Adam Ozimek

Chief economist at @InnovateEconomy. Host of the EconTwitter Water Cooler, live on twitter spaces and downloadable here:

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

What should we do about high skilled immigration and why? This is the topic of my huge new report with @LettieriDC and @cojobrien: Exceptional by Design. Quick thread on why I think you should read this report.

https://t.co/9F0Pi130Z0

[Conor Sen @conorsen]

The Chief Economist at Indeed just posted that software development job posting growth is outpacing overall job posting growth:

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Enough messy kludges and listening to Borjas. We should actually fix H-1Bs

https://t.co/Pq20RT9ADQ

[Brandon Fuller @fuller_brandon]

Under the new H-1B lottery, a $65,000 family therapist in Huntsville, Alabama has TWICE the odds of getting a visa as a $130,000 aerospace engineer in the same city. That's not a glitch, it's how the system is designed.

In @CityJournal, @SpeakSamuel and @jasonhehehe of @InnovateEconomy show that the Trump administration's weighted lottery, meant to punish the IT outsourcing firms who game the H-1B system, actually helps them. Wage Levels measure pay relative to occupation and location — not age or experience — so outsourcers' older workers look well-paid next to younger peers in the same field. They get certified at Levels II–III and enjoy 2–3x the selection odds of recent grads with far higher earning potential.

They offer a straightforward fix: scrap the lottery and select H-1B workers on lifetime earning potential, salary adjusted for age. Under this approach, they estimate that outsourcer share of H-1Bs falls from 18%+ to under 4%; annual net fiscal impact rises $20,000+ per visa holder; and the number of visas going to workers in AI roughly triples.

The administration is right that H-1B abuse is real. But the answer isn't fees or a broken lottery. It's picking those with the highest lifetime earning potential, on purpose.

https://t.co/p8aQm7nIiA

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

oh boy, is it time for the tribes to use their indigenous ways of knowing to put the petty short-sightedness of the colonizers to shame again?

[Sam Peak 🇺🇸💡 @SpeakSamuel]

.@jasonhehehe and I in @CityJournal today. We argue that the Trump Admin's H-1B fee is doomed. But he can fix the H-1B program by selecting H-1Bs based on an applicant's earning potential.

[Cardiff Garcia @CardiffGarcia]

As @jessrems explained in detail in a great piece in March: "Cutting property taxes for seniors would offer a benefit to the cohort of people that is most insulated from the housing affordability crisis in the first place." (Link next.)

[Lei 𝕏ing邢磊 @leixing77]

Here comes the Volkswagen Group Q2 and H1 2026 numbers, not pretty in 🇨🇳:

Total:
Q2: 424,300, down 36.6%
H1: 973,000, down 25.9%

BEV:
Q2: 21,500, down 35.6%
H1: 30,900, down 47.9%

"The Volkswagen Group was unable to escape the significant decline in the Chinese total market and recorded a 25.9 percent drop in deliveries."

Volkswagen Group at its peak sold more than 4 million vehicles in the Chinese market, this year it might not get to 2 million.

#bloodbath

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

All 677,081 vehicles murdered by the cash for clunkers program.

RIP

https://t.co/I5NRCQeFLt

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Somebody tried to send Winship to defeat Winship!

[Scott Winship @swinshi]

@somsai @tonyannett You know I’m the author of this report, yes? It doesn’t refute my claim above. And the report shows that aggregate pay tracks aggregate productivity extremely well. Whether median pay tracks median productivity is something we can’t answer, but I offer reasons to think it has

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

When we talk about the impacts of remote work on training for younger workers, we have to understand that the process by which we get this training is extremely inefficient and under-rewarded in firms. This is exposing, and possibly exacerbating, what is a major pre-existing inefficiency.

[Alex Cohen @alexwcohen]

Some cool evidence from ~37,000 software development projects on github: when a lot of juniors join a project at once relative to the number of seniors, fewer of them successfully get up to speed, apparently because senior staff have limited attention to spend on mentoring

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

@scottlincicome Need to understand what kinds of strawberries this man has access to before I decide whether this pay level is good or not

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Back in the bad old days of mistaking the Great Recession for structural problems, a profile of a retailer and the wages they paid would be focused on a union advocate who works for the union and also the retailer and "hasn't gotten a raise in a decade" or something

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Some celebrated incomplete passthrough as a success for tariffs. But really it seems to be just slow passthrough, which drags out the pain and makes it harder for the fed to "see through"

https://t.co/hGbdjGLqzA

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Good news: Tesla is selling a bigger family vehicle again.

Bad news: It's $63,630 and just a stretched out Model Y

https://t.co/hcvFhWE34y

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

@lymanstoneky @LeahLibresco Would watch

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

Growth is not the enemy of prosperity or community:

"Over the period in which our social solidarity was soaring, our GDP per capita nearly tripled"

https://t.co/QOKL9DDMLr

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

@conorsen @TheStalwart Could I do one tweet so good that I could retire from it?

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

@conorsen @TheStalwart Is there such a thing as a six figure tweet?

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

@kenanfikri

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

The most prosperous neighborhoods are more likely to be recently built

New must read from @kenanfikri

https://t.co/xPVdyAYI3F

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

"Housing is not the root cause of Buffalo’s travails, but speak with Rust Belt civic leaders, and a lack of the type of housing people want usually comes up quickly as a key barrier to their regeneration. A quality housing/quality workforce chicken-and-egg problem is one of several obstacles standing between them and renewal."