Where I've Been Lately
From EconTwitter to the White House to useR! to Yale to the Boston Globe to the New York Times to the Washington Post
Here are some events I've been on that you might enjoy.
useR!: EconTwitter to the White House
I gave a short 15-minute talk last summer at the useR! conference for the R statistical programming language, titled “From #EconTwitter to the White House: Real Time Economic Data with R.” (A sentence I still can't quite believe is autobiographical.) The pitch is four reasons to use R, convincing analysts not to use Excel and economists not to use Stata.
There are a lot of fun tidbits from my experiences in and out of government working on data releases that you might enjoy.
Slides here. Even as more statistical analysis will be done through LLM terminal prompts rather than working directly in IDEs like RStudio, the reasons to base your code in R are still relevant. The ease of the tidyverse, the grammar of graphics framework, and the variety of data libraries available make it a great foundation to iterate with AI tools.
Yale Budget Lab
I was on a panel this past week at the Yale Budget Lab and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy titled “Tariffs, AI, and Our Economic Futures,” looking at the first year of the Trump second term. Moderated by business journalist Alexandra Scaggs, with Michael Faulkender (a Trump first-term Treasury official and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, the number two, from January to August 2025) and Natasha Sarin (Budget Lab President, and former Biden Treasury official).
Around 32m55s, I pointedly bring up the IRS giving ICE access to ITIN tax records for undocumented workers, which Faulkender signed off on while at Treasury. There’s a back and forth among the panelists that is interesting if you follow the IRS/ICE story, one that ends with a chill coming over the room. (You’ll know when it happens. This was recorded before the Washington Post broke a story about related improper breaches.) There’s also a debate starting around 10m44s about why exactly Trump is doing tariffs the way he is, where I push back on the administration’s rationale.
Columbia / Groundwork Collaborative Webinar
I did a webinar with the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia and the Groundwork Collaborative examining the impacts of Trump’s economic agenda.
It was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, with Groundwork’s Alex Jacquez, University of Michigan economist Sarah Miller, and Bharat Ramamurti. It’s a great overview. Even as someone following this closely, I’m still learning and amazed at the damage the Trump administration is doing to healthcare. Sarah Miller’s comments (starting 29m) on healthcare were informative.
Stiglitz & Konczal in the Boston Globe
Stiglitz and I keep our buddy cop routine going with an opinion piece in the Boston Globe covering much of what we discussed there: “The high cost of Trumponomics.” We take on Trump’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed claiming his tariffs have brought about an economic miracle, and walk through why those claims are unmoored from the economy around us.
I was also quoted in the New York Times about recent data releases and the Washington Post on why affordability has become a campaign buzzword.
If you want me to appear or write for your next event, feel free to reach out!
Current Mood: Burn it down.
Current Music: St. Vincent’s excellent cover of Big Black’s “Kerosene.”
Every fascist regime has dutiful functionaries, such as Faulkender, who try to mask their role in implementing the evil policies of the regime. They must held accountable at every opportunity. Good on you Mike for speaking truth to someone who dutifully played his role in the ongoing attempt to destroy our republic.