Kevin Drum 🕸

This is downtown Los Angeles at night viewed from Angeles Crest Highway. City Hall is off to the left. There's a thin marine layer settling in south of downtown, with the lights of Long Beach behind it and then yet another marine layer over the ocean.

Last night I posted a chart showing the relationship between interest rate hikes and subsequent changes in the unemployment rate. I got some pushback because the data was so noisy it seemed like the relationship was made up. To clarify things, here's a smoothed version of the chart that uses rolling 6-month averages: Apologies for ...continue reading "Another look at interest rates and recession"

Temecula, California, is not MAGA country. It's wine country, sort of rural but not very, and is generally moderately Republican. Donald Trump won 53% of the vote in 2020. And yet, Temecula is currently ground zero for a furious backlash against a fifth-grade history textbook because it includes optional supplementary material that mentions gay activist ...continue reading "Temecula school board goes insane over Harvey Milk"

I didn't realize this until I saw it this morning, but if you exclude California homelessness has been steadily declining in the US since 2007. It's down by a quarter over the past 15 years: You'd never know it from media and activist reports, but homelessness has been a big policy success in 49 states. ...continue reading "Raw data: Homelessness is down everywhere except California"

Today I learned, via the Washington Post, that several blue states have made it legally possible to ship abortion pills to women in states where they've been outlawed: A new procedure...allows U.S. medical professionals in certain Democrat-led states that have passed abortion “shield” laws to prescribe and mail pills directly to patients in antiabortion states....The ...continue reading "Shield laws allow blue states to ship abortion pills to red states"

I'm feeling a little bored so I'm going to do something foolish: make a prediction. In particular, I'm going to make a prediction about the economy. As most of you know, my view of the economy has always been resolutely boring and conventional: In response to inflation, the Fed raises interest rates. A while later ...continue reading "I wouldn’t count on a soft landing, folks"

This is a doctor making his way from Medical Office Building 1 to Medical Office Building 2 at my local Kaiser Permanente hospital. I've spent many an hour whiling away the time in MOB 2.

Dan Wang writes this week about Xi Jinping's increasing obsession with controlling every aspect of Chinese society and the impact this has on the already parlous state of China's technology sector: The general political environment poses perhaps the greatest threat to technological momentum....I grow less certain that a third-Xi term China will sustain an innovative ...continue reading "China is not quite the technology powerhouse it seems to be"

In the Washington Post, David Byler shows us how often people decide to change their self-identified race: About 14% of Hispanics switch to white, as do 26% of multiracial folks. The multiracial category is fairly small, so the switchers don't affect the overall racial picture much. But that's not the case for Hispanics, who make ...continue reading "Race switchers could tip the 2024 election"

Here is Donald Trump's support in the Republican primary since the beginning of 2022: Trump's level of support is bafflingly steady. He routinely blurts out absurdities and nothing happens. He gets indicted twice and nothing happens. Ron DeSantis enters the race and nothing happens. His mental acuity shows obvious signs of decline and nothing happens. ...continue reading "Why do Republicans support Trump?"

CBP released border encounter numbers for June today, and they're down a lot from last month: The June decline is fairly typical for the start of summer, so there's no telling yet if it's temporary or not. Of the 145,000 border encounters in June, about 45,000 were asylum requests and 100,000 were attempts to cross ...continue reading "Raw data: Illegal immigration is down in June"

Earlier today I posted a chart showing that in-person classes were canceled at higher rates for poor kids compared to richer kids during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The same was true for Black vs. white students and for students with high-school educated parents. My assumption, naturally, was that this all happened for ...continue reading "Black parents preferred school closures during the pandemic. White parents didn’t."

Bottles of Benriach at La Maison de Whisky in Paris. The shop is in the Madeleine district and we passed it whenever we walked out toward the Place de la Concorde.

Donald Trump wants Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis tossed off the investigation of Trump's attempt to change the presidential vote in Georgia. He also wants to quash the grand jury report into his actions. He has precisely no good argument to make in either case, but he nevertheless went straight to the state Supreme ...continue reading "Georgia court tells Trump to fuck off"

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.