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Portrait of Ben Casselman

Ben Casselman

I write about the U.S. economy, especially the labor market: who has a job and who doesn’t, where and how people are working, how much money they’re making, and how all of that affects and is affected by the broader economy. I’m particularly interested in the long-term trends — demographic, geographic, technological, political — that shape the way we live and work.

I’m an unapologetic econ nerd. I love reading research papers, debating the effect of policies and diving deep into economic data to find stories. But what I really care about are people — economic models matter only if they teach us something about the real world.

I have been reporting on the economy in one way or another for nearly 20 years. I covered real estate for The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the mid-2000s housing bubble, then moved to Texas to cover the oil industry during the rise of the fracking boom. I moved back to New York in 2011 to write about the long, painful recovery from the Great Recession, first for The Wall Street Journal and later for the data-journalism site FiveThirtyEight. Along the way, I got interested in how data can help reporters find and tell better stories, so I learned to code and now often incorporate data and data visualization into my stories. I joined The Times in 2017.

In addition to my work at The Times, I also teach economics reporting at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. I grew up in Boston, earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and now live in Brooklyn.

The Times holds all its journalists to high ethical standards, and I take those principles extremely seriously. You can read more about The Times’s policies here. I do not own stocks in any individual companies (other than The New York Times Company itself) and I do not actively trade investments of any kind; my retirement savings and other investments are in broad-based mutual and index funds. I do not accept gifts, money or favors from anyone who might figure into my reporting. I do not participate in politics, make political donations or engage in public or private advocacy around policy issues.

I cover a very broad beat, so I make a point of talking to people with a wide range of perspectives and experiences. For the past several years, I have analyzed the diversity of my sources in an effort to identify gaps in my reporting.

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    Two surveys tell different stories.

    Household data shows the labor market cooling and employment recently falling. How can that be reconciled with the job gains reported by employers?

    By Ben Casselman

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