Kevin Drum 🕸

A few weeks ago (?) former Trump lapdog Jared Kushner parachuted into Saudi Arabia hoping to pick up an investment in his new private equity firm. Here's a sample of his pitch deck, which was obtained by The Intercept: I had a hard time picking out the most embarrassing slide from the deck and eventually ...continue reading "The Republican way of politics is changing"

This is a brightly lit mourning cloak butterfly that I took a picture of last year. It's a reminder that summer is coming soon this year.

In the New York Times today, James Forman Jr. and Kayla Vinson take another shot at the "superpredator" theory of the mid 1990s: In January the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed the 60-year sentence imposed on Keith Belcher, a Black teenager, for sexual assault and armed robbery committed when he was 14. Mr. Belcher was sentenced ...continue reading "Superpredators were real. But they aren’t anymore."

Today the BLS released the March edition of "Employment Characteristics of Families Summary." I have never noticed this report before and I've never looked at it, but it's basically just what it sounds like. It lists the employment rates of people depending on whether they're married, have kids, and so forth. Here's one chart: Men ...continue reading "When the kids grow up, parents stop working"

Paul Krugman says the Fed has to raise interest rates in order to get control of inflation: There is, however, a problem. The Fed’s efforts to control inflation will work mainly through the housing market, driving down sales and construction. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that America hasn’t been ...continue reading "We don’t have a housing shortage"

Social media hasn't changed behavior, it has revealed it. The best way of reining in social media is not to rein in what people are allowed to write. It's to give users the ability to decide what they're going to see. The default setting should be something along the lines of "I only want to ...continue reading "Some notes on social media"

This is part of the path around Lake Martin in Louisiana. Much of the path is just packed earth and gravel, and another part is sort of modified jungle with a barely visible trail hacked out of it. However, a couple of miles (out of five) is like this: a nice, wide path with a ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I have no particular reason for posting this aside from the fact that March unemployment figures were recently released. If you're curious how your state has done over the past year, here's the decline in unemployment since March 2021: Before you get too excited if your state did well, keep in mind that the states ...continue reading "Unemployment change by state"

On Monday a federal district judge appointed by Donald Trump overturned a CDC mandate that required masks on airplane flights. Liberals naturally went nuts. But it's worth a brief explainer about this. This particular ruling was just a ruling, but it falls into the general category of what are called "nationwide" injunctions—which have exploded in ...continue reading "Nationwide injunctions: A brief explainer"

Here in Los Angeles¹ we have a mayoral election coming up. The two main candidates are Karen Bass, a local member of Congress, and Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer. Caruso is running mainly on a platform of getting tough on crime² and fixing the homeless mess. He's gonna build build build homeless shelters; ...continue reading "As usual, California’s latest homeless initiative is widely hated"

I haven't done a COVID-19 post for a little while, so I decided to use my dex-driven insomnia to do one tonight. Warning: I got pulled down a bit of a rabbit hole. This time I calculated excess deaths per country, which is generally considered a more accurate metric than official figures for COVID death ...continue reading "Raw data: Cumulative excess deaths from COVID-19"

A couple of days ago I mentioned that, in general, our prime-age labor force was now almost completely back to work. One smallish exception was prime-age women, many of whom had dropped out of the workforce and were no longer being counted. The most likely explanation for this has to do with the continuing shortage ...continue reading "Raw data: The child day care worker shortage"

This is a teaching flight at Cable Airport in Upland, California. We were up there visiting Marian's aunt in the hospital, and when we were done we took a quick trip by the airport to see if there was anything to take pictures of.

As you may have heard, Los Angeles is undergoing a rash of unusual crimes. Gangs from South LA have been sending crews specifically to target rich people, tailing them from fashionable hotels, restaurants and clubs and then stealing their watches and purses. At first glance, this might not seem mysterious. For one thing, it's been ...continue reading "Does higher income inequality produce higher crime rates?"

How's the ol' labor force doing? The Wall Street Journal says today that "several million" workers have dropped out of the workforce permanently thanks to COVID-19, but I suspect that yet again this is a misconception that comes from looking at the entire labor force instead of just the prime-age labor force. Here are the ...continue reading "Raw data: Prime age workers in the post-COVID era"

Progress is slow. My distance vision is now 20/20—though barely—and I had my second adjustment on Wednesday. This should improve my distance vision slightly and my reading vision considerably. For now, though, things are still pretty fuzzy. I can read and use the computer without glasses, which my doctor wants me to do, but it's ...continue reading "Eyeball update and more"

Charlie seems to be mesmerized by something, but what? Is Marian holding up a can of cat food? Is she getting ready to toss a toy Charlie's way? Or is it just the big glass eye that has him enthralled? I'm afraid the answer is lost in the mists of history.

Russia really seems to take it personally when a country they've invaded decides to  fight back: Thunderous blasts echoed in the capital, Kyiv, and in Ukraine’s eastern battle zone on Friday, a day after Russia’s most important warship in the Black Sea sank while being towed to port, marking a humiliating wartime setback for Moscow. ...continue reading "Russia says it blew up its own ship, but takes it out on Ukraine anyway"

This is last night's sunset over North Tustin. I was out on a different photographic mission and caught this on my way home.

My earlier post reminds me that I've uncharacteristically made a few economic predictions lately: 30-year fixed mortgages will break 5%. Home prices will stop rising and might even drop 10% by the end of the year. Gasoline prices will drop 40-50 cents within the next couple of weeks. Inflation will start to recede by late ...continue reading "Kevin’s economic predictions for 2022"