Kevin Drum 🕸

Are we at the start of a big ol' bull market? Maybe. But I'm skeptical of the hype: Since the beginning of the year the S&P 500 has been virtually flat—right until the beginning of June. Then it started to surge a bit, but even at that it's grown only 8.5% on a real basis ...continue reading "Are we heading into a bull market?"

The Wall Street Journal says we still have a big shortage of restaurant workers: Americans are becoming fed up with lousy service while eating out. Many restaurants face a continued drought of experienced workers and are still working to get new hires up to speed. At the same time, customers are giving restaurants less leeway ...continue reading "Restaurants are too stingy to get all the workers they want"

A  week ago the New York Times ran a piece about people fleeing big cities to become remote workers during the pandemic. It started off like this: In the two years leading up to the pandemic, for example, about 20,000 remote workers moved away from the San Francisco metro area. Then during 2020 and 2021, ...continue reading "Raw data: Emigration of remote workers from large cities"

Yesterday's tromp through Mississippi's reading scores for third-graders got me a little curious about taking a slightly deeper dive. I'm not sure why. Just bored, maybe. As you'll recall, in 2013 Mississippi established a set of reading reforms primarily focused on teaching phonics. These reforms included a mandate to hold back kids who don't pass ...continue reading "Here’s a little more about miraculous Mississippi"

I caught up with Bob Somerby today and it turns out he's been lamenting a spate of recent articles about the "Mississippi Miracle." I don't blame him. Reports of educational breakthroughs are often overblown and should be taken with several grains of salt. Still, let's take a look at this one. Mississippi passed a package ...continue reading "How miraculous is Mississippi?"

About five minutes after I wrote that Wagner mercenaries were advancing on Moscow at "light speed," they suddenly . . . stopped. Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that he had accepted a personal deal to exile himself to Belarus while his troops would be pardoned and put under the control of the Ministry of Defense. It's all ...continue reading "Wagner Group throws in the towel"

If it's possible to know less than zero about something, that's my knowledge of the Wagner Group insurrection/coup taking place in Russia right now. It's hard to say if there's anyone to root for here, since on one side we have Vladimir Putin, a thug who started a huge, unprovoked war with Ukraine, complete with ...continue reading "The Wagner Group seems to be advancing on Moscow at light speed"

A couple of weeks ago Public ran a story identifying three Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who became sick in November 2019 with a "COVID-like" illness. If this was true, it would mean they were the first people in the world to contract COVID-19, which in turn would suggest they were the ...continue reading "The lab leak hypothesis continues to look pretty far-fetched"

Over at Vox, Emily Stewart says that over the past couple of years even "the economy’s winners feel like losers." Historically speaking, higher-income families have consistently felt more confident about the economy than lower-income families, explained Joanne Hsu, who runs consumer surveys for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. That’s changed. “About a ...continue reading "Are the rich feeling precarious these days?"

Here's some weird shit based on responses to the American Time Use Survey: Sadly, there's no time series for this since no one cared much about it before now. However, based on commuting microdata from its annual American Community Survey, the Census Bureau estimates that working from home hit about 18% in 2021, while their ...continue reading "Holy smoke! How many people work from home?"

This is Charlie on the balcony upstairs hiding under a quilt that's draped over the banister. He's keeping an eye on everything going on in the living room downstairs, but out of the frame he's also keeping an eye on Hilbert—who is also up there keeping an eye on the living room. Everybody is keeping ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 23 June 2023"

The 2022 edition of the American Time Use Survey is out, which means we can check out more recent data on what people are doing these days. Nothing has changed much over the course of a single year, but there's at least one good table about remote work that confirms something I wrote about a ...continue reading "The 2022 time use survey is out. Here’s some new data about work and church."

A whole lot of folks who were close to retirement went ahead and pulled the lever early after the pandemic hit: By the end of 2022 retirements peaked at about 2.95 million extra retirees compared to standard projections. Then excess retirements declined in April to about 2.4 million above projections. The authors suggest this may ...continue reading "Raw data: Retirements during the pandemic"

Here's a headline from the print edition of today's LA Times: Why Silicon Valley's elite adore RFK Jr. Palo Alto, though long a bastion of privilege, loves the illusion of a scrappy underdog Scrappy underdogs? Hmmm. When you get to the text of the story it turns out there's something else at play in their ...continue reading "Why do so many tech bros support RFK Jr.?"

I'm not going to say that the Supreme Court has been Joe Biden's biggest friend lately, but they've been surprisingly sympathetic toward him in several recent medium-button cases. They voted in favor of him yesterday in the Navajo water case, a few days ago in the Alabama redistricting case, and last month in the Section ...continue reading "Supreme Court rules yet again in Biden’s favor"

Back in the '80s through the early aughts the US prison population increased inexorably and nearly everyone thought this would continue forever: But guess what? In the early '90s crime suddenly and permanently started to drop from its peak. Incarceration lags crime, but eventually the prison population finally turned around and started to go down ...continue reading "Forget overcrowding. California now wants to get rid of prisons."

This is an iceberg rose with lots of pink coloring. One of our neighbors has a big hedgerow of icebergs, which bloom and get pruned back several times a year. Some of them are pure white, while others have the pinkish streaks. They make a very striking hedgerow.

Yesterday I posted a pair of charts that showed the growth in various categories for spending on food eaten at home—newly updated through 2022! But over Twitter I got a complaint. First, by showing percent growth all I was demonstrating is that new sources of food (warehouse, home delivery) grew faster than conventional sources (grocery ...continue reading "Updated: Household spending on all food through 2022"

This chart shows the growth and decline of the nine largest US shale plays over the past  three years: Out of nine fields, only two have shown production growth since 2020. The rest are either flat or down. This is one of the drawbacks of shale.¹ The development of fracking has allowed us to open ...continue reading "Raw data: Shale production in the United States"

Every year the boffins at the USDA Economic Research Service tot up the amount we spend on food from different kinds of outlets. On Tuesday they released final figures for 2022. Adjusted for inflation, here's the growth in nine categories since 1997 for food eaten at home: In absolute terms, grocery stores remain by far ...continue reading "Raw data: Spending on food eaten at home"