Cats, charts, and politics
This is Captain Lionel Birger on the bridge of the Viking Skaga. Captain Birger was a serious guy, which I suppose is all for the good. After all, I don't really want to socialize with the captain of my ship. I just want him to drive carefully and get me home without a scratch. Which he did.
Over at my old stomping grounds, Dan Friedman reports on the latest tape-recorded sleaze from Steve Bannon:
Aiming to hurt Joe Biden’s chances and at least narrow the election results, Bannon ensured that sexually explicit material from Hunter Biden’s laptop was widely publicized. For that, he enlisted help from his patron, exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui. Bannon also expressed approval of lies by Guo and his associates about what that material actually showed, referring to their false accusations that Hunter Biden committed salacious crimes as “editorial creativity.”
The audio comes from an October 31, 2020, meeting between Bannon and supporters of Guo, who controls pro-Trump, Chinese-language media sites and nonprofits that spread various forms of far-right disinformation.
I suppose I'm not surprised. But the thing I've never understood is why Republicans have spent such vast effort trying to smear Hunter Biden. The truth is that they've never come up with much aside from showing that Hunter was a little too willing to imply to his clients that he had Dad's ear.
But they've never come up with any evidence that Joe Biden helped out Hunter. Without that, they've got nothing except a case that Hunter is a flawed human being.
But nobody cares about that, and there was never any reason to think otherwise. Presidential families—like so many ordinary families—are notoriously flaky and that never seems to hurt them. Americans just don't hold family eccentricities against people.
I was puttering around tonight looking at life expectancy, and I happened to come across this table in a paper from a few years ago:
At the top, smoking and obesity matter a lot. This is not big news.
In the middle you have a bunch of stuff that's fairly close to a zero correlation. Some of them might matter, but not a lot.
Then, hidden at the bottom under "Other Factors" are several things that obviously make a big difference. Mostly they're related to higher incomes, which matters a lot within the poorest slice of society. There's a big difference between the life expectancy of someone at the very bottom, living on the street, and someone who's a little higher up, living in a lousy apartment with at least enough income to eat regularly and see a doctor occasionally.¹
The highest correlation is with the number of immigrants living in a neighborhood. The authors don't say much about this, and it turns out that's because this is common knowledge among demographers. Here's a more recent study:
In 2017, foreign-born life expectancy reached 81.4 and 85.7 years for men and women, respectively. That’s about 7 and 6.2 years longer than the average lifespan of their U.S.-born counterparts.
“Demographers knew that immigrants lived longer. The main question that we set out to answer was, ‘How much is this really contributing to national life expectancy trends?’” said Arun Hendi, the lead author of the study.
....Research shows that the difference between immigrants and the U.S.-born has widened substantially over time....“The fact that immigrants are doing well suggests that there is a capacity to thrive in the U.S., but the U.S.-born aren’t fulfilling that potential,” he said.
This is new to me, and I don't have anything insightful to say about it. It's just something to ponder over.
¹Income matters even more between the poor and the rich. We've known for a long time that this is probably the single biggest factor in longevity. Rich people have life expectancies nearly a decade longer than poor people.
I'm an idiot. I got into a Twitter beef about housing and now I feel like I have a point to get off my chest. It's this: there's no such thing as a shortage, full stop. There are only shortages at a particular price. Price, as it always has been, is the great mediator between supply and demand.
So when you say that we have a "housing shortage," all you're really saying is that you think the price of housing is too high. But aside from the past year, neither housing prices nor rents have budged more than slightly over the past couple of decades:
This hasn't stopped anyone from saying we have a housing shortage. Housing experts have been warning about it forever. But if this isn't based on rising prices, what is it based on?
That's the crucial question: how much housing should we have? And who decides? There's no cosmic "right" number for housing stock, only comparisons over time and personal opinions based on anecdotes.
For example, here's a chart showing the level of housing stock in a random selection of cities, both large and small. The current housing stock is shown by the light orange bars:
The "additional housing" bars are based on a simple local anecdote: the belief that Los Angeles County needs to add about 800,000 housing units. If you translate that into a per-capita figure you get a goal of 420 housing units per thousand residents. If you then apply that number to all the other cities in my chart, you get the dark orange bars.
Is that the level we should aim for? Why? Is there a good reason that our biggest, most crowded cities should continue growing into mega-crowded cities? Or should they slow down and let medium-size cities grow into big cities instead?
Whatever your answer, it's an opinion and little more. Some people, mostly young ones, want to move into urban cores and are unhappy that they can't afford it. Their opinion is that we should allow massive growth while somehow stabilizing demand so that prices will come down. Other people, mostly the ones who live in crowded cities already, don't want their streets and their buses and their subways to be even more jammed than they are now. They'd just as soon keep growth low.
But the law of supply and demand won't be denied. If you increase demand, as young people are doing, prices go up. If you increase supply, prices go down. If you increase both supply and demand, prices will . . . do something.
But that's not all. Nobody likes to say this, but the easiest way to increase supply is to let prices rise. Conversely, if you reduce prices, perhaps by mandating affordable housing, supply will go down.
I'm not expressing an opinion on any of this. For all I care, developers could demolish the tennis courts next to my suburban house and replace them with a 50-story high-rise. We'd probably need to widen a few streets, though.
But there's no getting around the basic facts. There is no "right" level of housing. When demand goes up, so do prices. When prices are forced down, supply goes down. Killing off zoning restrictions and letting the market loose will have unpredictable effects. My guess is that prices would stabilize for quite a while, and might then start to decline. Maybe. I don't really know and neither does anyone else.
For the most part—though not entirely—this question is unrelated to other issues like homelessness and affordable housing. By far, the biggest obstacle in the way of fixing homelessness is the fact that no one wants shelters near them. The big problem with affordable housing is figuring out who's going to pay for it. Neither has very much to do with the overall supply of housing stock.
So: what's the right level of housing stock? And who decides? If you can't answer that, you probably shouldn't have much of an opinion on the more complicated stuff.
A few weeks ago, coming home from one of my night sky photography sessions, I noticed that dawn looked very nice in my rear view mirror. I wasn't planning to stop, but eventually I caved in and decided to turn around.
Having done that, I needed to find an exit so I could get out and take the picture. After many miles I got to one, but it went nowhere. So I got back on the highway and kept going. And going. And going. Finally, with the sun about to come up over the horizon, I pulled over onto the median strip and then raced to the other side of the road. And just as I did the sun came up and ruined the picture I intended to take.
But! When I got home it turned out that my very first picture was OK. There was just a sliver of sun above the clouds, which left the little ribbon of cloud radiance intact. And that was what I was after.
Plus there were some really beautiful colors in the sky. I don't know for sure that this picture was worth the effort, but it's very pretty.
The Washington Post writes today that Millennials fled the workforce when they were teens but that Gen Z teens are pouring back. Regular readers of this blog are ahead of the curve here, since I pointed out three months ago that Gen Z, on average, seems to like work more than previous generations.
But how about Millennials? Are they really a bunch of slackers?
No! Compared to the allegedly grim and determined Xers, Millennials have joined the labor force in consistently greater numbers than Xers. The difference is about two percentage points. That's a difference of 1.5 million workers.
Now, this might just be an age effect. Maybe 30-year-olds always join the labor force in greater numbers than 50-year-olds. Unfortunately, I'm writing this on my tablet in cubicle 6 of my local infusion center, which means you're lucky to get anything from me at all, let alone extensive research and detailed fact checking. So take this for what it's worth.
Riddle me this: what happened to the United States during the aughts?
If you ask people how the nation is doing, it normally depends almost entirely on the economy. If we're in a recession, America is going in the wrong direction. If the economy is expanding, America is going in the right direction. We aren't complicated people, it turns out.
Most of the time, anyway. We all got more satisfied during the Reagan expansion of the '80s. And the Clinton expansion of the '90s. And the Obama expansion of the teens.
But then there's the Bush expansion of the aughts, when opinions about America went straight to hell and never recovered—despite the fact that personal satisfaction with our lives stayed high and steady. Aside from one outlier year in the Gallup poll above, the share of Americans satisfied with the direction of the country hasn't topped 30% since.
What happened around the year 2000 to cause this? There are (at least) four big possibilities:
Let's go through them. After a decade of spadework from the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, #1 is what finally set off the red America/blue America brawl that still dominates American politics today. The 2000 recount debacle left both sides with a conviction that the other side had tried to steal the election.
#2 produced a simmering background of fear and retaliation that permeated the country as we engaged in two overseas wars.
#3 sucked manufacturing out of the United States, producing a stagnant job market and causing millions of blue-collar workers to lose good paying jobs.
And with all that as background, #4 sealed the deal with relentless programming that built on this fear and blamed it on liberals:
By 2010 we had a Black president and the job was done. By 2020 liberals had followed suit and we were as scared of conservatives as they were of us:
"Affective polarization" is the most important thing you've never heard of, but it's not complicated. It's just academese for "how much I hate the other party." Affective polarization was fairly low in the decades following World War II, increased a bit after Watergate, and then settled down for a couple of decades during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies.
But in 2000 it suddenly started to shoot up. By the 2012 election, on average, dislike of the other party was 41% higher than dislike of your own party. By 2020 it was 52 points higher. It was no longer enough to say that Republicans merely disliked Democrats, they hated and feared Democrats:
Nearly a majority of Republicans (48%) gave the Democratic Party a zero on the 0-to-100 scale. This marks a nearly 600% increase in two decades. Slightly fewer Democrats (39%) give the opposition a 0.
....According to a 2020 poll from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, 64% of Democrats see Republican policies as so misguided that they pose a serious threat to the country. Among Republicans, 75% believe Democratic Party policies are so misguided that they pose a serious threat to the country.
Fears of political Armageddon are a bit lower among Democrats than Republicans, but they're catching up. In fact, these numbers are from 2020, and I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of the 1/6 insurrection; the ongoing Republican program to corrupt the vote; and the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision have brought Democrats fully even with Republicans in the hate and fear department. Let's check out a few quotes from both sides of the aisle.
On the left: Trump’s tilt of U.S. foreign policy in the direction of anti-democratic forces everywhere is reminiscent of fascist fellow travelers everywhere who justified repression and violence in the fight against the international left.
On the right: We, as a movement, are at war with the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch.
On the left: The Republican Party is the biggest threat to American democracy today. It is a radical, obstructionist faction that has become hostile to the most basic democratic norm: that the other side should get to wield power when it wins elections.
On the right: We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life.
On the left: If historians of the future are forced to record this country’s descent into tyranny, they’ll be required to sift through the grim record and identify a few decisive moments when the tide turned.
On the right: Democrats are purposefully trying to destroy our country as we know it in their quest to change America into the world’s next failed socialist state. From the open borders disaster, the defund police violent crime spike, critical race theory, choking off domestic energy production, to trillions upon trillions in wasteful spending — none of it’s a mistake. In fact, it’s all part of the left’s grand plan.
I could go on and on—and keep in mind that all of this is sincere. Conservatives believe that liberals routinely engage in mass election fraud and deliberately encourage destructive policies in order to bring down a nation they hold responsible for the world's ill. Liberals believe that conservatives have become a fascist cult that's openly trying to destroy democracy in order to keep power permanently.
So how does this end? On possibility is that it doesn't, and the United States falls to either fascism or moral collapse. Another possibility is that our intense hatred eventually burns itself out and we return to normal. Yet another is that, somehow, both Fox News and MSNBC are put out of business and we stop poisoning ourselves.
Other guesses?
Over at National Review, Charles Hilu is pissed:
Incoming University of Michigan Medical School students staged a walkout of the school’s White Coat Ceremony Sunday to protest the choice of a pro-life doctor as the ceremony’s keynote speaker.
....On its face, this collective decision by many of the incoming students is inappropriate for civil society and academia. Whenever one of these incidents occurs, we rightfully lament the damage it does to academic freedom.
Wait a second. It's one thing to heckle a speaker so ruthlessly that he or she is literally unable to deliver a scheduled address. Plenty of liberals oppose that kind of thing.
But are we no longer allowed to protest a speaker even by quietly walking out? That seems like something we all have a perfect right to do. And needless to say, it has no effect at all on academic freedom: Kristin Collier is a well-known pro-life Christian and I have no doubt she'll remain one.
Protesting is not the same as cancelling. Folks on the right need to get this straight.
Inspired by a Twitter conversation last night, here's the answer:
As of now, about 3 million people work for the federal government; 5 million for state governments; and 14 million for local governments.
Rep. Lee Zeldin is running for governor of New York. Yesterday, as he was talking to a small crowd about public safety, a drunk guy apparently got tired of listening to him:
Video footage of the encounter showed Mr. Jakubonis wielding a pointed plastic self-defense tool shaped like the face of a cartoon cat as he lunged at Mr. Zeldin. Mr. Jakubonis can be heard on video repeatedly saying, “You’re done.”
....Mr. Jakubonis, a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, said that he was battling a relapse of alcoholism and was being treated for anxiety. He described his mental state on Thursday night as “checked out,” adding that he had fallen “asleep within” himself.
He suggested the cat-shaped object he held was intended for self-defense. “The ears are plastic, but I guess they’re sharp,” he said in the interview on Friday afternoon. “Then I was tackled.”
A cat-shaped object? Inquiring minds demand to know more:
Hmmm. Can we please see this in more detail?
Cats are always getting bad press. Why couldn't this guy have gotten a dog-shaped keychain thingie instead? The company that makes the "My Kitty" model also has a very nice looking "Brutus Bulldog" design.