Kevin Drum 🕸

I have no special reason for posting this. It's just to remind everyone that, in the end, productivity growth is the single most important metric of economic prosperity and ours has been slowly declining in both the medium and long term. We should ask our presidential candidates what, if anything, they plan to do about ...continue reading "Raw data: Productivity growth in the United States"

Pelicans are generally big, ungainly, semi-comical creatures, but if you can catch them as they're dive bombing for lunch you can see their true selves. This is what nature intended for them.

We already knew this from other data, but Case-Shiller confirms that house prices are in free fall: This is the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite index adjusted for inflation, and it shows that house prices plummeted at an annualized rate of 16% in August.¹ This is the third straight month of falling prices since housing fell off ...continue reading "Home prices plunged 16% in August"

I was piddling around on the Department of Transportation website and came upon some numbers that surprised me. Here is the growth rate of various kinds of transit: I was aware that public transit ridership had gone down during the pandemic, but I hadn't realized it was down so much and had stayed down so ...continue reading "Raw data: How we get from place to place"

The Washington Post editorialized a couple of days ago about the explosion of local "newspapers" that are actually just hyperpartisan attack sites in disguise. Here's the fifth paragraph: Stories are generated by robots and sometimes stuffed full of made-up quotes — a trend known as “pink-slime journalism.” The name is borrowed from a pasty meat ...continue reading "“Pink slime journalism” is a Republican thing"

Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister of Great Britain, apparently gets a lot of flak for marrying into great wealth: Sunak, a former banker, and his wife, Indian tech heiress Akshata Murty, have an estimated fortune of about 730 million pounds ($830 million), according to the Sunday Times Rich List. On this year’s list, published ...continue reading "Rishi Sunak is sort of mildly well off"

This is the brand new location of the Orange County Museum of Art, formerly the Newport Harbor Art Museum, formerly the Balboa Pavilion Gallery. After a nearly 30-year planning and fundraising effort, the building has finally been completed and is now part of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Thanks to a donation from a ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has decided that Europe is likely to have a mild winter this year thanks to its third consecutive year of La Niña influence: Partly because of this, and partly because Europe has been successful in refilling its natural gas reserves, the price of gas has plummeted over the ...continue reading "Good news for Europe"

Tyler Cowen is not joking here: It is not sufficiently remarked upon that many Democrats have an increasingly difficult time believing in democracy....To put it bluntly, many Democrats have arrived at the position that democracy works satisfactorily only when it delivers sufficiently low gas prices! See my previous post, and also the new column by ...continue reading "Republicans are the anti-democracy party"

Now that California sends mail-in ballots to everyone, I figure I should do my usual recommendations a little earlier than usual. Keep in mind a couple of things: I don't like ballot initiatives because they lock things into the state constitution that shouldn't usually be locked in. So my standards are high for a Yes ...continue reading "Here’s my take on California’s ballot initiatives"

Has Brexit ruined the UK's trade with EU countries? I've always been a bit skeptical of the horror stories, but for some reason most published analysis only goes through the end of 2021. Today I got curious enough to check out the figures on the UK trade site, which goes through August 2022. Here's the ...continue reading "How badly has the UK suffered from Brexit?"

Surveillance of workers is on the rise, and it turns out this even applies to retired people. After all, you may be retired from ordinary, unimportant human work, but you're never retired from crucial cat maintenance duties. The feline community likes to keep a close eye on its underlings to make sure they understand this, ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 21 October 2022"

You have undoubtedly heard about the mysteriously leaked recording of Hispanic Los Angeles city council members mocking their Black colleagues and trying to figure out how to redistrict LA in a way that benefits themselves. This has consumed LA for the past couple of weeks, and last night town halls were held around the city ...continue reading "LA’s racist recording scandal doesn’t seem to faze ordinary residents"

This is from the Treasury Department today. The 2022 federal deficit was half what it was in 2021.

Rani Molla writes at Vox about job burnout: Some 43 percent of US office workers “feel burned out at work,” according to the latest quarterly survey by Slack’s Future Forum. That figure is near its peak level last year, though Slack has only been tracking this data since May of 2021. First off, Slack is ...continue reading "Let’s talk about burnout"

Democrats seemed to be doing well this summer as their approval level surged following the Dobbs decision. But now Republicans are surging back. This is partly because the out party always does well in midterm elections, but David Brooks thinks there's more to it: The Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force ...continue reading "Why are Republicans surging as the midterms approach?"

Here's a little patch of morning glories alongside Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach.

According to Zillow, here is average home price growth over the past five years in our ten biggest cities: This surprised me. The highest price growth was in the sprawling sunbelt cities that have fewer exclusionary zoning rules and therefore more homes being built. The traditional big cities like Los Angeles and New York, by ...continue reading "Raw data: Home price growth"

Have you ever wondered what fetal tissue actually looks like in the early stages of pregnancy? Poppy Noor got hold of some pictures from the MYA network and apparently it looks vaguely like a jellyfish. Here's a picture showing tissue at nine weeks: It doesn't really look all that human, does it?