Kevin Drum 🕸

Here are the results of a new CNN/SSRN poll about Joe Biden's involvement with Hunter Biden's business dealings. I had to interpolate a few numbers because CNN inexplicably provided only some of them, but they're all pretty close. It's almost impossible to overstate how completely nuts this is. There is literally zero evidence that Joe ...continue reading "Polling about Hunter Biden is off-the-charts insane"

In case you haven't heard, Tucker Carlson's latest is that in 1999 Barack Obama had a night of coke-fueled sex with a guy named Larry Sinclair, a serial con artist with a very long rap sheet and a slew of aliases. Seriously. I say "latest," but only because it's new for Tucker. For the rest ...continue reading "Tucker Carlson has gone nuts"

Via Tyler Cowen, a new study estimates the incarceration rate of immigrant men vs. native born Americans from 1870 to the present day. In the present context of the immigration debate we care mostly about immigrants from south of the border, so here's the chart for that: Up until 1960 male Latino immigrants had a ...continue reading "Raw data: Incarceration of 1st generation Latino immigrants"

The Wall Street Journal has alarming news: Health-insurance costs are climbing at the steepest rate in years, walloping businesses and their workers. Costs for employer coverage are expected to surge around 6.5% for 2024, according to major benefits consulting firms Mercer and Willis Towers Watson, which provided their survey results exclusively to The Wall Street ...continue reading "Just stop it: Health insurance costs are rising moderately *if you adjust for inflation*"

This is apropos of nothing aside from running across something that made me wonder if demand for paper was up or down. I expected to see that it was still going up, which would prompt a snarky remark about the paperless office and related things. But no: Global demand for ordinary office paper (i.e., not ...continue reading "Raw data: We’re using way less paper these days"

You may have heard of the replication crisis. It mostly refers to studies in the social sciences that get a lot of media attention when they're first published but then fail to produce the same results when other researchers try to replicate them. The reason it's become a crisis is that a lot of studies ...continue reading "Replicating a study is very, very hard"

This bridge was built by the Army Corps of Engineers after the 1970 flood in Silverado Canyon washed out the old bridge. It spans Silverado Creek, which is normally pretty dry but got some water during our big rains earlier this year.

Over at Mother Jones, we have this headline today: The Real Crisis Driving America’s Teacher Shortage The article describes a real problem: in some areas of the country, housing is so expensive that teachers can't afford a place to live. But the premise is still wrong. There's no overall teacher shortage in the US: This ...continue reading "What teacher shortage?"

Hmmm. The Wall Street Journal says that the boom times in commercial real estate loans are now well and truly over: With the commercial real-estate market now in meltdown, those trillions of dollars in loans and investments are a looming threat for the banking industry—and potentially the broader economy. Banks’ exposure is even bigger than ...continue reading "Banks are in danger of a commercial real estate “doom loop”"

In Zeke Faux's new book, Number Go Up, Sam Bankman-Fried explains how cryptocurrency works: A day before the start of the Bahamas conference, Bankman-Fried had all but admitted that much of his industry was built on bullshit. During an interview on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, the columnist Matt Levine asked a straightforward question about a ...continue reading "Please bullshit me"

Was our pandemic stimulus too big? Paul Krugman says yes, but doubts it would have made much difference if it had been smaller. I'm not sure I agree. Total stimulus amounted to roughly $6 trillion. The Obama stimulus package during the Great Recession was around $1 trillion. I think it's safe to say that the ...continue reading "The COVID stimulus was probably too big. But not the stimulus you’re thinking of."

I know that you probably get tired of hearing me whine about innumeracy in the media, but every time I think I'm out they pull me back in. Here is the Guardian today: Global cases of early onset cancer increased from 1.82 million in 1990 to 3.26 million in 2019, while cancer deaths of adults ...continue reading "Cancer deaths in the young are down by a quarter since 1990"

Here's the latest from the Washington Post: Wait. Pickleball shoes?

This is a skipper butterfly photographed in the bright midday sun in our front yard.

Rachel Cohen asks: Is public school as we know it ending? Private school vouchers lost a lot of battles, but they may have won the war. Here's the growth of vouchers over the past 30 years: You can interpret this in two ways. First, after three decades vouchers still account for only about one-half of ...continue reading "Raw data: Vouchers account for 0.6% of all school enrollment"

Last year a federal court told Alabama that its congressional map was racially gerrymandered and "it's not close." They ordered the legislature to redraw its map so it would include two majority Black districts instead of one, and the Supreme Court upheld the ruling earlier this year. Republicans in Alabama responded very simply: they told ...continue reading "Federal court strikes down Alabama’s racist gerrymandering for a second time"

The New York Times notes today that Medicare spending has flattened out over the past decade. They say that no one knows why its spending growth is now so low, but I'd put it differently. Here is medical inflation over the past 50 years: The growth of medical spending has not always been sky high. ...continue reading "Health care inflation has been low for more than 20 years"

Dean Baker pointed me today to a very peculiar chart: Why peculiar? According to the Conference Board, job satisfaction declined steadily and by a large amount for more than 20 years from 1987-2010. Then it abruptly turned around and has risen steadily and by a large amount for the past 12 years from 2010-2022. Why ...continue reading "We are getting ever happier with our jobs"

Here in California, state senator Aisha Wahab has introduced a bill to add caste to the list of groups protected from discrimination. It was subsequently watered down thanks to efforts from two members of the Assembly, Evan Low and Alex Lee. All three represent Silicon Valley, where nearly every immigrant Indian hails from one of ...continue reading "Caste bigotry is alive and well in Silicon Valley"

This is the famous Capitol Records building on Vine Street in Los Angeles just north of Hollywood Boulevard.