Some observations about taking the 2026 and 1985 SATs:

• The current SAT is adaptive. You get 4 sections, 2 verbal and 2 math. If you do well on the first verbal and the first math, you get a really hard next section. I think I did well on my first two sections, because my second math and verbal sections were impossible.

• The administration was very bad. The proctor let people come in late, which was disruptive, and did not provide scratch paper in a timely manner (yes, I’m totally using this as an excuse).

• I did literally take the test with high schoolers. No one said anything to me, but it was definitely weird. I haven’t been in a room that tense in a LOOONG time. I took the test at one of the top academic schools in SoCal (Los Alamitos) and you could feel the pressure.

• The 1985 SAT was legit easy. Because it’s not adaptive, there were just one or two hard questions per section.

• Percentile-wise, my PSAT, 1985 SAT, and 2026 SAT scores were roughly similar. My actual SAT score (the only one that mattered) was far lower. Go figure.

• Getting rid of the SAT will go down as one of the many stupid things we did in the pandemic. And like all the other mistakes from the era, no one will admit fault or take responsibility.

Sources:

SAT and IQ:

Frey, Meredith C., and Douglas K. Detterman. “Scholastic assessment or g? The relationship between the scholastic assessment test and general cognitive ability.” Psychological science 15.6 (2004): 373-378.

Effect of Tutoring:

DerSimonian, Rebecca, and Nan Laird. “Evaluating the effect of coaching on SAT scores: A meta-analysis.” Harvard Educational Review 53.1 (1983): 1-15.

Powers, Donald E., and Donald A. Rock. “Effects of coaching on SAT I: Reasoning test scores.” Journal of Educational Measurement 36.2 (1999): 93-118.

Briggs, Derek C. “The effect of admissions test preparation: Evidence from NELS: 88.” Chance 14.1 (2001): 10-18.

Hansen, Ben B. “Full matching in an observational study of coaching for the SAT.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 99.467 (2004): 609-618.

Domingue, Ben, and Derek C. Briggs. “Using linear regression and propensity score matching to estimate the effect of coaching on the SAT.” General Linear Model Journal 35.1 (2009): 12-29.

Montgomery, Paul, and Jane Lilly. “Systematic reviews of the effects of preparatory courses on university entrance examinations in high school‐age students.” International Journal of Social Welfare 21.1 (2012): 3-12.

Economist David Deming post on the SAT:

Forked Lightning

Should Selective College Admissions be Test-Optional?

It’s been a busy last few months at Harvard. But I’m back with a two-part series on whether selective colleges should be test-optional. Part 1 (today) is about the historical context of college admissions testing. I’ll also walk you through some recent research on whether SAT/ACT scores predict later life success. Part 2, coming later this week, is abou…

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3 years ago · 18 likes · 8 comments · David Deming

Effect of removing SAT:

Sacerdote, Bruce, Douglas O. Staiger, and Michele Tine. How test optional policies in college admissions disproportionately harm high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. No. w33389. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2025.

Chetty, Raj, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. “Diversifying society’s leaders? The determinants and consequences of admission to highly selective colleges.” Opportunity Insights (2023).

Dartmouth President statement: https://president.dartmouth.edu/news/2024/02/reactivating-satact-requirement-dartmouth-undergraduate-admissions

• The Planet Money episode on the Bet is excellent (it is from the era when Planet Money was actually good), but it lets Ehrlich off too easy, IMO. A better, definitive treatment of the Bet is from the ever-excellent Hannah Ritchie: https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet.

• My thought with the video was to do an updated version of the Bet incorporating Ritchie’s research. Toss in an Ehrlich takedown, since public intellectuals who don’t admit mistakes don’t deserve the standing Ehrlich enjoyed.

• The video veers far more personal than usual at the end. I do this because

  • 1) delaying children is indeed a huge regret of mine, and

  • 2) I believe my generation was severely misinformed about fertility. The received wisdom I got was that there is a fertility cliff after 35 and you can always do IVF. These just aren’t true. Conceiving can be a long process at any age, and IVF’s chances of success are small to nonexistent past 40.

• Further, we were severely misinformed about children themselves. Children were seen as a burden, a money and time vacuum. These again aren’t really true in my experience. I suppose they can be a money suck, but the spending is somewhat optional: Public schools and cheap activities exist. Day care is admittedly expensive, though; there is no way around that unless one partner doesn’t work or there are grandparents about. Time-wise, the first six months are genuinely awful, but after that, the good far outweighs the bad. The best days of my life are just simple days spent with my son doing mundane activities like biking on the beach or going to the movies.

• My trip to the Simon Archive in Maryland was my first ever real research trip. As an economist, you mostly just download data and work with it. So a trip to look through Simon’s papers was a treat. I went through a couple of boxes, and it took two days. It was definitely an arduous but enjoyable process just seeing the correspondence of a great man. My only main insight is how little the life of a tenured professor has changed. He was dealing with regrades, referee reports, and reimbursements, the minutiae of academia.

Sources in order of appearance

New York Times obituary for Ehrlich: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/books/paul-r-ehrlich-dead.html

Ehrlich, Paul R. (1968). The population bomb. Internet Archive. New York, Ballantine Books

Ehrlich famine quote is from: Williams, Nigel. “The population bomb.” Current Biology 18.13 (2008): R535-R536.

Famine data is from: https://ourworldindata.org/famines

Ehrlich claims about future famines and India are from: Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. “The population explosion: why we should care and what we should do about it.” Envtl. L. 27 (1997): 1187.

India statistics: Life Expectancy and GDP per capita

Ehrlich’s England comments are from a 1971 speech. Multiple sources, here is one: https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/paul_ehrlich_1969_predictions.pdf

Crop yields and land use is from OurWorldinData: https://ourworldindata.org/yields-vs-land-use-how-has-the-world-produced-enough-food-for-a-growing-population

Ehrilich’s comments about the Green Revolution are from: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/12/ehrlich/377016/

Many of Ehrlich’s appearances and quotes are sourced from this excellent NY Times piece, specifically the India part: The Population Bomb? | Retro Report | The New York Times

Hvistendahl section taken from the referenced book: Hvistendahl, Mara. Unnatural selection: Choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men. Public Affairs, 201

Raw correlations between population size and GDP per capita: https://medium.com/@davidsmits_55886/population-size-and-country-performance-fafae7df7374

Coal resources of Great Britain: https://nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/coal-mining-in-the-british-isles/collieries-of-the-british-isles/

Current Coal usage: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/coal-power-has-effectively-died-in-the-united-kingdom

UK GDP stats: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/uk-log-of-real-gdp-per-capita-in-2011-us

Metal prices and quantities are from the aforementioned excellent Hannah Ritchie article on the bet: https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet

I originally intended this to be a short, but the cool maps in the papers and the stock footage from Getty convinced me it deserved a longer piece.

The video combines two papers. The first is one I saw back in 2011 in graduate school. I thought it was maybe the coolest paper I’d ever seen, and sure enough it landed in the AER, econ’s top journal:

Michalopoulos, Stelios, and Elias Papaioannou. 2016. “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa.” American Economic Review 106 (7): 1802–48.

It blends history, geography, and econometrics (always a great combination), to show how Africa’s artificial colonial borders held back development.

To that paper we add a more recent one on how soccer victories shape ethnic identity:

Depetris-Chauvin, Emilio, Ruben Durante, and Filipe Campante. 2020. “Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football.” American Economic Review 110 (5): 1572–1602.

Let me know in the comments if you like these shorter videos or prefer the usual 12–15 minute format.

Video notes

• The video is based on this excellent post by Joy Buchanan, who also appears in the video: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/01/03/summary-of-you-wouldnt-steal-a-car/

• Australian Lego Masters really is great. I encourage you to watch it by any legal means necessary.

• Gary Becker is an absolute legend in economics. His paper on marriage changed my life. Not because it affected my marriage, but because of something far more important: I shifted my research focus from Latin American development to marriage.

• Steven Levitt on Becker: “What is Becker’s secret? It doesn’t hurt to be incredibly smart. That isn’t really what sets him apart, though, I don’t think. He has four other traits that are just as important: he works harder than anyone else, he loves what he does, he is not afraid of criticism, and he has never stopped learning new things.”

• The footage of me fake-stealing from Toys R Us is real. It’s from my senior-year high school Spanish video. I stumbled on it recently while going through a Google Drive of old family photos. I rewatched it with my son, who loved it more than any Econ Nerds video, and I was shocked at what was in it. It includes (1) me jumping off a bridge into the ocean (breaking the law), (2) multiple sexually explicit jokes, and (3) an ending where everyone who appeared moons the camera. I can’t believe I played this for the class without any repercussions. The 90s were a different time.

Recommendations

• The Economist Writing Every Day newsletter, where Joy’s article first appeared, is excellent.

• I had never seen The Blues Brothers until this year. It deserves its sterling reputation. Blues Brothers 2000, unfortunately, also deserves its reputation.

• Have I mentioned how much I like Lego Masters Australia?

Sources

Anker, Anne Sofie Tegner, Jennifer L. Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø. “The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 13.4 (2021): 194-225.

Becker, Gary S. “Crime and punishment: An economic approach.” Journal of political economy 76.2 (1968): 169-217.

Buchanan, Joy, and Bart J. Wilson. “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property.” Available at SSRN 5757162 (2025).

d’Este, Rocco. “The effect of stolen goods markets on crime: evidence from a quasi natural experiment.” (2014).

Di Tella, Rafael, and Ernesto Schargrodsky. “Do police reduce crime? Estimates using the allocation of police forces after a terrorist attack.” American Economic Review 94.1 (2004): 115-133.

Ellis, Havelock. The criminal. Vol. 7. W. Scott, 1916.

Source for silver heist: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/01/22/thieves-empty-a-dutch-silver-museum

Silver prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IP7106

Article on what is pirated: https://piracymonitor.org/muso-q1-and-may-2022-data/

Poland is hot. Matt Yglesias wrote about it recently, and the country has been at the center of the “is Europe actually poorer than the US?” discourse. I started this video maybe three months ago, so I guess it’s well-timed.

Poland v. Russia is a good way into the larger story: how narratives get set, and which stories get told.

I remember in undergrad that shock therapy was just dismissed. “Well, that didn’t work.” Now it’s called neoliberalism, a term I never heard as an undergrad history major in the early 2000s. But by 2019, when I was teaching in that same history department, UCLA had multiple courses on the topic: all of how awful and what a failure it was. I wasn’t teaching one of them. I was teaching the Economic History of the U.S., and I found a working paper version of this Grier and Grier paper, which showed that the Washington Consensus (i.e. shock therapy, neoliberalism) worked.

I added it to my slides on the Cold War, but I wondered: why hadn’t the discourse been updated?

Well, the first draft of history is written by journalists and professors, who often have a strong anti-market bias. The initial sputtering of the Eastern bloc countries had this group taking victory laps. But the countries that persisted all succeeded in the long run, and it’s time for the second draft of history to be written.

As I dove deeper into the research, I found that it had moved well beyond the Grier and Grier paper. This was a fully developed literature. Essentially, here is the lay of the land:

1. Economic freedom reforms work if the country does not abandon them.

2. Some aspects are far more important than others.

3. The timing of the reforms matters.

4. Failure of reform often has to do with political or cultural issues.

A special shoutout to Justin Callais, one of the authors of this research, who appears in the video.

Now, with every Econ Nerds video I try to add some fun element that separates it from a standard econ video. I rented a Cybertruck for the Cybertruck video. I lost weight for the weight loss video. I interspersed movie clips in the Witch Trial and Mariel Boatlift videos. For this one, I thought: let me hire some Polish people off Upwork and have them watch the video and react. It worked better than I could have hoped. Their personal experiences matched the video’s narrative almost perfectly.

Recommendations:

Two Tibor Rutar posts on the topic:

Political Economy, Stats, and Society

Do free markets and social progress go together?

Those sceptical of capitalism tend to dismiss evidence, either causal or correlational, of economic freedom being tightly connected to GDP per capita. They say GDP is a crude measure that might mean something to those worshipping money and material wealth but is meaningless as a true measure of social wellbeing or progress…

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a year ago · 32 likes · 1 comment · Tibor Rutar

Political Economy, Stats, and Society

How not to criticize neoliberalism

I’m afraid the central message of The Shock Doctrine remains just as influential as it was ~20 years ago when it first came out. If you hate neoliberalism, as many anti-capitalist leftists (and an increasing number of right-wingers) instinctively do, then you’ll find yourself nodding along as you read Naomi Klein’s book…

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7 months ago · 123 likes · 21 comments · Tibor Rutar

Jack Salmon on Economic Freedom

The Unseen and The Unsaid

Why the Case Against Economic Freedom Doesn’t Hold Up: What Hickel Gets Wrong About Capitalism and Poverty

* Much of the empirical literature cited in this article was helpfully compiled by George Mason University economist Vincent Geloso, whose public thread on the subject served as a valuable resource…

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5 months ago · 41 likes · 6 comments · Jack Salmon

Vincent Geloso thread on much of the work cited

Full sources

Sources for examples of dysfunctional soviet economy:

Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia (1994)

Cucciolla, Mario Riccardo (2017) The Crisis of Soviet Power in Central Asia: The ‘Uzbek cotton affair’ (1975-1991)

Ivashchenko, Y.V., Clapham, P.J., & Brownell, R.L. Jr. (2011). “Soviet Illegal Whaling: The Devil and the Details.” Marine Fisheries Review, 73(3): 1–19.

On Vodka Consumption

Razvodovsky, Y. E. “Alcohol consumption and liver cirrhosis mortality in Russia.” J Alcohol Drug Depend 2.152 (2014): 2.

Anti Shock Therapy pieces:

Stiglitz, Joseph, and Robert M. Pike. “Globalization and its Discontents.” (2004).

Rodrik, Dani. “Goodbye Washington consensus, hello Washington confusion? A review of the World Bank’s economic growth in the 1990s: learning from a decade of reform.” Journal of Economic literature 44.4 (2006): 973-987.

Klein, Naomi. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Macmillan, 2007.

Recent research on the effects of Economic Freedom

Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/2025-10/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2025-annual-report.pdf

Alvarez, Sean P., Vincent Geloso, and Macy Scheck. “Revisiting the relationship between economic freedom and development to account for statistical deception by autocratic regimes.” European Journal of Political Economy 85 (2024): 102577.

Billmeier, Andreas, and Tommaso Nannicini. “Assessing economic liberalization episodes: A synthetic control approach.” Review of Economics and Statistics 95.3 (2013): 983-1001.

Billmeier and Nannicini 2011, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, “Economies in Transition: How Important Is Trade Openness for Growth?”

Callais, Justin T., et al. “Institutions Matter: Economic freedom and income mobility.” Economic Modelling (2025): 107351.

Callais, Justin, and Kerianne Lawson. “Underperforming reformers: Examining disappointing cases of economic reforms.” Kyklos 77.3 (2024): 593-615.

Callais, Justin T., and Andrew T. Young. “A rising tide that lifts all boats: An analysis of economic freedom and inequality using matching methods.” Journal of Comparative Economics 51.3 (2023): 744-777.

Grier, Kevin B., and Robin M. Grier. “The Washington consensus works: Causal effects of reform, 1970-2015.” Journal of Comparative Economics 49.1 (2021): 59-72.

Grier, Robin, and Kevin Grier. “The sequencing of economic and political reforms in Latin America.” Journal of Comparative Economics (2026).

Kantorowicz, Jaroslaw, and Rok Spruk. “Using synthetic control method to estimate the growth effects of economic liberalisation: Evidence from transition economies.” The World Economy 47.6 (2024): 2332-2360.

Kaul, A., Klößner, S., Pfeifer, G., & Schieler, M. (2022). Standard synthetic control methods: The case of using all preintervention outcomes together with covariates. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 40(3), 1362-1376.

Kochanowicz, Jacek, Piotr Kozarzewski, and Richard Woodward. “Understanding reform: the case of Poland.” (2005).

Lawson, Robert, Vincent Miozzi, and Meg Tuszynski. “Economic freedom and growth, income, investment, and inequality: A quantitative summary of the literature.” Southern Economic Journal 90.4 (2024): 1099-1135.

Petrarca, Ilaria, and Roberto Ricciuti. “Synthetic ‘real socialism’: a counterfactual analysis of political and economic liberalizations.” Economics and Business Review 1.1 (2015): 69-88.

Saccone, D., & Migheli, M. (2022). Free to escape? Economic freedoms, growth and poverty traps. Review of Development Economics, 26(3), 1518-1554.

The most famous would be the person who the most other people have heard of… in history.

Famous people now have a disadvantage because there’s all these humans who can’t have heard of them because they’re dead. It’s impossible for a peasant in 1700 to have heard of Taylor Swift, but he can have heard of Shakespeare.

So you’d think it would be an old person, but here is a stat that will blow your mind.

7% of all humans who ever lived are alive today. (that stat seems to have its origin here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/, seems broadly plausible, but also maybe an underestimate, given our fame clock probably starts around 1000 B.C., in that we don’t know anyone before that)

There are way more humans today.

Largely due to the massive advances in food production (due to technology and better institutions):

So, we have so many more people around today. That means someone famous now has the chance to be known by billions, whereas it was millions in the past.

The world has also become more interconnected. Back then you sort of wandered around near your birth village and then died in that same village. The average American travels >10,000 miles a year and can access news or images from all corners of the world on their smart phone. Further—

87%. That’s the global literacy rate today vs. 10% around 1800.

So today famous people can go global more than ever, because we are more interconnected and able to communicate with each other.

And yet, social media has fragmented us into information silos. It’s hard to be mega-famous like Michael Jackson, Madonna or Michael Jordan were.

The most famous person is probably then someone whose fame peaked around 2010, before social media took off, but when world population was high enough to reach the most number of people.

That person would be… Cristiano Ronaldo:

Below is the social rankings, you can see Ronaldo tops the list:

People might say Michael Jackson was more famous, and I’d agree, but the world has added 3 Billion people since Michael Jackson’s fame apex, Ronaldo is picking up way more of those new people than MJ, while also being exposed to the all the people who know MJ.

Other candidates like the Pope, Trump or Obama seem to have less global appeal to me than Ronaldo. Soccer is played virtually everywhere, kids in small villages know Ronaldo and Messi. Trump and Obama are America-brained picks.

But I feel like I’m forgetting someone…

Oh yeah, Jesus.

Most people today have heard of Jesus, so he racks up all the current numbers. Plus all the people since 0, the year that’s literally 0 because of him. And he’s a figure in Islam as well, so Muslims will have heard of him as well.

Jesus is definitely 1.

1. Jesus

2. Ronaldo

3. ?????

Either way I think we’ve learned the key to fame is great abs.

But let me know in the comments, who is number 3? Is there someone I’m missing.

That might not seem like much, but it’s more than a 10% difference.

I drove to Vegas recently and for “research” decided to get the same meal at a McDonald’s in California and one in Nevada.

California enacted a $20 fast food minimum wage law in 2024, and recent work by Clemens, Edwards, Meer, and Nguyen estimates it raised fast food prices by around 3%-4%.

So I thought, let’s test it.

I got more than triple that, a 10% difference between my meals.

Obviously N=2 isn’t research, but it’s still interesting, why such a huge effect?

I don’t think demand is doing most of the work here. Both McDonald’s were on the way to Vegas, serving broadly similar customers (people volunteering to lose money).

So costs probably are the main story: rent, regulations, and yes the minimum wage (Nevada’s ($12) is way lower than California’s ($20)). Which caused me to revisit the minimum wage literature, but first–

A Vegas aside: People love to crap on Vegas as a soulless city whose very existence is a middle finger to God and nature. To which I’d say, I agree! HOWEVER, I have had an absolute blast in Vegas all the recent times I’ve gone. Here’s the hack: go with kids, preferably a kid you enjoy being around. There’s a ton of kid stuff to do. We went to the pool, arcades, shows. Meow Wolf is amazing to do with a kid. Also, as solar and desalination become more viable, Vegas is less a middle finger to God and nature.

Economics and the Minimum Wage

The economic theory is clear on the minimum wage. It is a price floor set above the equilibrium which means the government is artificially pushing the price too high, so we will have more people who want these now higher paying jobs than firms want to hire, so it will create unemployment.

That’s the theory, but for a long time the evidence didn’t exist.

The famous paper is the 1994 Card Krueger paper which looked at fast food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They found no employment effects after New Jersey raised its minimum wage.

The standard reconciliation was that firms have wage-setting power in the labor market (technically called monopsony). A minimum wage pushes against that power and moves the market toward where it should be, so the dis-employment effects predicted by basic theory don’t show up.

But the literature has moved again. This Alex Tabarrok post is a good summary of what he calls the “new consensus.” Basically, the world is much more complicated than the initial theory or data indicated, in the following ways:

• Small minimum wage increases may have small effects, but large ones (like California’s $20 fast food wage) do produce measurable disemployment.

• Firms adjust on margins other than headcount:

  • Raising prices

  • Automating

  • Reducing employment of workers with disabilities and other marginal groups

  • Cutting hours, benefits, and other forms of compensation

So we’re not quite back to Econ 101. The new view is that Econ 101 effects are real but show up on more margins than just employment, and they’re heterogeneous (worse for the least-skilled) and nonlinear (worse the higher the minimum bites).

One caveat worth flagging: the minimum wage literature is famously contentious and can be downright nasty. The main protagonists have publicly feuded for decades. The field keeps evolving as new work comes out, so today’s consensus may not be tomorrow’s.

Works Cited

Brynjolfsson, Erik, et al. Minimum Wages and Rise of the Robots. No. w34895. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2026.

Card, David, and Alan B. Krueger. “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania” The American Economic Review 84.4 (1994): 772-793.

Clemens, Jeffrey, et al. The Effects of California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage on Prices. No. w34990. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2026.

Clemens, Jeffrey, Melissa Gentry, and Jonathan Meer. “Divergent Paths: Differential Impacts of Minimum-Wage Increases on Individuals with Disabilities.” National Tax Journal 79.1 (2026): 000-000.

Liu, Qing, et al. “Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages.” Journal of Public Economics 239 (2024): 105247.

Notes on the video:

• My wife actually had no idea about the CyberTruck, I literally just showed up one night with one. The reaction is genuine. The video was also recorded the day after Valentine’s Day, which I also really didn’t realize until my wife pointed it out.

• Okay, so the video is mostly an economics video teaching the ideas of S-curves and Veblen goods, it’s not an actual CyberTruck review video. So here are my honest thoughts after renting it for a week– if you can get past tribal biases, the truck is genuinely awesome. I love the looks. It drives great. Self-driving is the second biggest technological breakthrough of my lifetime (after AI). It has 2 distinct downsides though

  • 1) the range is terrible, sub-300 miles, I had to charge it every day (granted I was driving a lot) and

  • 2) I live firmly in the blue bubble of Los Angeles, people give you tons of dirty looks and won’t let you merge and just generally treat you awfully while driving it. If you have one, you will not be anonymous. Although this does have some upside: pro-Tesla people come talk to you.

I would totally get one, but my wife has made it clear she would legitimately divorce me, so I’m stuck with my sweet 2014 Prius for the foreseeable future.

Recommendations:

Our world in data has a cool graphic on the adoption of various household appliances: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/technology-adoption-by-households-in-the-united-states

Lesson 1: When writing is hard, that’s a sign of deeper problems

The best scripts I’ve written, either for Econ Nerds or from my comedy career, all happened fast. Everything clicked.

This script was the opposite. It took forever. I finally turned in a draft, and my colleague pointed to a fatal flaw.

The original version centered on the Shirky Principle, the idea that institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

That was the whole pitch, let’s make a video about the Shirky Principle. In that I’d focus on non-profit dysfunction.

My colleague Aaron had a simple note: “Do we actually think the Shirky Principle exists?”

He put a name to what I was struggling with. Most of the examples I was trying to use weren’t really the Shirky Principle, they were more like St. Peter’s Syndrome (profiled in the video) or Goodhart’s Law (i.e., when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). Nonprofits and government agencies aren’t doing the Shirky Principle; they aren’t actually trying to preserve the problem. They aren’t malicious actors.

If you ask AI about the Shirky Principle, it will cite examples from private industry. But those didn’t strike me as right either. The one often given is TurboTax blocking the free government version of tax filing, but that’s just plain old regulatory capture.

I’d assumed the Shirky Principle would make a good video. I had never even thought it wasn’t real. But Aaron’s note clarified it: I was trying to make a video without good examples because the Shirky Principle sounds good in a dorm room, but it’s not real.

Maybe that’s another video: debunking the Shirky Principle.

Lesson 2: You’re never done

I chucked the Shirky Principle in the trash and instead wrote a video about threat inflation and St. Peter’s Syndrome. Basically all about how nonprofits work: inflate a threat to drive donations; if the crisis ends, find a new one and hype that. Then I went into the examples: climate change, police shootings, and immigrant crime.

I finished the draft and thought, awesome, it’s done. Then I got another note: why not start the video with the examples, as a crisis audit? That’s way more engaging.

The note was right, but I’d have to totally rewrite the script AGAIN. Usually I do one draft and then minor revisions for Econ Nerds videos. This would be the THIRD major rewrite, but it had to be done.

Lesson 3: Making videos is a great excuse to meet your heroes

Arnold Kling is a legend to me. I’ve been reading him for over ten years, his Substack is a go-to. And because of this channel, I can just cold email him and ask to talk, and he said yes.

One of the best parts of Econ Nerds is having an excuse to email heroes of mine and tell them how great they are. But even if you don’t have a podcast or YouTube channel, you can still reach out. I’ve found most people to be incredibly responsive.

Sources (in order of appearance)

Deaths due to natural disasters: https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters

GDP by world region: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-world-regions-stacked-area

Global extreme poverty rate: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/was-the-global-decline-of-extreme-poverty-only-due-to-china

Co2 emissions per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?country=USA~GBR~OWID_EU27~CAN

Solar adoption by state: https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0203-patel-solar

Changes in forest area: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/deforestation-is-no-longer-inevitable

Oil spills: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/oil-spills-from-tankers-have-fallen-by-more-than-90-since-the-1970s

Wildlife increase: https://ourworldindata.org/europe-mammal-comeback

Effect of climate change on GDP estimates:

Barrage, Lint, and William Nordhaus. “Policies, projections, and the social cost of carbon: Results from the DICE-2023 model.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121.13 (2024): e2312030121.

Shirley, Chad, and William Swanson. The Effects of Climate Change on GDP in the 21st Century: Working Paper 2025-02. No. 61186. 20

Unarmed men killed by polcie is from the Washington Post database: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

Data on perceptions of police violence is from here: https://www.policemag.com/news/half-of-surveys-very-liberal-respondents-believe-1000-or-more-unarmed-black-men-killed-by-police-in-2019

Incarceration rates: https://www.statista.com/chart/18376/us-incarceration-rates-by-sex-and-race-ethnic-origin/

Illegal immigration numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/29/us/illegal-border-crossings-data.html

Murder rates:

Jeff-alytics

There Were 14,000 Murders In The United States Last Year

Measuring crime trends is all about the journey, not the destination. As such, I think the journey to figuring out how many murders there were in the United States last year is an interesting one that says a lot (complimentary) about the state of crime data in 2026…

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6 months ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Jeff Asher

Arrest rates by immigration status:

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/immigrants-and-crime

Crime rates, immigrant vs. non:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/10/15/crime-rises-among-second-generation-immigrants-as-they-assimilate/

Crime rates by country of origin:

Abramitzky, Ran, et al. “Law-abiding immigrants: The incarceration gap between immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020.” American Economic Review: Insights 6.4 (2024): 453-471.

Crime index by share of non-citizens:

https://progressless.org/2024/04/05/do-more-immigrants-equate-to-more-crime/

Source for the maternal mortality section:

https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-measurement

Can Americans solve big problems polling research:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/governments-scope-efficiency-and-role-in-regulating-business/

Econ Nerds is a project of MRU. MRU, if you aren’t familiar, is a nonprofit focused on economics education founded by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Over the years, we built out our offerings: full Micro and Macro courses, interactive practice activities, and a high school curriculum. In 2025, we hit our market-share adoption goals and started deciding what to do next. We settled on Econ Nerds. We wanted to build a space where we could make fun economics videos and encourage others to do the same.

Our initial vision was one video a week and a podcast featuring many different contributors. I’d serve as a test case and regular contributor, and other professors and grad students would hop on board to make videos. One year later, here’s what we’ve learned:

Lesson 1: It is hard to get people to make Econ videos

We thought we’d be able to get presenters other than me, but professors and researchers didn’t seem very interested in making videos. Shoutout to Ariel and Jadrian, who were the only two others willing to make the plunge into video creation.

How we pivoted: I now interview researchers and showcase their work. Rebecca Lowe appears in the Space video, and I’ve interviewed Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan for upcoming videos. I’ve also lined up interviews with researchers for 4 of the 7 videos currently in production.

Lesson 2: It is hard to get people to watch Econ videos

Our view counts are low, and much lower than those of similar channels.

Pivot: In October, we realized we had a huge problem: not only were our views low, they were declining. Since then, I’ve watched a ton of videos on what I call “YouTubeMAXXING.” Now we spend a lot of time on titles, thumbnails, and the first minute of each video. There is a mantra that is true: If no one clicks, no one watches. Since then our numbers have improved slightly and <<fingers crossed>> seem to moving in the right direction. We’ve had a couple videos break the 10K mark and our like and comment ratio are huge. Usually 10 percent of the people who watch click the like button which is huge, plus we get very engaged comments. So we are trending in the right direction and attracting the people we want: curious and intelligent.

Lesson 3: Quality seems to matter more than quantity

We thought consistency was extremely important for the YouTube algorithm, but later research suggested it wasn’t all that important.

The pivot: We now spend more time on scripting and production to make each video better, and we aim for about two videos a month. That means one video every two weeks, with four weeks of vacation a year for me. This is far more manageable for me, and I generally try to either write a script or shoot/edit one each week. So in any given week, I’m either focused on writing or producing.

Lesson 4: What people want to watch is depressing

Our most popular videos either have partisan appeal or appeal to a victim mindset. On social media, people want their priors confirmed or want to be told that someone else is responsible for their problems.

Pivot: No pivot here. We make interesting economics videos, and we don’t want to be part of the problem. To the extent that we confirm a prior or play into a victim mindset, it will be because the research led us there.

Lesson 5: We can make really entertaining, Econ-grounded videos

The small number of people who watch our videos seem to really enjoy them, and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback via email and in person.

Pivot: We’re leaning further into higher quality and more activity. I’m trying to get out of my office and shoot around town as much as possible, while also doing more interviews.

Lesson 6: We could not make a high-quality podcast

We couldn’t quite make a podcast we were proud of. We came close, but ultimately decided to focus on video-making instead.

Pivot: We ended the podcast, although we’re definitely open to restarting it.

We are confident in what we are making, and personally I’ve never had more fun. So we will keep making videos despite the low views.

Here is a preview from our most ambitious video yet, coming in a few weeks:

One of the hard parts about making econ video essays is that you want the video to feel like an exploration of a question: a mystery unraveling rather than a lecture. This one seemed difficult to pull that off, so I decided to embrace the lecture format but add an audience member to push back and land the key takeaways.

More generally, so many things we think of as culture can trace their origins to laws and technology. Every time I research something, I almost always find culture as the dominant explanation in the public consciousness, but there’s a law change plus a technological innovation operating in the background. For instance:

Why did wheeled suitcases take so long?

Cultural explanation: Men were macho and refused wheeled suitcases, insisting on carrying their own bag and their partner’s.

But the real reasons—

Law change: Airline deregulation in the late 1970s meant cheaper tickets, more middle-class fliers, and more solo fliers.

Technology: Polyurethane wheels and telescoping handles.

Why did the IPA rise to dominance in the U.S.?

Cultural explanation: Gen X wanted bolder-flavored beer.

But the real reasons—

Law change: Another deregulation in the late 1970s allowed home brewing, which led to local breweries.

Technology: A new hop variety (Cascade), developed in the 1970s, became the backbone of the American IPA.

Do you have any other examples?

I hope you enjoy the video and my son’s excellent acting (I’m biased).

Recommendations

• Reason on the history of sugar–

• New York Times on junk food – https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/how-the-government-supports-your-junk-food-habit/

• Planet Money on the chicken tax –

Sources:

Fetter, Daniel. “The 20th Century Increase in US Home Ownership: Facts and Hypotheses.” Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective (2012).

Kish, Richard J. “The dominance of the US 30-Year fixed rate Residential Mortgage.” Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education 24.1 (2022): 1-16.

Siegel, Karen R., et al. “Association of higher consumption of foods derived from subsidized commodities with adverse cardiometabolic risk among US adults.” JAMA internal medicine 176.8 (2016): 1124-1132.

Snowden, Kenneth. “A Historiography of Early NBER Housing and Mortgage Research.” Housing and mortgage markets in historical perspective. University of Chicago Press, 2014. 15-36.

Ullman, Darin F. “A difficult road ahead: Fleet fuel economy, footprint-based CAFE compliance, and manufacturer incentives.” Energy Economics 57 (2016): 94-105.

Sounds great! What could go wrong? Well, it turns out it is a pretty standard process and there are already a million videos on the topic.

I thought there’d be huge differences between government agencies and that that would be interesting to explore — there weren’t. I thought there’d be huge differences between countries and the reasons would be interesting — there doesn’t seem to be much there beyond income differences driving different valuations.

So I had to find a new way in.

Enter the rescue mindset.

To be able to name the cognitive bias that infects a lot of decision making was something the video could add to the world. Treating infinitesimal dangers as dire really makes me mad. My kid’s school does active shooter drills. Why? Might as well do lightning strike drills or shark attack drills, as those are equally likely. Why are we scaring 2nd graders over an incredibly low-probability event? Rescue mindset.

I also wanted to bring micromorts into the video because we really need to be smarter about risk. Having a number starts us on that path. If you want to dive into to various risks, this site: https://micromorts.rip/

It was a bear to get all these pieces to work together. If you notice, I basically just go from interesting vignette to interesting vignette (micromort → rescue mindset → Alex Honnold → crash test video), and buoyed it with some great acting by my son.

Shout out to Calvin Tran and his team, who did excellent work on the graphics in this video. He’s done a number of Econ Nerds videos now and always delivers, and he also pushes me script-wise.

Works Cited

Costa, Dora L., and Matthew E. Kahn. “Changes in the Value of Life, 1940–1980.” Journal of risk and Uncertainty 29.2 (2004): 159-180.

Thaler, Richard, and Sherwin Rosen. “The value of saving a life: evidence from the labor market.” Household production and consumption. NBER, 1976. 265-302.

Monty Python kept office hours 9 to 5 writing comedy. In Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, you watch them clock into the studio and noodle around until a song emerges. They didn’t wait for lightning to strike. They showed up, mostly sober, and worked.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You schedule the time. You sit down. You write, or paint, or compose, build, etc.

I’m saying all this because this installment of Econ Nerds was basically assigned to me. My colleague Roman Hardgrave had been pushing for a Mariel Boatlift episode. I finally stopped waiting for an idea on how to do it and just sat down and wrote it.

I’m proud of the result. I think the video adds something useful to the conversation. Most economics coverage fixates on who’s right: Borjas or Card. I wanted to zoom out and appreciate the bigger story: revealed preference, American flexibility and evolving culture.

I hope you like it. And if you’re waiting for inspiration or permission to make something, stop. Sit down and do the work.

Don’t obsess over whether it’s good. If you keep producing, you’ll eventually create something great. Maybe not something on the level of Scarfaceface, but it is better to have made something than nothing.

That’s more than enough.

Works Cited

Bodvarsson, Örn B., Hendrik F. Van den Berg, and Joshua J. Lewer. "Measuring immigration's effects on labor demand: A reexamination of the Mariel Boatlift." Labour Economics 15.4 (2008): 560-574.

Borjas, George J. "The wage impact of the Marielitos: A reappraisal." Ilr Review 70.5 (2017): 1077-1110.

Borjas, George J. We wanted workers: Unraveling the immigration narrative. WW Norton & Company, 2016.

Card, David. "The impact of the Mariel boatlift on the Miami labor market." Ilr Review 43.2 (1990): 245-257.

Lewis, Ethan. How did the Miami labor market absorb the Mariel immigrants?. No. 04-3. Philadelphia, PA: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2004.

Peri, Giovanni, and Vasil Yasenov. "The labor market effects of a refugee wave: Synthetic control method meets the Mariel boatlift." Journal of Human Resources 54.2 (2019): 267-309.

Notes:

• Thanks to the magic of fair use, I managed to wedge as much Monty Python into this video as legally permissible.

• I asked my class of 160 students whether anyone had seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Three hands went up. Three. That’s some awful parenting. If you don’t force your child to watch Monty Python by the age of 12, like… just call CPS on yourself.

• To wit! I forced my child to watch it last weekend. A local theater screened Holy Grail for its 50th anniversary. It sold out. That alone was reassuring. Even better: the movie absolutely holds up. Comedy rarely ages well. And yet, to my right, my 9-year-old son was dying. To my left, a 76-year-old woman seeing it for the first time was cackling just as hard. When you can land jokes across a 67-year age gap 50 years after written, that is some Shakespeare level brilliance.

• The one flaw—still a flaw—is the ending. The 1970s had a real fixation on breaking the fourth wall (see Annie Hall, Blazing Saddles). Personally, I don’t think it ever works. The one exception I’ll grant is the animator’s death in Holy Grail—that gag is worth breaking the fourth wall.

• And yes, props to my son for his acting in the video. Strong performance. Comedic timing to make the Pythons proud. I might be slightly biased.

Recommendations:

• Peter Leeson has produced a string of fascinating papers and books over the years. I’d especially recommend his later work on the real witch trials later:
  https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/128/613/2066/5088765

• His book The Invisible Hook—on the economics of pirates—is also well worth reading (and yes, that’s the book I’m holding in the video). It’s a sharp, data-driven look at how even outlaw societies developed governance mechanisms to solve incentive problems.

I group the components into two buckets. First, boring proxies: punts (I added these too, pretty boring), three-and-outs, and penalties. All three are possession-killers. They stop action, limit information, and drain momentum. Second, excitement proxies: plays of 20+ yards, lead changes, and tie scores.

Big plays create sudden shifts; lead changes and ties capture competitive uncertainty.

Each variable is standardized (so they’re on the same scale) and then summed into a single index. Higher values mean more boring. Applying this to the past 20 Super Bowls produces the table below.

When we sort by the index, yesterday’s game comes in second. It had a high number of punts and three-and-outs, and the game state was pretty non-competitive.

The most boring Super Bowl by a wide margin was Broncos–Panthers (so boring I have zero recollection of it) following the 2015 season: a massive blowout featuring relentless punts, constant penalties, and almost no offensive dynamism. Yesterday’s game wasn’t quite that bad—but it’s firmly in the same family.

Intro to Econ: This year’s Olympic medals are worth more than ever | CNN Business

The value of the metals in an Olympic medal are worth double compared to the Paris Olympics. But most Olympians won’t sell their medals, valuing them much higher than their monetary value.

Externalities and Public Goods: How Tourists Are Already Skirting Rome’s New $2 Fee to Toss a Coin in the Trevi Fountain | People

Rome turned the overcrowded Trevi Fountain into a club good, requiring a 2 euro fee for entry, in an attempt to solve a tragedy of the commons situation and fund expensive maintenance for the landmark. But, tourists unwilling to pay the fee have discovered a new way to make themselves a nuisance–throwing coins into the fountain from outside the barrier.

Elasticity: PepsiCo cutting prices on Doritos and other snacks by up to 15% | Food Dive

PepsiCo is lowering the price of Doritos by 15% in a bid to boost purchases as consumers have switched to store-brand chips, or healthier alternatives. Translation: demand for Doritos is elastic and PepsiCo is betting that lower prices will boost revenues.

Creative Destruction: Minute Maid to discontinue frozen canned juices after 80 years | Food Dive

Buy yourself some frozen OJ before it disappears forever. Improved pasteurization has made frozen OJ obsolete.

Until next week,

Ariel

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Global Developments

Does China Underconsume?

It’s now become an economic truism that China underconsumes: that Chinese households consume far less than those from countries with similar incomes…

Read more

a year ago · 113 likes · 12 comments · Oliver Kim

I read it and immediately thought it was a wonderful example of using research to unravel a genuine mystery. I then combined it with my love of Police Squad / The Naked Gun, and the accompanying video is the result.

In many ways, this is my ideal Econ Nerds video. It combines economic research, curiosity, and humor. We’ll see how it performs, but I’d love to do more in this style—so let us know if you’d like more.

Recommendations:

If you’re looking for similar humor, I recommend Karate P.I.

For background data, here is Our World in Data on Engel curves:
https://ourworldindata.org/engels-law-food-spending

If you want more economics, I strongly recommend the original Oliver Kim post—and honestly, almost anything he writes.

Works Cited:

Kuznets, Simon. “National Income, 1929-1932.” National Income, 1929-1932. NBER, 1934. 1-12.

Nakamura, Emi, Jón Steinsson, and Miao Liu. “Are Chinese growth and inflation too smooth? Evidence from Engel curves.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 8.3 (2016): 113-144.

Martinez, Luis R. “How much should we trust the dictator’s GDP growth estimates?.” Journal of Political Economy 130.10 (2022): 2731-2769.

Monetary Policy: Fed holds key interest rate steady as economic view improves| CNBC

The Fed held rates steady for the first time in 6 months, with Powell expressing confidence in the economy’s growth rate and steady job market. 2 Fed governors dissented, calling for a quarter-point cut.

Trade and Specialization: This is what’s in the India-EU trade deal — and who stands to gain | CNBC

India and the EU have signed a trade deal covering 90% of goods traded between them. The agreement sharply cuts India’s steep tariffs on European vehicles and machinery, while the EU eliminates duties on a wide range of Indian exports — including textiles, leather, seafood, and gems.

Trade and Specialization: GM expects to top Ford in U.S. vehicle production as it faces up to $4 billion in tariff costs | CNBC

GM is looking to boost US assembly and production capacity at plants in Kansas, Tennessee and Michigan as it looks to lower its hefty tariff liabilities and cater to US consumer demand for crossovers and SUVs.

Intro to Econ: The US government doesn’t fund Olympic athletes. So one man is paying them $200,000 each. | MSN (WSJ)

Some countries pay olympic athletes, but not the US. To encourage US athletes to stick with their sports longer, Ross Stevens has funded a program to pay US olympic athletes $200,000 for every games they compete in, but they won’t receive the money until 20 years after they compete!

Oligopoly: Exclusive-Novo’s Wegovy and Ozempic US advertising spend doubles rival Eli Lilly, data shows | Yahoo Finance

After shoring up its supply chain, Novo Nordisk spent nearly $500M on U.S. ads to defend market share against rival Eli Lilly and lower-cost compounded GLP-1 alternatives.

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Monetary Policy: US Supreme Court appears reluctant to let Trump fire Fed’s Lisa Cook | Reuters

SCOTUS heard arguments Wednesday regarding the president’s authority to remove Fed governor Lisa Cook. The justices’ questions indicated concern that unchecked presidential power could upend the Fed’s independence. The case highlights a core political-economy tradeoff: democratic control versus credible commitment to evidence-based monetary policy.

Economic Growth: China’s population falls again as births drop to lowest rate since 1949 communist revolution | AP News

China’s population shrank for the fourth straight year as births hit their lowest level since 1949—even after the government ended the one-child policy and rolled out pro-baby incentives. Officials are now trying everything from cash bonuses to tax breaks for childcare—and even taxing condoms—to reverse the slide. The economic worry: a fast-aging population and shrinking workforce could drag on growth just as China tries to transition to a more consumer-driven economy.

Supply, Demand, and Equilibrium: Watches are in their finest hour | Morning Brew

Demand for secondhand mechanical watches surged during the pandemic, pushing resale prices to a 2022 peak. Since then, the market has cooled, with most models falling back toward more normal price levels—though a handful of in-demand watches still command significant premiums.

Externalities and Public Goods: Weight loss drugs could save airlines money on fuel as Americans slim down | CBS News

GLP-1 side effects now include lighter planes—not just slimmer patients. As passenger weight falls, jets burn less fuel, quietly cutting emissions and costs in a rare case where better health delivers economic and environmental spillovers.

Exchange Rates: Did Iran’s Currency Collapse? Rial Plummets to “0.00” Against Euro While Inflation & Protests Escalate Across the Country | The Sunday Guardian

With inflation above 40%, shrinking GDP, and sanctions cutting off foreign currency, Iranians are fleeing the rial as the streets fill with protestors.

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Until next week,

Ariel

Please watch and yell at me in the comments.

Notes:

• Conveniently, EconGOAT Noah Smith just wrote about zero-sum thinking:
  

  Noahpinion

  Zero-sum economics keeps failing

  The biblical story called the Judgement of Solomon isn’t just meant to illustrate what a wise king Solomon was. It’s also supposed to demonstrate a central principle of economics, and of society in general — that the world isn’t a fixed lump of resources waiting to be divided up. In the story, two women are arguing over which one is the real mother of a…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 584 likes · 135 comments · Noah Smith

  This video was also partly based on his earlier article on elite overproduction:
  

  Noahpinion

  The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis

  I usually do a “state of the nation” post on July 4th, but I was traveling to Japan today, and the wifi didn’t work on the plane, so I’ll have to do it tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought I’d repost a fun post that I wrote back in 2022, about how an excessive boom in higher education, coupled with a saturation in the markets for many humanities-based j…

  Read more

  a year ago · 386 likes · 61 comments · Noah Smith

• One side effect of the Industrial Revolution was that land became less essential for wealth creation. You can view the World Wars as the last gasp of zero-sum, land = prosperity thinking (unfortunately, not all world leaders have gotten the memo). The decline of territorial warfare means we now live in the most peaceful era in human history: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

• It may be hard to believe, but when I was an undergrad, we thought majors were roughly equivalent. We knew engineers and CS majors would get better jobs, but we assumed all the other majors were basically fine. (Side note: this list of “regretted majors” is elite overproduction in action.) Thankfully, it seems undergrads today are better informed.

• Similarly, when I went to graduate school for history, I assumed a PhD would set me up for life. Shout-out to Historian Stephen Haber for literally sitting me down and telling me to get the hell out—that a history PhD was a dead end. I don’t keep in touch with much of my peer group from that program, but of the ones I know, here’s what happened:

  • Never used the degree; works at a family business

  • Tenured professor in a location I would never want to live

  • High school teacher at an elite private school

  • Precarious, grant-funded job

  These aren’t terrible outcomes, but they’re very far from writing cool history books and lecturing to eager undergraduates, which is how we all imagined our lives would turn out.

• I tried to be pretty even-handed in the video, but increasingly I think Zucman is an ideologue and can’t be trusted. For reference, here’s Phil Magness from 2019:
  https://philmagness.com/2019/10/somethings-fishy-with-the-saez-zucman-tax-stats/

  And here’s Jack Salmon more recently:
  

The Unseen and The Unsaid

What Gabriel Zucman Gets Wrong About Venezuela

French economist Gabriel Zucman’s recent Substack post argues that U.S. efforts to unseat Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro cannot be understood without recognizing a long history of “staggering cross-border wealth extraction” from Venezuela to the United States. The centerpiece of the claim is striking: At the peak of the oil era in the 1950s, roughl…

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8 months ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Jack Salmon

CITES for the Video:

On genetics—

Armit, Ian, and David Reich. “The return of the Beaker folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory.” Antiquity 95.384 (2021): 1464-1477.

Narasimhan, Vagheesh M., et al. “The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia.” Science 365.6457 (2019)

Bajić, Vladimir, et al. “Genetic structure and sex‐biased gene flow in the history of southern African populations.” American journal of physical anthropology 167.3 (2018): 656-671.

1 in 4 hunter/gatherers died violent deaths:

Gurven, Michael, and Hillard Kaplan. “Longevity among hunter‐gatherers: a cross‐cultural examination.” Population and Development review 33.2 (2007): 321-365.

Poverty stats:

Wimer, Christopher, et al. “2023 Poverty rates in historical perspective.” Poverty and Social Policy Brief 8.4 (2024): 1-11.

Reverse Dominance hierarchies:

Woodburn, James. “Egalitarian societies.” Man (1982): 431-451.

Lee, Richard Borshay. “Eating christmas in the Kalahari.” 1969,

Main inequality papers by both “teams”:

Piketty, Thomas, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. “Distributional national accounts: methods and estimates for the United States.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133.2 (2018): 553-609.

Auten, Gerald, and David Splinter. “Income inequality in the United States: Using tax data to measure long-term trends.” Journal of Political Economy 132.7 (2024): 2179-2227.

Reality - Expectations= Happiness research:

Ekici, Tufan, and Selda Koydemir. “Income expectations and happiness: Evidence from British panel data.” Applied Research in Quality of Life 11.2 (2016): 539-552.

Downward mobility stat:

The Pew Charitable Trusts. (2012, July). Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations. Economic Mobility Project.