Justin Wolfers

Announcing: Platypus Economics — a Substack, YouTube channel, and podcast built around one idea: Economics is one of the most useful, surprising, and weirdly beautiful subjects in the world. It belongs to everyone — not just the people who happened to take it in college. 🧵

It's really quite a thing to have a Secretary of Energy who does not understand, ummm... energy.

Lemme speak with directness and a sense of urgency about our most important economic threats, and what history teaches us about moments like this.

Health care went from 8% of jobs in the 1990s to nearly 16% today. That's a sign we got richer.⁣ ⁣ Once you've got a house, a car, a dishwasher, the next dollar doesn't go to a second oven. It goes to more years of life. https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/revising-my-summer-forecast-down

A friendly reminder that the stuff dominating political discourse isn't always what actually moves the economy https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/revising-my-summer-forecast-down

The August 2026 jobs number was just revised down from +162,000 to +133,000, and this is actually the process working normally. ⁣ ⁣ If every business owner responded to the BLS on time, I'd have even more concern for our economy https://youtu.be/XttGlE71UJs

Sometimes Washington is debating one economy while Americans are living in another.⁣ ⁣ We keep hearing about manufacturing and AI, but almost all recent job growth has been in healthcare https://youtu.be/XttGlE71UJs

One of the most important things I learned from Gary Becker was a small number of economic principles explain more of life than you'd think. That's why I love this field. https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/i-can-save-you-from-a-bad-relationship

The best cure for ideological bias is find someone on the other side and go to lunch with them.⁣ ⁣ Sometimes we disagree about facts. Sometimes we disagree about values. Figuring out which is which is fun part. https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/my-libertarian-friends-were-right

It’s time to mourn the death of cheap money. Let’s not be sad it’s over. Let’s be glad it happened 🥲 newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/whos-afrai...

In 1989 CEOs made 60x the average worker. Today it's 325x. I guess the corporate ladder is getting taller. With @svaneksmith.bsky.social https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/why-is-concentrated-wealth-a-problem

Wage growth is now running below 3%, the slowest in years. So many families are feeling this right now. https://youtu.be/mlZg8gQAUTk

Labor's share of income just hit an all-time low. That means for every dollar a company brings in, workers are taking home smaller and smaller slices. Income keeps shifting to the owners. With @svaneksmith .bsky.social https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/why-is-concentrated-wealth-a-problem