Feed aggregator

One of the side-effects of the pandemic back in 2020 and 2021 was the sheer number of new businesses people were forming. Business applications were off the charts for over two years, according to the Census Bureau.

A lot of that had to do with people being unemployed, or working from home, maybe dreaming about a different kind of life they might want to live. People also received plenty of pandemic relief aid that helped them finance those dreams.

Fast forward five years, and while almost everything else in this economy has returned to pre-pandemic levels, business applications have stayed high. And many entrepreneurs are starting businesses that are adapted to post-pandemic realities.

Less than a year-and-a-half ago, JoEllen Depakakibo launched Pinholita Coffee Van, based in Ojai, California. She opened the business after moving here with her wife and newborn from San Francisco, where she still owns a brick and mortar cafe called Pinhole Coffee. 

Depakakibo said a big reason she decided to run her new business out of a van was to improve her work-life balance.

“I can pop up whenever I want to, and not have to open up every single day, and still have time to be with my child,” Depakakibo said.

Running the business out of a van also helps Depakakibo deal with a post-pandemic reality that’s weighing on a lot of businesses: high costs. She said she pays her employees about $20 an hour plus tips. And then, there’s the price of milk and coffee beans. 

Depakakibo said those pressures affect both of her businesses. But the van’s overhead is much lower than the cafe’s. It only has one full-time employee other than her. And Depakakibo doesn’t need to stockpile as many supplies.

“I’m just buying less milk at a time, less disposables, less coffee,” Depakakibo said. “I can order just what I need, rather than things in bulk.”

Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, Jordan Anthony-Brown has been running a new business with much higher overhead: a sit-down restaurant called The Aperture.

“We’re settling into our identity a little bit,” Anthony-Brown said. “Definitely more upscale casual, bordering on fine dining, in terms of price point.”

Anthony-Brown said he recently raised his prices from around $65 a person for dinner a year ago to $80 or $90 today. Part of that was to cover the rising costs of food and wages. But Anthony-Brown said it also reflected another post-pandemic reality: people want a fine dining experience. Many of his customers are older, and they’re comfortable paying those prices.

“We have a lot of business people coming in, a lot of private bookings for business dinners that we’re starting to see,” Anthony-Brown said. “And a lot of people in the neighborhood are in that 60 to 70 range, and they just have more disposable income.”

As a result, Anthony-Brown said he’s happy spending more on overhead. He’s buying more expensive ingredients to justify those prices. And he said he’s paying competitive wages, starting at $21 an hour, to make sure his 25 or so employees are happy.

“It’s the number one reason we look to maintain a strong culture, because that trickles down,” Anthony-Brown said. “As the saying goes, ‘Happy employees make for happy guests.’”

Other aspects of the post-pandemic economy have inspired entrepreneurs to start businesses.

“I’ve been really inspired by what was happening in AI, and then, found this application that I thought there was an opportunity for,” said Sean Steigerwald, CEO and founder of CustomerIQ, a software company he started a couple years ago.

The company uses artificial intelligence technology to help businesses record and summarize meetings, emails and other forms of communication.

“I did ask myself the question, like, fast forward 10 to 15 years, do we have more online meetings or less?” Steigerwald said. “And I thought it’s a pretty safe bet that we’d have the same or more.”

Many of the economic challenges people have faced during and since the pandemic prompted Aria Joughin to start their business about a year-and-a-half ago. It’s called MakeWith Hardware and Learning Center in Portland, Oregon, and it teaches people a wide range of do-it-yourself skills.

“We offer workshops on things like drywall repair, on refinishing furniture, sharpening knives, how to change a tire, how to change your oil,” Joughin said.

Joughin said learning these kinds of skills can be helpful for people who’ve struggled amid high inflation, economic uncertainty, and climate-related challenges — especially women, queer and trans folks, and people of color.

“There are barriers in employment, there are barriers to housing, there are so many different kinds of barriers folks are facing to gaining economic stability,” Joughin said.

Joughin said if the business goes well, one day, they hope to expand by opening a hardware store.

Here at Marketplace, we report on economic data from the government all the time: stats on housing, the job market, inflation, and much more. They help us help you understand where the economy is and where it’s heading. Government data informs business decisions, and assists policy makers to, well, make policy. 

But now, the Commerce Department has disbanded two groups that worked to ensure the government’s economic data paints a realistic picture. The Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee and the Bureau of Economic Analysis Advisory Committee have been around for decades. What happens next now that they’re gone?

Erica Groshen had no idea this news was coming: “This came out of the blue, nothing up until I got the email yesterday,” she said.

And she was on one of the committees. An economics advisor at Cornell University, Groshen was told that the decades-old committee was getting disbanded because its purpose had been fulfilled.

“You don’t fulfill an ongoing mission by canceling this communication mechanism,” she said.

That mission? To get a bunch of experts at the top of their economic fields to help the government.

“When the BEA wants to develop a new methodology or maybe go into a new area they haven’t been before, they can run their ideas by the committee,” said retired economist and committee member Marshall Reinsdorf.

He said advice was one major benefit. The other was government transparency — the committees opened their doors to the public.

“It gives them a chance to reach out and get their message out to a broader community,” Reinsdorf said.

Getting rid of these two committees doesn’t save much money. Mainly because the members weren’t getting paid, said former committee chair David Wilcox with Bloomberg Economics and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“So we’re talking about eight plane tickets, twice a year, one night at a non-fancy hotel. This was really inexpensive stuff,” he said.

And it was money well spent, Wilcox said.

Former committee chair Louise Sheiner with the Brookings Institution said with less input, the data that the government gathers will get worse over time. And that data is supposed to provide answers on GDP and productivity and jobs and inflation.

“Depending on what question you’re asking, you’re going to go to the data, and if the data are not good, your answers to those questions are also not going to be good,” she said.

Sheiner said disbanding the committees was a mistake. The Bureau of Economic Analysis declined to provide Marketplace with a comment, and the Commerce Department didn’t respond to our request.

Government workers are still receiving emails asking them to list what they did last week at work, part of the Elon Musk-led initiative to make the federal workforce leaner and more efficient. This project raises questions about what productivity looks like and the power all workers have at a moment when the labor market isn’t as hot as it used to be and there’s significant new economic uncertainty.

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He’s also host of the podcast Re:Thinking and author of the book “Think Again.” He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour for more. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: How much leverage have workers lost in the private sector side?

Adam Grant: On its face, if you follow the media headlines, it seems like workers have lost a lot of leverage, because we’re not talking about “quiet quitting” anymore as a major concern. We’re seeing a lot of headlines about return-to-office mandates, but if you actually look at the data just on coming to the office, for example, the trends are completely flat. There has been no meaningful change in the number of days that people are showing up versus working remotely in the past couple of years. And so it seems that we’ve stabilized with around a third of work days happening from anywhere, which is a huge win for employees.

Ben-Achour: The things that we’ve seen Elon Musk do — you know, these emails defending your employment — are these tried-and-true strategies employed by corporate America normally? Or are these just things Elon Musk did one time at Twitter?

Grant: It’s hard to say. I know of no evidence that these are effective strategies. Some strategies that may be common in startups, and may be popular in startups, are being overgeneralized to a large bureaucracy. I’ve seen this a lot, when we see leaders leave Silicon Valley and enter the behemoth of the U.S. government, they often find themselves hammering away at what they discover are screws, and that doesn’t work very well.

Ben-Achour: Is that a constant or common mindset in corporate America? I mean, is there this idea that people are generally not being productive enough, and you gotta fix it through terror?

Grant: It’s more common than I would like it to be. And I think the response to that by many leaders and managers is to say, “Well, we’ve got to monitor people.” And yet, the evidence tells a very different story. There was a great meta-analysis, a study of studies recently — 94 studies in total — showing that monitoring people’s performance fails to improve it. That, if people know they’re being observed, they do not do any better, and meanwhile, they’re more stressed, they’re more dissatisfied, and especially they’re less likely to trust their managers.

Ben-Achour: Well, what is the best way to motivate and specifically to improve productivity?

Grant: I think the research on motivation is pretty clear that people do their best work when they’re given a chance to pursue autonomy, mastery, belonging and purpose. But, of course, they have to be coupled with accountability. And I think what a lot of leaders don’t understand is when it comes to holding people accountable, there’s a huge difference between being demanding and being demeaning. Being demanding is setting high standards and giving tough love. Being demeaning is insulting people, being uncivil, unkind, cruel, belittling, bullying. And it’s the former behavior, not the latter, that tends to bring out the best in people.

Ben-Achour: The labor market is still strong, but it’s been cooling down for a while. There have been a number of high-profile layoffs. If that results in even less leverage for employees, what does that mean for their happiness?

Grant: Well, I think the short-term effect of layoffs, obviously, is to increase job insecurity among people who are still lucky enough to be employed — and with that sometimes comes survivor’s guilt, where people feel like, “It should have been me. I should have been the one whose job was cut.” And we know that’s bad for productivity. We also know that when workplaces start to cut jobs, the biggest superstars — the people who have the most options elsewhere — are the quickest to jump ship, and so this can be a pretty short-sighted strategy for employers. And my hope is that as we see more haphazard downsizings, leaders start to learn that actually this behavior backfires for them. And the evidence is strong on this one. There was a paper published in a top academic journal about downsizing that literally called them “dumb and dumber,” which is not language that academics normally get away with. But it was a study comparing thousands of firms in similarly dire financial straits. Some of them downsized and cut jobs; others found alternative ways to deal with the financial pressure, like, for example, executive pay cuts. And, lo and behold, the firms that downsized actually ended up performing worse.

Ben-Achour: What is the way to manage a workforce that improves productivity and offers a sense of fulfillment and purpose?

Grant: I think instead of being micromanagers, we need leaders to be macromanagers. I think that a great macromanager is somebody who helps you understand why your work counts. I studied this early in my career. I was doing randomized, controlled experiments with fundraising callers who were bringing in donations to a university, and they had no idea where the money they raised actually went. So I designed a simple experiment to connect those dots. And a month later, the average caller had spiked more than double in phone time per week and nearly triple in revenue per week. All I’d done was bring in one scholarship student who was able to say, “Here’s how the money you raised changed my life.” And I think, intellectually, the callers knew that work was happening, right? They were aware that they were raising money that benefited somebody. But it wasn’t until they were able to connect that work to a living, breathing human being that they found a reason to invest their full energy and attention in their job.

It’s the start of the busy spring break travel season, and it’s happening as consumer sentiment has been iffy, at best. 

The planner in me shudders to think this, but a lot of people right now still haven’t decided whether to travel for spring break.  

“The booking windows are decreasing — so the amount of time between when people book and when they actually do the vacation, that has shrunk considerably,” said Jan Freitag, who analyzes hotel data for CoStar.

These last-minute travel decisions speak to the unease consumers are feeling, she said.

“They’re saying, ‘OK, we’re still going to go, but maybe we’re not going to go for four days. Maybe we’re just going to go for three.’ Or, ‘maybe we’re not going to fly somewhere. Maybe we’re going to drive somewhere,'” Freitag said.

Or maybe they’ll opt to hop on a cruise, instead. Pete Larkworthy is the executive vice president of sales at Infinity Research, which analyzes cruise industry data. He said that bookings are strong during this spring of uncertainty.

“There’s a pretty nice cost advantage that the cruise industry enjoys versus, you know, a trip in Vegas or Disney,” he said.

The cruise industry also benefits from recent investment in splashy new ships, Larkworthy said. “There’s always some kind of halo effect surrounding new hardware.”

Royal Caribbean last year introduced the world’s largest cruise ship — just in case you want to spend spring break with 7,000 of your closest friends.

It happens every time Southern California has a devastating wildfire. The supply of contractors, laborers and construction materials stays the same while demand skyrockets from victims trying to rebuild.

Which means that almost overnight, architects like Christopher Norman get their pick of jobs.

“If a contractor could work on a $5 million ground up, versus a $1 million,” Norman said, “they’ll take the bigger project.”

The fact that higher-budget projects attract more attention from contractors is good news for many people rebuilding in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood. It’s less good news for the folks rebuilding in middle-class Altadena, about 40 miles away.

“If I wanted to build a house for $750,000 or $1 million, which is what it’s going to cost a regular person in [Los Angeles], that would be very challenging to find a contractor,” Norman said.

The finite resources mean some communities have to wait to rebuild. Another problem in the affected communities is “underinsurance.”

“If you don’t look at your policy on a regular basis and you’re paying the same amount, you’re vastly underinsured,” said Nora O’Brien of Connect Consulting Services, which is an emergency management and disaster resilience company.

That can happen when someone buys, say, a $500,000 house that had appreciated into an $800,000 house when it burned down, but they never updated the policy to reflect its new value.

“When something does happen, you’re only going to get a small fraction of the value,” said O’Brien. “If that gets destroyed, and that’s your only asset, and you don’t have insurance to replace it, there goes your wealth.”

And there goes your chance to rebuild along with it.

Marcus Betts’ whole extended family owns property in Altadena. Between all of them, 16 homes were damaged or destroyed. He knows contractors will prefer rebuilding in the Palisades.

“That’s to be expected. That’s what big companies do — they go for the big money,” Betts said. “But we have a plan in Altadena.”

Betts said he and his neighbors are ready to hammer, frame and paint one another’s homes. Plus, he said, there are architects and builders from Altadena, and he hopes they’ll pick their own community first, regardless of money.

“Because the legacy and everything that is in Altadena needs to be retained,” he said. “And the only way that’s retained is with the family and friends and residents of Altadena to kind of keep that in place.”

“My Economy” tells the story of the new economic normal through the eyes of people trying to make it, because we know the only numbers that really matter are the ones in your economy.

Ben Chehebar has been surrounded by soccer from before he can remember.

“I grew up in a household that was really all about soccer,” said Chehebar. “My dad was our coach. My mom is from Manchester, England, so we grew up watching Manchester United play.”

In 2024, Chehebar made soccer his life when he founded his own soccer brand, Eleven. But taking on industry giants like Nike, Puma or Adidas will not be an easy task. The good news is, the sport is growing in the U.S. and Chehebar is looking to other sports for brand inspiration.

Chehebar playing his weekly pickup game in Washington D.C. (Courtesy Chehebar)

“We’re seeing in other spaces like running or trail running or cycling, where there are a number of indie or startup brands that are really starting to break through,” said Chehebar. “And there really hasn’t been a brand in soccer, so I really think there’s a big opportunity to do this for that market.”

But making the shoe a reality, has been a whole different story. From design to manufacturing, Chehebar had to try and try again.

“Our first sample that we got, I got the first pictures of it on Thanksgiving Day, and it was awful,” Chehebar said. “First, we pushed back and said, ‘Hey, here are all the things that you need to do.’ And when it was clear that they didn’t want to put in that effort, we ended up switching factories.”

Since then, progress has been smooth as Chehebar brings his vision to life. He hopes that by the fall of 2025, his shoe will see its first gametime minutes. After that?

“Really get as many players as possible exposed to our product through a lot of in person demos at tournaments and other events in the lead up to the World Cup, which I think is going to be huge in 2026,” he said.

Let us know how your economy is doing using the form below, and your story may be featured on a future edition of “My Economy.” .captcha { padding-bottom: 1em !important; } .wForm .captcha .oneField { margin: 0; padding: 0; } // initialize our variables var captchaReady = 0; var wFORMSReady = 0; // when wForms is loaded call this var wformsReadyCallback = function () { // using this var to denote if wForms is loaded wFORMSReady = 1; // call our recaptcha function which is dependent on both // wForms and an async call to google // note the meat of this function wont fire until both // wFORMSReady = 1 and captchaReady = 1 onloadCallback(); } var gCaptchaReadyCallback = function() { // using this var to denote if captcha is loaded captchaReady = 1; // call our recaptcha function which is dependent on both // wForms and an async call to google // note the meat of this function wont fire until both // wFORMSReady = 1 and captchaReady = 1 onloadCallback(); }; // add event listener to fire when wForms is fully loaded document.addEventListener("wFORMSLoaded", wformsReadyCallback); var enableSubmitButton = function() { var submitButton = document.getElementById('submit_button'); var explanation = document.getElementById('disabled-explanation'); if (submitButton != null) { submitButton.removeAttribute('disabled'); if (explanation != null) { explanation.style.display = 'none'; } } }; var disableSubmitButton = function() { var submitButton = document.getElementById('submit_button'); var explanation = document.getElementById('disabled-explanation'); if (submitButton != null) { submitButton.disabled = true; if (explanation != null) { explanation.style.display = 'block'; } } }; // call this on both captcha async complete and wforms fully // initialized since we can't be sure which will complete first // and we need both done for this to function just check that they are // done to fire the functionality var onloadCallback = function () { // if our captcha is ready (async call completed) // and wFORMS is completely loaded then we are ready to add // the captcha to the page if (captchaReady && wFORMSReady) { grecaptcha.render('g-recaptcha-render-div', { 'sitekey': '6LeISQ8UAAAAAL-Qe-lDcy4OIElnii__H_cEGV0C', 'theme': 'light', 'size': 'normal', 'callback': 'enableSubmitButton', 'expired-callback': 'disableSubmitButton' }); var oldRecaptchaCheck = parseInt('1'); if (oldRecaptchaCheck === -1) { var standardCaptcha = document.getElementById("tfa_captcha_text"); standardCaptcha = standardCaptcha.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode; standardCaptcha.parentNode.removeChild(standardCaptcha); } if (!wFORMS.instances['paging']) { document.getElementById("g-recaptcha-render-div").parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.style.display = "block"; //document.getElementById("g-recaptcha-render-div").parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.removeAttribute("hidden"); } document.getElementById("g-recaptcha-render-div").getAttributeNode('id').value = 'tfa_captcha_text'; var captchaError = ''; if (captchaError == '1') { var errMsgText = 'The CAPTCHA was not completed successfully.'; var errMsgDiv = document.createElement('div'); errMsgDiv.id = "tfa_captcha_text-E"; errMsgDiv.className = "err errMsg"; errMsgDiv.innerText = errMsgText; var loc = document.querySelector('.g-captcha-error'); loc.insertBefore(errMsgDiv, loc.childNodes[0]); /* See wFORMS.behaviors.paging.applyTo for origin of this code */ if (wFORMS.instances['paging']) { var b = wFORMS.instances['paging'][0]; var pp = base2.DOM.Element.querySelector(document, wFORMS.behaviors.paging.CAPTCHA_ERROR); if (pp) { var lastPage = 1; for (var i = 1; i < 100; i++) { if (b.behavior.isLastPageIndex(i)) { lastPage = i; break; } } b.jumpTo(lastPage); } } } } }; document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() { var warning = document.getElementById("javascript-warning"); if (warning != null) { warning.parentNode.removeChild(warning); } var oldRecaptchaCheck = parseInt('1'); if (oldRecaptchaCheck !== -1) { var explanation = document.getElementById('disabled-explanation'); var submitButton = document.getElementById('submit_button'); if (submitButton != null) { submitButton.disabled = true; if (explanation != null) { explanation.style.display = 'block'; } } } }); document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(){ const FORM_TIME_START = Math.floor((new Date).getTime()/1000); let formElement = document.getElementById("tfa_0"); if (null === formElement) { formElement = document.getElementById("0"); } let appendJsTimerElement = function(){ let formTimeDiff = Math.floor((new Date).getTime()/1000) - FORM_TIME_START; let cumulatedTimeElement = document.getElementById("tfa_dbCumulatedTime"); if (null !== cumulatedTimeElement) { let cumulatedTime = parseInt(cumulatedTimeElement.value); if (null !== cumulatedTime && cumulatedTime > 0) { formTimeDiff += cumulatedTime; } } let jsTimeInput = document.createElement("input"); jsTimeInput.setAttribute("type", "hidden"); jsTimeInput.setAttribute("value", formTimeDiff.toString()); jsTimeInput.setAttribute("name", "tfa_dbElapsedJsTime"); jsTimeInput.setAttribute("id", "tfa_dbElapsedJsTime"); jsTimeInput.setAttribute("autocomplete", "off"); if (null !== formElement) { formElement.appendChild(jsTimeInput); } }; if (null !== formElement) { if(formElement.addEventListener){ formElement.addEventListener('submit', appendJsTimerElement, false); } else if(formElement.attachEvent){ formElement.attachEvent('onsubmit', appendJsTimerElement); } } }); wFORMS.behaviors.prefill.skip = false; #tfa_5, *[id^="tfa_5["] { width: 660px !important; } #tfa_5-D, *[id^="tfa_5["][class~="field-container-D"] { width: auto !important; } #tfa_1, *[id^="tfa_1["] { width: 320px !important; } #tfa_1-D, *[id^="tfa_1["][class~="field-container-D"] { width: auto !important; } #tfa_2, *[id^="tfa_2["] { width: 320px !important; } #tfa_2-D, *[id^="tfa_2["][class~="field-container-D"] { width: auto !important; } #tfa_9, *[id^="tfa_9["] { width: 320px !important; } #tfa_9-D, *[id^="tfa_9["][class~="field-container-D"] { width: auto !important; } #tfa_6, *[id^="tfa_6["] { width: 320px !important; } #tfa_6-D, *[id^="tfa_6["][class~="field-container-D"] { width: auto !important; } #tfa_7, *[id^="tfa_7["] { width: 670px !important; } #tfa_7-D, *[id^="tfa_7["][class~="field-container-D"] { width: auto !important; } #tfa_7, *[id^="tfa_7["] { height: 120px } #tfa_7-D, *[id^="tfa_7["][class~="field-container-D"] { height: auto !important; } #tfa_7-L, label[id^="tfa_7["], *[id^="tfa_7["][id$="-L"] { height: auto !important; } .wFormContainer .supportInfo { display: none; } function uuidv4() { return ([1e7]+-1e3+-4e3+-8e3+-1e11).replace(/[018]/g, c => (c ^ crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(1))[0] & 15 >> c / 4).toString(16) ) } Email Address
First Name
Last Name
Zip / Postal Code
Phone
Message
Newsletter Subscription
Sign Me Up

reCAPTCHA helps prevent automated form spam.
The submit button will be disabled until you complete the CAPTCHA.

The Donald Trump administration’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico started Tuesday, and their effects will ripple across the U.S. economy and abroad. But one state is particularly exposed: Texas. It has what amounts to roughly a $300 billion trade relationship with Mexico all on its own, which has supported hundreds of thousands of jobs and brought in billions in capital investment to the state.

New tariffs could raise the price of what Texans eat and drink. That includes beer, liquor, produce, agave, sugar, coffee and chocolate, said Emily Williams Knight, CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association.

They could also raise the prices of where Texans sleep.

“Softwood lumber, which is like your frame lumber, gypsum board, which is your drywall — all those are largely sourced in Canada and Mexico,” said Matthew Reibenstein, president of Royal Design Build and former president of the Greater Houston Builders Association. “These tariffs on the building materials would drive up the cost to build homes.”

Out in West Texas, oil producers, who get pipes from Canada and Mexico, could also feel the squeeze, said Karr Ingham, president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers.

“There’s a lot of steel that is deployed in the business of drilling for and producing and transporting crude oil and natural gas,” he said.

In the trucking industry, which has boomed under free trade, John Esparza, CEO of the Texas Trucking Association, said he worries tariffs will increase the cost of semitrucks and decrease demand for trucking.

“That could mean less business and at a higher cost,” he said.

Many trucks operate out of Laredo, which is particularly exposed to tariffs, said Daniel Covarrubias, director of the Texas Center for Border Economic & Enterprise Development at Texas A&M International University.

“On a 30-mile radius here across the border, you have upwards of 1,500 logistics companies … transportation companies, customs brokers or logistics warehouses,” he said.

These firms grew out of decades of free trade. But now?

“You really rip up an entire supply chain that we’ve spent the last 50, 60 years building,” said Ray Perryman, an economist and president of the Perryman Group. “It really begins to impact employment in a significant way. Because of inflation, consumers have less money to spend.”

He said if tariffs are sustained, all states will feel it, but especially Texas because its economy is so integrated with Mexico’s. 

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Frustrations with the economy are part of what led to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sinking popularity after nine years in charge — and a calculation by some in his party that a fresh start was needed before the election. Trudeau announced his resignation in January, which paves the way for a leadership contest ahead of a general election later this year.

For the leadership contenders — like former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney — the economy is front and center, as is the threat of fresh tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.

“We don’t need their cars. You know, they make 20% of our cars. We don’t need that. I’d rather they make them in Detroit,” Trump said in January.

But Canada’s economic issues have deeper roots, with a sluggish economy and squeezed incomes and falling productivity.

“We don’t have a sense that the economy is becoming more productive over time,” said Stewart Prest, a political science lecturer at the University of British Columbia. “So Canadian industry leaders and Canadian political leaders continue to grapple with this question about how to reignite the economy in ways that can compete on a global scale.”

Public services are also under pressure — with long waiting lists for health care — and pressure on housing. The population has been rising, thanks to welcoming immigration policies. But those policies are now resented by some.

At her Toronto office, realtor Anya Ettinger described how the two issues have become connected.

“Everyone’s wanting to move here. So many people want to come here because it is, I mean, the biggest city in Canada. And with that demand, we only have so much land. We only have so much space,” she said. “So there’s so many people coming that our population will grow, but the amount of housing that we have does not.”

Then, there’s the cost of living: The headline inflation rate has been falling, but people are still feeling the squeeze.

“There is no question that whoever is prime minister next is going to have to find a way to deal with concerns with cost of living,” noted the University of British Columbia’s Stewart Prest.

Who that will be will be decided in March.

As part of our Marketplace Economic Pulse series, we examine the economy from a range of perspectives.

Today, we hear from Clara Mattei, a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa In Oklahoma and director of the newly established Center for Heterodox Economics — which aims to reimagine how we measure economic progress, prioritizing people’s experiences.

She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio about the Center and its goal of centering people in our understanding of the economy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: “Heterodox” — I had to look it up again — [it means] “unorthodox.” What’s the mistake orthodox approaches to economics we’re making that needs new thinking from your team?

Clara Mattei: It is absolutely timely to rethink economics in a broader, pluralist way, so that we’re not stuck in abstract and narrow methods that ultimately hide rather than explain what happens in the real world.

Brancaccio: One remedy for abstraction is to bring it down to earth and put people into the equation. Is there a greater focus on the human experience and the type of work that your center wants to do?

Mattei: The idea is that economics is not a hard science. It has been presented this way to give absolute authorities to experts that ultimately a lot of times justify economic systems that exclude people from decision-making. And as I worked in my own research, I showed that actually neoclassical economics a lot of times supports authoritarian regimes. So instead, the idea is that economics is based on social relations, that people are at the center of the economy, and thus we need to understand these social relations as something that can evolve, and thus we can have a greater say in what our economy should look like.

Brancaccio: The orthodox economic indicators had been showing the U.S. economy was in many ways fine and dandy; many people didn’t feel it was fine and dandy. So do you think some of your approaches to putting the experience of real people back into the analysis would resolve — I hate to use a big 50-cent word — but would resolve the dichotomy? Economic indicators saying things are great, people saying they’re not so great.

Mattei: This is exactly the point. People feel the economic injustices on their own skins. But there’s no tools to understand these, because the type of economics we’re exposed to operates to hide these problems. So the Center is trying to say, if we want to be academics and intellectuals and grow a generation of students that can really tackle issues for people, we need a different approach to economics. The agenda of economics has to be inspired by what people feel and live, and so people can be empowered by these tools in order to potentially participate for a better economic system.

Brancaccio: Professor Mattei, I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but I do have to raise this issue, which is, there was a lot of talk like this, in 2009 in 2010 after the great financial collapse — that mainstream economics didn’t see it coming, that mainstream economics needs new tools — and yet, here we are all these years later, and you’re forced to innovate again in this space. Do you think it’ll stick this time?

Mattei: That’s the real challenge. This is something that is ultimately a political battle. Academic battles are political battles because they are based on resources and the will of institutions. The University of Tulsa has the energy and the courage to give us the resources to start up this institution. We cannot do this alone, but I do think that we can serve as an example that may be able to multiply in which we say we can be a place of serious, courageous scholarship.

We’re continuing to follow reports that the Donald Trump administration has fired more than 6,000 IRS workers, many of them in collections and enforcement.

The administration said it’s doing so to cut costs and because it says many IRS employees aren’t fully occupied. 

But job cuts at the IRS will come with their own costs. That’s because the money the IRS spends on tax collection helps it pull in even more money from taxpayers.

A few years ago, Nathan Hendren, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that when the IRS audits somebody, it costs the agency $6,000 to $7,000 on average. And when it audits people with higher incomes? 

“Those audits get a little more complicated. And we end up spending just over $10,000 on those audits,” said Hendren. 

But he also looked at how much the government receives when the IRS does an audit. Turns out that for people on the bottom half of the income spectrum, the IRS pretty much breaks even.

And for those with the highest incomes? “Every dollar we spend delivers more than $12 in revenue back to the U.S. Treasury,” said Hendren. 

He said that’s not only because audits pull in lost revenue. It’s also because of what happens next.

“Those people end up changing their ways going forward, and you deliver back a lot more revenue to the government even in the future years.”

Another factor pushing up the IRS’ return on investment: the basic taxpayer services it provides, said Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights.

“Everything from the IRS publishing publications and forms to answering the phones on tax law questions to processing returns,” Olson said. 

Olson said those services help the IRS take in revenue by helping taxpayers who have questions, unique situations or even a dispute over a tax return.

“People need to be there to work through those issues, so the return can go its merry way into the system to be processed,” said Olson. 

Cutting staff will slow down those services, she said, making it harder for taxpayers to get the help they need.

Online travel sites like Priceline, Kayak and Booking.com rang out 2024 on a high note, according to quarterly earnings reported by parent company Booking Holdings on Thursday. The strong results followed better-than-expected readings from Expedia and Airbnb earlier this month.

Travel saw healthy growth last year, with airline and cruise bookings hitting new all-time highs, and industry groups expect bookings to push higher yet in 2025. Though the new administration has brought a bit of turbulence.

The days of post-pandemic “revenge travel,” when bookings were growing at double-digit rates, might be over. “But the ghost of revenge travel, the spirit of revenge travel, lives on,” said Seth Borko, director of research for travel news site Skift.

He said people seem to have come out of the pandemic with travel as a higher priority. A recent Skift global survey found consumers were most excited to spend discretionary income on travel.

“What we think we’re seeing, both short term and long term, is travel as an identity, right? And experiences as an identity,” he said.

But as we saw in Friday’s consumer sentiment survey, buyers might be feeling a bit unsettled. That could be affecting travel plans for May and June, said analyst Patrick Scholes at Truist Securities.

“The bookings are kind of mediocre. They’re not going down, but they’re not, you know, they’re not exactly on fire either,” he said.

Scholes said tariffs could have a direct effect on travel because they affect exchange rates. A stronger dollar would be good for U.S. travelers internationally. But foreign tourists’ money won’t go as far here.

“One thing that’s interesting we’re watching very closely is inbound Canadian to the United States,” he said.

Typically the U.S. gets its highest number of foreign tourists from Canada, followed by Mexico.

Flyers are also voicing concerns about safety, said Jay Sorensen, an airline consultant. There have been several high-profile air travel incidents in recent weeks.

“Of course, it’s still safe to fly. But then you add to it the whole disruption that the Trump administration is creating in terms of the FAA, so that begins to magnify itself a little bit in terms of perhaps a hesitation for some,” he said.

The new government recently cut hundreds of jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration, but stipulated that air traffic controllers and other safety personnel would not be affected.

Western sanctions on some oil producers, like Iran, Russia and Venezuela, have caused a growing number of oil tankers to “go dark.” That is, to shut off the tracking system that could alert authorities of their movements.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates a whopping 43% of seaborne crude oil exports traveled on “dark ships” in recent years.

That 43% is just an estimate because it’s hard to get an exact number. But the fact is, a whole lot of sanctioned oil is still moving around the global economy.

If you’re piloting an oil tanker and you shut off your transponder, you don’t disappear altogether. 

“This is not Star Trek. We don’t have cloaking devices,” said Ellen Wald of the Atlantic Council. 

But Wald said it does make it harder to find you, which might involve combing through satellite photos and the like.

“It’s just tedious,” said Wald. 

So ships go dark to try and hide their cargo. This often happens when two oil tankers rendezvous at sea, said Ian Ralby, CEO of the maritime consultancy I.R. Consilium.

“ If you have a small tanker, that takes sanctioned oil out from Iran, and transships onto a much larger tanker that is carrying a cargo of legitimate oil, they can obscure the fact that that oil is partially sanctioned,” said Ralby. 

And it turns out it’s not hard to find a buyer for oil of questionable origin. Erica Downs, an energy researcher at Columbia University, said a lot of dark-shipped oil ends up at small, independent refineries in China.

“ These refineries operate on very thin margins and they’re highly opportunistic crude buyers,” said Downs. 

This means they’ll take the lowest cost crude, sanctioned or not. Oil on dark ships also winds up in South Korea, India and Egypt, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research study.

This all means that sanctions haven’t really squeezed the oil market, said Robin Brooks of the Brookings Institution.

“Global oil supply was not at all materially impacted,” said Brooks. 

He said neither was the price of oil. What has happened, with so many major oil suppliers under sanction, is that the global oil trade has basically split into two parallel channels, said Ian Ralby of I.R. Consilium.

“ If you put everyone outside of the tent, they’re just going to make their own tent. And that’s essentially what we’ve done. We’ve created a new marketplace for sanctioned actors and their enablers,” said Ralby. 

Another unintended side effect, said Ralby: these tracking systems are a safety feature to help ships avoid collisions. It’s not a great idea to turn them off.

In our weekly I’ve Always Wondered series, we tackle all of your questions about business, finance and the economy.

Have you ever wondered why gas prices end in nine-tenths of a cent? What you should do with old savings bonds? Why cereal doesn’t come in resealable bags? Or how tariffs will impact the economy?

We’ve got you covered. Let us know what questions you want answered using the form below.

Submit a form.

This is just one of the stories from our “I’ve Always Wondered” series, where we tackle all of your questions about the world of business, no matter how big or small. Ever wondered if recycling is worth it? Or how store brands stack up against name brands? Check out more from the series here.

Richard Rowley asks: 

What do retail stores do with damaged merchandise that is returned to the store by customers? Like a toaster that doesn’t work or a dress shirt with a tear in the fabric.

Returns are not only costly for companies – they’re also costly for consumers in the long run. 

Customers returned an estimated $890 billion worth of goods in 2024, which amounted to 17% of all merchandise, according to a report from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, a logistics division within the United Parcel Service. 

That’s almost triple the $309 billion worth of goods customers returned in 2019. “Returns are a very costly problem for retailers,” said Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at the Santa Clara Leavey School of Business.

Returns increased over the pandemic as online retailers offered generous, free return and shipping policies to consumers in an effort to compete with one another, said Lauren Beitelspacher, a marketing professor at Babson College. 

If a customer returns a product that was already damaged, some retailers will send it back to the manufacturer, and then ask the manufacturer to refund them for selling a defunct product, Beitelspacher said.

If the customer is responsible for any damage, like a crack on the item or a hole in the garment, retailers who do accept the return will likely just end up throwing it away, Beitelspacher said. Most resellers don’t have the capacity to fix an item and then resell it, with the exception of some stores that sell outdoor products, she added. 

Many online stores will also tell customers to keep their item because of the hassle of handling returned items. Generous return policies have become an increasingly bigger headache for retailers, especially online stores who lose out on the sale and have to pay for the cost of shipping, retail experts told Marketplace. 

They also lead to higher consumer prices, since retailers want to compensate for reduced profit margins.

“You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. If you don’t have a good returns policy, people are going to go shop elsewhere, because returns help people feel comfortable making purchases.” Beitelspacher said. ”But if you do have a good returns policy, people will take advantage. So what you see a lot now is a lot of retailers just saying, ‘Just keep it.’” 

During the pandemic, e-commerce business rose exponentially, and retailers tried to lure customers to shop online through their return policies, Beitelspacher said. But some customers who ordered clothing purchased multiple items if they didn’t know their size, and then returned the ones that didn’t fit, Beitelspacher explained. 

“If something wasn’t damaged before, and you would return it to a store, they could just hang it back up and put it back out on the floor. But now that we have more e-commerce, it’s been out of the inventory for weeks at that point,” Beitelspacher said. 

Retailers struggle with handling returned merchandise even if it’s in pristine condition, especially seasonal clothing items. If you returned a sweater in January, retailers will struggle to sell it at the original price now that the weather is becoming warmer, Kalyanam said. 

Return rates tend to be high in the apparel and fashion industry, reaching 20% to 30%, he said.

The problem is worse for e-commerce sites because they have to pay for shipping and return shipping, Kalyanam added. “It really, really hurts their financials,” he said. 

The cost of consumer goods across the board have been rising since the pandemic, including apparel (although price increases are far less than other items, like food). 

“Part of the reason that costs are going up for consumers is because of a huge increase in returns coming out of the pandemic,” Beitelspacher said. 

To reduce returns, Amazon uses a concept inspired by the andon cord method, which empowers assembly line workers to stop production if they find certain parts are repeatedly faulty, Kalyanam said. If Amazon discovers that customers are excessively returning an item, the retail giant might decide to stop selling it, he explained. 

Amazon will also tell customers if an item has frequently been returned, Kalyanam added. 

Some retailers are also offering less generous return policies, lowering the period from 60 days to 30 days and providing store credit instead of a full refund, Beitelspacher said. 

“It is better, when we can, to go to the store and touch the product, try it on, get some information from a sales associate if it’s a high-involvement purchase, and just really pause and think to ourselves, ‘Is this what I really want?’” Beitelspacher said.

Submit a form.

Whether it’s the jobs report, gross domestic product or the Consumer Price Index, public data is key to understanding what’s going on in the economy. But under the Trump administration, public data increasingly looks to be at risk of disappearing, or even fall under the influence of Elon Musk, which begs the question: can private data take the place of public data?

“If we think about the ways that companies collect data, it ranges so widely from different company practices and styles,” said Tara Sinclair, professor of economics at George Washington University. “That’s why it’s so important that we have government statistical agencies.”

Sinclair spent nearly a decade working in the world of private data at Indeed, where she served as chief economist and founded the Indeed Hiring Lab. She spoke to “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about what private data can, and can’t, do.

Kai Ryssdal: You have spent a good chunk of your career working on private indicators about this economy, and I guess the first thing I want to get your sense of is how hard it is to take data from private sources and make it useful to the public.

Tara Sinclair: Well, that’s a fantastic question, because it is really, really hard. If we think about the ways that companies collect data, it ranges so widely from different company practices and styles, and to be able to try and take that data and condense it into something that answers a question that is important to the general public really takes specific tools, specific skills, and it’s typically outside the scope or objectives that any one particular company has. That’s why it’s so important that we have government statistical agencies.

Ryssdal: Yes, go back to that thing you just said, “Outside the scope of what any specific business has.” These businesses are collecting this data for their business purposes, not to clarify things for the public.

Sinclair: Right, exactly. And they have their own objectives, and those objectives can change over time, so they don’t have necessarily a need to keep things consistent from month to month or quarter to quarter. The way that it’s so important for us to have that information to be able to make longer run decisions for the general public.

Ryssdal: You’ve got a couple of decks that you put together as you were doing presentations on this throughout your career, and there was a phrase that hit me that I’d like it explained. You talk about “unstructured data,” and you call that something of a peril, and I want to know why.

Sinclair: Well, oftentimes people think that if we can just go and get the data directly from companies, it’s going to be this, you know, amazing archeological find. And it is, but it requires you all of the tools and digging of archeologists, like it’s not just sitting there as this glorious, perfect data set. It’s rather this giant, unstructured mess that has several perils. One of them is that we might find the wrong story from that data, rather than if we had a more comprehensive view from all of the companies in the economy, rather than just a few select ones that are willing to offer the data. I think that’s one of the biggest concerns.

Ryssdal: It does bear a mention here that private data — sometimes called high frequency data, we’ve done stores on that in the past — this private data already plays a role in government policy decision making. You know, on the margins, but it’s there.

Sinclair: Oh, absolutely. And it can be a great input. In fact, it may be one way that we can save people time, because instead of filling out a survey, maybe we can just collect the data of their shopping habits directly from the store. That sort of thing is already being used at statistical agencies and is really improving their efficiency, but it’s got to be done carefully, because we need to make appropriate adjustments for the fact that that data is coming from a select set of sources. We have to make sure that what we’re observing is actually answering the question that we want to be answering.

Ryssdal: So here comes the more subjective question, what is the risk for this economy if government economic data becomes unreliable or something short of unreliable, just gets called into question?

Sinclair: Right, That is really, really scary, because that’s something that I think the statistical agencies have worked very hard to get that credibility. It may be the case that the typical American household isn’t looking up what’s going on with inflation from month to month, or GDP from quarter to quarter, but it is the case that it’s affecting them because it’s affecting decisions that are being made on their behalf, by their employers, by their local and state governments, and without that clear information, we’re going to be in the dark making our decisions. Forward-looking decisions are just already hard enough.

Consumers in this economy are not thrilled. At all.

Their sentiment fell by almost 10 percentage points between January and this month, according to survey numbers released Friday by the University of Michigan.

But behind that decline, there’s a stark divide between consumers. Because when you break sentiment down by political affiliation, you see two entirely different stories. 

There is one thing that consumers across the political spectrum agree on: inflation isn’t going anywhere.

“Regardless of where you lean, I think there’s concern over what does it mean and how’s it going to impact me?” said Sonia Lapinsky with the financial advisory firm AlixPartners. 

She said inflation fears and talk of tariffs make consumers feel uncertain. And uncertainty shows up as negative sentiment.

“They don’t want to spend money, they don’t want to take any risks. So that’s what we’re seeing, I think, a lot in the consumer, for sure,” said Lapinsky. 

Republican sentiment is about the same as the previous month. Meanwhile, Democrats are freaking out.

That switch happened — you guessed it — in the fall.

“And then everything went pretty haywire after that, of course, as the political bias I think gets baked into that data set,” said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial. He’s hopeful the political chasm will start to shrink soon.

“There’s probably some shock factor on maybe both sides coming out of the election. … So I would expect some of these sentiment indicators to normalize a bit,” said Turnquist.

But the divide didn’t start in November.

Michael Green, chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management, said consumer sentiment polarized in 2023, when the University of Michigan stopped gathering data by phone and started using an internet survey.

“You can imagine a phone interviewer saying something along the lines of, ‘OK, so you’re predicting a dramatic jump in inflation,’ and somebody on the phone responding and saying, ‘No, I mean, I just think inflation is really high,’” said Green. 

Meaning that when you’re talking to another person, you’re more likely to moderate your view. Now that it’s people alone with their computers, “you have absolutely no obligation to fill in the survey with any form of accuracy. You can basically reflect any wild view,” he said. 

While consumer sentiment remains divided, business leaders are feeling more confident. New data from The Conference Board said CEOs are the most optimistic they’ve been in three years.

There’s another casualty from the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development: Funding for agriculture research at 17 labs at U.S. universities is now frozen. The labs are laying off workers, and some research is on hold.

David Hughes got the stop work order from USAID at the end of January. Hughes is director of the USAID Innovation Lab on Current and Emerging Threats to Crops at Penn State and was helping farmers in Africa fight a caterpillar that eats corn.

“And that can cause damages and losses to yield between 10% to 40% per year — it depends,” he said. “And we had scaled up an incredibly successful tool.”

The tool? A type of small, parasitic wasp that eats the caterpillars. Hughes’ lab got a grant of up to $39 million from USAID and used part of the money to mass produce and release the caterpillar-killing wasps.

But that money was frozen as part of a 90-day review period. Hughes’ lab had to stop work in five African countries and laid off 40 to 50 local staffers.

Hughes said it’s good to try to root out waste at USAID and thinks too much money is spent on consultants — but he doesn’t want research funding cut. He said more money should go toward science, which can help American farmers. (The same ones who have depended on food purchases from USAID.)

“We need a global surveillance system for problems that could come here — because they always come here — and then respond to them effectively based on training we’ve done in places like Kenya or DRC, etc.,” he said.

In an emailed statement to Marketplace, a State Department spokesperson said the review is aimed at “restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests.” Programs that serve those interests will continue. Those that don’t will not.

The manufacturing sector has been pretty sluggish in recent years, partially thanks to high interest rates and weak customer demand. But there are some signs that the manufacturing sector has been getting busier lately.

Up until last month, the manufacturing sector had been contracting for more than two years, according to the Institute for Supply Management. In the last few months, however, orders of manufactured goods have been growing.

“What appears to be happening is our conservatism on investing in capital and long-life durable goods is easing a little bit,” said ISM’s Tim Fiore.

It helps that interest rates have come down some, he said. And the equipment and other goods companies bought early in the pandemic might be getting old.

“People need to replace capital, people need to replace consumable goods,” he said.

It’s still too early to tell whether the recent uptick in manufacturing activity is a long-term trend, according to Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, a senior manager of business cycle indicators at the Conference Board.

For instance, some companies might be making one-off orders because they’re worried about new tariffs — “making sure that I’m going to get the goods before the prices go up, before tariffs go up,” she said.

Either way, Zabinska-La Monica thinks an uptick in new orders today means more spending on production and hiring in the future.

Gambling is inescapable these days, with options everywhere from your phones to convenience stores. If you love this, credit Massachusetts. If you think this is a force for bad — blame Massachusetts.

“Scratch & Win” is a new podcast from Boston-based GBH News about how we got here with our gaming/gambling across the country. It turns out Massachusetts has a major role to play through the lottery. Ian Coss is the host of “Scratch & Win.” He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Sounds like the Bay State was, what should we call it? A cauldron of innovation when it comes to gambling and lotteries?

Ian Coss: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. A really important thing to understand is that early on, when the state lotteries got rolling in the ’60s and ’70s, these were incredibly conservative agencies. They were terrified of breaking the public’s trust, of getting infiltrated by the mob. So they did not try a lot of new things. What happens in Massachusetts is that the state lottery winds up in the hands of this state treasurer who was kind of a vaudeville guy. He’d literally grown up the son of a vaudeville stage hand. He loved to sing. He had this sort of showman personality.

This is Bob Crane, that state treasurer, singing at a nursing home back in the 1970s. He had this whole group called The Treasury Notes that used to go around and perform.

You can see how the culture in Massachusetts around innovation, experimentation and really entertainment, was very different from the start.

Brancaccio: We think of like drawing ping pong balls in a random drawing when you think of the lottery. But of course, another part of it is the scratch ticket.

Coss: Scratch tickets are the bread-and-butter game of all state lotteries. That’s not just Massachusetts. It’s something like two-thirds of all lottery sales, and that’s $100 billion industry, if you want to call it an industry. And scratch tickets start in Massachusetts. It really is the first and most important of the innovations that happened here. And I spent some time at a convenience store in Quincy, Massachusetts. I met this man who’s a mechanic, who did not want to share his name, but he would come there every day on his lunch break and spend literally hundreds of dollars.

One day when I ran into him, he’d already spent $300 and won nothing. He said he does this because he’s dreaming on hitting the big one so he can retire. He’s 75 years old and has nothing saved for retirement.

And that’s really — I mean, the scratch ticket, if you think about it, that is instant gambling, anywhere, anytime, in the palm of your hand. It started in 1974 in Massachusetts.

Brancaccio: Instant gratification. And how does that vignette help us understand where we are today nationwide?

Coss: Lotteries, they kind of did the political work and a lot of the cultural work of bringing gambling out of the shadows of society and into the open. You know, back in the ’60s, gambling was something you associated either with Las Vegas or the mob. And lotteries, by taking this thing that was vice, that was in the shadows, putting the state’s stamp of approval on it, it really brings it out into the open. And that’s what sets the stage for casino expansion in the 1990s, for states to get into sports betting, and really everything that we’re living in today.

Elon Musk, the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, says that tens of millions of people over the age of 100 are marked as “alive” in the U.S. Social Security system.

This week, he tweeted a spreadsheet showing how many people in the system are in each age bracket. More than 1.3 million people are marked as between the ages of 150 and 159, while almost 2,800 are listed as 200 and older. 

“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” tweeted Musk, implying that the Social Security Administration could still be distributing benefit checks to these people. 

President Donald Trump also expressed concern that people are receiving “fraudulent” payments. 

“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,” Trump said. 

But data on the Social Security Administration’s website shows that only about 89,000 people over the age of 99 are receiving payments on the basis of their earnings. And there are only an estimated 108,000 centenarians living in the U.S., according to United Nations data, while the oldest known human being lived to the age of 122. 

The idea that millions of centenarians are still receiving benefits is “preposterous,” said Eric Kingson, a professor emeritus of social work at Syracuse University and an expert on Social Security. 

“This is part of an orchestrated attack to undermine Social Security,” Kingson said. 

SSA Acting Commissioner Michelle King recently left the agency over DOGE’s attempts to access Social Security recipient information, and dozens of probationary SSA employees have been offered job reassignments. 

Social Security has records on millions of people, but that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving payments, said Charles Blahous, a former public trustee for Social Security and Medicare who served as deputy director of President George W. Bush’s National Economic Council. 

“There are many people who were born more than 150 years ago for whom Social Security lacks information about their death, just like we lack information about a lot of things involving people who lived that long ago,” Blahous said. 

The SSA also says it has a special code in place to stop payments from going to people over the age of 115.

Wired magazine reported that the number of people in the 150-year age bracket may have to do with the programming language used by the SSA, known as COBOL, or the Common Business Oriented Language. The 65-year-old system can still be found at government agencies, businesses and financial institutions. 

Basically, when there is a missing or incomplete birthdate, COBOL defaults to a reference point. The most common is May 20, 1875, when countries around the world attended a convention on metric standards. Someone born in 1875 would be 150 in 2025, which is why entries with missing and incomplete birthdates will default to that age, Wired explained. 

Another explanation for some centenarians being on the books: Social Security benefits are provided to qualified widows and widowers, who have to wait until they reach a certain age to receive payments, said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University.

If there was a large age gap between a couple, and one partner who’s now deceased was born over 100 years ago, the SSA would still need to maintain the information of that deceased person, Kotlikoff said. 

The SSA does make mistakes, though. A report from the agency found that between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, the agency sent out nearly $72 billion in improper payments, which were mostly overpayments. That’s about $9 billion a year. 

It might sound like a lot of money, but it’s a very small amount relative to the $1.5 trillion in benefits the Social Security Administration paid out last year, said Richard Himelfarb, a political science professor at Hofstra University. 

That $9 billion is less than 1% of expenditures, he pointed out. It’s also a tiny fraction of last year’s federal deficit, which stood at more than $1.8 trillion.

“If you want to save money, if you want to really reduce the deficit,” Himelfarb said, “you’re going to have to do more than find waste and fraud and abuse in Social Security.”