Cats, charts, and politics
As we move ever deeper into fall, here's a reminder of the glories of spring.
And as a special present for all of you on my birthday, a regular reader has finally educated me on how to make pictures enlargeable with a plugin so simple even I can use it. Just put your mouse over the picture and you'll see a little magnifying glass with a plus sign. Click it and the picture gets embiggened. Hooray!
What's with the worker shortage? Ben Casselman takes a crack at explaining:
Conservatives have blamed generous unemployment benefits for keeping people at home, but evidence from states that ended the payments early suggests that any impact was small. Progressives say companies could find workers if they paid more, but the shortages aren’t limited to low-wage industries.
This is true, and it's very peculiar. It's one thing for McDonalds or Target to have trouble finding workers, but even unionized workplaces with pretty good pay and benefits seem to be having trouble. Onward:
Instead, economists point to a complex, overlapping web of factors, many of which could be slow to reverse.
The health crisis is still making it hard or dangerous for some people to work, while savings built up during the pandemic have made it easier for others to turn down jobs they do not want. Psychology may also play a role: Surveys suggest that the pandemic led many to rethink their priorities, while the glut of open jobs — more than 10 million in August — may be motivating some to hold out for a better offer. The net result is that, arguably for the first time in decades, workers up and down the income ladder have leverage.
I guess. But two-thirds of the country is now vaccinated, and it's higher in some states than others. But do states with high vaccination rates have less of a worker shortage? I've seen no data to suggest that.
As for savings, that's a pretty reasonable suggestion. However, personal savings have largely been used up by now and there's still a worker shortage.
Finally there's all these people who are "rethinking their priorities." I hope Casselman will forgive me for thinking that this is a very upper-class New Yorkian suggestion. The vast, vast majority of ordinary middle-class workers are almost certainly not rethinking anything except the need to put food on the table.
One subcategory of "thinking their priorities," however, could plausibly be women who have decided to stay home and care for their children rather than return to the paid workforce. But that doesn't really pan out either:
Women have dropped out of the workforce at a slightly higher rate than men, but even that small difference is only due to a blip in September. In August the numbers were nearly identical.
So we still have a mystery. But it just might be one with a silver lining. If workers were piling back into the workforce, it's possible that the economy really would be overheating, with dire consequences in the year ahead. Conversely, if they return slowly, the economy might continue on a strong but sustainable growth path. Just possibly, this might be a good mystery, not a bad one.
Exciting news today! After eight long years the Department of Education has finally released a new edition of the long-term NAEP assessment. Note that this is not the main NAEP, which is generally considered the best reflection of student achievement. However, the main assessment has changed modestly over the years while the long-term assessment is designed to be frozen in amber, thus providing a better comparison over time even if some of the questions are more out-of-date than they should be.
So without further ado, here are the latest reading scores for 13-year-olds:
And the math scores:
Among white and Hispanic kids, there's nothing much to see. Reading scores are basically flat and math scores are slightly down, but still far higher than they were at the start of the century.
Among Black kids, however, the story is more dire: Reading scores are down 3 points and math scores have plummeted 8 points since the last test. Black kids have basically given up all their gains in math since 2000. The Black-white gap is now as big as it's been since 2000 in reading (25 points) and since 1980 in math (35 points).
This is not the final word. The main NAEP is still the best assessment and it doesn't show that the Black-white gap has grown this much. Still, no matter how you cut it, the gap is pretty sizeable on both tests. It's a shameful shortcoming.
It's possible that Joe Manchin is the worst person in the world. It's gotta be a close call, since the US Senate breeds vainglorious assholes like fruit flies, but who knows? He might be the worst. Anything is possible.
That said, does anyone think that pissing him off is a constructive thing to do? That it will somehow make him more likely to compromise with progressives? How'd that work out with Susan Collins?
There are some aspects of human psychology that are deep and mysterious. There are others so obvious that kids on playgrounds know them. This is one of the latter. Regardless of whether Manchin is or is not a consummate dick, we need his vote—and a full frontal assault on him is really not the way to get it. Can progressives—who, last I looked, are a minority even within the Democratic Party—please pull their heads out of their asses on this score? Passing legislation is more important than you getting to feel righteous on Twitter.
Let's talk about wonks and hacks. As you know, wonks are the technocratic policy experts, and they're expected to craft proposals that are workable, that get the details right, and provide the biggest bang for the buck. Hacks, by contrast, are mostly interested in figuring out how to get stuff to pass through Congress. It's not that they don't care about crafting good policy, just that they care more about crafting policy that will somehow be acceptable to a few hundred individual egos.
Wonks and hacks are both part of the political ecosystem. Neither is good or bad. In a fallen world, they're both necessary.
So where are the hacks these days? I've read endlessly from wonkish sorts who are outraged that Joe Manchin is killing parts of the climate change bill because he's a slave to the coal industry. And sure, fair enough. But the BBB bill has already been through the wonk wringer and should—should—be well into the hack stage of things. And the first thing a hack would say is something like this:
Are you insane? What's all this coal stuff doing in there? You know that Manchin will never tolerate anything aimed at the coal industry. It's West Virginia, for God's sake.
That would be in private, of course, but I don't get the sense that anybody is even saying this in private. Why not? Maybe you're disgusted by legislative sausage making and maybe you're not, but it's been a reality since the day the first tribe met to argue about who should keep watch over the the first fire. It's just the way H. sapiens works.
I'm a wonk. But that doesn't make me an idiot. Once we've taken our shot we have to turn things over to the hacks. And a good hack will survey the political landscape and tell you what horrible things you need to do to get your wish list passed. This senator wants a means test. That senator wants to make sure home care for the elderly gets more funding. Another one wants to protect coal mining.
And then there will be a bunch of unseemly dealmaking and finally something will pass. It will be maybe 80% as good as the original immaculate bill, and that will be cause for much handwringing. But the 80% bill will be 80% better than nothing and it will be a triumph once it's signed into law.
So: where are the hacks? Like it or not, they're the ones who should be driving the process now. Why do they seem to be missing in action?
This is a panorama photo of St. Peter's Square—the whole thing. It's sort of like taking a circle and unraveling it into a straight line.
The downside, of course, is that it really needs to be about 3 feet wide, not 600 pixels. But you go to war with the pixels you have, not the pixels you wish you had.
What causes high inflation? An overheating economy. But what's the best sign of an overheating economy? Rising inflation.
This doesn't get us anywhere. It will eventually tell us the story, but too late to do any good. So how about if we look at other signs of a possibly overheating economy?
First up is asset inflation. Both home prices and stock prices have been rising above historical trend levels since the middle of last year:
Another sign is household credit. If banks are loaning out a lot of money, that's usually a sign of an economy getting out of control. But that's not happening. Household credit hasn't grown since the start of the pandemic:
How about personal savings? If people have a lot savings to draw on, that could produce artificially high growth. But the spike in personal savings due to federal assistance programs has nearly played itself out. The overhang in savings is almost gone:
As a result, consumer spending isn't spiking, as it might in an overheated economy. It's right on its old trendline:
A traditional sign of an overheating economy is a spike in wage growth. But wages have come down from their pandemic high and are nearly down to their pre-pandemic trend:
When the economy is strong, people are more confident about their ability to find a new job, so quits go up. Over the past couple of months quits have been high, but at this point they're still only slightly above trend:
Finally, there's how close GDP is to potential GDP, a measure of the maximum sustainable output of the economy. Potential GDP is an estimate, and a sometimes controversial one, but it remains a useful measure. Currently, the economy is still below its potential, but at its current rate of growth it might reach it fairly soon:
Put all this together and we have one sign of an overheating economy (asset inflation) and half a dozen that show an economy that's fairly normal at the moment. This doesn't prove anything, but combined with the fact that inflationary expectations are well anchored at 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year terms, it does suggest that, at least for now, the economy is strong but not on the verge of roaring out of control.
The LA Times reports on VP Kamala Harris's latest stumble:
The fallout over the video...is the second in recent weeks where a seemingly innocuous appearance by Harris has become modestly troublesome.
I envision this as a huge argument between the reporters and their editor. How about problematic? No, too woke-y. Maybe something about baggage? Yuck. Yet another headache? Too strong. Troublesome? Hmmm. Sort of troublesome? Modestly troublesome? Go with it.
Well, how do you describe something that's basically a nothingburger? Here's the story: YouTube Originals commissioned a video for World Space Week and the production company did all the usual stuff. They hired a crew, some child actors, put a script together, and did the shoot. One of the segments took the kids to the US Naval Observatory, where Harris talked about science stuff. That's it.
Oh, except that the video didn't explicitly make it clear that the kids were actors. Why does this matter? Beats me, aside from the following clue:
Such stumbles have been featured extensively in conservative media...
Well, duh. Kamala Harris could wear the wrong color shoes and it would be featured extensively in conservative media. In this case, Fox News invented the notion that Harris paid the kids and that the video was a government production, even though they surely knew that neither of those things were true, which immediately made the whole thing a controversy. But only a modestly troublesome one, according to the Times. And only in Fox News circles.
BY THE WAY: Just in case you don't know, Harris is the new Hillary Clinton. Fox News savages her on a regular basis, and they've basically turned her into the Antichrist over there. Why? I suppose partly because she's a woman and mostly because she seems the most likely presidential frontrunner if Joe Biden decides not to run in 2024.
You will be happy to know that Hopper's wound is now completely healed and she is swishing her tail around as if nothing had ever happened. She's convinced that this means she should be let out into the backyard again, but I plan to wait until she's regrown her tail fur. Considering how much fur we brush off the cats every day, you'd think that wouldn't take long. But it does. She probably has another month or two of being trapped inside.
For Instacart workers across the country, the popular grocery delivery app promised flexibility and a solid wage, perks that enticed thousands to join the app during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But amid worsening working conditions including plummeting pay, safety concerns, and a punitive rating system, Instacart employees, known as shoppers, will be staging a walkout on 16 October and will continue striking until the company meets their demands for better treatment.
You want to talk about crappy jobs? The delivery biz—Instacart, DoorDash, Grubhub, etc.—is ground zero. If anything better is available, you'd grab it.
And better jobs are available! There are allegedly millions of unfilled jobs right now, many of them requiring little or no experience.
Now, I acknowledge that jobs aren't all interchangeable, and delivery jobs are popular with workers who want to work on their own schedule. Still, does it really make sense that with millions of open jobs out there, Instacart can be reducing pay?
Once again, this doesn't compute. Are all those "open jobs" for real? I'm beginning to wonder.