Month: April 2022

This is part of the path around Lake Martin in Louisiana. Much of the path is just packed earth and gravel, and another part is sort of modified jungle with a barely visible trail hacked out of it. However, a couple of miles (out of five) is like this: a nice, wide path with a lovely canopy that keeps everything shady and cool. Unlike the rest of it, this part was really nice.

I have no particular reason for posting this aside from the fact that March unemployment figures were recently released. If you're curious how your state has done over the past year, here's the decline in unemployment since March 2021:

Before you get too excited if your state did well, keep in mind that the states with the highest unemployment also had the biggest declines. But you probably guessed that already.

On Monday a federal district judge appointed by Donald Trump overturned a CDC mandate that required masks on airplane flights. Liberals naturally went nuts.

But it's worth a brief explainer about this. This particular ruling was just a ruling, but it falls into the general category of what are called "nationwide" injunctions—which have exploded in recent years. However, being nationwide isn't really what's new about them. After all, if a district court ruled that my Booble search engine violated Google's trademark, it wouldn't apply only to Irvine. It would apply anywhere I tried to use it across the country.

However, the ruling would apply only to me. If someone else started up a Tootle search engine, Google would have to sue them all over.

In other words, the main thing that's new about these injunctions is that they apply to everyone, not just to whoever filed the suit. This is a departure from the normal behavior of district court judges, who generally require you to prove standing and then issue rulings that apply only to the particular person or group that demonstrated harm.

That said, everyone calls them nationwide injunctions and it's hopeless to try to change that. So let's move on to the other thing that's new about them: they're new.

With only a few exceptions, the recent wave of nationwide injunctions from district courts started in 2015, when a bunch of Republican attorneys general filed suits against DACA. Since then they've become wildly popular.

That is, they're popular with whatever party is out of power, since they're mostly used against presidential executive orders—which have also become much more widely used in the face of a generally deadlocked Congress. At a 100,000 foot level, however, nationwide injunctions are generally viewed skeptically by both parties for a bunch of obvious reasons: they encourage forum shopping; they run the risk of conflicting injunctions; and they can be issued very quickly, which forces the Supreme Court to rule on them without the kind of long judicial record they typically rely on.

The other problem with nationwide injunctions is that their constitutionality is dubious. Basically, nothing in the Constitution explicitly forbids them, but then again, the general framework of the Constitution seems to anticipate a much narrower ambit for district courts. If you look into this, though, be prepared for extensive discussions of English courts around the time the Constitution was adopted.

What to do? One of the reasons nationwide injunctions have taken off is that both parties, but especially Republicans, have appointed highly partisan district judges who are pretty much willing to approve injunctions against anything their own party dislikes. That's not going to change. But what could change is Congress. Nobody really disputes that Congress can rein in the use of nationwide injunctions, and both parties have a certain amount of opposition to nationwide injunctions. This means there's a chance of putting together a bipartisan coalition to address them, but it's difficult because at any given point in time there's one party that's more opposed to them than the other.

In any case, that's the lay of the land. Nationwide injunctions really are a new phenomenon, partly because of the newly widespread of use of executive orders and partly because the politicization of the court system has spread all the way down to district courts. There's a chance Congress could do something about them, and there's also a chance that the Supreme Court could rein them in. However, it's not clear that bipartisan annoyance is near the point of actually taking action yet.

Here in Los Angeles¹ we have a mayoral election coming up. The two main candidates are Karen Bass, a local member of Congress, and Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer. Caruso is running mainly on a platform of getting tough on crime² and fixing the homeless mess. He's gonna build build build homeless shelters; put in place lots of drug and alcohol rehab centers; force the mentally ill into treatment; and clear out homeless encampments.

In other words, the same thing that everyone says they're going to do but then doesn't because the public revolts. Take the mentally ill, for example:

Six weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a far-reaching effort to push more people into court-ordered treatment for severe mental illness and addiction, homeless advocates are calling it legally misguided and immoral as the proposal’s first public hearing at the state Capitol has been delayed.

....In their 14-page letter, the advocates blasted the proposal as involuntary and coercive treatment that would strip individuals of their personal liberties and “perpetuate institutional racism and worsen health disparities.” They said CARE Court “flies in the face of any evidence-based approach to ending homelessness” because it prioritizes mental health services — not housing — as the initial step toward recovery, which they said would deviate from California’s “housing first” principles.

Ah, this would deviate from our beloved "housing first" principles, which, it turns out, are also widely opposed. In theory everyone loves the idea, but in practice they only love it if it's done somewhere else.³ Plus there's the question of where you're going to hire the thousands of psychiatrists and therapists you'll need at state salaries, all of whom will probably fail anyway since no one really knows how to cure serious cases of mental illness and addiction.

Anyway, Caruso can talk big about homelessness and people will swoon, but all the talk in the world won't fix things. Ditto for money, which we have plenty of. Until residents are willing to accept homeless shelters across the street from where they live, your favorite policies are going nowhere.

¹I say "here," but of course I don't live in LA. However, Caruso is the developer behind The Grove, a high successful outdoor mall in the Fairfax district. I don't care much about that, but Caruso left intact the Farmers Market when he built it and I love the Farmers Market. So I'd probably vote for him regardless of anything else.

²The is a tried-and-true election appeal, even though crime rates were mostly down from 2019 to 2021 (aside from homicides). The increase from 2020 to 2021 is mostly an artifact of crime declines in 2020 thanks to the pandemic.

³And they'd really hate it if they understood that a big part of this program was originally about allowing homeless people to qualify for shelter with no rules at all. None of this "earning it" business, which generally doesn't work but appeals strongly to bourgeois morality.

I haven't done a COVID-19 post for a little while, so I decided to use my dex-driven insomnia to do one tonight. Warning: I got pulled down a bit of a rabbit hole.

This time I calculated excess deaths per country, which is generally considered a more accurate metric than official figures for COVID death rates. Here are cumulative deaths per million since the start of the pandemic:

There are no big surprises here. The United States is highest and the Nordic countries are lowest. As usual, I'm comparing largeish, rich countries in Europe plus the US and Canada. The reason is that these countries are all culturally similar and economically similar, which means they could be expected to have fairly similar resources for responding to COVID.

But then I decided to look at all these countries by how far north they are. This is because there's a common belief that colder countries have lower natural rates of COVID spread. I used the population center of each country, not the geographical center, since viruses obviously spread among people, not trees or wheat fields. Here it is:

The trendline that showed the closest fit was a power curve, which had a surprisingly high R-squared of 0.58. This means that latitude explains 58% of the variability in COVID death rates.

As an aside, there was very little difference in geographical center and population center. In some cases this was because the countries were too small to allow much of a difference in the first place (Belgium, Switzerland) and in other cases it was because the population was fairly centrally dispersed (US, Germany). The country where it had the biggest impact was Canada, where the population center is near Toronto, which is almost literally the southernmost point in the country. The most surprising countries were Norway, Sweden, and Finland, which are all tall, thin countries with big populations in their southern climes but have a difference of only a degree or two between their population and population centers.

The first thing that comes to mind when you see this chart is how far each country is from the trendline. So I checked that out:

The winner (i.e., loser) is the UK, which has a death rate far higher than it should. The US, by contrast, is fairly average. We have a high death rate, but we're also the farthest south of every comparison country (even farther south than Greece).

Using this metric, Sweden looks worse than its raw count suggests, as does Spain. Canada is by far the best, along with Norway and Denmark. Germany and Switzerland, which usually get good marks, turn out to be only average considering their location.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that, in general, our prime-age labor force was now almost completely back to work. One smallish exception was prime-age women, many of whom had dropped out of the workforce and were no longer being counted.

The most likely explanation for this has to do with the continuing shortage of child care workers:

As you can see, we're short about 1.4 million child care workers. At a horseback guess, a single child care worker can handle about four families (assuming 1.5 small children per family), which means the worker shortage affects about 5-6 million families. Some of them find help from friends or relatives, but probably around 2-3 million can't. Women are disproportionately responsible for child care, so it's likely that 2-3 million mothers exited the labor force entirely to take care of their children.

So what are we doing to attract more child care workers? Here's what their pay looks like:

Pay went up when the pandemic began, but a big shortage surfaced again in late 2021 when businesses re-opened and more mothers wanted to return to outside work. At that point, pay went up about 5%. On the bright side, this shows that the child care industry is reacting to its worker shortage. On the not-so-bright side, it's only a raise of 80 cents per hour. That's not nothing, but it's not going to stock your shelves with Beluga caviar either.

This is a teaching flight at Cable Airport in Upland, California. We were up there visiting Marian's aunt in the hospital, and when we were done we took a quick trip by the airport to see if there was anything to take pictures of.

As you may have heard, Los Angeles is undergoing a rash of unusual crimes. Gangs from South LA have been sending crews specifically to target rich people, tailing them from fashionable hotels, restaurants and clubs and then stealing their watches and purses.

At first glance, this might not seem mysterious. For one thing, it's been going on for a while. Second, gangs are targeting rich people for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that's where the money is. But apparently that's not reason enough to satisfy everyone:

One of the things that’s getting glossed over at the moment? The role of straight-up economics....“There is a sizable body of research that finds a positive relationship between income inequality and crime,” said Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice and a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

That's from Erika D. Smith, an LA Times columnist, but it's dead wrong. There's evidence that crime rates are higher in countries with greater income inequality, but there's virtually no evidence that it's higher within the US in places with greater income inequality. A recent meta-analysis puts the effect at zero. Another finds a negative correlation. Another finds a very strong negative correlation at the state level. And yet another finds "little evidence" for a link when county- and time-fixed effects are accounted for.

The link between income inequality and property crime goes back to 1968, when economist Gary Becker proposed an economic model of crime which posited that criminals acted like everyone else, committing crimes if it seemed like the reward was likely worth the risk. In this model, it stood to reason that income inequality would lead to more crime since, in areas of high inequality, criminals would be poorer than average and rich people would be richer than average. That makes for a relatively larger payback for the risk of committing a high-profile crime.

But Becker's model was just a model, and a very broad one at that. When economists started testing not just the basic model, but some of the details, they didn't all pan out. One of the casualties was the theory that income inequality leads to higher crime rates. This becomes obvious if you just take a look at LA County crime rates vs. GINI inequality scores:

There's obviously not much there. You can force a result for the data from 2010-present if you want, since you basically have two fairly flat lines, but it still won't get you anywhere. I did it just for laughs and got an R-squared of 0.12.

Be careful with crime stats! There are lots of theories out there and lots of seemingly sensible links between poverty and crime; policing and crime; family structure and crime; drug markets and crime; inequality and crime; incarceration and crime; lead and crime; and so forth. Some of them pass muster once you put them to a rigorous test, but a lot of them don't. They seem reasonable, but often they turn out to be little more than myths. Don't just repeat stuff "you've heard" without checking to see if it's really true.

How's the ol' labor force doing? The Wall Street Journal says today that "several million" workers have dropped out of the workforce permanently thanks to COVID-19, but I suspect that yet again this is a misconception that comes from looking at the entire labor force instead of just the prime-age labor force. Here are the prime age labor force levels and participation rates for both men and women:

Among men, both the labor force level and the participation rate are right on trend for prime-age workers. Among women, the labor force level is below trend but the participation rate is slightly above trend. Here's how that pencils out:

Among women, there are 0.3 million fewer prime age workers than the trendline projects. Among men there are 0.2 million fewer.

In other words, nothing. These differences are so small they're within the margin of error of the BLS survey. Right now the prime age labor force is exactly at its pre-pandemic trend level.

Now, there are about 1.6 million prime-age women who have exited the labor force (top chart), though they were probably the ones who were most weakly attached in the first place and will only be coaxed back by higher wages.¹ And there might be more still outside of prime age. So the Journal might be correct—but about a fairly meaningless metric. The one that really matters is prime-age workers, and on that score we're pretty much at full employment.

¹Which isn't happening no matter how many McDonald's signs you see that are allegedly offering $20 an hour to flip burgers. Despite all the complaining from employers about how hard it is to find workers, real wages in most industries have been falling for the past year. Even in the restaurant biz, which is supposed to be the tightest around, real wages have only increased about 6% over the past year. In other words, burger flipping has gone from around $12 an hour to $12.70 an hour. That's hardly going to tempt a lot of marginally attached workers back into a fast-food kitchen.

Progress is slow. My distance vision is now 20/20—though barely—and I had my second adjustment on Wednesday. This should improve my distance vision slightly and my reading vision considerably. For now, though, things are still pretty fuzzy. I can read and use the computer without glasses, which my doctor wants me to do, but it's not yet sharp or comfortable. I hope things will be improved by the middle of next week. In theory, when I go in for my next adjustment it should be a small one.

In other news, I also had my first infusion of Empliciti (elotuzumab) on Monday, along with 40 mg of dex. The good news is that it went fine. I had no allergic reaction or anything else. The bad news is that it sure packs a wallop. I was fine on Tuesday and Wednesday, but then on Thursday I crashed like a Tesla on full auto mode. I was also very tired all day Friday and I'm pretty tired today too. My slot for the CAR-T treatment can't come soon enough.