Month: March 2021

I know you don't believe me when I keep telling you that things are better than you think. But maybe you'll believe a team of Ivy League economists who have studied media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Via David Leonhardt, here's the nut of what they found:

The US national media is relentlessly negative about COVID-19. It's also pretty negative about everything else, and this has nothing to do with partisan leanings. It's as true for the New York Times as it is for Fox News. But why?

An obvious question is, why are the U.S. major media so much more negative than international media and other outlets?...We suggest three possible explanations which deserve further exploration.

First, most of the non-U.S. markets in our sample include a dominant publicly owned news source. The U.K. has the BBC, while Canada has CBC and Australia has the ABC. Each of these news outlets is the number one news source in its respective country and may be following a different objective function than private news providers. This could potentially alter the behavior of all news providers.

Second, U.S. media markets are notably less concentrated than media markets in other OECD countries (Noam 2016). This higher level of competition may cause U.S. major media companies to use negativity as a tool to attract viewers.

Finally, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission eliminated its fairness doctrine regulation in 1987....It may be that profit maximizing U.S. news providers realized that they should provide not only partisan news to serve their consumers' tastes but also negative news which is in high demand.

In other words, perhaps the answer is that Americans love bad news and demand ever more of it. But if that's true, why is it only national media that's so negative? It's one thing for American media to be more negative than international media, but American national media is wildly more negative than local media. What accounts for that?

Hypotheses non fingo, I'm afraid. But this paper suggests that media negativity extends beyond just COVID-19 coverage. Keep this in mind the next time you scan the day's news and come away thinking the United States is close to collapse. It's really not so.

This is it. The last unused photo in my queue that was taken with my old Panasonic camera. It's been waiting its turn for more than three years.

The photo is of Black Star Canyon, which is just north of the larger Santiago Canyon that makes up the northeast edge of Orange County. It was taken just after Christmas in 2017.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 23. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is from Gallup:

There have been peaks and valleys, but basically about 40% of American households have owned at least one gun since 1980. The NRA has certainly been responsible for turning this into a virtual cult, but the underlying rate of gun ownership is the fundamental reason that gun control laws are so hard to pass. As is so often the case, while lobbyists and politicians can amplify the preferences of their constituencies, it's the constituency itself that's the real opposition. Somehow they need to be convinced to change their minds.

As far as I know, nobody has a plan for doing that.

Good news, folks! We've been working hard and our infrastructure is showing the results:

For years, the American Society of Civil Engineers has been awarding us a D+ for our infrastructure, but this year they've upgraded us to C-. Progress!

I continue to wish there was some reliable indicator of infrastructure quality other than ASCE, which obviously has a dog in this fight, but there's not much out there. However, here's a funding chart from the Council on Foreign Relations:

If this is to be believed, our "investment gap" between now and 2040 is basically pretty tiny—around $20 billion per year—for everything except roads. That's the only real gap. And by "roads," I suspect this mainly means "bridges."

The underlying data for this chart comes from the World Economic Forum's competitiveness rankings, which are split into several different areas. Overall, WEF ranks us third in the world in competitiveness, but only 12th in infrastructure:

This is for 2015, which is the most recent data they have. It's not great, but honestly, 12th in the world isn't all that bad. We're way ahead of Denmark!

This all leaves me a little confused, and I wish there were a more reliable marker of how good or bad our infrastructure really is. To be honest, my impression is that our infrastructure "crisis" has long been overblown. We can and should do better, but it's not as if the country is crumbling before our eyes.

The golden age of blogs is long behind us, and there's a school of thought that blames Google for this. Specifically, it blames Google for cancelling Google Reader, the app that nearly everyone once used to read blogs.

For some of you, that paragraph makes perfect sense. For others, it might as well be in Greek. So let me explain as briefly as possible.

All blogs, including this one, have an RSS feed. RSS is an independent standard that broadcasts the text of a blog (and other forms of web content) in a common format. An RSS reader is an app that pulls in that content and displays it. After the death of Google Reader I switched to NewsBlur, which looks like this:

I use NewsBlur only for blog reading, but there are plenty of other things you can also use it for. As you can see, it keeps track of all the blogs I've told it about and tells me if any of them have new posts since the last time I checked. This is very handy since it means I don't have to scroll through all of them periodically just to see if they've posted anything new.

Anyway. As I said, Google Reader was the de facto standard for reading blogs back in the day, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth when it was canceled. But was that responsible for a decline in blog audiences?

I asked that question on Twitter yesterday, and the consensus was "Meh. Maybe." But people also pointed to other things. There was the period when many of the most popular bloggers turned pro. There was the upswing in social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Maybe those were more at fault.

This got me curious in a navel-gazing sort of way. So in bloggy fashion, I went to Google Trends to extract some data that might or might not be a good proxy for blog popularity. Here's a chart showing Google searches for the topic "blog" since 2004:

If we assume that this really does represent blog popularity, we can say a few things about the decline that started in 2009. First, my recollection is that the peak years for bloggers turning pro was around 2005-07. But blog popularity continued to increase for several years after that. So that's probably not the cause of the decline.

Google Reader is an even worse fit. Blog popularity had already been on a downswing for more than three years when Google canceled it in 2013. It obviously can't have been the initial cause of the decline.

Social media is harder to get a handle on. Twitter is an unlikely villain for a downturn that began in 2009, since Twitter just wasn't that popular back then. Facebook, however, fits pretty well and provides a platform for blog-length musings. It's clearly a candidate.

But you can't look at this chart without noticing one other thing: The decline in blog popularity starts almost precisely when George W. Bush left office. It was Bush and the Iraq war that popularized blogs in the first place, so it would be sort of poetic if his departure marked the beginning of the end for blogs. Maybe blogs just lost their mojo when their favorite punching bag flew home to Texas.

Or it might just be a coincidence. Personally I find Facebook the most likely culprit.

But there's one other question left hanging: Google Reader might not have been responsible for the initial decline of blogs, but why was it canceled? It was a pretty low maintenance product and could have easily been kept around. Nobody at Google would even have noticed it. In a similar vein, Facebook and Twitter have reduced their support for RSS even though it requires very little effort to maintain. Why?

The most likely answer to all these questions is that RSS broadcasts content directly to users. There's no way to monetize it, and it cannibalizes users away from platforms that want to be your sole hub for news aggregation. Google wanted its users on Google+, or at the very least finding the news via search, which generated ad revenue. Facebook wanted you to read a news feed full of ads within their walled garden. And Twitter wanted to be the place where news broke first—but only if you were actually on Twitter.

In other words, RSS was a threat to practically every platform that aggregates news since it allowed users to decide for themselves what news they wanted to see—and to see it without passing through a gatekeeper. The best way to eliminate this threat was to eliminate or reduce support for RSS, as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all done.

Blogs were just collateral damage here. An RSS reader is the only decent way to read a collection of blogs, and with the demise of RSS and Google Reader it became more difficult to follow blogs. Sure, lots of people switched to a different reader, but lots more didn't know how or just never got around to it. And with that, the decline in blog readership accelerated. This was the start of a vicious cycle that opened up opportunities for Twitter, Medium, YouTube, podcasts, Substack, and other platforms that increasingly replaced blogs as the place for web-centric conversation.

Maybe. It's a plausible story, anyway. I just don't know for sure if it's true.

This is Lone Pine peak in the Eastern Sierra (the peak slightly right of center). I don't know if the mountain is named after the town or the town after the mountain. Either way, the peak looms over the town no matter where you are.

This is the best picture I got of the Sierras, and that's all because of the light. During the next few days of my trip the sky was clear and lovely, which is great for touristing around but not so great for dramatic picture taking.

As far as I know, the following two things are true:

1. Democrats don't have the votes to break a Republican filibuster.
2. Democrats don't have the votes to eliminate the filibuster.

And yet, I keep reading stuff like this:

White House officials are exploring tax increases on businesses, investors and rich Americans to fund the president’s multitrillion-dollar infrastructure and jobs package, according to two people briefed on internal conversations.

....President Biden’s tax increases may prove among the most controversial elements of the administration’s coming “Build Back Better” agenda, setting up a major confrontation with business groups and congressional Republicans.

And this:

White House officials are preparing to present President Biden with a roughly $3 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that includes high-profile domestic policy priorities such as free community college and universal prekindergarten, according to three people familiar with internal discussions.

If the bill isn't going to pass anyway, I suppose there's no harm in larding it up with yet more provisions that Republicans will hate. But the first article says only that tax increases might prove to be "controversial" while the second doesn't blink at the idea of stuffing the bill full of unrelated liberal wish-list provisions.

Am I missing something here? Biden has zero chance of passing a huge spending bill that includes huge tax increases. He has zero chance of passing a huge new voting law. He has zero chance of passing anything. And so far, at least, I've seen nothing to suggest that he has any chance of persuading all 50 Democratic members of the Senate to kill the filibuster. And yet the conversation surrounding these bills continues to have a sort of fairlyland tone that, hey, maybe Biden can negotiate with Republicans to get some of this stuff passed.

Later this year there will be a chance to pass another reconciliation bill, which can't be filibustered. Perhaps the plan is to pass the infrastructure bill, with all of its wish-list provisions hanging off it, that way. I can't think of any other possibility, but I never see it reported that way. Why not?

The 2021 World Happiness Report is out, and it's a stunner. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions and made everyone else miserable, so it's no surprise that happiness plummeted last—

Wait. That's not what happened at all. On a scale of 1-10, average happiness in 2020 was flat compared to 2019. Among large industrialized nations, more countries reported an increase in happiness than a decrease:

The United States recorded an increase of 0.09 points—not much, admittedly, but it is an increase, not a decrease.

In other words, for all our moaning and groaning, the pandemic apparently didn't make us unhappy. Or, at the very least, not enough to make us change our response to pollsters who asked about it.

To me, this is evidence for the "thermostat" theory of happiness, namely that we basically all have a set-point of happiness and we stay there most of the time unless something truly terrible or truly great happens. The pandemic apparently didn't qualify as all that terrible. Go figure.

The LA Times reports on the movement to recall California's governor:

As the effort to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom from office intensifies, a critical question is whether another Democrat jumps into the race to replace him. No candidate has come forward yet, but many political experts believe it is inevitable.

Democrats “won’t have any choice,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communication at USC and UC Berkeley. “It’s important to present a unified front, but it’s even more important for them to protect themselves.”

Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist, said the party must consider the worst-case scenario. “The fundamental point is Democrats really have to think long and hard about not having a good alternative to Gavin on the ballot if he is recalled,” he said. “That’s just the reality.”

This is crazy talk. There's really no chance that Newsom will lose the recall election as long as Democrats stay united behind him.

But wait. Didn't Gray Davis lose a recall election in 2003? Indeed he did. But Davis was a robotic guy who was never well liked. He won reelection in 2002 by less than 400,000 votes, compared to a 3 million vote margin for Newsom's reelection in 2018. Davis was also hamstrung by the state's energy crisis, which he oversaw, as well as a big budget deficit that he addressed with unpopular tax hikes. Newsom, by contrast, has generally handled the coronavirus well and has no budget deficit to deal with. Finally, and most damning, Davis's approval rating eight months before the recall was a dismal 24% among likely voters. (That is not a typo.) Newsom has declined a bit lately, but still clocks in at a respectable 52%.

This year is nothing like 2003. The electorate is more Democratic; Newsom is more popular than Davis was; there's no charismatic, populist Republican like Arnold Schwarzenegger to lure voters away; and the current recall election is widely viewed as nothing more than a Republican hatchet job from the same lunatics who brought you Donald Trump and insurrection at the Capitol. And remember that even with all his baggage, Davis still lost by only a small margin, 55%-45%. Short of some kind of unpredictable catastrophe, there's no way that Newsom can't improve on that by at least five percentage points. More likely is something like 20-30 points.

Given all this, I can't imagine what Democrats are afraid of. Just stick with Newsom, run a tough campaign, and win easily. Republicans have little to run on aside from a single ill-advised campaign dinner at the French Laundry, and that's just not enough to get the job done.