A 5-month experiment leading up to the release of the Survey of Consumer Finances

In October 2026 - just weeks before the midterm elections - the Federal Reserve should release the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). This survey is the gold standard source for data about economic inequality in the U.S. and the source of almost every stat you’ve ever heard about the racial wealth gap or about how much wealth the 1% or 0.1% have compared to the rest us.

When the data is released, experts expect the Fed’s summary to highlight increases in wealth. Americans, it will say, are wealthier because the stock market and housing market have gone bananas.¹ Experts also expect the Fed’s report to bury data about the affordability crisis.

This blog will be the place to find new analyses of the Survey of Consumer Finances that explore the affordability crisis and wealth inequality.² I’ll be rapidly analyzing the raw survey data and posting updated findings like these, which are drawn from my analyses of the 2022 SCF:

• The majority (52%) of working families could not afford food and housing if their income were interrupted for just one month.
• 77% of Black families could not cover food and housing if their income were interrupted for just one month.
• One in four renting households has less than $200 in cash on hand, and 42% have less than $1,000.
• I’ll also highlight how much less money working families have in their checking and savings accounts now compared to 2022 - expect a number in the big billions.

So stay tuned!

In the meantime…

As a build-up to late October, I’ll be publishing new analyses that are newsworthy. The first are a series about World Cup ticket prices and how they compare to the last time the U.S. hosted the event in 1994. If you are a reporter and have a question about affordability, reach out and I may be able to leverage publicly available data to answer it for you.

The motivating idea

When elites talk about “the economy,” they’re not talking about you.

When the President says we have “the greatest economy ever” or the Treasury Secretary says 2026 is poised to be a “feast and the banquet” for the American economy, they’re not talking about you. They’re not even talking about people.

When elites talk about “the economy,” they’re talking about money. More than that, they’re talking about money making money.

How does money make money? By extracting it from you.

Who gets rich? The people who are already rich.

Who gets squeezed? The ~98% of us who are or have worked for pay; the 99% of us who enter the market as consumers; the 99% of us who pay subscription fees; the 99% of us whose data Facebook sells for massive profits.

It’s about people

In Our Economy is a blog about the economy as people experience it. It’s about families working to survive — struggling to survive — in an economy that’s rigged.

Its goal is to put people - not money - at the center of debates about how the economy is and isn’t working.

What sets this blog apart from many other great projects about inequality is that most posts contain new analyses of complex survey data. I’ll be repurposing economic datasets that the elite use to talk about their economy to gain insights into the economy as working people experience it. Countless sources can tell you that World Cup ticket prices are insanely expensive — this is the place where you can find hard data showing how many American families can’t afford them.

Here are the kind of pivots this blog will be making

You can download and share these. If you have suggestions about new/better/different permuations, send an email and I’ll create them for you.

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1. Elites will say that increased housing prices are a good thing - but are they? Sky-high home prices have priced a generation (and counting) of Americans out of homeownership. And even people whose homes are more valuable on paper can’t use them to buy groceries, gasoline, or health insurance. ↩

2. I am exploring other outlets as well. Reach out if you are interested in publishing or broadcasting the findings to your networks. ↩