Best of #econtwitter - Week of July 5, 2026: good tweets
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter newsletter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Good tweets
Jonathan Robinson@jon_m_rob
Excited that this important piece is finally out. Serious long-running problems w/ UMich consumer sentiment survey has HUGE impact on topline econ satisfaction levels. Overrepresenting partisans (particularly Dems today) & going from phone to online broke the trends big-time
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
People often accuse polls of oversampling Democrats.
It's often BS.
But in the case of the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index, it's true! And it's a huge problem for interpreting how consumers feel about the economy.
6:26 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 74.3K Views
2 Replies · 39 Reposts · 132 Likes
Ernie Tedeschi@ernietedeschi
Great piece expanding on the method research from Ryan Cummings & me. We found that the shift to online collection subtracted 8.9 pts from the UMich consumer sentiment index. This piece finds that an additional channel exacerbating that shift has been a change in party ID sample.
Nate Silver @NateSilver538
People often accuse polls of oversampling Democrats.
It's often BS.
But in the case of the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index, it's true! And it's a huge problem for interpreting how consumers feel about the economy.
7:26 PM · Jun 29, 2026 · 67.2K Views
7 Replies · 8 Reposts · 69 Likes
Archie Hall@ArchieHall
IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG?
Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong.
Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive
12:46 PM · Jul 3, 2026 · 673K Views
80 Replies · 218 Reposts · 1.57K Likes
^:💀💀💀💀💀💀
^countarguments? besides Brian Albrecht’s hotly-anticipated upcoming
Public goods
Noah Dasanaike@dasanaike
I'm proud to finally announce the first release of the Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE) dataset, encompassing global, granular, standardized, geocoded, polling station or equivalent-level election results for 110 countries, conditionally accepted at Nature Scientific Data.
6:08 PM · Jun 30, 2026 · 459K Views
13 Replies · 178 Reposts · 915 Likes
Charts
Forecasting Research Institute@Research_FRI
2️⃣ If AI capabilities progress rapidly, forecasters predict a roughly 5x increase in the probability of a global AI-related catastrophe compared with a world with slow AI progress
We defined a global catastrophe as any event in which more than 10% of the people alive at the
2:57 PM · Jun 30, 2026 · 597 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 4 Likes
Christoph Herpfer@ChrisHerpfer
the economist investigates falling aptitude of college students around the world and the U.S. in particular. Non-existing standards are a big part of it -- but glad to see economics at least somewhat holding the line (N=1 but matches my experience):
economist.com/international/…
1:14 PM · Jul 2, 2026 · 609 Views
1 Reply · 7 Likes
Hedgeye@Hedgeye
America is running out of places to gather:
Bars and clubs per capita have fallen over 60% since the late 1970s, and since 2001 a fifth of movie theaters have shut their doors.
Over the past two decades, the country has lost roughly 2,000 golf courses and 7,000 bars and
9:45 AM · Jul 5, 2026 · 508K Views
233 Replies · 458 Reposts · 2.32K Likes
Paul Novosad@paulnovosad
Interesting: How many women are among the national top 100 Chess players.
Institutions matter!
Easy to notice the gender-equality paradox, where we observe the most unequal choices in some of the most gender-equal places for opportunity (like Scandinavia).
8:08 PM · Jul 5, 2026 · 9.07K Views
4 Replies · 10 Reposts · 95 Likes
Sar Haribhakti@sarthakgh
Stripe compared YoY growth in nominal air conditioning unit spending in the Stripe data the week of June 19-25 to the difference in temperature over the same period
Findings:
- Across the EU, proxy AC sending rose ~ 130% YoY
- France, where temperatures rose roughly 4°C to
4:50 PM · Jul 7, 2026 · 7.85K Views
4 Reposts · 19 Likes
Fin
morty@findmorty
banger
Per Bylund @PerBylund
What causes #poverty? Nothing. It's the original state, the default and starting point. The real question is, What causes #prosperity?
11:38 AM · Jul 5, 2026 · 1.9M Views
102 Replies · 5.33K Reposts · 64.7K Likes