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The US Housing Market Is Very Quickly Becoming Unaffordable
In a post from July 2021, I discussed housing affordability and “zoning taxes” — in other words, how land use restrictions such as zoning were driving up the cost of housing in some US cities. San...
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Food Inflation in the G7 and Russia
Food prices are up a lot in the past few years. I’ve written about this several times in the past few months. In the US, we’ve seen grocery prices go up 20% on average in just 3 years. That’s much...
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Alabama’s Homicide Rate is More than Double New York City
A lot of people think New York City is an especially high-crime city. Including some US Senators. Here’s senior Senator from Alabama: Hope @JoeBiden enjoyed going out for ice cream in NYC while the...
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Shrinkflation: Not Just for Cookies
Cookie monster is mad: Me hate shrinkflation! Me cookies are getting smaller. — Cookie Monster (@MeCookieMonster) March 4, 2024 But he’s not the only one. President Biden is mad too. By now, hopefully...
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How Long Does It Take Prices to Double?
Let me start by saying high rates of inflation, especially unexpected inflation, is bad. Still, it is useful to have some historical context. We’ve experienced the highest inflation rates in a...
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Median MSA Incomes: 1949 vs 2022
Lately on Twitter this chart has been going around: The chart comes from Bloomberg journalist Justin Fox, who always puts together interesting economic data. You can read his interpretation of the...
View Article“The Pope and the Price of Fish”
Christians across the world are observing the season of Lent right now, concluding this week. This important period of religious observance involves personal sacrifice of some sort, and for Western...
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Social Media, Mental Health, and Young People
What’s the connection between social media use and mental health, especially among young people? You’ve probably heard a lot about this recently, in the media, by politicians, and among friends...
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Grocery Inflation is Under Control, Fast Food Prices Aren’t
Thankfully for US consumers, grocery prices have leveled off. They haven’t fallen, of course, which will still lead to viral complaints about egg prices, etc. But over the past 4 years, wages have...
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Wages Have Increased Faster Than Prices Since 2019 (Unless You are Rich)
While there are many factors to consider, ultimately whether living standards are rising is a race between prices and income. What does that race look like if we start the clock in December 2019, just...
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Counting Jobs (Revisited)
In January 2023 I had a post looking at the different ways that the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures employment. Those who follow the data closely probably know about the difference between the...
View ArticleHow Much Inflation Do Americans Want?
If we have learned anything in the past 2 years, it’s that people don’t like inflation. Well, you probably already knew that. But I guess we learned that they really, really don’t like inflation....
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What’s Killing Girls Ages 10-14?
I’m in the process of writing a review of Jon Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. I wrote some preliminary thoughts a few weeks ago, but I’m diving a lot deeper now, so watch for that review soon....
View ArticleWhere’s the Deflation?
Inflation continues to remain stubbornly high in the US. While Core CPI is down to 3.6%, the lowest it has been in 3 years, this is still well above the Fed’s 2% target (the Fed’s preferred Core PCE...
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Income Growth Since 1966 in the US
Has the US tax and transfer system reached an egalitarian ideal? That’s one reading of this new working paper “How Progressive is the U.S. Tax System?” by Coleman and Weisbach. After accounting for...
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Grocery Price Nostalgia: 1980 Edition
Many people have nostalgia for nominal prices of the past. I’ve written about this topic in various contexts before, but the primary error in doing this is that you must also look at nominal wages...
View Article2023 Jobs Data
While many data watchers eagerly anticipate the monthly jobs report coming out this Friday, today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released another set of jobs data, and arguably a much better and more...
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Was 2022 The “Deadliest Year on Record” For Children in Arkansas?
In my Inbox I read the following sentence, summarizing an article on child health in Arkansas: “The latest Annie E. Casey Foundation KIDS COUNT Data Book shows 2022 was the deadliest year on record...
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The Growth of Black Wealth and Income in the United States
African Americans have seen much adversity throughout US history, but also significant economic progress. One way to measure economic progress is by looking at wealth. There is a fantastic paper by...
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Young Americans Continue to Build Wealth, Across the Distribution
First, here is an updated chart on average wealth by generation, which gives us the first glimpse at 2024 data: I won’t go into too much detail explaining the chart here, as I have done that in more...
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