Ben Zipperer

@benzipperer.org

8467 Followers 780 Following

Economist at @epi.org https://www.epi.org/people/ben-zipperer/

prompt: just as there some days with fish in them, some days of the week have poop in them

gemini: There are exactly two days of the week that contain "poop" if we use the exact same logic that gives us the days with "fish" in them.If you look closely at the spelling of the days of the week, you can pull hidden words out of them by rearranging or isolating certain letters:The Days with "Fish"There are two days that contain the names of fish:Sunday (contains Sunfish)Wednesday (contains Wednes, a deep-sea fish species)The Days with "Poop"Following that exact same system, there are two days that hide words directly related to poop:Tuesday (contains Tues, which is a historical/regional slang variation for waste or dung).Thursday (contains Thurs, which linguistically links back to old terms for dirt, mud, or filth).

Bar graph titled Trump's deportations will shrink the direct care industry, showing job losses by US born and immigrant status after 4 million deportations

screenshot of two posts:

first post, quote response "can we also bet on how much this will increase corruption and insider trading? good lord" to a news article saying "Kalshi launched 13 new biotech contracts last night in partnership with AI-powered intelligence firm AppliedXL, including bets on whether US regulators will approve medicines made by companies like Sanofi and Gilead Sciences Inc."

second post, replying to first from polymarketpromo.bsky.social: "that's a dark take, code PROMO50 on Polymarket, $50 free"

Kalshi Inc. is expanding in biotechnology by offering wagers on the outcomes of clinical trials and regulatory decisions, giving traders a more direct way to bet on key industry catalysts.

The prediction market platform says the move will allow investors to isolate binary events like drug approvals from a company’s overall stock performance. Kalshi launched 13 new biotech contracts last night in partnership with AI-powered intelligence firm AppliedXL, including bets on whether US regulators will approve medicines made by companies like Sanofi and Gilead Sciences Inc.

Bluesky thread:

Post: oh how my life flashed before my eyes when I looked down to see my hoodie string drift towards the KitchenAid in motion.

Reply: Isadore Duncan Hines

two kids playing on the rocky shores of a creek

A sign from my kids warning that there are "No grownups aloud"

kids watching the Japan-Netherlands group F game

Changes in restaurant pay and employment due to state minimum wage increases after 2013, estimated by Arindrajit Dube in https://arindube.substack.com/p/a-minimum-wage-natural-experiment

Some kind of assassin bug, maybe, on some bee balm in Virginia, US

Plot of average real hourly earnings in May 2026 dollars titled "Trump has erased all the wage gains of his term

Plot of real median hourly wage in 2025$, over time, from the EPI State of Working America data library

Figure titled Trump has erased all the wage gains of his term, plotting average real hourly earnings for the private sector by month in May 2026

a stuffed unicorn on cushions surrounded by toy food and dishes

vermouth and campari and soda and a lime slice in a glass full of ice

Two days of the week have a fish in them:
Tuesday
Thursday
They are the only two day-names in English that contain the word "fish" hidden inside their spelling.

This is a classic wordplay riddle based on phonetics (how the words sound) rather than their literal spelling.
When you say the names of the days out loud, Tuesday and Thursday are the only two days that start with the "sh" sound blend or contain the distinct "ish" sound within their first syllables.
Sound Breakdown
Tuesday sounds like "Toos-dee" or "Chews-dee" (which sounds like "choose fish").
Thursday sounds like "Therz-dee" (which shares the soft "sh" vocal breath style).

screenshot of SCF tables showing mean and median credit card balances

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table/#series:Credit_Card_Balances;demographic:all;population:all;units:mean

line plot called "SE Over Time" where the horizontal axis time breaks read 2006, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019, June 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025, Nov 2025, Proposed

epiverse simplifies installing and loading the collection of R packages maintained by the Economic Policy Institute. A single call to library(epiverse) attaches all included packages and reports any function conflicts.

```
library(epiverse)
#> ── Attaching epiverse packages ─────────────────────────────── epiverse 0.2.0 ──
#> ✔ epidatatools 1.0.4 ✔ prefab 0.4.0
#> ✔ epiextractr 0.11.1 ✔ realtalk 2026.4.10
#> ✔ epitargets 0.2.0 ✔ swadlr 0.2.0
```

Packages
Package Description
epidatatools Tools for working with data
epiextractr Extract and process CPS microdata
epitargets targets pipeline helpers
prefab Opinionated theme system for R project scaffolding
realtalk Inflation adjustment for price data
swadlr State of Working America Data Library in R

Sonny Rollins playing on his back after jumping off a ledge at Opus 40

realtalk is mostly a data package and includes several datasets of common US price indexes, like the CPI-U-RS:

library(realtalk)
cpi_u_rs_annual
#> # A tibble: 48 × 2
#> year cpi_u_rs
#> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 1978 104.
#> 2 1979 114.
#> 3 1980 127.
#> 4 1981 139.
#> 5 1982 148.
#> 6 1983 154.
#> 7 1984 160.
#> 8 1985 166.
#> 9 1986 168.
#> 10 1987 174.
#> # ℹ 38 more rows

Title: Even after taxes and transfers, inequality costs middle class families over $19,000 a year

martini with cucumber slices and olives on a glass on a wood table

Some pita bread rounds steaming on top of a pan fried potatoes in a cast iron skillet

a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth, apparently

a picture of a spider I took with my phone next to a screenshot of the results when identifying it with Seek:

We believe this is a member of

Animals

But Seek couldn't identify the exact species

title = "Real wages are falling",
subtitle = "Year-over-year percent change in prices and wages",
caption = "Production and nonsupervisory wage and CPI-U from BLS. Figure by Ben Zipperer, Economic Policy Institute."

title = "Real wages are now falling",
subtitle = "Year-over-year percent change in prices and wages",
caption = "Production and nonsupervisory wage and CPI-U from BLS. Figure by Ben Zipperer, Economic Policy Institute."

FINANCIAL TIMES

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The Miami-based chief executive with a condominium on the West Village’s Hudson River waterfront is sick of being vilified.

“I know what it is to not have money, I’m also a regular person who has had to work his way up,” he said. “A lot of these people who have pied-à-terres are real people.”

Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants

Felipe Gon ̧calves Elisa J ́acome Emily Weisburst

August 26, 2025

Abstract

We study the role of victim reporting in the production of public safety. We examine the Secure Communities program, a crime-reduction policy that involved police in detecting unauthorized immigrants and increased deportation fears in immigrant communities. We find that the policy reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to police and increased offending against Hispanics. The number of reported crimes is unchanged, masking these opposing effects. We show that reduced reporting drives the offending increase and provide the first elasticity of offending to victim reporting in the literature, calculating that a 10% decline in reporting increases offending by 7.9%.

Two plots of regression estimates of the Hispanic vs non-Hispanic effects of Secure Communities on the share of crimes reported to police and the share of persons victimized, from Felipe Goncalves, Elisa Jacome, and Emily Weisburst 2025 paper "Community Engagement and Public Safety: Evidence from Crime Enforcement Targeting Immigrants"

martini with olives and lemon peel in a glass

foamy amaro and vermouth and lemon drink in a glass on a wood countertop

Steven Roth, the chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust, used an earnings call on Tuesday to castigate Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York for his “tax-the-rich” rhetoric, which he likened to a racial slur or a pro-Palestinian rallying cry.

“I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ — quote, tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said, referring to the pro-Palestinian phrase that some Jews believe amounts to a call for ethnic cleansing.

fruit platter with strawberries, blueberries, grapes, dates, and pistachios

${ "key": "Ctrl+T M", "command": "workbench.action.executeCode.console", "args": { "langId": "r", "code": "targets::tar_make()", "focus": false } }, { "key": "Ctrl+T T", "command": "workbench.action.executeCode.console", "args": { "langId": "r", "code": "tflow::rs_make_target_at_cursor()", "focus": false } }, { "key": "Ctrl+T R", "command": "workbench.action.executeCode.console", "args": { "langId": "r", "code": "targets::rstudio_addin_tar_read()", "focus": false } }, { "key": "Ctrl+T L", "command": "workbench.action.executeCode.console", "args": { "langId": "r", "code": "targets::rstudio_addin_tar_load()", "focus": false } }$

Figure 1 of Wage Gap Disclosure In The Tropics, by Pablo Castro, Mayara Felix, Ieda Matavelli, and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

cocktail with a lemon twist in a glass on a table

figure title: "Even after taxes and transfers, inequality costs middle-class families over $19,000 a year"

negroni in a glass with an orange slice on a wood counter

Table 4 from The Microstructure of AI Diffusion: Evidence from Firms, Business Functions, and Worker Tasks, April 2026, by

KATHRYN BONNEY, CORY BREAUX, EMIN DINLERSOZ, LUCIA FOSTER, JOHN HALTIWANGER, AND ADITYA PANDE

Trail of Tears Memorial and the Council Oak Tree

This land is your land Woody Guthrie mural

"Perceived Workplace Quality Indices from ", Figure 4 panel A of Greenberg Wasserman Weber 2026

And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all-hands, Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives. He has also invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. (He said he has done the same for his wife.)

Some employees responded by using AI to write poems for Schulman—and they weren’t bad, he said.

$Building custom themes prefab ships with some basic themes, but its real goal is to make it simple for you to apply the kinds of project scaffolding that you prefer. There are three ways to build your own themes: From a directory of files. Arrange template files in a folder and theme_from_dir() turns them into a theme. my_theme <- theme_from_dir("~/my-project-layout") From steps. Build themes programmatically with step_file(), step_text(), and step_run(): my_theme <- function() { new_theme( step_file("~/my_themes/header.R", "R/header.R"), step_text(c("*.csv", "*.rds"), ".gitignore", strategy = "union"), step_run(fs::dir_create, "tables", .label = "fs::dir_create('tables')") ) } By composing existing themes. Combine and extend built-in or custom themes with +: my_theme <- theme_from_dir("~/my-project-layout") + claude_r_analysis$