Month: December 2021

There are lots of trends that range from annoying to downright fatal. Here are ten of them, mostly US but a few that span the globe. They are in no special order.

1. The decline of working-class life expectancy. We still don't know for sure what's causing this, but it's for real. It's an extension of the growing long-term gap between the life expectancy of the rich and the poor, but in the past couple of decades it seems to have metastasized in some way.
2. Blaming everything on social media. This really ought to stop. There's very little rigorous evidence to back it up, and quite a bit to suggest that social media is a net positive.
3. The rise of aggressive, bigoted nationalism in India and China. This simply doesn't bode well in a pair of countries that contain a third of Earth's population between them.
4. Our continuing lack of serious action on climate change. We meet, we talk, we set goals, and nothing ever happens.
    
   Given the now obvious fact that no one is really willing to change their lifestyles in the face of climate change, our only hope is new technology or, if even that fails, geoengineering.
5. The continuing Black-white education gap. This is one of our country's biggest disgraces, and we seem to have all but given up on it. We will never overcome our racist past until we make concrete progress on this.
6. The growing conservative terror about the future of America. Too many conservatives believe that liberals are stealing elections and deliberately destroying the country—and it's this fear that drives things like the January 6 insurrection. This trend predates Fox News, but Fox has certainly turned up the volume to 11.
7. On a related note, the Republican embrace of Trumpism is obviously the worst thing to happen in recent years to US politics. It's inexplicable that mainstream Republican leaders and journalists have allowed this to happen.
8. Charges of racism from liberals. Conservatives have complained for years that lefties are too quick to accuse conservatives of being racist. They've always had a point, but not much of one since conservatives are so obviously unwilling to police racism in their own ranks. Over the past few years, however, this lefty habit has spiraled out of control and now encompasses endless and frivolous charges of racism against anyone who misspeaks slightly or doesn't support the most up-to-the-minute racial politics of young, educated white people.
9. Littering up space. First we sent up satellites by the dozens. Then the hundreds. Now we're sending them up by the tens of thousands and low earth orbit is getting crowded. The more satellites we send up, the greater the chance of collisions, which creates thousands more bits of orbiting debris. At some point, there's a chance that low earth orbit becomes unusable. I may be overreacting to this, but after watching humans poison the land, the water, and the atmosphere, it's hardly a stretch to think we may do the same to space.
10. Franchise mania. This is more of a pet peeve than a dangerous trend, but it's my list, right? I'm speaking here of the art world, not the fast food world. Movies are increasingly prequels, sequels, and adaptations. In the world of science fiction and fantasy books, practically everything these days is a multi-part series in one way or another. Even serious art strikes me as being driven more by the artist-as-franchise than in the past. My advice is simple: There's nothing wrong with doing something new, doing it once, and moving on.

These are not the most important charts I posted this year, nor do they "explain" 2021. They are the ones that are interesting, unexpected, or tell a story that few people know. In no particular order, here they are.

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I promise only one COVID-related chart. This one shows the massive benefit from being vaccinated, which only gets stronger if you've also gotten a booster shot. Get vaxxed!

Liberals like to say that "programs for the poor are poor programs," but it's not true. Means-tested programs are generally popular and are almost never clawed back by Republicans except at the margins. Since the Reagan era, spending on means-tested programs has increased 6x. This includes a 3x increase in programs that distribute cash to the poor.

Is this chart just a big, fat coincidence? I think not.

Here is the "smoking gun" that Instagram is bad for teen girls, but it's almost hilariously just the opposite. Out of twelve issues, Instagram was a net positive for all but one (body image). A thousand think pieces have mentioned that single negative effect, but I haven't seen a single one that, for example, mentions that teen girls find Instagram to be a huge help when it comes to family issues or loneliness.

Middle-class income hasn't increased as much as it should have over the past four decades, thanks to increasing returns to the rich. However, it hasn't been stagnant either. When you account for taxes and government benefits, middle class income has increased about 65% since 1980.

It's conventional wisdom that housing has skyrocketed out of reach in recent years. However, this isn't true: in general, housing has increased at about the same rate as earnings. What's more, if you account for the way in which low interest rates have reduced mortgage payments, the cost of homeownership has declined noticeably.

What is true is that the cost of housing has soared in certain hot cities, like Denver and Austin. But every decade has its own hot cities and the housing bell curve will always include both big gainers and big losers in the housing market.

Republicans always promise that their economic polices benefit the working and middle classes, but it's not true. During the Trump administration, Republicans passed a big tax bill and increased tariffs considerably. This benefited the top 1%, but reduced net income for everyone else.

The white evangelical church, which is the backbone of the Republican Party, has been losing members for a long time. In the past 15 years it's dropped from 23% of the country to 14%. Far from being the unstoppable political force that liberals think it is, it's losing influence steadily. This is why they embraced Donald Trump so enthusiastically: he was the first person in years who promised to bring back their glory days.

It's conventional wisdom that transit projects in the US cost far more than in other countries. But as this chart shows, that isn't true. Transit projects in New York City are fabulously expensive, but in the rest of the country they're roughly on par with the rest of the world.

This chart outlines a great mystery. Normally, murder and violent crime move in nearly identical directions, but in 2020 they suddenly diverged. Overall violent crime increased slightly, while homicide skyrocketed. Why? No one has an answer yet.

This chart shows the rise in anti-democratic sentiment in the US. The main takeaway is that it happened only among Republicans, and only after Fox News started operation.

Fox News is a danger to the country, and not a small one. We ignore it at our peril.

Charlie wishes you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. Be safe.

Here is my top ten list of good news. I want to make clear that this is not a Pollyanna list of minor accomplishments that ignores all the bad news of 2021. It's a companion to all the lists of bad things that happened in 2021. And everything on this list is seriously good.

1. Democrats won two Senate seats in Georgia. This was something of a miracle, and without it liberals would have gotten absolutely nothing for the rest of the year.
2. Joe Biden was inaugurated president. Donald Trump did his best to stop it, but failed on all fronts.
3. Multiple highly effective vaccines were rolled out to fight COVID-19. Today, anyone who is vaxxed and boosted runs only a tiny risk of contracting a serious case of COVID.
4. Congress passed a $1.9 trillion rescue bill. This bill provided an expanded child tax credit; bigger subsidies for Obamacare; extended the $300 unemployment bonus; mailed out $1,400 checks to everyone; and provided nearly half a billion dollars to states and schools.
5. After 20 years, we finally withdrew from Afghanistan. It was messy, but in the end the Pentagon pulled it off with minimal casualties.
6. Congress passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.
7. Joe Biden and Senate Democrats confirmed 40 federal judges, a one-year record. They will continue to confirm judges for at least another year.
8. Georgia passed a bill that would effectively give a Republican commission the authority to overturn election results in Democratic counties. This, rather than routine tightening of election laws, is the real danger to democracy that we face. However, over the course of the year no similar bill was passed anywhere else. (Arkansas came the closest, but their new law is meaningless in practice since Arkansas is the reddest state in the Union and will vote for a Republican president regardless.) Don't just write this off as Kevin trying to make lemonade out of putrid lemons. It shows that there are real limits to anti-democratic actions from Republicans when we fight back.
9. Serious progress was made on development of a "super vaccine" that will be effective against a wide variety of coronaviruses. If this pans out, we will have vaccines that are not only effective against all COVID variants, but are ready to go at the first sign of a fourth SARS-like coronavirus outbreak (the first three were SARS, MERS, and COVID).
10. Britney is finally free.

In case you're wondering why I've left the economy off this list, it's because I've had second thoughts about it. With low unemployment and strong growth, it's unquestionably better than 2020. At the same time, we're also suffering through high inflation, wage declines, and falling savings. For a lot of people, the economy doesn't really look so great right now.

These are my personal favorites from the past year, though if you ask me on a different day I might choose a different set. They are in no particular order.

Last year Donald Trump was president and the risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 was pretty high.

This year Donald Trump is not president and the risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 is pretty low as long as you're vaxed and boosted.

In other words, 2021 was a big improvement over 2020. Right?

This mysterious gate leads to 2022. Do you dare enter?

How accurate are rapid antigen tests? It turns out this is actually two questions, one of them easy and one of them hard. Here we go:

What if a rapid test comes back negative?

If you conducted the test properly, then you almost certainly aren't infected at the time you took the test. Tomorrow, of course, is a different story.

What if a rapid test comes back positive?

This is the hard one. I'll spare you the math, but this depends on PPV, or Positive Predictive Value, which in turn depends on both the accuracy of the test and the prevalence of COVID-19—i.e., the number of people who are currently infected. When the prevalence of COVID is high, positive test results are more reliable.

I know: that's kind of weird. What makes it even trickier is that (a) you have to estimate prevalence and it changes over time, and (b) every state has a different prevalence level. In fact, you could do it down to the county level if you wanted. In general, though, even a pretty good test that has high sensitivity and specificity delivers surprisingly low PPV.

With that warning, here's a rough estimate of how reliable a positive test result is in areas with different prevalences of COVID:

• High: 40-60%.
• Medium: 20-40%
• Low: 10-20%.

And here's an estimate of the current prevalence of COVID in each state. There's nothing fancy here. I just took the cumulative seven-day case rate and multiplied by 1.5 to get a measure of how many new cases had been reported over the past ten days. Since COVID seems to last about ten days or so, this provides a (very rough) estimate of the number of people who are currently infected.

Bottom line: Even in high-prevalence states like New York or Florida, a positive antigen result probably means there's only a 50-50 chance that you actually have COVID. In low-prevalence states, a positive result is next to useless. In either case, you should do another test in two days to check.

Of course, also use common sense. If you have COVID symptoms—fever, cough, sore throat—then a positive result is much more likely to be accurate.

The Household Pulse Survey from the Census Bureau has started up again after a two-month hiatus, so let's take one final look at the status of the rental market before 2021 finally comes to an end:

There's a bit of an uptick in the number of people who have low confidence in their ability to pay next month's rent, but it's in the noise range—and still lower than it was last year.

The Household Pulse Survey may not be super accurate, but it would have to be off by a lot to make a difference in these numbers. At this point, I think it's pretty clear that the end of the eviction moratorium simply didn't have much effect.

Today was a serious crash day: I was out for nine hours straight from 9 am to 6 pm with only a short wakey period for lunch. I'm told that cats were sitting on me, apple sauce was being made, etc., all while I was snoozing away.

So let's see if I can squeeze in a quick post before midnight. How about something related to inflation? You all know how much I love inflation. Here it is:

This chart shows three measures of inflation that are designed to avoid the variability of headline CPI and give a better look at the real level of inflationary pressures:

• Core CPI omits food and fuel because they jump around a lot and don't really tell us anything about underlying inflation.
• Trimmed mean CPI cuts off the biggest gainers and losers so that a few outliers don't affect the bulk of the items in the CPI basket.
• Median CPI looks at the inflation rate of the median item in the CPI basket.

For those of you who want evidence that inflation isn't all that bad right now, median CPI is your hot ticket. Not only is it relatively low at 3.5%, but it's only 36% above its average 2016-2019 level. The others are 116% and 135% above their 2016-2019 averages.

And if you're an inflation hawk? Then ignore all of these and just use headline CPI, which is currently at 6.8%.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is the conclusion of a recent paper that studied the accuracy of various measures of core inflation:

The last two years have been highly informative about the behavior of alternative core measures. Headline inflation has fluctuated erratically....XFE [eXcluding and Food Energy] inflation has performed quite poorly....Fixed-exclusion measures of core that exclude a wider set of industries, such as the Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price inflation rate, have performed better, but the most successful measures have been weighted medians and trimmed means.