Weblogs – Page 2 – Economist Writing Every Day

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.

Hotel Taxes and Quality: Why Georgia Sucks (Value)

May 24, 2024Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

Every year my family travels from SW Florida to the mid Atlantic area. Without stops it takes 16-17 hours. With small children, it’s definitely a two day trip. We find that they handle it better if we leave super early, take a longer leg on the first day, then stop at a hotel midway and get the kids in the pool to help burn off some energy. We also rent a suite whenever possible.

We’ve made this trip many times. I use the Bonvoy app which is for Marriott hotels. We even have a particular hotel that we prefer: The Fairfield Inn in Santee, SC. It’s clean, spacious, the employees are welcoming and kind, the breakfast includes cooked items that aren’t bad, it’s within walking distance of a grocery store, and the price isn’t bad at all. Fairfield Inns are generally a great price per quality…. But not in Georgia.

I’ve stopped at several Fairfield Inns in GA: near Atlanta, near Savannah, and we’ve been disappointed. Every. Single. Time. All the margins on which the Fairfield in Santee is great are the same margins on which Georgia ones are poor. I’m sure that there is not just one reason. Maybe there is a bad regional manager or bad assistant to the regional manager. That’s not my primary hypothesis though.

Continue reading →

How to Keep Up With Economics

May 16, 2024December 10, 2025James Bailey3 Comments

… other than reading our blog, of course.

I was writing up something for my graduating seniors about how to keep learning economics after school, and realized I might as well share it with everyone. This may not be the best way to do things, it is simply what I do, and I think it works reasonably well.

Blogs by Economists: There are many good ones, but besides ours Marginal Revolution is the only one where I aim to read every post

Economic News: WSJ or Bloomberg

Podcasts on the Economy: NPR’s The Indicator (short, makes abstract concepts concrete), Bloomberg’s Odd Lots (deeper dives on subjects that move financial markets)

Podcasts by Economists: Conversations with Tyler and Econtalk (note that both often cover topics well outside of economics). Macro Musings goes the other way and stays super focused on monetary policy.

Twitter/X: This is a double-edged sword, or perhaps even a ring of power that grants the wearer great abilities even as it corrupts them. The fastest way to get informed or misinformed and angry, depending on who you follow and how you process information. Following the people I do gives you a fighting chance, but even this no guarantee; even assuming you totally trust my judgement, sometimes I follow people because they are a great source on one issue, even though I think they are wrong on lots of other things. Still, by revealed preference, I spend more time reading here than other single source.

Finance/Investing: Making this its own category because it isn’t exactly economics. Matt Levine has a column that somehow makes finance consistently interesting and often funny; unlike the rest of Bloomberg, you can subscribe for free. He also now has a podcast. If you’d like to run money yourself some day, try Meb Faber’s podcast. If you’d like things that touch on finance and economics but with more of a grounding in real-world business, try the Invest Like the Best podcast or The Diff newsletter.

Economics Papers: You can get a weekly e-mail of the new papers in each field you like from NBER. But most econ papers these days are tough to read even for someone with an undergrad econ degree (often even for PhDs). The big exception is the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which puts in a big effort to make its papers actually readable.

Books: This would have to be its own post, as there are too many specific ones to recommend, and I don’t know that I have any general principle of how to choose.

This is a lot and it would be crazy to just read all the same things I do, but I hope you will look into the things you haven’t heard of, and perhaps find one or two you think are worth sticking with. Also happy to hear your suggestions of what I’m missing.

The Largest Health Systems in the US

May 2, 2024James BaileyLeave a comment

Health spending keeps rising, and hospitals keep consolidating, so the largest health systems in the US keep growing bigger. But getting exact data on how big is surprisingly difficult. So I appreciate that someone else did the work, in this case Blake Madden of Hospitalogy. Here are his top 10:

See his post for the full list of the largest 113 health systems, and details and caveats on the methodology. I have found that Hospitalogy generally has good coverage of the business of health care, and that following Blake on Twitter is a good way to keep up with it.

Updated List of Top Blogs for 2023

December 30, 2023December 25, 2023Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Back in August I listed the most-read posts of 2023. Here I will finish out the year by listing a few more highlights. This has been another big year for our website.

From Jeremy in October: Kids Are Much Less Likely to Be Killed by Cars Than in the Past This is good news (goods new is underreported). Jeremy also dives into the trade off between safety and letting kids roam free.

This connects with Jeremy’s post from March: The Leading Causes of Death Among Elementary-Age Children Happy New Year, everyone. We are glad you made it through childhood to share this next year with us. Tyler says he is “thankful for being able to watch and to try to understand the procession of history before us”. Agreed.

Thanksgiving 2023 is the Second Cheapest Ever (Relative to Earnings) Jeremy didn’t get a ton of blog traffic from this (good news is under clicked), but the White House Press Secretary picked it up. Jeremy also contributed a helpful table to the raging debate over How the Economy is Doing vs. How People Think the Economy is Doing.

Zachary has been giving out good advice for economics teachers, backed up by his data. All professors can read: 5 Easy Steps to Improve Your Course Evals. Econ professors check: Update on Game Theory Teaching. It’s about how to teach Game Theory, but I also see it as a testament to how much a course can improve if you allow a teacher to iterate multiple times at the same school. Administrators, take note.

What We Are Learning about Paper Books is jointly my reflection on AI generative books and a review of Tyler Cowen’s new book GOAT. I’m a techno-optimist, but I think there is value in an old-fashioned paper book, mostly from a behavioral or neuro perspective.

Warren Buffett’s Secret Sauce: Investing the Insurance “Float”

Where Can You Still Buy an Affordable Home in the US?

Simply known to some as the Horpedahl Zone
— Joy Buchanan (@aboutJoy) January 10, 2023

James on investing. Historical Price to Earnings Ratios By Industry

Two from Mike: Stop and Frisk was an Unmitigated Disaster and On minimum wages and the devil’s discount

What if you could get your phone or tablet to read Kindle or other text aloud to you? Search engine traffic has landed tens of thousands of visitors on this practical post by Scott: How to Read Aloud Kindle and Other Text on iPhone, iPad, and Android

3 Great Habits from 3 Great Economists

December 29, 2023December 29, 2023Zachary BartschLeave a comment

Jumping right in:

Acknowledge Biases

Have you ever tried to do something objectively. It’s impossible. We might try, but how do we know when we’ve failed to compensate for a bias or when we’ve over compensated. Russ Roberts taught me 1) all people have biases, 2) all analysis is by people, & 3) analysis should be interpreted conditional on the bias – not discarded because of it.

The only people who don’t have biases are persons without values – which is no one. We all have apriori beliefs that color the way that we understand the world. Recognizing that is the first step. The second step is to evaluate your own possible biases or the bias of someone’s work. They may have blind spots or points of overemphasis. And that’s OK. One of the best ways to detect and correct these is to expose your ideas and work to a variety of people. It’s great to talk to new people and to have friends who are different from you. They help you see what you can’t.

Finally, because biases are something that everyone has, they are not a good cause to dismiss a claim or evidence. Unless you’re engaged in political combat, your role is usually not to defeat an opponent. Rather, we like to believe true things about the world. Let’s get truer beliefs by peering through the veil of bias to see what’s on the other side. For example, everyone who’s ever read Robert Higgs can tell that he’s biased. He wants the government to do much less and he’s proud of it. That doesn’t mesh well with many readers. But it’d be intellectually lazy to dismiss Higgs’ claims on these grounds. Higgs’ math and statistics work no differently than his ideological opponents. It’s important for us to filter which claims are a reflection of an author’s values, and the claims that are a reflection of the author’s work. If we focus on the latter, then you’ll learn more true things.

Know Multiple Models

In economics, we love our models. A model is just a fancy word which means ‘argument’. That’s what a mathematical model is. It’s just an argument that asserts which variables matter and how. Models help us to make sense of the world. However, different models are applicable in different contexts. The reason that we have multiple models rather than just one big one is because they act as short-cuts when we encounter different circumstances. Understanding the world with these models requires recognizing context clues so that you apply the correct model.

Models often conflict with one another or imply different things for their variables. This helps us to 1) understand the world more clearly, and 2) helps us to discriminate between which model is applicable to the circumstances. David Andolfatto likes to be clear about his models and wants other people to do the same. It helps different people cut past the baggage that they bring to the table and communicate more effectively.

For example, power dynamics are a real thing and matter a lot in personal relationships. I definitely have some power over my children, my spouse, and my students. They are different kinds of power with different means and bounds, but it’s pretty clear that I have some power and that we’re not equal in deed. Another model is the competitive market model that is governed by property rights and consensual transactions. If I try to exert some power in this latter circumstance, then I may end up not trading with anyone and forgoing gains from trade. It’s not that the two models are at odds. It’s that they are theories for different circumstances. It’s our job to discriminate between the circumstances and between the models. Doing so helps us to understand both the world one another better.

Continue reading →

The Open Internet Is Dead; Long Live The Open Internet

December 28, 2023James Bailey1 Comment

Information on the internet was born free, but now lives everywhere in walled gardens. Blogging sometimes feels like a throwback to an earlier era. So many newer platforms have eclipsed blogs in popularity, almost all of which are harder to search and discover. Facebook was walled off from the beginning, Twitter is becoming more so. Podcasts and video tend to be open in theory, but hard to search as most lack transcripts. Longer-form writing is increasingly hidden behind paywalls on news sites and Substack. People have complained for years that Google search is getting worse; there are many reasons for this, like a complacent company culture and the cat-and-mouse game with SEO companies, but one is this rising tide of content that is harder to search and link.

To me part of the value of blogging is precisely that it remains open in an increasingly closed world. Its influence relative to the rest of the internet has waned since its heydey in ~2009, but most of this is due to how the rest of the internet has grown explosively at the expense of the real world; in absolute terms the influence of blogging remains high, and perhaps rising.

The closing internet of late 2023 will not last forever. Like so much else, AI is transforming it, for better and worse. AI is making it cheap and easy to produce transcripts of podcasts and videos, making them more searchable. Because AI needs large amounts of text to train models, text becomes more valuable. Open blogs become more influential because they become part of the training data for AI; because of what we have written here, AI will think and sound a little bit more like us. I think this is great, but others have the opposite reaction. The New York Times is suing to exclude their data from training AIs, and to delete any models trained with it. Twitter is becoming more closed partly in an attempt to limit scraping by AIs.

So AI leads to human material being easier for search engines to index, and some harder; it also means there will be a flood of AI-produced material, mostly low-quality, clogging up search results. The perpetual challenge of search engines putting relevant, high-quality results first will become much harder, a challenge which AI will of course be set to solve. Search engines already have surprisingly big problems with not indexing writing at all; searching for a post on my old blog with exact quotes and not finding it made me realize Google was missing some posts there, and Bing and DuckDuckGo were missing all of them. While we’re waiting for AI to solve and/or worsen this problem, Gwern has a great page of tips on searching for hard-to-find documents and information, both the kind that is buried deep down in Google and the kind that is not there at all.

Secondhand for AdamSmithWorks

August 5, 2023August 3, 2023Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Last month, I blogged about the book Secondhand. This week, I wrote a piece about it for AdamSmithWorks: THE INVISIBLE THREADS: ADAM SMITH AND THE GLOBAL SECOND-HAND CLOTHING TRADE

The author of Secondhand, Adam Minter, simultaneously appreciates the value created by large “impersonal” markets and also paints colorful pictures of the individual people involved. He has respect for individuals in the system who, using local knowledge, extract all the value out of what rich people consider to be trash. Minter sits in the seat of Adam Smith.

But it is not the popular movement, but the travelling of the minds of men who sit in the seat of Adam Smith that is really serious and worthy of attention.
Lord Acton, Letter of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone

Another piece about clothes from AdamSmithWorks is: “WHO ARE YOU WEARING?” FASHION PRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF ADAM SMITH. This article does “the pin factory” for clothes. The global supply chain is incredible, just looking at manufacturing alone. Minter takes it further by following goods all the way from their first consumer to their very last user.

There is some good news about how the world is getting better as the average person gets richer, but trash does also cause problems as we consume more stuff. Does Minter write about the environmental concerns of the “fast fashion” camp? He has a different idea than what others have proposed like taxing by volume or banning some commercial activity. In terms of practical advice, Minter advocates for labeling consumer goods by how long they are expected to last. It’s tragic when someone spends $20 on a good that will wear out after 1 year when they should have spent $30 on a good that will last 10 years. There are some “dollar bills on the ground” here because consumers don’t accurately assessing quality at the time of purchasing. The power of brands to signal quality helps with this problem, but if you don’t want washing machines piling up in landfills then you might want stores to put a greater emphasis on durability at the point of sale. We do something like that with nutrition labels, so it is possible.