Kevin Drum 🕸

We've all seen the videos of organized gangs barreling into stores, grabbing armfuls of merchandise, and then escaping before stunned store workers can do anything. The National Retail Federation puts some numbers to this crime wave: Savvy, confident organized retail crime gangs — who steal billions of dollars worth of merchandise each year only to ...continue reading "Retail shoplifting is up slightly over the past decade"

Because it's the season for stories about teachers, here's the latest BLS report of public school employment for September:¹ Employment in 2023 is the highest it's been in the past 15 years, and the ratio of students per ed worker is down to 6.16, the lowest over that period. This is a pretty good year ...continue reading "Raw data: Public school staffing"

This is a lone sailboat in the late afternoon, taken from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. There's nothing very special about this picture, but I'm accustomed to taking pictures of the Pacific Ocean, where I'm generally shooting into the sun. On the Atlantic coast you're shooting away from the sun, which certainly produces much deeper blues ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Will Bunch on the stakes of the auto strike: "What Fain and the UAW are proposing isn’t just a nice little bump in next week’s paycheck, but a return to the day when a person from the assembly line could afford a fishing cottage — or to send their kid to college," writes @Will_Bunch.https://t.co/0KsHimntd1 — ...continue reading "Raw data: UAW pay over the past century"

Over at National Review, Andrew Stuttaford writes about the war against cars: Some of those directing climate policy genuinely believe that climate change poses an existential threat to our species, but many others see it as a way to force the construction of the kind of society that certain strains of the Left have long ...continue reading "The War on Cars™ is going very badly indeed"

Our latest Israeli-Palestinian war has me more depressed than I would have expected. Longtime readers with good memories will recall that I long ago lost all sympathy for Israel. I won't bother spelling out the entire list of their appalling behavior, but it's long and damning. But if it's possible to have negative sympathy for ...continue reading "The latest Palestinian war will end the same way as all the others"

I don't have anything in detail to say about today's surprise Hamas attack on Israel. Except this: what are they thinking? Hamas has never won a war against Israel and never will. They must know this. They'll inflict some pain, get crushed, and Gaza will end up even worse off than before. None of this ...continue reading "Gaza"

I turn 65 shortly, and yesterday I got a note from my doctor: I will no longer be allowed to use Ambien. Nor any other sleep med. Why? Because they...... ......make you drowsy. I'm not joking. All sleep meds carry a risk of keeping you drowsy longer than intended, and in old folks that increases ...continue reading "I am now forbidden from taking sleep meds"

My sister is back from a vacation to Merrie Olde Englande and she brings catblogging home with her. This is Budge, the resident cat at Norwich Cathedral. My sister reports that Budge is very sociable, though I'm sure he has a hidey hole somewhere when he doesn't want to be disturbed. He has an Instagram ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 6 October 2023"

Hey, have Republicans released the video yet of Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulling that fire alarm? Just asking.

This is a common lament on lefty Twitter: Dear Joe Biden: you are WINNING on policy. You are HELPING voters. But you are LOSING media, and because of that, you are LOSING the hearts and minds of voters. pic.twitter.com/7fjL6xoPo5 — Will Stancil (@whstancil) October 6, 2023 I get the frustration over the headlines, but there's ...continue reading "Economic reporting is not biased against liberals"

Nagorno-Karabakh—better known as Artsakh—is a smallish (100,000 people) Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. It's long been recognized as Azerbaijani territory, but for many years it's been effectively controlled by Armenia. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is, when long-simmering conflict in the region ended abruptly with a lightning military takeover by Azerbaijani forces. Within a ...continue reading "What happened in Artsakh?"

Here's the medium-term trend in blue-collar wages:¹ Wages are up slightly over the past year but have been dead flat for all of 2023. I know I bore everyone with repetition, but this is not the sign of a tight labor market. ¹Using an estimate for September inflation.

The American economy gained 336,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 246,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate stayed the same at 3.8%. This is a nice, strong jobs report. It's not world beating, and job growth remains ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs through September"

And now for something completely out of the blue. Let us consider the most widely used grading scale in American schools and colleges. It looks like this: A straight-A average is a 4.0. A B+ is a 3.5. The lowest grade is an F. Even if you blow off an assignment completely, that's still the ...continue reading "How much is an F worth?"

With mortgage rates continuing to climb, here's an updated chart showing the average monthly payment on a 30-year mortgage: Monthly mortgage payments are still very high, but they've dropped since their peak thanks to falling home prices. They're about the same as they were one year ago.

While we're on the subject of declining life expectancies for high school dropouts, here's another look at things: This is for people with low incomes, which is not the same thing as dropouts. Still, it's in the same ballpark, so this chart tells us a few things: Income for the poor has gone up fairly ...continue reading "Stagnant life expectancies for the poor probably aren’t related to health care"

"Horse and cow ignoring each other," 2023. Pixel on pixel.

The Washington Post is running a series of pieces about declining life expectancies in the US, and it reminds me of this chart: The real problem with falling life expectancies is with high school dropouts, not just everyone without a BA. That got me curious about the economic decline of high school dropouts. I was ...continue reading "Falling life expectancies aren’t about jobs or pay"

Ukraine's attacks on Russian ships docked in Crimea have proven remarkable effective—and apparently unstoppable: Russia has moved powerful vessels including three attack submarines and two frigates from Sevastopol to other ports in Russia and Crimea that offer better protection, according to Western officials and satellite images verified by naval experts. ....The move represents a remarkable ...continue reading "Russia moves naval fleet out of Sevastopol"