Kevin Drum 🕸

This is a few months old, but it's nonetheless instructive. It shows the percentage of school classes that were closed at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. It turns out that administrators were far more willing to cancel classes outright in poor neighborhoods than in rich neighborhoods: As you might expect, you get the same ...continue reading "Rich and poor kids during the pandemic"

It's hot. Death Valley is recording temps of 120°F at night. A town in central Spain set a European record of 140°F. Last week saw three days in a row of the hottest global temperatures in modern history. Phoenix has recorded 18 consecutive days over 110°F. Just west of the Gobi Desert, China's Flaming Mountain ...continue reading "Our big heat wave is all about global warming"

Earlier today I was browsing through a Wall Street Journal piece headlined, "Europeans Are Becoming Poorer." The basic theme is that the US has recovered from the pandemic better than Europe, and that's true enough. But the more I read, the fishier things got. The numbers were all over the map and weren't adjusted for ...continue reading "No, Europe hasn’t been pauperized"

This is neither here nor there, just something that's been bugging me for a while. It's a timeline of vaccine development after the pandemic hit in 2020: I've got no beef with Operation Warp Speed, which set up a pretty effective program to handle expedited development and manufacturing of COVID vaccines. That said, virtually everything ...continue reading "The real story behind Operation Warp Speed"

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but . . . My M-protein number is continuing to drop. It's now at 0.21, quite a bit less than it was a couple of weeks ago. Will it keep dropping? Was my response to the CAR-T better than I thought? Is it an unusual response ...continue reading "Health update"

This is a small pavilion in the Rose Garden on the grounds of the Huntington Library. The statuary inside is a classically draped woman with a winged cherub at her feet.

Business formation continues to grow like gangbusters: New business applications are up 6% from last month and 15% from a year ago. I don't know what's going on with this, but it certainly suggests that the economy looks awfully good to a lot of people.

California's infamous CEQA—the California Environmental Quality Act—has been around for more than 50 years. It's a product of the late '60s, when environmental concerns over big corporate construction projects first emerged as a major issue and Californians decided they wanted to do something to rein them in. Today it's much hated by housing advocates because ...continue reading "Here’s why California’s terrible environmental law is less terrible than you think"

During the pandemic there was a lot of conversation about child care services and how badly they'd been affected. But the reality is a little different. Here is total revenue for the child care industry over the past decade: Child care services briefly dropped by a third at the start of the pandemic, but had ...continue reading "Raw data: Child care during the pandemic"

Here's an interesting little tidbit about religion in America. Devin Pope of the University of Chicago has been tracking church attendance using cell phone data that tells us whether you're really in church, and his results are remarkably consistent: Week in and week out, there are roughly 25 million Americans at church each Sunday. Note ...continue reading "How many people really attend church?"

Vehicle miles traveled per adult peaked in 2004 and has fallen pretty steadily since then. By 2022 it had partly recovered from its pandemic dip but was still 10% below the 2004 peak.

Last year Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided he needed to revive the old State Guard under his personal command—in order, he said, "to respond to a projected active hurricane season." In particular: In a natural disaster-prone state such as Florida with a potentially active hurricane season on the horizon, there is a clear and present ...continue reading "DeSantis’s personal guard: Fewer hurricanes, more immigration stunts"

What really happened with Sweden and COVID-19? The story is a little more complicated than you usually hear, but you don't have to get too deep in the weeds to see that something interesting happened there. Start off in 2020, when the pandemic begins and Sweden adopts the most hands-off policy of any peer nation. ...continue reading "What’s the real story with Sweden and COVID-19?"

Can someone tell me what's going on with this headline in the Washington Post today? This turns out to be a routine kind of story we've all read a dozen times. It's about a feud between neighbors that spirals out of control and becomes completely insane. What it's not about is the fact that one ...continue reading "Washington Post pretends routine feud is about being gay. Why?"

It's natural for Republicans to dislike the Democratic agenda and vice versa. But check out these Republican quotes from a Wall Street Journal story today: “It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are.”...If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.” “We ...continue reading "The Republican apocalypse"

I'm hesitant to post this chart, because it comes from a source I'm unfamiliar with and don't know if I can trust. But it seems both interesting and plausible. Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute combined the answers to a whole slew of mental hygiene questions into a single index of teen mental health, and ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Teen mental health has plummeted"

Catherine Rampell says that if we achieve the coveted economic soft landing, it won't be because of anything radical we did: It will be because of boring, standard economic textbook fixes for inflation: i.e., supply shocks subsiding, fiscal support fading and, most controversially, interest rates rising. The Federal Reserve’s 10 rate hikes since March 2022 ...continue reading "Fed hikes haven’t slowed the economy—yet"

I never expected to get dragged down the rabbit hole yet again of Mississippi's "reading miracle," but I have no choice. It looks like I might have been wrong again. Sigh. Let's recap: In 2013 Mississippi passed a new law that focused on teaching phonics in elementary school. The results were impressive. After the law ...continue reading "Mississippi revisited: The Mississippi reading miracle looks to be real after all"

Just sayin': I know that some of you think I'm crazy for constantly adjusting everything in the world for inflation, but with rare exceptions it's always the right thing to do. Even for the stock market. If it's going up but not even beating inflation, then it's not really doing that great, is it? Anyway, ...continue reading "A different look at the amazing bull market"

Remember that lunatic judge last week who decided the federal government was censoring right-wing views and banned them from talking to social media? His order was appealed and today the 5th Circuit issued, with no comment, an emergency stay. Routine cooperation about election security and other issues can now resume. Although the 5th Circuit is ...continue reading "Lunatic judge in censorship case is sent packing"