Month: November 2021

The Guardian regales us today with yet another article about the shortage of truck drivers:

Truckers say the problem isn’t a shortage of qualified drivers; there’s plenty of people who have been through the training programs and hold a commercial driver’s license. The rot, they say, is far more systemic: low pay, long hours and an industry that treats drivers like “cannon fodder”, churning out new recruits who inevitably quit because the job is so grueling.

“There is no driver shortage; there’s a retention problem,” said Mike Doncaster, a 30-year veteran and driver trainer who parked his big rig at Joe’s Travel Plaza for the night, before heading up to Canada with another load of vegetables.

I don't doubt that long-distance trucking is a pretty crappy job these days. But are truckers really quitting at higher rates than usual? Unfortunately, that's hard to say with the data we have at hand. Here's the quit rate:

Nothing looks out of whack in the most recent months, but the data for quits uses pretty broad categories. In this case, it's all transportation, plus warehousing and utility jobs.

We also have this:

The absolute number of long-distance truckers is within a percent or two of where it was before the pandemic, and employment is rising at a rate of more than 3%.

So we have one series that shows quits, but only broadly, and another that zeroes in on long-distance drivers but only shows employment levels. If you put them together I think the obvious interpretation is that nothing new is happening right now. Quits are probably no higher than historic levels, and the number of drivers is increasing solidly. What's more, long-distance driving continues to pay about 25% better than other blue-collar jobs.

To put things simply, we don't have a trucker shortage, we have a goods surplus. In an economic sense I suppose you can say they're the same thing, but given that the goods surplus is almost certainly temporary it hardly seems likely that trucking firms want to hire a lot more permanent drivers who they won't need six months from now. They're hiring as many truckers as they think they need and they don't seem to be having a lot of trouble attracting them.

Why is Joe Biden so unpopular? As the pundits stroke their chins and come up with ever more abstruse theories, allow me to butt in. We should all know by now that normal political polls of "the public" are all but useless in these polarized times. You have to look at Democrats and Republicans separately to make any sense out of anything. Here's what Biden's approval rating really looks like these days:

Roughly speaking, support among Democratic and Republican partisans went down by a modest six points during Biden's first few months and then flattened out. Since about midsummer, their support hasn't fluctuated more than a point or two.

In other words, all the stuff that happened after the middle of summer—Afghanistan, inflation, CRT, the infrastructure bill passing, the social spending bill not passing—has had essentially no impact on partisans.

But then there are independents. Their support went down 13 points through midsummer and then kept on dropping, losing another 11 points through November. What's going on with them? All the usual suspects might explain what happened after midsummer, but independents also soured on Biden very strongly in the months before midsummer, when none of this stuff had yet happened.

So that's the mystery. Why has Biden lost a whopping 24 points of support among independents? For this, we have to abandon our usual way of thinking and pretend to be the kind of people who don't pay much attention to politics. They don't know what Tucker Carlson said last night. They don't know that Republicans are refusing subpoenas to testify before Congress. They don't know what's so great about the infrastructure bill, and are probably totally unaware of what's in the social spending bill. Generally speaking, they aren't especially outraged by anything going on in Washington DC.

So what's been eating at them for the past ten months? You probably think that this is the point at which I unveil my brilliant analysis, but I don't know any more than you do. My only real guess is that it's less connected to politics than we political junkies like to think.

The most obvious candidate is the seemingly endless COVID-19 pandemic. Ditto for the related turmoil over remote school, which is a huge issue for parents with young children.

On the other hand, it's probably not the economy: the unemployment rate is low and nominal blue-collar wages have been rising steadily over the past year. Inflation is an issue, but only over the past couple of months.

Cars have been a problem. The price of new cars and trucks has gone up amid continuing shortages, while the price of used cars and trucks has skyrocketed.

What else is bugging people? Give this a real try without resorting to political effluvia. Just ordinary, everyday problems that have gotten more and more tiresome over the past year with Biden seemingly unable or unwilling to do anything about them. Ideas?

This is the Atchafalaya Swamp, just up the road from Lafayette. You can see the distinct water line on the tree trunks, which shows how high the water level gets in spring. These are mostly new-growth cypress trees, the old-growth trees having long ago been cut down to feed the maws of northern factories.

The LA Times says that Colorado may hold a lesson for California:

California is entering the holiday season with an uncertain outlook. Optimistically, new weekly coronavirus cases have become stable statewide; the vaccination rate is higher than in many other states, and there are few signs right now of a big winter surge.

But the deteriorating conditions in Colorado offer a cautionary tale of how things can go south quickly....In Colorado, 62.8% of all residents are fully vaccinated, almost identical to California’s 62.7%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the differences in weekly case rates are stark: CDC data show California currently has the 10th lowest out of all states, and Colorado has the eighth highest.

It's worth remembering that researchers long ago changed their estimates of herd immunity from 60-70% of the population being vaccinated to 90+% of the population—including children—being vaccinated. Obviously more vaccination is better than less, but as long as we remain well below 90% we should expect that we will continue to suffer periodic outbreaks. Colorado is having one now, and there's little reason to think that California or any other state will avoid one over the next few months.

POSTSCRIPT: Why the change in estimates of what it takes to reach herd immunity? Part of it was the introduction of the Delta variant. Part of it is the fact that our vaccines appear to get less effective over time. And part of it is better modeling of vaccines—like the ones we have—that don't prevent viral transmission.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: Yes, this means that we will probably never eliminate COVID-19 via herd immunity. We can manage COVID-19, but it's likely to eventually become endemic, like the flu.

The Kyle Rittenhouse case was genuinely complicated and could have gone either way. Conversely, the Ahmaud Arbery case is genuinely simple: a bunch of armed white vigilantes chased an unarmed Black guy and then shot him when he fought back against them.

I haven't followed the trial—which, yes, means I should probably shut up—and I've been wondering all along just what the defense could possibly say about all this. Closing arguments are now underway and the Washington Post provides a quick summary:

The defense has argued that the McMichaels and Bryan were carrying out a legitimate citizen’s arrest in a neighborhood on edge about crime. The McMichaels have said they recognized Arbery from surveillance footage and an in-person encounter at an under-construction home that Arbery entered several times in the months leading up to the shooting.

A citizen's arrest? For a guy who was just jogging on the street and never did anything even remotely illegal? I guess those of you who have followed the trial know all about this, but it barely even seems like a defense to me. A jogger can hardly be said to be fleeing the scene of a felony, after all.

All I can say is that these guys better be convicted. There's just no way they can be let off for what they did.

I was—and am—unimpressed with the results of the COP26 climate change meeting, but Bill Gates says there was some genuinely good news to come out of it:

At an event like this, one way I measure progress is by the way people are thinking about what it’ll take to reach zero emissions. Do they think we already have all the tools we need to get there? Or is there a nuanced view of the complexity of this problem, and the need for new, affordable clean technology that helps people in low- and middle-income countries raise their standard of living without making climate change worse?

Six years ago, there were more people on the we-have-what-we-need side than on the innovation side. This year, though, innovation was literally on center stage. One session of the World Leaders Summit, where I got to speak, was exclusively about developing and deploying clean technologies faster.

It took me many years to get fully on the innovation side, but eventually the evidence simply piled up too high for me to ignore it any longer. This is still a matter of massive funding, not just speeches at international talkathons, but if Gates is right it means that at least more people are starting to get the message.

Over at the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom has devoted three separate columns (here, here, and here) to a careful exegesis of Sen. Kysten Sinema's clothes. Sinema has called this "inappropriate," and three of her fellow senators went further on Friday, writing in a letter that it was "demeaning, sexist and inappropriate."

On Friday Cottom responded to her critics. In a nutshell, she said that ordinarily they would be right, but Sinema is a unique case:

It’s important to consider the context when setting the bounds of appropriate discourse. The details of the Democrats’ social spending bill, Build Back Better, are in flux. But it has funds for Pell Grant increases, affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded health care coverage. It contains policy to slow climate change and mitigate its effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives hang in the balance with the fate of the bill.

And Sinema has placed herself at the center of this political drama. So it matters how she marshals her power. It also matters how she manages attention.

Sinema largely allows her performance to speak for her. She avoids interviews, and has been quite guarded about what she wants out of these negotiations.

....That silence puts a curtain between a powerful political actor and the public, who have a lot on the line. It also means it is more than fair to discuss and critique the political rhetoric coded in her performance, and that includes what she is wearing.

Hoo boy. The upshot here is that (a) BBB is an important bill, (b) Sinema mostly works behind the scenes, and therefore (c) lacking better options, it's OK to critique the "political rhetoric coded in her performance," which includes the clothes she wears.

This is a pretty weak pretext for doing something that Cottom knows she shouldn't. After all, there are always lots of important bills and lots of legislators who mostly work behind the scenes. That's hardly a compelling justification for viewing Sinema as somehow unique.

The fact that Cottom is herself a woman—and one who can sling academic discourse with a sure hand—is nowhere near enough to justify the kind of misogynist blather that women have been trying for decades to stop.  Let's leave fashion criticism to the fashion writers, OK?

A few days ago I posted a chart showing the current case rate of COVID-19 in the US and its peer countries in Europe. We look fairly good on this metric because COVID is spiking in Europe right now but not in the US.

In the end, though, what matters is the cumulative number of cases and deaths during the entire run of the pandemic. On that metric, here's where we are so far:

There are two things I take away from this. First, and most obvious, the United States is at the very top of both charts. Obviously our approach to the pandemic looks pretty bad.

Second, though, is that a number of European countries are starting to catch up to us on case rates and there are already several that are very close to us on death rates. We still have a while to go before COVID-19 reaches its endemic stage, but once we get there and look back, I wonder just how much impact all the different approaches to lockdowns etc. will end up having? I think it's obvious that the answer will be "more than zero," but how much more? As time goes by I'm less and less confident that I know the answer to that.

We have a question:

We have known since Keynes that nominal wages are sticky downwards. Are wages also upward sticky? Seems like maybe yes? @lkatz42 @jasonfurman @Austan_Goolsbee @ProfNoto @delong @alexoimas @ATabarrok @DLeonhardt https://t.co/lwTO9jkBca

— Richard H Thaler (@R_Thaler) November 19, 2021

Speaking from the point of view of a practitioner, not a theoretician, I'd hardly be surprised if wages were sticky upward. I can think of at least two reasons for this.

First, there's just plain inertia. Hiring managers use compensation surveys or other forms of past compensation data to figure out what they need to pay, and those are always a year or two behind.

Second, if you start paying new hires more, word gets around pretty quickly and your existing employees start demanding raises. That's expensive.

So there's fear of paying new hires more than experienced workers. There's plain old greed, since obviously employers would prefer to pay their workers as little as possible. And there's lack of knowledge about inflation. Put it all together, and wages are probably slow to respond to both labor shortages and higher inflation, especially when they manifest themselves as sudden spikes.