to afford to devote a great deal of time to sheer entertainment, rather than growing potatoes. A comment by a certain @petesounds9321 on Andrea’s epic 2025 AGT YouTube showed he had evidently not read Straw Dogs:
“I’d say we need more scientists than hula hoopers but hey…maybe I’m way off.”
Economist Writing Every Day 