Month: April 2021

California will be losing a House seat following the release of the 2020 census results. This is not because California's population has gone down. On the contrary, it's increased from 37.3 million in 2010 to 39.5 million in 2020. However, that's only a 5.9% increase, compared to a 7.4% increase for the nation as a whole. This chart tells the story:

California peaked in 2015 at 12.12% of the nation's population and has been declining ever since. In 2020, California accounted for only 11.93% of the country's population.

This will spawn a tedious new set of conservative essays trying to make the case that liberals have ruined the Golden State blah blah blah. It's one of their favorite topics. However, the real reason for the population decline is a simple one: California has rolled up the welcome mat and told people to stay away. This has been done indirectly by refusing to build new housing, thus making shelter so expensive that fewer people can afford to live here.

In other words, California is still a very popular destination, and if the state wanted more people it could easily attract them. But it doesn't.

Dumbbell of the gods?

Suppose you wanted to know the population of the United States for the years 1920-1970. Where would you go to get that information?

The Census Bureau, of course. Counting people is their job.

And yet, if you hop over to their website you won't find this. Nor will you find much of anything else related to simple population measurements. If you want to know how many 18-year-olds owned cars in 2016, you can find out. Not easily, but you can do it. There are also reports galore on specific demographic subjects. But if you just want a straightforward count of people, or of the Hispanic share of the population, or the male-female ratio, or anything like that, forget it.

Why is this? Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's the kind of thing I'd like to see:

Don't bother critiquing this. I'm not actually proposing it as an interface, and it has some obvious drawbacks. It's just to provide a sense of what I think the Census Bureau should provide in a fairly simple-to-use manner.

This is the kind of thing the Census Bureau should make available, right? So join me in my jihad to get them to do it. Their job is to count people, and they should make their historical population figures easily accessible to anyone who wants them. Who's with me?

POSTSCRIPT: It's possible, of course, that the Census Bureau already has something like this and I'm too dim to have ever located it. That would be OK! I'm perfectly willing to accept the ridicule I'd deserve in return for finding out where this is.

Ben Smith reports in the New York Times that Facebook has a policy of blocking posts that show your house—if you complain about it. The intent is to prohibit doxxing, but since the policy has no exceptions it also includes news articles in, say, the New York Post, that report on the $1.4 million house recently purchased by BLM founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors.

Smith is unhappy that Facebook doesn't defer to editorial judgment on these stories, instead simply applying its policy no matter where the reporting originates. It's fine to have an argument about that, but I was more taken by the suggestion that a Facebook block essentially erases news:

On Wednesday, I learned a new way to get a news article erased from much of the internet. [Explanation of Facebook policy follows.]

....“We’ve been thrown into a situation where all you can do is pick your billionaire monopolist,” [Danny] O’Brien said, lamenting “a world in which you get to pick your gatekeeper, rather than the world we were promised — and which technology offers — of not picking a gatekeeper at all.”

Suppose we go back 30 years. If the New York Post ran an article, it would be read by people who buy the New York Post.

Now let's come back to the present. If the New York Post runs an article, it will be read by people who buy the New York Post.

And people who see it online.

And anyone who watches Fox News.

And pretty much anyone who listens to right-wing talk radio.

And anyone who sees a link in Twitter.

And anyone who sees a link in any social media platform not owned by Facebook.

And anyone who reports on the controversy over the Post's whining about how Facebook hates them.

In other words, even without Facebook the audience for this piece is vastly larger than it would have been back in the good old days of print journalism and hard-bitten editors making tough editorial judgments. I understand that lots of people get some of their news from Facebook these days, but being banned from Facebook is hardly the equivalent of Big Brother shoving something down the memory hole. I heard all about the Patrisse Khan-Cullors thing even though I don't read the Post and don't get any of my news from Facebook.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about the control that Facebook and Twitter and Google have over the news we see, but it needs to start with a recognition of just how much Facebook really determines our newsreading habits. That's not an easy thing to measure rigorously, but in the meantime I'd say the evidence we have suggests a relatively small role. Smaller than most people think, anyway.

Maybe eventually we'll get some really solid research on this and it will turn out I'm wrong. But I kinda doubt it.

The weekend vaccination rate dropped again this week, hitting about 3.4 million on Friday and Saturday. It's obvious that we have both the infrastructure and the supply to vaccinate more people, which means the slowdown is due to vaccine hesitancy. At this point, we just need to convince more people to get off their duffs and get vaccinated.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through April 25. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The New York Times reports that Europe wants to allow entry this summer to any US resident who has been vaccinated against COVID-19:

The fast pace of vaccination in the United States, and advanced talks between authorities there and the European Union over how to make vaccine certificates acceptable as proof of immunity for visitors, will enable the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to recommend a switch in policy that could see trans-Atlantic leisure travel restored.

....Technical discussions have been going on for several weeks between European Union and United States officials on how to practically and technologically make vaccine certificates from each place broadly readable so that citizens can use them to travel without restrictions.

Wait a second. The Biden administration has been swearing up and down that it has no plans to create a "vaccine passport." But isn't this the same thing? And apparently they've been discussing it for weeks.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of this. A vaccine passport/certificate is not some kind of big government invasion of personal privacy. It's just something that provides useful information. In this case, foreign governments legitimately want to know if visitors have been vaccinated. Presumably the United States wants to know the same thing about people who visit us. Not only is there nothing wrong with this, it makes all sorts of obvious sense.

Anyway, if I'm reading this right, it looks like vaccine passports are coming soon. Among their other good aspects, perhaps they will also help persuade more people to get vaccinated.

Here is the rate of new COVID-19 cases in India compared to the United States:

India is skyrocketing, but still has quite a ways to go to match the January peak in the United States. However, keep a few things in mind:

• The cases in India are likely undercounted.
• In terms of raw numbers, India is already well above our daily peak (300,000 vs. 250,000 in January for the US).
• The US hospital system is far more advanced than India's.

It's natural that every country is looking toward its own needs first. Like it or not, that's human nature. However, the US has more vaccine doses than it needs at this point, including millions of AstraZeneca doses just sitting in a warehouse, and we could certainly afford to ship most of those to India. We should do that.

(And if you insist on a selfish motivation, it's this: over the next few months India is likely to become the primary source for coronavirus variants. These endanger everyone, and the faster we get the case count under control in India the less of a threat they'll be.)

India also needs syringes, PPE, vaccine precursors, and other things. We—and the rest of the world—should mount a Marshall Plan-esque effort to provide this material.

Beyond that, it's difficult to know what to do. Waiving vaccine patent rights might or might not be a good idea in a broad sense, but it would do nothing to make vaccines more available at the moment. Manufacturing capacity is the main bottleneck right now, along with the willingness of other countries to share vaccine doses if they have a surplus. Unfortunately, manufacturing capacity is already close to 100% and it takes months or years to create more.

This is not a problem with a simple answer. That said, the US is one of the few countries with a potential surplus of both vaccines and medical gear, and we should be establishing an Operation Warp Speed II to get every bit of help to India that we can as fast as we can. What's the counterargument, after all?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through April 24. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for MoJo that concluded there was little danger associated with Democrats taking an aggressive approach to racial justice issues. However, the evidence on this topic was thin at the time, so I've continued to follow it ever since. Needless to say, it's become a far more pointed subject ever since the George Floyd murder and the subsequent summer of BLM protests in 2020.

Yesterday Jon Chait pointed to a new study that offers a warning: "Telling subjects that a proposal would reduce racial inequity makes them less likely to support it," he says. But that's not quite right, it turns out. Here's the chart:

The first thing I noticed was at the bottom: these effects are on a 7-point scale, which means a difference of 0.1 is fairly small. But what does that mean in language easily understood by us lay folks?

Luckily, the authors do something unprecedented and actually tell us straight out:

To contextualize this effect, we can convert the seven-point scale into a binary measure of policy support, where any degree of support is coded as 1 while any degree of opposition or undecidedness is coded as 0. On this binary measure, we find that the class frame increased policy support by a statistically significant 2.1 percentage points....On the other hand, neither the race nor the race-class frames have any detectable effects on policy support.

In other words, emphasizing racial equality has no effect, while emphasizing class (i.e., poverty and income inequality) raises support by about two percentage points.

I have long been a fan of emphasizing class over race, so I'm happy to see research that supports this view. However, this study supports it pretty weakly (that's the authors' word, not mine). Race, it turns out, does no harm, and class arguments make such a small difference that they're probably swamped by the specifics of the issue at hand and the wording of the message.

As it happens, I'm less convinced by my own argument now than I was when I wrote it in 2018. However, this is solely because the liberal/Democratic emphasis on racial justice has gone much further than I ever guessed it would. My read of the evidence at the time was that talking about racial justice would do no harm, so Democrats should go ahead and do it. But what's the effect when racial justice almost literally consumes the entire public discourse? I don't know, and I think we're now in uncharted waters. There's certainly an argument to be made that it hurt Democrats across the board in the 2020 election, turning what should have been an easy win into a nailbiter. And it sure gave Fox News plenty of fodder. On the other hand, there's not yet any firm research evidence to back up the notion that it hurt Democrats. So for now I'm on the fence.