Jack Meyer

Health care continues to be a key driver of Vermont’s rising cost of living. Aging demographics and rural community reliance on emergency care services are raising systemwide costs, with downstream budget impacts on education spending and other state employment

That’s right

The legislative and judicial incentives to defer authority and acquiesce to executive consolidation always rested on the fragile assumption that bipartisan norms would prevail across administrations

Durable institutional reform must look beyond the past year of executive abuse and reckon with the ongoing abdication (if not outright refusal) of congressional responsibility to meaningfully constrain national security agencies and curtail the capacity to inflict state violence

We are witnessing the outcome of decades of unchecked expansion of the security state, a project that collapsed the distinction between law enforcement and national security, weakened oversight and accountability, and consolidated authority within the executive branch

A graph of US data center construction, which rises from $15B to $42B from 2022 to 2025

US data center construction inched up to a new record high in data released today, exceeding a $42B annualized rate (and this only includes the data center facilities, not the expensive computers within)

Growth has slowed down, but investment is still up 18.5% over the last year

These trends are reinforced by demographics and affordability. Vermont has a shrinking share of young professionals, alongside a widening gap between income and housing costs, making it increasingly difficult to attract and retain early-career workers.

The problem isn’t captured in headline employment figures. Vermont’s labor market appears tight, with persistently high job vacancies, as labor force participation trends downward pointing to a shrinking pool of available workers rather than strong underlying growth.

Most of the spending is concentrated in healthcare, even in education the growing cost burden can be traced back to insurance, and while ending one-off pandemic programs provides a limited stop-gap, Vermont needs to address the structural imbalance that comes with an older population

Some good and bad in the budget, but Vermont's most pressing concern as far as state expenditures should be growing revenue against an aging tax base below replacement. We're a few years out from a fiscal wall unless we can attract more young professionals to the state.

Amid all the noise it’s important to remember that no matter how you index historical prices $700 billion for Greenland is decidedly the worst deal in the history of US territorial acquisition

But I just solved the economy

My proposed solution: we eliminate application materials entirely and introduce an auction theoretic hiring framework in which prospective applicants simply bid Claude tokens for the opportunity to interview for the position.

The problem: LLMs undermine the efficacy of cover letters and screening questions as a costly signal of applicant skill and effort in the hiring process, such that they lose their informational content and no longer reliably communicate applicant quality.

E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved by Limiting Air Pollution In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show.

Breaking News: The EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses.

A regional beer market consolidation case study; The Shed was a local brewpub acquired by Otter Creek in 2011, owned by Long Trail as of 2010, acquired by Mass Bay in 2022, merged with Finestkind to form Barrel One Collective in 2024, now the largest craft brewer in New England

I have no idea what's going on. And I will be vindicated by history.

this is all very confusing for those of us who thought that fascist regimes were ideologically coherent, tactically consistent, and didn’t launch military attacks on other countries without a worked-out plan of exactly what to do next

Despite my longstanding skepticism of constructivist IR theory, oil being framed as the explicit objective in Venezuela is completely detached from material state interests and serves more as a symbolic obsession embedded deep in the American political consciousness

yep. i can identify any number of structural issues but at the end of the day the basic problem is the republican party. this has been apparent for at least 20 years. it is also an incredibly unpopular observation to make among “serious” people.

It’s almost the ideal follow-up recommendation to someone that enjoyed Why Nations Fail, there’s a lot you can get out of it and further it’s a good test of whether you have the patience for studying economic history

But, the book does serve as a detailed review of the important literature and major debates in long-run economic growth and comparative development

My short review of Two Paths to Prosperity: I don’t find the affirmative case or causal identification of the ‘Great Bifurcation’ very compelling or sufficiently separated from other contemporaneous developments or even the exogenous and geographic factors discussed

Looking back on the last half century of U.S. regime change interventions and concluding that we should try it again, but closer to home

Economic historians wait nervously, knowing Robert Allen will bring coal if you’ve misbehaved

New Institutionalists on Christmas be like: “I can’t wait for Douglass North to come down the chimney with his bundle of institutions to deliver self-enforcing credible commitments and reduced transaction costs”

personally getting very irritated by the unbelievable arrogance of the data boys

a picture of Dr. Manhattan on Mars

it is 2022. I am watching people yell about the economic data & the vibecession discourse
it is 2023. I am watching people yell about the economic data & the vibecession discourse
it is 2024. I am watching people yell about the economic data & the vibecession discourse
it is 2025. I am watching...

Growth of real wage (purchasing power) has continued to be strong,* and broad-based, even as nominal wage growth has slowed.

*not affected very much by quirks in last month's CPI print.

New working paper 🚨🚨🚨

What was the origin of modern economic growth?

Joel Mokyr had a Nobel winning answer - growth took off when science and technology began to reinforce each other

But can we test this quantitatively?

This paper does so – read more ⬇️ 🧵