Cats, charts, and politics
In a poll released last week, Fox News asked people who was more favored in the United States these days: whites or minorities? Here's a chart showing how various groups responded:
I wish they had included a category for Fox News viewers. I'll bet it would have been even higher than Trump voters.
This is a panoramic shot of Mono Lake from the south, with a good view of the tufa columns that dot the shore. They are basically limestone formations made possible by the high salinity of the lake.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 29. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
One of the difficulties of taking pictures of birds is that the camera's autofocus often chooses to focus on the foliage surrounding the bird instead of the bird itself. It's a problem with no great solution, but once in a while you solve it by just getting lucky.
Today's photos are a lucky triptych that shows a hummingbird coming in for a landing on a nearby stem. The hummingbird was right in between two stems dead center in the viewfinder, so the autofocus did its job perfectly. The shutter was set to 1/16000th of a second, so the wings are perfectly stopped. All in all, an excellent look at the flying style of nature's cutest little bird.
Since American history is now front and center in our national, um, discourse, I thought I should share a tidbit of history about history. There's no special reason for this except that (a) it's true and (b) it's history that I'll bet a lot of progressives no longer remember if they ever knew it at all.
Back in 2014 the folks who make up curriculum guidelines for the AP history course decided to update things. This prompted dismay from conservatives and got a fair amount of press coverage at the time. Nothing like what's going on today, however, so you might have missed it. Here's a description from David Casalaspi, a mainstreamish liberal who's an education policy analyst for the National Governors Association:
The maligned 2014 framework represented a first attempt by the College Board to produce a coherent narrative of American history which would encourage teachers to stop teaching history as a collection of trivia facts and instead teach the subject more thematically. In doing so, though, it pressured teachers to adopt racial and gender conflict as the dominant paradigm of historical development.
In this way, the 2014 framework listed “Identity” — with an emphasis on racial and gender grievances — as the first of seven “organizing themes” for the teaching of American history. Additionally, the framework was littered with references to “white Americans,” “white settlers,” “white pioneers,” and their racial biases. The concept of Manifest Destiny, for instance, was described as “built on the belief in white racial superiority.” And one of the only things students had to know about World War II was that the dropping of the atomic bomb and the internment of Japanese citizens led to the questioning of American values.
....I am a liberal, but I often found myself agreeing with conservatives on this issue because I am wary of any U.S. history curriculum that both infringes upon the free speech of teachers and proffers a narrative of history which encourages identity-building through the balkanization of student populations along racial and gender lines. The long-standing purpose of social studies is to help students understand each other as citizens, not as members of competing tribes of with irreconcilable cultures.
The curriculum was changed in response to complaints, and everyone seemed to be relatively happy with the final 2015 product.
The only reason I'm bringing this up is to make it clear that the current right-wing jihad over "critical race theory" is itself rooted in history. The question of how much to emphasize the dark side of US history is a topic that's been active for decades, with plenty of participation from both liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, as you might expect, liberals have consistently pushed for a more honest reckoning with our past, which has just as consistently been met with conservative alarm at anything that intrudes on the traditional view of America as the greatest country in the world.
For various reasons, Fox News recently decided to take this long simmering controversy and turn it into the outrage of the moment. But don't let that fool you. It's been around for a while, and both liberals and conservatives have contributed to periodic fights that push things farther than many people are comfortable with. Generally speaking, however, liberals nearly always manage to eke out modest victories that push the envelope a bit. The result has been a slow but steady reform of US history pedagogy that, with each passing year, is a little bit more honest about our past.
Nothing about this has changed much in the past year aside from the temperature of the fight. Liberals really do want more emphasis on how racism and genocide have fashioned the history of the US. Conservatives really do push back against this. Now, as always, the question isn't whether the liberal view should prevail—it always has—it's how far it should prevail at any given moment. How much should Americans, just like citizens of every other country, learn about the seamier side of their culture and history? This is not an easy question to answer.
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, [Sonny] Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America....An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Remember when Donald Trump was president and stories like this were almost weekly occurrences? And Republicans didn't care even slightly? Those were the days.
Then Joe Biden took over and . . . life got boring. There was a story a few weeks ago trying to make hay out of the fact that a few sons and daughters of cabinet member had gotten government jobs, but it was pretty weak tea and went nowhere. We seem to be living once again in an era of relatively honest governance from the White House.
But at least we have Hunter Biden to kick around, eh? Ne'er-do-well offspring of presidents are practically a tradition in the United States, which means that Hunter fits right in. So far he's failed to even fail spectacularly, but I'm sure Republicans will keep up the hunt.
This is hardly a big deal, but a short piece over at National Review provides a short, snappy example of how conservatives manage to stoke the culture wars with wildly misleading accounts of wokeness sweeping the nation.
The outrage du jour is Broders' Pasta Bar, a restaurant in Minneapolis that charges a "benefits and equity" fee. The entire NR piece is copied from John Miltmore, who says, among other things:
Telling your customers you are going to begin charging them more because they are too bigoted to tip fairly might not be a winning restaurant strategy. Just sayin’.
....If Broders’ doesn’t feel restaurant workers in the back are earning enough money, there is a solution to that: pay them more. This action doesn’t require any surcharges or public lectures on systemic oppression. It only requires the restaurant to run an efficient and profitable business that allows them to pay workers a wage they believe is fair and “livable.”
But wait. The original statement from Broders' is here. Go ahead and read it yourself. They say that:
However, the statement also says they hope to reduce unconscious bias in tipping. "In general, Black or Brown servers receive less tips than Caucasian servers. There is gender bias as well."
That's it. All that happened is that a restaurant in Minneapolis decided to implement European-style gratuities included in the bill. They hope this will allow them to pay back-of-house workers more fairly and they also hope it will overcome known bias in tipping behavior. But apparently Miltmore's polemic went viral, so Broders' has updated its statement to make all this crystal clear. The NR writer doesn't seem to have noticed this, just copying Miltmore's week-old piece verbatim.
Broders' implemented this policy more than a year ago, by the way, and I gather that no one has complained since then. But even though it isn't costing customers any more, and even though the main intent appears to be paying all employees more fairly, conservatives just can't stand it if a new policy might also reduce racial bias. Hell, they hate the idea of acknowledging that racial bias even exists. It just throws them into a tizzy. So they write angrily about it, stoke the outrage, and lie about what's going on. Gotta get a piece of that sweet Tucker/CRT/wokeness action sweeping the nation, after all.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 28. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
A couple of years ago California passed a law that allowed college athletes to make money from licensing their name, image, or likeness (NIL). At first the NCAA huffed and puffed and threatened that if California went through with this it might ban them from playing football, but no one took that seriously. Nor was it ever plausible that universities in other states would allow California schools such a huge recruiting edge without demanding the same advantage for themselves.
For months the NCAA pretended that it might be able to square this circle somehow, but last week's Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston put paid to that, and today they officially caved in completely:
The NCAA Division I Council — reeling from a Supreme Court ruling last week that further stripped away confidence in the ability of the NCAA rule book to withstand antitrust scrutiny — voted to recommend its board of directors “adopt an interim policy that would suspend amateurism rules related to name, image and likeness,” according to a NCAA statement. The board is scheduled to meet Wednesday and expected to approve this measure.
So that's that. But as much as it seems fair to allow athletes to profit from a system that already profits everyone except them, it's hard to see how big-time college sports (i.e., men's football and basketball) survives this.
The problem is that this is certain to blow up inequality in NCAA sports to unsustainable levels. Take my local powerhouse, USC. They've been planning for this day and are certain to adopt a very athlete-friendly NIL policy. For the top recruits, this can mean hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and football factories like USC can make an easy case that stars on their team will cash in at far higher levels than run-of-the-mill big-conference teams. The biggest programs will have on-campus offices that help athletes find agents and get the best deals. They'll remind recruits that their teams get cherry TV exposure. USC in particular will argue that there's no better place for NIL riches than Los Angeles. By the time this gold rush plays out, there will be maybe a dozen top teams that are so far ahead of everyone else that they're going to have to create a new conference just for them.
Make no mistake: there's not much difference between colleges competing for recruits on NIL revenue and colleges competing on just plain paying their athletes. And once you do that, only the very richest places can survive. Welcome to capitalism.
I don't really know what the answer is to this. I suspect there isn't one. Continuing the strict amateurism policy just wasn't in the cards. Eventually it would fall. But I always figured that once it did, there was no longer any way to keep college teams on even a notional level playing field. If a dozen universities basically run pro programs that are farm teams for the NFL while the rest are essentially relegated to Division II, that's the end of big-time college athletics.
Maybe I'm off base about how this plays out. You never know what kind of weird stuff can turn up. But this is how I see it.
POSTSCRIPT: I've used football throughout as my example, but I suspect much the same would happen to men's basketball. And since those two sports fund everything else, if their revenue dries up then so does every other sport. The dozen or so big schools will be fine, but everyone else will see their athletic budgets crater.
In the New York Times today, Jill Filipovic makes the case that declines in the US birth rate are due to family-unfriendly policy:
Liberals make the (better) case that birth declines are clearly tied to policy, with potential mothers deterred by the lack of affordable child care and the absence of universal health care, adequate paid parental leave and other basic support systems. Couple that with skyrocketing housing prices, high rates of student loan debt and stagnant wages and it’s no surprise that so many women say: “Children? In this economy?”
To judge this, you need to take a look at fertility rates by age. First off, here is teen fertility:
Teen fertility has plummeted strongly and steadily over the past four decades. Since teen fertility has always been viewed as a problem, this should be seen as a policy win even if we don't know for sure what policies caused it. Easier access to contraceptives may have played a role, but the evidence suggests it was at most a small role.
For many years, fertility at higher ages made up for the decline in teen births, but that changed a few years ago:
Until 2007, the fertility of women in their 20s (thin gray lines) remained roughly stable and the fertility of women in their 30s went up. But then things changed: 20-something fertility began a sharp downturn while 30-something fertility flattened out.
It's difficult to make a case that policy changed suddenly around 2007. It also doesn't fit the experience of Europe, where fertility in most countries declined steadily during the exact period (1970-2010) that family-friendly policies became commonplace.
The most obvious explanation for this is one that Filipovic also alludes to: the economy. Fertility peaked in 2007 and began to drop in 2008, the first year of the Great Recession. Its effect appears to have been permanent, and it's been strongest on the youngest women. Since 2007, fertility rates look like this:
One way or another, the fertility bust in the US seems to have been triggered by the Great Recession, which traumatized young women just entering the workforce far more than it did older women who had been through previous recessions and were entrenched in their jobs enough to be less affected by it. Policy may have something to offer here, but a solid, growing economy seems more likely to turn things around.