Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

One Economy to Rule Them All

Deflation

…AND CHEAPER…:

Homes Today Vs. 1956 – What’s The Difference? (NICOLE MURRAY, 4/14/26, The Mortgage Note)

To start, American homes today are larger. Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, recently told The Mortgage Note that new single-family homes are twice as big in terms of square footage compared to 1956.

“Believe it or not, it costs roughly the same per square foot,” Horpedahl said.

Beyond that, Horpedahl says it’s all about the amenities. For example, in 1956, only 50% of new homes were equipped with a garage. In 2024, 96% were. The percentage of homes with central air systems and appliances has dramatically increased as well.

Contra the Left/Right, our affluence is staggering.

Deflation

…AND CHEAPER…:

Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore (Ben Casselman, April 3, 2026, NY Times)

In a working paper published this week, a team of researchers surveyed economists about their outlook over the next five and 25 years. Most expect the economy to grow a bit more quickly as A.I. improves, but not to diverge substantially from historical patterns. If the technology improves rapidly — a possibility they consider unlikely but plausible — they envision a far more drastic scenario with faster growth but also greater inequality and the disappearance of millions of jobs.

“Economists are certainly taking A.I. seriously,” said Ezra Karger, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who was one of the study’s authors.

One Economy to Rule Them All

BUT WHAT DOES THE rIGHT/lEFT HAVE LEFT IF THEY ACCEPT THE FACTS?:

Behind the Scenes with Oren Cass, Policy-Based Evidence Maker: A Revealing Email Exchange (Scott Winship, Apr 02, 2026, First World Problems)


Our saga begins with a chart in a paper I wrote and ends with a sentence in a new American Compass report citing me. In late 2022, I wrote Bringing Home the Bacon, which examined whether the evolution of young men’s earnings could explain the sharp decline in sole-breadwinner families or the dramatic increase in single motherhood. Many populists argue that a deterioration in men’s economic standing has led to these changes. My report showed that real median annual compensation among young men was essentially the same in 2019 as in 1969 and that by various “marriageability” thresholds, young men were “at, near, or above historic highs.” That ruled out declining male earnings an explanation for the striking changes in the family that occurred over this period.

In my paper, I made a number of conservative methodological choices because I wanted to show that male marriageability had not declined even using methods that worked against that result. Nevertheless, in public events, podcasts, and even the inaugural post for his “Understanding America” Substack, Cass highlighted that young men’s earnings were lower or no higher than “50 years ago.” He did so again during our 2024 debate on the state of the economy.

After the latter, I took to X to share some updated results that I didn’t get a chance to mention in the debate. I indicated that, using an improved price index that I had developed earlier that month, young men’s real median post-tax compensation rose 20 percent from 1973 to 2019, or $7,200, and rose 24 percent ($8,500) from 1989 to 2019. Optimistically, I wrote, regarding whether young men’s earnings have stagnated over 50 years, “I’ll trust my chart doesn’t get cited anymore in support of that claim!” I also stated unambiguously that, “In case it’s not clear, the chart [showing stagnant earnings] was what I considered the best evidence then, but it is not the best evidence now. You [Cass] can still cite it, obviously, but you should either say why you think it is still the best evidence or clarify that you don’t care.”

One Economy to Rule Them All

LIBERALISM FOR THE WIN:

The upper middle class is now the largest income group in the U.S., study finds (Aimee Picchi, April 6, 2026, CBS News)


The U.S. middle class is shrinking, but not because more Americans are poorer. Instead, more households are climbing into the echelons of the upper middle class due to income gains in recent decades, according to research from the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute.

About 31% of U.S. households earn enough to be considered upper middle class, a roughly threefold increase since 1979, making it the nation’s largest economic group, the research found. Meanwhile, the share of Americans in the “core” and “low” middle class segments has declined over that time, primarily because more households in those income groups have jumped ahead economically, AEI found.

Neoconomics Uncategorized

ONLY TAX CONSUMPTION:

Consumption Tax on the Horizon (Mitch Daniels, 3/31/26, Law & Liberty)

Those socially conscious Europeans, whatever fiscal messes they have created for themselves, have had no qualms about taxing their whole populations. The primary vehicle is sales taxation, in the form of value-added taxes, which accumulate along a product’s value chain and are ultimately paid by the consumer. VATs extract roughly 9 percent to 10 percent of middle-class incomes across the euro zone and can result in middle-income citizens paying for nearly half of all VAT revenue. Every country in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development except the United States has one.

When the promises of Social Security and Medicare can no longer be kept, millions of Americans will have to be reintroduced to the reality that the lunch is never free.

That’s a major reason the US, frequent misrepresentations to the contrary, has the most progressive tax system among the most developed countries. Here, the top 10 percent pay about 70 percent of US income taxes, and more than half the total US taxes even when payroll taxes are included. The dreaded 1 percent pick up more than a quarter of the entire federal tab.

The tax-to-income ratio is the highest anywhere, and the reason that glib calls to simply tax the rich more can’t come close to solving the country’s biggest domestic (and, increasingly, a national security) problem.

Make it transparent and adjust it to cover expenditures.

Identitarianism Immigration Malthusianism

THE LONG RACIST TAIL OF MALTHUS/DARWIN:

The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti‑immigration efforts today ( Brian C. Keegan & Emily Klancher Merchant, March 26, 2026, The Conversation)

Ehrlich’s predictions were conspicuously wrong – and experts said so at the time. But his logic resonated through the 1970s and ’80s across the political spectrum. Its shadow is evident in today’s anti-immigration campaigns and White House arguments for mass deportation.

We have followed its long afterlife, as a computational social scientist studying contemporary extremism and as a historian whose book “Building the Population Bomb” analyzed Ehrlich’s impact. […]

The intellectual genealogy behind “The Population Bomb” ran deeper than Ehrlich’s own career. The “bomb” analogy was borrowed from a 1954 pamphlet by Hugh Moore, a businessman whose population anxieties descended from Guy Irving Burch, the anti-immigrant eugenicist who founded the Population Reference Bureau in 1929.

Burch, worried about “alien or negro stock” replacing Europeans, introduced the phrase “population explosion” to American public discourse in the 1930s as part of a campaign for immigration restriction. Moore updated Burch’s framework for the Cold War, warning that population growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America would produce communist expansion and nuclear war.

Ehrlich’s use of ecological carrying capacity – the idea that any environment has a finite number of resources to support a population before collapsing – justified coercive population control initiatives as foreign and domestic environmental policies in the minds of many Americans.

Too many of you: not enough of me.

Malthusianism

IDIOCY FROM JUMP STREET:

Paul Ehrlich’s False Gospel (Theodore Dalrymple, 3/10/26, Law & Liberty)


John Maddox (1925 – 2009) was for many years the editor of Nature, one of the two most important general science journals in the world. In 1972 he published a broadside against the radical pessimism then very prevalent with the title The Doomsday Syndrome: An Assault on Pessimism. In this book, which makes interesting reading today, Maddox attacked the propensity of scientists such as Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner to project current trends indefinitely into the future and to conclude therefrom that catastrophe must sooner or later (usually sooner) result.

One Economy to Rule Them All

STINKIN’ RICH:

More On Average Real Net Worth of U.S. Households (Don Boudreaux, March 19, 2026, Cafe Hayek)

In earlier posts I’ve reported on data that belie the assertion that U.S. trade deficits necessarily drain wealth from the U.S. Here I report such data that are more complete – specifically, I count as part of Americans’ liabilities not only our private debt but also that portion of federal-, state-, and local-government debt for which the average American household is liable. Here are the conclusions, with all dollars converted into 2025$ using this personal-consumption-expenditure deflator.

In Q3 2025 (the latest date for which all relevant data are available), the average real net worth of U.S. households – taking account of all outstanding debt issued by federal, state, and local governments – was $1,031,144.

In 2001 (Q3), the quarter before China joined the World Trade Organization, the average real net worth of U.S. households was $583,989.

In 1993 (Q4), the quarter before NAFTA took effect, the average real net worth of U.S. households was $424,630.

At the end of 1975 – that is, in Q4 1975 – the last year the U.S. ran an annual trade surplus, the average real net worth of U.S. households was $339,074.

Therefore, in Q3 2025, the average real net worth of U.S. households was:

– 77% higher than it was in 2001
– 143% higher than it was in 1994
– 204% higher than it was in 1975.

End of History One Economy to Rule Them All

THUS eNDED hISTORY:

Adam Smith’s Moral Authority (Daniel Klein, 3/09/26, Law & Liberty)

Shortly after The Wealth of Nations appeared, the rate of economic growth and living standards in the Western world shot up dramatically. In charts of per capita wealth or GDP, spanning hundreds of years, we see a long history of flatness and then a striking acceleration beginning around the time of Smith’s death, as though his work caused the change. Economist Deirdre McCloskey calls it “The Great Enrichment.” The shape of the curve has been called “the hockey stick,” with the blade of the hockey stick representing the past 250 years of remarkable enrichment. […]

First, Smith taught that when someone honestly pursues income, his activity most likely contributes to the good of society. Thus, Smith morally authorized the pursuit of honest income. Smith told people, in effect, that when you get up early and work hard in the quest for honest income, God approves. The same notion was rising in sermons of clerics and in other writers, but The Wealth of Nations expounded the notion in a remarkably impressive and even imposing way.

You are morally authorized to take care of your part of society because that is where your efforts are most effective in advancing the good of the whole.

Smith’s book of 1776 taught that, in pursuing honest income, you are not only innocent but even presumptively virtuous. The moral authorization of the pursuit of honest income lent vigor to economic life. Not only did people get up early and work hard in their calling, but it also invigorated innovation. One way to earn an honest income is to come up with new goods and services, and new ways of producing goods and services. Because honest income was morally authorized, people were emboldened to step out of traditional occupational grooves, to innovate in whatever way, provided that it was honest.

By giving the green light to honest income, Smith invigorated innovation, and that is essential for The Great Enrichment.

The second great moral authorization was directed to the policymakers. Smith morally authorized them to support policies that allow people to pursue honest income.

Smith morally authorized a presumption in favor of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way.” That would mean not restricting ownership rights and the freedom of association or contract. It would mean liberalizing restrictions.

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