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Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl 📈 Profile picture
Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl 📈
@jmhorp
Dad, Economist, and Arkansan. Associate Professor @UCAbusiness, Director @ACRE_UCA, Visiting Scholar @Mercatus, Adjunct Scholar @CatoInstitute. Tweets are mine
3 subscribers
Feb 17 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The stereotype that highly-educated "childless cat ladies" aren't getting married is false. The decline in marriage rates is exclusively among women without college degrees.

(note: this is measured at age 45) Image source: opportunityinsights.org/paper/bachelor…
Feb 12 • 9 tweets • 7 min read
An essay in Politico today makes broad claims about the economic data being "wrong" and asserts that, therefore, voters were correct to think that the economy was performing poorly last year.

Let's go through the data in this 🧵 Image Author uses a measure of "true" unemployment (produced by his organization) to show that about 1/4 of the potential workforce is unemployed, underemployed, or poor.

Problems:

1. this is mostly just an expanded measure of poverty, but using a $25K per worker (rather than household) threshold
2. it also counts as "unemployed" lots of people who aren't even trying to find a job
3. but... even by their own measure, this rate is close to historically low levels! The reading in December 2024 of 23.7% was the second lowest December on record (lowest was 2022 at 23.5%), and is almost 9 percentage points below Dec 1995 (first year of this measure)Image
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Oct 17, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Biden has already pardoned large groups of people convicted of marijuana possession. Twice. First in October 2022, and then to a broader group in December 2023.

Did libertarians miss this?

Source: justice.gov/pardon/preside… x.com/avensobrien/st… It's totally fine to ask Biden to do more, although there are limits to presidential power (and that's a good thing)

But it's very on-brand for libertarians to ask him to "Pardon victimless offenders" when this has already been done. Twice. Very prominently. The Oct 2022 pardon was on A1 in the NY Times and many other papers.
Jul 19, 2024 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
I don't know anything about whether fridges of the past preserved lettuce longer, but let me tell you a few things about 40-year-old fridges in this here thread

Most important point: fridges are *much cheaper* today. How much? Almost 5 times cheaper...

🧵🧊💸 Let's compare apples to apples as much as we can

In 1984, you could buy a 25.7 cu foot side-by-side fridge/freezer with water/ice in the door for $1,359.99

Today, you can get a similar model at Home Depot for $998

That's right... it's cheaper today in *nominal terms*
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Apr 10, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The US has a progressive tax system. By this estimate, the richest Americans pay double the effective overall tax rate of the poorest Americans Image Source:

As always, take all estimates (especially about 2024, which is only 1/4 over) with a grain of salt. But this comprehensive tax calculation is very challenging, so kudos for ITEP for continuing to try!itep.org/who-pays-taxes…
Jan 24, 2024 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Major update to the Generational Wealth chart. Based on the updated SCF data, young people have a lot more wealth than we had previously thought.

Millennials and Gen Z have dramatically more wealth than Gen X had at the same age, and it's growing fast!

economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/01/24/you…
Image Using the 2019 SCF data as the benchmark, wealth of Millennials and Gen Z was dramatically understated in 2023. The 2022 SCF update increased their wealth in 2023 by over 50%
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Nov 12, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The average hourly wage in 1947 was about $1 per hour, meaning it took 12.5 hours to buy these groceries. With 12.5 hours of work at the average wage ($29) today, you would have $350 -- more than enough for 2 weeks of groceries Image The average family of 4 spent $8,000 on groceries in 2022 -- about $150 per week

Source: bls.gov/cex/tables/cal…
Nov 9, 2023 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
This is an important trend, but note that the biggest factor driving the decline in fertility is the drop in the teen birthrate.
Image The decline in teen birth rates after 1990 is important to understand in context. The teen birth rate had been falling for decades after the Baby Boom. But then in the late 1980s, it began to creep back up again. This was seen as a crisis. For example, this Time cover from 1985
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Nov 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
New paper by @PhilWMagness, @MarcusWitcher, and me on the Great Depression as presented in college-level economics and history textbooks. History textbooks not only differ from econ textbooks, they present "causes" that are at odds with current research

economics-finance.org/jefe/issues/JE…
Image Econ textbooks focus on monetary factors and aggregate demand (and to some extent, protectionism) Image
Sep 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
5.5 million views for a completely misleading graph. The rent line isn't inflation adjusted, the income line is inflation adjusted

Can we get a @CommunityNotes on this, please? It's the bread tweet all over again!

May 8, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This very viral video is based on false statistics.
She claims that new college grads were making $33,700 in the early 1980s, and then adjusts this for inflation to $102,000

But the $33,700 was already adjusted for inflation! It was $15,200

dailydot.com/news/college-s… Best I can tell, this is the likely source, or if it isn't her source, it's still a good one. Recent college grads made $15,200 in 1981. Oddly, she picked a dollar figure that was already inflation-adjusted, but in 2006 dollars (?)

nces.ed.gov/programs/diges…
Apr 23, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Have you heard that Fannie and Freddie are changing the fee structure for mortgages? You may have heard that buyers with bad credit are being "subsidized" by those with good credit. That's false. See the column I circled in the table. Better credit still gets lower fees! Image So what's changed? They have *flattened* the fee structure. Here's the old table (still in place through this month), with the same column circled, for 15-20% down.

Fees go up for those with good credit in May, and they go down for those with worse credit Image
Jan 9, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Thousands of what? 16 year-olds dying suddenly? Certainly not. So what is it?

Do they mean heart disease deaths among young Americans? Here's the data for ages 15-39. You'll notice there was an increase (I truncated the y-axis to show detail), but it STARTED IN 2020 There were a lot more heart disease deaths among young Americans AS THE PANDEMIC TOOK OFF, but also importantly BEFORE VACCINES. And in 2020 it plateaus AS WE START VACCINATING PEOPLE

The decline at the end may be due to data lags, but I already dropped the last 3 months of 2022
Jan 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Adjusted for inflation, median family income in the US for families with one earner is 70% greater than the mid-1950s

The inflation adjustment includes the cost of housing and education Source: www2.census.gov/programs-surve…
Aug 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Here's a chart showing the distribution of benefits from student loan forgiveness. Just, kidding, it's the distribution of benefits from the mortgage interest deduction, which costs about $250 billion every 10 years (and will cost more if TCJA isn't extended after 2025) I point this out not to play "gotcha" or say people are hypocrites, but I've never even seen even 1% of the rage directed at student loan forgiveness these past few days directed at the MID. Is that merely because it's done by executive order rather than Congress?
Aug 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Folks, I gotta ask: is this adjusted for inflation?

(Link is gated) I know people will say, "but it's only 20 years ago"

Nominal median family income rose by 65% between 2002 and 2019, and is likely even higher now (it did dip slightly in 2020)
Aug 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
At the time of the Revolution, the US had the broadest franchise in the world. Estimates are that 50-80% of white males could vote, compared with less than 20% in England. States began to quickly experiment with even broader franchises, such as women (NJ) and non-property holders While property holding qualifications for voting were common (following England and other early democracies), after the 13 original states, no new states had strict property-holding requirements, and many of the original states copied those frontier states
May 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
In 1958, a roundtrip first-class ticket from NY to London on Pan Am was $720, over $7,000 today ($522 in coach, or about $5,000 today)

Today on American that flight is about $900 in coach, $3,000 in Business, $6,000 in Flagship Business, and about $9,000 in Flagship First Flagship First is way more decadent than any pictures of flights from the "golden age" you can find:

upgradedpoints.com/travel/airline…
Apr 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
150 days per year comes from Juliet Schor's book, which is lifted from an assumption in a 1986 Gregory Clark working paper. But Clark no longer believes the 150 day estimate, and put it at 250-300 days per year for medieval peasants: https://t.co/6fSebrwdjq
And as many others have pointed out, it was not so great to be a medieval peasant. Average incomes, a measure of how many real goods and services you can purchase, were perhaps 1/30 of what they are today:

https://t.co/d1Si6lH6ldourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-pe…
Feb 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
He just compared inflation adjusted income to nominal housing prices. It's the famous "bread tweet" all over again! If you don't know about the bread tweet, you gotta see it. This thing was super viral. Then read up thread for my debunking of it:
Dec 10, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The tax cuts in Arkansas are being described as "historic" since they are the largest in state history

And indeed that's true, but they are also historic in another sense: the personal income tax rate in 2025 of 4.9% would be the lowest in state history, just below original 5% However, the rate at which the tax applies is very different than in 1929. It's interesting that in *nominal* terms, the top rate in 1929, 1971, and 2025 (roughly, depending on inflation adjustments) applied to taxable incomes of $25,000

But $25K in 1929 was a very high income!