Kevin Drum 🕸

The BLS released its estimate of total worker compensation for Q1 today. This includes both wages and benefits. Here's where pay is highest and lowest: The nationwide average for private industry workers is $41 per hour. It's significantly higher for public workers ($58), union workers ($54), and big companies ($59). Adjusted for inflation, total compensation ...continue reading "Total worker comp in Q1 is highest in San Francisco, lowest in Miami"

This is just a coincidence, but let's pick on Matt Yglesias again today. The topic is how best to calculate CEO pay. There are two basic methods. The bulk of most CEO pay is in stock options, and you can value stock options as either granted or realized. The former is an estimate of their ...continue reading "CEO pay has doubled in the past decade"

No, this is not from Texas. It's a lovely yellow rose from our backyard. I suppose it has a formal name, but I don't know what it is.

A few days ago the New York Times ran a piece about how doctors were using ChatGPT in their work. Many of them, it turns out, aren't using it to help with diagnoses. They're using it to help them talk to patients better. One of them is Dr. Michael Pignone at the University of Texas ...continue reading "ChatGPT helps doctors talk better"

Adjusted for inflation, retail sales increased at an annualized rate of 2.7% from April to May. However, this small increase did nothing to change the overall downward trend in retail sales over the past year:

Tyler Cowen pointed me toward an odd new research paper today. The authors set out to determine the effect on economic growth of changing temperatures, which they broke this into two parts: steadily changing temperatures (from global warming) and temporary temperature shocks. Their basic finding is that temperature changes have had negative economic effects on ...continue reading "Rich and poor countries are opposites in how they respond to global warming"

I sure got this wrong: I figured the boycott of Bud Light would have only a smallish and temporary effect. But it's now lasted two months and has caused Bud Light sales to plummet by about a third. When you consider that most of the decline is probably due to Republicans, it suggests that more ...continue reading "The Bud Light boycott has been stunningly effective"

Silhouette of a horse on a ridge on a stormy day in Trabuco Canyon.

The Fed is finally backing off its endless series of interest rate hikes—but only slightly: The Federal Reserve is leaving interest rates unchanged for the first time since spring 2022, signaling a new chapter in the central bank’s fraught fight against inflation. ....The Fed also signaled more rate hikes would come before the end of ...continue reading "Fed finally backs away from yet another rate increase"

In 2014, after more than a decade of lobbying, Congress passed a bill that transferred land near Oak Flat, Arizona, to a mining company that planned to build a huge copper mine on the land. This prompted opposition—and a lawsuit—from an Apache resistance group led by Wendsler Nosie Sr., a 64-year-old Apache elder, which claims ...continue reading "Is Oak Flat sacred?"

Over at his substack, Matt Yglesias muses about television and suggests that maybe it's something we should panic about: As Tim Cook encourages us to spend more time sitting alone in dark rooms, enjoying immersive audiovisual experiences, I can’t help but think that the panickers, at least those of the last few decades, might have ...continue reading "TV may be better than ever, but TV watching is down"

If yesterday was CPI day then today must be PPI day. Here's what the Producer Price Index looks like through May: If you look at goods and services separately, even the PPI for services was up only 2.9%—largely because of autos and auto parts. That's an excellent number since services are the prime contributor to ...continue reading "PPI drops to -3.7% in May"

Section 702 of the FISA Act allows agencies like the NSA to eavesdrop on foreign nationals overseas. It prohibits spying on US citizens or anyone who's within the United States. But sometimes NSA ends up collecting the communications of US citizens anyway. Quite often, in fact. This is legal as long as it's not intentional. ...continue reading "The FBI abused its surveillance of Americans 278,000 times in 18 months"

The Associated Press reports today on "The Great Grift," a combination of the plundering of COVID-19 aid programs by fraudsters and plain old mistakes in doling out the money: All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the ...continue reading "AP estimates fraud and mistakes in pandemic programs cost $300-400 billion"

Eric Levitz makes an interesting point today about Donald Trump and his obsession with holding onto classified documents. The Department of Justice, far from indicting him for political reasons, actually went easy on him: In January of last year, in response to a subpoena, Trump returned 197 classified documents to the federal government. Despite his ...continue reading "The Department of Justice went easy on Trump"

A few days ago we learned that US spy agencies knew in advance of plans by Ukraine to bomb the Nord Stream pipeline. Today there's more. We not only knew about it, we warned Ukraine not to do it: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned the Ukrainian government not to attack the Nord Stream gas ...continue reading "The CIA warned Ukraine not to bomb the Nord Stream pipeline"

Sunset in the French town of Vernon, about 40 miles downstream on the Seine from Paris.

Here's something from news of the weird: Toyota’s latest engineering feat is an electric vehicle that behaves as if it has a stick shift, complete with revving sounds and faux gear shifts. ....The system generates fake sounds and simulated gear changes as well as genuine stalling if a rookie driver fumbles the controls, although the ...continue reading "Can stick shifts make a comeback?"

Bloomberg projects that peak oil usage is coming in six years: Back in the day, many of us predicted that peak oil would arrive by 2015 or so. But that was based on the ability to produce oil, and it turned out to be wrong thanks to the shale oil revolution. Bloomberg's forecast, by contrast, ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Peak oil is coming in 2029"

Weekly blue-collar earnings were up 4% in May compared to April. However, earnings have been flat for the past year, and after their big jump at the start of the pandemic have been dropping steadily ever since: Earnings for all workers fell 1% in May after adjusting for inflation.