Principal Economist at @Gallup, posting mostly about markets and wellbeing. Catholic, father, husband. Forthcoming book: https://xitter.twitterapi.xyz/t.co/Ob5KoH6HVx
Washington DC
Joined December 2010
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U.S. teens saw notable declines in self-reported sadness and suicidal ideation from 2021 to 2025.
Relative to 2021, they were also more likely in 2025 to:
1) play sports (49% to 58%)
2) do strength training (45% to 51%)
2) eat fruit >=twice/day (19% to 28%)
3) eat at least one vegetable/day (55% to 63%)
The data are from the Youth Behavioral Risk Survey, which is useful for monitoring aspects of teen health but not very useful for understanding causes, due to design limitations and little contextual information about family and social life.
Among the variables most associated with youth mental health in the survey: parental maltreatment (highly negative), measured as experiences of emotional and/or physical abuse, experiences of bullying (moderately negative) sexual identity (moderately negative if not heterosexual), frequency of not having enough food (moderately negative), and social media usage (small negative).
In other surveys, I find comprehensive measures of parenting and parent-child relationships can explain around 1/3 of the variation in mental health, far more than other constructs.
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Country-level summary data from a new international study on mental health shows a large negative correlation between mental health and GDP per capita (r = -0.52) (via World Bank data) and a large positive correlation with the religiosity of the population (r = 0.54) (via Gallup World Poll data)
Mental health has gotten worse around the world but having a good job, an education, and people around you are still the best chances of doing well.
Much more on our study, Global Mental WEALTH, with over 250 collaborators from 92 countries now at link.springer.com/article/10…
This is such terrific research, with so many implications.
Among those that occur to me:
1) Paraphrasing the authors, NW Europe became rich more than 700 years before European colonial expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Asia; this is consistent with McCloskey's arguments and those of many other scholars that colonialism was not especially important to the economic development of NW Europe.
2) This documentation of extensive international trade networks in NW Europe during this period is another nail in the coffin of Gibbon's work and the "Dark Ages" theory of the post-Roman European world. Rodney Stark had already laid out the counterargument with great clarity, documenting major innnovations in agriculture (the plow and horse-drawn, energy (eg wind and water mills), military (eg stirrup, metallurgy), and moral (eg the spread of representative urban governments; the banning of slavery). This is confirmatory evidence.
3) The period between the fall of the Roman Empire and pre-modern Europe was characterized by rich trade networks & monetary exchanges. This is more more evidence--though none was needed--against the idea that "capitalism" is a coherent concept representing some historic break in the "mode of production."
4) The conquest of Islam had very important effects on the fate of West Asia. As the authors report:
"[R]eal consumption in the heartlands of the Byzantine empire, initially among the highest, gradually collapsed starting in the 7 th century, in part due to the fall of trade in and out of regions newly conquered by the Arabs"
@johannesmboehm and Chaney combine data on half a million ancient coins with a model of trade and money to reconstruct trade and consumption from AD 325 to 950. The estimates show economic activity shifting away from the Mediterranean from the 6th century.
econometricsociety.org/publi…
I love to see this, a superstar professional athlete publicly taking pride in caring for his newborn baby and reinforcing the masculinity of meeting paternal obligations . Now, to provide the full benefits of this enthusiastic commitment, I’d like to see him marry the mother :)
Tyrese Maxey on whether he changes his baby's diaper:
"I'm a big diaper changing guy. I take pride in the speed that I'm able to change a diaper and keep her from crying. So I'm a big diaper change guy, big feed guy, big nap guy. I'm all of it, wake up in the middle of the night, go get it. I do it all man. I try to cherish these moments, cause it feel like already now she trying to crawl and do different things. So she's already moving too fast for me"
When I was young, the “systems” theory of mental health was very appealing to me in its assertion that mental illness was essentially impossible under good societal conditions. It offered a vision for heaven on earth with the right rulers.
I came to realize that mental health is largely caused by a combination of genetic and family circumstances.
The benefit of this view is that it flips power. People don’t need a “great society” or great leaders to be mentally healthy. A good family will do, loving parents, and friends, grounded in deeper beliefs about life’s purpose.
The president of @APA Division 39, Dana Charatan, has responded to @Hartz_PhD's and my essay in the @WSJ exposing the ideological takeover of the APA.
She ignored every substantive point we made and seemed to defend the activist nature of the conference by claiming that "Patients are affected by the systems in which they live and may be particularly vulnerable to the harms those systems produce. Therapists must attend to power dynamics within and beyond the consulting room."
There are many problems with this statement, which appears to be informed by some of the worst zombie ideas in pop psychology, such as the blank slate and the notion that mental health issues are primarily caused by minority stress and the accumulation of trauma.
When you believe that poor mental health and bad behavior are caused by "oppressive systems," treating the patient feels to them like blaming the victim. There's nothing wrong with them. It's society's fault!
The target of therapy is therefore no longer the individual patient, but society itself. Many therapists now seem to view their job as becoming full-time social justice warriors, agitating for a revolution to overthrow the "system(s)" supposedly responsible for causing so much psychological harm.
But even if their diagnosis of the problem were correct (it isn't), therapists simply don't have the ability to carry out the societal upheaval they believe is necessary to help their patients. And so the patients never get any real help.
Instead, they're told things that take them further from reality and are almost guaranteed to make their mental health worse: you're a perpetual victim, family structures are bad, you're a woman if you say you are, etc.
I was really hoping she'd address why the conference had a talk titled "Feel the F--king Fantasy (Redux): Drag, Desire, and Queer Theory at WERK in Psychoanalysis" that concluded with a drag performance that gave attendees 1.75 Continuing Education credits.
The APA Division 39 president is totally clueless in her response. She's not even driving the field off a cliff. It's already airborne and she's somehow still oblivious that she is seconds away from smashing into the jagged rocks.
🔗wsj.com/opinion/a-true-crisi…
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The financial incentives to rent out a home are extremely weak when housing price growth is weak, as is now the case, and they are weakened further by regulations like this that override contractual terms between tenant and landlord.
Every year, thousands of DC residents lose their homes over unpaid rent. Most owe less than $5,000. Going to court is stressful for tenants, expensive for landlords, and slows down the system. We need a better way to resolve rent issues. 🧵⬇️
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Tariffs, the Iran conflict, and the lowering of the Federal Funds Rate have probably each contributed to inflation, which notably increased starting in the Spring (2.8 to 3.4).
These effects, however, seem rather small compared to what happened after the COVID stimulus in March 2021 (1.5 to 7.2)
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The temptation to portray one's identity--in this case agnosticism--as the target of mass discrimination and suppression appears to be so high in some people that even respected scientists will succumb to the slightest hint that it might be true in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary.
New research shows that 80 million Americans are afraid to express religious doubts. The documentary HEATHENS follows five of them when they stopped pretending, paid the price of truth, and rebuilt free, joyful lives. I found the film moving, even shocking.Catch an upcoming screening in SF, LA or NY. With US mid-terms coming up, it's a good time to examine beliefs and values.heathens.movie
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Imagine that you pay $1 bil/year in taxes AND you created a business that employs tens of thousands of people with high wages and benefits AND you created a product that lower prices for huge numbers of people, creating a large consumer surplus, not to mention many large charitable donations.
You might find it at least a bit frustrating to have French academics living in the USA devoting their lives to arguging that you have not contributed your fair share to your country or humanity.
What amazes me is the attitude of so many of the centibillionaires.
A 5% tax will not make any difference to the way they live. Their spending may be extravagant, but it is still much less than their (correctly measured) income.
They know that, as gifted as some of them indeed are, they have benefited from extreme luck (and the help of the state, and, to speak like an economist, monopoly rents).
They know that their effective tax rate is low, relative to what many others pay.
They know that extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, and can lead to political unrest, backlash, or worse.
They must admit that, morally, it is hard to argue for a society in which some become obscenely wealthy, while so many are poor and see their income stagnate.
They typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.
But they are still willing to fight the tax, spending hundreds of millions in California to avoid paying the tax. Why?
They simply think what is theirs is theirs, end of story.
They believe in the slippery slope, and if they do not take a stand on this levy, the government will come back for more.
They hate the state and the notion that their money will be misused?
Or?
The French actually used to value entrepreneurship, a French word meaning one who undertakes
Here's how Victor Hugo describes Jean Valjean's enterprise in 1862:
"In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich, which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better...It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside. . .At first, when they watched his beginnings, the good souls said, “He’s a jolly fellow who means to get rich.” When they saw him enriching the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, “He is an ambitious man.” Hearing of this, the king was so pleased that he was appointed mayor.
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The top four billionaires in Gabriel's database paid $1 Billion per year in total taxes from 2019 to 2026 based on his estimates. Their contribution to CA taxes was about $68 Mil each per year.
The second big issue in their work involves their estimate of how much income tax the top California billionaires (those they assume will leave) actually pay.
They overstate it by a factor of 5.
That’s because they do not have data on the income tax paid by those top billionaires (e.g., Brin and Page).
By contrast, we have direct data on this, from the Securities and Exchange Commission, where we can see compensation, dividends, and stock sales for Page, Brin, and other top billionaires.
gabriel-zucman.eu/files/BSZ2…
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Portraying fraud as a social experiment is quite a creative attempt at a cover story!
We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data and emailed them for comment this morning, ahead of publishing the findings tomorrow. They are trying to cover up their fraud with the "we were doing a social experiment" excuse.
Full story here: blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fif…
Economic modernization is positively associated with many wonderful things, like longevity, how people evaluate their life on a 0-10 scale, & lack of psychological distress, but it is negatively associated with religiosity, hopefulness, gratitude, self-reported virtue adherence, and the quality of relationships with parents, friends, & others.
I'm enjoying the recent trend of scientists debating metaphysics, as if we were back in the early Enlightenment.
I've been reading @FeserEdward's excellent summary and defense of Thomas Acquinas's careful arguments on final causality, essence, and related topics.
Logical discussion about esoteric religious topics and the limits of a mechanistic view of the universe are suddenly extremely relevant to understanding what to make of our friendly AI bots.
Spectacular Nature piece on why AI is not conscious and probably will never be.
Three arguments:
1) Intelligence is not consciousness.
Intelligence is about solving problems. Consciousness is about having subjective experiences.
AlphaFold can solve super difficult problems. By contrast, our brains performs complex operations entirely outside awareness.
Problem-solving and consciousness are two separate things.
2. Biology is essential.
Our brains are alive, down to every cell. Their activity is inseparable from the living tissue that produces it.
The idea that consciousness can be reproduced simply by running the right computations on silicon components who do not fight for their life is a very far fetching and, I would add, almost religious, assumption.
3) The physical organization may matter more than the computation.
According to integrated information theory, consciousness requires specific causal relationships between a system’s physical components.
The computer architectures running today’s AI lack this organization.
The comparison with AlphaFold is particularly revealing:
Almost nobody things AlphaFold is conscious, despite its inner working is very similar to an LLM
Why?
Because it does not speak.
LLMs do speak like us and therefore we fall into an illusion:
Since they speak like us, they must be like us.
But this inference is wrong.
LLMs are just a series of matrix multiplications.
They are not conscious, and they will never be.
*
Paper in the first reply
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Inflation continues to be a problem during Trump's second term, but price growth has come down substantially. Unlike during the Biden, inflation now is primarily driven by energy prices.
In the first century, 31 cities in the Roman Empire had pop>30k. The Christianization of these cities is strongly and almost equally predicted by its having a Jewish diaspora and Hellenic/Greek community.
This is consistent with biblical, historical, and philosophical analysis; sociologist Rodney Stark analyzed the actual data predicting Christianization, measured as 0 if none, 1 if congregation by 180 CE and 2 if 100 CE.
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Stark argues that Christianity spread
most rapidly among urban Hellenized elites, whether Jewish or Gentile, who appreciated its combination of Greco-Roman philosophy with Jewish monotheism, providing a novel universal religion centered on Reason and virtue that, in contrast with many competing ideas, did not reject worldly practicalities or require extreme asceticism.
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61% of U.S. families own stocks. This is reported to be the highest share in the world.
They do so either directly (19% of families, often through brokerage accounts) or indirectly through retirement accounts (55% of families).
Either way, the majority of American families are poised to benefit from stock market growth, whether from AI or other sources.
Source: 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances & Paul Kedrosky on global comparison
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My view is that material progress has been unbelievably positive over decades and centuries, but those gains have generated surprisingly weak and conflicting evidence of psychological benefit, particularly in recent decades.
I see this as a paradox that demands more intellectual attention than it has received. My forthcoming book is an effort to wrestle with it.
The Apostles of Progress have not truly reckoned with the causes or consequences of the profound demoralization unfolding among young adults in our country today:👇🏽
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