Month: December 2021

The Wall Street Journal says that pay hikes are coming soon:

If inflation turns around, this will mean nice pay increases for workers. However, if it instead feeds into an inflationary spiral, it will do little except force the Fed to take strong action. That wouldn't be good for anyone.

My money is on the former. Assuming that these raises actually materialize, they're just making up for sluggish pay increases this year. I continue to see little to worry about on the medium-term inflation front.

The New York Times has a very peculiar story today:

Infusions of government cash that warded off an economic calamity have left millions of households with bigger bank balances than before the pandemic — savings that have driven a torrent of consumer spending, helped pay off debts and, at times, reduced the urgency of job hunts.

But many low-income Americans find their savings dwindling or even depleted. And for them, the economic recovery is looking less buoyant.

The first bolded sentence is certainly true, as regular readers know:

Overall, "excess" savings are down to about zero. We're all on our own now.

The second bolded statement is also true. At least, it sure seems like it must be true. If overall excess savings are zero, it stands to reason that the excess savings of low-income households are also zero—or maybe even less. But the Times treats this as a new discovery on its part and offers up the following chart in evidence:

This is based on checking account balances, which is never explained. Are checking account balances good proxies for savings? That's not obvious to me.

What's worse, though, is that this chart shows that low-income families are doing better than anyone else. Their checking account balances are still 70% above their pre-pandemic level, and since this is apparently driven largely by child tax credit payments it ought to last a while longer. Maybe a lot longer, if the BBB bill ever passes.

The author of the piece later makes the point that even if low-income families have a bigger percentage increase than richer families, that's still not much in absolute dollars. This is true, of course, but it's true for virtually everything this side of winning the lottery. It's meaningless.

Anyway, I don't get the point of any of this. I don't understand the use of checking account balances. I don't understand why we're supposed to think low-income families are worst off when, in fact, they're doing better on this particular metric than anyone else. Nor do I understand why a return to normal savings levels should be a huge economic problem if nearly everyone is back to work—as they are even now, let alone six months from now.  I'm just mystified.

Instagram says it's about to launch a bunch of new features that will make it safer for teenagers:

Among the measures, the popular photo-sharing service will be implementing tools to help users take breaks, or view new topics if they’ve been dwelling on one thing for too long....[It] will also block users from tagging or mentioning teens who don’t follow them. It will give parents more control over how long their children use the app. And in January, it will allow all users to bulk-delete their own content, including photos, videos, likes and comments.

That's good. Maybe just a good start, I suppose, but it's nice to see them responding to public criticism. At least, that's what I'd think if it weren't for this:

However, many features are “opt-in”—meaning they are off until users turn them on.

The boffins who run Instagram know perfectly well that if you make a feature opt-in, it's unlikely to get adopted by more than a handful of users. After all, this has been the playbook for years whenever Facebook pretends to address privacy concerns: add a bunch of complicated features, bury the UI someplace inconspicuous, and make everything opt-in without changing any of the default settings.

This stuff is only serious if you change the defaults. And while you can at least make a case against changing defaults on the fly for adult users, there's not much of case against doing it for teens.

Jack Shafer argues that we all need to stop paying attention to cable news, and to Fox News in particular:

Why all this attention when cable news barely matters to most Americans? The average audience commanded by Maddow and Cooper and Hannity and all the others slithering down your cable cord is so tiny you can almost get away with calling cable news a niche media. According to October numbers from TV Newser, the three major cable networks attract an average audience of only 4.2 million viewers during primetime, which is when viewing peaks.

This is by far the biggest pushback I get when I talk to people about the enormous impact that Fox News has had on the conservative movement. Even if they accept my dismal view of Fox News, they wonder how important Fox can be when even their top-rated shows only draw about 3 million viewers.

But the Nielsen numbers for Hannity or Carlson are just snapshots in time. The number of different viewers who watch Fox News at some point during the day is probably upwards of 10-20 million or so. And the number who watch Fox News at some point during the average week is:

Gallup tells us that about 100 million people self-ID as Republicans or Republican leaners. According to Pew, 62% of them watch Fox News at least once or twice a week. That's 62 million conservatives. That's a lot.

Beyond this, there's the fact that Fox viewers tend to be those most interested in politics. They talk to their friends about "things they've heard" and fill your Facebook feed with conservative memes. Their impact goes beyond that 62 million number.

It's nice to think that Fox News is limited to only 3 million viewers—and if all the rest of us started ignoring them it would relegate those viewers to their own private bubble where they would bother us no more. Nice, but wrong. Fox News has a huge audience, and an influence that spreads even beyond that. If we want to crush them—and we really, really do—it's going to take a lot more work than just pretending they don't exist.

Helen Butler, a voting rights activist in Georgia, is disappointed in Joe Biden:

After Biden was inaugurated, Butler and many others expected that voting rights would be one of the first things the president and Democrats addressed. Instead, during the president’s first year in office, Butler has watched with dismay as Biden and Democrats have failed to pass any voting rights legislation.

....“[It] makes voters say ‘Did I vote for the right people? … you haven’t fought for me. Why should I fight to keep you in office in 2022?’”

I get the disappointment, but why do we keep going through this? The situation now is exactly the same as it's been from the start. There are two alternatives:

• Get support from ten Republicans so that the bill can pass with 60 votes.
• Persuade Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to kill the filibuster so it can be passed with 51 votes.

Neither of these things is going to happen. Neither of them was ever going to happen. This has nothing to do with how hard Joe Biden or the Democratic Party tried. It is solely the fault of either (a) the Republican Party or (b) two specific recalcitrant Democratic senators. That's it. Take your pick.

Here's some early morning fog on Laguna Canyon Road. The Pacific Ocean is about half a mile outside the bottom left corner of the frame.

In the LA Times today, Nicholas Goldberg says the Democratic Party of the past was upbeat and optimistic:

So why do I now wake up feeling I’m preaching the politics of pessimism? How did the Democratic Party and its liberal-to-left followers become the voice of desolation and woe?

The voice of catastrophic climate change.

The voice of masks and mandates and staying home.

The voice of the-American-dream-is-dead and we’re all downwardly mobile. The voice of that-was-an-insurrection and our democracy is collapsing.

....These days, Democrats seem (and scholarly studies back me up on this) less happy than Republicans. And I don’t buy the argument that it’s just the result of a lack of faith and family and community on the left, as some have suggested. I suspect it’s at least partly a conviction — which Republicans apparently don’t share — that with climate change, the pandemic and the threats to American democracy, the world is going to hell.

I think Goldberg makes one good point here but misses another by a hair.

It's true that Democratic messaging has become more and more pessimistic over the past couple of decades. In the case of climate change, the result has been an unending stream of lectures to the public about things they should and shouldn't do anymore, coupled with a related stream of lectures about the hellhole our planet will become by 2040 or 2050 or 2070 or 2100. In the case of the economy, it's been the belief that no matter what the numbers show, practically the entire bottom 99% is on the verge of penury. In the case of civil rights, it's a newfound belief that not only do Black people have it bad, they have it worse than ever. There are other examples, and they add up to a profound pessimism about the liberal project.

So Goldberg's point about this is a good one. I'm not sure what to do about it, but it's a good point.

Goldberg's second point, though, is subtly off. It's true that liberals these days tend to think the country is going to hell. Where he's wrong is in thinking that conservatives don't share this view. Not only do many of them share it, they put liberals to shame in the strength of their conviction.

A large number of conservatives believe that moral degeneracy is threatening to destroy the country. They believe that Democrats have been stealing elections for years and will keep doing it unless someone stops them. They believe that liberals hate white people. They believe that Democrats are deliberately—deliberately—trying to weaken the country because they've disapproved of it ever since Vietnam. And they believe that liberals hate religion and have been trying to undermine it for decades.

My take on this is different from Goldberg's: Republicans are so pessimistic that they're willing to elect Donald Trump president and storm the Capitol when he loses his bid for reelection. That's pessimistic. When have liberals ever done something comparable?

But there's a difference between the parties, even if both tend toward pessimism. Whether this is true or not, Democrats act as if they're the establishment while Republicans act as if they're the revolutionaries. It's hard for establishments to be happy. They can be satisfied, perhaps, if things are quiet, but that's about it. When they feel like they're slowly losing ground, they practically exude pessimism.

Republicans, by contrast, feel more strongly that the country is going to hell, but they also feel like they're the ones fighting back. Their message to the public may be unexceptional, but their message to themselves is that they are fighting to overthrow a corrupt empire and restore the country to its rightful path. That's a fundamentally righteous battle, and it's all due to Donald Trump. He took a bedraggled community that just a few years ago was at the end of its rope and convinced it that it could win.

This is not something that will show up in survey instruments about happiness. But it's where we are. Republicans largely feel like they're an insurrectionary force fighting an unscrupulous liberal establishment. Democrats, by contrast, feel like they're a fundamentally admirable establishment being pecked to death by an insurrection of reactionary zealots—and they don't know what to do about it.

Which of these do you think is going to be the happiest?

Here is your question for the evening: Where would you rather live?

This isn't about politics or beautiful beaches, only pure economic security. Among large countries, the US is near the top in median disposable income (i.e., income after taxes). On the other hand, residents of other countries often have access to benefits that we don't, like childcare and long-term care for the elderly. Sometimes these things are free, sometimes they're only partly subsidized. Government pensions tend to be better elsewhere, but overall retiree income is higher in the US.

Overall, Americans make a lot of money, but other rich countries offer more benefits to parents than we do (pre-K, childcare, maternity leave, etc.). In your 20s and 30s you might be economically better off in France or Germany, for example, but once you're in your 40s and beyond, chances are good that you're better off here. That said, you might be more secure in places where losing your job doesn't mean that you also lose access to healthcare.

So what's your choice?

After my progress report on Charlie yesterday I received a tsunami of demands for video evidence of Hilbert finally getting used to having a little brother around and playing cheerfully with him. I live to serve, so here it is.

I don't know how long the fight over critical race theory will last. Conservatives are already showing signs of getting bored by it. But one thing is certain: it's a skirmish, not a war, and its origins go back, like so many culture war artifacts, to the decades shortly after the end of World War II.

It's no secret that ever since McCarthyism and Vietnam, modern liberals have had a fraught relationship with traditional ideas of patriotism. We are uneasy with open displays of flag waving and nationalism. We find unapologetic expressions of patriotism to be dangerously tantamount to jingoism. We are reluctant to say that the United States is the greatest country in the world.

All of this is understandable. If your country goes on communist witch hunts; if your country turns water cannons and attack dogs on civil rights protesters; if your country kills millions in a war in Vietnam—if your country does all this and more, how can you say in good faith that it's the greatest country in the world?

But this doesn't go down well with the half of the country that's unashamedly patriotic and distrusts anyone who isn't. Liberals have never had a good answer to this, typically mumbling something about true love of country being expressed by those who understand our shortcomings and are working to fix them. This has never been persuasive to anyone who doesn't believe it already.

And it's what the fight over CRT is really about. Nobody actually cares about the technical definition of CRT, and it's pointless to mock people who use the phrase without knowing anything about its origins and whether it's really taught in our public schools. Nor is it really about racism for most people. It's about patriotism.

The underlying question, as always, is this: How can you teach children the truth about slavery, native genocide, red scares, and other ugly episodes from our past, and yet also teach them that the United States is the greatest country on earth? Because this is what the CRT warriors really care about. They care about our children learning to love their country.

This, for example, is at the heart of the fight over Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 Project. It's not about minor errors of fact or even the factual content writ large. It's about what the authors think about America, a word I use advisedly. Do they think America is a great idea enacted by great people who made some mistakes along the way? Or do they think that America is at root a racist country created and built by racist white men who also did a few good things along the way?

The former highlights both the ideals of our origin and the events in our history that make America admirable—democracy, personal liberty, economic dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit, religious tolerance, victory over fascism and communism—and thus allows you to acknowledge even the most sordid chapters in our history while still believing that America is the greatest country on earth. The latter simply doesn't. It makes America no better or worse than any other country that prospered due to the blood on its hands.

And there it is. This is what the fight has been about for decades. How do we present American history to our children in a way that acknowledges the worst of our past while still teaching them that America is the greatest country in the world and well worth our unconditional love? And do we even want to?

If you focus on that, real compromises might start to appear. Or not. Maybe it's an impossible circle to square. But if you focus on anything else, you're certain to never do anything except evade what the real dispute is about.