In 2014:
- wages were stagnant
- income inequality was skyrocketing
- unemployment numbers didn't account for reduced labor market participation
But these claims don't hold in the last decade.
Got tired of looking up BLS series, whipped this up with Claude Code
prestonmui.github.io/bls-series-l...
How old is the first-time homebuyer?
Turns out, the best answer is probably, "Mid-/late 30s" and "a bit older than in 2010."
New blog entry: "Capital funding poisons software projects."
In short: Using capital funding instead of operational funding is a major source of government software project failures. The fix? We've got no good playbook here, but it's probably an IT investment fund.
I guess this is maybe just cope for trying to get back a semblance of what we had and if we re-establish the gate keepers they just get swept away in the next wave of technological and cultural change but it feels less fundamentally system altering than disenfranchisement.
from being available is more preferable than disenfranchisement. I realize these institutions and the electorate are somewhat mutually reinforcing but some layer of more hardened insulation at the institutional level that gives us guardrails.
I take your point that there's a startling proportion of the electorate that are either just down with fascism or too uninformed to know the consequences. But a liberalism with elite institutions (political parties, media, education, etc.) that codify norms that prevent the levers that get us here
I don't disagree with this. Feels like major technological and cultural change underlie a lot of political instability throughout history. Makes me think that our elites and their institutions need reform & strengthening rather than just the electorate.
The global energy system will never be the same (or at least won't be for a very long time), almost regardless of when the Iran conflict ends.
heatmap.news/energy/energ...
A Ghanaian man in his late 20s detained by ICE in NJ was transferred 10 times over 196 days, traveling 7,700+ mi.
“The point is to not make it easy for them, so they give up.”
via @jeffgammage.bsky.social and @joeyerardi.bsky.social
More: www.inquirer.com/news/ice-det...
Is this an @ipums.bsky.social bat signal?
There can be rich-people taxes that are about reducing inequality rather than raising revenue, and then for the taxes that fund the welfare state, it's best to do broad based ones like payroll taxes, VAT, etc. Everyone pays, everyone benefits.
We requested and extracted information from more than 3,000 disclosure documents for you! Search around and let us know what you find. 👇
NEW: Last year, the top 10 super speeders covered such an expansive swath of New York City with their reckless driving that more than 2.5 million New Yorkers live within a 5-minute walk of an intersection that just these 10 drivers were caught blasting through.
Isn't this for IVs and not NIVs? I might have misread the piece.
The other thing is that people perceive transit/healthcare as "welfare" in opposition to growth when really the inability to build lots of good infrastructure or keep life expectancy up are *drags* on US economic growth
You undoubtedly have a more well researched perspective into it than I do so I'm sure I'd learn more from of your thinking on it. I assumed we'd need to do something like your latter suggestion eventually. I also thought there are ways to smooth out a VAT to be ~proportional or slightly progressive.
That makes sense. Of course there's a variety of factors but my prior is that absent major pop growth/immigration and given the aging demo profile and higher propensity of HC consumption it would be hard to pencil out substantial expansions of social programs just through raising the $600K rate.
I'm as excited about Claude Code / Opus 4.5 as anyone.
It's helped me create things this year that I couldn't have done otherwise.
But I notice often it lacks "common sense."
Meaning, it makes decisions that "work" but shouldn't be made.
This whole thread 💯
It is certainly erroneous to group HHs in that part of the distribution with the ~95+%ile portion which as you mention is a more meaningful cut point in the distribution. I guess I am trying to draw almost three distinctions more for political reasons rather than purely mathematical ones.
HHs between the ~67th to ~90th/95th income %tile need to pay somewhat higher taxes for the gov't to have the revenue for the policies to make the US a (imo) more just *and* economically dynamic place. I have a fear this becomes more difficult to do if these HHs are defined as "middle class".
Totally, and this makes sense as a framework statistically. (Kind of makes me want to dive into the SCF microdata and flesh it out a bit more). I realize this is kind of semantic but I'm getting hung up on it for a particular reason:
I know you are certainly aware of this but folks in that income bracket are also more likely to possess other types of economic levers and assets which might not show up on the HH W-2 or even balance sheet but exacerbate this distribution.
I've been thinking about this a lot and I agree it's necessary to update priors but find the idea "my HH makes ~$200k and I am ~middle class" is still pervasive.
While "rich" & "middle class" are of course nebulous I still believe that HHs in the 80th percentile are better described by the former.
Your periodic reminder that you have the right to find out why your health insurer denied your claim.
We built a tool to help you do it: projects.propublica.org/claimfile/
I'm not sure how it works in Canada but for the BLS I believe the employment rate is just (1 - unemployment rate) i.e. (# employed / labor force) and the EPR is the (# employed / civilian noninstitutional pop). So different denominators.
Very cool, thank you! The comparison table is incredibly helpful. Are there vignettes any of the functions?
Reminds me of this apparently real thing from awhile back.
my stance has always been that we have an economy so as to have people, and arguments that we need to make people to have an economy are silly