The Bad Econ Takes Bracket 2026

Current top contenders

Over on the former bird website, I am hosting a bracket for the worst economics take. Out of 64 competitors, 32 have been eliminated, and voting on the remaining 16 match-ups has already begun. Let’s take a look at the top contenders for worst of the worst.

Edit, 3/10/2026 & 4/24/2026: This post has become much more popular than it was when I first shared it. If you’re wishing you didn’t miss your chance to vote, feel free to fill out this Google Form that decided the contest between the final eight. If your votes change the winner, I’ll announce that on my Twitter/X account. Also, welcome ACX subscribers! The contest winner was the $80k minimum wage, but I’m still checking the form.

Living Standards

The first division focuses on living standards takes. People love to pretend that Americans are materially worse off, but aside from maybe the cost of healthcare, Americans can buy more of just about anything nowadays. Let’s take a look at the interesting ways people try to refute this fact.

Real wages (in gold)

Nothing shouts “I haven’t thought about this for longer than five seconds” like believing you should define living standards in terms of gold buying power.

Gold, if you aren’t aware, is often used as a hedge against inflation, and was the asset used to back money before governments dropped it for fiat money. This gives it a special status in the hearts of many a libertarian, but unfortunately, you need to use your mind for this sort of thing, not your heart.

Your ability to buy gold doesn’t define your living standards, since gold can easily become cheaper without everyone getting significantly richer. If an asteroid were mined for the entire quantity of gold currently on Earth, cutting its price in half, we wouldn’t all be twice as rich. Certainly, we’d all appreciate the extra gold for making jewelry and computers, but gold isn’t used for everything.

As if this take weren’t dumb enough, Financial Physics also uses the federal minimum wage as a proxy for income. But as time has gone on, this has become a worse and worse proxy for the typical worker’s income, since very few people are paid the federal minimum:

If you don’t like reading tweets from people who sound like they’ve been hit on the head several dozen times with a mallet, I’m sure this guy will enjoy his future home on your block list.

Wealth transfer

More Perfect Union might be the heaviest hitter when it comes to its impact-to-intelligence ratio. Seemingly everything they post about economics is made up. Here’s their entry into the bracket:

Wow! What’s the source? As you might imagine, this isn’t sourced to anything that definitively shows the 1% stole trillions in wealth from the bottom 90%. Here’s their methodology:

1. Assume that any increases in inequality are due to theft.

2. Measure this increase.

3. Done!

That’s it. Here’s a direct quote from their source:

The author extends prior work to estimate the gap between what workers earned in 2023 and what they would have earned with a more even growth rate from 1975 to 2023. The bottom 90 percent of workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more with the more even growth rates that would amount to the cumulative amount of $79 trillion. These numbers differ from the prior estimates because of inflation, growth in inequality, and a longer time frame.

So, rather than showing $79 trillion being stolen from the bottom 90%, we simply observe how much workers would make if their income grew as much as the income of the top 1%, and call that extra income “stolen.” We could try to show that this income was stolen using some kind of data-based argument, but—pfft, what, you think we’d bother with that when everyone will believe us anyway?

Inequality can grow for multiple reasons. If the top 1% become more productive than everyone else, inequality grows. You might know deep down in your heart that this didn’t happen and all of that money was stolen, but you actually have to do something, anything to show it, rather than just assuming it happened.

An edit, 4/24/2026: I received a lot of criticism for this part for the “stolen” language. Some points: 1. Yeah, I probably should’ve just paraphrased as an “unfair transfer” or something. 2. At the very least, the people viewing the tweet and replying to it clearly interpreted this as theft. 3. If you’re going to tweet about inequality, just do that instead of this! Why mislead people about your evidence with this “transfer” language?

Invented inflation

This take comes from the archives of @BadEconTakes:

Look, just… just stop and think. If the government prints money and hands out cash to multiply everyone’s income by ten, will we suddenly have ten times as much stuff? Will people gain the ability to produce ten times as much? Of course not.

Productivity is responsive to the money supply—that’s what economists at the Fed leverage when an aggregate demand shock occurs—but there’s an obvious physical limit to this. At that limit, either prices go up to deal with the increase in the money supply, or you get shortages of goods (i.e., too little stuff compared to the massive demand from the new money).

I would really like it if economists could simply “uninvent inflation,” since we could then make everyone a billionaire by printing money, but that’s just not how this works. Good lord, man.

Paycheck to paycheck

Bernie Sanders and other brainless curs have been saying this same bullshit for a very long time, and Matt Darling has been the go-to guy to rebut him. It’s kind of his thing. Using his numbers, sourced from the Federal Reserve:

- 54% of adults have cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses.
- The median American household holds $8k in transaction accounts (checking/savings).
- The median American household has a networth of $193k

Where did Sanders get his 60% number? As described by Noah Smith (because this has been done to death and I don’t need to produce my own version):

The claim that “60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck” comes from a survey by the fintech company LendingClub. The company refuses to release its survey methodology, but we can get a general idea from its website, which says: “For those Americans, [living paycheck to paycheck] means that they need their next paycheck to cover their monthly financial outflows.”

Meanwhile, as Noah explains, the Fed also does a survey like this, except (1) it’s transparent about its methodology and (2) it isn’t a payday lending company trying to advertise its services. They find that “In 2023, 54 percent of adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency savings or ‘rainy day’ fund—unchanged from 2022 but down from a high of 59 percent of adults in 2021.” It cannot simultaneously be true that most adults can pay for three months of expenses and most adults cannot pay for one month of expenses. More likely, even more than 60% of American adults can cover a month of expenses.

Given two different surveys, we should probably trust the transparent government survey over the random lending company. This is one of the richest countries in the world; stop LARPing as the poor and downtrodden.

Gross Domestic Stupidity

GDP is a measure of the size of an economy that is hard to make sense of for most people. If all it’s measuring is the sum of all goods and services sold multiplied by their respective prices, wouldn’t that leave out important stuff like love and joy and whether the environment is good? As it turns out, no, not really. Practically everything is positively correlated with GDP per person: happiness, environmental quality, and even lifespan. Once you realize that GDP is calculated in a way that almost makes it equivalent to the sum of all income, this isn’t that surprising.

Infinite growth is impossible

Still, people can get confused:

On first inspection, GDP appears to grow only by using up more and more resources. Real life gives off that vibe: regular news headlines about pollution and environmental destruction, exploited workers, etc., etc., etc. It can look like society eating itself alive. But as I described in the previously linked post, GDP primarily grows through innovation, not by using up more resources. In other words, growth occurs when we find new ways to use resources we already have—not by finding more resources to use. The limit on economic growth in the long run is the presence of new ideas.

There’s still a decent point embedded in this post about how unregulated free market capitalism can destroy the environment that sustains it, but “Capitalism guarantees collapse” is wayyyy too hyperbolic. Moving on…

Criminal illegals cause everything bad

I won’t blame people for not knowing everything about a subject that has tons and tons of empirical work on it. But once you see the problems with this kind of thinking, they’re hard to unsee.

First, why hasn’t population growth made us all poorer? The United States was much smaller at its founding, and much, much poorer. If new workers in the market just add competitive pressure, we’d expect population growth to always make everyone poorer.

In the pre-industrial past, this was essentially true: technology was mostly stagnant, so population growth quickly butted heads with the limited amount of land available for farming. That limit disappeared as we got much, much better at creating new technologies and deploying them at scale during the Industrial Revolution. As the population grew, we added more potential innovators as well as more mouths to feed. There was also lots of land in the United States to begin with, but even smaller countries like the United Kingdom have grown a lot since the Industrial Revolution.

In the language of supply and demand, the supply of goods is somewhat elastic and can grow as we add more workers. As new workers enter the market, they earn money and spend it on goods. So it’s perfectly sensible—and much more accurate, in practice—to think of this situation as one where supply and demand increase. From the article I linked:

So, new workers join the market, and their entry is absorbed by the new demand they create for goods. Any business that has new demand for goods is going to need to hire more workers to provide them. That’s what makes anti-immigration rhetoric like this DHS tweet especially funny: somehow, undocumented immigrants produce new demand for goods, compete with native workers… and businesses don’t respond by hiring more workers to produce those goods. In practice, that just isn’t what happens. Businesses are happy to scale up production when new consumers arrive. That’s how the United States has been able to get rich while continuously absorbing tons of immigrants throughout its history.

The crime narrative, likewise, is a bit silly, since undocumented immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes than natives. If you imagine the United States and its own criminal population as a glass of water that’s a bit murky from bits of sediment, undocumented immigration is like adding a spoonful of equally murky water. Nobody is in greater danger because of immigration, even though plenty of individuals have been attacked by undocumented immigrants. Unfortunately, there are immigrant groups that are more prone to crime, but that isn’t the general picture.

In general, it isn’t at all obvious that “criminal illegals” would cause all these bad things to happen, since in this case their only real crime is usually the fact that they’ve chosen to move here without permission. They rent apartments, and they help build them, they buy groceries, and they help provide groceries. It all cancels out.

There is a decent supply-and-demand reason to believe undocumented immigrants drive up housing demand more than they increase supply, and the reason is zoning. Lots of American cities keep housing supply artificially low by blocking new construction. If that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter if you have more labor available for construction, and you just wind up with a demand increase without a proportionate supply increase. That means higher prices for native-born Americans.

In Texas, there are about 2 million undocumented immigrants out of a population of about 32 million. If the administration managed to remove half of them (a very big if!), that’s a population reduction of ~3%. If we plot this in R with the empirical supply elasticity from Glaeser for Dallas (within 10 miles of the city center), we get a one-time price cut of 5.72%:

Note that the prices and quantities shown are arbitrary and the % change is unaffected by them. And of course, it would be hard to actually spot this price effect in real life because lots of coincident effects occur at once. That doesn’t change the fact that in the counterfactual where they stayed, prices would be higher.

So does it actually work this way in real life? Apparently not. We have very few empirical tests of this question, but the Secure Communities program provides a decent test, since it had a staggered rollout that allows us to compare places where the program was introduced early to places where it was introduced later. Researchers found deportations actually increased housing prices, so the effect usually looks kinda like this:

This should be taken as only loosely accurate. It’s merely descriptive of the empirical directional nature of simultaneous shifts.

In either case, the real effects are probably small and don’t have much bearing on the long-run trajectory of housing prices and, in particular, the accessibility of housing. If you want people to be able to move to a bustling city in the long run, you need to make it legal to build there, otherwise population growth is going to butt heads with the legal limit at some point. It’s also notable that to maintain the price reduction, you need to keep the immigrants out forever, and Republicans have so far focused on short-term enforcement action driven by the executive rather than passing legislation that would bind immigrants in the long term.

Disappointed Microeconomics Professor Division

Blackstone owns 1/3rd of the housing

As described in the community note, the article Jacobin linked here lies about Blackstone owning a third of the housing in the US. “We just need to ban institutional investors” is the kind of solution that appeals to people who want an easy way out, but unfortunately, it’s entirely bullshit.

The story goes that, seeking higher profits, giant institutional investors like Blackstone buy out homes so that they can keep them empty and maintain high prices through artificial scarcity. Don’t you know that there’s no real housing shortage? We have plenty of homes! Just look:

(This take was knocked out in the previous round.)

The trouble is that these homes are not located in the places people want to live. People want to move to cities like New York and San Francisco for work, and only a select few cities like Austin and Minneapolis have been permissive enough to allow housing supply to grow for the new entrants. That’s what the housing shortage really is: a shortage of housing in many of the places people want to live and work.

I could just link this post explaining it all with sources, but one of its links is dead. They had shared a map like this one, describing the vacancy rates in different counties in the US:

Here, we can see lower vacancy rates in high-demand areas like California’s coastal hubs, Chicago, NYC, and you can even spot Austin and Dallas by observing the low-vacancy splotches in central and north Texas. Where housing demand is high, vacancy rates are low, and where nobody wants to live, vacancy rates are high, providing abundant housing for anyone who decides they’d like to live in… Belleville, Kansas, or some other small town with a stagnating population.

If you would like to send America’s poorest to run-down shacks in the middle of nowhere, be my guest, but I don’t think they’d appreciate it. Please build more housing.

$80k minimum wage

The minimum wage is not as apocalyptic as opponents claim, nor as effective as proponents claim. Among academic economists, it garners some respect for being surprisingly effective at raising incomes without hurting employment, but is mostly treated as an inferior choice compared to, say, wage subsidies, where the government adds extra money to your paycheck in proportion to how much you work.

This, however, would be genuinely apocalyptic:

The median full-time worker in the United States makes about $63k. On the lower end, someone making the $17/hr minimum wage in NYC and working full-time would make about $35,360 a year. A minimum salary of $80k a year would mean that the businesses hiring these people would face two choices for each worker:

1. Pay them more than twice as much.

2. Lay them off.

We don’t really have empirical evidence confirming that they’d usually go for option #2 because nobody has ever been dumb enough to do something like this.

For this kind of policy to not cause an insane unemployment rate, you would need the majority of American workers to be massively underpaid. Imagine the McDonald’s worker in NYC making $17/hr. If their real productivity is $80k/year, or $38/hr, then McDonald’s is making a huge profit off of them. Most of their productivity is siphoned away by McDonald’s and eaten up by shareholders.

Now think about competing restaurants. You run KFC, and you notice that hiring one of these workers is extremely profitable. If you swooped in and offered one of them $25/hr—still way below their real productivity!—any of these workers would immediately jump ship. So of course you would, and the difference between productivity and pay would mostly disappear. There are frictions that (to some degree) prevent this from happening in real life, like how workers cannot move locations costlessly to work at a competing business in another state. But I would be really, really surprised if these frictions were so strong that the typical worker is underpaid by more than 50%.

It’s more likely that these massive discrepancies between worker productivity and worker pay do not really exist, and huge numbers of people would get laid off under this policy, followed promptly by economic collapse. Thankfully, no state or city in America will do this; even Mamdani is only shooting for $30/hr, and not until 2030, at which point it will have been partially inflated away by a rising money supply.

Abolish debt

Nobody likes being in debt, so it’s natural to conclude that we’d all be better off as a “wealth economy” where the government never runs a deficit and nobody is allowed to lend. Yay! No more debt!

But this ignores the purpose of debt, which is to transfer the benefits of an investment across time. If you have an idea for a business that will cost $500k to build and run, and you expect it to bring in $700k of revenue, you’d like some way to acquire that $200k profit. Everyone would like that, in fact, since your success would mean the community has a new business it likes. (Unless you’re selling hard drugs.)

The trouble is that the $700k of revenue exists only in the future, and you probably don’t have $500k lying around to pay for the business. Luckily, the bank does, so if you can convince them that you’ve got a good idea, they can lend you the $500k. You take the money, run your business, and make $700k. You pay $10k in interest to the bank. You benefit, the bank benefits, and your community benefits from the new business activity. Everyone wins.

This isn’t the only way we can do this, at least in principle. Some government entity could do the lending instead, or it could directly manage resources, providing goods and labor to people with the best ideas instead of lending money. (That kind of system doesn’t have a good track record, but to be nice, I won’t rule out the possibility entirely.) But this is still a really important idea: we want some way to transfer the benefits produced by business activity across time so that they can be paid for in the present. We similarly want some way to pay for education before it pays off, even if one doesn’t have the money to pay for it right now.

Ban lending, and all of that goes up in smoke. Business activity crumbles, students can no longer pay for college, and you can’t even use your credit card to pay for an unexpected expense before your paycheck arrives. “No more deficits” is also a terrible idea, for reasons explained in just about any macroeconomics textbook, where deficit spending often plays a useful role in managing economic downturns.

All of this is just a long-winded way of saying “please learn the lessons of the Great Depression and don’t let it happen a second time.” Lending provides money, and money is the lifeblood of the economy.

The random bullshit division

The entire premise of economics is dead

Do all economics classes assume people are rational? Fact check: No. Believe it or not, the average economist has thought about this topic for longer than a few minutes. They aren’t morons in need of your stunning and revolutionary genius.

The 2002 Nobel (memorial) Prize in economics was awarded to Daniel Kahneman for his work on prospect theory, which does away with some of the assumptions of rationality economists normally use. One of the papers I’ve read in the past year was about present bias, how people can behave differently from a simpler rational agent because they are biased towards costs and benefits in the present. Economist Bryan Caplan popularized rational irrationality in 2001 to reconcile irrational behavior in politics with the rational models of economics. In short, economists spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing!

I won’t deny that there are occasional inaccuracies in economics due to the simplifications of models, but the only reason this take goes as far as it does with the general public is that the general public doesn’t spend much time engaging with economics.

Unskilled labor is fake

This one is dumb enough that it barely deserves a place here. It’s not very interesting to talk about.

In the first place, “unskilled labor” isn’t even an invented term in the usual sense of “invented.” That would suggest someone had to sit down and think about it before saying it. It’s just “unskilled” (an adjective) follow by “labor” (a noun). Anybody can think of this, and will think of this when they notice some people have more skills than others. Christ.

As for this:

If any job is unskilled it’s the job of CEO, it can be done by anyone bc they don’t do anything.

David Graeber would be proud.

No, I don’t think every major corporate board is making the annual mistake of paying out tens of millions of dollars to their CEO when they could just fire them and nothing would happen. CEOs do actual work managing a company, and it is extremely hard to get a position as a CEO because not everybody knows how to do it.

Is it conceivable that CEOs are, to some degree, overpaid because they have some kind of market power, or because of the weird social dynamics of a corporate board? Of course. But “unskilled” and “doesn’t do anything” aren’t words that describe the typical CEO. Just stop being a moron.

Late-stage gamerism

man what the hell are we doing here

Whatever.

Look, in the first place, this result isn’t all that unexpected. If you looked at consumers of Pokémon cards or even books, I guarantee you that a huge portion of new sales are attributable to a small minority of Pokémon card owners and readers. For every hobby, there are only a select few who really engage with it. Most people just dabble in it a bit.

If we look at overall sales, those are up, not down:

We are not entering a new phase of “late stage capitalism” where the people are too poor to buy video games, or are rebelling against their capitalist overlords by refusing to purchase the latest Call of Duty. I’m sure there’s some way to steelman this “late stage capitalism” idea and make it nicer and more accurate, but it seems mostly useless for describing the trends of interest to me.

There are plenty of other takes not covered here, which you can check out by heading to the polls and voting on them. I hope you enjoyed reading, and I have nothing more to say except that I think many of you shouldn’t have internet access.