Month: June 2022

I didn't check the COVID-19 stats at all while I was on vacation, so I figured I should take a look now that I'm back. This time around, I was interested in death rates by vaccination status. Here it is:

The CDC provides death rates by vax status through the start of April. The more recent numbers are extrapolated from overall death rates provided by Our World in Data.

At the peak of the Omicron surge in January, the death rate for the unvaccinated was about 160 per million. Today it's 2.5 per million. For the vaccinated it's about 0.5 per million.

Of course, if you look at age you get a different picture. The Omicron surge primarily affected the unvaccinated elderly over the age of 65. The death rate for those under 50 has been low for a long time and is tiny today. It's especially minuscule for those who are vaccinated: 0.2 per million vs. 0.9 for the unvaccinated in the 30-49 age group. (Click the chart to embiggen.)

The difference in death rates between races and ethnic groups has largely disappeared too. In fact, the CDC reports that the white death rate is now higher than both the Black and Hispanic death rates.

Case rates have also fallen to low levels, which is a very good thing. Even if COVID isn't killing a lot of people anymore, long COVID is nothing to sneer at. It's still well worth your time to get vaccinated and to practice at least basic pandemic hygiene.

The price of gasoline continues to skyrocket. This got me curious about how closely it's following the price of oil these days, so I went back and did a more careful job with the regression chart I've posted a few times already. Here it is:

Gasoline is now selling for 61¢ more than the current price of oil would suggest it should. Here's what that delta looks like over the past few years:

The delta between the actual price of gasoline and the projected price has averaged around zero since 1991—which it has to if your regression is done correctly—and it's also been zero since 2000. Since 2018 it's averaged a few cents above zero.¹

But then it took off when the Ukraine war started and is now 61¢ above its projected price. Keep in mind that the projected price already takes into account the rise in the price of oil. The 61¢ delta is over and above that.

Why has this happened? It's not because of a difference between WTI and Brent crude prices, which have been consistently within a few dollars of each other this year. Is it an uncertainty premium based on fear of oil stocks being depleted later in the year as sanctions against Russia bite harder? Is there some kind of hoarding going on? Are refining and delivery costs skyrocketing, which would add to the pump price of gasoline even if crude oil prices didn't change?

I don't know. But at the moment the delta shows no sign of reverting back to its mean. It just keeps going up

¹Technical note: I calculated average delta through the end of 2021 so that it wouldn't be affected by its current runup in 2022.

Over at New York, Sam Adler-Bell says that he doesn't care about the word "woke." If you don't like it, fine. But if you believe in the principles behind the word, you need to quit using its pseudo-academic language with anyone other than your own circle of true believers:

This idiom — or perhaps communicative register — replaces the obligation of persuading others to adopt our values with the satisfaction of signaling our allegiance and literacy to those who already agree. In some cases, this means we speak in an insular language that alienates those who haven’t stewed in the same activist cultural milieu.

....When college-educated radicals speak for the left, they tend to speak in the language of “wokeness” — precisely as I have defined it — with distorting and destructive effects. This is due, in part, to the peculiar history of 20th-century campus radicalism. The victories of student activists in the 1970s onward — in creating departments and new curricula through which radical thought could be studied and taught — were pyrrhic. Conceived as beachheads in a broader war against capitalist society, radical departments became sepulchers for radical thought: places where wild ideas could be quarantined from the challenge of convincing anyone outside to believe them.

Ironically, this is an argument that conservatives have been making for decades. They say—correctly, I think—that the overwhelming dominance of the left on university campuses weakens progressives because they're never forced to learn how to persuade non-progressives. Conservatives, by contrast, who face a stewing cauldron of students and faculty who all disagree with them, learn fast that they'd better figure out how to make convincing arguments.

Conservatives probably overstate this point, but there's not much question that there's something to it. This is why it drives me nuts whenever some progressive says "It's not my job to teach you ______ ." Of course it is. Not only that, it's your job to teach others constantly, patiently, sociably, and in language they can understand. If you aren't willing to do this, you don't really care about winning support for progressive ideas.

Politics is all about persuasion, and right now progressives are doing a lousy job of it. We need to up our game.

Did you watch the 1/6 hearings last night? I did, but thanks to lingering jet lag I dozed through bits and pieces of it. I think I mostly got the gist, but there were some things I probably missed.

Anyway, it seemed pretty effective, though as usual it's all but impossible for me to judge how it went over with ordinary people who aren't political junkies and didn't know all this stuff already. The biggest problem facing the hearings, I think, is that for an awful lot of people the evidence about Trump and 1/6 doesn't matter in the first place. They already believe that Trump tried to overturn the election results and they think that was a good thing. I mean, Democrats were the ones who originally tried to steal the election, right? So why shouldn't Trump fight them on the same level?

So we have (1) people who believe Trump tried to overturn the election and don't care, and (2) people who believe Trump tried to overturn the election and think it was an attempted coup. But I suppose there must still be some folks in the middle who don't realize what Trump did and would be outraged if they finally figured it out. That's the audience for these hearings.

Is it big enough to matter? Polling suggests that two-thirds of Republicans are in group (1) and pretty much all Democrats are in group (2). Independents split about half and half. A back-of-the-envelope guess, then, is that about a quarter of the electorate doesn't fully realize what Trump did and might be swayed if they found out.

Maybe. This is just the roughest kind of guess. I suppose we'll find out for sure after we see if the polls move much after a summer's worth of hearings.

We return you now to our regular Friday programming featuring fully American cats. In today's photo, Charlie is showing off his hunting skills by leaping onto a painted ping pong ball. He mainly likes it because it rolls around nicely and makes a great sound when it bounces off walls. He never quite brings it to heel, though. It just keeps rolling around.

Jim Geraghty tells us what's on his mind:

How Can a Tired, Old, Overwhelmed President Respond to Terrible Inflation Numbers?

Earlier this week I wrote, “we don’t know precisely what the national inflation numbers for May will be, but we can all sense they’re not going to be good.” It turns out that May’s inflation numbers were the worst since December 1981.¹ The confident declarations that “inflation has peaked” in February and April and May now appear to be whistling past the graveyard, as inaccurate as President Biden’s confident assertion in July 2021 that inflation was temporary and transitory.

Golly. If only we a had a lively, young, brilliant president in office. Just imagine what inflation would be like!

Answer: the same as it is now. There is nothing Joe Biden or anyone else can do about short-term inflation. In the longer-term, we can get our supply chains back in order; we can work to get gasoline prices down; and the Fed can manipulate interest rates and asset purchases. This will eventually get inflation levels back to normal.

Now, if you want to blame Biden for passing a big stimulus bill that probably caused some of the inflation we're experiencing right now, fair enough. There's a good case for that. But using high inflation as an excuse to call Biden senile is beneath us all. At a minimum, Biden's mental acuity is better than Donald Trump's and better than Ronald Reagan's during his second term. What's more, y'all could have voted for Hillary in 2016 if having a sharp, non-deranged mind in the Oval Office were really so important to you. But it wasn't, was it?

¹Just for the record, this is technically true. However, inflation in May was 8.58% compared to 8.54% in March. So it's sure not a record by much.

Woke pronouns have drawn George Will's attention this week. The scandalous activity took place in Kiel, a town of 4,000 in central Wisconsin:

In April, the district lodged a complaint against three eighth-grade boys for the offense of “mispronouning,” referring to a classmate using the biologically correct pronoun “her” instead of the classmate’s preferred “them.” This, district officials — supposed educators — said, constitutes “sexual harassment,” a Title IX violation.

....Represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the boys are arguing that their use of biologically correct, if politically incorrect, pronouns is speech protected by the First Amendment. The Constitution also forbids the district from compelling them to speak as district bureaucrats suddenly [] prefer.

Well, this certainly seems like a pretty trivial bit of middle-school horseplay, something that can easily be handled locally without getting a Washington Post columnist involved. Speaking of which, how did George Will even hear about this?

Last month, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-wing legal organization, sent a letter to the Kiel Area School District asking it to end a Title IX harassment investigation into three eighth-grade boys for repeatedly misgendering a classmate. To further its cause, WILL embarked on a national media campaign to draw attention to the 1,500-student district.

That attention — which included appearances on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, Newsmax and an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — resulted in six bomb threats made against the district, Kiel City Hall, the Kiel Public Library, the homes of district employees, roads and utility companies in the city. The threats resulted in the district going to virtual school for the remainder of the year, the cancellation of the city’s Memorial Day parade and the postponement of the high school graduation.

It certainly looks like WILL's national media campaign was a roaring success. Bomb threats, school cancellation, Laura Ingraham—I'll bet those left-wing twits in the Kiel Area School District caved in fast enough after all that!

And they did. WILL assures us that they condemn the violent threats, and I suppose we have to believe them. Surely they meant this to be a discreet, purely legal investigation into a minor case of teenage harassment.

Of course, it's a little unclear why you'd get Newsmax and the Wall Street Journal involved in such a thing. Or Laura Ingraham, for that matter. Then again, Newsmax is run by Christopher Ruddy, who has a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics. Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal is widely respected for his dedication to explaining why conservatives are always right. And Ingraham is a lawyer. So perhaps WILL figured they were the perfect people to carefully and dispassionately explain the legal ins and outs of this case to their viewers. I didn't see the coverage in any of these places, but I'm sure that's what they did. Right?

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that the US inflation rate has basically plateaued at above 8%. March was 8.6%; April was 8.2%; and May has clocked in 8.6%.

Core CPI has actually declined for the past few months. Note that these are the standard year-over-year figures, which compare May 2022 with May 2021. However, if you want a sense of how inflation is running this month, your best bet is to extract month-over-month figures and then look at the trend. Here's an updated version of my chart from yesterday, which does exactly that:

This is CPI core inflation, not PCE core, because that's all we have available today. However, the difference between the two is small and the trendline is still down from last year.

Finally, if you want to see what's driving inflation, here it is. There are no surprises:

Energy has been skyrocketing since the beginning of 2021, while food began outpacing general inflation in early 2022. Core inflation, by contrast, has been rising too fast, but only by a moderate amount. Once again, my horseback guess for the components of inflation right now are:

• 2% from underlying inflation
• 2% from stimulus spending
• 2% from supply chain problems
• 2.5% from food and, especially, energy

I expect the middle two to wane over time, assuming that COVID-19 remains under control and delivery of goods and services gets back on track. As for the extra inflation generated by food and energy, who knows? That depends on global issues, and there's really no way to predict how those are going to unfold.

With my vacation officially over, it's time to put other things back into the daily photo rotation. This one is a picture of some guys playing a bit of beach volleyball in Laguna Beach a few weeks ago. I don't know who they were, but they were really, really good.

How polarized is America? A couple of Vanderbilt political scientists decided to find out:

According to the prevailing national narrative, American unity is at or near an all-time low....Even so, we do not have good, systematic evidence about national unity — or, more important, about how it may have changed over time....To overcome this, we sought to develop something more objective. The Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy has launched the Vanderbilt Unity Index (VUI) to estimate the state of U.S. unity.

Ah. An index. Basically they took a bunch of different metrics, normalized each one on a scale of 0-100, and then mushed them all together. Here's the result:

According the the VUI, American unity has declined from 68 to 52 since the start of the Reagan era. However, it hasn't declined in a straight line:

I have no idea whether this index is a good measure of what it claims to measure. However, a point in its favor is that it confirms a mountain of other evidence telling us that the long-term decline in America's political psyche got its first push in the Gingrich era but didn't really take off until the Fox News era.

By now, it might be too late to undo the damage Rupert Murdoch has done. I hope not.