A great episode and worth your time.
11.03.2026 03:43
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A great episode and worth your time.
Great post!
That is an amazing anecdote
Yeah I'm not absolutely confident either but if true seems unwise to have everyone in DoD to start writing their talking points in commercial chatGTP as we (maybe) go to war with Iran
It's a room of economists and it's in Vegas. Think I might go for it
Does DoD have enterprise AI that isn't Claude? That's the only one I know they have.
I'm going to put that slide in a talk I'm giving in a couple of weeks and now that I'm not running a government agency anymore, the question I am wresting with is: can I put this ad in my slide deck
Board games are a great example because all the little game pieces are generally produced in Asia and distribution is through warehouses so you can factor in trades services
When tariffs first hit I built myself a toy example of a board game factory supply chain to to understand how the tariffs would move through prices and when I showed it to the inflation staff to make sure I had the intuition right they were like 'you should put that in a talk' so I did.
For those confused about the lags in rent inflation in the CPI measure vs. commercial data on new leases, it's bc rent increases for existing tenants are generally smaller, so continuers are somewhat sheltered from big rent increases but over time their rents catch up or they move
Sorry - that's from 2015. Faster than the rate of inflation for all goods over that same horizon.
These has been some softening in leases for new apartments recently, but rents have increased 40-50% since 2019 depending on your preferred index
It's really a story of generational inequality in housing affordability - people who have been in their homes for a while are comparatively well off, while young people renting and trying to buy a home are facing high costs. It's also a story of immobility - homeowners face high costs of moving.
Mortgage debt service as a share of income is actually down since the pandemic, as many homeowners locked in low rates.
But if instead you measure housing affordability as, 'how hard is it to afford to buy a home now' housing affordability is historically low. Rents are also much higher...
Another person who is glad you are here. It's been lovely to see finsky grow here recently.
I assume the low response rates post-shutdown are because of the lack of initiation in October. Haven‘t seen any notes on this but maybe I missed something.
Survey initiation for new respondents for the household survey works as follows: respondents first get a letter in the mail saying that they have been selected for the survey. The first interview is done in person. Follow-up interviews are via phone call. So they are not cold calling people.
BLS had a note in the employment situation release that snowstorms across large parts of the country hampered household survey data collection for January and so there was an unusually low response rate
Cool! Thanks for sharing this. Still curious about the non recessionary dip - temp help started to decline when the market was still quite strong but good to confirm occupationally it looks broad based
I cannot tell you how many times I used OEWS data when briefing politicals on the industry level data in the jobs report. People always want to know what kinds of workers are impacted
Temp help is actually largely blue-collar workers these days - mostly manufacturing/construction/warehousing laborers. Haven't been able to figure out if this dip in temp help we've seen is driven by the weakness in manufacturing, warehousing or something else www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may...
One of the highly underrated things about living in Washington, DC is your friends and neighbors often have jobs straight out of an action movie but it's still a job so you'll get anecdotes like 'today I had to learn how to drive a car from the passenger seat in case I was taken hostage'.
We knew when it happened in Argentina because the career people they fired blew the whistle. Because other people collecting similar data saw the official data diverge. Because economic data stopped making sense when you looked at them in combination. If it happens here there will be signs
But it isn't impossible; it has happened in other countries. It happened in Argentina. The government began by firing career statisticians and replacing them w/politicals. Then they started manipulating data collection and statistical methodology and firing any remaining staff who got in their way.
It's quite hard to manipulate data. For the jobs report, data are collected from thousands of individual businesses and households. Field agents collect prices in stores and online. Statistical methods are published online. Commercial data often exists that provide confirmatory evidence of trends.
As I recall, my IDs at the time were: Erica McEntarfer, Erika McEntarfu, and Erika MccEntarfer
My grandfather was into genealogy and claims that what happened here was some German peasants from Meckendorff ('Meckendorffers') boarded a boat to the Americas from Ireland and 'McEntarfer' is what the Irish shipmaster wrote down.
They have not promised. You are right to be wary.
I can only tell you what I know from the good people I worked alongside for 18 months: if the admin does interfere in the data they will let us know. The financial press has their own contacts; it will be a loud whistle if it goes off.
Completely understand.
Public-sector statisticians can withstand a great deal more pressure - delivering bad news to political appointees is part of the job. I was the only one who could be fired via tweet. Interfering further is harder. Not impossible, but harder.
True story: it took me years to get a passport in my late 20s - at the time I did not have a single piece of identification with my name spelled correctly. All different misspellings. I eventually found a sympathetic clerk who was like 'I can see what happened here'.