In 2000, the median American was breathing air about as polluted as the most polluted parts of the country in 2023. Reducing PM2.5 exposure is like the one thing we did right as a country in the 21st century. (note these map pop. weighted percentiles, so the middle of the palette=median person)

Tomorrow at 10:30 AM EDT! We're excited to host @johnvoorheis.bsky.social from the US Census as he presents, "Housing Capital & Intergenerational Mobility in the US." #AcademicSky #EconSky RSVP & learn more: myumi.ch/15erV

I wonder why no one wants to have kids anymore

Whatcha looking at me for? I'm no good at math

This got lost in a comment, so going to put it back up here, because I think its super interesting. There was this Axios article that got some discourse play last year based on a survey where people were asked how much you have to earn to be financially successful. Gen Z says they need 587k

Vibes-related synthesis I think might be: Millennials (largest cohort of prime age workers) are, by a combination of normal lifecycle earnings and post-2020 inflation finding themselves with nominal earnings that they have anchored as "making it", but are in fact just (maybe upper) middle class

Also! This almost fully explains the whole "Gen Z thinks you need $587k to survive" thing -- the typical Gen Zer (~age 21 now) says you need $600k to be rich, approx, the 98th percentile. Millennials say they need around 200k, which *would have been* the 95th percentile when they were 21!

But wait there's more! If you adjust for household size, things are even more dramatic! A married couple with two kids making 150k (typical example from the take wars) would have been at the 74th percentile of per capita income (HH inc/# of people in HH) in 2010, but are now at the 47th percentile!

Look, I too fought in the "People who make 150-400k in expensive cities are not rich" wars of the 2010s, but these takes need to be updated: 150k in 2010 was at the 90th percentile of HH income, but is at the 67th now. 200k in 2010 was at the 95th percentile of income, but is at the 79th now.

Specific to people in Ann Arbor: I will be giving a talk next Tuesday at the Stone Center on Inequality Dynamics seminar series. I'll be presenting new research on the intergenerational transmission of housing wealth in the US, more details here: inequality.umich.edu/john-voorheis/

FWIW, meat is murder and eating meat makes you a bad person; I will not be taking further questions on this matter.

The Bay Area was a mistake

Any issues with groupthink in academia are because we select too much on rule following nerds who never made a mistake and got high SAT scores and don't have enough fuck ups and dirtbags, not because we don't pay enough attention to standardized tests.

It brings me no pleasure to see an Ohio state university lose to the only worse state in the union (Florida)

Journalists, like doctors and lawyers, are members of a skilled trade who are in denial about this fact. Their work is vital, but also in many ways repetitive boring and unfulfilling. That's the gig!

If you think of "hiring in entry level positions" as "procuring labor to do the tasks entry level people do" then you probably do think AI is a magical headcount reduction machine. But the point of hiring in entry level positions is to produce mid-career employees.

Type of guy who talks about heritage Americans unitonically but also thinks the check boxes for SPD-15 race and ethnicity are too complicated for white people

Trying to convince my niece and nephew the monster cookies I made are healthy because the oats + peanut butter make a complete protein

A whole season of the Pitt, but each hour the ER staff needs to treat a new set of victims of Kevin McAllister's booby traps

Die Hard 2 rules supreme among all the Die Hard movies because what do you mean the forests of Northern Michigan and Colorado are inexplicably in walking distance from Dulles?

New CES Working Paper: "Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income" by Ainsworth, Ainsworth, Cleveland, Clark, Brummet, Penner, Hibel, Saultz, Spiegel, Hanselman, and Penner www.census.gov/library/work...

The counterpoint to this take (which is true when considering incomes and labor market outcomes and becomes less true when you expand from there) is this graph, but of course I would say that:

war is bad, you shouldn't do war, the quakers and anabaptists were right about this

New CES Working Paper: "Parental Death, Inheritance, and Labor Supply in the United States" by Elif Tasar and John Voorheis www.census.gov/library/work...

In retrospect not actually doing the cancel culture that exists in a kind of guy's head was a mistake, intense social stigma is an important, load bearing bit of social infrastructure

Note that the take relies on plentiful and stable employment opportunities in the federal government, which, uhhhhhh

In the presence of unequal baseline distribution of resources, any roughly equally distributed shock has larger relative impacts on low income people -- this is just Kolm (1970) -- which means that a large array of shocks are "regressive" in a relative sense.

I would say this of course but: RAs/predocs who have experience working in physical FSRDCs will have outsized success, not necessarily because of data access, but because it's one of the few environments that forces you to code from scratch without AI tools

I'm super skeptical of the result/magnitude here: • gradual change doesn't match traffic responses, which were sharp • confidence intervals are tiny (PM has high variance!) • This is not a standard DiD • Cook et al. use synthetic control + more monitors and find no change [1/3]

There's updated data on PM2.5 exposure through 2024 from the famous van Donkelaar (2021) series, so we can check on trends in exposure; and it turns out we still haven't made any progress on air pollution since 2016 (trends are still moving in the wrong direction)

A fun fact is that the guillotine was originally invented as a, you might say, "woke" reaction to gruesome execution methods by the masculine leadership of the Valois and Bourbon kings of France

Letting the economy get swallowed by scams is bad and people who let that happen need to suffer consequences

scams all the way down

Unpopular opinion, but we should be meaner about scam-adjacent stuff across the board -- crypto, gambling, car dealerships, legacy admissions and high SES parents weaponizing disability accomodations are all bad and shameful

The whole fitness ecosystem is in many ways a good analogy for how AI fits in the current economy. You have guys who desperately want gains (CEOs who want higher profits) who maybe should know that they need diet, exercise and discipline (actually doing something useful people want to buy)

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

alright, I'm making pies, you guys figure out the poverty measurement discourse mess you've made without me

A lot of people who understand that "not knowing that IPCC reports exist, redoing climate science from scratch with bad math, but coming up with an answer that I like" is bonkers banana in the tailpipes nonsense, but treat doing the same thing with poverty measurement like its a fun time.

The thing is that poverty lines are in some sense always going to be arbitrary, the whole point is having something you can compare to over time. I'm totally sympathetic to the idea we have a higher standard of precarity now. But you just need to apply that consistently over time.

This is rightly getting a lot of opprobrium for good reasons, but the meta lesson here is that back of the envelope math and tech/finance guy self-regard is a great way to get engagement and also a bad way to learn true facts about the world

AGI is just astrology for smart computer boys

Show me the lie

For household surveys that only collect householder information (e.g. the SCF, HVS), claims like "Millennials are doing better than previous generations" are just picking up increasingly positively selected householders if household formation differs across generations and is related to resources

Sharply progressive income and wealth taxation should be understood as a public health intervention targeting a vulnerable subpopulation

Yea fuck that guy pretty much

no one actually believes in meritocracy in the lurch is the thing

Men will literally sabotage their wives careers doing dumbass stock gambling instead of going to therapy

Benjamin Couillard’s job market paper finds rising housing costs explain 51% of the decline in US total fertility rate between the 2000s and 2010s, and we’d have 11% more births since 1990 without rising costs. Any economics care to opine on the methodology? drive.google.com/file/d/1BK6j...

Homeownership is supposed to be a sign of passing into adulthood but paradoxically creates the whiniest babies ever