The Data Dispatch

How Federal Employee Layoffs Will Impact State Unemployment Rates

With plans to make drastic cuts to the federal labor force underway, the impact on unemployment rates will vary significantly…

As expected, Washington, D.C. would be the most impacted by federal worker layoffs, with its unmployment rate skyrocketing in…

Wednesday, February 12th, 2025

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Access to Electricity

Most of us living in wealthy countries are guilty of complaining about what are really just minor inconveniences…

It's astonishing to think that in 2022, the same year ChatGPT was launched, so many people in the world didn't even have access to…

Tuesday, January 14th, 2025

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There Are Plenty of Houses in America

The state of the housing market in the U.S. has led to a lot of speculation over the past few years. Much has been written about why prices have increased so dramatically, and about how (or whether) this period of unprecedented unaffordability will end. I find the market perplexing…

According to these data, there are more housing units per person now than there have been in the past 25 years. In the following chart, I used more Census Bureau data to calculate the number of completed housing units per net new inhabitant. This is simply a…

Thursday, January 2nd, 2025

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What's Wrong With American Middle Schools?

I recently came across the School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I had never heard of this survey before, and after exploring the data briefly, I was close to moving on to a new source as I didn't find anything in it particularly interesting…

This makes sense to me and I expected most of the charts to look more or less like this one. Here's where I got my first surprise…

Wednesday, December 18th, 2024

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Cookies, Wine, and Gasoline

What do these things have in common? They have become much more expensive over the past five years, in nominal terms. Take a look at the following chart:…

Looking at the price trends from 2019 to 2024, there are several notable patterns. Chocolate chip cookies show the most dramatic relative price increase. Starting around $3.50 per pound in 2019, prices remained fairly stable until 2021, when they began a noticeable upward trend. By 2023, prices had climbed…

Monday, December 16th, 2024

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