Weblogs – Economist Writing Every Day

Updated List of Top posts for 2025

December 13, 2025December 12, 2025Joy BuchananLeave a comment

In August, I listed the Top EWED Posts of 2025. Here are a few more highlights. This list is roughly based on web traffic, starting with the highest number of views for 2025, since the August list.

Our breakout post for the entire year is Jeremy Horpedahl with:

The Poverty Line is Not $140,000

It has been cited in the Washington Post and the Financial Times, and shared many times.

Mr. Green has understated typical family income by something like 70 percent. Knowing this fact alone would, I think, cause him to reconsider his entire essay. But it’s worse than that: he also overstates the amount of spending required to support a family!

Jeremy wrote a follow-up the next week: Poverty Lines Are Hard to Define, But Wherever You Set Them Americans Are Moving Up (And The “Valley of Death” is Less Important Than You Think)

2. James Bailey’s biggest hit this year is:

Writing Humanity’s Last Exam

What a great title!

3. Many have clicked on Jeremy’s Bad Claims About Food Stamps (SNAP)

On Twitter I joked that if it is true, you should just run all of GDP through SNAP and we could be 80% richer. But my joke isn’t quite fair, because it could be true at the margin, but the effects might dissipate at some point. At what point? Well, a key assumption by USDA’s model is that the recipients of SNAP benefits have a higher marginal propensity to consume than the average household…

4. Did you know that One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000

5. Have you wondered about: What is $300,000 from “The Gilded Age” Worth Today?

6. I rarely do this in top post roundups, but I’ll mention that Mike Makowsky’s post from 2022 generated a lot of interest this year, possibly because of the rise of interest in “agents”: Why Agent-Based Modeling Never Happened in Economics

I, myself, am embarking on a research project about AI agents. More to come on that.

7. In case you struggle to accept that the world is getting better along at least some margins: The Growth of Family Income Isn’t Primarily Explained by the Rise of Dual-Income Families

8. Many people searched and found their answer from Scott Buchanan in: “Big Short” Michael Burry Closes Scion Hedge Fund: “Value” Approach Ceased to Add Value?

Funds are nearly always shut down because of underperformance, not overperformance.

9. Zachary Bartsch wrote: What is truth? The Bayesian Dawid-Skene Method

The Bayesian Dawid-Skene (henceforth DS) method helps to aggregate opinions and find the truth of a matter given very weak assumptions ex ante.

Is that what happens on a group blog? Trying to tie it all together.

10. A post from Zachary that I have shared with my students considering an economics major: What’s the Best Major to Prepare for Law School?

Money is not everything, but…

11. Not technically Jeremy’s top post, but I make this list and it made me laugh to see the title: Is Everyone Going to Europe This Summer?

Though don’t worry: not everyone went to Europe this summer, despite what social media might have you believe.

Just wait for my posts from Europe, people. I’ll get back there soon.

This cuts against the idea that all progress is just more people staring into their screens. Although, arguably, people travel for the social media engagement it generates. Sometimes I feel like my Facebook friends document their trips so thoroughly that I don’t even need to go.

12. I posted an update to our hallucinations result: Counting Hallucinations by Web-Enabled LLMs

13. Here is a take that could come back to make me look stupid in 10 years: Is AI learning just MOOCs again?

14. We have some readers who are also classroom teachers, so here is James: Why I Started Grading Attendance

15. I endorse this message from James: LinkedIn is OK, Actually

We are a little cringe here, too.

16. This post hasn’t had weeks to pick up a high views score, but Mike was one of the first to this paper, and I subsequently saw big accounts talking about it: Obviously baseline economic security matters, but…

If you asked me five years ago where a new UBI might, at the margin, have a zero effect, I would have picked a Nordic country, but still…

Our biggest source of web traffic is Google search. We get readers who click through links shared by our friends (thank you). And, something that’s way up in percentage terms is referral traffic from a certain “chatgpt.com” – 8 times more than in 2024.

Thanks to all the humans and others who read.

Benefit Cliff Data

December 4, 2025James Bailey1 Comment

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 higher taxes. This could be trapping many people in poverty, but we don’t have a good idea of how many, because so many of the relevant subsidies operate at the state and local level. Descriptive work cataloging where all these “benefits cliffs” are and how many people they effect would be hugely valuable. You could also study how people react to benefits cliffs using the data we do have.

But it turns out* that the Atlanta Fed has now done the big project I’d hoped some big institution would take on and put together the data on benefits cliffs. They even share it with an easy-to-use tool that lets you see how this applies to your own family. Based on your family’s location, size, ages, assets, and expenses, you can see how the amount of public assistance you are eligible for varies with your income:

Then see how your labor income plus public assistance changes how well off you are in terms of real resources as your labor income rises:

For a family like mine with 3 kids and 2 married adults in Providence, Rhode Island, it shows a benefit cliff at $67,000 per year. The family suddenly loses access to SNAP benefits as their labor income goes over $67k, making them worse off than before their raise unless their labor income goes up to at least $83,000 per year.

I’ve long been concerned that cliffs like this in poorly designed welfare programs will trap people in (or near) poverty, where they avoid taking a job, or working more hours, or going for a promotion, or getting married, in order to protect their benefits. This makes economic sense for them over a 1-year horizon but could keep them from climbing to independence and the middle-class in the longer run. You can certainly find anecdotes to this effect, but it has been hard to measure how important the problem is overall given the complex interconnections between federal, state, and local programs and family circumstances.

I look forward to seeing the research that will be enabled by the full database that the Atlanta Fed has put together, and I’m updating my ideas page to reflect this.

*I found out about this database from Jeremy’s post yesterday. Mentioning it again today might seem redundant, but I didn’t want this amazing tool to get overlooked for being shared toward the bottom of a long post that is mainly about why another blogger is wrong. I do love Jeremy’s original post, it takes me back to the 2010-era glory days of the blogosphere that often featured long back-and-forth debates. Jeremy is obviously right on the numbers, but if there is value in Green’s post, it is highlighting the importance of what he calls the “Valley of Death” and what we call benefit cliffs. The valley may not be as wide as Green says it is and it may be old news to professional tax economists, but I still think it is a major problem, and one that could be fixed with smarter benefit designs if it became recognized as such.

Thanks to the Readers

November 27, 2025November 25, 2025James BaileyLeave a comment

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 fun. Why? Because I can quickly make an original point. When I blog, I assume that readers already understand the basics of economics, philosophy, political science, and history. Or to be more precise, I assume either that (a) readers already understand the basics, or (b) are motivated enough to self-remediate any critical gaps in their knowledge. I also assume that readers already know the basics of my outlook, so I don’t have to constantly repeat repeat repeat myself. Finally, I assume that readers already appreciate me, at least to the extent of, “You’re often wrong, but reliably interesting.” So rather than spend precious time convincing readers that I’m worth reading, I can immediately try to convince them that the thesis of my latest post is important and correct….

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to say that I owe almost all of this to you, my dear readers. You’re the people I wake up thinking about. You’re the people I hope to excite on a daily basis. You’re my sounding board, and my confidants. I owe you, big time.

I couldn’t say it better myself, so I’ll just leave it to Bryan.

Thanks to you all and happy Thanksgiving.

Everything Except Book Reviews

October 5, 2025James BaileyLeave a comment

For the last few years the blog Astral Codex Ten has run contests for the best reader-submitted book reviews. This year Scott mixed things up and asked people to review anything except books.

You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts. Review political parties – no, whole societies! Review animals or trees! Review an oddly-shaped pebble, or a passing cloud! Review abstract concepts! Mathematical proofs! Review love, death, or God Himself!

The 13 finalists have a couple of entries on the sorts of things that are typically reviewed: a play, a food, a specific school. But most are pretty abstract or unusual as reviews go: like the general idea of school, dating men in the Bay Area, and fighting in the Russo-Ukranian War.

“This is not like Iraq” the Ukrainian recruiting officer soberly told me with a thick accent. “You have 50% chance of dying.” That wasn’t actually true, but it was a lot closer to being true than almost anything you can voluntarily sign up for in an organized way. I decided it was worth it.

Recommended, I thought several of the essays were excellent, voting goes through October 13th.

Discuss AI Doom with Joy on May 5

May 3, 2025May 2, 2025Joy BuchananLeave a comment

If you like to read and discuss with smart people, then you can make a free account in the Liberty Fund Portal. If you listen to this podcast over the weekend: Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Dangers of AI (2023) you will be up to speed for our asynchronous virtual debate room on Monday May 5.

Russ Roberts sums up the doomer argument using the following metaphor:

The metaphor is primitive. Zinjanthropus man or some primitive form of pre-Homo sapiens sitting around a campfire and human being shows up and says, ‘Hey, I got a lot of stuff I can teach you.’ ‘Oh, yeah. Come on in,’ and pointing out that it’s probable that we are either destroyed directly by murder or maybe just by out-competing all the previous hominids that came before us, and that in general, you wouldn’t want to invite something smarter than you into the campfire.

What do you think of this metaphor? By incorporating AI agents into society, are we inviting a smarter being to our campfire? Is it likely to eventually kill us out of contempt or neglect? That will be what we are discussing over in the Portal this week.

Is your P(Doom) < 0.05? Great – that means you believe that the probability of AI turning us into paperclips is less than 5%. Come one come all. You can argue against doomers during the May 5-9 week of Doom and then you will love Week Two. On May 12-16, we will make the optimistic case for AI!

See more details on all readings and the final Zoom meeting in my previous post.

New Website

January 9, 2025January 8, 2025James Bailey1 Comment

Don’t worry, EWED is in the same place as always, but my personal website is moving.

Temple University has generously hosted my site long after my 2014 graduation. But next week they are moving to a more typical policy where alumni lose access to online university resources like web-hosting, email, and library datasets starting one year after graduation.

My new personal website is at jamesbaileyecon.com. Unless you just trying to learn more about me or my research, I think the big draws are the pages where I share cleaned-up datasets and ideas for research papers.

Updated List of Top Posts for 2024

December 21, 2024December 18, 2024Joy Buchanan1 Comment

In August, I listed the Top EWED Posts of 2024. Here are a few more highlights. This list is roughly based on web traffic, starting with the highest number of views for 2024, since the August list.

Mike Makowsky has the top post since August with Bad service is a sign of a better world. “What if service in restaurants, hospitality, etc is, in fact, lower in quality than it was one or two decades ago? I would like to suggest that this is a good sign of improving times.” Thoughtful. Recommended. Bosses will not be requiring “15 pieces of flair” anymore. I have noticed that restaurant servers these days seem to wear whatever they want. It was previously noted by Mike that Kitchen staff were canaries in the coal mine.

2. Grocery Inflation Since 2019: BLS Data is Probably About Right by Jeremy-“What if we actually looked at receipts?”-Horpedahl. You can find him on Twitter/X.

3. You know it’s good when a post with such a cryptic title goes viral. Mike wrote about the topic people were thinking about, in the moment: At the moment (updated 10/22/24) Sometimes we write about the economics community and what began as a critical mass of people that used to call itself #EconTwitter. Some of those people have moved to Bluesky. You can find Mike there at @mikemakowsky.bsky.social, and most of us have accounts there. Getting social media just right is tricky. If you follow the right people and don’t waste too much time on it, then social media can be part of How to Keep Up With Economics (James).

4. Predicting College Closures: Now with Machine Learning James Bailey brings the important (unwanted) news that not all college are going to make it through the next decade, and there are signs. This follows up on what was previously listed as a top post in August: Predicting College Closures

5. Publish or Perish: A Hilarious Card Game Based on Academia My review of a new board game. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you. I played a test copy with some fellow nerds and had a great time.

6. Jeremy explains, “… fast food prices (“limited service meals”), which have definitely outpaced wages over the past 4 years, and continue to grow…” Grocery Inflation is Under Control, Fast Food Prices Aren’t

7. Jeremy asks, Did 818,000 jobs vanish?

8. Scott’s saga is perhaps attracting traffic from search engines from people with the same problem. Recovering My Frozen Assets at BlockFi 2. Scams and More Scams

9. Post-Pandemic Lumber Market Zachary Bartsch writes, “People used to talk about higher gasoline prices all the time, but never discussed with the same enthusiasm when prices fell. The same is true for lumber.” Good for teaching about supply and demand.

10. I Give Up, Standard & Poor’s Wins James lets us learn from his journey- “my stock picks underperformed the incredible 26% return the S&P has posted so far this year.” This is something most people would rather not admit, and yet for most of us it’s true.

11. James explains, “Cheapflation”: Inflation Really Does Hit the Bottom Harder. People were mad about inflation. Voters were mad about inflation. It’s worth understanding better. Some of us are in an echo chamber and need to peer out, especially if we think a lot about how (in fact) the world is getting better. Or maybe we even think about data indicating that On Average, American Wage Earners are Better Off Than They Were Four Years Ago (Jeremy).

12. Why Podcasts Succeeded in Gaining Influence Where MOOCs Failed attracted some attention. If you are being honest, would you have predicted a priori that Joe Rogan talking in a closed room FOR HOURS would outdo Ivy League professor lectures? In retrospect, it might seem obvious, but I probably would have gotten the prediction wrong. MOOCs and podcasts both launched around the same time because the internet lowered the cost of broadcasting. They both had some success. In terms of shaping culture or voting behavior, I think it’s clear that podcasts win. Until a product is launched on the market, we just don’t know what will become popular, which is a topic that came up in the podcast I recorded recently: Joy on The Inductive Economy podcast

Speaking of what I don’t predict, EWED is starting to get web traffic from LLMs like chatgpt.com. Right now, it’s very small compared to Google search. For a while, I wondered if LLMs would simply plagiarize us without giving us any credit. Maybe that’s our raison d’être. Here’s me being dramatic about it in 2022 – “Because of when I was born, I believe that something I have published will make it into the training data for these models. Will that turn out to be more significant than any human readers we can attract?”

However, writers of the world, LLMs might start giving you credit. There is some demand from users for sources and citations. (My paper on made up sources).

A little more credit to the true 2024 EWED all-stars, even though they were already listed in August: Young People Have a Lot More Wealth Than We Thought, by Jeremy Horpedahl, continues to be a top performer. And, Mike wrote about an important current event in culture: Civil War as radical literalism

While we are settling scores and doing web traffic round-ups, there is one thing I’d like to put on the record. I made one resolution last year, publicly on January 3, 2024. I have made good on this promise. The people who run the AdamSmithWorks website have informed me that I wrote their top post of the year, Would Adam Smith Tell Taylor Swift to Attend the Super Bowl?

Woodstock for Nerds: Highlights from Manifest

June 13, 2024June 13, 2024James Bailey4 Comments

I’m back from Manifest, a conference on prediction markets, forecasting, and the future. It was an incredible chance to hear from many of my favorite writers on the internet, along with the CEOs of most major prediction markets; in Steve Hsu’s words, Woodstock for Nerds. Some highlights:

Robin Hanson took over my session on academic research on prediction markets (in a good way; once he was there everyone just wanted to ask him questions). He thinks the biggest current question for the field is to figure out why is the demand for prediction markets so low. What are the different types of demand, and which is most likely to scale? In a different talk, Robin says that we need to either turn the ship of world culture, or get off in lifeboats, before falling fertility in a global monoculture wrecks it.

Play-money prediction markets were surprisingly effective relative to real-money ones in the 2022 midterms. Stephen Grugett, co-founder of Manifold (the play-money prediction market that put on the conference), admitted that success in one election could simply be a coincidence. He himself was surprised by how well they did in the 2022 midterms, and said he lost a bunch of mana on bets assuming that Polymarket was more accurate.

Substack CEO Chris Best: No one wants to pay money for internet writing in the abstract, but everyone wants to pay their favorite writer. For me, that was Scott Alexander. We are trying to copy Twitter a bit. Wants to move into improving scientific publishing. I asked about the prospects of ending the feud with Elon; Best says Substack links aren’t treated much worse than any other links on X anymore.

Razib Khan explained the strings he had to pull for his son to be the first to get a whole genome sequence in utero back in 2014- ask the hospital to do a regular genetic test, ask them for the sample, get a journalist to tweet at them when they say no, get his PI’s lab to run the sample. He thinks crispr companies could be at the nadir of the hype cycle (good time to invest?).

Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara says they are considering paying interest on long term markets, and offering margin. There is enough money in it now that their top 10 or so traders are full time (earning enough that they don’t need a job). The CFTC has approved everything we send them except for once (elections). We don’t think their current rule banning contest markets will go through, but if it does we would have to take down Oscar and Grammy markets. When we get tired of the CFTC, we joke that we should self certify shallot futures markets (toeing the line of the forbidden onion futures). Planning to expand to Europe via brokerages. Added bounty program to find rules problems. Launching 30-50 markets per week now (seems like a good opportunity, these can’t all be efficient right?).

There was lots else of interest, but to keep things short I’ll just say it was way more fun and informative doing yet another academic conference, where I’ve hit diminishing returns. More highlights from Theo Jaffee here; I also loved economist Scott Sumner’s take on a similar conference at the same venue in Berkeley:

If you spend a fair bit of time surrounded by people in this sector, you begin to think that San Francisco is the only city that matters; everywhere else is just a backwater. There’s a sense that the world we live in today will soon come to an end, replaced by either a better world or human extinction. It’s the Bay Area’s world, we just live in it.