Gray Kimbrough
@graykimbrough
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Economist, @UNCG PhD, "serial millennial myth debunker," labor, housing and time use researcher, @AU_SPA adjunct prof. Views are my own and not any employer's.
Silver Spring, MD
Joined December 2007
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One persistent myth about millennials is that they switch jobs more than previous generations. It's not true.
In fact, millennial workers have been less likely to switch employers during the year than members of prior generations were at the same age, especially Baby Boomers.
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We talk about millennials lagging behind in household wealth, but I don't think people fully comprehend how far behind they lag in building up housing wealth in particular.
In 2019Q4 Fed DFA data, the millennial generation holds approximately zero net real estate wealth.
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The Town of Chevy Chase is a place where wealthy white people feel comfortable admitting that they want to live in an urban area with good infrastructure while excluding everyone else.
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Roses are red
Violets are blue
My
#AcademicValentine
submission is attached
In which I determine that my regression discontinuity is you
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The latest White House COVID-19 message to the public:
NEW: 'We need to live with it': White House readies new message for the nation on coronavirus
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I realize that this is a controversial take, but I would like for economics, as a discipline, to elevate more economists who aren't sociopaths.
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Gender gap, doo doo doo-doo doo-doo
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We need to talk about the real reason behind US housing cost inflation.
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I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Montgomery County Planning Board public hearings and then asked it to write a public hearing transcript of its own. Here is the first page.
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Reporters when a piece of economic data could be interpreted as evidence that the economy is overheating:
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Percentage of workers 25 and over who can work from home:
College graduates: 52%
Some college/associate's degree: 24%
High school graduates, no college: 13%
Did not complete high school: 4%
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This proposed Crown Heights development included 1,578 rental units, 789 of them affordable.
Instead, the developer will build 500 market-rate condos and no affordable units, which will be by right and not subject to objections from a botanic garden not open to the public.
We are thrilled to share that
@NYCPlanning
voted unanimously today to reject rezoning at 960 Franklin Ave preventing a massive luxury development whose shadows would have devastated
@brooklynbotanic
and the neighborhood.
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Economists should be advocating for holding conferences in places where all attendees are safe.
But we must also grapple with how support for pushing the judiciary to the right has often come from economists trained and employed at elite institutions in blue states.
Academics talking about boycotting the South as if four of the five monsters who overturned Roe didn’t get their degrees from Harvard and Yale.
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To those seriously claiming that academic economics is hostile to conservative ideology, I guess I have one main question:
Are you high?
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Every time I hear a boomer say, "I worked summers to pay for college, and saved up for two years to buy a house."
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8 of the 10 largest US cities in 1950 lost population and never reached that level again. Detroit and St. Louis now have about 1/3 the population that they did in 1950.
As a country, we invested a ton of resources into dismantling these cities.
Sometimes the most basic facts you look up while you're writing are the most stunning ones. Such as this one: 9 of the 10 largest cities in the country in 1950 had lost population by 1960
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In retrospect, THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES (2012) was a prescient warning for us all. It focuses on Jackie and David Siegel, Floridians who amassed their wealth in the scammy world of timeshare marketing and were building an enormous, incredibly tacky home while facing bankruptcy.
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Support legal abortion and other progressive policies, but live in a solidly blue state?
Keep pushing these priorities at the state and federal level. But in our current system, the most progressive policy is to end exclusionary zoning and restrictions in housing in blue states.
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Many economists get very defensive about non-economists seeing us as privileged ghouls, but here we have a senior University of Chicago economist (who was acting chair of the Trump CEA) writing at Christmastime that we shouldn't be helping children by sending money to parents.
From
@WSJopinion
: You don’t cut poverty by increasing people’s reliance on government. You do it by making them self-reliant, writes Tomas J. Philipson
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It's quite the capstone to a very strange weekend for someone in Chicago to be angrily tweeting a picture of my house.
they made a version more annoying than the original
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Some economists really don't see this as satire, it seems:
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My wife sent me a picture of the Triscuit choices at the grocery store, and I'm wondering how one might explain this to a non-American.
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Speaker Pelosi: "I say to my Republican friends, take back your party. The country needs a big, strong Republican Party. And I say that as a leader in the Democratic Party... Don't have it be a cult of personality on the extreme, extreme, extreme right."
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Did we really need another house price index?
For the first time, U.S. News launches rankings of public elementary and middle schools.
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The Jack Ryan series is absurd escapist drama, made even more ridiculous by changing the lead character's PhD to economics.
But for a few fleeting seconds, it captured the life of a PhD economist pretty well.
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I already respected Krueger, but knowing that he and Card upset James Buchanan this much (with their solid empirical evidence on the minimum wage that he was certain must be wrong) makes me respect him even more.
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The real skills gap is in HR.
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I am excited to announce that my third dissertation chapter has been accepted and is forthcoming in American Economic Review Total Landscaping.
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I will not troll my neighbors by asking if they would like one of these signs, I will not tr
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Graph of the day:
MILLENNIALS 👏 AREN'T 👏 JOB-HOPPING 👏
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Part of why the popular narrative on redlining has been so popular is that it has allowed people to blame an external factor (like HOLC maps) rather than recognizing that a wide range of systems were inherently racist, and many continue to be racist.
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I had no idea that the National Mall used to have tons of trees, but we should definitely bring back something like this. The wooded parts on the edge of the current version are lovely; we shouldn't insist on giving the rest over to shadeless grass.
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Mean weekly hours spent playing games by those ages 15-24 in 2015-2018:
Iowa: 4.76
Rest of US: 4.66
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Remember, this is a doom scrolling marathon, not a doomscrolling sprint.
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It's come to my attention that many people don't understand how PhD microeconomics courses depend on so much high-level math.
So, I present to you how the textbook used in most micro PhD core courses kicks off a discussion of consumer preferences.
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Every time someone waxes nostalgic about a downtown Silver Spring house from a century ago, when I dig up the original deed...
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National health insurance would make labor markets work much more efficiently. It would significantly reduce the risk of switching or quitting jobs, let alone starting up new businesses.
There is a strong capitalist case for national health insurance. Note that rates of entrepreneurship are higher in Scandinavia than in the U.S.
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I haven't seen any of the loud economist critics of student loan forgiveness come out against 529/ESAs, which provide significant subsidies for the college costs of well-off families (and essentially no benefit for poorer families).
As I read fairness/distributional critiques of $10k SL forgiveness, I'm reminded that my family received larger tax savings through our 529/ESAs. Unlike the well-targeted Biden SL forgiveness plan, 529/ESAs dispense almost all $$-benefit to upper-middle-class+affluent families.
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Across the DC area, homeowners are warping progressive language to fight modest reductions in exclusionary restrictions.
This is not a noble fight against corporate developers; it's the wealthy homeowners fighting to keep others from living in their neighborhoods.
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Gen Xers lagged far behind Baby Boomers in the percentage of U.S. household wealth held at similar ages. Millennials lag even further behind.
Boomers continue to hold steady at over 56% of U.S. household wealth.
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I joined the Takoma Park listserv, and it just a phenomenal window into the minds of people who see themselves as progressive, moved to one of the most consistently liberal cities in America, and absolutely detest those who can't afford to buy million-dollar houses.
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I see economists talking about "unskilled" and "low skill" labor, which reminds me that we all learned this terminology, we know what it means, and economists may always intend to use it without judging the value of certain jobs or workers.
But we should stop using these terms.
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Fake progressivism on display in East Silver Spring: one sign in favor of exclusionary zoning, another protesting a general plan (Thrive 2050) that calls for making Montgomery County more welcoming, and a Black Lives Matter sign.
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My son claimed I worked him too hard shoveling an inch of snow.
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Without twitter, I'd just be a random guy with an econ PhD who knows a *lot* about the ATUS, the CPS, and Census data.
With twitter, I'm engaging with journalists at the Washington Post, NPR, Vox, and the BBC. I'm sharing graphs with people all over the world. It's pretty great.
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The above message on Nextdoor, to which the author attached her name, is typical of many apocalyptic and entitled comments from MoCo homeowners, egged on by NIMBY County Executive Marc Elrich.
Another one from a Town of Chevy Chase homeowner paraphrases "First They Came...":
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"Luxury" housing doesn't actually mean anything, since it's just a marketing term used to describe almost all new housing.
This site will have a subsidized building with fully affordable apartments. Or as the sign describes it, "Affordable Luxury Apartments."
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This is an "astonishing" extrapolation based on 31 men ages 18-30 reporting not having had sex in the past year in the General Social Survey in 2018.
Here are the numbers of men 18-30 with valid answers to the relevant GSS question from 1989 to 2018.
According to Washington Post, the number of men under 30 who never have sex has TRIPLED in the last ten years.
That is an astonishing statistic.
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"If you don’t build enough of something, the only people who will get anything are rich people. Reflexively opposing new buildings doesn’t protect neighborhoods from gentrification but actually increases a neighborhood’s exclusivity." --
@JerusalemDemsas
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MILLENNIALS 👏 DON'T 👏 WANT 👏 DRINKS 👏 THEY 👏 WANT 👏 A 👏 PLACE 👏 TO 👏 LIVE 👏
Was talking with a Montgomery County planner today about the county's failure to attract millennials. One solution they suggested? Make it easier to serve bottomless drinks at brunch. Someone should run for county executive on that platform. (You listening
@hansriemer
?)
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The tenured GMU economist has weighed in with some extremely important questions.
I know many of you must have these same thoughts and questions:
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I highly recommend taking budget trips with your kids. My daughter and I rode Greyhound, made meals in our hotel room, took tons of trains and ferries, saw many of the best NYC playgrounds, and had a blast.
I'm so glad we got to do this before she starts kindergarten on Tuesday.
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I'm getting back into my analysis of young adults living with parents (to be presented at ASSA in January), and I'm reminded how dramatically the prevalence of this has increased in recent years.
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I continue to be amazed by how many wealthy people there are in the US who moved to urban areas despite hating cities and/or people and don't just...move somewhere else, but instead stay and complain about cities.
Diane and her late husband moved to the Bay Area over 30 years ago. Since then, she has watched the area change: “It’s overcrowded now. It used to be lovely, you know — you had space, you had no traffic. Here it was absolutely a gorgeous place."
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Which of these causes gentrification?
1) 68 affordable apartments, 4 affordable townhouses, and 7 market-rate townhouses where there was no housing
2) As shown here, a tiny old house replaced with a $1.4 million SFH
The first was attacked; the other had almost no reviews.
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Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and it still wouldn't be enough for a down payment in Robert Reich's neighborhood, since he keeps working to block new housing.
Just a reminder: Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic.
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Inspired by
@andrewvandam
's figure, I calculated the average cumulative real GDP growth 2-10 years after reaching age 18 (approximately graduating from high school) by generation. As he put it: Millennials really are special, or at least unique in the economy they inherited.
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Chetty's most recent 15 articles have an average of 3.6 authors (not to mention the many uncredited RAs), but please tell me more about how the lone genius has transformed everything all on his own.
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@jdcmedlock
Abolish poverty by disbanding every agency capable of calculating poverty statistics
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If you, as a tenured academic, feel the need to publicly trash the work of a grad student: just don't. This is the worst of academic twitter.
If you want to advance the topic, then share your methods and findings and discuss how they could inform others' work.
Don't do this.
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Opponents of new housing often claim that building housing inevitably displaces low-income residents. Montgomery County planners show that one of the few locations where significant amounts of dense housing has been allowed, downtown Silver Spring, has grown without displacement.
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It's insane for anyone to try to take away much from comparing tiny GSS subsamples across years. Limiting to men under 30 with valid values of this variable:
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Let's be clear: millennials are not "job hopping." Young adults aren't even switching jobs at anything close to the levels of those in their age groups before 2001.
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I was reminded yesterday of these excellent
@Stata
cheat sheets, available for free. I hand them out to my students, and I'm sure that all Stata users could find something helpful in the six themed sheets.
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"Paid daily" as a significant benefit might make you wonder what such employers did to make workers doubt that they would be paid in full a couple of weeks later.
Yes I will be that economics reporter tweeting a fast food sign as anecdotal evidence of tightening labor markets.
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We have a major problem here in downtown Silver Spring within walking distance of the Metro: a builder can tear down this small, old house and build this huge single-family home, but can't easily build even a duplex or townhomes on the same lot, let alone an apartment building.
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One thing I only recently realized is that most (if not all) of the big-name economists regularly producing 100-page applied papers are doing approximately none of the empirical work and coding.
Instead, this work is done by RAs who don't get authorship credit on these papers.
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Access to abortion isn't just for our girlfriends and daughters; it's for men too. I say this as someone who decided with a girlfriend to get an abortion in our 20s.
My life--and the lives of my two children I had in my 30s--would be very different if that hadn't been possible.
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Unlike most people,
@Claudia_Sahm
actually read the footnotes in the Chetty, Friedman, and Stepner paper which claims that households with income over $78,000 didn't spend much of the stimulus.
This one's a doozy, since it says that they didn't actually measure household income.
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The author of this piece, who according to public tax records lives in a 16-story condo building within walking distance of the Friendship Heights metro, strongly opposes an 18-story apartment building a block away.
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My new favorite moral panic was one in the early 20th century over ~apartment buildings~
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Quite a day on
#EconTwitter
. I get it, people. You went to Harvard or Yale or some other elite program. Some economists were kind to you. Which is a great thing!
But maybe you're kind of missing the point about what's wrong with the profession with this particular humblebrag.
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When my advisor looked at my dissertation chapter draft during one of our meetings.
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This remains one of my favorite dad jokes, and don't try to tell me it's not a good one.
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Today's jobs report is strong evidence that video games have gotten way too good. That employment continues to lag for women, especially those with young children, proves that video games for mothers have just improved far too much.
We need policy solutions to address this.
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@Econ_Marshall
Houses are also a highly leveraged asset whose owners feel empowered to fight anything that could create any downside risk.
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Incorporating updated Federal Reserve DFAs data, Boomers held a much higher proportion of US household wealth than Gen Xers at similar ages. Millennials continue to hold an even lower percentage of wealth at each age.
Boomers still hold more than half of U.S. household wealth.
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It would have been valuable for Senators to verify that Treasury nominees were not in the thrall of Jeffrey Epstein.
It would be valuable for the Senators to verify that Fed nominees are not in the thrall of MMT.
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A general question was posed to me recently, which I interpreted as: What are the economic realities for young adults, and how have they changed from prior decades?
I of course started making graphs. Here's a thread of those. First: job switching.
Let's be clear: millennials are not "job hopping." Young adults aren't even switching jobs at anything close to the levels of those in their age groups before 2001.
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Anyway, that's all to say that this person living in Takoma Park--one of the American jurisdictions that most consistently and overwhelmingly votes for Democrats--has some interesting views on the possibility of building a few more apartments or townhouses there.
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Today is the five-year anniversary of the day I took this great picture of my daughter before my wife informed me that the outfit was on backwards.
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Last weekend,
@profpauldolan
spoke at the Hay festival in the UK, and some of his remarks were picked up by the BBC, the Guardian, and the Independent, and then repeated dozens of times in outlets across the world, including US reporting from FOX News to local TV stations. 1/
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