Kevin Drum 🕸

Saturday was astronomy night, so I headed out to the desert to take a picture of the Heart Nebula. I've done this already, but my telescope has too long a focal length (900 mm) to capture the whole thing. All I got was a part of the nebula and you couldn't really tell that it ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

If Jeff Asher's Real-Time Crime Index is to be believed—and it probably is—our 2020 surge in homicides is now all but over: On an international basis, our murder rate is very high—thanks mostly to the wide availability of guns—but it's now barely higher than it was before the pandemic. Overall violent crime and overall property ...continue reading "Raw data: The US murder surge is nearly over"

Here are a pair of charts that show the skyrocketing cost of training new AI models. The top chart shows compute cost, with Google's Gemini the current record holder at about 100 billion petaflops. That's 100 yottaflops. The bottom chart shows training costs in dollars. Gemini clocks in at nearly $200 million. GPT-4 cost nearly ...continue reading "The evolution of AI training is astonishing"

Jimmy Carter left office under a hail of scorn, but his reputation has improved over the years. I personally would take this only so far. Carter wasn't a great leader. His malaise speech was a bad idea even if he never used the word malaise. Purging his cabinet in 1979 was an act of public ...continue reading "Jimmy Carter’s economic legacy"

Not everyone is happy about the money the IRS got a couple of years ago to beef up its tax enforcement of rich people: Adding ten times as much to their budget to get this doesn’t seem like a great deal. And we were promised it would be net positive. By your party, and probably ...continue reading "Auditing the rich is paying off already"

A reader brought to my attention the 2024 Stanford AI index Report, and it's basically catnip for someone like me. I shall regale you with various charts from the report over the next few days, but let's start with the good and the ugly (we'll get to the bad later). Here's how basic AI performance ...continue reading "The good and the ugly of AI performance"

I've either discovered something interesting or else I've made a big mistake. I'm not sure which. It started with a tweet from the St. Louis Fed that linked to a paper about wage growth. The authors compared wages (from the QCEW survey) to inflation in individual cities between 2019 and Q2 of 2024, but they ...continue reading "Wages have plummeted in big cities over the past four years"

Which states have the highest violent crime rates? As always, we have two sources for this: the FBI, which compiles records from local police departments, and the NCVS, an annual survey of crime victims. The FBI releases state totals routinely, so that part is easy. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, however, had to spend an ...continue reading "High and low crime rates in the 50 states"

The Supreme Court will soon decide if banning TikTok violates the First Amendment. Donald Trump has no opinion about that,¹ but he weighed in today with an amicus brief anyway. It's...... unusual: President Trump is one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history.... Further, President Trump is the founder ...continue reading "Dealmaker-elect shares some thoughts on his greatness with the Supreme Court"

I haven't checked up on EV sales recently, and I was reminded of it by a New York Times piece about Tesla's recent woes. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and take a look at both: EV sales are rising again since flattening for a while in 2023. But Tesla sales ...continue reading "EV sales are rising again, but not at Tesla"

This is a rare archival photo of Hilbert and Charlie hanging out together back when Charlie was still a kitten. Well, kittenish. They were so cute together.

Today HUD released the 2024 figures for homelessness: For the first time in a while California wasn't the big gainer in 2024. Its homeless population rose a modest 5,700 while the count in the rest of the country rose a whopping 113,000. I had to look at that number twice to make sure I'd read ...continue reading "Raw data: Homelessness in 2024"

How is globalization coming along? This used to be a common topic of conversation, but ever since the COVID pandemic you might think globalization was nothing but a naive dream of 20th century economists that faded away and was then smashed to bits by Donald Trump and his tariffs. But no. The KOF Swiss Economic ...continue reading "Surprise! Globalization is still a global force."

During yesterday's Twitter rage-a-thon against Indian immigrants, Vivek Ramaswamy—the son of ultra-high achieving Indian immigrants—decided to hold forth on the problems of American culture: A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. ....This can be our Sputnik moment...but only ...continue reading "There were no good old days in America"

Elon Musk, who spent the entire presidential campaign whipping the MAGA crowd into an anti-immigrant fervor, got involved in a Twitter scuffle today over H-1B visas for Indian engineers. Unsurprisingly, he's for them. But he was apparently sort of shocked to discover that the racists he baited during the campaign are...... racists. They don't care ...continue reading "Elon Musk learns about racism"

CMS released a big slug of enrollment numbers for Obamacare last week and we now have a pretty good idea of how enrollment is going to turn out for 2025: Enrollment in the Obamacare marketplace has doubled during Joe Biden's term in office. Part of this is due to more aggressive recruiting and part to ...continue reading "Raw data: Obamacare enrollment"

Did you know that the Philadelphia Fed tracks something called the Partisan Conflict Index every month? They do. Here's what it looks like over the past couple of decades: The spikes and one valley (for COVID) seem reasonable, but there's an odd upturn in early 2010. It's not a spike, it's a permanent increase. What ...continue reading "The Partisan Conflict Index hit 178 in November"

I've mentioned before that Donald Trump has been remarkably successful at making people fear him. Partly this is because he's focused his attention on things where he has a lot of discretion. I'm not talking about the dumb little stuff like tax on tips, which is never going to happen, but on the big ticket ...continue reading "Trump plans to amass a great deal of personal authority to punish his enemies"

This is the Donnerbrunnen in Vienna. The name doesn't have any special meaning: it's a fountain designed by a guy named Donner. This one is a copy that sits in the newly finished pedestrian zone in the Neuer Markt. The original is in the Belvedere Museum.

Today the Washington Post profiles New Castle, Pennsylvania, a desperately poor town where a quarter of all families live in poverty. But most of them voted for Donald Trump anyway even though they depend on welfare benefits that Republicans have long wanted to cut back. Some quotes: Lori Mosura: “He is more attuned to the ...continue reading "A look at the poor people who think Trump will help them"