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Top EWED Posts of 2025

August 9, 2025August 9, 2025Joy Buchanan1 Comment

These are notable posts from 2025, roughly presented in descending order, starting with the post that got the most views.

Is there a competitive threat to the NBA? Mike Makowsky wrote, “… let’s put it this way. Why *wouldn’t* the Saudi Arabian PIF invest $5 billion in creating a rival basketball league?”

2. Perspective: This Stock Correction Fear, Too, Will Pass In March, Scott Buchanan presented “an optimistic take on the current stock market pullback.” Indeed, the market came back, despite the tariff doomerism of 2025 Spring.

3. The Middle/Working Class Has Not Been “Hollowed Out” Jeremy Horpedahl, corrector of common myths, corrects a common myth.

4. Montana’s New Property Tax System Jeremy explains “interesting changes to residential property taxes in Montana.”

5. How Scott Bessent Outfoxed Peter Navarro to Get the 90 Day Tariff Pause from Scott: “As Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent would be particularly sensitized to the interest rate issue…”

6. Spending on Necessities Has Declined Dramatically in the United States Jeremy reminding us that Americans are richer today.

7. Was the US at Our Richest in the 1890s? If you don’t believe Jeremy, consider one of the American Girl Doll historical books I was just reading to my kid. In our book, a little girl sends a letter to Samantha (the 1904 doll) reporting that both of her parents just died from the flu.

8. The Wild Market of July 8th, 2025 James Bailey on the topic that we are all trying to keep up with this year: “Yesterday the S&P 500 shot up 9% on the news that most of Trump’s new tariffs were paused.”

Special mention to Joey Politano who has been trying to follow the news all year and might go insane according to his Twitter/X.

9. No Tech Workers or No Tech Jobs? I (Joy) wish I had more time to write about the market for tech jobs this year. There is some indication that hiring is slowing. Some people still call it a correction from the Covid tech over-hiring spree. Other people take this as a sign that AI reduces the need for human programmers and otherwise “high-skill” humans, while some refute that claim.

10. Other “I, Pencils” It was fun for several dozen of us economists when everyone else in the world suddenly re-discovered the value of international exchange.

11. The Best Investments of the 1970s James considers “what were the best investments of the 1970’s?” Interesting to consider the performance of gold in retrospect considering stagflation.

12. Women Have Always Worked More Than Men: Hours of Work Since 1900 I feel seen.

13. Shocked 2025 is shocking, as Mike pointed out in February.

14. Trump’s Economic Policy Uncertainty Along those lines, Zachary Bartsch examines how people are shocked and confused.

15. Salty SALT in the OBBB Zachary explains. “Economically, the SALT makes it cheaper for individuals to live in high-tax jurisdictions. That’s distortionary.”

16. Illusions of Illusions of Reasoning I wrote, “evaluating AI reasoning is difficult…”

Reflections: We’ve been doing this for 5 years now, as of August 2025. From the analytics I can see, our posts have been the answer to a stranger’s Google query hundreds of thousands of times. Having been the beneficiary of so many other posts from strangers online, I’m happy about that.

Reminder: You can subscribe to our WordPress site to get posts sent to your email. The widget for putting your email in should be on the right side of your screen on a computer, or you can find it by scrolling to the bottom of the home page on a mobile device. WordPress will let you customize your preferences so that you get emails batched once a week if you prefer that to Every Day.

Based on my crude analytics from WordPress, “traffic” to our site from LLMs is low but increasing. It appears that readers occasionally click over from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai What we can’t see is if and when our writing is re-molded as part of an LLM answer without attribution. In one sense, writing online is more important than ever, to feed the beast and help get good quality answers to LLM users. On the other hand, old systems in place like upvotes and view counts that used to motivate people to write for free might crumble in the new world.

From me in 2024: “AI companies have money. Could we be headed toward a world where OpenAI has some paid writers on staff? Replenishing the commons is relatively cheap if done strategically, in relation to the money being raised for AI companies.”

If anyone knows Mark Zuckerberg, please tell him that I’ll write for a fraction of what he’s paying these new engineers. What if he gave out a writing fellowship on the understanding the person never publishes (else the other bots would scrape it) and just exclusively lets Llama train off of original work?

In our case, anyway, we enjoy writing and learn from the process, so we are looking forward to being here every day.

To find prior year “top post” lists, start with: Updated List of Top Posts for 2024

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.

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