Nominal News – 2025 Recap
Happy New Year!
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As we are about to enter 2026, we wanted to do a small recap of how 2025 has been for Nominal News, as well as introduce to you a new chat feature we have launched (if you’d like to skip to the new feature – please scroll to the Looking Forward section).
Nominal News – By the Numbers
At the end of 2024, we wrote the following:
“Last year, we set our target to reach 1,000 subscribers. For this 2025 year, we’re going to set ourselves a target of 3,000 subscribers.”
As of this article, we have 4,799 subscribers so we ended up achieving our goal and then some! We grew by about 3,600 subscribers this year, and for that we want to thank all our readers – every read, open, share, like and comment are extremely meaningful to us, as it helps grow our Substack.
Most of the growth came in a significant surge at the beginning of the year (when one of our Notes on the Substack platform was widely shared):
Since then growth on a net basis has stalled, but we still couldn’t have forecast such high subscriber count and retention.
With regards to the number of articles we wrote – here is a summary graphic from substacktools:
We wrote 32 articles in 2025, which is 4 more than in 2024. Consistency is something we’ve been trying to improve upon, so publishing a higher number of posts than last year is a personal success.
Our most liked and discussed articles, as can be seen in the graphic above, are all related to inflation – a topic that remains in the headlines. Links to those three articles can be found here:
Another highly viewed article was our discussion of the research on work requirements for benefit eligibility, specifically how work requirements are an ineffective policy.
The Substack Network
Our growth would not be possible without the Substack Network. We have discovered several new interesting Economics Substacks this year:
The Peeples Economist – Jordan Peeples, PhD a fellow economics PhD, writes about economic research on important social topics such as education, affordability, and, most recently, on trust in the field of economics.
Mike Konczal’ Substack – former Special Assistant to the President and Chief Economist of the National Economic Council under President Biden and current Senior Director of Policy and Research at the Economic Security Project, Mike Konczal writes about economic and social issues with a focus on policy making and policy outcomes.
Housing Hell – Mike Fellman, a former economist at Freddie Mac (a US government-sponsored enterprise that specializes in residential mortgage liquidity), focuses on real estate economics and the research in this field.
Moreover, I continue to recommend the following great newsletters:
Monday Morning Economist – a newsletter by Jadrian Wooten that covers a broad set of economic topics in a very accessible way. Topics include the limited cost savings from government bureaucracy, the economic impact of Taylor Swift and how universities are competing on price.
American Inequality – Jeremy Ney presents very important data via maps to explain how inequality impacts the US. Along with economic insights, the American Inequality newsletter elucidates the distributive consequences of economic inequality in the US.
Can We Still Govern – Don Moynihan presents actionable economic policy insights on how to resolve certain economic and social problems.
Emancipatory Research – Keshler Thibert undertakes deep dives into important historical events, as well as the effects these events have to this day. Keshler also interviews individuals related to these events which gives a personal perspective on the topic.
Risk and Progress – J.K. Lundblad synthesizes research and knowledge from a variety of fields to discuss how human progress and development continues to evolve, as well as how to foster human innovation.
Alpha in Academia – a newsletter focusing on academic research in finance, which distills key and actionable findings of recent research papers.
MacroMostly – Guy Berger analyzes US labor market data, providing key insights about the state of the economy.
There are many great Substacks and the list above is just the tip of the iceberg.
Looking Forward
Nominal News is a 2-person team – a writer and an editor – that started in November 2022. We started Nominal News with the intent of bringing and sharing the tools and skills that I’ve learned during my Economics PhD, and use them to discuss current economic issues. (Actually, my favorite piece to write was the “Reader’s Guide to Economic Headlines”, which gives a three-question approach to filtering out the noisy headlines from the valuable ones. The editor’s favorite piece was “H-2Bs - Immigrants Without Degrees Spur Economic Growth”, which shows the positive economic effects of temporary non-agricultural workers)
Currently, this is a publication we do in our free-time (one of the reasons why we have not enabled a paid feature), but we hope that as we continue to grow, we will be able to turn this into a full-time project!
With regards to goals, for 2026, we’re going to set ourselves a target of 7,000 subscribers. I think this will be a tough goal to achieve. As always, your support is always the most impactful in helping us with this goal and the longer goal of making this a full-time project, which is why if you do find our writing interesting, please consider liking, commenting and sharing our work.
New Feature Launch
On that note, we have recently launched a Nominal News chat/discussion board on Substack, where we post interesting research papers that we might not always get to write about. If you enjoy research, please join, comment and ask questions in the chat linked below:
Thank You!
Lastly, Nominal News would not be possible without you! So we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our subscribers and followers, as you are the reason we keep working and writing new articles. We hope that you find our articles useful and interesting and we are always interested in making them better for you!
Thank you for being a valued reader of Nominal News and a Happy New Year!
Amazing growth hitting 4,799 subscribers from such focused economic research content! The three-question framework from the economic headlines piece is genuinely practical stuff I've bookmarked for filtering noice. I've been looking for somthing exactly like the research chat feature too, since keeping up with new papers while maintaining a skeptical lens can be time-consuming. That goal of 7K by next year seems totally achievable given the quality here.