Mike Konczal

The most fun I have ever had reading about constrained optimization. 🏅

A nice piece on algorithmic pricing worth your time.

A question I got frequently when I led BLS was why the agency went into stores and didn’t just collect prices online. My answer, “prices online are often different than in the store, so we do both” often surprised people.

The Baby Euler Equation How rational expectations model the fertility gap and clarify the debate over pronatalism.

A post for the real ones, where we stress test our new fertility take and try to understand the politics of pronatalism and the left, by using the baby Bellman equation, baby first-order conditions, and baby envelope theorem to get:

The Baby Euler Equation.
mikekonczal.substack.com/p/the-baby-e...

That is a great comparison point!

Good thread.

Useful reminder from @mtkonczal.bsky.social: What looks like people having a lot fewer children than they did 25 years ago, is really just people having children later. mikekonczal.substack.com/p/the-eldest...

(What if any policy or political significance this has, we will leave for another time.)

The Eldest Millennials Had the Same Fertility as the Youngest Baby Boomers How U.S. fertility is happening later, not less.

New post: The Eldest Millennials Had the Same Fertility as the Youngest Baby Boomers.

I did not have a strong take digging into 'fertility crisis' debates, but was genuinely surprised as how different the data is from the panic of that Discourse.
mikekonczal.substack.com/p/the-eldest...

"Affordability" is a Cause Without an Enemy It's a wonderfully inclusive theme, but tests a basic rule about narrative

New post on affordability, and why a political theme that doesn't name a villain might work. open.substack.com/pub/markschm...

YouTube video by Tomtaroo In The Loop - American Government

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU9M...

"Unitary executive" is really "24 year olds in the West Wing tell everyone in the federal government with experience and knowledge what to do at their jobs."

I bring it up!

We take a detour into how Ann Saphir at Reuters caught that Miran messed up the calculation, using the wrong denominator and forcing the author to step in, beating me to this!

Mass Deportation Will Save Renters Less Than $5 a Month President Trump wants to deport his way to affordability. But immigration can’t explain the housing crisis, and deportation won’t fix it.

The Trump team seems serious about saying mass deportation is a housing affordability strategy. I ran their numbers, and, at best, it'll save renters less than $5 a month.

RealPage's algorithm, for instance, is estimated to cost impacted renters $70.
mikekonczal.substack.com/p/mass-depor...

Mass Deportation Will Save Renters Less Than $5 a Month President Trump wants to deport his way to affordability. But immigration can’t explain the housing crisis, and deportation won’t fix it.

Obviously "mass deportation will lower housing costs" was never a real argument but @mtkonczal.bsky.social crunched the numbers. Get ready to for crimes against humanity to save you a two liter of shasta mikekonczal.substack.com/p/mass-depor...

This Hannah Black essay on indecision and becoming a parent is, unsurprisingly, as good as everyone is saying. feeld.co/magazine/ple...

It would be interesting to understand how exactly he got hooked into MAGA and had his brain melted. I've heard crypto and being triggered by the libs, but whatever it is I don't think it's just opportunistic career advancement in the new GOP.

Assumed then that generics are more reliant on global trade and had lower margins, so trade shocks push through to consumers more. Relevant for 2025!

Note the welfare loss is from substituting into a less preferred good and subsequent rising cost meaning less real consumption.

In 2024 (and now apparently) there was an interesting debate over "cheapflation." A study found the price of generic-brand food increased faster than premium, as more affluent customers substituted into generic.

Standard to assume this is a welfare loss.
www.library.hbs.edu/working-know...

My co-author Becky Chao crushed it on her first (!) podcast appearance, discussing affordability across all the things, ideas, paradigms, and policies.

Reporter: Are you affirming that you think the president is a fascist?

Mamdani: I've spoken about --

Trump: Just say yes, it's easier than explaining.

Opinion | Economists Hate This Idea. It Could Be a Way Out of the Affordability Crisis.

Smart, nuanced piece by @nealemahoney.bsky.social and @bharatramamurti.bsky.social that centers the essential trade-offs of price controls in this affordability moment (rather than assumes them away in either direction), as well as the politics of tackling them.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/o...

Anxiety about *change* to health care has been a key factor in several consequential elections: 1994 (Clinton plan), 2010 (ACA), and (to some degree) 2018 . Even if people are unhappy w/ health care costs and choices, change is terrifying. GOP setting itself up on the wrong side of this dynamic. 1/3

The thing to understand about this is that this catastrophe in the UK has redounded to the political benefit of the very same people and political movement that pushed for it! Extremely perverse.

Amazing.

It seems that basically nobody likes this idea? It is a bad one, but usually there's some case. I wonder if they go through with it.

Thanks for the insight!

Why, in this age of AI-enchanced code translation, is Dynare not available for Python?

third kind: poster (VP Vance, FHFA commisioner Pulte)

How good has plotnine gotten? I tried it a few years ago and thought it was at a good beginning but couldn't replace ggplot2, a sufficient reason for me to stay locked.

Also, no point arguing with obvious bad faith but I feel obliged to note that YIMBYs advocate for consistent, non-arbitrary, rule-bound development standards. Not for public servants to knock down whatever buildings they want with impunity to build a Bribe Cathedral.