Kevin Drum 🕸

This is not the best catblogging picture ever, but it is brand new. No archival stuff this week. I'm home and taking fresh pictures once again.  

Rep. Thomas Massie on why he voted for the debt ceiling deal: “The engineer and problem-solver in me wanted to vote for it and the politician did not. By engineering, I’m thinking of calculus and linear algebra. When I look at this logically and mathematically, the derivative is in the right direction.” Okey doke. Whatever ...continue reading "Quote of the day: Linear algebra and the debt deal"

The American economy gained 339,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 249,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked up three notches to 3.7%. This is not a good jobs report, regardless of the topline number. The number ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Net new jobs in May"

A few minutes ago I happened to run across a Twitter screed about how screwed and abused Millennials and Gen Z are, and how they're not going to take it much longer. It was just the usual stuff, but for some reason it prompted me to check it out using the simplest possible measure. Not ...continue reading "Are Millennials happy?"

Stories about existential threats from AIs typically revolve around the so-called "alignment problem." That is, how do you make sure an AI's goals align with human goals? If we train an AI to make paper clips, obviously we want it to do this sensibly. But what if the AI goes haywire and decides that its ...continue reading "When AI goes rogue"

This is a copy of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, possibly the greatest book ever written. It's on display at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Great news! During my Tuesday visit I badgered my doctor into doing another M-protein test, and the trendline is yet again straight as a string: The latest result is 0.47 and it's dropping right on schedule for a final June reading of zero. Hooray! And as long as I'm on the subject of the CAR-T ...continue reading "Health update"

Crime is going down in California: Through May 20, L.A. experienced a drop of more than 10% in violent crime this year compared with the same period in 2022. Property crime fell by slightly more than 1%, and arrests were up 4.4%, according to Police Department data....The Police Department posted additional positive numbers in a ...continue reading "The 2020 crime wave is steadily receding"

Not much good news today. Labor productivity fell 2.1% in the first quarter, marking the fifth decline in a row going back to October of 2021: Hourly compensation is a key component of productivity, so BLS also calculates hourly pay as part of its overall measurements. Thanks to a raft of revisions, BLS now estimates ...continue reading "Raw data: Productivity and compensation"

A newly published study in Behavior Genetics describes the genetic heritability of a vast number of traits based on measurements of 772 pairs of twins (half identical, half not). The basic concept here is that if a trait is largely genetic, it will be more closely shared by twins who have identical physical and cognitive ...continue reading "How much of you is your genes?"

This comes a little out of the blue, but this morning I happened to come across a paper on innovation policy that struck me as sensible and well-argued. It's an important thing to get right since innovation is the single most important key to both productivity growth—and thus rising living standards—as well as overall economic ...continue reading "What are the best innovation policies?"

This is just a cranky aside, but I keep seeing liberals mocking Republicans as "hostage takers who didn't even know what to do with the hostage." In this telling, the debt ceiling deal was an ongoing fiasco of dealing with terrorists willing to blow up the economy for reasons they themselves didn't even fathom. Give ...continue reading "Republicans were never a mob of idiot hostage takers"

Airplanes lined up at their gates at John Wayne Airport.

Today is JOLTS day, which provides a snapshot of the employment market. Here's what it looks like through April: Job openings were actually up a bit in April but were down by 30% from their peak a year ago. Quits are steadily down, an indication that workers are afraid they can't leave for a better ...continue reading "The job market looks weaker and weaker these days"

What a bizarre story we have today. The House Rules Committee has 13 members, which means rules can be passed with seven votes. There are nine Republicans and four Democrats on the committee. All simple enough, except that back when Kevin McCarthy was desperately making deals to win the speakership he made a deal with ...continue reading "Republicans forget which secret rules they agreed to"

Earlier today we were on the subject of corporations raising their prices and profits far beyond anything justified by inflation. So I thought you might be interested in a different way of looking at this for the economy as a whole. Roughly speaking, this chart shows how much profit corporations make for each dollar of ...continue reading "Corporate price markups surged during the pandemic"

The Congressional Budget Office has scored the debt ceiling deal and it's worse than I thought. A big part of the issue is assumptions about inflation: CBO’s baseline projections for discretionary appropriations are assumed to grow each year with inflation from the amounts provided for the most recent year, whereas CBO’s projections under the [debt ...continue reading "CBO says debt ceiling deal could cut domestic spending 8-13%"

The New York Times writes today about greedflation: PepsiCo has become a prime example of how large corporations have countered increased costs, and then some. Hugh Johnston, the company’s chief financial officer, said in February that PepsiCo had raised its prices by enough to buffer further cost pressures in 2023. At the end of April, ...continue reading "Companies are raising prices because consumers are letting them"

Traffic jam at the bird feeder in the late afternoon.

We all know that abortion rights tend to be popular at a nationwide level—even more so following the Dobbs decision. Most polling suggests that around 60% of Americans think abortion should be legal all or most of the time. But nationwide doesn't matter since Dobbs made abortion a state matter. Abortion is now banned, or ...continue reading "Abortion bans aren’t popular—even in red states"