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Jeremy Horpedahl 🥚📉 Profile picture
Jeremy Horpedahl 🥚📉
@jmhorp
Dad, Economist, and Arkansan. Associate Professor @UCAbusiness, Director @ACRE_UCA, Adjunct Scholar @CatoInstitute. Tweets are mine
3 subscribers
Sep 13 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I am no Constitutional law expert, but it seems like many Americans know very little about the 1st Amendment. Public school employees can't be fired for speech they make outside of school (Pickering v. Board of Education) and there is no hate speech exception (Matal v. Tam) Free speech isn't absolute, and there may be edge cases that aren't covered by these and related cases. But in general, public school teachers and professors can't be fired for speech, even hateful speech. But you are free to condemn them: that's your right too!
Aug 30 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Over on Facebook, people are excited about these prices from 1998. For example, one person commented that a 24-pack of Coke is $17 today, compared with $4 in 1998

But people are being fooled by two things here: nominal prices and sale prices Image Let's take sale prices first. In 1998, the sale price at this store was about 17 cents per can. Yes, if you just pay full retail price at $17/case, you are paying 71 cents per can. However, I can easily find a sale today at Target for 40 cents/can (I do need to buy 3 12 packs)Image
Mar 28 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Prediction: the claim that the National Park Service did a $1 billion survey will turn out to be an obvious lie in multiple ways, and we will know this with 24 hours (the entire NPS budget is about $3 billion) Here's what I have been able to find so far:

1. The total amount spent on Federal Consulting Group was $75 million, not $1 billion

2. That's total spending since 2010, not an annual allocation

3. Just $2.3 million involved the National Park Service, again over multiple years: usaspending.gov/search/?hash=5…

4. None of the NPS awards say they are specifically for a survey -- FCG provided multiple consulting services, not just surveys. So any survey they did was likely a part of one of the other awards

I'll keep digging. But yeah, "$1 billion for a survey asking if people like the NPS" is miles from the truth
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
Apr 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
In the late 19th century, 70-80% of elderly men were still in the labor force

ourworldindata.org/economic-growthImage Yes, this includes agriculture:

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
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