Cats, charts, and politics
For what it's worth, I'd recommend that everyone hold off on hot takes about "What the California recall means for ________ ." The recall was the work of idiot Trumpistas, and it failed because California is a very blue state and Republicans had no credible candidates to oppose Gavin Newsom. It has no lessons for normal elections in swing states.
That won't stop anyone, I suppose. But you have been warned.
After 16 years of Republican governors, California has elected three Democrats in the past 20 years. Republicans have tried to recall two of the three.
It's time for this nonsense to end, and given the current state of the Republican Party there's no guarantee that even tonight's epic drubbing will convince them to stop. At this point, we don't need to reform the recall process, we need to eliminate it entirely. It serves no purpose that can't be accomplished by other means.
The Wall Street Journal has gotten hold of a trove of internal Facebook documents and is publishing a series of stories about what it's found. Today the focus is on Instagram, and specifically on the impact Instagram has on teen girls:
For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
....“Social comparison is worse on Instagram,” states Facebook’s deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that “keep the focus on the face.” In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.
At first I found this all pretty plausible, and I suppose I still do. Still, girls are exposed to unrealistic body expectations starting with Barbie dolls in early childhood and extending later to TV, magazines, the internet, videogames, and more. They are practically surrounded by it, and I started to wonder if trading some hours of, say, TV for a few hours on Instagram really made a big difference.
I don't know if there's any way to answer this, but the Journal article did suggest that Instagram's impact on body issues was producing an increase in eating disorders. I could at least check that, and here's what I found:
This is all people with eating disorders, not just teen girls, and it only goes through 2017. Still, Instagram has been a Facebook property since 2012, and if it's had more than a trivial impact on eating disorders you'd expect that it might show up in the overall data. But obviously it doesn't. The share of the population with eating disorders has dropped steadily over the past decade, exactly the period when Instagram use was rising.
In the end this probably doesn't tell us anything firm, but it seemed worth throwing out there. In any research of this kind, the proper question to ask is "compared to what?" Instagram might well have a negative effect on teenage girls, but to know if it's truly dangerous you have to ask "compared to what?" That is, what would teenage girls be doing if they weren't on Instagram, and would it be better or worse? That question doesn't seem to have been addressed.
Last week I told you I had three wildflowers I had never been able to identify. So why not let you guys take a crack at all of them? Here is mystery picture #2, a medium-size violet flower with dark violet stripes.
UPDATE: Probably a common mallow.
I'm a little late to this, but George W. Bush gave a speech on 9/11:
George W Bush on 9/11: "We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within ... they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them." pic.twitter.com/TGvHoCbjJV
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2021
This is all very fine, and I'm glad to see Bush denounce the violent Trumpist wing of the Republican Party even if he didn't actually name them. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near enough.
The actual Trumpistas themselves I can almost feel some empathy for. They are largely old, poorly educated, and feel like they have genuine grievances. They are wide open to being conned, and Trump, Fox News, and the rest of the right-wing media machine is happy oblige them. To a large extent, these folks oppose vaccines and believe the election was stolen because that's what they're being told—over and over and over.
The people I have a real problem with are the non-insane Republicans. These are the ones who don't like Trump and understand that he's dangerous. But they aren't willing to do the only thing that might rid the party of Trumpism: vote for Democrats.
Not forever. Just temporarily until their party gets the message that it needs to purge Trump and his influence if they want to win elections.
I don't expect anyone to become a liberal. Or to like Democrats. I just want them to hold their noses and vote D for a little while on the grounds that a few years of liberal governance is better than allowing the Republican Party to permanently become a party of Trumpism. The old notion that Trumpism is bad but fundamentally harmless was never really justified, but after "Stop the Steal" and January 6 and now the season of vaccine madness, it should be obvious that it's not harmless at all. It's dangerous and will likely get more dangerous over time.
But there's no way to clean up the Republican Party by words alone. As long as they're winning elections, they'll keep doing what they're doing. So vote D. Just for a little while.
The Census Bureau released poverty figures for 2020 today, and depending on how you look at things poverty was either up or down:
The "official" poverty measure, which no one likes, is based solely on wage income. Naturally, then, it went up last year since lots of people lost their jobs and their incomes went down.
But the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account government benefits, among other things, was down substantially. This makes sense since Congress allocated a vast amount of money to people, with a focus on the poor and the unemployed.
So which one is right? The SPM does a better job of estimating real-life resources available to families, and it's the one you should probably trust. This is, once again, evidence that social welfare programs do exactly what they're supposed to do. They make people better off.
Today is election day here in California, where we all get to vote on whether to recall our governor. But why are we doing this? The LA Times dives deep into this baffling question:
When 1.6 million voters signed a petition to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, they signaled their indebtedness not just to century-old political reforms but also to a spirit of restless reinvention that took root 170 years ago.“
Californians,” said historian H.W. Brands with the University of Texas at Austin, “have learned to be impatient with patience. The idea of sticking to an unsatisfactory status quo doesn’t stick.”
....Filter out the static and a bipartisan picture emerges of an electorate struggling to address the most challenging issues California has had to face. Climate change and catastrophic wildfires, a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis, income inequality and racial inequities have reached a point where any proposal that doesn’t lead to a fix is reason to mobilize.
....Former Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez sees a struggle taking place in the conscience of Democrats and Californians who are trying to understand what it means to be “the most multiracial, diverse and forward-looking state.”
For chrissake. I've rarely seen such a stream of pseudo-analytic bafflegab in service of avoiding the simple and obvious answer. Here's the deal: The recall is solely the work of "Stop the Steal" Trumpistas who took advantage of the fact that California requires only 1.5 million signatures to certify a recall. Even in their current moldering condition Republicans still make up about a third of all voters, so all the nutbags needed was signatures from the 20-30% of their compatriots in the nutbag wing of the party. Easy peasy, especially if you're gathering signatures at the same time that Trump and Fox News are firing up the nation about corrupt Democrats trying to take the presidency away from him.
That's it. Forget the crap about Californians being any more impatient or unhappy than anyone else. We aren't. Nutbags got the recall on the ballot, and once that happened Republicans were all perfectly happy to go along with putting one of their own in office. That's it. That's all there is.
The headline CPI index in August clocked in 0.27% higher than the previous month, an annualized rate of 3.3%. This is quite a bit lower than the 9%, 7%, 10%, and 5% rates of April through July.
Core CPI, which excludes food and energy, came in at 1.2%. Since the headline number usually follows the core number, this suggests that inflation is likely to head even lower over the next few months.
Compared to 12 months ago, the inflation rate for food was up a bit to 2.9%. That's not outrageous, but it's been rising for the past three months and is starting to get a little peaky. The inflation rate for used cars softened a bit but is still running at an astonishing 32%.
NOTE: Normally I focus on CPI as measured compared to the previous year. However, right now we're in a volatile period and are interested in how inflation is doing right this moment. For that, it's best to look at the increase from the previous month and then multiply by 12 (more or less) to get an annualized rate.
My Twitter feed has been full of people who are confused by the chart in the previous post showing rising incomes for everyone. Here's the explanation.
First off, here's data from the Census Bureau showing earnings growth since 2000 broken out by race and sex:
This is probably the most common income chart you'll see, and it shows that incomes have risen for men and women of all races since 2000. The only exception is Black men, who are stuck at their 2000 level.
There's nothing wrong with this data. However, it includes only wage income, and many households have other sources of income. For that reason, every year the Congressional Budget Office estimates total income, including wages, Social Security, business income, capital gains, and other market income.
It also estimates how much income is lost to taxes. In general, rich households lose more to taxes than poor households, and some households actually gain income from net tax refunds.
Finally, the CBO estimates income from government benefits. When you put this all together, you get this:
Since I was mostly interested in the period from 2000-2020, I took the CBO data and renormed it so that 2000 = 0. I also chose to show nominal numbers with a separate line for the inflation rate, instead of showing inflation-adjusted numbers. I didn't have any special reason for that. Just keeping everyone on their toes. In any case, when you do this, here's what you get in the more familiar form of inflation-adjusted numbers:
This is probably the most accurate assessment we have of actual disposable income across income classes. The chart in the previous post is exactly the same as this one except it shows nominal income compared to the inflation rate. They both mean the same thing.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present to you the State of America over the past 20-40 years. This is focused strictly on long-term trends, not on specific good or bad things that have happened recently, and solely on trends that have a broad impact.
Please note that no trend is perfect. It's fine to note that poverty remains too high, for example, but it remains true that the trend has been steadily down. That said, first up in medium-term trends is:
Income is up for everyone: men, women, Black, white, Hispanic, rich, poor, and middle class. Data from the CBO is here. UPDATE: Confused by this chart? Explanation here.
The spiraling cost of medical care has been brought under control. Over the past 20 years, medical inflation has been only slightly higher than overall inflation.