Kevin Drum 🕸

Tyler Cowen points us to this chart: "Psychological distress," according to the author, is defined as scoring ≥ 5 on the Kessler-6 Distress Scale, which is administered as part of the National Health Interview Study. As you can see, distress has been rising steadily for the past two decades. It has risen for all age ...continue reading "More Americans are distressed than ever"

The Klondike bar is 100 years old, and CNN is here to misinform us about it: You don't hear about many products getting cheaper over time, but technically at least, people can pay less for a Klondike bar today than they did 100 years ago. When it first came out, in 1922, the Klondike bar ...continue reading "Today’s worker can buy 80,000 Klondike bars per year"

Consumer spending growth was flat in May: After huge spikes due to the pandemic and its rescue packages, consumer spending growth now appears to have settled down to its normal, pre-pandemic rate of about 2%. This means that spending isn't driving inflation higher. Wages aren't driving inflation higher. Home prices are no longer driving inflation ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Consumer spending growth has gone flat"

Big news from the Wall Street Journal! But how long has this Twitter holiday been? Inquiring minds want to know and the Journal is here to tell us: The billionaire chief executive of Tesla Inc. last posted on June 21, marking Thursday as the most extended silence since October 2017. Normally a serial tweeter, he ...continue reading "Elon Musk is . . . quiet"

Last night, like thousands of nights before it, USC was part of the Pac-12 conference when I went to bed. This morning, I woke up, came downstairs, and immediately crashed. When I finally woke up for good this afternoon, USC was a member of the Big Ten. wtf?

A few days ago I wrote about an AP study showing that over the past year about 1 million voters had switched their party registration to Republican compared to 600,000 who had become Democrats. This was based on a party switching report from L2, which combined actual data from states that report it with modeling ...continue reading "Update: Party defections are tiny and mostly meaningless"

When the price of gasoline goes up, it's all over the news. When the price of gasoline goes down, crickets. Guess what? Yep, the price of gasoline has gone down for the past couple of weeks. And just like that, it's suddenly out of the news. Of course, it didn't help that the EIA website ...continue reading "Raw data: The price of gasoline is dropping"

As expected, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling today that limits the EPA's authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Needless to say, liberals were appalled: Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, said in a statement that by insisting that an agency “can promulgate an important and significant climate rule only by showing ‘clear ...continue reading "The logic games behind today’s Supreme Court ruling on power regulation"

This is Monet's lily pond. As you can see, there are no lilies blooming in this picture, so it's basically just a pond. When you're on an eight-day cruise, it's inevitable that some of your tours will be on weekends. That was the case here, and Monet's garden was jammed—though you can't tell in this ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

It sure seems like it these days, doesn't it?

According to the latest numbers from the BLS, here are the cities where pay has increased the most over the past year: Both the biggest and smallest pay increases seem to be scattered pretty equally around the country, so no interesting conclusions about this spring to mind. I will say that only in the yellow ...continue reading "Map of the day: Here are the cities where pay has increased the most"

Well fuck you, Mark Zuckerburg: Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them after a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure. ....Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across ...continue reading "Facebook and Instagram decide that abortion is too icky"

In his opinion in Dobbs, Sam Alito took great pains to say that nothing in it threatened any other rights. This was primarily because abortion kills an unborn child, which makes it unique. Clarence Thomas disagreed, but he's always disagreed and no one joined him. So the question is, was Alito sincere, or was it ...continue reading "What will the Supreme Court do next?"

It's time to tell you the final chapter of my drone story. The reason I got the drone is because height is the photographer's best friend. At ground level, the perspective is lousy and there are always things in the way: trees, buildings, power lines, and so forth. The best perspective, oddly, is often from ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty says he's surprised that progressive anger over the Dobbs decision has been relatively modest: There were some loud marches through major cities over the weekend, but hardly the wave of riots, vandalism, and sacrilege promised by the group Jane’s Revenge. I think many of us prepared for our ...continue reading "Have progressives been pretty muted about abortion?"

A few days ago I showed you this chart: This points to one of the most interesting ways of fighting the Supreme Court's abortion decision. Abortion pills are approved by the FDA—a federal agency—and are nearly as safe as aspirin. A lot of experts think that it's impossible for a state to ban the use ...continue reading "We can fight the Supreme Court with abortion pills"

As usual, California leads the way: On Monday, the Democratic-controlled Legislature gave final approval to a measure that would put [abortion] before the state’s voters, in the latest countermeasure aimed at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Senate Constitutional Amendment 10 by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) would, ...continue reading "California will vote on abortion in November"

The chart below shows core inflation for both the US and Europe: For the US I used the PCE price index excluding energy and food. For Europe I used Eurostat's HICP index excluding energy and unprocessed food. Since these are core inflation rates, they are unaffected by differences in oil spikes, Ukrainian food blockades, and ...continue reading "Raw data: The economic response to the pandemic, US vs. Europe"

Since court expansion is in the news, here's a quick historical note about "The Switch in Time That Saved Nine." When FDR took office and began putting together the New Deal, he he knew that his presidency faced a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority. In particular, it featured the "Four Horsemen," a clique ...continue reading "The myth of FDR’s court packing scheme"

The New York Time informs me that the latest craze among our youth is the "0.5 selfie"—so named because you tap 0.5 on your smartphone to engage wide angle mode and produce a distorted picture. But that's nothing. Behold the old-school 0.2 selfie. No smartphone required.