John Voorheis
@john_voorheis
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Principal Economist, Center for Economic Studies at @uscensusbureau . I study how people, places, businesses and the environment interact. Opinions my own.
Michigan
Joined August 2015
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Rent control is fine, but if we really want to improve the lives of landlords, we need to help them transition from dependency on non-labor income and into productive work.
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According to predictions from my "cubic model" fitted on yesterday's data, today's temperature is approaching absolute zero and we are all dead, mercifully.
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"my property taxes went up (because I own an asset that has increased in value)" has to be the least sympathetic complaint about cost of living you can come up with.
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This has all the hits: suburban guy so carpilled he cant tell the difference between the density of cars and the density of people, being fake mad about regressive taxes, immediately abandoning libertarian principles as soon as a Democrat does anything, the whole deal. No notes.
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Because this is blowing up, let me ruin the joke by explaining it: people get really mad when you suggest putting strings on non-labor income received by the rich, but are fine with messing with the lives of the poor.
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I will never understand how, time and again, Apple will intentionally cripple a key part of their products' functionality, and their users, instead of demanding better products, respond by socially ostracizing anyone whose presence would highlight the crippled features.
“A green message — anyone with an Android — throws off the entire chat, because now the whole thing has to be SMS,” said Annelise Hillman, the 24-year-old [boss] of a men’s grooming business. “So the social pressure to get an iPhone is pretty insane.”
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86% of planned new US electricity generation is coming from zero carbon sources!
The Unemployment Rate is lower than its been since at least the late 1960s!
Carbon emissions from electricity are 40% lower than 2007!
PM2.5 is 40% lower than it was in 1998!
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@jbouie
The long guns "working class" militants parade around with are like a years worth of car payments, but you never see "why is are working class men wasting their money on guns instead of saving for retirement" a la millennials and avocado toast
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It turns out all of these things are measured on the ACS, so we can actually answer this instead on randomly bullshitting.
The median household that meets these criteria in 2021 nationwide had an income of $125,000.
I don’t see why you’d need to make $400k for any of this except sending all the kids to four-year colleges but it’s never been the case that most Americans got a BA.
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The idea that taxing unrealized gains is simply too complex to administer is extremely stupid! Every county in the dang country administers a tax on unrealized gains of illiquid assets! If Marge in the county assessor office can do it, so can the IRS. You just don't want them to.
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So we're going to blow up the best labor market in decades, intentionally exacerbate intergenerational inequality and still manage to not actual reduce housing costs, just because some boomers had bad memories of the 1970s. Not a serious country.
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When you see a bunch of grown ass adults fighting with 17 year olds, remember that basically all of the adults were lead poisoned as children and none of the 17 year olds were.
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Boomers having a bunch of kids and then just refusing to do even the bare minimum required to make sure those kids can have a reasonable life if it requires literally any sacrifice is on brand
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People wanting 2019 prices and 2024 incomes is just another instance of people having a temper tantrum about the linear progression of time. I also wish I was 25 again, but it feels a bit unseemly to whine about something that's impossible, you know?
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If only there were some sort of, I don't know, theory, that, and I'm just spitballing here, might allow us to take a critical look at why ostensibly colorblind policies might lead to racial disparities. That's crazy talk though
Surgical precision? JD suit: "SB 202’s limits on drop boxes...will cause a precipitous decline in drop box availability in the counties that are home to the largest number of Black voters...[it] limits Fulton to ~8 drop boxes, Gwinnett to ~six, and DeKalb and Cobb to ~five each."
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@fordm
@TVietor08
@EllenPompeo
I would read an alternate history short story about the exploits of Ellen Pompeo, who, because of a series of mistakes, is inadvertantly nominated and confirmed as secretary of state
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@JimPethokoukis
Yes, it is interesting to note that the top marginal tax rate was 70% the year Apple was founded. Seems like that worked out pretty well.
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This meme has gotten completely out of hand and is incredibly wrong and dumb! It is making me very angry! So angry I spent most of the morning mucking around in 1930/1940 Census microdata. Here's a thread on what the actual numbers are:
Great Depression vs Silent Depression 🚨🚨🚨
Comparing costs of homes, cars, rent and income between 1930 and 2023.
These numbers are incredible.
What went wrong?
🔊 … sound on
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Econ relentlessly selects for dweebs who've never made a mistake in their lives and are terrified of doing so, which is a source of all of our dysfunction, from inadequate reckoning with race and Inequality to a broken publication process weighed down by fussy perfectionists
Been thinking a lot recently about how many Economists have never had to worry about money, or work a low-wage job, and how this limits our ability to be good social scientists
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@JosephPolitano
Thousands of people toiling away at BEA, BLS and Census to provide timely and accurate information look down in sorrow when they realize they could have just asked some random girl's friends about eggs
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A "men are garbage" identification strategy is pretty neat to see in the wild
Just published in
@JPubEcon
:
"How does parental divorce affect children’s long-term outcomes?"
By
@WFrimmel
(
@jku_econ
),
@HallaMartin
(
@WU_econ
),
@EbmerWinter
(
@IHS_Vienna
)
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So the way you'd want to make sure that economic indicators represent the experiences of people on the streets is you'd ask maybe like 60k people about their jobs every month.
There is a disconnect on economic indicators and the economic realities of those in the streets.
The state of the Union matters, but the state of the streets matters more.
#SOTU2024
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I am once again imploring any economist who is publicly very worried about inflation to first sit down and write down the formal normative reason why inflation is bad, taking into account current distributions of income, wealth and consumption.
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Because I am old and boring, the Reddit and Youtube algorithms have been sending me a lot of personal finance content. And this type of story -- almost always a guy who gets into almost intractable debt to get an oversized ugly truck -- keeps showing up again and again
The way some young dudes destroy their lives to buy toy trucks is truly heartbreaking.
In an update we find out the dude is paying $1,966 for 72 months (at 14%) for this $95 THOUSAND truck.
Would have been better off getting hooked on sports betting!
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@tomgara
@daveweigel
Similar thing with cars, you still see "prius driver" as an epithet, which hasn't been the virtue signaling choice in a decade. Guess it's hard to keep up when you're in an epistemically closed bubble
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Has Larry Summers apologized for getting his infamously weaselly prediction about growth/inflation wrong, despite his 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 assignment? Has anyone asked him why he got it so wrong?
The US economy grew at the fastest rate since the Reagan administration in 2021, with a substantial uptick in the final quarter
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Journalists deciding that they needed to come up with a new, secret definition of inflation once the actual consensus measurement of inflation started declining should be a deep occupational shame that haunts everyone who's ever darkened the halls of a j-school, forever
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In summation:
1) let feral zoomers go wild with unchecked economics conspiracy theories on tiktok (which sometimes leak out to Twitter/IG)
2) wonder why the vibes are wrong
Perfect example of the "vibes" theory. Post that fries cost $7 and gets 6k likes. Admits this is the marked up delivery price "for the meme". Deal on the same app is $1.14. Admits he has no idea the issue in the great depression was deflation not inflation.
@whstancil
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I don't know who needs to hear this but the variance of income within zip codes is not zero
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Racist guy, racistly: (says a racist joke)
GMU economist: I see no problem with this.
Racist guy, racistly: (says a racist joke)
Actual economist: that's fucked up man
GMU economist: hey man, if you act all offended, think of all the racist jokes you won't hear
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A not insubstantial number of people conceive of liberty as primarily consisting of the unfettered ability to impose costs on others. This is not a conception that deserves to be treated with anything other than contempt.
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My spiciest take (which I will probably delete) is that the online left's criticism of mayor Pete as an untrustworthy careerist willing to sacrifice any of his stated commitments for professional advancement was 100% projection
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Because this periodically comes up, I'll take advantage of the fact that we have new CPS-ASEC for 2023 data to update some graphs on homeownership (and grind an axe that bugs me about the discourse). The TLDR: homeownership rates for prime aged adults really have declined a lot.
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The benefit of taking core classes in Macroeconomics is not really the theory per se (esp at the PhD level), it's just that it general involves getting a rudimentary understanding about basic facts about the economy and how these have changed over time.
GDP growth last year was 2.5%. That's a nice number! But also almost exactly the long-term average. The idea that it's the "best economy in decades" is straight-up misinformation.
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My advice for anyone, really:
Regardless of what the recipe says, you should definitely add at least one more clove of garlic
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Daily reminder that the 30 year mortgage a) is just government backed rent control for middle class people and b) means that there's a huge wedge between housing costs as actually experienced by real people (which decline in real terms) and CPI housing inflation
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This is my thing now, so let's sing from the hymnal again: the official homeownership rate is a *household* level measure from the Housing and Vacancy Survey, NOT a person based measure. The trends in these two ways of measuring homeownership have diverged sharply since the 1970s
Interesting that the homeownership rate is higher than it was five or ten years ago, and higher than it was when I was a kid or than when the boomers were kids.
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My contribution to the is 150k middle class discourse:
In the 2019 ACS, the median white, non-hispanic head of a 4 person household aged 45-55 living in a metropolitan area has a household income of 149,000.
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Alternately: the reason why the median house only cost 2.5x median income in 1950 is because people were poor and the median house was a piece of shit. That the median house now costs more is a reflection of affluence, not a sign of diminished fortunes
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I'll have some new results to share on this soon, but at least part of this story may be related to decreasing inequality in exposure to fine particulate matter, especially after the Clean Air Act of 1990.
A bit of good news: The white-black life expectancy gap in America has shrunk significantly, and continues to trend downward.
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@Noahpinion
A lot of this depends on technical details, per usual. If you average across all individuals (not just householders), Millennials do look meaningfully disadvantaged relative to Boomers -- 15 pp lower homeownership at age 30.
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Obviously geography matters, so if we restrict to any metro area, its more like $137. In the NYC metro its 181k, in DC its 192k.
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@MattBruenig
@PatrickRuffini
No one is stopping conservatives from working hard, getting phds and academic jobs and then indoctrinating students, but no one wants to work anymore smh
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Instead of plagiarizing text from a paper you've actually read, real OGs know you just cite a bunch of marginally relevant papers without reading them with a broad description that 100% does not actually reflect the arguments in the papers but gets the referees off your back
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Half-baked theory: the dramatic improvement in balance sheets at the bottom of the income distribution over 2020-2021 has semi-permanently reduced the primary value of restaurant sector jobs (cash income flows that avoid debt collection, taxes, garnishments)
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@curtmilam
@jbouie
The south was a moral abomination and Sherman's only fault is that he did not burn down more of it.
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@jdcmedlock
To preserve the character of I-395, we need to strictly limit how many cars can get on the freeway, conveniently exactly after I have merged on
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@SHamiltonian
@AlanMCole
To be fair, a herd immunity strategy at least would have the advantage of being a cohorent set of goals rather than the random flailing about of a hollowed out government fully staffed by Dunning Kruger cases
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#EconTwitter
#NBERSI
I’m looking forward to the
@nberpubs
environmental and energy economics summer institute meeting today and tomorrow! I’ll be presenting new
@uscensusbureau
and
@en_equality_lab
research with
@JonathanColmer
at 2:30 ET on Tuesday! A short 🧵⬇️
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I guess it went up on the website last week, but my paper with Janet Currie and Reed Walker on the causes of the decline in black-white pollution disparities is now forthcoming at AER, which is pretty neat!
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I'm not a good enough macroeconomist to really figure this out, but it does seem like fear of inflation is entirely driven by a sort of ambient fear of the 1970s that's divorced from any structural changes that have happened since (higher inequality, less worker power, etc)
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@mattyglesias
It is in fact almost as though these white males believe they have some sort of white male privilege, curious
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One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the income distribution in Mississippi *for Whites* pretty closely mirrors the overall national income distribution.
Mississippi has the highest poverty rate of any state, the lowest median income of any state and comes in third when it comes to state reliance on federal money.
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But IDK, seems unlikely that only the top 6% of households that own a 3+ bedroom house, have at least 2 cars and 2-3 kids go on vacations and send their kids to college
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Meritocracy and the implied equality of opportunity involved is a much more radical prospect than simple redistribution or reparations for past harms, which is how you can tell people don't actually believe in it
“Returning” my brother in Jesus what on earth are you talking about
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@jonfavs
Assuming expanded federal employee "accountability" legislation passes, there's no reason to not fire ever single ICE employee on Jan 21, 2021.
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Anyway, the fearmongering journalists are right and the boomer chart guys are wrong: things really do suck
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In fact, you have to go up to around the 94th percentile (ranked within this group) to get to $400k
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If I were the fed I would simply not meet at random ass 6 week intervals
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My dumb joke tweet did numbers over night I guess. I don't have a SoundCloud, but I guess maybe read my paper about racial disparities in pollution exposure:
🚨🚨🚨New Working Paper Alert🚨🚨🚨
"What Caused Racial Disparities in Particulate Exposure to Fall? New Evidence from the Clean Air Act and Satellite-Based Measures of Air Quality", joint with Janet Currie and
@reed_walker
()
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I am extremely optimistic, cards on the table, that we will manage to avoid the worst potential futures of climate change, and that the transition away from fossil fuels will leave us better off, not worse off
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Turns out having fuck ups, and low level dirtbags, general mischief makers around is important, and like any ecosystem that turns into a monoculture getting rid of them ultimately spells doom
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David Autor coming out strongly against 94 page working papers -- "It's like being bludgeoned to death with a Nerf bat". Write shorter papers, fellow econs!
#ASSA2018
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That's easier in R
In 5 words or less, start a fight without politics
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FWIW, equality of opportunity is more radical than equality of outcomes. Equality of outcomes merely requires progressive taxes and transfers, while equality of opportunity would require, e.g. taking Elon Musk's children and randomly assigning them to some other parents.
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Substantially all economists are gainfully employed after 5/6 years of grad school, philosphers take 9 years and end up unemployed. There's a lot of other stuff people tell themselves, but that's the central fact
What, exactly, explains this attitude to economics in philosophy? Sure, a lot of it is bad. But so is a lot of most sciences.
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The average guy who a) has a college degree, b) is married, c) lives in the suburbs, d) works in the private sector and e) owns a house between 400-500k had a household income of 199k in 2022, about the 81st percentile of the national income distribution.
You will go to the public flagship university
You will live in the $400k home in the good school district
You will eat the Trader Joe’s and the occasional fast casual
You will marry a beautiful mid
You will work the white-collar wagie job
You will own a goldendoodle
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There are quite a lot of structural reasons for why Economics has not really done the best work on inequality, poverty and low wage work, to be sure. But I think an underrated one is that economists are all rule-following nerds who mostly had good luck.
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Normalize hating your job, jobs suck, requiring people to put in the emotional labor of being passionate about supply labor is violence etc
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This is, FWIW, the left wing mirror universe version of the current administration's deregulatory push, but instead of assuming benefits don't exist, assumes costs don't exist.
Neoliberalism rots people's brains into thinking climate policy means sacrificing something. If we do it right climate policy will mean most everyone gets luxurious public goods & a better quality of life as billionaires become millionaires and we shutter the fossil fuel industry
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Guy who believes in the infinite power of dynamic adaptation, unless you make people pay a couple bucks to go on a bridge
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Meritocracy and equality of opportunity are both in fact radical notions, that, if we took seriously, would require drastically curtailing parents' influence on their children; but no one actually takes them seriously so 🤷♂️
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Roses are red
Violets are blue
To avoid catastrophe
We must tax CO2
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Econ/policy/etc folks who have become increasingly worried about targeting aid are of course free to lobby for large investments in data infrastructure, changes to statutes governing data privacy and sharing, and increased FTE at statistical and regulatory agencies
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FWIW, an easy way to thread the current needle is to put work requirements on the tax provisions of the reconciliation bill. Want a 38% capital gains rate instead of 100%? Better make sure you register your hours with a rickety system that's only available on Saturday at 4am.
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Something I was talking about last night with some Census folks (a bunch of us are in person at AAPOR) -- to a first approximation, no one who gets a PhD from a top 10 place these days has ever made a serious fuckup, and I think that's a terrible thing for our profession
“since 1985 almost 70% of the leadership of the AEA have been doctoral graduates of Harvard, MIT, Chicago, or Stanford a staggering overrepresentation, given that around 150 American universities grant doctorates in economics.”
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I am obligated to note that Gen X got the most lead exposure as well
“Generation X has now become the most conservative generation, surpassing the Boomers in their rightward tilt.”
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I feel like if they're going to make Jack Ryan a PhD economist, they need to have a scene in season 2 where he runs into his PhD advisor who guilt trips him for not getting his job market paper published.
New trailer for Jon Krasinski in Amazon’s ‘Jack Ryan’ series. Thoughts?
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Just to pull one slide out from a recent presentation by my colleague Brad Foster: emerging evidence seems to be converging on a story where the "decline in mobility" literature based on the CPS might have been a mirage, driven by survey measurement error
Well, this is wild. CPS data (a survey going back to 1940s), used by many social scientists, is getting interstate migration, non-market income, retirement income incredibly wrong compared to other surveys, for difficult to correct non-response reasons. I had no idea.
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@mattyglesias
The median senator is 63 & was born in the early 50s, when average pre-school child blood lead levels were an order of magnitude higher than they should be under current standards.
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@jdcmedlock
Remains impressive (but not surprising) that we went from "CRT and BLM are an assault on the American dream of color blind meritocracy that distracts from the real racism of personal prejudice" to just "white people are superior and non-white people are inferior" in like a year
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Every pro-natalist policy that doesn't specify a path to destroy the housing wealth of people above childbearing age so that young couples can afford to live in housing consistent with family growth is tinkering around the edges
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I feel like a large part of this is issue is a demographic of people unused to the sludge of paperwork we routinely put poor people through rebelling against this. We're merely treating landlords like SNAP recipients, and they do not like it.
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Just the biggest self-own here is that the business owner in this article now has to work a crappy job and it is severely impacting her mental health, but instead of introspection about her role in creating said crappy jobs, it's easier to blame UI.
I see that we're still continuing to hear from business owners blaming government for their inability to hire people when they're only offering part-time jobs without health insurance.
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@arpitrage
@maiamindel
There's still a bunch of descendents of Hugh Capet rolling around Europe who periodically make a half hearted argument that they are the rightful king of france
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One way around this would be to graph homeownership rates for adults in prime age range (25-64). And when you do this (and average over everyone not just householders) things look even more stark, with close to a 15 point drop in homeownership since the 1970s:
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Your wages are determined by current and past technology you didn't invent, tax policies you didn't pass and capital you didn't buy.
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File under "price changes are an injustice done to me by nefarious forces, income changes are the just deserts of my labor"
I don't want to party like it's 1999. I want to go grocery shopping like it's 1999.
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Guess we get to see what happens, narrative wise, when the Midwest but neither coast gets affected by bad air quality from wildfire smoke
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Can I just register my grumpiness at this genre of analysis? Assigning all emissions to primary extraction absolves all downstream uses and flattens the hard but solvable issues of decarbonization in a way guaranteed to demobilize
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Important context for the periodic "the family in Home Alone was middle class and this implies a large reduction in economic fortunes since 1990"
Wild statistic in this State Department release about passport processing times returning to pre-pandemic levels: “In 1990, only five percent of Americans had a passport. Today, that number is 48%”
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