What, you don't want any turkey? From new column with gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

I dunno, I would read this chart as showing that restaurant price increases slowed substantially in 2024 and stopped slowing in April. (This is from the DoorDash State of Local Commerce Report that the White House is bragging about about.doordash.com/en-us/news/s...)

Abolishing property taxes is a terrible idea. They're more conducive to economic growth than other taxes, plus local governments need the money

This sounds like it was a fun mayoral race en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_P...

Major Cities Chiefs is out with data through Q3 2025. They find a 14% drop in violent crime with across the board drops in individual crime types. Their sample includes 68 agencies. This matches (though slightly overstates) the drops being measured in the RTCI. majorcitieschiefs.com/wp-content/u...

They're deporting the Fonz www.al.com/news/2025/10...

Law school is back (it's not shown in the chart because it's so early and the numbers so volatile, but as of yesterday the number of applicants for next year was up another 28%). From new column, with gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

🚨🎃 for my fellow NYC halloween voters and sticker obsessives: there are a total of FOUR items available to you today — ask your poll worker! 1. halloween voting sticker 2. halloween **temporary tattoo** 3. borough-specific early voting sticker 4. regular early voting sticker gotta catch ‘em all 🗳️

Frank Bisignano's move to the Social Security Administration has enhanced at least one person's retirement security www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Interesting headline encountered while looking for something else entirely www.nytimes.com/1968/03/02/a...

Hey, remember when Elon Musk was going save hundreds of billions of dollars by revoking Social Security benefits for dead people? Didn't happen, because hardly any dead people were getting Social Security. Instead, there's been a big *increase* in Social Security recipients since Musk's DC stint.

Reupping this morning because Blueskyers seem to be weirdly (and gratifyingly) interested in Clement Clarke Moore

Since @jamellebouie.net has got people talking tonight about Clement Clarke Moore's 1804 critique of Thomas Jefferson's racism, here's my epic 2021 examination of Moore's complicated ties to and attitudes about slavery, with gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

I'm in @opinion.bloomberg.com today talking about three "partial truths" in the US economic narrative. "Partial truths" are not myths--they have more than a kernel of fact behind them--but they demand caution, asterisks, and grains of salt. www.bloomberg.com/op... 1/9

BTW let's appreciate the sheer bathetic comedy of Trump's threats sliding from WE'RE GOING TO BAN ALL CRITICAL SOFTWARE WE WILL BRING YOUR ECONOMY TO A HALT down to WE'LL MAKE OUR OWN COOKING OIL SEE IF WE DON'T.

If your language already has a nickname for CBP secondary inspection, the risk of traveling to the US is not much higher than before. If one develops in French or German, that will coincide with a serious drop in numbers. Spanish: cuartito, small room Chinese: 小黑屋 xiǎohēiwū, little black room

US-bound visitors from most of the world are used to the kind of treatment that white people are now also subjected to, so it doesn’t faze them (more than it did in the past).

Despite fears that tourism to the US would collapse during Donald Trump's first term, it held up fine. That's not the case so far in his second term. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Big surprise: New York is the only US city where most households don't have cars. But there are some big zero-car minorities across the river in New Jersey and in Washington, Boston and San Francisco. From new column with gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

one way to understand the LLM boom is that we have finally, actually, invented Ask Jeeves.

Lots of transit news from BART director Victor Flores - including that the BART board has voted to use standard gauge for the 2nd set of transbay tubes. This will open up the option for Caltrain, High Speed Rail, and Amtrak to cross between downtown San Francisco and the East Bay in the future.

I noticed! www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

New York's Gun Involved Violence Elimination initiative (GIVE) has data updated through August. Shooting victims were down 34% relative to August 2024 and fell to a new 12 month rolling record low since 2007. See their excellent dashboard: www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa...

A month into the DC deployment we see no real change in the violent crime trend, a possible drop in shootings that seems real but is a bit tough to tease out from the pre-existing trend, and a drop in property crime that's possibly tied to dropping mobility. Still too early to say much for sure IMO.

New Census data on working from home is out this week, and Santa Monica is No. 1! This is ranked by Public Use Microdata Data — I explain why in my new column (gift link) — but it also tops the list if you rank by cities. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Got that wrong

I think the preliminary benchmark payroll revisions coming out in a few minutes are going to be on the low end of all the estimates. Looking at the Q4 2024 QCEW data (the revision will be based on Q1 2025 data) I just don't see the kinds of huge discrepancies there were in Q4 2023.

New this week: Chicago likely has had fewer shootings through August year than any year since the mid-1960s. Gun violence remains a problem there, but I wrote about the city's encouraging trends and the data challenge of historically contextualizing this year. jasher.substack.com/p/contextual...

How reliable are crime statistics? @byjustinfox.bsky.social explains why he still trusts the data, even with its flaws 🎥

The Real-Time Crime Index has just been updated with numbers from nearly 150 more law-enforcement agencies and now it shows both violent crime and murder to be lower as of this June than in 2018-2019 realtimecrimeindex.com

Excellent primer on crime statistics from @byjustinfox.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

@agordon.me gets action!

Some super-exciting (and mostly imaginary) things going on with the BLS native- and foreign-born population estimates www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

- If you ride NJ Transit and haven’t read @agordon.me’s story, you should! - If you live in a state that refuses to fund its transit systems because ‘ey what could happen’, send this bad boy to your state lawmakers *cough PAers cough*

What’s at stake in the unexpected US-China fight over the Panama Canal? @jpspinetto.bsky.social traveled to the crucial waterway to find out 🎥 Read the feature: bit.ly/4mGDoCv

OK I have finished part 1 (less technical) of an epic #rstats and #demography blog post on men doing domestic work and its relationship to total fertility rate at the country level. Ultimately there is none, once you control for GDP per capita and inequality. freerangestats.info/blog/2025/08...

Watch out after midnight, America. From new column on the FBI's increasingly detailed crime statistics. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

2024 NYC homicide rate (using CDC data): 4.4 deaths per 100K population 2024 homicide rate in Troy Downing's district (I counted all of Pondera County as in the district; hope that's OK): 6.3 deaths per 100K population

My subway-safety charts, now on video

Good piece from @amandamull.bsky.social that helps me better understood the cultural world my soon-to-be-tween daughter is interacting with.

Violent crime is down in DC but it still has one of the highest murder rates among big US cities

Great thoughts from @byjustinfox.bsky.social on what's behind the Great American Murder Decline www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Good times

"To the best of my knowledge, I did not pass away last November 20. That is not just my opinion. In recent months I have been examined by two different licensed physicians, and if I had been dead, I'm pretty sure at least one of them would have mentioned it." davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

I am so thrilled my daughter will by going to college in NYC, in large part because she will not be doing the single most dangerous thing a young person can do (drive), and will instead be getting around on one of the safest means of transportation ever devised (the subway).

The subway risk chart you've been waiting for (Sawyer County, Wisconsin, is where Sean Duffy is from). Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Major crimes on the subway are down but that's mainly because the most common major crime, grand larceny, is down. Felony assaults are in fact up ~60% relative to 2019 — up 127% if you adjust for ridership. Annual data here: www.mta.info/document/163... YTD data here: www.mta.info/document/176...

They shoulda listened to Clement Clarke Moore (in 1818) babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nn...