Zoom out to the last month, and you see the same shape three times in miniature — small bumps around June 15, June 21, June 26 — before the line goes vertical on July 3.

Cabo Verde stole our attention, and our Google search behavior tells us we wanted to learn more. Does this attention matter? Attention is not revenue after all. So what, specifically, has to happen between “the world just searched your name” and “money actually shows up” for a 40-year-old goalkeeper or a country of 525,000 people?

As we watched the game on Friday, that question was on our minds. What does Cabo Verde’s recent success on the world stage mean moving forward? How do we turn a viral moment into something sustainable?

SO WHAT IS CABO VERDE, ACTUALLY

Before this month, if I’d asked you to place Cabo Verde on a map, could you have done it? No shame if not; that’s the point. It’s a cluster of ten volcanic islands off the coast of West Africa, a former Portuguese colony that’s been independent since 1975. Roughly 525,000 people live there. More Cabo Verdeans live outside Cabo Verde than inside it. The diaspora, spread mostly across the U.S., Portugal, and France, is larger than the country itself.

Only 10% of its land is arable, and it imports 80–90% of its food; this is not a country that can fall back on natural resources or agriculture. What it has built instead is an economy that depends almost entirely on outside visitors: tourism drives about 25% of GDP directly and closer to 40% of all economic activity when you count everything downstream. In 2024, 1.18 million tourists visited.

The other pillar is remittances: money sent home by Cabo Verdeans living abroad, worth more than 10% of GDP. Because more Cabo Verdeans live outside the country than in it, money flows into the country to help family and friends.

Put those two pillars together and you get an economy that grew 5.3% in 2025, one of the fastest rates in the region, on a base of about $3 billion. For scale, Argentina, the team that eliminated Cabo Verde on Friday, runs a $660 billion economy. GDP per capita sits around $6,000. Poverty has been falling, down to roughly 14.4% in the most recent estimate, and the government’s stated goal is to eliminate extreme poverty by 2026.

Regarding the names, “Cabo Verde” and “Cape Verde” refer to the same country. Cabo Verde is the official Portuguese name (meaning "Green Cape"), while Cape Verde is the anglicized version. The country officially requested that the international community use Cabo Verde in 2013

THE VIRAL GOALKEEPER

Josimar José Évora Dias, known to us as Vozinha, was the star of the game. He should have been named player of the game, but the award went to Messi. His story is being celebrated as an overnight success, but it’s a story about working hard when no one sees you and shining bright when the spotlight finds you.

His Instagram went from about 50,000 followers to more than 20 million after his performance against Spain. Marketing analysts at Apex Marketing estimated he generated roughly $17.7 million in brand value in the first eight days.

Advertising Value Equivalent, or AVE, is a standard marketing metric that asks, “What would it cost a company to buy this much media exposure through paid advertising?” It is not $17.7 million sitting in Vozinha’s bank account. It’s an estimate of what his exposure is worth to someone else if they decide to buy it.

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

We live in the attention economy. Everyone is vying for your time, eyeballs, and interest. But attention alone does not turn into money; there has to be a strategic approach to turning that attention into transactions. Vozinha needs to turn this into a brand that pays him to wear their gear, a sponsor pays for his name in a campaign, and his club renegotiates his contract because he now sells jerseys he didn’t sell in May. Every one of those requires someone on the other side to actually sign something. Until that happens, 20 million followers are only a vanity metric.

CABO VERDE’S CHALLENGE

The country-level version of this question has actually been studied. A 2020 economics paper examined national teams that overperformed expectations in past World Cups — Costa Rica’s 2014 run is the closest comparison to Cabo Verde this year — using panel cointegration regressions to trace the effects on tourist arrivals afterward.

The result: a significant increase in tourist arrivals followed. But it showed up roughly one to two years later, not in the weeks after the tournament.

A search spike reflects curiosity, and curiosity has to travel through trip planning, flight availability, and a tourism board’s marketing campaign before it becomes a booked vacation. None of those steps is automatic. If nobody in Praia spends a marketing budget at the moment, interest reverts to baseline exactly as the 24-hour graph is already starting to show, and two years from now, there’s no bump to measure.

Specifically on foreign direct investment, I want to be honest: I don’t have solid evidence that a single tournament run moves FDI numbers on its own. What the tourism data supports is that sustained demand, if it materializes, can eventually justify hotel and infrastructure investment, but that channel runs through the lag above, not straight from a Google Trends chart to a wire transfer.

There’s a second point worth investigating, and it comes from Usamah Alfarhan, who is a colleague, coauthor, and friend of mine at the Haile College of Business at Northern Kentucky University. He and his co-authors just published a paper examining how digital information affects what tourists actually spend, using survey data from the U.S. and Chinese tourism sectors.

Their finding: when digital platforms shift what travelers know and expect, the additional economic surplus tends to improve the profitability of hotels, platforms, and tour operators through higher prices.

What’s the actual pricing lever doing that work? Usamah has a second paper that names it, and it’s a term worth knowing: third-degree price discrimination. That’s the practice of charging different groups different prices for the same thing, based on what each group is willing and able to pay — the reason a movie ticket costs less for a student than for a working adult in the same seat.

The paper shows tourists can be sorted along two lines: how prosperous their home country is, and how much they personally aspire to the trip. And here’s the part that matters for Cabo Verde: those two things predict how much a traveler will spend, which means a hotel or tour operator that reads them correctly can charge the eager, well-off visitor more than the budget backpacker for the identical room. A viral moment doesn’t just bring more tourists. It brings a wave of high-aspiration ones, people like you and me, who just Googled Cabo Verde and discovered we wanted to go. High-aspiration travelers are exactly the segment a smart operator marks up.

So layer that onto Cabo Verde. Even in the best case, where the tourism board spends the marketing budget and Gholipour’s tourism bump actually shows up in 2027, there’s a second question sitting underneath the first one: whose margins grow when it happens?

The wave of newly curious, high-aspiration travelers is exactly the segment that gets marked up, and a resort chain headquartered in Lisbon captures that markup differently from a family-run guesthouse in Mindelo. More information reaching more travelers doesn’t automatically mean more money staying on the islands. It means more money changing hands, and where it lands after that depends on who owns the property taking the booking and who’s sophisticated enough to price the moment.

DR. A’S TAKE

What I do believe is that Cabo Verde is structurally positioned to convert this into something real, because it already has the tourism infrastructure. Hotels, an airport, and a functioning marketing apparatus that has already attracted tourists. Whether they actually get the tourism bump the research would predict depends entirely on whether their tourism board treats this month as a marketing opportunity worth funding, right now, while the world is still looking. And even if they do, Alfarhan’s research is a reminder not to assume the money automatically benefits the islands themselves — that depends on who owns what gets booked. Vozinha faces the individual version of the same test: he has followers now, but whether this is a career-altering event or just a great month depends on which agent calls him back this week.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS

If you or your organization ever gets an unplanned moment of visibility- the search spike, the mention, the viral post- don’t celebrate the number. Ask immediately: what is the specific action, this week, that turns this into a signed contract, a booked customer, or a committed dollar?

Most organizations seek attention, but they aren’t prepared to act on it when they do receive it.

MBA 600 at Haile College of Business

Dr. Aron Levin (Marketing) and I (Economics) are building a course on exactly this gap between brand, attention, and the economics behind it. Marketing is awareness, and brand is product differentiation. The mistake almost everyone makes with a moment of visibility, whether it’s a viral goalkeeper or a LinkedIn post an algorithm suddenly decides to push, is treating the attention itself as the win. It isn’t. It’s raw material. How do you turn this into a sustained brand and product differentiation?

Most viral moments generate less value than they could because nobody on the other end was ready to convert them into anything.

Inflation Expectations as Oil Prices Increase Again

What Happened

PCE inflation came in at 4.1% year-over-year in May, with core at 3.4%. The bump was mostly airfares and fuel — not a broad-based reacceleration. Inflationary pressure seemed to ease when the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Then, days after the report, oil prices started climbing again amid fears that a breakdown in Iran-US talks could disrupt supply from the Middle East. As of Wednesday morning, Brent futures rose 33 cents, or 0.45 percent, to $73.28 a barrel at 06:39 a.m. Saudi time, while US West Texas Intermediate crude climbed 34 cents, or 0.49 percent, to $69.84 a barrel.

The Economics

As we have said, the Federal Reserve can’t fix this inflationary problem. This is a risk premium, not a demand story. Oil traders aren’t pricing in more barrels getting used; they’re pricing in fewer barrels being available. That distinction matters because a demand-driven price increase tells you the economy is heating up. An increase in the risk premium signals that geopolitics is acting like a tax on all of us, increasing our costs without any associated growth.

The Supreme Court Just Ruled Two Different Ways on the Same Question — and Nobody’s Talking About It

What Happened

In the same term, the Supreme Court handed down three rulings that all touch the same underlying question — how much power does a president have to override an institution’s independence — and answered it three different ways.

First, in a 6-3 decision, the Court struck down Trump’s executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship, upholding 150 years of precedent. The Constitution won in this fight.

Then, on Monday, the Court split its logic. In a 5-4 ruling, it sided with Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump had tried to fire in August 2025. Fed governors serve 14-year terms and can only be removed for cause, and the Court preserved that protection, for now. Cook’s term runs through 2038. Financial experts called it a win for consumers and the broader economy, since a Fed that can be fired at will is a Fed that can be pressured at will.

But in a companion ruling the same day, the Court went the other direction. It gave the president the power to fire members of other independent federal commissions — the FTC and, by extension, bodies like the SEC and the CFTC. These are agencies that have functioned for decades as independent, bipartisan regulators with consumer protection mandates, deliberately insulated from being an extension of whoever happens to be in the White House.

The Economics

Here’s the mechanism most coverage is missing: markets and businesses don’t price in what a rule says. They price in how confident they are that the rule will hold. Economists call this regime uncertainty. It’s the cost of not knowing which version of the rules you’re operating under. Here at Decode Econ, we strongly believe in the rule of law and its importance to a functioning economy.

The Fed ruling reduces that uncertainty. Businesses, investors, and foreign governments can still treat U.S. monetary policy as insulated from short-term political pressure; that’s what allows a 10-year bond to be priced without a political risk premium baked in.

The FTC ruling does the opposite. If the agency enforcing antitrust law, or the SEC deciding what counts as securities fraud, or the CFTC regulating derivatives can now flip its priorities every time the White House changes hands, every business operating under those rules has to build “regulatory whiplash” into its planning. Not because they know the rules will change but because they can no longer assume they won’t.

The Court didn’t rule against independence. It ruled against independence selectively — protecting it for the institution most closely tied to interest rates and inflation, and removing it for the institutions most closely tied to enforcement and competition. Two branches of the same tree.

Dr. A’s Take

Most coverage of this frames it as “Trump wins one, loses one.” That framing misses the actual economic consequence, which isn’t about who won. It’s that the predictability of independent agencies just became conditional. A rule that can be selectively applied isn’t really a rule in the economic sense; it’s a signal that the next fight over the next agency is still live. Businesses don’t get to relax just because the Fed held. They now have to ask, agency by agency, whether this one is protected or exposed.

A more important consequence of the current Supreme Court is that it has become a partisan body, voting along party lines most of the time. This, in itself, has consequences for the long-run stability of the U.S. economy. Remember, if rules can change frequently, you don’t have rules.

The throughline between these two stories is that risk premiums exist; most countries face them because of a lack of institutional stability. The U.S., through self-induced actions, is introducing more risk. Higher risk means higher interest rates in the long run.

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A Note From the Team

Our latest podcast has found traction in Oman — thanks to all our newest listeners; welcome to Decode Econ! If you haven’t listened to the latest episode yet, here’s the link:

We’re taking a couple of weeks off to prepare for the new academic year. is working on new course prep and AACSB accreditation reports; and are developing a new Instagram strategy; is building our podcast guest list; and Ben is developing our LinkedIn communication strategy. To keep up with the behind-the-scenes, make sure to follow Decode Econ on Instagram and Dr. A’s personal account, @EconwithDrA. We will continue to post there because the economy never stops!

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After the 2008 financial crisis, we spent 15 years telling people that the average American doesn’t understand personal finance. We weren’t wrong. But the lesson that we taught didn’t focus on understanding your options; it was to save every dollar, distrust Social Security, and never forgot a Roth IRA. Gen Z is doing just that.

“Gen Z isn’t saving optimally for the future. They’re responding to fears that they won’t have one.”

During this week’s podcast, we also discussed Oman’s budget and strategy, and Alan Greenspan’s legacy. We ended the podcast with an audience question from Claire.

Thank you for sharing your questions; it allows us to weave you all into the podcast. If you have more, leave them in the comments.

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Is Gen Z saving too much, too early? The opportunity cost nobody talks about

• 11:41 — The Roth IRA deep dive: tax advantages, income limits, and why personal finance is personal

• 13:30 — The Oman case study: logistics diversification, Dutch disease, and the easy dollar problem

• 23:35 — Alan Greenspan: moral hazard, irrational exuberance, and the AI parallel

• 32:30 — Audience question

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On Wednesday, we covered Gen Z’s surge into Roth IRAs. The numbers are real and striking. Today, we go deeper. Why is this happening now? What does it actually mean for retirement security in this country? And what should we do next?

This is a paid subscriber post. Thank you for making it possible.

Gen Z is now the leading contributor to IRA accounts in America. Not millennials, not Gen X, but the youngest generation. The generation that came of age during a pandemic, graduated into a brutal housing market, and watched the cost of everything outrun their paychecks- they’re saving for retirement at a rate no generation has matched at their age.

According to Fidelity data, Gen Z accounts for 34% of total IRA contributions so far this year. The share of IRA owners under 30 has nearly doubled since 2016, from 5% to 9.5%. Financial literacy advocates are calling it a win. They might be right. But the story underneath that number is more complicated and more urgent than the celebration suggests.

It sounds straightforward: financial literacy education is working. We taught young people about Roth IRAs, compound interest, and the magic of starting early. It is starting to pay off because Gen Z is listening. That narrative is not wrong, but it’s just incomplete. Because some of what’s driving Gen Z into retirement accounts isn’t confidence; it’s fear.

The Decode — What Is Actually Going On

The financial literacy effect is real. The 2008 financial crisis cracked something open in American public policy. When millions of people signed mortgage contracts they didn’t understand, and the economy nearly collapsed as a result, policymakers and educators reached a shared conclusion: we need to teach people how money works.

What followed was a sustained push to get financial literacy into high school classrooms. I was a big player in that movement. I worked with policymakers, educators, and organizations to help advocate for improved financial literacy.

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Gen Z Is Betting on the Future — And the Math Might Be Right

What Happened

Gen Z now accounts for 34% of IRA contributions so far this year, according to Fidelity data, and the share of IRA owners under 30 has nearly doubled since 2016. These aren’t trust fund kids parking windfalls; this is a generation that watched their parents navigate the 2008 crash, deciding early that waiting isn’t a strategy.

This is a shift, and it is worth discussing. More on this in Friday's post to our paid subscribers.

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The Economics of Roth IRAs

A Roth IRA is a tax-timing trade: you pay taxes on contributions now in exchange for tax-free growth later. The bet is that your future tax rate will be higher than your current one, which usually pays off most for young, lower-income earners who are almost certainly near the bottom of their lifetime earnings curve.

The opportunity cost is real (that money can’t be easily accessed before retirement without penalties), but compound growth over a 40-year horizon makes early contributions disproportionately valuable.

If you are looking to invest in a Roth IRA, here is what you need to know for 2026:

The contribution limit is $7,500 if you are under 50, and $8,600 if you are 50 or older. The extra $1,100 is a catch-up contribution designed for people who started late. You can make the full contribution if your Modified Adjusted Gross Income is under $153,000 (single) or $242,000 (married filing jointly). Above those thresholds, your contribution limit phases out and disappears entirely at $168,000 (single) or $252,000 (joint).

Watch out for this:

It turns out that a common mistake is opening an IRA account and funding it but never investing the funds. The funds must be invested; otherwise, you are just parking your cash in an IRA account.

Oman Quietly Builds a Second Economy

What Happened

Oman closed 2025 with a budget deficit of roughly $1.2 billion. That is 26% lower than projected, thanks to oil prices running above the $60/barrel assumption the budget was built on. More interesting than the deficit number: the transport and storage sector contributed $2.3 billion to GDP, and the government has set a formal target for logistics to become the country’s second-largest economic sector by 2040.

The Economics of Strategic Development

This is economic diversification as deliberate industrial policy. Oman is using geographic advantage (Oman sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, outside the Strait of Hormuz) to build infrastructure that generates revenue independent of oil prices. Port investment and free trade zones create agglomeration effects: once the infrastructure exists, the activity clusters around it. The goal isn’t to move containers; it’s to make Oman a structural node in global supply chains so that when oil revenue falls, something else holds the economy up.

Alan Greenspan, 1926–2026

What Happened

Alan Greenspan, who served as Federal Reserve Chair from 1987 to 2006, died Sunday at 100. His tenure was the second-longest in Fed history, second to William McChesney Martin. His leadership of the Fed spanned some of the most consequential moments in modern economic life. He presided over the long expansion of the 1990s, responded to crises in real time, and left office three years before a financial crisis that critics argue his regulatory philosophy helped create.

Five moments that defined his tenure:

• Black Monday (1987) — In his second month on the job, the Dow dropped more than 22% in a single day. Greenspan moved immediately to inject liquidity into the financial system. It worked. That response established the template for every Fed crisis intervention that followed.

• The “irrational exuberance” speech (1996) — Greenspan warned publicly that asset prices might be dangerously disconnected from fundamentals. Markets barely blinked. The dot-com bubble kept inflating for four more years, and then it didn’t.

• The dot-com crash (2000–2001) — When the bubble burst, Greenspan cut rates aggressively. The recession was short. The lesson policymakers walked away with was that the Fed could manage the downside of any asset bubble. That would come back to haunt them later on.

• Post-9/11 rate cuts (2001) — Rates fell to historic lows following the attacks. Combined with financial deregulation, cheap money flowed into housing. The seeds of the next crisis were planted here, though few saw it at the time.

• The 2008 reckoning — Greenspan testified before Congress in October 2008 and admitted he had found a “flaw” in his ideology — the belief that financial institutions would self-regulate in their own self-interest. It was a rare public acknowledgment from a central banker that a worldview, not just a policy, had failed.

The Economic Mechanism

The “Greenspan put” — the expectation that the Fed would intervene to support markets during downturns — became one of the most consequential implicit policies in modern financial history. When market participants believe a safety net exists, they price risk differently. They take more of it. Whether that moral hazard contributed to the leverage that made 2008 so destructive is still debated, but the mechanism is clear: expectations about central bank behavior change everyone's behavior. Greenspan personified the argument that central bank credibility is itself a policy tool — and the corollary that it can cut both ways.

I keep coming back to Greenspan’s phrase: irrational exuberance. He said it in 1996, four years before the dot-com bubble burst. He saw something, mentioned it but never did anything about it.

I think we are in a similar moment. The excitement around AI has lifted markets for three years running. That is not inherently bad, but asset price inflation driven by a single technology thesis looks a lot like 1999. And the contagion risk reminds me less of the dot-com crash and more of 2008, when Wall Street’s exposure to mortgage-backed securities was supposed to remain contained to the people holding them. We learned the hard way that our financial system does not contain risk; it distributes it across the market.

Here is what concerns me most: the AI-driven market rally has deepened the K-shaped economy. The top of the wealth and income distribution is where the assets that have appreciated are held. They are also the reason this economy continues to grow. That is a fragile foundation. When the engine of growth is concentrated at the top, the correction, when it comes, does not stay there.

Greenspan found a flaw in his ideology in 2008. I hope we are not building the conditions for someone to say the same thing about ours.

It’s no secret I love teaching economics. What I love even more is watching it click for someone else. That exact second a concept moves from “I don’t get it” to “wait, that explains everything,” that’s what keeps me in education.

It’s also why I went all in on social media. Not as a marketing channel, but as a classroom that never closes, one that reaches undergraduates, graduate students, and business leaders trying to make sense of the economics they’re actually living through, not just the version they got in a textbook.

This week, those two things collide. Decode Econ became less of a podcast and more of an apprenticeship: my research assistants, and , sat across from me, and we talked through what they’d actually learned. The economics, about business, about figuring out how the two connect once you’re out of a classroom. At one point Claire put it simply:

I am learning economics through my work with Decode Econ.

That’s the whole episode in one sentence. That’s experiential learning, and it’s the whole reason I love this community.

Here’s what I’ll admit: I never built Decode Econ to be a teaching tool. I built it to reach people who’d never set foot in one of my classes, to translate economics for a public audience. The classroom was always separate. But watching Claire and Jonathan learn economics by actually doing the work — writing it, researching it, defending their take on it — I realized I’d built a better classroom than the one with a syllabus. Nobody assigned this. They learned it because the work was real and public.

I am a huge believer in the power of building in public.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when teaching and content actually merge into one thing, this episode is it.

More on today’s episode below.

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Our listener, an educational mentor, and previous guest pushed our team in a comment on last week’s podcast:

Thank you for her advice. It is helping encourage my students to make their voice heard. In this week’s episode, you hear more from Claire, and Jack doesn’t hold back in sharing his views.

That is what I love about teaching and sharing publicly: we get more input from the audience.

Here is what we cover this week!

• 00:30 – Welcome Back to Decode Econ (Claire’s 2nd Episode)

• 02:54 – How Levi’s Turned a Logo Ban Into a Viral Moment

• 07:40 – FIFA’s Hydration Breaks: Player Safety or Ad Revenue?

• 10:05 – For-Profit vs. Nonprofit: Why FIFA Still Maximizes Profit

• 14:50 – Kevin Warsh’s First Fed Press Conference

19:25 – Claire on Learning Economics Before Forming Opinions

Show Correction

We mistakenly refer to Alan Greenspan as Alan Greenberg in this show. Here is more on both Alans.

• Alan Courtney "Ace" Greenberg (September 3, 1927 – July 25, 2014) was an American businessman who was an executive at The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc., serving as its CEO from 1978 to 1993 and Chairman of the Board from 1985 to 2001.
  

• Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926- June 22nd 2026) was an American economist who served as the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He worked as a private adviser and provided consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC.

Update: A version of this post went out before the news of Alan Greenspan’s passing. I learned a lot of my central banking philosophy from Greenspan. His line about “irrational exuberance” is etched in my memories. It is a phrase I use often in different contexts.

Irrational Exuberance

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Consider a map of a neighborhood, with a house marked just past the corner of an intersection, and a line leading from that house down the street, heading to the left for a bit, and then picking up a street that forks to the right before ending at its destination. Now, consider another neighborhood map with the exact same house as the starting point. This time, the line leads down the street, past that first intersection and across a busy city street, until it intersects with another busy street. It turns right and continues down another busy city street, moving farther away from the first neighborhood, until it turns left and ends at its destination, in a completely different neighborhood area.

These are simple maps, lines drawn between two points. But what if you knew that these two lines defined a person’s life decades before they were born?

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Meet Antowan Batts

Ah, now I have your attention. Allow me to introduce Antowan Batts, a thirty-something Black author who writes about the intersection of sociopolitical topics and economics.

The first map, the one where the line begins and ends in the same neighborhood, traces the distance from Antowan’s mother’s childhood home to the nearest elementary school, a distance of no more than one-third of a mile one way. The second is the distance his mother had to walk to the elementary school she was allowed to attend being, as Antowan describes, a “colored” child in the South. When he went to walk that same distance, a road closure forced him to walk another five blocks, making his one-way journey two and a half miles one way.

In history and daily life, we learn about the shadow of the past and can never fully conceptualize what those facts mean to us. Growing up, his mother tried to shield Antowan and his brother from the hardships that were byproducts of being treated like an ‘other’ in society, but she did make sure to teach them history.

Segregation With a Bureaucratic Costume

Segregation is oftentimes seen as a benign blip in the American historical record. Separate but equal was treated as an obvious wrong in hindsight, but one that wasn’t too bad… at least, until you educate yourself. Today, we’re going to examine the economic effects of segregation and how policy changes shifted the entire foundation of America.

Antowan grew up in Virginia, the same state that organized legal architecture to make sure children like his mother kept walking those two and half miles each way to school. This wasn’t passive resistance. This was a coordinated, government-backed campaign to strangle integration before it could breathe.

In 1956, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. called it Massive Resistance. The name was honest, at least. Virginia didn’t drag its feet, it built a machine. The Stanley Plan cut state funding to any school that moved to integrate. The logic was simple: if you comply with Brown v. Board, we will defund you into oblivion. The federal government said to integrate. Virginia said watch us.

When that wasn’t enough, they went further. Pupil Placement Boards were established across the state. Race neutral on paper. Designed entirely to deny Black students’ entry to white schools in practice. The board evaluated students on criteria vague enough to justify any outcome they needed. It was segregation with a bureaucratic costume on.

When They Chose to Close the Schools

And then, there was Prince Edward County. In 1959, rather than integrate its schools, Prince Edward County closed them. All of them. For five years. The county funneled money through tuition grants so white families could send their children to newly created private segregation academies. Black children received nothing. No schools. No grants. No alternatives. Just five years of their education erased. Some of those children never recovered academically. Some never returned to school at all.

Think about what that means. A government did not simply fail to provide equal education. It actively dismantled public education rather than share it. When the cost of integration is apparently worth destroying the institution itself, you have told on yourself completely. Separate but equal was never about equality. It was about separation.

Economically Suicidal

Now here is what makes the resistance even more damning in hindsight. It was economically suicidal. Gavin Wright’s Sharing the Prize makes the case with the kind of rigor that doesn’t leave much room for argument. Wright documents what happened to the Southern economy after integration took hold. The short version is that it grew. Significantly. Black workers who had been locked out of skilled labor markets, professional positions, and decent wages entered them. Consumer markets expanded because the people who had been deliberately kept poor now had more money to spend. Business activity increased. The South began its long convergence toward national economic norms, a convergence that had stalled for decades under the weight of the system it was so committed to protecting.

What Wright identifies is not simply that Black Americans benefited, though they did, substantially and measurably. The broader point is that the Southern economy as a whole moved upward. The white families whose elected officials burned down public schools were also living in a region that was economically stunted by those same choices. Segregation was not just a moral catastrophe. It was a costly one. The South paid in capital, in talent, in wages, in growth that never happened because an entire population was deliberately excluded from contributing and consuming at full capacity.

The Prize That Was Always There

Prince Edward County closed its schools for five years. Virginia built a legal apparatus to make sure integration failed. And the economic argument for doing so was always weak. Wright’s data makes it look weaker still. The prize was always there to be shared. The resistance was a choice to refuse it.

That is the piece of the history that rarely makes it into the popular account. Segregation is taught as a moral failure, which it was. It is taught as a legal failure, which it was. What gets less attention is that it was also a profound act of economic self-sabotage, sustained by ideology so deeply embedded that the people enforcing it were willing to absorb real costs to keep it in place.

This Wasn’t Long Ago

This may all seem like a world long ago. But that was Antowan’s mother, and he is only 32. These lines defined a great deal of his life long before he was.

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Levi’s Stadium Has No Name — And Levi’s Loves It

What Happened

FIFA’s “clean venue” rules require host stadiums to strip all non-FIFA sponsor branding during the World Cup. That means Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara is operating as “San Francisco Bay Area Stadium” through July 19. They have “covered” the logo, and the name is gone. Levi’s responded by posting the shrouded batwing on Instagram set to “Nobody’s Gonna Know,” leaning into the erasure rather than fighting it.

The Economics

This is free advertising through exclusion, what economists and internet historians call the Streisand Effect. In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued to remove an aerial photo of her Malibu home from a public database. Before the lawsuit, the photo had been downloaded six times. After the news broke, it went viral with hundreds of thousands of views. The attempt to suppress something made it impossible to ignore. FIFA's restriction created the same dynamic: the covered logo became more visible than the uncovered one would have been, and no paid campaign could have manufactured that success.

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FIFA’s Hydration Breaks Are Not About Hydration

What Happened

Every half of World Cup play now includes a mandatory three-minute hydration break. FIFA frames this as player welfare to protect them from the heat. What it actually does is divide each half into quarters, creating two additional commercial windows per game that didn’t exist before. Players and fans are frustrated. Virgil van Dijk said publicly they’re “not great” for the game.

The Economics

This is producer surplus extraction through rule change. FIFA controls the product entirely — the game, the venues, the broadcast rights. By engineering a break into the flow of play, they’ve introduced new time that can be monetized, at the direct expense of product quality. Fox Sports VP Zac Kenworthy basically said the quiet part out loud: FIFA is “very intrigued in the American market, the way we do sports here.” They’re not wrong that American sports are quartered by design. They’re just pretending that’s not the reason, and fans are hating the lie. Call it what it is, and maybe football fans will forgive you, maybe.

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Cultural Economics: The World Cup Roster Is a Labor Market

What Happened

Of the 26-man USMNT roster, six players were born outside the United States

• Sebastian Berhalter: born in London, UK

• Sergiño Dest: born in Almere, Netherlands

• Gio Reyna: born in Sunderland, UK

• Antonee Robinson: born in Milton Keynes, UK

• Malik Tillman: born in Nuremberg, Germany

• Alejandro Zendejas: born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

There are nine players born in the U.S but are representing different countries

• Born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, Esmir Bajraktarević is representing Bosnia and Herzegovina at the upcoming World Cup

• Jonathan David, born in Brooklyn, New York, is representing Canada.

• Goal Keeper CJ Dos Santos, born in Philadelphia and played for the Union, is representing Cape Verde.

• Duke Lacroix and Derrick Etienne Jr. is representing Haiti; both are U.S. Born.

• Zion Suzuki, born in the U.S. to a Ghanaian father and Japanese mother, is playing for Japan.

• Mohammed Abdulnadi is representing Jordan.

• Obed Vargas and Brian Gutierrez are playing for Mexico.

The Economic Mechanism

Labor mobility and comparative advantage, applied to athletic talent markets. When given the choice, players opt for the national team where their marginal value and probability of playing time are highest. The U.S. benefits from drawing on a global diaspora. Other nations benefit from American-raised players whose development systems produced what their home countries needed. This is a labor market working exactly as economists would predict.

Dr. A’s Take

All three of these stories are really about the same thing: who controls the terms of participation, and who captures the value. FIFA covered the Levi’s logo and accidentally handed them a viral marketing campaign. FIFA adds breaks to a continuous sport to extract advertising revenue while causing fan inconvenience. FIFA benefits from a global labor market that sorts talent to where it is valued most.

FIFA is operating as a near-perfect monopolist. A near-perfect monopolist will always find a way to monetize whatever it didn't previously monetize — branding restrictions, rule changes, even the free movement of players helped increase FIFA's value. I believe the fans will keep watching. That's the thing about monopoly power: you don't have to make the product better. You just have to make sure there's no alternative, and there isn't an alternative to the World Cup.

Meet Claire Maddox.

is a first-year student; she starts her second year in August at the Haile College of Business, and she's my research assistant on a project we’re running this summer on housing affordability policy. This was her first episode, and the in-person setup was actually her idea. We weren’t sure if it would work. We think it did, but we want to hear from you. Tell us in the comments if you want more episodes like this one.

And do us a favor: this was Claire’s first time on the mic. Drop her a comment and welcome her to the show. First episodes are nerve-wracking, a little encouragement goes a long way.

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Here’s what we got into:

The jobs report looked fine on the surface: 170,000 jobs added, unemployment holding at 4.3%. But almost half of those jobs came from hospitality and leisure, and there’s a real chance a lot of that hiring is World Cup-driven and temporary. The number that actually worries me is long-term unemployment: over 2 million people have now been out of work for 26+ weeks. That’s not a “create more jobs” problem anymore; that’s a skills-depreciation problem, and it calls for a completely different policy response.

Then we layered in this week’s inflation data. CPI came in at 4.2%, PPI was close to 6.5%, and 80% of that increase was due to energy prices. Real wages went negative. So if your grocery and gas bills feel like they’re outrunning your paycheck, you’re not imagining it, the math backs you up.

We also got into the economics of the World Cup (hosting it is probably a wash — or a loss — once you account for crowding-out effects), and a conversation about picking a major that I think is one of the more useful things we’ve said on this show: it’s not about whether your degree has “ROI.” It’s about whether you understand the risk profile of the path you’re choosing and budgeting accordingly.

Timestamps

• 0:40 – Welcome back + introducing Claire’s first episode

• 1:34 – Does hosting the World Cup actually pay off?

• 6:27 – The jobs report: 170K looks fine, until you look at long-term unemployment

• 11:48 – Real wages went negative — what that means for your wallet

• 12:34 – Claire’s take: how this economy hits students at the pump and the grocery store

• 13:08 – Rethinking the “is college worth it” question

• 22:22 – Retirement, the FIRE movement, and why doing nothing is harder than it sounds

One more thing:

Next week the Fed meets for the first time under Kevin Warsh. We’ll be watching that press conference closely, see you then.

Thanks for sharing this post with your community. Informed consumers and employees improve market outcomes for all.

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This is a guest post by Dallin Gariety.

Dallin Gariety is an Economics student and Research Fellow at BYU–Idaho whose research focuses on labor market outcomes, educational decision-making, and the ways economic information shapes student choices.

Skepticism toward higher education is growing rapidly. A recent NBC News poll found that 63% of voters believe a four-year degree is no longer worth it, with many believing students graduate with “a large amount of debt” but without “specific job skills.”

That is a brutal number. But I think the conclusion many people draw from it is too broad. College as a whole is not the scam. The bigger problem is that students are often pushed through college without seeing the labor-market risks attached to the specific major they choose.

That distinction matters. A college degree is not one product. It is a bundle of very different pathways that happen to share the same campus, tuition bill, and graduation ceremony.

The Decode

The economic mechanism here is human capital investment under imperfect information. That sounds technical, but the idea is simple: students spend years of time, tuition, and foregone wages preparing for a career before they fully know what their chosen field is likely to return. When that information is missing, students may sort into majors based on identity, family expectations, social pressure, or vague career impressions rather than on a clear picture of earnings, unemployment, and the risk of underemployment.

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This is why the “college is worth it” debate often feels stuck. Broad averages can be true yet unhelpful. A student does not graduate into the average college degree. They graduate into a specific field, with a specific wage profile, a specific unemployment risk, and a specific chance of working in a job that does not fully use the degree.

To make those differences more visible, I grouped college majors using labor market data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Labor Market for Recent College Graduates. Instead of ranking majors by a single number, I used four outcomes: early-career wages, mid-career wages, unemployment, and underemployment. I then used k-means clustering, a method that groups similar observations together, to identify majors with similar labor-market profiles.

The tiers are not moral categories. They do not measure whether a major is meaningful, intellectually serious, or personally fulfilling. They describe labor-market profiles. In my updated analysis,

• Tier 1 majors combine relatively high earnings with relatively low unemployment and underemployment. Across 73 majors in the NY Fed data, this group has an average early-career wage of $76,211, an average mid-career wage of $112,053, a 4.2% unemployment rate, and a 22.9% underemployment rate. Examples include Aerospace Engineering, Construction Services, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Chemical Engineering.

• Tier 2 majors look different. They may not dominate the wage rankings, but they tend to have more stable employment outcomes. Their average early-career wage is $47,471, with unemployment around 1.7% and underemployment around 22.7%. Examples include Special Education, Miscellaneous Physical Sciences, Elementary Education, Miscellaneous Education, and Secondary Education.

• Tier 3 is the group that complicates the usual “high-paying versus low-paying” story. These majors often show mixed profiles: some earnings strength, but also more labor-market mismatch or employment risk. The average mid-career wage is $82,161, but underemployment is 48.3%. Examples include Engineering Technologies, Geography, Biochemistry, Journalism, and Public Policy and Law.

• Tier 4 majors have the weakest labor market profile on average: lower earnings, higher unemployment, and higher underemployment. The average early-career wage is $50,312, while unemployment and underemployment rates are 6.2% and 44.7%, respectively. Examples include Architecture, Advertising and Public Relations, Pharmacy, Commercial Art & Graphic Design, and International Affairs.

The point is not that every student should chase Tier 1. Students should know which kind of risk they are accepting.

Why This Feels Personal

Imagine two students choosing majors during their freshman year. One chooses a field because it sounds practical. Another chooses a field because it feels personally meaningful. Both may be making reasonable decisions. But neither choice is fully informed unless the student understands the labor market environment associated with that field.

This matters because students do not choose majors solely for the money. Interest, identity, values, mentors, family expectations, and the feeling that “this is the kind of person I am” all matter. That is not irrational. But it does mean labor-market data should not be treated as a replacement for personal fit. It should be treated as the missing piece of the decision.

A good advising conversation should not ask, “What are you passionate about?” or say, “Pick the highest-paying major.” It should ask, “Do you understand the tradeoffs this path carries, and are you choosing it on purpose?”

My Take

Higher education increasingly asks students to make six-figure investment decisions while withholding some of the most important labor-market information needed to evaluate risk. I believe colleges should make those tradeoffs far more visible before students are deep into their degree plans. Not because earnings should dominate every academic decision, but because hiding the numbers does not protect students. It simply makes the decision less informed.

In many ways, the market for college majors behaves like any other market. When large numbers of students concentrate in a field faster than labor-market demand grows, wages tend to fall, and underemployment tends to rise. That does not mean the major lacks value. It means students are entering a more crowded market with different risks and rewards.

I think one of the biggest mistakes in higher education is treating all majors as economically interchangeable, even though the data clearly show they are not. Students deserve honest information about earnings, unemployment risk, dependence on graduate school, and career volatility before committing years of their time and tens of thousands of dollars. The goal should not be to push students away from certain fields. The goal should be to help them make decisions with clearer expectations about the trade-offs associated with different paths.

What This Means for You

If you are a student, do not ask only, “What can I do with this major?” Ask, “What usually happens to graduates from this major, and what would I need to do to beat the average?” The second half of that question matters. Internships, location, networking, graduate school, technical skills, and work experience can all change the outcome.

If you are a parent, advisor, or professor, the goal should not be to scare students away from certain fields. The goal should be to make the trade-offs visible early enough for students to respond.

The main thing I want readers to carry with them is this:

What labor-market information do you wish someone had shown you before you chose your major or career path?

Sources and Notes

• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Number of associate’s degrees conferred by degree-granting postsecondary institutions in selected fields of study: Academic years 2011–12 through 2021–22. Condition of Education, U.S. Department of Education.
  https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta

• Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Labor Market Outcomes of College Graduates by Major. Data derived from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (IPUMS), 2024.
  https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market

• Post Editorial Board. Americans are rightly waking up — much of higher education is now a scam. New York Post, November 30, 2025.
  https://nypost.com/2025/11/30/opinion/americans-are-rightly-waking-up-much-of-higher-education-is-now-a-scam/

Methodological Note

Majors are grouped using k-means clustering on standardized early-career wages, mid-career wages, unemployment rates, and underemployment rates. The resulting clusters are ordered into tiers using a composite labor-market score. These tiers describe average labor-market profiles and should not be interpreted as deterministic predictions for individual students.

Appendix: Majors by Labor-Market Tier

The Jobs Report Looks Strong. It Isn't Simple.

The economy added 172,000 jobs in May, and unemployment held at 4.3%, a level strong enough to prompt a sell-off in stocks on the news. The logic: a resilient labor market gives the Fed less reason to cut rates and more reason to focus on inflation, which means rates stay higher for longer. Markets priced that in immediately. But the headline obscures two things worth knowing.

• First, 70,000 of those new jobs, nearly half the monthly gain, came from leisure and hospitality, a sector surging ahead of summer travel and the FIFA World Cup, where wages average well below the economy-wide median and women held more than 80% of the new positions.

• Second, long-term unemployment, people jobless for 27 weeks or more, jumped by 524,000 workers year-over-year and now stands at 2 million people, or 27.5% of all unemployed Americans. Losing a job today means you will have to wait longer till you find a new one. Be prepared and make sure your emergency savings fund is topped off.

The Economics

Two forces running in opposite directions. The headline job number is a flow statistic; it counts who entered employment this month. Long-term unemployment is a stock statistic; it counts those who have been out of work for half a year or more. Both can rise at the same time, and right now they are.

This is labor market bifurcation: employers are hiring, but the path back in for displaced workers is getting longer, not shorter. Meanwhile, wage growth at 3.4% annually is running below inflation, which means the average worker’s paycheck buys less in real terms even as the top-line numbers look healthy. The stock market and the working household are reading two very different reports.

Decode Econ friend wrote more on his Substack

The World Cup Is Already Moving the Jobs Numbers

The 2026 FIFA World Cup — which kicks off tomorrow — is the largest in the tournament’s history. The field expanded from 32 to 48 teams, split into 12 groups, with a new Round of 32 added before the traditional knockout stage. That means 104 total matches across 39 days, with the US hosting 78 of them across 11 cities.

The expanded format also produced a historic result for Arab football: eight Arab national teams qualified, including Jordan’s first-ever appearance and Morocco, which reached the semifinals in 2022. That 70,000-job surge in leisure and hospitality from May’s jobs report? This is a significant part of why.

The Economics

Mega-events generate temporary economic activity — a burst of spending concentrated in hospitality, transportation, and retail, followed by a return to baseline. Independent economists have long warned that projections for mega-events routinely outpace reality by 30 to 40 percent. The extra spending is usually spending that would have occurred elsewhere in the economy; it is not necessarily new spending.

Hotel bookings in many host cities are running below expectations, and international tourism to the United States has softened since 2025. Skyrocketing ticket prices and broader economic uncertainty are raising questions about whether the event will deliver the windfall many cities anticipated — and for international travelers, the current immigration environment has become an additional deterrent. The jobs created ahead of and during the tournament are real. Whether they persist past August is a different question.

According to in the post from this week:

Monday Morning Economist

The World Cup Won't Boost the Economy (Don't Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise)

You’re reading Monday Morning Economist, a free weekly newsletter that explores the economics behind pop culture and current events. You can support the newsletter by sharing it or by becoming a paid subscriber to help it grow…

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a month ago · 85 likes · 16 comments · Jadrian Wooten

The Students Who Got Better at Reading by Doing Puzzles

Economists gave elementary school students in India either math practice or logic puzzles for roughly 20 hours over five months. Both groups improved their reading and language grades by the same amount. The puzzles contained nothing transferable to a language exam, but their grades improved anyway. A separate analysis of international test data found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds fade roughly three times faster during long exams than their wealthier peers, not because they know less at the start, but because they run out of cognitive stamina before the end.

The Economics

This is a human capital story, but one layer deeper than most. Schooling doesn’t just transmit knowledge; it also trains the raw capacity to sustain effortful thinking. Students in lower-income schools spend significantly less time on independent, unassisted cognitive work (roughly 40% less in poor countries and about 10% less in lower-income U.S. households). Less practice means less endurance. The achievement gap that shows up in the second half of a test isn’t a knowledge gap; it’s a stamina gap, and it responds to training the same way a physical muscle does.

Personal Side

I have shared with you that I am seeing a lot of “fading” in higher education. Students start off strong, but cannot maintain their effort throughout the 16-week semester. Persistence and resilience are diminishing. This paper suggests that one reason this might be the case is that our students are not spending enough time on independent, unassisted cognitive work and are therefore unprepared to do so when they arrive in my classes.

Based on: Christina Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon, Heather Schofield, Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 140, Issue 2, May 2025, Pages 943–1002. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae043

Decode Econ friend, Mallika Pung, covers this in more detail in this ECONOMICS UNPACKED at THE GOURMET ECONOMIST. Check out the image summary too!

Economics Unpacked

Dr. A’s Take

I think we are living through a moment where the headline numbers have become almost useless as a guide to what is actually happening. 172,000 jobs added sounds like a healthy economy, until you see that real wages are still falling and 2 million people have been locked out of work for more than six months.

A 48-team World Cup sounds like an economic windfall, until you remember that twelve of the last fourteen World Cups resulted in financial losses for host countries, and the extra spending is mostly spending that would have happened somewhere else in the economy anyway.

Students improving their reading scores sounds like a school success story, until you realize the improvement came from doing puzzles, which means the real deficit was never about content in the first place.

In all three cases, I believe the conventional read leads people to the wrong conclusion — and the cost of that misread falls hardest on the people least equipped to absorb it: the worker whose paycheck buys less than it did last year, the city that borrowed against a tourism boom that may not materialize, the student who keeps getting told they need to learn more when what they actually need is to practice thinking harder for longer.

What It Means for You

If you are evaluating your own financial position right now, do not let the strong headline numbers talk you out of caution. The job market is bifurcated. Getting in is one thing, but if you lose your footing, getting back takes longer than it used to. Top off your emergency fund, because the gap between jobs lost and jobs found is wider than the unemployment rate suggests. And if you have students in your life who are struggling to persist through hard work, the research says the fix is more independent practice, not more instruction — give them harder problems and step back.

On YouTube

On Spotify

This week, Dr. A and Jack work through three data points that don’t look related on the surface:

Those stories share a common thread. The consumer is still spending, but they’re running out of room to do it.

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Plus: Dr. A’s take on higher education’s real problem. It’s not AI. It’s that faculty stopped explaining what they actually do.

• 02:00 — The personal savings rate: what it is, why it matters right now, and why Abdullah has been watching it

• 04:30 — Credit card debt, delinquency rates, and how much longer the consumer can hold this up

• 09:47 — The Wall Street Journal’s childcare piece — and why Abdullah thinks they gave men too much credit

• 12:00 — The real driver: childcare costs are reshaping labor force participation, not culture

• 19:15 — Stock market reality check: what’s holding the positive numbers up, and why Abdullah is personally preparing for Q3/Q4 weakness

• 24:00 — What students should do differently right now (and why office hours are underrated)

From Last Week

I received several requests to remove the paywall from this paid-subscriber post. So here it is if you missed it last week.

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I just got back from the Conference on Teaching and Research in Economics Education (CTREE). It helped facilitate a lot of reflection. One thing I left with is the power of trust and community in education. This is always an important question but especially in the era of AI, where content is easy to find, but someone still needs to bring it to life. My view is that the role of the educator is more important than ever, not less, as some might argue. But the work we do has to be reshaped.

Here is what I want you to keep in mind:

The content is not the job. The content is the vehicle. The job is helping the person sitting across from you grow.

WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN EDUCATION

AI has dramatically reduced the cost of accessing information. A student can ask an AI to explain comparative advantage, get a worked example, and move on. That part of the traditional educator’s job, content delivery, is being commodified fast. What is missing is the teaching. AI is not a good teacher, at least not in its current form.

There’s a difference between access to information and teaching, and we’ve started to confuse them. Information tells you what. Teaching shows you how to think, how to sit with a hard problem, how to know when your answer is wrong, how to build the confidence to try again when it is. A language model can give you the answer. It cannot give you the moment of genuine struggle that makes the answer stick. What I have called productive struggle and what I believe makes up good learning.

The education system spent two decades chasing scale. Bigger classes. More online courses. MOOCs that promised to democratize learning for millions. Completion rates on those courses are still sitting below 10%. The content was fine, most of the time excellent.

But most people didn’t finish because finishing requires more than access to information. It requires someone who notices when you’re stuck. Someone who adjusts. Someone who pushes back when you’re wrong and encourages you when you’re close. That is teaching. And it does not scale the way a video lecture does.

The answer is not more technology. It is a return to quality teaching. Those two things are in tension, and we need to stop pretending they’re not. Do not get me wrong, good teaching can happen in large courses, but it requires a whole lot more work. The institutions that figure out how to provide quality teaching will be the ones still standing when the enrollment cliff hits. The ones that don’t will find that no amount of AI integration saves a model built on the wrong premise.

WHAT EMPLOYERS ARE ACTUALLY ASKING FOR — THE BLS DATA

Here’s where the data gets interesting, and where a lot of educational institutions are looking in the wrong direction.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published its 2024–34 employment projections alongside a new dataset: the top skills required across every major occupation group. I went through all of it. Not one of the top skills is content-focused.

Across all 170 million workers in the U.S. economy, the top three skills employers need are Adaptability, Detail-Oriented, and Interpersonal. Not coding. Not subject-matter expertise. Not technical credentials. The skill that ranks #1 across 22 of 22 major occupation groups- management, healthcare, construction, education, sales, you name it- is Adaptability.

Think about what that means for a moment. The fastest-growing occupations- nurse practitioners, wind turbine technicians, solar installers- all list adaptability and interpersonal skills ahead of technical knowledge. Even computer and mathematical occupations, where you’d expect hard skills to dominate, rank adaptability second, right behind technical computing skills.

The labor market is not asking for more content delivery. It is asking for humans who can navigate uncertainty, read a room, and work with other humans. Those are teachable skills. But they are not taught in a lecture. They are not learned from an AI. They are developed through relationships, through feedback, through being pushed by someone who actually knows you and cares.

The skill employers need most across every sector of the economy — from management to healthcare to construction — is adaptability. You don’t learn that from a textbook. You learn it from someone who challenges you and cares.

This is the argument I wish more deans and provosts were having: if the labor market is pricing human skills above content knowledge, and AI is eating content delivery, what exactly is the justification for large lecture halls, 200-student courses, and transactional faculty relationships? The data doesn’t support that model. The economy doesn’t support it. And increasingly, students aren’t supporting it either; they’re voting with their feet at enrollment time. They are looking for apprenticeships and guides to facilitate their next steps and growth.

Education is getting a bad name because we are refusing to adapt and revisit exactly what we do. We are more than just subject-matter experts; we are educators. Teaching requires more than what we are currently providing.

THE POWER OF COMMUNITY AND TRUST

The future of education relies more on mentorship and trust. Deeper connections. Think coaches and personal trainers, not mass fitness gyms. It requires faculty to invest in their own interpersonal and relationship-building skills. It also means we need to rethink enrollment, class sizes, and most importantly, the business model of education. This will also have implications for equity and who receives quality education. That’s a discussion for another time.

Today, I want to focus on what I mean by quality teaching. I referenced it in a previous post when I discussed the “Commodification of Everything”: education needs to shift back to the local, personalized level.

That means educators need to focus on building trust, a sense of belonging, and connections. This is my area; I have built my career on programs centered on exactly this point. Although I’m an economics professor, I see my role as mentor and coach. When students come to my class for the first time, I think of it as a lifelong relationship, and I invest in it as such. Not every connection will be of that type, but my intentions have to be set. Because intentions impact every other aspect of how you and I show up.

THE OFFICE HOURS PROBLEM

This week, my post on office hours blew up, relatively speaking. I heard from educators and administrators. I was hoping to hear from more students, but some chimed in.

My post covered something I hear often:

If you walk down the halls of Haile College of Business, you know my office hours are loud and packed. Students just hang out; sometimes they linger beyond my scheduled hours, and I have to tell them I need to go.

But it doesn’t start that way. At the beginning of every semester, things start slowly, and I have developed an approach to inviting students that I want to share with you. The method is simple, but you have to genuinely believe that office hours matter and truly want to connect with students. followed my blueprint and improved on it. Her office hours are even better than mine now. Maybe I’ll have her on the podcast to discuss her approach.

Get 50% off for 1 year

Here’s How it Works:

1. Invite them. Repeatedly. The first two weeks, no one shows up. That’s normal — students aren’t used to being genuinely invited. Keep inviting anyway. I am not beyond sounding desperate. Here is an Instagram post where I creatively express that office hours are underutilized. It worked! I am not saying you have to create your own Instagram plea, but I am saying that your initial invites will seem desperate. You have to be ok with that.

2. Get to know them before you try to help them. When the first student walks in, ask three or four questions about them, not about the assignment. People show up where they feel seen. Think connections before content. If a student shows up and your first question is “how can I help you?” you aren’t building a community. You have communicated that this space is transactional. My approach goes something like:

   “ Hey, thanks for stopping by, remind me of your name again”

   “ Come on in, have a seat. How are classes going for you?”

   “Other than my class, do you have a favorite?”

   “What’s your major?”

   “What year are you?”

   “Do you like it here at NKU?”

   “Are you from the area?”

   “What high school did you go to?”

   “Thanks so much for stopping by to see me today, it’s nice to have someone visit office hours. Did you have a specific question or did you want to just hangout?”

   That last question is important because it signals that it is okay to just show up and hang out.

3. Close the loop in class. Mention, without embarrassing anyone, that a student stopped by and how valuable that conversation was. Publicly signal that office hours matter and that they’re not a waste of your time.

The real secret? Students show up when they genuinely believe you care, not that you’re just tolerating them.

Relevance

Beyond office hours, your content needs to be relevant to students. That means investing in learning what they care about. Social media has been useful for me to research what my students are thinking about. But I also just ask them at office hours.

BELONGING AS AN ECONOMIC STRATEGY

Belonging was what I sought as a student. I needed to feel like I belonged in the space and that my surroundings reflected a piece of me. I have a paper on how to create exactly that kind of environment.

But other ways I’ve leaned on recently include community building: an Oreo party for the student in my class who mentioned her birthday was coming up and that she’d never had a chance to celebrate it. Or the student art projects hanging in my office. Or my presence on social media and how students encounter me there. Or the Haile Research Lab and the research assistants who work with me.

All of these efforts started because I wanted to create a space for students, but they ended up helping me more than they did them.

THE ENROLLMENT CLIFF IS COMING — AND IT REQUIRES A DIFFERENT RESPONSE

As we approach the enrollment cliff and as AI takes over answering students’ basic questions, our direct interactions with students may decrease. But the future requires us to be more present, more intentional about connections, and more focused on helping our students grow beyond the content. The content is the vehicle through which we carry their professional growth. If we present ourselves as content providers, we are replaceable.

A couple of months ago, I was on a panel on the future of labor markets in Northern Kentucky. One audience question was: “How do managers adjust to the changing landscape of talent and working with new hires?”

My answer to that question is no different from what I say to faculty:

Genuinely care about the people you serve. Trust is the new currency — build it with the people you care about.

The institutions that survive the enrollment cliff will be the ones that built genuine relational infrastructure while they had the chance. Large class sizes without an investment in relationships result in transactional education and are exactly the wrong investment in this environment. And the students who need this most- first-generation students, students from under-resourced high schools, students working full-time- are precisely the students most likely to be at institutions facing the steepest enrollment pressure. We should be asking, how do we make education personalized? How do we build trust?

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you’re an educator, at any level, in any institution, the AI question isn’t “will it replace me?” It’s “what do I offer that it can’t?” The honest answer is: relationships, judgment, accountability, and the experience of being genuinely invested in. The BLS data backs this up. Focus there.

If you’re a manager or team leader, the same principle applies. The people who feel like someone at work actually sees their potential show up differently. That’s not a morale program; that’s a retention and performance strategy with real economic returns.

If you’re a student, especially one wondering whether your tuition is worth it, ask yourself whether you’re using the human infrastructure you’re paying for. Go to office hours. Not because you have a question. Go because that’s where the actual education lives and opportunities begin.

The Takeaway

The labor market isn’t asking for better content delivery. It’s asking for humans who can adapt, connect, and lead other humans. Those skills aren’t built in a lecture hall. They’re built in relationships. That’s what an educator who’s paying attention is now in the business of building.

YOUR TURN

The Number Everyone Ignored Inside the Inflation Report

The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index, rose 3.8% year-over-year in April, the highest reading since May 2023. That number got all the headlines. But buried two paragraphs down in the same BEA report was something more telling: the personal saving rate fell to 2.6% in April, down from 3.2% in March and 4.3% in January. That’s the number that should be worrying you and me. Higher prices are coming for our savings.

THE ECONOMICS

This is a real income squeeze running headfirst into consumption smoothing. American households have one of two choices, buy less or save less. If you are trying to maintain spending even when real incomes fall, it will cause you to draw down savings or take on debt to bridge the gap. Credit card debt reached $1.25 Trillion, fueled by higher prices and higher interest rates as inflation continues to rise. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that percent of credit cards with balances that are 90 days past due increased to 13.1% up from 12.3% a year earlier.

Real disposable income fell 0.5% in April, the second consecutive monthly decline. People aren’t spending more because they feel good. They’re spending more because gas, groceries, and rent are increasing and to make up, they are having to save less.

Over the past year, the personal savings rate went from 5.5% in April 2025 to 2.6% in April 2026.

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“Dads are Choosing Family”

The chart above tracks labor-force participation for parents aged 25–44 with children under five. Mothers’ line runs upward for 35 years. Since 1990, it has increased from roughly 57% to near 70% today. Fathers’ line is nearly flat the whole time, hovering just under 97%, until COVID, when it fell.

The WSJ article highlights that between 2019 and the period ending in 2024, college-educated fathers boosted time spent on housework and childcare by more than four hours per week while cutting paid work by six hours. That is the first shift in two decades. And researchers are careful about the framing: the labor-force participation rate for fathers held near 94% in 2025, and unemployment for dads with kids under six sat at just 2.8%. These men are choosing to work, but they are working less in favor of more time at home.

While the WSJ is highlighting this as a big shift in the behavior of men, I am not convinced it is as drastic of a change as presented.

Across all couples with young children, women still do 14.8 more hours of unpaid weekly work than men. But that gap narrowed by 3.8 hours between 2019 and 2024 — and among the college-educated, it narrowed by 4.5 hours. It is good to see the allocation of household responsibilities adjust. But it is also a reminder of how much ground there still is to cover.

DR. A’S TAKE

Here’s what I think these two stories are actually telling us together: the savings rate story and the dad story are the same story.

When real incomes fall, every household has to figure out where the slack gets absorbed. Some families absorb it financially, drawing down savings to keep spending stable, which is exactly what the PCE data shows. Other families absorb it through labor reallocation, one partner scaling back paid work to cut what they’d otherwise spend on childcare. That’s part of what the dads data is picking up.

The framing of “dads choosing family” is genuinely true and worth acknowledging. It’s also incomplete. Some of this shift is cultural and deliberate. But some of it is a rational response to childcare costs that have gotten so high, and inflation that has squeezed budgets so hard, that the math on two full-time incomes no longer always works the way it used to. According to this CNBC data, the average annual cost of infant care is $8,756 in Kentucky.

I know families personally who have made the call to have one parent leave the workforce entirely, not because they wanted to, but because the numbers don’t work. Childcare costs that exceed a monthly mortgage payment have a way of making the "both parents work" assumption feel less like a choice. That pressure doesn't stop at the household budget. It shapes where families live, which jobs they take, and. as we've covered here before, whether they have more children at all.

In addition to childcare costs, add to that an increase in transportation costs with increased expectations to return to the office, and work becomes a financial burden. This was part of our discussion on the impact of higher prices on labor markets with

WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU

If your budget feels tighter than the headlines suggest it should, you’re not misreading the data. Roughly 65% of consumers say price increases now exceed their income growth.

THE MONEY MOVE

Check your savings rate, and your savings balance. Your cashflow might be tighter than usual, but If you’ve been dipping into it monthly to cover normal expenses, it’s a signal to revisit your budget.

And if you’re a household weighing whether one partner should scale back paid work, run the actual numbers on childcare and commuting costs before assuming two full incomes automatically wins. In more cases than people expect right now, the math is closer than it looks.

Monday’s Podcast

We appreciate the feedback on the discussion with Dr. If you haven’t had a chance to catch our podcast, you can find us on your favorite platform. Here is the YouTube link.

Consumer sentiment just hit its lowest level since the 1950s — yet Americans are still spending. Inflation is picking up, and your grocery bill is getting out of hand. Economists even have a name for what’s happening: doom spending — spending freely because the future feels too uncertain to save for.

This week on The Weekly Rap, Dr. A and Jack sit down with Dr. Cecilia Cuellar, research analyst at the Hibbs Institute at UT Tyler, to decode the gap between what the data says and what people actually feel.

Chapters

• 2:03 Economic Headlines and Their Impact

• 10:02 The Role of Uncertainty in Economic Decisions

• 14:21 Research at the Hibbs Institute

• 24:40 From Athlete to Economist: Building Resilience

• 36:20 The Importance of Communication in Economics

Resources

• Hibbs Institute at the University of Texas, Tyler

• Decode Econ Podcast

• Dean Network for Economic Education

• Cecilia Cuellar’s Substack and LinkedIn

Cecilia Cuellar

Think of me as a LEGO engineer for applied economics: I like building with data, pressure-testing ideas with econometrics, and chasing interesting questions in labor and AI.

I’m talking about The Econ Games.

You can access the slides here and read my notes below.

The Econ Games Ctree 2026

8.56MB ∙ PDF file

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I wanted to write up my notes here for two reasons. First, many of you have been following the Econ Games since the beginning and deserve to hear the latest update. Second, we have some new data worth sharing.

It started with a horse racing company

Equibase Technology came to us with a problem. Equibase is the official data provider for North American thoroughbred horse racing. They collect GPS data, race performance data, and historical records. They have so much data. Their question was simple on the surface: horse racing is an aging sport. Attendance is declining. Younger audiences aren’t engaging. The sport is struggling to stay relevant in a world of instant data and digital entertainment. Can economics help?

The economic problem.

That’s actually a classic demand-side economics problem. Shrinking consumer base. Shifting preferences. The threat of a market in long-run decline. It’s also an information economics problem. Equibase has rich GPS data that could generate new value, but that value isn’t being captured or communicated effectively.

This is the kind of problem economics is built to solve. Consumer behavior, market structure, data-driven product design, it’s all there. But students almost never see it in economics classrooms. Not in this form. Not messy, open-ended, with real data and a real company waiting for an answer.

That gap is what the Econ Games were built to address.

What are The Econ Games?

The Econ Games is an applied economics competition in which student teams tackle a real-world business or economic challenge posed by an industry partner. They get real data. They work under time constraints. They collaborate in teams, get feedback from mentors, and present their analysis to a panel of industry judges.

This year’s competition had:

• 29 universities participating

• 225+ students competing

• 30+ faculty mentors supporting teams

• The event was held in Lexington, Kentucky, co-hosted with the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics

The Equibase prompt asked students to use GPS race data to develop a data-driven product or tool that delivers meaningful insights beyond traditional racing metrics. Something that could attract and retain new and younger audiences. Students had to analyze both traditional and GPS variables, demonstrate the added value of the data, and apply their solution to an actual upcoming race.

That’s applied microeconomics. In the real world. With real stakes.

The economics education problem underneath all of this

One of the slides is titled “The Econ Ed Problem.” I put it there on purpose, right after the Equibase story, because the two problems are connected.

Students ask:

What can I do with an economics degree?

Employers ask:

Why don’t economics graduates know how to communicate their analysis?

Both questions point to the same gap. We train students to think like economists. Specifically, academically focused economists. We don’t always train them to act like economists in an industry setting. How to take a real problem, work with imperfect data, collaborate across teams, and explain what they found to someone who isn’t an economist.

The Econ Games is a direct attempt to fill that gap.

Darshak Patel and I started this program to bridge exactly that distance between the economics classroom and the business world, where most of our students will eventually go. The program has grown since, but that original problem, the one that made us think something like this was worth building, hasn’t changed.

The data — who participates, and what we measured

Our research team, Darshak, Haley Wilder, and I, collected pre- and post-competition surveys from participants and used a matched sample approach to evaluate the program’s impact. Here’s what the sample looked like:

• Full sample: 184 students

• Matched sample: 137 students

• Average age: 20.7 years

• 45% female, 55% male

• 71% White, 20% Asian, 12% Hispanic, 6% Black

• 76% declared economics majors

• 49% had taken 5 or more economics courses

• 17% had no declared economics major or minor at all

That last number matters. The Econ Games isn’t just for econ majors. It draws students from adjacent disciplines who want real-world problem-solving experience, and the program is intentionally designed to welcome them. It can serve as a path into the major or minor.

What we found.

We measured students across three domains: NACE workplace competencies, what we call RBG (Relevance, Belonging, and Growth Mindset), and research and data skills.

Here are our early findings worth reporting.

Career development got better for everyone.

Across all participants, career development readiness improved significantly after the competition (p = 0.074). For economics majors specifically, career management also showed a meaningful gain (p = 0.083). These are students who came in already committed to economics, and the competition still moved the needle on how prepared they felt for the workforce.

Women showed the biggest gain in critical thinking.

This one stood out. Female participants showed a statistically significant improvement in critical thinking (p = 0.024), the sharpest gain of any group on that measure. The applied, team-based format of the Econ Games may be creating conditions where women are more likely to demonstrate and recognize their analytical capabilities. That’s not a small finding.

Men shifted on belonging and mindset.

Male participants showed significant gains across multiple dimensions of economic identity: comfort participating in economics discussions, sense of belonging in the field, and growth mindset. For men in the matched sample, the fixed-ability mindset item — “my abilities in economics are fixed and cannot improve with effort and practice” — shifted significantly toward a growth orientation (p = 0.006).

The strongest finding of all: communication.

Across every group we analyzed — all students, women, men, and economics majors — the ability to communicate economic ideas and findings to others improved significantly. The full-sample result was significant at the 0.1% level (p = 0.001). This held for women (p = 0.012), men (p = 0.006), and economics majors (p = 0.001).

Communication is the number-one skill employers say economics graduates are missing.

The finding that surprised me most

After the competition, students rated applying economic theory to real-world problems as harder, not easier.

At first glance, that sounds like a failure, but it isn’t.

What it reflects is a more honest self-awareness about the theory-practice gap. Students who participate in the Econ Games encounter a difficult problem. They struggle with imperfect data. They get professional feedback on their analysis. And on the other side of that experience, they have a clearer picture of what they don’t yet know.

That’s what learning looks like. It’s not confidence that everything is easier; it’s an honest realization of the gap between textbook economics and real-world economics. The result was significant across all students (p = 0.021), men (p = 0.003), and economics majors (p = 0.009).

We’re calling it productive struggle, and I think it’s one of the most important things the Econ Games produces.

What this means if you’re an economics educator

The Econ Games is not a substitute for rigorous coursework. The sharpest gains in the data are often among students who are already deeply committed to economics; they reinforce and extend academic preparation, not replace it.

What it does is function as a bridge. It converts theoretical knowledge into applied confidence. It gives students a professional context in which to demonstrate what they know. And it connects them, through industry partners, faculty mentors, and cross-university competition, to a broader community of practice in economics.

If you’re an economist at a university and you’ve ever had a student ask you what they can do with an economics degree, the Econ Games is one answer worth knowing about.

What’s next?

Darshak and I continue to ask how we can increase value to participants and the economics community.

Three areas we are investing in for 2026-2027 are:

1. Regional Econ Games: We have an interest in the Carolinas, Texas, and Utah

2. Graduate School and Program Bridge: We have 200+ students annually seeking their next opportunities. We would love to help them connect to their next offering, whether it is a job, graduate school, or a new program.

3. Faculty Opportunities: We are connected with student-focused educators committed to making economics accessible. We would like to identify new opportunities for them.

Subscribe if you haven’t. Share this if someone you know needs to see it.

And if you’re reading this while at CTREE, stop by session E6.

— Abdullah

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I want to talk about a few things today. The new episode, the team, where we are headed, and Las Vegas.

While editing this week’s episode, I couldn’t help but smile.

Not because of the economics, though the topics are genuinely good this week. But because of .

People development is the thread that runs through everything I do. At the Haile College of Business, I get to watch undergraduate students walk in unsure of themselves and walk out ready to lead. In the , I work with mid-career professionals who are taking a bet on themselves and figuring out who they want to become next. And as an administrator, I take great pride in seeing my team members grow professionally.

I love being an economics professor. The most rewarding moment is when someone finds their footing, gets confident, and starts to own their space. Economics is the vehicle through which I get to mentor and help people grow. In education, we are in the people business, and I love seeing people grow.

That is what I am watching happen with Jack Marx on this podcast, and it does not get old.

I see the same look in Jack that I see in my best students, the moment when the material stops feeling like an assignment and starts feeling like something they actually care about. He is not just showing up to co-host. He is getting curious, pushing back, bringing his own perspective, and growing in real time in front of the microphone. That energy is contagious, and it is making every episode more fun than the last.

Watch this week’s episode and tell me you don’t see it. Whether it was the topics, the K-shaped economy, congressional trading, prediction markets, or the fact that he was hours away from his first trip to New York, something clicked. The energy is there. The curiosity is there. This is what Decode Econ is supposed to feel like.

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The team just got bigger.

You already know , who has been running our Instagram and making our ideas look better than they deserve. And (Jack), whom you are getting to know on a weekly cadence via the podcast.

I want to introduce two new Research Assistants, Ben Warburton and . Both are working on funded research projects at the Haile College of Business. Claire will also be working directly with Decode Econ, so you will start hearing from her here.

Frannie and Claire are now the team behind our Instagram. Follow along to see how they translate the newsletter and podcast into content worth sharing and saving.

This is a real team now. It feels like one. We are having a whole lot of fun.

On standing out in a crowded space.

There are more economic newsletters today than ever before. That is a good thing. More people are paying attention to economics, and that is exactly what we want. But it also means the question of differentiation matters more than it used to.

Here is where I think Decode Econ lives: we are not a markets newsletter. We are not a policy newsletter. We are not trying to predict what the Fed does next quarter.

We are trying to answer a harder question: what does this actually mean for you?

This newsletter is for the person reading on their phone before work, wondering why the economy that looks fine in the headlines feels nothing like the one they are living in. It is for the person in line to board a flight, but they are reading the latest news and want to understand the latest policy shift that might affect their life, but do not know how just yet. It is for the student at the back of an economics class who asks why any of this matters.

We write to make economics relevant. We write FOR you.

Vegas bound.

This week, I am heading to Las Vegas for CTREE, the Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education.

CTREE is where economists who care about how we teach economics gather to share research, swap ideas, and push the field forward. This is the 15th annual conference, organized by the American Economic Association, to be held May 27–29. About 300 economists, educators, and researchers in one place, asking the same question I think about every day: how do we improve economics education?

If you are attending, please reach out. I would love to connect.

If you aren’t, here is the conference program so you can see what you are missing out on.

I will also be attending at the end of July. I hope you make that one. More on that in the future.

Back to the show.

This week, I asked Jack a simple question. Why does Gen Z complain but not show up at the polls?

What he said next surprised me.

I hate nepotism. We’re in a nepotistic government right now. A hundred votes with the Republican party, five against, and the president called him a moron. Word for word. What are we doing?

That frustration is real. And it is connected to everything else we talk about in this episode, the K-shaped economy, prediction markets, and congressional trading. It all comes back to the same thing. Trust. And what happens to an economy when people lose trust.

Watch the full conversation below.

• 00:00 — Welcome & intro

• 02:12 — The K-shaped economy: why the average hides the real story

• 06:50 — Economics has become the third rail, after religion and politics

• 09:15 — Congress is working less. Is that actually the problem?

• 12:04 — Gen Z, voting, and institutional trust

• 15:47 — Congressional stock trading: the incentive structure is broken

• 19:46 — Prediction markets are the new cigarette ads

• 22:40 — Capitalism runs on trust and hope. What happens when both erode?

• 25:44 — Where to find us this week

Links & resources mentioned:

• Washington Post: prediction market ads appear every 4 minutes during sports broadcasts. This is a correction from the episode, where I say every 4 seconds.

• Senate committee meets this week to examine prediction market oversight

• OGE financial disclosures: 3,700+ stock transactions tied to Trump portfolio in Q1 2026

Subscribe to the Decode Econ newsletter: Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — economics decoded without jargon, hype, or partisan framing.

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I haven’t checked the math on this, but according to others, it checks out. To be honest, the post wasn’t fully clear about the strategy, when to buy, and when to sell. However, the post racked up thousands of comments and likes, and the finance bros spent days arguing about it.

If you believe markets are perfectly rational machines that only respond to earnings reports and interest rates, you have a problem, because this post violates that theory.

The rational markets hypothesis, the cornerstone of most mainstream finance, says that stock prices reflect all available information at all times. There is no edge. There is no pattern to exploit. The price is always right.

But here we are, with a claim on X that has intrigued our team. So we did what we love: we searched the academic literature to see whether any peer-reviewed research had examined this phenomenon before.

Here is what we found

Read more

More Evidence of a K-Shaped Economy

The Federal Reserve’s annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) found that 73% of U.S. adults reported being financially stable in 2025 — a number that looks reassuring until you look at who’s pulling that average up and who’s pulling it down.

This is a K-shaped economy in action. At the aggregate level, the numbers hold steady. But beneath that surface, the split is widening. Low-income, young, and Black adults saw meaningful declines in financial well-being. Nearly 50% of adults under 30 now live with a parent, up 12 percentage points since before the pandemic. Rent delinquencies are rising. Credit card balances among people already struggling have jumped more than 35% since 2023. Meanwhile, fraud losses totaling an estimated $100 billion hit hardest among those least able to absorb them — people earning under $50,000 had a median fraud loss of $400, yet 4 in 10 of them couldn’t cover a $100 emergency from savings alone. As economist Gary Hoover of Tulane put it, things are holding steady or improving for those at the top, and declining for those at the bottom.

The fraud number is the most underreported finding in this entire report, and it's worth discussing. Most people associate financial fraud with wealthy targets: stolen investment accounts, wire transfers, and large-scale identity theft. The SHED data tells a different story. Non-credit-card fraud cost U.S. consumers an estimated $100 billion in 2025, with $56 billion borne directly by individuals.

The headline number looks fine, but it obscures a concerning story. When nearly half of young adults can’t afford to live independently, when rent delinquencies are climbing, and when the people most exposed to fraud are also the least able to recover from it, that’s not a stable economy. Gary “Hoov” Hoover is right that this isn’t sustainable. An economy where the bottom half increasingly relies on family support, credit, and deferred expenses to stay afloat is one that builds fragility into its foundation.

What It Means for You: If you’re in the lower half of the income distribution, the data confirms what you’re already feeling, and the trajectory is getting harder, not easier. If you’re doing better than average, that aggregate stability number probably feels more real to you than it does to your neighbors. This is yet another example of the economic gap in our economy. We are experiencing very different economies based on our income.

For up-and-coming researchers, this is a great dataset to work with.

Interactive Maps https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddataviz.htm

The Survey

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2025-supplement-economic-well-being-us-households-202605.pdf

Congress Stopped Showing Up, and The Data Proves It

H/T to Jose Fernandez for sharing two graphs with us over the past week that highlight how little Congress is doing these days.

Here is What Happened

The current Congress is on pace to pass fewer laws than any Congress in modern history. So far, they have passed 75, compared to 700+ during peak legislative sessions in the Carter era. A second chart tells you part of why: the U.S. House worked 173 days in 1975 and just 109 days in 2025, a drop of more than 50 working days over 50 years.

The Economic Mechanism: We aren’t getting political here, but this is a story about an institutional productivity problem with real economic consequences. Congress is the body responsible for authorizing spending, setting tax policy, regulating markets, and responding to economic shocks. When it works less and passes less, the outcome is reliance on the executive branch and regulatory uncertainty, neither of which gives businesses or households the stable policy environment they need to plan. Fewer working days means fewer committee hearings, fewer markups, fewer floor votes. The pipeline for economic legislation slows down.

What People Missed: The working days chart complicates the easy narrative. It’s tempting to blame gridlock purely on polarization and chalk it up to two parties that can’t agree on anything. But you can’t negotiate what you never show up to debate. The House worked 180 days in 1995, a period of genuine partisan conflict between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, and still managed to produce legislation. The current Congress is working 40% fewer days than the peak and producing a fraction of the output. At some point, reduced legislative output stops being a symptom of disagreement and starts being a choice.

Dr. A’s Take: There is an economic cost to legislative paralysis that rarely gets priced in. When Congress doesn’t act, uncertainty fills the vacuum, and you will often hear me say that uncertainty is expensive. When uncertainty increases, businesses defer investment. Households can’t plan around a tax policy that might change by executive order tomorrow. Infrastructure, workforce development, and safety-net programs that require reauthorization quietly deteriorate. The 119th Congress isn’t just historically unproductive. It’s unproductive at a moment when the policy agenda, tariffs, AI regulation, labor market transitions, housing, and prediction/financial markets are unusually consequential. That mismatch should concern anyone watching the economy.

What It Means for You If you’ve felt like Washington isn’t responding to the economic pressures you’re facing, the data backs you up. It’s not just that Congress can’t agree; it’s that Congress is structurally doing less work than it used to, on fewer days, producing fewer laws.

The government you chose is doing less to support you.

More Evidence the Government is Insider Trading

I was interviewed a couple of months ago by a media company that was building its economic stories. They asked me about the economic issues worth digging into and deserve to be heard. At the top of my list were the unregulated prediction markets and the rampant insider trading on these platforms.

In a recent CBS article and a 60 Minutes episode, they reported on a data analytics firm, Bubble Maps, that identified nine anonymous Polymarket accounts that placed bets on U.S. military action against Iran. These bets covered detailed events like the timing of strikes, the removal of Iran’s supreme leader, and a ceasefire announcement, and won 98% of them across more than 80 wagers.

The payout netted over $2.4 million. Separately, $800 million was wagered on oil prices dropping roughly 15 minutes before President Trump publicly posted about progress on a ceasefire with Iran. Federal investigators are now probing the oil trades. Also, an Army master sergeant was indicted last month for allegedly using classified information to bet on a special operations mission, netting over $400,000.

The Economic Mechanism

Prediction markets are supposed to work by aggregating information. Thousands of bettors each contribute a small piece of what they know, producing a price that reflects collective probability. The theory is beautiful; better information improves market outcomes. We are all supposed to win!

But what happens when one party in a transaction has information that others don’t? It increases the likelihood that insiders will trade on nonpublic information. This isn’t market improvement; it is insider trading. In regulated financial markets, insider trading is illegal.

The Polymarket case adds a twist: because every trade is publicly visible on the blockchain, the position is transparent but anonymous in real time. What that means is detection is possible, but prevention is nearly impossible without identity verification. The platform has resisted making the identity of position holders public. There’s also a national security threat here that standard insider trading analysis misses: if these bet positions on war events are public, American military movements eventually become readable in market data before they become public. If Bubble Maps could do it, adversaries can as well.

Dr. A’s Take: Prediction markets are being sold as the next frontier of financial participation, a way for ordinary people to put real money behind what they believe about the world. For those of us working in financial literacy and behavior, we are seeing an increase in young adults and kids participating in prediction markets. The “betting and gambling” wave is impacting the financial futures of the next generation of Americans. Your kids are impacted, and it is worrisome.

In this example, what worries me beyond the individual losses is what this does to institutional trust over time. The moment people realize that someone in a government situation room is using confidential information to make money, they will lose trust in both prediction markets and their government.

Prediction markets are behaving like financial markets and require the same regulation and insider-trading protections.

Here is a 60 Minutes Reel that sparked this take.

Last Wednesday, we reported that the CPI came in at 3.8%. The next day, the BLS reported that the PPI, the prices producers pay, increased by 6% year over year.

What does that mean?

The PPI leads the CPI. What businesses absorb today, consumers pay tomorrow. When producers face higher input costs, they eventually pass them downstream as higher prices. The latest data shows that the transition is already underway.

What makes the current picture more concerning is the breadth of the increase. Higher oil prices may be the primary driver, but energy costs don’t stay contained; they push up the prices of nearly everything that moves, refrigerates, or is manufactured. That’s contagion, not a one-sector story.

Add to that the pressure from tariffs, which economist Brandon Sheridan flagged as still very much in play, and consumers are looking at multiple cost pressures converging at once. Brace accordingly: CPI is likely to accelerate before it slows.

“This is a Choice”

Here’s what Brandon said on the podcast this week that is a good reminder for all: this isn’t something that happened to us. Tariffs are a policy choice. The Iran conflict accelerated it, but the stair-step rise in prices was already underway before that. And because prices move up like a rocket and come down like a feather, sticky on the way down due to long-term contracts, renegotiation cycles, and producer margins, expecting a fast reversal is wishful thinking.

The labor market is holding, but it’s not dynamic. Brandon noted that with reduced immigration, the economy simply needs fewer new jobs to maintain stability, which makes 115,000 monthly additions look better than they probably are. And less immigration over time means fewer entrepreneurs, less innovation, and more anemic growth further down the road.

What does this mean for your wallet right now? Brandon’s personal story said it better than any chart could: airfare that was $300 rose to $1,200 after the news of Iran broke. He took a connecting flight instead of a direct flight. Gas is running 50–60% higher than it was two months ago, which changes the calculus for which jobs are worth commuting to, how hard people push back on return-to-office mandates, and which big purchases get delayed.

It is easy to focus on the data point and forget the human-centered story behind the data.

What is EENE?

One more thing from this episode worth knowing about:

Brandon is a founding member of EENE — the Economic Education Network for Experiments (eene.org). It’s a research collaboration of 200+ economics instructors across institutions — public, private, HBCUs, R1s — running synchronized classroom experiments to actually answer what works in economics education. Most education research is too small to generalize. EENE is trying to fix that with scale and rigor. They have papers under review and their third annual conference coming up after CTREE in Las Vegas this summer. If you teach economics or know someone who does, this is worth knowing about.

Thank you for sharing this post with your community. Informed consumers and employees improve market outcomes for all.

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