Month: July 2021

As long as we're having fun with inflation today—and we are, aren't we?—let's take a dive into everyone's favorite category, the weekly trip to the supermarket. Here's the inflation rate for a random selection of food items:

This shows you how the game is played. If you want to run a scare story about people having seizures over the high price of food, just run some B-roll of a cash register ringing up the items on the right. Bacon is up 6.1%! Apples are up 6.5%! And whole milk is up a wallet-busting 7.5%!

Naturally you have to ignore the fact that hamburger is down 8.4%, hot dogs are down 3.8%, and bread is up only 1.3%. That would ruin the narrative, after all.

Anyway, when you add it all up, food in supermarkets is up 0.9% from last year. That's not busting anyone's wallet unless they eat bacon and apples for every meal.

Just for fun, here's an updated chart that shows the inflation rate for various categories of goods and services:

Used cars and trucks are up 45.2%! What the hell is going on?

This time I've included figures for Drum household personal hobbies. Photo equipment is up 5.9%, which is tolerable. However, sewing machines are up 13.3%. I hope Marian isn't planning to buy a new sewing machine any time soon.¹

¹Anyway, what we really need is the world's best buttonholer, even if the price is high. Buttonholes are the big challenge around here.

Exciting news today! The June inflation numbers are out. I won't keep you in suspense:

That's pretty high! However, if you use Kevin's Handy Inflation Calculator, which adjusts for base effects (that's the dip in mid-2020) the real-world rate is more like 4.4%. And if you eliminate the distortion of used cars, the inflation rate for everything else is probably less than 3%.¹

I know, I know, that's a lot of adjustments. Take 'em for what they're worth. The only adjustment that really matters is to go forward in time and see if inflation settles down once the economy adjusts to its grand reopening. But that's one adjustment we're just going to have to wait for.

¹According to the BLS, the inflation rate of used cars "accounted for more than one-third of the seasonally adjusted all items increase."

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How effective is preschool? There is, to put it plainly, much research has been dedicated to this question and we still don't know for sure. One constant, however, is that every discussion of pre-K includes a reference to the Perry Preschool Project, a smallish study done in 1962 that provided high-quality preschool to poor Black students beginning at age three. But it's frankly tiresome to keep hearing about it, since it's now 60 years in the past and included only about 60 kids in the treatment group. If we haven't come up with better studies by now, we should just give up the whole thing.

However, the PPP does have one advantage over other studies: It took place 60 years in the past. This means that it provides a unique look at participants throughout their entire lives without any guesswork about things like expected future income or criminal activity. By now, that information is all available directly. A team of researchers has done just that and their conclusion is pretty simple:

The authors present benefits in terms of present value dollars, and they find that the effect of PPP on education is minimal. Ditto for health care. However, the impact on income and crime is considerable. Graduates of PPP ended up earning substantially more than the control group and engaged in substantially less crime. Nearly all of these benefits came between the ages of 16 and 40.

This is consistent with other studies of pre-K, which generally find that preschool doesn't make you smarter or better in the classroom. Rather, preschool seems to improve life outcomes by instilling good cognitive habits in other areas.

This is progress, and it makes a good case for universal pre-K. However, it still leaves the basic Black-white education gap in place, with Black kids graduating from high school with an average 9th-10th grade reading level compared to 12th grade for white kids. Until we figure out what to do about this, our education problems in the Black community are very far from solved.

This looks like a model, but it's not. It's just a big ol' BNSF freight train on its way to the BNSF switching yard in Barstow.

I've read dozens, maybe hundreds of pieces about how some particular group or organization or ethnic minority has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and truthfully I've gotten pretty tired of them. Roughly speaking, it turns out that the pandemic affected everyone and it affected them in pretty similar ways.

But even with that in mind, Perry Stein's look at Ketcham Elementary, a school in one of Washington DC's poorest neighborhoods, is genuinely heart wrenching. I won't try to summarize it. By now it's a cliche to call people dealing with COVID-19 "heroes," but this story is truly filled with them.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Welcome to Monday:

The endless preoccupation of the US news industry with inflation is truly spectacular. They will simply take any opportunity, no matter how trivial, to hoist the red flag of high inflation right around the corner.

I'm not even saying the stuff in this particular piece is wrong. Rather, it's ancient. It's a bunch of trends that inflation hawks have been warning about for years. And who knows? Maybe they're finally right. But the article exhumes all these dusty warnings for no particular reason, as near as I can tell, aside from the fact that it provides yet another excuse to blather on about inflation, inflation, inflation.

Wouldn't it be great if our news media calmed down about inflation and instead decided to scare everyone constantly about the possibility of high unemployment? Or stagnant blue-collar wages? That would be a service.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 10. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.