Month: December 2021

Dave Wasserman is the US House editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report:

By our estimate, neutral/commission maps in the blue states of CA, CO, NJ, VA and WA (93 seats total) will end up costing Dems 10-15 House seats they could have seized by gerrymandering, making Republicans even stronger favorites for House control. https://t.co/B6pIvVChXf

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 9, 2021

In several states controlled by Democrats—including my own California—voters have approved nonpartisan commissions to draw district boundaries. In those states, we get fairminded maps that treat Democrats and Republicans equally.

No state controlled by Republicans has ever created a truly nonpartisan redistricting commission. In nearly every red state, the legislature controls district maps and gerrymanders them as ruthlessly as they can. There are a couple of blue states that also do this, but not many. The end result is that blue states tend to draw maps fairly while red states draw maps that heavily favor Republicans.

On the bright side, liberals can all feel good about themselves for being so dedicated to fair voting. On the down side, we're probably going to lose the next election because of this. Hooray for us.

Ezra Klein says the public has lost faith in the ability of the government to build big things:

A key failure of liberalism in this era is the inability to build in a way that inspires confidence in more building. Infrastructure comes in over budget and late, if it comes in at all. There aren't enough homes, enough rapid tests, even enough good government web sites.

....There's both a political and a substantive problem here. The political problem is if people keep watching the government fail to build things well, they won't believe the government can build things well. So they won't trust it to build....The substantive problem, of course, is that we need government to build things, and solve big problems. If it's so hard to build parklets, how do you think that multi-trillion dollar, breakneck investment in energy infrastructure is going to go?

Ezra naturally wants to solve this problem, since building big things is a key part of the liberal project. But first, it's worth taking a look at whether it's really a problem in the first place. Here is spending on public construction projects:

There's no sign of a decline in public construction. Here's a look at municipal bonds:

Muni bonds are used to fund public works, and the supply of these bonds has been steady over the past ten years. IHS Market estimates that $28.7 billion worth of muni bonds were on ballots in last month's election, about average for the past decade, and that 65% of them were approved.

This is just a couple of pieces of evidence, but it's enough to make me think it's at least worth investigating whether the public really has lost faith in the ability of government to build things. I suspect not.

If I'm right, it exposes an odd paradox: As we know, trust in government is way down, but trust in the ability of government to build stuff is perfectly steady. My own county is an example of this. Orange County is famously skeptical of big government, but in 1990 we approved a half-cent sales tax increase to fund transportation projects. In 2006, a whopping 70% of voters re-approved it. OC voters might be skeptical of government in general, but the one thing they do approve of is spending money on asphalt and concrete in ways they can see with their own eyes.

There are always big-ticket fiascoes around to grab the headlines. In California we have our bullet train to nowhere. In New York City, the Second Avenue subway is a long-running punch line. But consider the real lesson of these projects: even though they are gigantic disasters, the public continues to support them. Isn't that remarkable? As long as the project is something people actually want, they are willing to put up with almost anything.

On the other hand, if it's something they don't want, they will find an endless barrage of excuses not to allow it.

I suspect that this is the real lesson to be learned. Trust in government to build things hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is what liberals want to build. If we can convince the public that our ideas are good ones, they'll support paying for them. If not, they won't. Maybe that sounds too simple to be true, but not every problem has to be complicated.

Good morning! Let's start off the day with the latest research results in cognitive decline with age. They come from Annalise A. LaPlume, a postdoc at McGill University, who has collected scores from thousands of people who performed a battery of online tests designed to measure various types of cognitive ability. This was then sifted, sorted, and finally fed through a series of statistical meat grinders that take complex data as input and gradually make it simpler and simpler. Here's the final result:

Here's the deal. A month ago I turned 63. This means that you can expect the sharp political analysis on this blog to rapidly turn to mush over the next few years. Sorry about that. Just don't say you weren't warned.

Conservatives are unhappy with the debt ceiling compromise engineered by Mitch McConnell today:

This filibuster carve out will be the demand for every “worthy” issue now that the Senate GOP has legitimized the premise by doing it on the debt ceiling.

Just an astoundingly stupid self-own. https://t.co/5WhiGMRBLY

— Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) December 8, 2021

Nah. This isn't a carveout. In fact, it's just the return of regular order: McConnell has promised to round up enough Republican senators to break a filibuster, after which Democrats can pass the debt ceiling bill with 51 votes. The only weirdness is that instead of using the Republican votes to "end debate," they're being used to pass some kind of enabling legislation. But it's all the same thing.

And it's happening because it's a win-win. McConnell doesn't want Republican fingerprints on the debt ceiling increase, but he also doesn't really want another big brawl over the government defaulting on its debt. His agreement with Chuck Schumer gets him this.

But it only works because he genuinely wants the debt ceiling increase to pass—and it's always been possible to do that if there are 60 votes in favor. For anything else, he will just return to his usual sphinx-like pose and Republicans will unanimously oppose everything Democrats want to do. No harm done.

The Wall Street Journal reports that there are 11 million unfilled jobs in the United States. That's true enough. But what really matters is how that looks in historical context:

Just before the pandemic started, there were 1.3 million more job openings than there were people to fill them. Then things went crazy, and it was only this year that the job market started to return to normal. Up through summer, the job gap was no worse than it had been in 2019 and early 2020.

In July things started to go south, as employers tried to hire more workers at the same time that workers were getting jobs. The gap is now 2.3 million workers bigger than it was pre-pandemic. There are a couple of things to say about this:

• It's the right number to use if you really want to know how tight the job market is. Raw numbers are misleading because there are always millions of job openings and millions of unemployed workers. The question is, what does the gap usually look like and how do we compare to that right now?
• The gap has really opened up only over the past few months. This is not (yet) a long-term problem.
• The source of this problem is the same as the source of our "supply chain chaos": skyrocketing demand. That's it. With vaccines in hand and the economy fully open, consumer demand has unexpectedly gone way up. The result of this is more orders than our factories can fulfill; more ships than our ports can unload; more need for transportation than our trucking fleet can handle; shortages of goods because people are snapping up everything they can find; and more need for workers than our labor force can provide.

There's really nothing more to it. A sudden and unexpected increase in demand is behind all this. It's not a vast failure of globalization, it's just a temporary spike that will eventually work itself out. Some factories will expand production, some non-workers will be attracted back into the labor force, some prices will go up, savings will return to normal, and demand will stabilize. That's the beauty of the free market and its invisible hand.

Like all matters of faith, even believers sometimes have doubts about this. But don't worry. Things really will work out this time around.

This is one of the transept domes in St. Peter's Basilica. Such lovely colors.

Most of the conversation surrounding climate change has to do with eliminating the release of carbon into the atmosphere. What's less talked about—at least in public forums—is the fact that this won't be enough. Even if we meet all our goals for getting net carbon emissions to zero, there will still be too much CO2 already in the atmosphere. This means that in addition to eliminating new carbon emissions, we have to remove lots of existing CO2 from the atmosphere in order to have any chance of limiting warming to less than 2°C.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) usually prompts visions of enormous carbon capture plants, which have been under experimental development for decades and seem unlikely to ever work at the scale we need. Far more promising are various forms of ocean-based geoengineering. Today, the National Academy of Sciences released a new report that follows up on previous reports about ways to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it in the ocean:

To meet climate goals, some form of CDR will likely be needed to remove roughly 10 Gt CO2/yr by mid-century and 20 Gt CO2/yr by the end of the century.

....The ocean holds great potential for uptake and longer-term sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 for several reasons....It is critical that ocean CDR approaches be assessed against the consequences of no action and as one component of a broad and integrated climate mitigation strategy. Without substantial decarbonization, emissions abatement, and potential options such as CDR, atmospheric CO2 growth will continue unabated with associated rising impacts from climate change and ocean acidification, putting marine ecosystems at risk.

The report is nearly 300 pages long and provides considerable detail about six different broad categories of ocean CDR. But this might be the most important part of the report:

Please note the title of the horizontal axis: "Millions." The entire budget they're proposing to investigate every possible strategy is $149 million per year. That's million with an M. It's a rounding error. It's insane that this is even worth discussing. Just do it. Double the budget or triple it, and start doling out the money. If the worst case is that we completely waste a few hundred million dollars a year, we won't even notice it.

Right now, we emit about 35 gigatons of CO2 every year. This is the end result of an enormous global infrastructure dedicated to fossil fuel drilling, shipping, refining, pumping into cars, etc. As a rule of thumb, you can figure that removing CO2 is a project with a similar scale. Think about that. The NAS report estimates that we'll need to remove at least 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, which means a global infrastructure about a third the size of the emission infrastructure. That's still enormous beyond comprehension. And it's quite likely something we'll need.

So without even reading the entire report, I'm massively in favor of funding the whole thing and telling the scientific community to get cracking. This is stuff we desperately need to know more about.

We have apparently come to an agreement on raising the debt ceiling. Republicans will support a bill that provides a one-time exemption from the filibuster, and Democrats will then pass the actual debt ceiling bill.

I guess I didn't really believe this until now, but the whole issue all along has been Mitch McConnell's desire to make sure that not one single Republican has to vote to increase the debt ceiling. He's convinced that this means Democrats will take the sole blame for all the new spending they've passed over the past year.

Whatever. I'm pretty sure Democrats are already on the hook for either full blame or full credit, and the debt ceiling itself doesn't matter. But what do I know about big time political maneuvering?

Out of boredom, I looked for a COVID-19 chart that I hadn't used before. Here it is: the number of vaccine doses administered over the past six months. It's going down everywhere since so many people have already been vaccinated, but the United States is in a league of its own. Even though our vaccination rate was already one of the lowest among our peers, we're also declining faster than any of them. What a bunch of idiots we are.

This is a patch of "swamp daisies" on Lake Martin in Louisiana. I believe they're actually called Spanish Needles, though I'm not sure about that. But a couple of different guides assured us that among swamp aficionados they are just swamp daisies.