Month: February 2021

In the annals of schadenfreude, this has to rank high. It comes from a USA Today poll of Trump voters:

There are disquieting findings in the poll for Fox News, which has prospered as the dominant news source for conservatives. In a USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll in October 2016, 58% of Trump voters said Fox was their most trusted source of news. In the new poll, that drops to 34%.

Trust has risen in two relatively new outlets that have made their reputations by championing Trump. Newsmax is the most trusted among 17% of Trump voters, followed by 9% for One American News Network, or OANN.

Fox News spent all of November and December doing everything it could to convince its viewers that the election had been stolen. They promoted every dumb conspiracy theory, every hopeless lawsuit, and every utterance from the mouth of Rudy Giuliani. They made themselves the target of libel suits from voting machine companies. Tucker and Sean and Laura and the rest of the gang spent every evening explaining how Democrats were fraudulently stealing votes in every state Trump lost.

And what's their reward for all this? They've lost the trust of the true believers because the events of January 6 went a little too far even for Fox to swallow. But it turns out that the audience conditioned by Fox News to always believe the worst of Democrats wants to keep hearing that even if Fox News itself is suggesting otherwise. So now 26% of Trump voters have dumped the Murdoch empire for the sin of being ever so slightly attached to the real world.

It kinda makes you weepy, doesn't it?

I think we all knew what this weekend would bring, and the numbers confirm it. COVID-19 vaccinations were not only below the old trendline, they were down in absolute terms. This is due partly to supply issues and partly to delivery problems caused by the unholy weather that hit two-thirds of the country last week.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The Washington Post reports that the US economy could very well grow like gangbusters this year:

Factories are humming and consumers are spending again, signs that the United States could emerge from the current health crisis with its strongest growth in decades. Goldman Sachs expects the economy to expand this year at an annual rate of 7 percent, the fastest pace since President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning again in America” in 1984.

....Not for 75 years, since American G.I.s were battling two totalitarian empires, has the economy been boosted simultaneously by so much deficit spending and so much easy money. The economy will enjoy additional support this year from consumers, who have more than $1.6 trillion in excess savings, thanks in part to last year’s stimulus checks, according to Bank of America.

Some people are worried about all this stimulus producing inflation, and maybe it will. But one of the best indicators of inflation expectations is the 5-Year/5-Year Forward rate, and it seems to be pretty untroubled right now:

Inflation expectations recovered from their pandemic lows in early 2020, but are still at about 2%—well below the rate of the entire period from 2003-2014.

For years, many of us who lived through the '70s have been urging our boomer colleagues to stop being traumatized by the inflation of those years. The inflation of the '70s truly was damaging, but a big reason is that the financial system of the era was designed on the assumption of low inflation rates. When inflation rose, we had to apply all sorts of Rube Goldberg hacks to keep people from literally making negative returns on their money. But those days are long gone. Deregulation of the financial system produced inflation indexing almost everywhere, which means that even if inflation rises it doesn't produce the kind of trauma that it did 40 years ago.

In the meantime, the aging of the US population, along with increasing globalization, puts steady downward pressure on inflation. The lesson here is simple: If inflation becomes unanchored for a significant period of time, then we should start pulling back. But there's no need to pull back every time expectations rise a few tenths of a point. Let's give the economy room to run and see what happens. The best outcome is that GDP booms, wages rise, and even the long-term unemployed start getting back into the workforce.

And the worst case? Inflation starts to grow too fast and the Fed has to raise interest rates. That's not good, but it's hardly the worst thing in the world. It's not a fear that we should let rule our lives.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 20. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Yesterday I wrote about the apparent tendency of Texas power plants to literally catch on fire and explode if demand for electricity gets too high. My deeply considered response was basically "Huh?" Today, though, a reader emails to explain things to me.

The story starts with the fact that our electric system is based on 60 Hz AC. This means that the direction of the current reverses 60 times per second, and obviously the entire grid needs to be in sync:

The fundamental reason why grid operators have to resort to induced blackouts to protect their generation stations (and why it's sometimes done automatically) is that AC frequency management is everything in grid safety. Every generation hooked to the grid that uses physical motion (typically a turbine) has huge, expensive, precise turbines turning at some local multiple of 60Hz, and all of them are putting out AC whose waves are synchronized with one another. A small gas plant in El Paso phase peaks within a few milliseconds of when the steam turbines at the Comanche Peak nuclear plants do.

Under normal conditions that's just how AC power works — if it wasn't in sync no one would get power anywhere. Under strain, such as when demand surpasses capacity, frequency starts to drop — turbines start getting more magnetic resistance from their coils, solar inverters start heating up, wind turbines get more rotational resistance from their generators, etc. Most of that equipment can't tolerate going out of phase or frequency target more than slightly before it's damaged in big expensive ways. Hence they'll trip off the grid to protect themselves if needed, and grid operators have to drop loads rather than letting the frequency drop when they're out of generation capacity. They wouldn't "blow up" if they just stayed connected, but the damage would be real. There's nothing special about Texas' grid in that respect — all AC grids work that way.

There's a whole side market in energy just around frequency management — batteries and generators that can add or take away energy just to maintain stable frequency in the phase of short-term load shifts. It's fascinating stuff if you're into that sort of thing.

Another reader writes:

Remember the testing done around Y2K or thereabouts of whether you could actually damage a generator through the Internet? They destroyed a really big diesel generator with astonishing ease by oscillating the load to form a standing wave and ruined it beyond repair. Mind you, diesels are not known for being fragile, and certainly not as fragile as a turbine. These are big, macho machines, and each one is essentially a one-off custom build, so when one is severely damaged, it might take years to replace.

This YouTube explains in graphical terms:

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 19. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A few days ago I wrote that our overall response to the COVID-19 pandemic had been pretty good, all things considered. I also mentioned that my post was basically a reply to Lawrence Wright, who argues that our pandemic response has been "one of the greatest failures in the history of American governance." He bases this on three big mistakes:

1. In early January, the CDC failed to get China to cooperate with an investigation.
2. In February the CDC botched the development of testing kits.
3. In March, the CDC fumbled on mask wearing and eventually made a U-turn.

This struck me as laughably thin. Wright admits that #1 is the fault of the Chinese and there was nothing we could have done about it. #2 is real, but I doubt very much that it had much of a long-term effect. Europe had tests earlier than us and their outbreaks were just as bad.

As for #3, the CDC could have done better. But there really was new research being done in real time, and it was only slowly that mask wearing was tested as a way to prevent the spread of the virus. Previous research had been mostly about protecting the mask wearer, and the CDC was correct in saying that this was of limited use. European countries were in the same boat, and they changed their minds at about the same time we did.

All in all, this just isn't the devastating indictment Wright thinks it is. But the funny thing is that he missed the truly greatest mistake we made. Take a look at this chart of COVID-19 deaths:

This is a chart of all European countries plus the US. In the early days, the US is at the low end of the pack. Despite our missteps, we're not doing too badly. But during the summer of 2020 the pandemic dies down in Europe but keeps shooting up in the US. By November we're doing worse than all but four or five European countries.

Why? Because Donald Trump insisted on reopening the economy too soon. Unlike Europe, we never crushed the virus to near zero. Instead we kept on killing people all through summer, and when winter came we were starting from a higher base. I think it's safe to say that this one mistake probably cost a hundred thousand lives or so.

This is why I rate our overall response to the pandemic as "pretty good." We really didn't make as many deadly mistakes as people think, and overall the CDC and FDA did a fairly reasonable job. The one big mistake we did make came down to a single sociopathic man whose motivations, as always, were beyond human ken. Electing Trump president was our only real mistake, and we did that long before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19.

NUTSHELL VERSION: We mostly responded fairly well to the pandemic, especially given how new it was and how the science behind it was changing rapidly in real time. On the vaccination front, our response has been all but miraculous.

We made only one big mistake: allowing Donald Trump to be our president. My take is that this is not enough to condemn the entire US response. It's only one thing. On the other hand, it was a big thing and we did elect the man. If you think it's sophistry to say "it was only one thing" when the result was so catastrophic, I can't really blame you. I think it's important to understand just where we went wrong, but I'm less concerned with how you then describe it.

Whenever I go on a photo expedition I try to find at least one cat to take a picture of. This puts a little variety into Friday Catblogging.

No luck this time, I'm afraid. However, I did get some pictures of horses. None of them were showstoppers, so I picked this one because I liked the dramatic mane highlighted by the sun. Consider this the first and probably last Friday Horseblogging.

This year is the 25th anniversary of the great Welfare Reform act of 1996, which means we will all be treated to loads of thumbsuckers about whether "it worked." This is a conversation I'm eager to avoid, since the question of whether it worked is almost entirely a question of values.

But I was curious about one thing. The stated goal among Republicans was to push more single mothers into the workforce. So I wondered: by their own lights, is it fair to say it "worked"? Did it really push more single women to find jobs?

Here's a chart from the New York Times that shows what happened:

Welfare reform passed in 1996 and spent 1997 being implemented. So it's fair to say that 1998 is sort of the dividing line for "before welfare reform" and "after welfare reform." There are several odd things here.

First, as many people have pointed out, single mothers were piling into the workforce well before the welfare reform bill had a chance to have any impact. In fact, just a glance at the numbers makes it clear that welfare reform, at most, raised labor participation only slightly above where it was already at.

Second, the labor participation rate declined gradually over the next 15 years, and it declined at the same slow rate through both recessions and economic expansions. That seems weird. Then, in 2016, it suddenly shoots up for no apparent reason. What's up with that? Whatever it is, it hardly seems like welfare reform could be the culprit.

So did welfare reform "work" according the metric that conservatives themselves set out? It's hard to say. Something caused lots of single mothers to get jobs during the '90s—and to keep them through the first 20 years of the aughts (most of them, anyway). One possibility that's related to welfare reform is that in the early '90s lots of states were experimenting with tightening standards for welfare benefits, and talk of national welfare reform was in the air. Might that have something to do with it? I'd rate it fairly unlikely since the early efforts were weak and welfare recipients almost certainly had no idea that welfare reform was getting a lot of attention in Washington DC.

But if it wasn't welfare reform that did it, what was it? The burnout of the crack epidemic? A new generation of single mothers who were less lead poisoned than earlier generations? Some kind of weird statistical artifact? I don't know, but from the very beginning there's been something of a puzzle about why single mothers started entering the workforce in large numbers before welfare reform passed and before the economic boom of the late '90s started up. There are mysteries here that deserve a look.