Some Links, 8/28/2025

John Haltiwanger on modernizing economic statistics; Matt Yglesias on giving cash to the poor; George Will on too many college students

Interviewed by Nathan Goldschlag, John Haltiwanger writes,

With barcode-level tracking of retail activity now widespread, it has become feasible to collect and process internally consistent, high-frequency data on prices, quantities and product attributes. Moving beyond the survey-centric methods of the 20th century, the statistical system must now evolve to harness these digitized data sources.

Matt Yglesias writes,

Poor people in Kenya are average people who happen to live in an extremely poor country. Basic habits of hard work, diligence, and thrift don’t necessarily pay off in an environment where everybody is so poor that hardly anyone can hire you or pay for anything you make. Dumping cash on people in these circumstances really lets them level-up. By contrast, the domestic poor are — unless they are recently arrived immigrants — often people who, for one reason or another, are struggling to get their lives together in a very wealthy country. If they were thrifty and diligent, they wouldn’t be poor in the first place. Putting money in their pockets doesn’t make them thrifty and diligent, so it doesn’t really alter their lives that much.

I once described American poverty as a problem of leaky buckets.

Speaking of me, I got cited by George Will in his WaPo column.

Economist Arnold Kling says that despite the limited “natural demand” for college education (“students who are excited by academic subjects”), graduate schools continue to churn out more PhDs (almost 60,000 in 2022) than the growth of undergraduate enrollment justifies. So, artificial student demand must be stimulated. Kling says “colleges adapt by offering dumbed-down courses and grade inflation.”

Will writes,

Many students consider writing a 750-word essay “long.” Although 64 percent of students say they devote “a lot” of effort to schoolwork, only 6 percent report spending more than 20 hours per week studying and doing homework. In 2024, 74 percent of first-year students reported no reading assignment longer than 11 pages and no writing assignment longer than five pages. And 51 percent of seniors said they had written nothing longer than 11 pages in their final year.

But as effort declines, grades rise. Hess and Fournier say, “At institutions like Harvard and Yale, the mean GPA is 3.7 or higher, and 80 percent of grades are at least an A-minus.”

substacks referenced above:

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US statistical agencies deserve support and funding. They also need to reform.

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What cash can and can’t do