NEW: You've probably seen this viral NY Fed chart on unemployment for recent grads by major. It's a table that's spawned a thousand hot takes about higher ed funding, the death of CS, and even immigration.

But look under the hood and you'll find it's deeply misleading. 1/ The data comes from the 2023 ACS.

This table filters for college grads 22-27 with one of 180+ majors. The sample sizes are absolutely tiny.

Using special weights from Census, we can calculate the confidence intervals for these unemployment rates. They're *HUGE*.

2/

Rising unemployment among recent college graduates is not correlated with exposure to AI, per a new @InnovateEconomy paper from @ngoldschlag + @SarahEckha89223.

Recent grads most exposed to AI actually have much *lower* unemployment. @InnovateEconomy @ngoldschlag @SarahEckha89223 More from Nathan and Sarah's piece:

AI is not pushing the most exposed workers out of the labor force.

Devastating takedown of Bidenomics/"the post-neoliberal delusion" from @jasonfurman

He writes:
-ARP was 3x too big
-The manufacturing agenda whiffed on creating jobs and low-end wage growth
-Fear of environmentalists nuked the value of infrastructure $

foreignaffairs.com/united-states/… @jasonfurman Furman points out that manufacturing's employment share continued its long-run decline.

As @ModeledBehavior and I showed in October, neither the promise of benefits for China Shock-ed places nor a revival of unionized manufacturing jobs materialized.
agglomerations.substack.com/p/manufacturin…

New: Demographic collapse has arrived in major American cities.

Between 2020 and 2023, large urban counties' under five population fell 8%. In NYC, it fell 18%. Los Angeles, 14%. Cook County, IL, 15%.

1/x Falling birthrates mean the number of young kids nationwide is falling, but it's falling much more quickly in large urban counties.

Only the exurbs are seeing growth in their under-five population post-pandemic.

2/x

New: Foreign-born workers make up an outsized share of the workforce in industries critical to economic and national security.

You simply cannot separate industrial policy success from skilled immigration reform.

Let’s dive into the numbers. First, foreign-born workers make up 20.3% of the workforce in strategic industries, compared with 18.1% in the rest of the economy.

How do we define strategic? We use @BrookingsMetro’s Advanced Industries classification as a starting point.

brookings.edu/articles/ameri…

NEW: How is Washington D.C. actually doing?

As we near the end of 2023, I take a look at key measures of the city's health, including demographics, crime, transit, schools, and housing.

1/ You can find the link to the full piece here, but I'll highlight its key findings below:

2/

open.substack.com/pub/regions/p/…