Mission accomplished? Iraq is more of a liberal democratic state than it was before the US invasion

To better days ahead, hopefully

Still waiting on final data for some cities, but murder fell a lot in in 2025 in the 30 cities with the most murders in 2024. Down 19.2% in those cities, down 19.7% counting just the 24 cities with data through at least mid-December.

I count 10 cities in 2025 that are on track to have the fewest murders since at least 1970. Newark is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1956 (though only have data through Oct this year) and San Francisco is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1942.

Your Fridge Is Bigger and Cheaper Today, Thanks to Global Trade and Innovation www.cato.org/blog/fridge-...

A recent essay claims the poverty line for a family of four should be $140,000. I disagree: economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/11/26/t...

People have been saying "past immigration was good, but immigrants today aren't the same" for a very long time. For example, this is from Grover Cleveland's veto of a 1897 bill that would have imposed a literacy test on new immigrants: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/ve...

These were Trump's major campaign issues

The increase in life expectancy is not solely a function of reduced child mortality. Life expectancy at age 15 has also increased dramatically in the past 100-200 years.

I am now writing occasionally for Cato as an adjunct scholar. Here is my first blog post, on the misuse of negative externalities: www.cato.org/blog/not-eve...

A parking lot turns into 75 homes over shops in Sacramento. (2017➡️2020)

Remember "20 million missing votes" in the days after the election? Now that most ballots have been counted, there were about 3 million fewer votes in 2024 than 2020: 155.5 vs 158.6 million That's notable, but 2024 still has one of the highest turnout rates in 100 years

Has economic progress stopped since 1971? No. Most goods and services are more affordable for the average worker today than 1971. Housing is a notable and important exception economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/12/04/t...

People have long complained about the rising cost of food. And in the 1970s families were well within their rights to complain: grocery prices indeed rose much faster than wages! Contrast that with the most recent decade...

100 year standard-of-living comparison from Antony Davies. As he summarizes: "the median US worker today has a quality of life similar to the top 1% in 1924, and a minimum wage worker today has a quality of life similar to the middle-class in 1924"

We love links at Seabird! Our platform is 100% dedicated to linking out. Posts with links are actually the only kind of posts our users can share. seabirdreader.com

It's fun to look at prices from the past, such as this 1899 Thanksgiving menu from the Plaza Hotel in NYC. But don't let those prices fool you: wages are over 200 times higher today: economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/11/27/d...

They should just rename vaccines “supplements” so everyone will like them.

At a zoning board meeting the phrase “we’ve eliminated all school aged children” was just uttered in DEFENSE of a project.

This from @zmazlish.bsky.social is THE analysis of wages/income under Biden-Powell jzmazlish.substack.com/p/yes-inflat... TLDR: growth has been... historically weak (this is not normative -- just the numbers)

Incredibly dim stuff to watch go up the chain to the president elect

23 mostly dismal thoughts on the election, worth exactly what you pay for them. (My blog is free.) www.jacobgrier.com/blog/2024/11...

Good stuff from Jacob.

About 9:30pm (CT) last night, I posted on Twitter that it was likely Harris would lose all the Blue Wall states. By 11pm, I said it was definitely over. But the AP and others wouldn't call it for over 5 hours later. How? I watched prediction markets: economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/11/06/b...

The good news is that within 1 year, a large majority of Americans will acknowledge the following (which have all been true for at least ~18 months): 1. Inflation rate is falling 2. Crime is falling 3. Wages are rising faster than prices 4. Stock market is booming

If you know, you know

US & EU Q3 GDP numbers are in, which means another update to my G7 GDP growth chart! Here's each country's cumulative increase in real GDP, since just before the pandemic: 🇺🇸 +12.2% 🇨🇦 +5.8% (thru Q2) 🇮🇹 +5.1% 🇫🇷 +3.5% 🇬🇧 +2.3% (thru Q2) 🇯🇵 +0.2% (thru Q2) 🇩🇪 +0.1%

Why are 7 million working-age men not in the labor force in the US? The biggest reason, and the primary reason for the increase since the 1960s: illness and disability economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/10/16/w...

*Of course* Bari Weiss is helping to spread the human trafficking moral panic, and *of course* her feature investigation does not include any actual examples of human trafficking. www.thefp.com/p/inside-ame...

That's quite a resumé

🚨New from me in the Washington Post🚨 Trump’s 1st term tariffs didn’t work. For his 2nd term he’s proposing tariffs that are significantly larger, cover essential imports, risk trade war with our allies—and would thus do immense economic damage www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

If another big tech company were backing Harris this unabashedly, Republican hacks would rupture their tracheas shrieking about it.

My seven-year-old managed to find Biden's master console. So why isn't the mainstream media covering this

Happy to get some friends over to Bluesky this weekend, and also getting new signups to our link-sharing app @seabirdreader.bsky.social. Sign up if you want to check it out before we launch our new app for web and mobile: seabirdreader.com

Had lunch today in Little Rock with the talented economist @horp.bsky.social, who also sported the shirt that's de rigeur for Natural State intellectuals

there are some people who are pre-object permanence about news—if 100% of coverage is not on an issue, it doesn’t exist. On NPR’s website rn Asheville is the #1 story and the special on the Sudanese hospital is behind “I went on a real life treasure hunt! Here’s what I found”

Marxism is when the government doesn’t tell you what type of home you’re allowed to build

we’re reaching levels of coping & seething that were heretofore unknown to scientists

You've got to be pretty naive to watch Trump attorneys throw everything they can into delays then ask "hey why is this coming out in October?"

>write about how tariffs on washing machines failed >guy who self-admits to being a US washing machine manufacturing exec shows up in my comments defending them

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters is looking to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. Out of 2,900 Bibles, only one fits Walters’ criteria: The Trump Bible.

The Employment-Population Ratio for prime age workers (ages 25-54) is at record highs (data back to 2007) for both native-born and foreign-born workers No one is taking your jobs

Another day, another lie about immigrants. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

It’s wild to see people like Tina Peters getting years in jail for election interference while Donald Trump, the FUCKING RINGLEADER OF THE CONSPIRACY, plays golf and runs for president again.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

Today Jimmy Carter is officially too old to play with Lego

See also: the RETVRN guys who post about having a picnic or barbecue. No one will stop you from doing that stuff.

Last month's cover story was an expose on how bad a second Trump term would be. April's was all about him going to prison. If the argument is you can't make accurate libertarian critiques of Harris because Trump is worse, just say that instead of lying about how we're supposedly pro-Trump

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Can't believe Oren Cass wrote a whole 2k-word piece defending Trump's **universal** tariffs while only talking about manufactured goods and not justifying how Americans somehow benefit from tariffs on Brazilian coffee, Canadian oil, Chilean Bass, French Wine, etc www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...