Jonathan T. Rothwell
@jtrothwell
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Principal Economist at @Gallup / @GallupNews | Nonresident Sr Fellow @BrookingsInst
Washington DC
Joined December 2010
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There's a terrific paper out today in AER on the effects of inter-racial contact.
Students at the U of Cape Town are randomly assigned roommates, leading to multiracial room assignments. How does this exposure affect attitudes, behavior, & GPA?
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Overall, this is another boulder on top of the mountain of evidence supporting contact theory (see Allport 1954 & Pettigrew & Tropp 2006).
Segregation is poisonous; social & economic integration leads to trust & cooperation, corrects & discards prejudice.
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There is stunningly well-conducted empirical analysis out in AER today on the effects of vapid, low-quality entertainment & biased news on cognitive ability, civic engagement, & support for populists politicians. The conclusion is that bad media harms people & politics.
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Somewhat goods news as people increase their social distancing: The growth in new U.S. COVID-19 cases has fallen from 10 new cases for every case 7-days earlier to 3.5. The slow-down in new cases has also coincided with higher testing rates.
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To my shock & chagrin, my work on Black inventors has been used to discredit an economist whom I have long admired, Lisa Cook, after her nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve. My view is that nothing about my work suggests flaws in her qualifications. The opposite is true.
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White students assigned to a Black roommate significantly 1) increased friendship & social interactions with Black students 2) expressed greater comfort dating Black students 3) showed greater cooperation in prisoner's dilemma game 4) showed less implicit bias
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Rather, the authors speculate, that Black students benefitted academically by exposure to a White roommate & social network through some psychological benefit (e.g. reduced stereotype threat).
There was no academic cost to White students (no sig effect on GPA or persistence)
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Black students assigned to White students generally had more social interactions & friendship with White students but the effect was insignificant. They also had significantly higher GPAs & were more likely to persist, but not b/c of roommate's academic performance.
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Let’s all agree that taxing PhD students to give break to richest 1% is a terrible idea. Huge % of tech founders have a PhD; 46% of US inventors have a PhD
Taxes for graduate students would rise astronomically in 2018 under house plan. Imagine being taxed on 80k while bringing home 30.
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I keep seeing analysis claiming to show that the U.S. economy is actually great, but Americans refuse to see it--or are too uninformed or unintelligent.
Let's consider the claims here from
@jburnmurdoch
"Americans are adamant that US economic circumstances are getting worse. They're wrong."
CC:
@FT
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"The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore"
anti-density zoning = bad idea
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While the COVID emergency officially ends today, one fact, in particular, gnaws away at me:
More young people died from excess deaths of despair-likely due to the policy & media response to COVID--than from the disease itself.
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Still wrapping my head around the implications of
@m_clem
's brilliant new paper, which shows massive policy-induced reduction in immigrant labor in ag sector had zero effect on wages of US workers but huge effect on mechanization. Substitutability with technology seems to be key.
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Very interesting experimental research out today on the value of Facebook & effects of deactivation.
*Most active users will deactivate for a month for $100.
*Subjective well-being improves slightly with deactivation
*People value FB less after deactivation
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As is widely known & discussed, U.S. male labor force participation rates have gradually fallen since 1960 (by ~0.14ppt per year) from 97% to 88.6%.
This has been called a "crisis" by Eberstadt and others & has been attributed to trade, technology, culture, & video games. . .
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How do US income inequality trends change if you look at lifetime earnings, rather than annual, and how do they differ by gender?
Terrific, perplexing analysis out today from
@fatihguvenen
@GregWKaplan
et al
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For the last year, I've delved deeply into research on parenting and adolescent mental health, drawing on my work and formal study--nearly 20 years ago--in clinical psychology, which I did before studying economics.
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Palo Alto govt refuses to increase supply of housing against advice of its city planner, pricing her out of city
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I'm a big fan of Autor, Hanson, & Dorn, but I conclude that their famous AER paper on trade has some serious flaws
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1) Median inflation-adjusted wages are in fact slightly down from before the pandemic and down quite a bit from the bailout period. This is a core economic indicator and it is not positive. Count this as a win for ordinary Americans against experts.
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I came across
@mattyglesias
claiming that Case & Deaton got it badly wrong on deaths of despair.
They did not. All of their findings remain true and relevant and important, after close scrutiny.
@ATabarrok
@Noahpinion
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I was skeptical after seeing a Fed paper claiming that there are no longer any wealth benefits for attending college (cited by Paul Tough in the NYT). I now see how they got their incorrect result. They assumed constant age-effects over time. I cut the data by age-group (rather
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Drawing on my new book, A Republic of Equals, my essay in the
@UpshotNYT
today explains what I believe are the real causes of income inequality and the potential for a more egalitarian society to emerge under political equality.
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Americans are correctly skeptical of claims that the macro-economy is delivering rising prosperity in the short term and worried about the consequences of mounting debt that fueled the recent surge in GDP and prices.
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The need for asymptomatic testing is the main reason why
@paulmromer
's plan for a massive scale up in testing is the most compelling approach I've come across of how to win the war, while minimizing self-inflicted damage.
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Stunning insight from Piketty, Saez, &
@gabriel_zucman
: Since 2000, the average US resident in bottom 90 of distribution experienced slight drop in income that you can actually buy things with; modest overall increase driven entirely by employer contributions to health/retirement
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Wow! Magyari's job market paper obliterates the anti-trade narrative. Firms exposed to CHN imports ++ US mfg jobs!
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Roland Fryer’s conversation with
@EconTalker
about his ambitious and brilliant policy & academic work to identify & provide truly enriching schools to every child was the most inspiring thing imaginable.
He did it. We just need to act on it.
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Very interesting data from this new report. I do, however, take issue with the analysis & interpretation of key points 1/
In 1st 22 months of the pandemic, shareholders at the 22 companies grew $1.5 trillion richer -- nearly TRIPLE their wealth increase in previous period.
Their gains were > 50x the pay gains to ALL 7 million frontline workers at those 22 companies, who earned extra $27 bn.
4/
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I liked this by
@Noahpinion
very much & agree with the broad point. It may be the biggest econ challenge US faces
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Our data show that 28% of the workforce--46 million people--have seen reduced hours, temporary, or permanent layoff as a result of COVID-19. No need to wait until the May 8th BLS report to understand the scale of what's happening & take action.
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@NateSilver538
This DOE agency conclusion from 2021 was “low confidence,” contradicted by other US agencies, and based on low-quality evidence since overturned by far more rigorous, scientific methods to answer the question. Read the scientific papers cited here:
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I'm reminded of Plato's ill-liberal criticism of much of the art of his day & his advocacy of censorship (which I do not endorse, but I would support access to publicly-funded film/tv ratings). Plato had a point: bad art makes us less intelligent & worse citizens.
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I have an article out in the
@UpshotNYT
today. It's about the local nature of U.S. inequality & challenges the idea that super-large metro areas are always better places to live
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Excellent journalism from
@joewalkerWSJ
on how healthcare has changed our economy. One striking fact: of the 500 largest publicly traded companies by value, 16% of value is classified in healthcare (up from 4% in 1984); that excludes almost every hospital and physician's office
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In sum, while the labor market looks pretty good in terms of the unemployment rate, labor force participation, and job vacancies, the high interest rates and price growth means that living standards are not increasing & many ppl are stuck in their homes.
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Today,
@andreperryedu
,
@lohplaces
, & I released a new
@BrookingsInst
study that investigates how residential & commercial property are valued in majority Black neighborhoods.
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US dynamism is slowly grinding to a halt from bottom-up regulations of occupations, labor market competition
The famously flexible U.S. labor market has quietly become much less so:
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My analysis of IRS data shows a higher percentage of Americans are receiving self-employment income than anytime since data reporting began in 1957.
I discuss this and the prevalence and quality of multiple jobs in today’s
@UpshotNYT
.
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More evidence that trade does not explain Trump support: exposed area voted more liberal from 2000 to 2010, not less
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The Fed SCF data were collected for 2021, when stocks and house prices had been inflated by excess govt spending (10% of GDP). What happened from early 2022 til now?
S&P up just 4%
Med home sale price up 6%
CPI/inflation up 8%
Another win for grumpy Americans over the experts.
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3) The FT tries a trick question on inflation, asking if the rate has gone up. It's gone down, of course, but the Y-Y rate of change is still well above the Fed's target of 2%, meaning we are still experiencing excess price growth and will continue to until the rate is 2% or less
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Finally, the idea that fluctuations in company valuation--but not revenue or profit--should be linked to pay is not right, as I see it. S&P 500 is down 10% year-to-date. Should workers get a 10% pay cut at these companies? Of course, not.
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Before blaming every bad economic & cultural outcome on globalization, please read this AER paper out today:
"[W]hile adjustment is costly and protracted, most workers still benefit from trade due to lower prices; only 5 percent of workers see a decline in lifetime earnings."
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With a clever experiment supported by
@knightfdn
to study trust in the media, my colleagues
@Gallup
solicited ratings of news articles by reviewers blind to the news source. I describe our findings in the
@UpshotNYT
today.
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A summary of my new analysis of Trump "A massive new study debunks a widespread theory for Donald Trump's success"
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After several years of research, I'm delighted to announce the publication of: "The Black innovators who elevated the United States: Reassessing the Golden Age of Invention" via
@BrookingsInst
, w
@andreperryedu
& Mike Andrews
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Excellent article in
@UpshotNYT
from
@sangerkatz
.
Further evidence that the 18% of GDP we pay on healthcare is largely waste, born of political dysfunction.
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A more realistic appraisal of median net worth shows that it *probably* has not returned to peaks established before the Great Recession for middle-aged Americans--and most young Americans still don't have any wealth.
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Today,
@andreperryedu
& I launch a new
@BrookingsMetro
-
@Gallup
report on the devaluation of homes in black neighborhoods. The report, metro map, & interactive (created by the talented
@afriedhoff
) are here: 1/
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@_Tlale_
Who would you say is playing the role of “White savior” in this? The UCT admin who created the roommate policy being studied? The economists who wondered what the effects would be on students, measured many outcomes, and reported them? The journal editors? The UCT students?
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The share of positive COVID-19 cases in the USA coming from the most at-risk age-group (those 65+) has fallen from 45% to 17% and risen in young adults, which explains why we see rising cases with (so far) falling deaths.
Young folks: Wear your masks!
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I'm pleased to announce a new academic publication out today from Gallup & World Bank social scientists on how societal restrictions related to COVID-19 were associated with economic distress & lower subjective wellbeing across the world.
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Data from the Imperial College London study on Omicron vs Delta show Omicron is 1/4 as severe than Delta--as measured by risk of hospitalization, so why did they report that it was just as severe?
A few comments on this:
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Trump's economic strategy: take money from tax payers to bribe firms to be less efficient
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@danielsunss
@_Tlale_
I didn’t know summarizing research could elevate one to such lofty status. Are you implicated for replying?
Alas, for the religious minded, the RCT “saves” treated White students more than Black students, so if anyone is doing the saving in this, it is Black students!
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A few points to consider.
1) Recent commentators ignore older data. US male lfp declined sharply during some of the countries most prosperous & innovate times (1920-1970)
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This thread became a post for the
@UpshotNYT
, where I discuss research on tv's effects on cognitive ability & civic behavior. In two words: quality matters.
There is stunningly well-conducted empirical analysis out in AER today on the effects of vapid, low-quality entertainment & biased news on cognitive ability, civic engagement, & support for populists politicians. The conclusion is that bad media harms people & politics.
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Today in the
@UpshotNYT
, I describe a massive global experiment on income inequality, involving 60 countries and 65K people. Designed by
@TheChoiceLab
& conducted by
@Gallup
, people were asked how they would transfer income under difference conditions.
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Important new research out today in AER Insights:
Expanding the size of the police force saves lives & Black lives disproportionately by reducing homicide. It also reduces the # of and arrests for serious crimes, but increases arrests for petty crimes.
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Of course, with different data from a broader source, conclusions about the level & timing of invention rates will differ from previous ones. This is how science works. There are many examples of star economists & scientists having their conclusions altered with new data.
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Edward Wolff has been going excellent work on wealth inequality for years. His recent NBER publication summarizes trends from 1962-2016 using the Survey of Consumer Finances, which has an IRS-based supplement to capture very wealthy households.
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When my friend
@IanHathaway
gave me a draft to his famous paper () on the long-run decline in entrepreneurship in the USA, I could scarcely believe it--it ran so contrary to the dominant macro-econ narrative of the time. It's a well established fact now
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3) Socio-economic status does not predict parenting practices or relationship quality, but four things do:
1) a strong spousal/co-parent relationship (most important)
2) conservative political attitudes
3) a happy/secure childhood for parents
4) pro-marriage attitudes
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The criticisms are petty political attacks by people who do not know her, have not read her CV, have not interviewed her or her collaborators, or former employers, but assume, with no evidence, that she has some far-left agenda for . . . monetary policy!
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super insightsful op-ed here by
@REalDHern
, with relevance to achievement gap research & intergenerational mobility
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For the second time this year, all DC Public School staff & student (N~46K) had to take a COVID test on same day, providing an excellent sample, unbiased by demand for testing or access.
There was a 94% reduction in COVID infection rates from Jan 5 (5.9%) to Feb 27 (0.4%).
7.2% of DCPS staff & 5.5% of students tested positive for COVID yesterday.
At school level, there was a small but significant relationship between student econ disadvantage & positivity rates (weighted by student pop), but no significant relationship with Black student shares.
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As the late and great Alan Krueger made clear, a large share of men who are out of the LF are experiencing poor health, physical pain, and are taking pain medication, and this seems to have increased.
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The quality of the parent-child relationship is extremely predictive of adolescent mental health, & the effect is enduring, fading out slowly at a rate of 2% per year. It is still highly significant 22 years later, and much more strongly related to mental health than parental
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For their business relief programs, Ireland required revenue losses of 25% or more. New Zealand's required 30% or more.
For some bizarre reason, our Congress decided to give grants to fully-operating businesses with no losses & then wonder why the $ ran out.
The law requires PPP borrowers to certify that “the uncertainty of current economic conditions makes necessary the loan request to support the ongoing operations of the eligible recipient.”
The words “harm” and “revenue” do not appear in the text.
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One interpretation is that economic development affords leisure (non-work time), & men increasingly purchase that leisure by temporarily leaving the labor market. It is unclear whether 97% LFP is optimal. Life is complex. Still, I think this explanation is only partly true.
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I have an essay out at
@BrookingsInst
today with Sonal Desai of
@FTI_US
. We've been collecting data on misinformation about
#COVID19
& running experiments to understand its causes & consequences.
Here's what we've learned:
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In sum, the long-term male LFP trends do not suggest that video games, trade w China, technology add much to the explanation. (As Krueger found, men out of work spend <7 hrs/week on video games).
Health, however, has always been important to LFP and remains so, including mental
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If mfg decline explains rise in non-marital births, then fracking boom should have increased marriage. It didn't!
@swinshi
@RichardvReeves
Male earnings, marriageable men, and nonmarital fertility: evidence from the fracking boom
@kearney_melissa
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The best research--based on decades of work--suggests parents should regulate and discipline their children and teens authoritatively, consistently, and with attentiveness, warmth, and affection. Few teens who receive this parenting have mental health problems
Oh yes we do.
Minimize screen time. Maximize exercise & in-person activities.
Minimize family instability. Maximize stable, married families.
Minimize catastrophizing. Maximize a hopeful, agentic worldview.
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One of my fav
@econtalk
episodes ever w/ historian
@christyfchapin
; she shows how US healthcare system evolved into such an inefficient mess
TWET is a fascinating look at the evolution of the American health care system and what might have been.
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Yes, life is becoming more prosperous for large portions of the earth's population.
http://t.co/wSTXJjaVuj
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New research out from our on-going
@FTI_US
-
@Gallup
study: More generous UI benefits do not deter people from going back to work--based on subjective responses
Great coverage from
@bencasselman
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In making this argument, I drew upon Lisa Cook's excellent & groundbreaking work that makes essentially the same point (innovation & growth are harmed by oppression) after painstakingly creating her own database. In subsequent publications, we continued to cite Lisa's work.
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My work with Mike Andrews &
@andreperryedu
uses data developed by Mike & his colleagues that links newly released Census records from 1870 to 1940 to patent records. This allowed us to identify many previously unknown Black patent holders.
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1) A bit weird that ADH critique a draft paper I sent ONLY to them in an effort to understand why I couldn't replicate their results
WSJ covers debate over trade paper: "On China trade shock, economists trade research barbs"
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Horrifying how quickly Trump has gone to war with the US constitution in realizing his nationalist vision
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Thank you
@MaryJoWebster
and colleagues at
@StarTribune
for this news article of the decade on inequality. Incredible research on zoning, applicable to every U.S. metro area. Should win Pulitzer.
“How Twin Cities housing rules keep the metro segregated”
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Unlike high-income workers, we found that most low-income workers are unable to work from home, but many are nonetheless staying home in accordance with public health guidelines and government orders. They deserve help---and more than a $1200 check. New article w/
@RichardvReeves
The upper middle class can work from home; the middle class, not so much. New from me &
@jtrothwell
with
@GallupNews
data
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*U.S. teens report spending 4.8 hours per day on popular social media apps.
*YouTube and Tiktok are the most popular
*entertainment and boredom relief are the most popular stated reasons
*social media use dominates time spent on homework, tv, video games, hobbies, & chores
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Enough of that. The criticisms of Lisa ignore all of her other research & qualifications: her dissertation on credit markets & a top econ program (UCB), overseen by leading experts on financial economics (Barry Eichengreen, David Romer), her publications in top journals like AER.
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New evidence that the top1% of income earners are no smarter than those at the 90th. I identified the same pattern in my book. Easy to understand when you realize many at the top get there via occupational/industry regulations. Inequality would be lower if income were based on IQ
Cognitive ability is correlated with income, but only up to a point. After the 90th percentile, the ability-income relationship plateaus – and in fact, the top 1% of earners score slightly *lower* on ability tests than the next rung down.
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Here's a fantastic article from
@mnolangray
at
@MarketUrbanism
on the differences between Japanese & US zoning regimes & what underlying social factors sustain their more liberal system
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A lot of people don’t understand how housing finance works. There are two ways to accumulate wealth: 1) the non-interest portion of each mortgage payment you make generates wealth even if home price doesn’t change 2) home price appreciation
"Young people can't accumulate wealth because houses are too expensive" is a fundamentally broken idea.
If houses were cheaper and young people bought them, they would only accumulate wealth if prices then rose so that future young people would be unable to buy them.
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Just out from
@KiraboJackson
, experimental evidence that giving middle-school teachers a) access to smart training (online materials in this case) & b) a platform to discuss & encourage adoption can be a super-efficient way to boost math test scores of students.
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Yes, many CEOs are rich, but elite professionals, not managers, stand out in the USA relative to OECD countries for high salaries & abundance in the top 1%
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Here's CPS data on work disability, showing that most prime aged men who are out for two years consecutively have a work disability. Similar results are available since 1997 showing poor health prevalence among those out of the labor force.
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In
@UpshotNYT
today, I show how the pandemic concentrated economic damage among the worst off in the USA and most countries around the world, while a smaller number of egalitarian democracies provided protection to those who needed it most.
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Revisiting one of my favorite topics in political economy, I had the opportunity to study new zoning data via
@TernerHousing
& wrote a short report "Land Use Politics,
Housing Costs, and Segregation in California Cities" . . .
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Here's a fun Angus Deaton quote: “Physicians are a giant rent-seeking conspiracy that’s taking money away from the rest of us, and yet everybody loves physicians. You can’t touch them.”
"Every American family basically pays an $8,000 ‘poll tax’ under the U.S. health system, top economists say"
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Yes, w/out competition, firms invest in maintaining market share, not lowering prices
@IanHathaway
This is a good
@DietzVollrath
post on the market concentration and innovation/growth debate that's been heating up
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As part of a project to study how socio-economic status is affecting COVID's disease burden, I created zipcode level data on cases and deaths and made the data and code public here:
It has raw data from over 5K zipcodes & imputations for 26K.
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2) What about median wealth? A naïve reading of the latest Fed Res data would suggest great news: big growth from 2019-2022, but there's more to the story.
. . .
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