Kevin Drum 🕸

Here is the suicide rate among teen girls age 15-19 going back to 1940. Values before 1968 are estimated from the age 15-24 suicide rate. The suicide rate: Declined for 17 years after the Great Depression. Reached a low point in 1957. Rose for 31 years. Peaked in 1988. Declined for 14 years. Reached a ...continue reading "Raw data: Suicide rate among teen girls"

The Center for American Progress says that our recent big deficits are due to Republican tax cuts. Their explanation is a little complicated, but it's all pretty obvious if you just look at federal spending: In 2019—the last year before the pandemic—the federal government spent almost exactly as much as it did in 1980. Spending ...continue reading "Yes, of course big deficits are due to tax cuts"

The Wall Street Journal reports that internal competition is brutal at Chinese social media companies: Former ByteDance engineers say ByteDance is one of the most aggressive in executing a strategy known within the industry as “horse racing,” where multiple teams are assigned to build the same product or feature with slight variations. Once it becomes ...continue reading "China almost has the key to great social media apps"

Which state has the most employers who allow employees to work from home at least part of the time? California isn't even close to the top: The winner is Washington DC! And this is strictly a survey of private businesses, so this has nothing to do with government workers. DC just has a lot of ...continue reading "Raw data: Top states for working from home"

This is Hilbert roaming around the backyard after the rain finally stopped. He is on our teak bench looking for a place to scratch an itch, and eventually he decided to stick his nose into the camera and give that a try. It didn't work so well for him, but it worked great for me. ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 24 March 2023"

From the Washington Post: Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal This story is all over the place. Why? A tiny charter school in Tallahassee fired its principal over some dumb thing. How does this become widespread national news? For what it's worth, the Post's headline is typical even though the chair of ...continue reading "BREAKING: Unbelievably trivial story somehow becomes national news"

Total factor productivity is productivity growth after you've accounted for labor and capital. Roughly speaking, it's the share of productivity growth due to technological improvements: TFP took a big jump in 2021 but then dropped in 2022. It is now back to its (sort of lousy) recent trendline.

Here's how much banks have borrowed from the Fed this month: During the Great Recession, this number peaked at around $400 billion in October 2008. That's the highest it's been over the past 40 years. We're nowhere near that, but March 2023 is still in a strong second place.

Here are the results of my brain MRI: FINDINGS: Study is limited due to motion artifact. Small punctate T2 high signal changes 5 mm in the deep white matter region right frontal lobe, nonspecific, likely of small vessel ischemic changes. There is no evidence for intraparenchymal hemorrhage, midline shift or mass effect. No evidence for ...continue reading "Contrary to popular opinion, my brain is just fine"

How satisfied are trans people with their transition? Here's part of an answer from a large-scale Washington Post poll of trans people: Unfortunately, the poll doesn't dig down on this question. Of the trans people who are less satisfied, is this because they think they made a bad choice or because they didn't realize how ...continue reading "How satisfied are trans people after their transition?"

I would really like to see Donald Trump indicted over his efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The problem is that it would be a tough case since Trump was savvy enough to avoid saying outright, "Hey, just invent the extra votes I need." Still, everyone knows that's exactly what he meant, and ...continue reading "How about if we indict Donald Trump for something serious?"

This is sunset over the Sheephole Mountains, very near to the spot in the desert where I do my astrophotography. It's a Bortle 2 area, which means it's very nearly the darkest possible area for stargazing. That compares to Bortle 8-9 in my backyard. Bortle 1 is the darkest sky possible. Death Valley is Bortle ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

A brief Twitter exchange yesterday got me to thinking about one of the favorite former topics here in the discourse-o-sphere: neocons. If you're over 40 50 you remember them: the cabal of foreign policy intellectuals who were behind the invasion of Iraq and had visions of an American imperium that stretched across the entire Middle ...continue reading "A second look at neocons and the Iraq War"

Brad DeLong continues to worry at the Chat-GPT4 issue as if he were a dog and it was an old shoe. In particular, he wants a chatbot that thinks like Brad DeLong, but it's not working out: A human neuron would require some 3000 neural-network nodes to model it, with each node connected to some ...continue reading "When will GPT be able to match Brad DeLong’s brain?"

First we had the "Great Resignation." Then "quiet quitting." Now we have "Revenge of the Bosses." The great trend these days seems to be that even CEOs and managers who once supported working from home are souring on it. The Wall Street Journal today has what feels like the hundredth piece I've read about this ...continue reading "Working from home is quietly falling out of favor"

Here's my latest brainstorm: we should set the federal minimum wage at half the average local wage, rounded up to the nearest dollar. Here it is for a random selection of places: This would take care of inflation and geography all at once. And of course states and cities would be free to set higher ...continue reading "Quick and easy minimum wage proposal"

I just got back from a brain MRI. Apparently I still have one. I thought I had done one of these before, but I guess not. At least, I don't remember it. Basically, they lock your head down in a little cage and then shove you into a tube only a couple of inches bigger ...continue reading "Science proves that even after two decades of blogging I still have a brain"

An approaching train at the Vermont/Sunset station on the LA metro red line.

Tick tock. The Fed's rate hike decision is almost here! Can you feel the tension in the air? POSTSCRIPT: Up a quarter of a point. Idiots. How tight do they think the economy needs to be?

Sam Quinones says he knows the solution to the fentanyl crisis. I was eager to hear it, but it turned out to be this: It is hard to believe that two nations that have negotiated complex free-trade agreements cannot come to some deeper collaboration on drugs, upheld across presidential administrations and sustained despite distracting conflicts ...continue reading "Still no answer to the fentanyl crisis"