Kevin Drum 🕸

This was my last picture taken in Rome. It's a shot of the Naidi fountain (near the Termini train station) taken at sunset. It was a tough picture to take! I had to position myself in the middle of the street, so I was dodging cars while my camera was acting up and mostly not ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

And here we go with this week's promised announcement on student debt: President Biden announced on Wednesday that he would cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for those earning less than $125,000 per year [or $250,000 per household], with an additional $10,000 for students who received Pell grants for low-income students. So we've split the ...continue reading "Biden announces $10-20,000 student debt cancellation"

The good news on inflation is that the core level is moderate and dropping. Energy inflation is also coming down thanks to dropping oil prices. The bad news is that food inflation remains high and rising: This chart shows the monthly change in inflation, annualized to a yearly level. Because this is a volatile measure, ...continue reading "Raw data: Core inflation vs. food inflation"

I was directed toward this blog post over at Hot Air, and I'm commenting on it more out of amusement than because it really matters. It's yet another screed about wokeness: [New York] Governor Kathy Hochul signed a new law last week that is banning a significant number of words from any use in government ...continue reading "Gender neutrality is hardly an invention of the wokeness movement"

What is this? What are these people looking at? UPDATE: You guys are too smart and too well-traveled for me. Of course, you all know I've been posting pictures of Paris, so I guess that helped. Anyway, this is indeed a picture of people ascending the famous outside escalator of the Centre Pompidou. I had ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Suppose President Biden announces that he is canceling all student debt, as many former students would like him to do. What happens to this year's crop of college seniors when they graduate in 2023? Is their debt canceled too? If not, we have a bright line of people ending with the Class of 2022 who ...continue reading "How do you decide whose student debt to cancel?"

We've heard a lot about how COVID-19 has devastated the commercial office market as more and more people work from home. And it's true that the vacancy rate of office space has gone up over the past couple of years. But the Wall Street Journal tells us the pandemic was not really to blame: America’s ...continue reading "The increase in the office vacancy rate isn’t really a pandemic phenomenon"

The price of gasoline is still going down: But it was only down a nickel last week. That's half its average decline since the June peak, so things might be slowing down. The price of oil has been flat for the past few weeks, so it would make sense if the price of gasoline started ...continue reading "The price of gasoline went down another nickel last week"

How many classified documents did the FBI find in its search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month? Today the New York Times provides a pretty good estimate, though they leave the arithmetic to us: January: "more than 150." June: "a few dozen more." Total: "more than 300." At a best guess, this means the August haul ...continue reading "The FBI recovered 100 classified documents in its search of Mar-a-Lago this month"

That's right, I've been blogging for 20 years: first on my own; then for the Washington Monthly; then for Mother Jones; and now back on my own again. This is longer than I spent on my allegedly "real" career in the high tech industry from college graduation through 2001. But I haven't yet achieved my ...continue reading "It’s my 20th anniversary"

I don't know why, but I didn't expect the Seine to have locks. I thought it flowed freely to the sea. But this isn't so, and we traversed half a dozen locks on our way from Paris to Normandy. Here's one of them at dawn while I was meandering around the upper deck waiting for ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Matt Yglesias wrote recently on his Substack about the Effective Altruism movement, but I think he makes a serious mistake in his historiography. The EA movement began with a group of rationalists and philosophers who argued we were doing charity all wrong. Instead of wasting your money on, say, a new gym for your alma ...continue reading "Is effective altruism good? Sure, but . . ."

The Washington Post gets us up to speed today on the latest meme/vibe/tiktok taking over the business world. It's called "quiet quittting": Kathy Kacher, founder of Career/Life Alliance Services, said that “quiet quitting” is a new term for an old concept: employee disengagement. But it’s arriving in a moment of “unprecedented burnout,” Kacher said. It’s ...continue reading "“Quiet quitting” is the latest half-witted workplace meme"

A cat and his shadow. This is Charlie sitting on a kitchen cabinet that looks into the late afternoon sun. He's probably watching the birds outside the dining room window, who tend to congregate around the bird feeder at this time of day.

Carl Quintanilla of NBC News provides us with a sampling of charts from a recent JPMorgan report: The easing inflation/supply-chain crisis, in four charts. (via JPMorgan) pic.twitter.com/F38bpA73Mp — Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) August 19, 2022 Of course, there's always this too: The monthly change in CPI (i.e., velocity) peaked in January and has been easing off ...continue reading "Inflationary pressures are easing"

Some of you may have noticed and others might not have, but the blog went kablooey last night and didn't get fixed until this morning. The cause was something to do with a plug-in from my hosting service, which they promptly fixed as soon as I contacted them. In any case, no harm done since ...continue reading "BREAKING NEWS: Blog now working again"

This morning I got a call from the transplant folks and I now have a date for my CAR-T treatment. I'll do a bunch of testing over the next two weeks followed by a plasma collection in early September. The plasma will then be shipped off to the CAR-T factory, where it will be turned ...continue reading "Good news!"

It's the end of the week.

As we all expected, home sales continued to slide in June: The number of existing homes sold in July was 20% lower than it was in July last year. The median selling price is still 2.1% higher, but declined by $10,000 over the past month. The official consensus is that home prices will continue to ...continue reading "Existing home sales drop another 6% in July"

Over at Bob Somerby's place he's pondering the question of whether half of all Americans read at less than a 6th grade level. Long story short, if you follow the links from a recent George Will column they lead you to a report that places everybody at one of three different reading levels. The report ...continue reading "Three-quarters of American adults read above a 6th grade level"