Kevin Drum 🕸

Brad DeLong continues to worry at the Chat-GPT4 issue as if he were a dog and it was an old shoe. In particular, he wants a chatbot that thinks like Brad DeLong, but it's not working out: A human neuron would require some 3000 neural-network nodes to model it, with each node connected to some ...continue reading "When will GPT be able to match Brad DeLong’s brain?"

First we had the "Great Resignation." Then "quiet quitting." Now we have "Revenge of the Bosses." The great trend these days seems to be that even CEOs and managers who once supported working from home are souring on it. The Wall Street Journal today has what feels like the hundredth piece I've read about this ...continue reading "Working from home is quietly falling out of favor"

Here's my latest brainstorm: we should set the federal minimum wage at half the average local wage, rounded up to the nearest dollar. Here it is for a random selection of places: This would take care of inflation and geography all at once. And of course states and cities would be free to set higher ...continue reading "Quick and easy minimum wage proposal"

I just got back from a brain MRI. Apparently I still have one. I thought I had done one of these before, but I guess not. At least, I don't remember it. Basically, they lock your head down in a little cage and then shove you into a tube only a couple of inches bigger ...continue reading "Science proves that even after two decades of blogging I still have a brain"

An approaching train at the Vermont/Sunset station on the LA metro red line.

Tick tock. The Fed's rate hike decision is almost here! Can you feel the tension in the air? POSTSCRIPT: Up a quarter of a point. Idiots. How tight do they think the economy needs to be?

Sam Quinones says he knows the solution to the fentanyl crisis. I was eager to hear it, but it turned out to be this: It is hard to believe that two nations that have negotiated complex free-trade agreements cannot come to some deeper collaboration on drugs, upheld across presidential administrations and sustained despite distracting conflicts ...continue reading "Still no answer to the fentanyl crisis"

Very pretty rainbow(s) over our house to end the day. I guess that's one good thing about endless rainshowers.

According to Datalytics, here's how things look on the homicide front so far in 2023: Down 10% so far! And that's on top of last year's 5% decline. This isn't enough to make up for the 30% increase during the pandemic, but we're getting there.

Is the Fed going to raise rates tomorrow? According to the Atlanta Fed's prediction tool, the answer is maybe: Before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the probability of a rate hike was 97%, a virtual certainty. After the collapse, that probability dropped to 40% and currently stands at 55%. Place your bets. POSTSCRIPT: Needless ...continue reading "There’s a 50-50 chance of a Fed rate hike tomorrow"

This is a house finch and, um, maybe a yellow warbler feasting away at our bird feeder in the late afternoon sun.

Over the past year or two I've commented on three conventional narratives that strike me as dead wrong: The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster. The CDC's response to COVID-19 was atrocious. Silicon Valley Bank was a time bomb waiting to go off. The common thread for all of these was an almost instant desire to ...continue reading "Narratives of doom get set in stone almost instantly these days. Why?"

The New York Times reports today on life inside the CDC during the early days of the COVID pandemic. In early March 2020, a bunch of young CDC scientists gathered in a small park across the street from headquarters to discuss whether COVID could be transmitted by people who showed no signs of infection. And ...continue reading "CDC critics should turn their bazookas on Donald Trump instead"

The Wall Street Journal says that in February home prices fell for the first time in 11 years. That's sort of true, but not really: February was the first time in 11 years that home prices fell if you look at year-over-year figures and don't adjust for inflation. But if you just chart real home ...continue reading "House prices stabilized in February"

Eric Levitz writes in New York about America's housing crisis: The scale of our folly only becomes clear when the second-order effects of the housing crisis are brought into view. The most productive and economically vibrant parts of the U.S. are also the places where housing supply has lagged most egregiously behind demand....According to one ...continue reading "Education, not cities, is the key to productivity growth"

A new paper is out today that tries to estimate job losses from ChatGPT and other similar apps based on Large Language Models. The paper includes much talk of binning and rubrics and OLS regressions, all with lots of Greek letters scattered around. But you don't care about that, since it all boils down to ...continue reading "Here’s a list of jobs that are safe from the ChatGPT revolution"

The latest on First Republic Bank: Eleven big banks banded together last week to deposit $30 billion in First Republic in an effort to restore confidence in the lender. The San Francisco-based bank’s customers have withdrawn some $70 billion since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. ...continue reading "First Republic was a strong bank, but not strong enough during a panic"

Here's an entire trip from Paris to Los Angeles in four photos. From the top: (a) our plane, (b) the village of Goussainville, about 30 seconds after takeoff, (c) Hudson Bay, halfway home, and (d) crossing the San Diego Freeway, about 30 seconds before landing.

It's the 20th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War Against the Terrorist Saddam Hussein, and many people think this is a good time for retrospectives. Personally, I'd prefer to forget about the whole thing, but I suppose that's a bad idea. Still, although I've explained before why I eventually turned against the war,¹ I'm not ...continue reading "Why I supported the Iraq War . . . for a while"

Here's the latest from the IPCC on our progress toward reining in climate change: Bottom line: Current policies "lead to warming of 3.2°C." That's about 6°F for real Americans who don't use the metric system. I sometimes think that this whole business of using temperature rises to describe climate change is misguided. In the US, ...continue reading "IPCC6: We are fucked (but don’t say that)"