Kevin Drum 🕸

This is getting tiresome. The New York Times tells us today that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, has apologized for her congressional testimony earlier this week. Here's their summary: Asked during Tuesday’s hearing whether urging the genocide of the Jewish people amounted to defying Harvard policies against bullying and harassment, Dr. Gay replied, “It ...continue reading "Harvard’s president apologizes for being right"

Charlie has been amping up the cuteness lately. Maybe he's having his second childhood a little early? In this picture he's up on the balcony keeping an eye on his domain as he rolls around for the camera.

Here's an odd thing. Several people suggested that Bard had a hard time with its fun facts about me because, after all, there are multiple Kevin Drums and it can't reliably know which one I was asking about. In fact, LinkedIn lists 20 Kevin Drums! That seems like a lot. I was curious about one ...continue reading "How many Kevin Drums are there, anyway?"

A month ago the National Retail Federation projected a weak holiday hiring season. But hiring data wasn't in yet, so it was just a guess. Last week we got JOLTS hiring data for October and today we got employment levels for November. So now we can finally take a look: Sure enough, holiday hiring is ...continue reading "Holiday hiring is down from pre-pandemic levels"

The American economy gained 199,000 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 a moderate 109,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down to 3.7%. The number of employed was way up and the number of unemployed was way ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in November"

Charlie Stross wrote today about an experiment with Google's Bard AI assistant. "Tell me five fun facts about Charles Stross," he commanded it, and for the first five it did pretty well. But then he asked for five more, and then five more. And at that point Bard just went bonkers, making stuff up out ...continue reading "Tell me 15 fun facts about Kevin Drum"

I got into a Twitter altercation last night with Nate Silver, and I need to get it off my chest because it's just so damn weird. Background: As you know, shortly after the pandemic started a team of researchers published an article titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." It concluded that the COVID virus was ...continue reading "Nate Silver and I disagree about the origins of COVID"

This is a follow-up to the previous post. It shows federal taxes and spending separately for three different categories: Medicare, Social Security, and everything else. The "everything else" category includes ordinary discretionary spending, Medicaid, and other social welfare programs. Social Security includes both retirement and disability. Medicare is Medicare. Here they are: I chose the ...continue reading "Raw data: The source of the federal deficit"

There is apparently some chatter among the chattering classes about the need for a debt commission to examine the federal debt and recommend ways forward. This is unbelievably tedious and dumb. The federal budget is not complicated, and everyone serious already knows what we have to do if we want to balance the budget.¹ Along ...continue reading "I have a question about our looming debt storm"

This is the sun setting behind a pair of bridges over the Atchafalaya River in Morgan City, Louisiana.

Google takes a victory lap for its latest AI model: With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities. ...continue reading "AI is coming soon. Blame humans."

From Reuters: The main lobbying group for U.S. retailers retracted its claim that "organized retail crime" accounted for nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021 after finding that incorrect data was used for its analysis. ....The NRF's claim that organized retail crime accounted for "nearly half" of inventory losses was repeated in multiple media ...continue reading "Retail federation admits its shoplifting number was ridiculous"

Apologies, but I couldn't really keep focused on the Republican debate tonight. Instead I spent my time shopping Time's Cat of the Year cover—which, honestly, was probably a better use of energy than watching the TV. Basically, there were two things going on tonight. On one side you had Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, who ...continue reading "I tuned into a debate but got a stupid insult fest instead"

For obvious reasons, I approve of Time's choice for Mammal of the Year.

These are backlit aerial photographs of Los Angeles adorning the entrance to the Metro Center station at the union of the blue, red, purple, and yellow lines. I suppose they're there to remind passengers of what they're avoiding by riding the subway.

Jason Furman reminds me this morning that GDI numbers were released a week ago. Why does it take a month longer to release GDI than GDP? Does anyone know? Anyway, GDI is Gross Domestic Income, and it's an alternate way of calculating economic output. In theory, GDI and GDP should be identical, but thanks to ...continue reading "Economic growth last quarter was probably a fairly ordinary 3% or so"

The stock of news stories asking why Americans are so sour on the economy continues to soar. If we could just figure out a way to give people a nickel for every one of these pieces our problems would be over. But can I please interrupt all these thousands of words? The answer is simple: ...continue reading "Here’s the definitive short answer about why we’re unhappy with the economy"

An op-ed in today's New York Times discusses an evergreen topic: prescription drug shortages. But how many drug shortages are there? Emily Tucker cites three sources which provide answers of 160, 49, or 37 for the year 2022. Here's the FDA's number: If we use this number—which is about the same as that reported in ...continue reading "Do we have a growing problem of drug shortages?"

Rep. Elise Stefanik had three university presidents on the hook today and decided to goad them by asking if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university's code of conduct or anti-harassment policies. "Yes or no?" she demanded repeatedly, but all three presidents demurred. Instead they replied with various versions of "it's context dependent"—which ...continue reading "Is calling for genocide protected speech?"