Kevin Drum 🕸

Alex Tabarrok takes on federal dishwasher regulations today: Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products ...continue reading "Why are modern dishwashers so slow?"

Ha ha ha: Former President Trump won’t make his own closing argument in his New York civil business fraud trial after his lawyers objected to the judge’s insistence that the former president would stick to “relevant” matters. Poor Donald. The judge won't allow him to rant about how unfair everything is, so instead he's going ...continue reading "No closing argument from Donald Trump"

Here is the average rental price of a vacant apartment over the past couple of decades: Note that this is the asking price for a vacant apartment, so it represents the actual cost of moving into a new place. Income is for nonsupervisory workers, who represent about 80% of the workforce, so it isn't skewed ...continue reading "Raw data: Rent in the US"

Today we have a new entry in the Annals of Pseudoscience: an estimate from Bloomberg News that war over Taiwan would be really expensive: This is based on some handwaving estimates that in the event of war Taiwan's GDP would fall 40%, China's would fall 17%, and US GDP would fall 7%. Add it up ...continue reading "War over Taiwan would be very bad"

Joshua Benton of Nieman Labs points us today to a recent study about people who "do the research" on fake news. In a nutshell, the researchers found that when people searched Google to check out a news article, it more often than not made them more likely to believe misinformation. But why? Here's the technical ...continue reading "“Doing the work”: Does it work?"

This whole Lloyd Austin thing is damn weird. He went into the hospital on January 1 due to "complications" from surgery but didn't tell anyone until four days later. I had a vague thought that maybe it was because the surgery was for something he didn't want to make public, like a vasectomy or syphilis ...continue reading "Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer"

Why has illegal immigration skyrocketed over the past few years? Steven Camarota provides a common explanation: Once it became clear that the administration was not going to detain people, send them home quickly, or require them to wait in Mexico, the number of people coming to the border skyrocketed. Here are total border encounters over ...continue reading "Why did illegal immigration surge after 2020?"

This is the Cluny-Sorbonne metro station in Paris. Pretty cool, isn't it?

The non-oil trade deficit declined slightly last month: We've recovered from the worst of the pandemic, but we're still running bigger trade deficits than we did during the teens. This was a big concern back in the day, but for some reason nobody seems to care about it anymore.

Apparently there's some kind of foofarah over Elon Musk highlighting a tweet that claims more illegal immigrants are coming into the country than there are native births. As near as I can tell, this isn't true using any statistics, including the raw number of border encounters. Here's my best take at a true number: Net ...continue reading "How does illegal immigration compare to US birth rates?"

Credit card debt rose in November at an (annualized) rate of 17.7%. Holy cow! But here's what that looks like: Credit card debt has been rising steadily ever since it recovered from the pandemic crash. It's now back to about where it was in 2019. True, 17.7% is a lot. But the data is pretty ...continue reading "Credit card debt keeps sneaking up"

Last week I went whale watching off the coast of Dana Point. I didn't see any of the fabled killer whales that are supposedly puttering around right now, but we did see some gray whales. The good news is that this was an early sighting and it was a pod of three, so I was ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

David Leonhardt writes today about the misguided campaign against using standardized tests like the SAT in college admissions. It's easy for lefties to hate on the SAT, but there was a time when lefties loved the SAT because it was a way of identifying smart kids who didn't necessarily grow up in great neighborhoods or ...continue reading "There’s no good reason to ditch the SAT"

Time offers the following numbers about the Israeli campaign to starve Gaza: A December report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification predicted that by February, all 2 million people in Gaza would face crisis levels of acute food insecurity, with at least one in four households facing famine-like conditions. ....[Colonel Elad Goren] says Israel ...continue reading "Biden needs to stop aid to Israel until its campaign of starvation stops"

The Wall Street Journal reports today that office vacancies are at their highest level since records began: A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in ...continue reading "Raw data: Unleased office space sets new record in 2023"

The LA Times has a story today about the miracle of East Palo Alto: In 1992, East Palo Alto was dubbed the “murder capital” of the U.S., with 42 murders in its 2.5 square miles — a per capita rate higher than that of any other city of any size. In 2023, according to East ...continue reading "Here’s a closer look at the miracle of East Palo Alto"

File this in the "dumb laws" folder: Erica Ingber has something of a dark past when it comes to handwriting: The future elementary school principal got a C-minus in cursive in the fourth grade. But she’s ready to follow the curvy ups and downs of a new California law that requires the teaching of cursive ...continue reading "New California law mandates cursive in school"

Dan Drezner has a great piece in Reason this month called "The Post-Neoliberalism Moment." It's an unfortunate title that hides its real argument: globalization didn't hurt us during the pandemic and we abandon it at our peril. We heard constantly during the pandemic that supply lines broke because they were so complex and global. But ...continue reading "Don’t blame neoliberalism for broken supply lines during the pandemic"

Over at National Review, Michael Strain notes that confidence in higher education has declined considerably over the past few years. But he says it's not just because of Republicans: Universities are bleeding support among Americans who identify as Democrats and independents as well. In 2023, universities had the confidence of only 59 percent of Democrats ...continue reading "Confidence in universities hasn’t plummeted in any unusual way"

Here is the quarterly change in population of the United States: Every year, like clockwork, population increases a lot in summer and then increases at a significantly lower rate in winter. Why? Here are births and deaths: Every year, births peak in summer and hit a low point in winter. Deaths peak in winter and ...continue reading "Raw data: Births and deaths in the US"