Month: May 2022

As I was trying to think of something else besides Roe v. Wade, it occurred to me this afternoon to wonder how long the Ukraine war was likely to last. We fought the Soviet Union as proxies in Vietnam for about a decade. We fought them as proxies in Afghanistan for five or six years. Now we're fighting them as proxies in Ukraine, and the harder we (and NATO) fight the longer the war is likely to drag out. This is especially true since this time the Russians are actually fighting instead of simply supplying their clients, and it's become clear that the Russian army is sorely incompetent.

On the other hand, the Russian objective seems to have shrunk considerably, so that should speed things up. But on the other other hand, the Ukrainians seem willing to fight for the Donbas pretty competently for approximately forever (eight years and counting at the moment).

But there are more hands in this argument than an octopus could handle. I've read dozens of reasons on both sides why this war could end fairly quickly or could turn into a long stalemate. And we'd be supplying weapons and sanctioning Russia the whole time.

My view of Russia is a pretty conventional one: I have nothing against the Russian people, and don't really blame them for being angry about how we handled economic reform in the 1990s and then pushed NATO almost to their new borders. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is just a thug. Even leaving his territorial ambitions aside, he just has no redeeming qualities.

So how long would we be happy fighting him? A year? Sure. Two years? Probably. Three? Four? More? We just finished up fighting two far more expensive wars that lasted more than a decade, so I suppose we could go at least that long in Ukraine.

But will we? Will Russia? Are we in for another forever war? Comments?

From the Wall Street Journal:

Job openings and the number of times workers quit reached the highest levels on record in March, as a shortage of available workers continued to pressure the U.S. labor market.

Sure, this is true, and the BLS press release even said so. But who cares? Quits always go up when hires go up. Here's my inevitable chart:

The recent record for quits as a percentage of hires was 68.26% in December. In March it was 67.33%. Not a record. And anyway, with the exception of the pandemic era, the trendline for quits as a percentage of hires has been rock steady for over a decade. There's absolutely nothing unusual going on right now.

Why does my local medical center have an outline of a cannabis leaf on its floor?

I imagine that this week is going to be abortion always and everywhere unless a meteor hits Kyiv or something. However, even though you might not be in the mood for good news about Justice Alito's latest tactical nuke on the progressive movement, there is a small bit of good news in his opinion that may or may not be obvious on first reading.

It's this: Alito, in his anxiety to put together a majority, made it very, very clear that his decision is about abortion and nothing else. Worried about the general right to privacy that Roe is based on? Don't be. Worried that the Court's conservatives plan to turn back the clock a century or so? Don't be. Here are his words on Lochner v. New York, a 1905 decision that restricted the right of states and the federal government to regulate working conditions governed by contracts between workers and their employers. Although Lochner was overturned decades ago during the New Deal, many modern conservatives have voiced hopes of having it at least partially re-enacted. In his discussion of substantive due process, Alito tells them to forget it:

On occasion, when the Court has ignored the “[a]ppropriate limits” imposed by “respect for the teachings of history,” it has fallen into the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York. The Court must not fall prey to such an unprincipled approach.

Alito also name-checks the cases that have been specifically used as precedent to support the right to an abortion:

Casey relied on cases involving the right to marry a person of a different race; the right to marry while in prison; the right to obtain contraceptives; the right to reside with relatives; the right to make decisions about the education of one's children; the right not to be sterilized without consent; and the right in certain circumstances not to undergo involuntary surgery, forced administration of drugs, or other substantially similar procedures. Respondents and the Solicitor General also rely on post-Casey decisions like Lawrence v. Texas (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts), and Obergefell v. Hodges, (right to marry a person of the same sex).

....What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion destroys what those decisions call “potential life” and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an “unborn human being.”...They are therefore inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in anyway.

None of this makes up for the loss of abortion rights. But it's at least something that in order to overturn Roe, Alito felt like the only way to make it acceptable was to soften the blow by clarifying that he didn't support a steady trawl through Supreme Court precedent, overturning every progressive decision along the way that might somehow be related to Roe. It's not much, and in practice there's no telling if he'll stick to his word, but it's something.

According to Politico, a draft Supreme Court ruling has been leaked that overrules Roe v. Wade completely. If this turns out to be a final opinion, I find it fitting that it was written by the Court's worst member, Samuel Alito, and affirmed by its most crotchety ideologue, Clarence Thomas, along with its three Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

According to Alito, whose history is one of simply supporting Republican positions without much further thought:

• Roe was a ridiculously stupid decision, "egregiously wrong from the start."
• The due process guarantee of the 14th Amendment applies only to rights that are "deeply rooted in the nation's history and traditions." Abortion on demand laughably fails this test.
• Nor does stare decisis matter in this case because Roe is only 50 years old.
• In fact, the Constitution has nothing whatsoever to say about abortion.
• Ditto for state constitutions:

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right.

....Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State....By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow.

• Abortion law is fundamentally about whether a fetus should legally be considered a "potential life." That is not a decision the Supreme Court is allowed to make. The Constitution reserves it "unequivocally" to the states.

And after Roe is repealed, what restrictions will there be on states regarding abortion? Alito makes it absolutely clear that the answer is none:

It follows that the States may regulate abortion for legitimate reasons, and when such regulations are challenged under the Constitution,¹ courts cannot “substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies.

....A law regulating abortion, like other health and welfare laws, is entitled to a “strong presumption of validity.” It must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests. These legitimate interests include respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development; the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability.

Alito is leaving absolutely no wiggle room for state or federal courts. He has literally given legislatures a list of reasons they can set forth that lower courts are explicitly prevented from overruling—and those reasons provide everything necessary for any restriction on abortion favored by a state. In particular, "respect and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development" plainly allows a complete ban on abortion starting at conception if that's what a legislature decides. All it takes is legislative language that's not obviously religious or racist or otherwise harebrained. It's not even clear if a court could intervene in cases where the mother is virtually guaranteed to be killed if she gives birth. Maybe. Maybe not.

It's possible that there will be changes to this opinion before it is released. Nevertheless, the language is so adamant—Roe is ridiculous; the Constitution is silent on abortion; states can create any regulations they want; and lower courts are powerless to overturn them—that it's hard to see how any but the most minor caveats could be added. It appears that not only is Roe dead, but the earth has been salted behind it.

Fuck.

¹This does not apply to state constitutions. The one exception in Alito's entire opinion is that state courts may overrule legislatures if their own state constitution has relevant language that applies to the case. Needless to say, this is meager solace since states that ban abortion (a) usually have conservative state supreme courts, and (b) can usually modify their constitution if that's what it takes.

I have no idea why I did this. I was just curious what the latest American Time Use Survey¹ showed about the difference in activities between working-age men and women. [Clarification: That is, this chart shows how many more minutes men spend on each activity compared to women.] Here it is:

On average, working-age men spend 114 minutes more at paid market work than working-age women. They also spend 35 minutes more on sports and leisure. Women spend more time on practically everything else.

By the way, sleeping is recorded as part of "personal care." Among the working aged, women sleep about 18 minutes more than men.

¹2019, so pre-pandemic

White backlash. One of the most powerful cultural forces throughout American history is white backlash. It is intense, self-righteous, often brutal, and absolutely inevitable. Anyone in the civil rights activism biz is an idiot if they don't understand this and have a plan to deal with it.

Sex education. Conservatives have always been conservative about sex. In particular, they have fought "progressive" sex education in schools for decades. These days that means teaching about gay and trans issues, but those are nothing special. They're just different varieties of sex and gender presentation, and conservatives hate having their kids taught any of it.

Elon Musk. At age 24 Musk started a company that he sold four years later for $22 million. Three years after that he sold his share of PayPal for $175 million. At age 31 he started SpaceX and within six years won a commercial resupply contract with NASA for the International Space Station. SpaceX has conducted 150 successful launches and is also building out a global internet constellation called Starlink that currently comprises more than 2,000 small satellites in low earth orbit, with the aim of eventually placing 40,000 satellites in orbit. At age 37 Musk became CEO of Tesla, the first mass producer of consumer electric cars. Within a decade Tesla had sold a million cars and is currently worth about $1 trillion. A subsidiary of Tesla makes batteries and solar panels for residential use. Musk is also a founder of Neuralink, which conducts research into brain implants, and OpenAI, which is responsible for the GPT-3 natural language model that has recently produced gaping jaws all over the internet.  Elon Musk is 50 years old.

Of course, Musk also has The Boring Company to his name. And "full self driving" mode for his cars that's anything but. And that infamous Joe Rogan interview. And SEC issues. And that cave rescue fiasco. And hyperloops. And (depending on how the lawsuit turns out) an aggressive lack of concern for the treatment of Black employees. Plus he just generally likes to mouth off in idiotic ways sometimes.

But there have always been lots of PT Barnum-esque entrepreneurs like that around. It's good for business. That said, a man with half a dozen highly successful startups by the time he's 50 is no fool and no slouch. Feel free to hate him personally all you want, but there's no question that he's a brilliant corporate show runner. His background alone is enough to lay odds that he'll be successful with Twitter, and that same background is enough to suggest that he doesn't really care much about partisan blather. He just wants to make money and become even more famous.

Believe it or not, I've been meaning to take this picture for years. I've just never had my camera handy at night when I've driven past it. But a few weeks ago, on a dex night, I was puttering around at 3 am and finally got my picture. There's just something about the sharp lines and bright colors that I like about this.

Data here.

Last weekend I wrote a long, chart-laden post that summarized the evidence about housing in the US. I received some criticism that seemed reasonable, so I figured I'd address them here.

Anne Paulson suggested that I shouldn't compare housing growth to population growth because housing is an adult thing. If a family has more children, it will still occupy a single housing unit. Here is adult population growth vs. housing unit growth:¹

I charted this over a long period in order to provide some context. After World War II there was a huge shortage of housing as soldiers returned home and got married. It was a major political issue that produced housing developments like Levittown; the growth of suburbs and interstate highways; and a huge increase in housing projects for low-income families.

The result was strong growth in housing units, followed by another strong growth in the '70s and '80s as the baby boomer generation grew up and moved out. More recently, growth slowed down in the aughts and flattened out to nearly nothing in the 2010s. In 2021 the number of adults barely budged, ending at 252.6 million. The number of housing units ended up at 142 million, for a ratio of 56.2% (compared to 56.6% in 2000).

You can draw your own conclusions from this. On the one hand, housing growth has slowed down considerably. On the other hand, this was largely because population growth also slowed down considerably. On a countrywide basis, we have the same number of housing units available per adult as we did 20 years ago.

A second comment came from Kevin Erdmann, who criticized my use of housing inflation vs. overall inflation. As it turns out, "housing" includes furniture and other things that go into the total cost of living. "Shelter" excludes those, but includes hotels and dormitories. The best measure is rent, which the BLS calculates directly for renters and as owners' equivalent rent for homeowners. I weighted the two together and produced this chart:

This shows a larger increase in rent CPI than my previous chart. In particular, rent has grown 11% more than overall CPI since 2000 (184 ÷ 166 = +11%). This suggests a tightening of the housing market—the rental market in particular—but note that it's a measure of inflation, not prices directly. I also included a chart that directly measures home prices, including the effect of interest rates, and it shows a decline in home price. Another chart shows average gross rents, and it suggests very little change at all.

In any case, these are easy charts to correct, so why did it take me so long to produce them? That's a different, and more complex story, and you might just want to stop here and skip the explanation. But if you want the read the whole thing, keep going.

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Kevin Erdmann also had a longer and very different criticism of my piece. It took me quite a while to plow through it, and that, among other things, explains why this post is showing up on Sunday instead of last Monday.

To begin with, Erdmann has written a couple of books making the case that there was never a housing boom. There are quite a few economists who now agree with him, so this isn't a wildly contrarian take. And if you'll take a look at the top chart, which compares housing units to families, you'll see one bit of evidence that he's right: The line from 2000-2010 is pretty smooth, with only a small upward rise. This may not suggest a housing shortage, but it doesn't suggest a housing boom either.

However, Erdmann believes that we do have a housing shortage now and have had one for quite a while. What happened in the early aughts was not a housing boom, but a credit boom. Banks lent freely, but many cities refused to allow enough home and apartment construction to match the level of credit available. As a result, the price of housing of all types—both low-tier and high-tier—was bid up.

Now, obviously anyone who thinks we already had a housing shortage, and then failed to have a housing boom, is likely to disagree with me about whether we're currently suffering from a housing shortage. However, Erdmann's belief is, in the end, not so different from mine: Overall, there's no housing shortage, but there is a housing shortage in hot urban areas that people want to move to:

This is a new era in American housing....The norm until recent decades was for metro areas to grow when they are economically ascendant and to stop growing when they struggle. During the early and mid-20th century, the Detroit metro population grew by nearly 3% annually. Back then there weren't individual cities with incomes far above the norm, like there are today. Over the early 20th century, people moved to opportunity and regional incomes were converging as a result. Today they can't, so some metro area incomes are skyrocketing away from the norm. This is new!

As the chart shows, the highest rents and home prices are all in California—and unless I miss my guess, the blue circles representing 2007 are the same four cities. In other words, this is the standard complaint: House prices in California are rising too much for anyone to afford moving there. But that's where people want to go! So they keep trying, and this increases house prices (and rent) even more.

More interestingly, Erdmann makes the case that "credit suppression" is making hot urban areas especially unaffordable for low-income workers. This is because banks, which were lending to anyone before 2008, have learned their lesson and are now less likely to offer loans to working class families. Before 2008, prices for all types of neighborhoods went up and down at about the same rate. After 2008, low-tier housing collapsed because banks refused to lend into poor areas. For example:

I can't guarantee that I fully understand Erdmann's argument, but I guess I'd distill it into two points:

• California has a housing shortage. The rest of the country not so much.
• Thanks to the subprime crisis, working class families have been significantly shut out of the credit market. Richer families have fully recovered from the housing bust.

I haven't read Erdmann's books, so I don't have the full story on why he thinks we have a housing shortage. However, you can read a condensed version here.

POSTSCRIPT: I'm going to stop here because I'm just confused by too many of Erdmann's arguments. For example, he says that if rent inflation is high, but people are spending the same amount every year on rent, then they're spending less in real terms on rent. That's true. But I didn't say that people are spending the same amount on rent. I said they're spending the same percentage of their income on rent, which is a growing number. Maybe Erdmann has an explanation for this?

¹The number of families is here,  Table FM-1. The number of housing units from 1950-2000 is here. The number of family units from 2000-2021 is here.