Cats, charts, and politics
This picture is three years old, and I need to either post it or spike it. But who among us would have the nerve to spike a picture of their beloved spouse? Not me. So here it is, a photo of Marian taken in the rear view mirror on a trip up to Yosemite.
Julian Sanchez offers up some sage advice:
The best thing legislators can do if they want private entities to combat misinformation is *stay out of it*, because those entities have much broader latitude to police misinformation than the government does. https://t.co/LO3Yy8b1GC
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) February 23, 2021
There's more to it than this, though. It's certainly true that any government effort to police Facebook's content is almost certain to be overturned by the Supreme Court and is therefore pointless. But it's also true that we shouldn't want the government to police Facebook.
My standard for this is simple: Whatever it is you want regulated on Facebook, would you also want the same thing regulated on CNN or the Washington Post? Why not? Speech is speech, after all, regardless of whether it's in print, pixels, or modulated carrier waves on a cable system.
(Private action, of course, is entirely different. We should all feel free to campaign against Facebook in any way we please. Public pressure is a great way to push media outlets to change the way they operate.)
I'm annoyed that I continually find myself defending Facebook these days. I'm hardly a big fan, but my objections—which now seem practically stodgy—have always revolved around their incessant disrespect for personal privacy. More recently, though, the criticism of Facebook (and other social media platforms) has revolved around content, and I'm a lot less comfortable with that.
Partly this is because I remain an old-school liberal who believes in free speech. There are limits, as with everything, but those limits should be pretty loose.
But it's also partly because I think we've all gone slightly bonkers over our view of Facebook's power. I've spent a fair amount of time researching this, and it turns out there's very little evidence that Facebook actually influences public opinion all that much. There are several reasons for this:
There's a ton of research suggesting that social media usage is correlated with depression or loneliness or whatnot. But there's precious little to show that it's correlated with an increase in conservative misinformation. It might be! But so far there's just not much hard evidence to back this up.
So sure, keep pressuring Facebook to do the right thing. Pressure the Biden administration to crack down on Facebook mergers. (It's big enough to deserve a very hard look if it tries to merge or buy a related company.) But until there's better evidence, ease up on the "criticism" that Facebook makes it easier for people to meet in groups or pass along gossip. There have always been good groups and bad groups, just as there's always been good gossip and bad gossip. Facebook really hasn't changed that very much.
We are fond of polls showing that liberals have a better grasp on reality than conservatives. But it's not always the case. Matt Yglesias points us today to this poll from the Skeptic Research Center:
According to the Washington Post's Fatal Force Database, the correct answer was 13 in 2019. That includes only Black men killed by guns, so the broader answer might be 20-30.
In any case, conservatives clearly have a much closer estimate than liberals. What's more, there are far fewer conservatives than the 10-20% of liberals who think the correct answer is 10,000 (!) or more.
These kinds of polls should always be taken with a shaker of salt. The answers rarely depend on actual knowledge—how many people have the slightest idea how many unarmed Black men are killed by cops each year?—and instead represent little more than guesses based on ideology. If the correct answer is a liberal one, then liberals do better. If the correct answer is a conservative one, conservatives do better. Most of the time, that's all there is to it.
As you're undoubtedly aware, the United States passed the 500,000 death mark from COVID-19 yesterday. This prompted a spate of pieces trying to put this in context. Laid end to end it's enough people to reach from San Diego to San Francisco. It's more than the number of people buried at Arlington Cemetery. It's enough to fill 25 Olympic-size swimming pools.¹ Etc.
I have never found these kinds of comparisons helpful. However, perhaps because I'm fairly nerdish, this one is:
Over the past few weeks, we have recorded about 40% more deaths than we normally would. On average, since the pandemic started, our death rate has increased by 20%.
In other words, if the normal death rate in a nursing home of 200 patients is, say, five per week, it's now six per week. During COVID-19 spikes, it's seven per week. Week after week after week.
¹Author's calculations for all of these.
A new NBER working paper concludes that when private equity firms buy nursing homes, they charge about 11% more and have 10% higher mortality rates—which clocks in at about 1,700 extra deaths per year. But that's just an average of all patients. The actual change in mortality depends a lot on who you are and why you're there:
The worst off are low-risk patients regardless of age, whose mortality rates increase by nearly a quarter. Surprisingly, nonwhite patients improve their mortality risk in PE-owned nursing homes. Also surprisingly, low-income patients have only a small increased risk compared to high-income patients.
I confess that these oddities, along with the fairly complex instrumenting used by the authors, makes me skittish about these results. Nevertheless, the overall result seems sound. After all, the only reason for private equity firms to be interested in nursing homes is if they think they can be run more profitably than before. This means charging more and reducing staffing levels—both of which they do—and this in turn is almost certain to produce higher mortality rates and lower patient well-being.
The only question left is: If I need to stay in a nursing home, how do I find out if it's owned by a private equity firm?
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 22. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
I don't quite remember what piqued my interest in this, but I got curious about the trend in hate crimes against Black people. According to the FBI, here are the numbers, represented as the rate per million of the Black population:
A number of people, including me, have posited that the Obama era produced a white backlash that eventually elected Donald Trump president. There's some evidence to support this, but it sure doesn't show up in the hate crime statistics. Hate crimes against Black people plummeted by nearly half during Obama's term and have pretty much stayed there ever since.¹ This is despite the fact that presumably the Obama administration put a greater focus on hate crimes than either George Bush or Donald Trump.
Violent assaults on Black people have gone down by nearly half since 2005, far more than violent assaults in general. In this case, however, the decline has been fairly steady over the entire period.
The FBI is not the only authority on hate crimes and the NCVS is not the only authority on victimization. Still, they're generally well respected and use the same methodology from year to year. This probably represents reality pretty well.
I have been accused—rightfully—of constantly telling you that things are better than you think. The reason is simple: Whenever I look into something, it very often turns out to be better than the media focus would have us believe. It wasn't my intention to find yet another example when I dug up these numbers, but I'm not really surprised any longer when that's the way it turns out.
POSTSCRIPT: Standard caveat that there are some things that really are as bad as we think—life expectancy, opioid addiction, income inequality, etc.—and that just because something is declining doesn't mean we don't still have a lot of work left to get it even lower.
¹However, despite the decline it's still the case that the rate of anti-Black hate crime is considerably higher than the rate against any other ethnicity.
It's traditional for new presidents to lose one of their nominees for cabinet-level posts. The opposition party needs a scalp to maintain their sense of self esteem, and they're usually able to dredge up a micro-scandal of some kind that gives them an excuse to demand one.
But this year is different. Republicans are after two scalps, and neither is associated with any kind of scandal. One is Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress, who has an unfortunate habit of getting into Twitter feuds with people. The other is Xavier Becerra, California's attorney general, who loves to mix it up with Republicans.
And that's it. The GOP is threatening to vote unanimously against both of these nominees because . . . they're not always nice. This might not matter if Democrats were united behind the nominees, but Democrat Joe Manchin has already announced that he'll vote against Tanden because her "overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact" on her relationship with Congress.
This is absurd. Tanden deserves to get dragged a bit, but she's done nothing even remotely worth denying her confirmation. Ditto for Becerra. If Democrats let themselves get suckered into believing that Republicans are delicate little flowers who can't abide partisan nastiness (Jeff Sessions! Mike Pompeo! Bill Barr! Mick Mulvaney!) then I guess they deserve whatever they get. But make no mistake: this is just fakery and no one should take it seriously.
This is a panoramic shot of Mono Lake, the source of all the water that Los Angeles steals from northern California. For some reason it's peculiarly washed out, which is very cool. I can't explain it, but I know that I like it.
I've been experimenting a lot with panoramic shots, and mostly I like the results. The big problem is that on the blog I'm limited to a width of 700 pixels, which means they look pretty tiny. This one isn't too bad, but I've got a few others that are real problems. They'd look great blown up big and hung on a wall, but not so great on a tiny computer monitor.
(Of course, you can always do a right-click and choose "View Image" if you want to see it larger. I assume something similar works on Macs.)
UPDATE: In the interests of precision, Los Angeles has never gotten water directly from Mono Lake, which is extremely salty. It got water from the streams that feed Mono Lake, thus lowering its water level by dangerous amounts.
Janet Yellen has joined the unemployment truthers:
“We have an unemployment rate that, if properly measured in some sense, is really close to 10 percent,” Ms. Yellen said on CNBC Thursday. A week earlier, Mr. Powell cited the same figure in a speech about lingering labor market damage.
Come on. We have U1, U2, U3, U4, U5, and U6. We have the labor force participation rate. We have the employment to population ratio. We have both those things for prime age workers only. That's nearly a dozen different ways of measuring "unemployment," and now we have yet another. Here is Fed chair Jerome Powell explaining the unemployment measure that Yellen was talking about:
All told, nearly 5 million people say the pandemic prevented them from looking for work in January. In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that many unemployed individuals have been misclassified as employed. Correcting this misclassification and counting those who have left the labor force since last February as unemployed would boost the unemployment rate to close to 10 percent in January.
Well, sure it would. And I could invent a new measure that would boost it even further. But neither Powell's metric nor mine would represent "properly measured" any more than the others. It all depends on what you want to know.
In any case, a raw number shorn of context doesn't really tell us anything. What we really want to know is how much higher (or lower) it is than normal levels in the past. This is fairly easy to see for measures like U3 (the normal headline rate) and U6 (unemployed plus marginally attached):
As you can see, these two track each other pretty well, with U6 a fairly steady 4-5 points above the headline rate. This tells us that if we improve the labor market, both measures will probably reach their previous lows at about the same time. They're both telling us roughly the same thing.
But Powell cheats. He only shows his new metric from the beginning of the pandemic:
Sure, his made-up measure is at 10% now. But what is its natural low level over the past 20 years or so? How much lower should we expect it to drop? You can't simply take a metric that's artificially designed to match the headline rate during a single month and then declare this the "right" way to measure things.
That's especially true for this metric. The "misclassification error" has dropped to almost nothing, and the labor force participation rate always drops during a recession. It dropped a fraction of a point in 1990-91; a little more than a point in 2001-04; more than 3 points in 2008-15; and two points during our current recession. It dropped faster and more dramatically this time around, just like every other economic indicator, but it's still not outside the range of normal for a recession of this size.
As usual, maybe there's something I'm missing here. But my take is that any of the normal measures of unemployment are perfectly suitable right now. What's more, we know exactly what we have to do to push the unemployment rate down: get everyone vaccinated and open up the economy completely. Then we can see where we're really at.
Will it turn out that some of the new unemployment is permanent? I wouldn't be surprised if it is. Ever since 2000 it's been normal for the participation rate to fall during a recession and then never make up all of its lost ground. This may be due to an uptake in automation or it might be something else. But whatever it is, it's not something brand new.
POSTSCRIPT: It may seem like I devoted a lot of words to something not all that important. Probably. I just find this kind of thing annoying, regardless of whether it comes from the Secretary of the Treasury or some nutball on the Fox Business Channel.