Kevin Drum 🕸

Is crime up these days? Or is it down? What kind of crime, anyway? You would be surprised how hard this question is to answer. On a national level, crime statistics take a year to compile so they're always way out of date. To make things worse, the FBI recently changed its crime-reporting process and ...continue reading "Raw data: A different way of looking at fear of crime"

Why, a reader wonders, did my Friday chart about job gains have a big chunk of it blanked out? That's easy to explain with a quick comparison of three different ways of presenting the data. Here is Chart #1, which is what you'd think of as the default presentation. Just set the y-axis to fit ...continue reading "Charting the pandemic"

Yesterday it was shipping and mortgage rates. Today it's semiconductors: The average contract prices for the two major types of memory, called DRAM and NAND flash, dropped by 15% and 28% respectively from the prior quarter during the July-to-September period, according to TrendForce, a Taiwan-based market researcher. Prices for both types of memory chips are ...continue reading "Yet more prices are already dropping"

Charlie has discovered the bird bath. This reminds me of Hopper, who jumped into the bird bath every morning to slurp up a little bit of protein smoothie to start her day. Yesterday Charlie discovered our squirrel. Not discovered, really, but he finally decided to chase it around. I was looking out the window in ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 7 October 2022"

For those of us who have been watching the national Senate races with only half an eye, this chart from the New York Times is instructive: If we take the leaners seriously, it means there are only four real Senate races in the entire country. Democrats have merely to beat Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and ...continue reading "Control of the Senate is coming down to four seats"

The American economy gained 263,000 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 173,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate edged back down to 3.5%. This is a pretty mediocre jobs report—although that depends on how you look at things. ...continue reading "Chart of the day: New new jobs in September"

President Biden says he hasn't yet made up his mind what to do about OPEC's decision to cut oil production. And by "OPEC" he means "Saudi Arabia." As he's pondering, here's something that should be front of everyone's mind: The United States is an energy independent nation. For convenience, we still import some oil, and ...continue reading "Raw data: Net oil imports in the United States"

Over at Slate, Molly Olmsted writes about the apocalypse. That is, the real apocalypse: If you peruse the list of recent releases in Christian publishing, you’ll get the sense that “the end times” are upon us. This summer saw the release of survival guides, books about current events, and prayer manuals all oriented around a ...continue reading "The coming end times explain (some of) Donald Trump’s popularity"

This cracks me up: Anti-trans activist Caroline Farrow portrayed her arrest as an aggressive response to "some insulting messages on the internet” She failed to mention she was arrested for doxing trans woman @flyinglawyer73 who this week received an arson threat...https://t.co/ilHYx9Bbls — David Gilbert (@daithaigilbert) October 6, 2022 Based on the gigantic picture, you'd think ...continue reading "J.K. Rowling not arrested by Surrey police"

This is a Cistus ladanifer in Monet's garden in Giverny. At least, that's what I think it is based on an extensive one-minute use of Google's image search engine. Good enough for blogging!

As I mentioned yesterday, the WTO forecasts a sharp slowdown in international trade next year. What does that look like in the US right now? There's no obvious interpretation to this. Trade has been increasing steadily since 2021, and then took a sharp upward turn in March. Since then it's been declining. Is that because ...continue reading "A further look at declining international trade"

This is another picture from my astronomy session on Sunday night—but it's not a photo of the sky. Since everything was going well, I let the telescope camera run for as long as I could and ended up staying until about 6 am. That made it a very long night, but it also meant that ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Here is a routine cri de coeur about the national debt over at National Review: We are doomed: Bottom-line: the party’s over. Current levels of federal borrowing are completely untenable. America’s flirtation with Modern Monetary Theory must come to an end. And we better course correct quickly. Otherwise, we might soon be staring down the ...continue reading "Who’s afraid of the national debt?"

Three researchers recently decided to take a look at how different kinds of students do in STEM courses at the university level. So they gathered up more than 100,000 records and then controlled for high school prep and desire to attain a STEM degree. Given that, how did different students respond to modest setbacks? Here's ...continue reading "Black students do a lot worse in STEM programs than white students"

Golly: World trade in goods is set to slow sharply next year, possibly easing high inflation but raising the risk of a global recession, a new forecast shows. Surging energy costs and rising interest rates are weakening household demand across the globe, a dynamic that could cause exports and imports to increase by just 1% ...continue reading "World trade will slow sharply next year"

Earlier today I ran across a headline in the Wall Street Journal informing us that job openings were down in August. That sounded interesting, so I pulled up the data to take a look. Down? I should say so: Yikes! In the space of a single month we lost more than a million job openings. ...continue reading "We lost a million job openings in August"

This is phase 3 of my Andromeda Galaxy imaging. I took this near the top of Palomar Mountain, which isn't as dark as the desert but makes up for it with 5,000 feet of elevation. Although my imaging session started out poorly, it ended up going very well. The sky was dark and clear; focus ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

This is from the 2022 American Family Survey: I wonder what Republicans really think about this? If they're serious about the cause not being spending bills passed by Congress (stimulus, CHIPS Act, infrastructure, the Inflation Reduction Act), what exactly is left to blame on "Biden administration policies"? It is a mystery.

Why is core inflation (i.e., underlying inflation not affected by food and energy) so high? Most analysts cite three reasons: First, there's high government spending, especially from the January 2021 stimulus bill. But that's back to normal: Second, there was increased consumer demand after the COVID-19 pandemic settled down. That was a problem in 2021, ...continue reading "What’s causing core inflation?"

I was up all night doing astronomy stuff and forgot to post a lunchtime photo today! In order to restore the proper clockwork of the universe, here's a photo of young French lovers on the Paris metro actually taken around lunchtime. That's a rare thing for lunchtime photos.