Kevin Drum 🕸

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"

Yesterday I mentioned that government bureaucracies were no worse—and probably better than—corporate bureaucracies, which are "frequently set up explicitly to help customers as little as possible without losing them." Today, by chance, we get a perfect example of this: Amazon Prime, whose parent is being sued by the FTC for making it just a little ...continue reading "Amazon is being sued for making it ridiculously hard to cancel a Prime subscription"

The big Supreme Court news today is that Sam Alito once accepted a fishing vacation in Alaska that was arranged and paid for by a guy named Robin Arkley II. Other guests on the trip included Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, and Paul Singer, a hedge fund zillionaire. ProPublica, which broke the story, ...continue reading "The Alito private jet story is pretty weak tea"

Today is the summer solstice—that is, it was the summer solstice 4½ hours ago at 7:58 am Pacific time. But why get fussy about things? It's the longest day of the year, which is why I've always hated it. I don't want the days to get shorter from here on out. But here's a picture ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The NAEP has released brand new results for its long-term reading and math tests. The long-term test is a special version of the NAEP that strives to stay the same from year to year so it produces scores that can be compared over time. Here's the main takeaway: Despite the pandemic, reading scores didn't go ...continue reading "Latest NAEP long-term test shows disastrous results during the pandemic"

I promise I'm not stalking Matt Yglesis these days, but he just happens to have written on some interesting topics lately. On Tuesday he ran an interview with Jennifer Doleac, an expert in how to reduce crime. The fascinating thing about this is that from 100,000 feet it seems like an intractable problem. Nothing works. ...continue reading "We already (sorta) know how to have less crime"

Jane Rosenzweig writes in the LA Times today about the perils of AI: Soon after ChatGPT was released, an artificial intelligence researcher from one of the big tech companies told me that I shouldn’t worry about how the technology would affect how students learn to write. In two years, she assured me, only aspiring professional ...continue reading "Writing is over! (Someday)"